Deep waves

One of the hardest problems in designing something is deciding where the 'sweet spot' is - just enough facilities to provide lots of possibilities, but not too much because that wastes money. Some current Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) provide lots of dedicated plug-ins for a variety of synthesis techniques, whilst others go for more novel approaches.

Abelton Live is one of the latter, with only a few dedicated virtual synthesis plug-ins. But by combining the simple sampler playback (via the brilliantly named 'Simpler') with the built-in MIDI and audio effects processing, and the general purpose 'Rack' that lets you build up your own special-purpose 'super-plug-in', you can do some amazing things.

This was highlighted for me with two recent purchases. I bought 'Lumen' for my Apple iPhone 3G, and 'Vector' from Puremagnetik.com for my Ableton Live 7 rig. Lumen is a puzzle game where you solve the problem of passing a beam of correctly coloured light through a series of checkpoints, using just a single light source, some coloured filters, and some mirrors. Rather like the Honda 'Cog' advert, both are variations on what is known as a Heath Robinson machine in the UK, or a Rube Goldberg machine in the USA, and they go by other names elsewhere. The machines build complex operations from simple parts, although practicality is not always high on the agenda.

The 'Vector' instrument rack produces sounds reminiscent of one of my favourite pieces of hardware: a Korg Wavestation. The Wavestation uses two distinctly different but related types of synthesis technique: vector synthesis and wave-sequencing.

• Vector synthesis was first introduced in the Sequential (Circuits) Prophet VS, and enabled a dynamic mix of up to four separate ROM sample-playback sounds either using a joystick controller, or stored as a 2D controller timeline.
  
  
• Wave-sequencing takes ROM-playback of samples, and allows the samples to be cross-faded together in a time sequence. This provides sounds with varying timbre, or a rhythmic character.

The 'Vector' instrument rack does not use a dedicated synthesiser, instead it uses the Simpler sample replay instruments, and puts them into time-sequences by using a series of built-in 'Note Length' MIDI processors to produce the timed note triggers, and it uses the ability to map parameters deep inside an instrument rack to be controlled from a simple top-level set of controllers. Having spent many a happy hour creating wave sequences, I was intrigued to discover that the process is very similar in the original hardware and this modern virtual form.

In fact, the virtual form might even be faster for making sequences, and it has the added bonus that the wave sequencing is not fixed, and can be edited with all of the MIDI and audio processing, plus all the instrument rack features like zones, velocity switching etc., plus the samples are no longer locked in a Korg ROM!

Being able to make and edit a synthesis technique by bolting together simple processors and instruments is a wonderful thing! For me, it is more satifying than solving a puzzle like the thousands inside Lumen... but it takes rather more time, and so far, isn't as portable!

Obscure Wipeout HD Locations Number 2

I've always thought that the interesting stuff is at the edges and the limits. When programming synthesizers, I explore extreme scalings, huge transpositions, rapid envelopes, tiny granules of waves and anything else that is a direct consequence of the necessary constraints. Sometimes you get really amazing sounds, whilst at other times you merely find out why the limits were set at that point!

For video games, the scope for moving outside of the expected path has increased as the complexity of games has increased. A game like Noughts and Crosses has only a few possible moves (and optimum playing leads to a draw...). Pacman has more moves, but has no unexplored corners - the world is tightly controlled. Modern games, where 3D models move according to physics engines on 3D surfaces, use imperfect collision algorithms to try and make sure that the models do not fall through the surface. And they do fail. I've experienced the alarmingly disconcerting experience of having Lara Croft fall through an edge - and she continued to fall, down and down into nothing, until I reset the console.

Finding these hidden 'exploits', the places where it is possible to get outside of the playing space, is rather like an extra facet of the game. In the future, I would not be surprised at all to find that game designers will increasingly build in support for these 'not the game we intended' activities - Criterion Games' Burnout Paradise is one notable example of a game where player inventiveness has influenced the ongoing development of new gameplay modes. After all, picking up the ball and running with it is against the rules in soccer/football, but is fine in Rugby football!

And so to the second 'Where was this screenshot taken?' challenge (Here's the first!). As before, the screenshot is from the current PS3 Wipeout HD game, and all that the reader has to do is identify the track and the location around the track.

Where is this Wipeout HD screenshot taken from?

As always, there is no prize for solving this 'not a competition at all'. Other than a certain amount of satisfaction, that is!

Adjectives and inventions

The fame from being the first to do something drives many people to great achievements. History and hindsight are increasingly the tools that are needed in order to understand the often complex web of incremental inventions that lead to a major new technology. The internet is a good example of something which was the result of the effort of a number of people over many years, each working on different parts: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's definition of the 'Internet Protocol', or Tim Berners-Lee's 'World Wide Web, are just two of these parts. The idea of putting data into packets, and then switching these packets around a network so that they could utilise different routes through the network, and so avoid congestion, is another of these parts, but not many people know the name behind this. To find out, visit this page.

I'm also fascinated by what I think of as the 'adjective explosion' that accompanies inventions. For example, the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air, controlled, photographed flight seems to have been made by the Wright Brothers in 1903. The adjectives used: 'manned, powered, heavier-than-air, controlled and photographed' are significant here, because it seems that others had flown first, but with less adjectives. For example, in 1890 Clément Ader reportedly flew for 50 m in a bat-winged monoplane that he designed and built - in the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight. Note that 'control' and 'photographs' are not mentioned. There are also photographs of Otto Lilienthal's flights in the 1890s, but he used gliders, and so lacked the 'powered' adjective.

It seems that the more you try to discover the reality behind the simple lists of inventors or 'firsts', then the more you uncover uncertainty. For example, it seems that Alexander Graham Bell was the first person to 'patent' the telephone, although even the story of the obtaining of the patent is far from straight-forward - and certainly not the stuff of a 'TV Quiz show' answer. The electric light bulb seems to have been independently invented more or less simultaneously by two people in two different places, and I'm sure there are long sequences of adjectives to describe those inventions too!

A Question of Sides...

Yesterday's thinking about preconceptions of 3D reminded me of something that I was shown as a child, and which I now know to be a classic puzzle. But armed with 3D thinking, then there's a couple of wrinkles that I'd like to add to the canon...

The premise is simple enough. There are three houses, and three utility suppliers: Electricity, Gas and Water. All you have to do is connect the three houses to each of the utilities, with the one constraint being that you cannot have any of the utility supplies crossing over another - some obscure local bye-law or something is usually part of the patter at this point. The diagram that accompanies the problem is straight-forward:

The start position

People often try connecting one utility to all three houses, and then the second utility, and then the third, two of which are normally easy, but the third is blocked by a previous connection. Back-tracking and re-routing only results in the same blocking, and persistence or ingenuity are no help in finding a solution.

Only the water connection to the middle house to go...

Actually, there isn't a solution, and the mathematics behind it is very well understood, and was neatly captured by Euler in a formula that describes the properties of 'planar graphs' and 'non-planar graphs', of which this is an example. It actually boils down to a planar graph being a collection of points and lines connecting them that can be drawn on a surface without any cross-overs, whilst a non-planar graph is one where you can't. The three houses problem is non-planar, and so can't be solved on a flat surface. Of course, now that you know that you can try to solve it on other surfaces, and a doughnut-shape (or, more formally, a torus) is one example of a surface on which you can solve it.

But one surface which most people forget about is the other side of the piece of paper on which this problem is normally drawn. By using the other side of the piece of paper, it is also possible to solve it. However, one of the consequences of technology is that we have new ways of representing things, and if you draw the diagram on a screen, then an interesting thing happens - you can't use the other side, because:

'Unlike paper, screens don't have an 'other' side.'

Which made me sit down and think hard, because I'd never thought about it before. Screens are single sided, rather like a möebius strip.

If you want to know more about the history and the maths behind this puzzle, then there's an excellent web-page here.

3D or 2D?

I've been using a popular example of slide presentation software for many years, and I've learned many ways to use it efficiently to get quick diagrams that convey ideas to people. But today I learned something that removed some of my confidence.

It all happened innocently enough. A colleague asked me if I could help with an urgent task by producing a diagram. Please note that this was because of my mere competence rather than any amazing talent that I have. The description of what was need went along the lines of: '...and you have a series of choices, and can take any choice at each stage...' and I was doing what my head does automatically at this point: visualising it.

But here's the problem - I was thinking about it in 3D, and the diagram I had in my head was perfect for expressing the concept, except that when I tried to draw it using the 2D slide presentation software I quickly realised that I couldn't re-produce what was in my head on the screen - at least not in a reasonable time-scale, and not without enormous efforts to do the 3D transforms manually by drawing line segments by hand.

It suddenly struck me that the 2D software was perfectly okay for just about all everyday diagram tasks, except those where I came up with a 3D mental picture, and couldn't find a 2D alternative. At a pivotal moment like this bloggers are supposed to have a neat analogy immediately to hand, something like: 'It is like the climactic space-ship fight sequence between Khan and Kirk in The Wrath of Khan, where Kirk and crew realize that Khan is thinking in 2D instead of 3D, and that this gives them an advantage because they aren't tied to the idea that there is any direction called 'up' in space.' Oh, I seem to have found a suitable quote!

To illustrate just how hard it is to avoid thinking in 3D, look at the picture below:


Did you see two shapes: a square and a strange four-sided kite shape? Or did you see a square, and another square, turned and twisted around in 3D space, and with the top left corner closest to you? Be honest! Now that I've told you you will see a kite, although trying to draw this in 2D is hard, and I cheated by using 3D transforms!

I'm now waiting/looking for a neat presentation slide software that lets me work in 3D. Something very different from a 3D modelling or rendering tool: a 3D diagram maker. I've never seen one. have you?

Synthesizer cycles

History repeats itself - but with variations. Long ago, the first analogue monosynth was constructed. Soon there were others, and then many others. Then the analogue polysynth arrived and soon there were lots of them too (and almost all of them were ever so slightly out of tune!). Then MIDI ushered in the digital age and with it came FM, and soon there were lots of digital synths, and many FM synths too. Some digital synthesizers acquired a sequencer and became workstations, and soon there were many of them, all the same but all slightly different. (and if they were out of tune, it was now deliberate!)

Then the sequencer swallowed the mixer, the effects unit, and even the synthesizer and the Digital Audio Workstation was born: 'DAW', as Homer Simpson seems to be always saying, although his pioneering work in electronic music has never featured in any of the episodes that I've seen. DAWs had little bits of flexibility called plug-ins, and soon, there were lots of them too, and they did lots of things, and one of them was synthesis...

The result of this 'history of synthesis in about 100 words' is that we have a hi-tech world where there are many software synthesizer plug-ins: some are recreations of classic noteworthy instruments, some are improved variations on ideas that didn't work very well in an analogue world, and some are relatively new and reasonably novel. Whenever there are many examples of something, things seem to conspire to remove them, and this seems to be happening now. Some manufacturers/programmers are now making 'players' that combine several synthesis techniques together so that instead of selling you several different synthesizers, they sell you just one player that can use any of the techniques, thus gaining flexibility AND locking you into their player for playing their sound sets.

History says that this approach will work for a while, but them someone will have the idea of making a player that has several synthesis techniques built in, and which can read the sound sets from several manufacturers. Someone may even produce a standard that formalizes this inter-working, and we jump back to a single player but lots of sound sets. And so on, saw-toothing our way from one to some to many and back to one, over and over again.

But whereas people tend not to learn the lessons of history, hi-tech seems to be different. One thing which has marked out all of the digital generations of synthesizers has been that the previous generations have been included, which is why, for example, virtual analogue is now used in many non-analogue purist applications, or why FM keeps coming back into fashion. So the future would seem to be one where the classic sounds will not fade away because the instruments that made them no longer exist, but instead, they will keep being re-incorporated into the latest technology. So here's my prediction:

"The equipment may falter, but the sounds will live on."

Remember me in 30 years time and see if this is still true.

James May's Big Ideas

You know those really good programmes that you only find out about when they have finished, and it is too late to use the online catchup services? (which vary from 7 days to a month or more, depending on the broadcaster, and which may be the subject of a future blog entry)

Well, there's another one currently 'happening', where I'm using the word 'happening' in that 'super special event' mode that comes from the 1960s. What's even more amazing, it is the second such series, so if you missed the first one, then you have twice as much catching up to do!

The series is, of course (which is the obligatory 'put down' that just has to be used in this type of sentence), 'James May's Big Ideas', where the third member of the Top Gear presenter team goes out and gets hands-on with technology. This all-too-short series of one-hour programmes is thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in hi-tech.

The first programme in this vein that caught my attention was 'James May's 20th Century', which was shown as several two half-hour programmes back-to-back on BBC2, and which was immediately followed by a repeat of the whole series. TV scheduling as an art-form is completely beyond me, I'm afraid...

But back to the plot of 'Big Ideas', although there isn't much plot to it! Basically James just shows you all manner of obscure and unusual hi-tech machines and gadgets but whenever possible, gets involved in driving, piloting, controlling, flying, or some other action verb associated with the machine, gadget, etc. Power geekery on steroids, if you will.

And I will! Sunday nights are now marked big and bold in my calendar.