O'Reilly Digital Media

The influence of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s thinking on flow continues to spread. Partly, no doubt, because learning to say his name (”Me-high Chick-sent-me-high”) is a flow experience in itself: just the right amount of challenge, and a satisfying experience once it’s accomplished.

I joined a then-growing list of writers on the topic in late 2004, relating an effort at Project BarBQ to apply the principles of flow to musical instrument design, and since then have returned to it now and then, including via the still-in-beta Flow Awards.

Now comes Jim Ramsey, lead designer of Movable Type blogging software, applying flow-oriented thinking to website design (and by extension many forms of design), in a useful and thought-provoking post at A List Apart.

Ramsey identifies 4 principles:

1. Set clear goals
2. Provide immediate feedback
3. Maximize efficiency
4. Allow for discovery

One example, under the heading “Maximize efficiency”:

Google Reader has several features that make it feel fast and effortless. Perhaps the best example is the “endless scroll.” It eliminates the need for pagination by fetching new articles as you scroll down the page so that you can read all the articles in a tag or feed without ever clicking to go to a new page. The user never has to disrupt their reading by clicking a link to the next page.

Another way that Google Reader ensures efficiency is through the email feature which, when clicked, appears directly below the article and allows you to send a story to a friend without losing your place. Google avoids causing a disruption in flow by reducing the mental cost of taking an action, thereby promoting more engaged use of the site.

The D50’s electret condenser microphones swivel between 90° and 120° orientations to capture normal and wide stereo. (Click to enlarge.)

If you’re looking for the ultimate handheld stereo audio recorder, you’ll probably want to check out the Sony PCM-D1. Scott Bourne reviewed it for us last year and called it “nearly perfect.” Alas, perfection in this case comes with a $1,995 list price.

Happily for the rest of us, Sony just unveiled a more affordable version — the PCM-D50. For around a quarter of the price, this little guy has some high-end features, like aluminum casing, adjustable mics, 4GB of onboard memory (expandable with Memory Sticks), Hi-Speed USB transfer, discrete circuit boards for audio and power, and a pre-record buffer that continuously captures the five seconds before you hit the Record button. It also runs on standard AA batteries instead of those annoying proprietary types.

Mark Nelson, whose exhaustive yet entertaining reviews of five previous handheld digital recorders grace the O’Reilly Digital Media site, just got his D50 review unit. When he started his last review, we asked what features you especially wanted us to check out, and got such a great batch of suggestions that the resulting article became a true community achievement.

So let’s try it again: Let us know in the comment section below what you’d like to learn about the new Sony PCM-D50 recorder.

With 486 comments at last count, our discussion on the Zoom H2 handheld surround recorder is teeming with questions and tips. One of the latest struck me, because I’d been wondering about this myself. Reader Lee Wong wrote:

Help! Does anyone have a schematic they can share for making a really small, portable preamp so I can stick my Soundman OKM II mics in to the H2?

Within hours, reader Gershon responded with this link to reader Trevor Marshall’s home-built preamp. Here’s a photo of the outside; the inside looks nothing like I expected, given the promise of high fidelity. (I won’t ruin the surprise; click the photo below to see it.)

Trevor Marshall’s DIY microphone preamp for the Zoom H2 reportedly provides much better quality.

Don’t miss our extensive review of the Zoom H2 and follow-up article on turning its recordings into surround-sound DVDs.

After 8 years, several hard drive upgrades, and a great lifetime of service, my daughter made our Series 1 TiVo go boom the other day. She knocked over the TV, the TiVo, and our DVD player/recorder. In the end, daughter was fine (albeit in big trouble), the HDTV also survived without a problem. The antennas on both the TiVo and DVD player ended up at about 45-degree angles off where they should be. Within hours, the TiVo reception had degraded to unwatchable.

A quick google turned up this TV Squad post that mentioned a Series 1 upgrade to HDTV TiVo for $500–$300 for the unit, $200 to transfer the lifetime service. I pulled out my long-suffering Visa card and ante’ed up.

In theory, this offer goes until November 8th. In reality, TiVo offers this kind of upgrade pretty regularly. Last year, transferring service would have cost me almost $1000. This year, it’s half the price. And next year, I expect the price to drop further.

What’s more, given the ready availability of really inexpensive tuners and scheduling systems like Elgato’s EyeTV, TiVo has to fight back not only with their great interface, beautiful remote, and vaunted reliability, but also with price.

George “the Fat Man” Sanger with his hand-tuned 1958 Rolls-Royce. He learned auto repair keeping it going; at one point he had almost enough tools and spare parts in the trunk to build another engine.

I’m just back from my 14^th trip to Texas to participate in one of the Fat Man’s amazing digital media conferences. This one was called Project Horseshoe, and dedicated to “solving game design’s toughest problems.” (That’s my back in the photo on the site; the image was from last year’s event, in which I ran a brainstorming group tasked with exploring how — and if — video games could become artistically “legitimate.”)

Videogame journalist Evan Van Zelfden was covering this year’s event, and just published this teaser. In the comments on that article, though, was a link to an earlier article about the Fat Man’s game music, and I found it mighty interesting reading.

Look for more detail from Evan over the next week, and the full reports from all four of this year’s brainstorming groups next month. If history holds, this improbable but beloved conference will have far-reaching results.

We were impressed with Edirol’s R-09 handheld digital recorder when we reviewed it, and thanks to a free firmware update, it just got better. OS 1.30 adds support for 8GB SDHC memory cards, which by my quick calculation should boost the recording capacity to eight hours in 24-bit, 44.1kHz WAV format or more than 132 hours in 128kbps MP3.

The new firmware also adds a splitting function that lets you start a new file with a single button press while recording. That could make it easier to zoom in on specific parts of an interview or concert later.

In other upgrade news, Edirol has released a windscreen for the R-09, addressing one of the main shortcomings we found in our review.

Instead of telling people what you are doing, show them!

I just got a call from a blind man who liked the sound of my podcast. He asked how he could get started podcasting. Would it require expensive equipment? I told him that all I used was a USB mic and some software. (In my case, Ableton Live, BIAS Peak, and Izotope Ozone, but there are plenty of free options as well.) The secret to my sound, I told him, was upgrading the mic, learning the software, and speaking with enthusiasm.

To demonstrate, I referred him to this before-and-after example (516KB MP3), contrasting my voice in the first episode and the tenth. The difference is enormous.

Then I offered to send him links to podcasting tutorials I’d found especially helpful. But when he told me that he uses a screen reader to browse websites, I started to wonder how helpful this background would be. Even if he could make sense of the pages (try clicking the “Listen” link above and closing your eyes), how would he be able to run a graphic waveform editor? I spend many hours cleaning up my recordings, often on a syllable-by-syllable level.

If you know of audio-editing software or techniques that are friendly to disabled people, please leave a link below. In the meantime, here are some of the podcasting tips I assembled for my listener.

Just in time for annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, I got this disturbing note from someone who read my “How to Stop Music Piracy” blog:

I recently found an area manager of a store selling illegally produced CDs, mostly dance club mixes by Hex Hector and people like that. He offered ten songs per CD. He makes a lots of money selling these illegally copied CDs. I told him he should not be selling CDs that are copies. He laughed and said no one cares. He had a catalog of 100s of CDs that he offered customers. Is there anywhere to report this or is it true that no one cares?

I replied, “Wow. That’s sad. You might try contacting your Better Business Bureau or local Consumer Action office. I suppose the RIAA would be interested too, as well as the local police.”

According to my correspondent, here’s what happened next:

Fourteen minutes into last week’s Digital Media Insider podcast, "Secrets of the Demo Gods," I asked longtime reviewer Mark Nelson if any recent music-making gear had surprised him.

Mark started praising the M-Audio Black Box, a digital guitar effect co-designed by Roger Linn, the drum-machine pioneer (and a fine guitarist himself). "It was just…inspiring. Amazing stuff would happen," Mark enthused.

Coincidentally, Roger just wrote to say his company is now shipping Version 3 of the Black Box’s big brother, the AdrenaLinn. In case you missed our Black Box review, the AdrenaLinn crosses a drum machine with a guitar-amp simulator and "beat-synched multieffects." Plug in a guitar (or other electrified instrument) and the AdrenaLinn makes it groove by applying rhythmic processing that syncs to the song’s tempo.

This is a Rhino3D model, but the real AdrenaLinn III is now shipping. Click the image for background and bigger graphics.

According to Linn, Version III "a pretty significant step up from AdrenaLinn II." It improves the quality of the amp models and drum sounds; adds stereo reverb, compression, a tuner, new modulation effects, and more MIDI control; and much more. What I find especially interesting in these days of disposable products is how easy the company has made it to upgrade the AdrenaLinn. For $99, it will send you an upgrade kit containing the chips, a chip-puller tool, a new faceplate, and step-by-step photographic instructions. A new AdrenaLinn III costs about $375.

And what of the Black Box? While editing Mark’s review, I was seriously tempted to buy one myself, even though I’m not a guitarist. With this upgrade, the AdrenaLinn pulls further ahead in tweakability, but the two boxes still target different audiences. You can read a comparison on Roger’s site.

For more on the joys of tempo-synced effects, see my article "Sync and Grow Rich" and podcast "(((Echo)))."

Seasoned recording engineers often audition their mixes in mono to check for phasing problems that might occur on the mono speakers in TVs and PA systems. Collapsing a stereo signal to mono also gives you another perspective on how well sounds are blending. But because I run audio straight out of my computer into powered speakers or headphones, I’ve never had an easy way to monitor in mono.

That shortcoming became more annoying when I started recording telephone interviews for the Digital Media Insider podcast. I like to edit audio in BIAS Peak, so to gain access to both sides of the conversation, I usually created a stereo audio file containing my voice on the left channel and the interviewee’s on the right. Those “dual-mono” files are easier to edit, but listening to them without going crazy required an absurd pile of adapters.

While working on a recent episode, I stumbled on a simple (and free) solution: I open the MDA Combo or Image plug-in and set it as follows:

These settings pan the left and right sides of a stereo file to the center. You’d need to run only one of these plug-ins at a time, of course, so I’ve bypassed Combo here.

The MDA plug-ins run on Mac and Windows in both AU and VST format. I also found an even simpler AU/VST plug-in called Monomaker from DestroyFX. At last, I can return the ridiculous adapter chain to the parts box!

Have you stumbled across unexpectedly helpful plug-ins too? Please leave a link.

O’Reilly’s Linux Dev Center just published a fairly technical discussion of how the various Linux audio subsystems work.

For those who just want to boot up and play, we’ve run several Linux audio articles, including:

• Resurrect Your Old PC for Music—with Linux
• Review: Fervent Software Studio-to-Go
• Inside a Luxury Synth: Creating the Linux-Powered Korg OASYS
• Inside Pandora: Web Radio That Listens to You

Are you using Linux for audio? Let us know what you’d like to read about.

This is cool: Simply adding &loop=1 to a YouTube <embed> tag makes the video loop forever. Check it out with this short clip of a Pong-playing watch from Make magazine. (Be sure to click the small play button below the video, not the big one in the center.)

Despite just writing an article on hacking embedded videos, I never thought to mess with the YouTube embedding tags, which are right out in the open.

Jake Luddington, on whose excellent blog I first saw this trick, also explains how to make an embedded YouTube video play automatically. Both his techniques involve removing the <object> tag and modifying the <embed> tag. I’m not sure if there’s any downside to that besides losing XHTML compliance.

A sculptor I know likes to say, “Art is a hammer knocking at your eyeballs.” Architect Robert Venturi described one of his approaches as “contradiction juxtaposed.”

Amy X Neuburg, here live at EXIT Theatre, juxtaposes fiery operatic vocals with electronic audio loops. (Photo by Rob Thomas)

Much successful art, it seems to me, takes concepts—or symbols of concepts—and squishes them together so our brains are provoked into making new connections. The art, or hammer-like impact, derives from the way those symbols are juxtaposed, the artist’s skill in adjusting contrasts—dark vs. light, repetition vs. surprise, fast vs. slow, sharp vs. blurry, realistic vs. distorted. . . .

There’s a whole chapter in my book called “Distortion is Art,” inspired by sound designer Gary Rydstrom’s advice to his staff while working on the tornado movie Twister. I was particularly intrigued by the tension between the computer’s power to generate perfect copies with the artist’s instinct to distort and juxtapose.

I was thinking about that after reading an artist’s reaction to my latest podcast, “Seize the Rhythm,” which was about hearing the rhythms all around us and blending them into songs. The sigh of tires on the pavement, the stuttering voice of a nervous caller on an answering machine…there are so many patterns out there to explore.

But what this artist said made me realize that a big part of art is the original vision:

The California Democratic Party held its annual convention in San Diego April 27-29, and I was there blogging, along with hundreds of other traditional and web-based reporters. Here are some observations.

<- First, a thought about this picture: No matter how much technology finds its way into campaigns and campaign coverage, politics is ultimately about touch. This shot is from a rally of Barack Obama supporters just before Obama went into the main hall to address the 2,000-plus attendees. Notice the hand wrapped around Obama’s wrist, and the other one hovering over his head. Also: the fists in the foreground, expressing solidarity, and the echo of the fist in the background, holding up a cell phone camera. And meanwhile a big bodyguard tries to make sure all these attempts to connect with the candidate don’t get out of hand. On to more practical matters…

I made up this little chart to keep track of the various makers of modular/patchable analog synths (including modules,kits, PCBs and virtual synths) outside America, especially here in Australia. Pin matrixes are definitely a British/Australian phenomenon.

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O’Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the “listen” link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher’s recent blog about the Game Developers Conference:

I love the Game Developer’s Conference! the lights, the cameras, the action, all the best and brightest coming together for meets and greets and foods and drinks, it’s exciting, exhilirating, and completely exhausting!

(Robot photo by AZAdam.)

I captured the synth’s output with Ambrosia Wiretap, imported it into Ableton Live, and cooked up the following ditty:

In the intro to my last podcast, I listed six popular songs that use the notorious E-mu Emulator II shakuhachi sound. For fun, here are two I couldn’t fit into the show itself.

• Tangerine Dream: Yellowstone Park (540KB MP3)
• Sade: Stronger Than Pride (432KB MP3)

Coincidentally, I came across a bucket of real shakuhachis last week at a camping lodge. As you can see in the photo composite above, the shakuhachi is a Japanese vertical flute made of bamboo. It’s also fiendishly difficult to play. When I studied it in Japan, one of the first things my teacher told me was the ancient proverb, “You have to shake your head for three years before you can play shakuhachi.”

Indeed, I couldn’t even get a sound out of one of the flutes in the bucket. With another, though, I quickly produced that amazing, soulful, wind-through-the-pines sound that enamored so many Western musicians when it came out in digital form. It’s just funny so many musicians adopted it as a signature sound.

In today’s O’Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. “It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had,” Jochen told me.

Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I’ve embedded it here for convenience. Even in cruddy YouTube quality, the performance shines.

Notice how Lewis plays pitch sweeps with the instrument’s D-Beam infrared controller about two minutes in and again at the end. But what really impressed me was another type of gestural control. As Peter Drescher said in our last Digital Media Insider podcast, vocoders offer an exceptionally expressive interface to technology:

I just love the whole concept of using the formants of my voice to control a synthesized waveform. Sound designers are always complaining about the clumsiness of digital audio interfaces, and with good reason. I have never used a program that gives me the kind of emotional control over a sound that musical instruments do. But the vocoder lets me control a sound with by far the most expressive instrument of all.

Jochen has several other YouTube music links in the article; I’m heading over to explore them right now.

Over on O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony blog, 3D audio developer Keith Weiner describes what happened when select Second Life players got hold of his positional audio technology: They used it to perform live music for each other.

I’ve been involved in developing this technology for almost 10 years. I know intimately its architecture and components. I worked through the process of integrating it into Second Life. But on that virtual beach in this online virtual world, I forgot all this.

Because of the guitar.

We often hear that the future of music is in touring, as it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sell CDs. It will be interesting to see if artists are able to support themselves through virtual tours. Making online concerts and open-mic sessions more immersive is a fascinating first step.

(Image Copyright 2007, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

The description in the press release for this gadget was so bizarre that I immediately requested photos. Can you guess what it is?

Hint: The SRS button “creates a wide and full sound stage with deep rich bass and adds a definition control for realistic clarity and significantly enhanced sound quality.”

Hint 2: Here’s another photo, showing accessories:

Podcasting Hacks author Jack Herrington turned me on to a bunch of excellent interview podcasts that I’ve been following ever since. One show in particular, Morning Stories, has a lovely informal feel, and part of the secret is the clever recording technique host Tony Kahn uses. Instead of jabbing a giant mic in the interviewee’s face or forcing him to hunch over one in a studio, Kahn uses a tiny lavaliere mic taped to the brim of a baseball cap.

Morning Stories’ Gary Mott and Tony Kahn record a relaxed conversation at WGBH thanks to their hat mics. Kahn’s initial inspiration was wanting a mic setup that would let him put his feet up.

As Kahn explains in this YouTube video, the hat-mic trick also allows interviewer and interviewee to relax and use body language, producing a more natural conversation.

Podcaster Adam Weiss, whose helpful tip on mic placement I covered recently, lists four more advantages of hat miking on his blog. That prompted me to head over to the Giant Squid Audio Labs site to check out its lavaliere mic selection.

Location, location, location: In this brief online video, podcaster David Adam Weiss demonstrates how to improve your voiceovers dramatically just by tweaking your mic position.

Weiss makes his point with a $65 Giant Squid mic taped to a ballpoint pen, but says it works equally well with the $15 mic he uses for Boston Behind the Scenes.

After watching the Weiss demo, I looked more closely at the technique Australian broadcaster Ken Sparks used with the Rode Podcaster mic. Notice how he too avoids P-pops by talking past the mic rather than right into it:

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.

Recording voiceovers for podcasts can be tricky, because it’s so easy to pick up background noise, slapback echo from your desktop, and room reverberation. Here’s an ingenious solution hacked up by a professional voiceover artist.

Harlan Hogan’s voiceover porta-booth uses a collapsable storage crate lined with acoustic foam to isolate the microphone from its surroundings:

The porta-booth set up in a hotel room. Note the Sennheiser 416 mic with shockmount and pop filter, Edirol UA-25 USB audio interface, and Sony laptop running Adobe Audition.

Folded for travel.

What a brilliant realization: You don’t have to build a vocal booth big enough for both the mic and the performer, just the mic. At the end of the article, which I found clear and entertaining, Hogan describes another kind of vocal booth that you may not realize you already have.

(Via DVguru)

In this week’s Digital Media Insider podcast, “Express Yourself,” I played a bunch of examples recorded with wind controllers, electronic devices that transform the player’s breath into expressive musical gestures. Matt Traum, who contributed the amazing Crumar sawtooth solo, just wrote to remind me about the extensive wind controller FAQ on his site.

Matt Traum on the Steiner EVI.

As a former French horn player who now lives in the push-button world of computers and MIDI keyboards, I’ve been planning to get into wind control myself. Time to haul that BC3 out of the closet and start breathing more life into my music!

The MIDI Solutions Breath Controller interface connects to the Yamaha BC3A breath controller headset (shown smaller than relative size here) to translate your breath pressure into MIDI data.