WEB SITE OF THE MONTH

If you want to stay up on the latest versions of your software, VersionTracker (www.versiontracker.com) can help. Just select an operating system and look for your favorite programs. The systems covered in the site include Mac OS and OS X, Windows, and Palm OS. If you're migrating from an earlier Mac OS to OS X, VersionTracker is almost indispensable as software companies race to get compatible applications to market.

The left side of each system's page shows categories such as Business, Games, and Word Processing. Select a category to view a list of applications and the most recent version available, along with the file size, a brief description of the program, and licensing information (for example, whether the program is freeware, shareware, or simply an update).

Version Tracker also provides a fee-based service, TechTracker Pro, to keep you up to date. The $49.95 fee gets you a personalized page on VersionTracker.com that tracks updates to the programs you use and notifies you when they become available. The fee lets you track programs on as many as three computers.

DOTDOTDOT.COM

OpenMusicProject (www.openmusicproject.net) is a new site designed to give recording artists a place to collaborate over the Internet. What's interesting about this particular site is that older versions of the collaborative work remain on the site, so a full history of each piece is available. Only the user who posted the particular version of a piece can delete it. The OpenMusicProject's creator, David Schmidt, calls this nondestructive collaboration. The site favors Propellerhead's Reason because the commonality of the sound libraries keeps the native files small. However, you can upload projects created in any application. You'll need Macromedia Flash 5 to take full advantage of Open Music Project.… The practicalities of online collaboration bring to bear a tangle of issues regarding intellectual property rights, ownership, and the electronic dissemination of art works. The EFF Open Audio License, created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/eff_oal.html), is one response to the needs of creators of new-media works. In the words of the EFF, the Open Audio License “allows musicians to collaborate in creating a pool of ‘open audio’ that can be freely modified, exchanged, and utilized in new ways.” Information about the license and how to use it is available at the EFF Web site.… Details about the first three Mellotron symposia are available from Ken Leonard's Mellotron Symposia Web site (www.kleonard.com/mellotron), which is dedicated to the venerable tape-replay instrument. The site includes troubleshooting tips to help when your tapes stick or hang up, as well as photos and details of the ultrarare dual-manual Chamberlin Music Master. Leonard notes that Tom Waits, who has used the Mellotron on recent recordings, is a big proponent of the instrument.

WEBCAST

For interactive fun on the Web, surf to the Piano Graphique (Graphic Piano in English) (www.pianographique.com). Developed by Jean-Luc Lamarque, the bilingual (English and French) site features five audio/visual “pianos” that you play from your computer keyboard.

To run Graphic Piano, choose one of the five pianos and wait for the sounds to load. Each key is assigned a sound or an image. As the keyboard loads, you are given hints about where particular elements reside on the keyboard (for example, rhythm tracks on the upper row of keys, or vibraphone samples on the lower row). Hit the Spacebar to begin a new piece, or hit the Tab key to return to the contents page.

The five pianos vary in design and playability. Angular Entropy (available in lo- and hi-fi versions) features experimental drum 'n' bass audio elements with abstract visuals. This piano lets you choose sound and animation with the letters, zoom in with the arrow keys, and change colors with the number pad. Compulsion is a jazz-based collection with swinging rhythm loops on the upper keys, solo guitar fills on the middle keys, and percussion and vibraphone licks on the lower keys. This piano also allows you to assemble the visual elements into an evocative record jacket by pressing E, O, H, or Z.

Rude Boy offers hip-hop-like instrumentals featuring a collection of sultry grooves, nasty scratches, and vocal effects. Graffiti textures can be created wherever your mouse is placed.

Lov'techno is full of electronically generated beats, vocoded voices, and repeating samples. This piano offers the most fun visually because the graphics continue to move after you've played them. Cargo has a global focus and contains more effects than the other pianos. At times, the resulting sound is reminiscent of works by the Orb or Banco de Gaia.

Graphic Pianos are also being created for mainstream music sites. My favorite example is a solely graphic piano that combines Beatles images over the song “Love Me Do” (www.thebeatles.com/lovemedo/treatment). To use Graphic Piano, you will need the Macromedia Shockwave plug-in.

DOWNLOAD OF THE MONTH

Developed in Spain by Sergi Jorda and Toni Aguilar, Faust Music On Line (www.iua.upf.es/~sergi/FMOL) is a freeware program for Windows that can be used for collaborative music making. FMOL was originally created to let musicians around the world to contribute musical phrases and short compositions to a 1998 production of Goethe's Faust by the Catalan experimental-theatre group La Fura dels Baus in Barcelona. Since then, the program has developed into a complete performance instrument with two alternative graphic user interfaces, one for Internet use and one for standalone software synthesis.

When used for Internet-based collaborations, players create and share FMOL score files. An FMOL file can describe musical phrases or complete compositions. The program can transfer its files between sites as well as render the scores into audio. In performance, users can create new scores or modify existing scores by adding new tracks or by adding audio processing to existing tracks. The database of score files is maintained in the form of a tree rather than a simple list. The database keeps track of the relationships between scores, some of which may be variations on earlier submissions.

The current FMOL synthesizer engine supports eight real-time 16-bit stereo audio channels at a 22 kHz sampling rate. Each channel consists of a generator that can play a waveform or sample, and three processor stages (filters, reverbs, resonators, and the like). Each composer chooses the channels' contents from more than 100 synthesis methods, algorithms, or variations.

The synthesis engine can be played externally using MIDI, or with one of the two available graphic interfaces, Bamboo or Medusa. Bamboo provides a more complete and complex interface, presenting each channel on the screen as a vibrating string that can be plucked by the mouse, with patch options editable in real time using the computer keyboard. Medusa is a looser gestural interface that tends to create thick sounds modulated by mouse movements and complex, mandala-like screen graphics. Using FMOL requires, at minimum, a Pentium/200 MHz with any 16-bit, DirectX-compatible multimedia sound card.
— Tim Perkis

WEB APP

A number of universal file formats are under development that will allow musicians to exchange music over the Internet more easily. In the field of notated music, the most exciting one is MusicXML. Developed by Michael Good at Recordare (www.musicxml.org), MusicXML utilizes the widely accepted tools of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and was created as a universal translator for symbolic representations of music.

Unlike typographically oriented markup languages, such as HTML, XML focuses on the content of a page, making it well suited for use with notated music. At this stage in its development, MusicXML allows you to translate musical documents scanned using the Visiv SharpEye Music Reader (www.visiv.co.uk) into Finale (version 2000 or later) files (www.codamusic.com). “Up to this point,” explains Good, “musical scores have been distributed online either as PDF files or in a proprietary file format. MusicXML gives you a way to move scores easily between different computer applications.”

MusicXML was designed to be an “adequate” (Recodare's description) interchange format — neither too specific nor too general — so that it could easily be implemented into commercial software. For example, the Standard Music Description Language (SMDL; see the September 2001 “Web Page”) was too generalized as a music-description protocol and ultimately proved too complicated for widespread use. On the other hand, the Notation Interchange File Format (NIFF; see the August 2001 “Web Page”) only represents music graphically and is too limited for most uses.

Future additions to MusicXML will include the ability to handle tablature and percussion notation, and the support of analysis and database applications. It's expected to be in development for several more years, but when analysis and database support become available, users will be able to sort MusicXML documents and to search for symbolic content. For more information about MusicXML and other computer-related music-notation developments, take a look at The Virtual Score (MIT Press), edited by Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field (see “What's New,” p. 20, for details).

BAND ON THE WEB

Negativland (www.negativland.com) is more than just a band: it's an experimental art group, in the style of the Dadaists and Fluxus artists, whose work attacks the boundaries of art, taste, and intellectual property rights, as well as the limits of the law.

After years of operating on the fringes of commercial music, Negativland gained worldwide notoriety in 1991 with its single “U2,” which featured an unusually profane diatribe by radio host Casey Kasem as (the band) U2's hit “Where the Streets Have No Name” played in the background. The resulting legal proceedings were later detailed by the band in the book Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2.

Negativland reuses the detritus of pop culture to create audio and visual works, including CDs, books, and now its Web site (aka NegativWorldWideWebland). Negativland's site is one of the best band sites you'll come across: it's attractive, well designed, thematically consistent, and, most importantly, packed with compelling content. For example, the site features a collection of articles about intellectual property issues. It also covers the band's “Over the Edge Radio,” fostering the “democratic principles” of phone-in radio access during a completely free-form live radio program.

NegativWorldWideWebland's other goodies include Museit, a portable, wireless media device that works with the next wave of file sharing networks and promises “All music on Earth will be free”; and details about the recently discovered primary color, Squant. Fact, fiction, entertainment, or prank? You be the judge.

Negativland's own recordings are available at the site's online store, NegativMailOrderland. You may also order selected works from other artists who share Negativeland's penchant for cultural appropriation, such as plunderphonicist John Oswald and sample-based composer-improviser Bob Ostertag.