sonification goes viral?

yesterday, youtube user r2blend posted a video titled MS Paint Interpereted as audio data = Awesome music! it was also posted on soundcloud. already, the soundcloud post has 160k plays, and is now circulating the blogs. (here it is on boingboing.)

r2blend had just discovered the wonder of sonification. of course, sonification is nothing new. i've been experimenting with it for 15 years now! in fact, back in 2009, i wrote part 2 of my databending primer specifically about this topic. (ironically, at the time i submitted the link to boingboing and they never posted about it, but rather than excoriate them for being late to the party, let's just be glad they finally arrived.) if you're at all interested in this topic, i highly recommend you check it out; it's full of detailed information.

if you want to hear some glitch music created using this technique, check out my dissonance is bliss EP from 1999 (available for free download) or my true data 12" (currently only available on vinyl, but i may put it online somewhere now that sonification is hot... in fact maybe i need to start a soundcloud account available for streaming on soundcloud). ¶

just no facts, ma'am

here's a heartwarming AP story (in its entirety) about a local company that is more loyal to its community and to its employees than to its bottom line:

GOSHEN, Ind. -- The owners of a Goshen-based food distributor say they plan to sell the company to its 280 employees rather than risk selling it to a company that might move it.

The Goshen News reports that Becky and Paris Ball-Miller will sell the company to its employees over the next 10 years. The Ball-Millers plan to continue to manage the company during that time.

The Ball-Millers said that to prepare for the change they have hired experts to guide them through the process and to make sure Internal Revenue Service requirements are followed.

The Ball-Millers have owned the company for 15 years. The company also has facilities in Evansville, Grandview and Bloomington

if only more businesses acted like this... why, i think i'd like to support this company! what did you say they were called?

oh, the story doesn't bother to mention the company's name? i guess they didn't figure that detail was very important.

i suppose if you really must know, you could check the goshen news, which identifies the company as troyer foods. you know, if you care about such trifling matters as identifying the subject of your news story. ¶

so, about the bad taste site...

as some of you may have noticed, the bad taste site is down. in fact, it's now been down for an entire month, which is an eternity online. the whole hosting service went down around this time in january, and the guy who runs it out of his basement apparently hasn't had time to do a full restore from backup. for the first week or so after the network went down, it returned dead space, and now every site on the network returns a page about some juggler who calls himself chabuku. of all the content that could be served up... it would be funny if it were happening to someone else.

of course, the bad taste site hosts all three animals within animals albums, as well as the latest few stAllio! albums and a bunch of other audio. thus my magnus opus, a huge smash, has been by-and-large inaccessible for an entire month.

there's no point in offering your music for free if nobody can hear it, so i've temporarily posted a huge smash here on my site. it's free to download, and some have called it my best work, so if you never got a chance to check it out before, you're in luck.

i still believe (perhaps naively) that the bad taste site will eventually return. but i have no idea when that might happen. if it still hasn't been resurrected in a week or two, i'll probably start posting other albums to keep them in circulation. for now, know that the label is not dead, and we are aware of the site being down, but there's not much we can do other than wait it out or switch to a different host, which we hope to avoid. ¶

wired uk stAllio! feature now online

if the weather reports are to be believed, then by this time tomorrow the city will be encased in a block of solid ice. but before indianapolis goes into cryostasis, i should point out that the wired uk feature about me has been posted online, so check it out, share it with your friends, remix it with your ipads, or whatever you kids do with internet articles these days. ¶

inquiring minds don't want to know

obviously i haven't been inspired to do much political blogging lately, and even toyed with the idea of stopping altogether (or at least separating the political stuff into a separate blog), but sometimes these things just fall into your lap:

shorter gary welsh, today: vicious, deranged attack bloggers and liberal media palin-haters are irresponsibly libeling the palin family based on nothing but scurrilous lies printed in the national enquirer. it is an outrage that the left would republish such tabloid trash without even fact-checking it.

verbatim gary welsh, 2008: As I've said before, you can knock the National Enquirer and other tabloids all you want, but when it comes to political scandals, they're usually dead on. They broke Donna Rice/Gary Hart; Jennifer Flowers/Bill Clinton; and Dick Morris and his call girls, to name just a few. ¶

...and we're back

so yeah, the blog was down for about three days, as was the AWIA news page. both are back up now, and expected to stay that way.

when i first purchased animalswithinanimals.com, nearly a decade ago, there was a lot less competition in the domain registry market, and i ended up using network solutions. but years passed, price wars were waged, and by 2011 i could no longer justify paying netsol's rates ($34.99/yr, going down to $15/yr if you renew for 5-10 years). one of my facebook friends suggested 1and1 ($4.99 for the first year and $8.99/yr after), so i decided to make the switch.

for some foolish reason i decided to do this while that wired (uk) article is on the stands, even though my domain wasn't set to expire until march. so naturally this resulted in a DNS error taking down the blogs (while the rest of the site stayed up), and since DNS can take up to 48 hours to propogate, i waited impatiently for two days, expecting the issue to resolve itself. all the while, wired readers were presumably punching in the url in the article only to find a dead page (though at least google had it cached).

on the evening of the third day, i felt enough time had passed to justify contacting 1and1 customer support. although their website brags that you can email them for free using your account control panel, i could find no such feature and in the end resorted to calling their free help line. after listening to several minutes of heavily distorted on-hold music—harsh noise remixes of led zeppelin, the cult, and the who, it would seem—i was eventually told that i would need to contact my web host. despite my suspicion that this was crap, i did so anyway, and sure enough, my web host was able to fix it immediately.

so now we're back, not that my regulars would even have noticed considering how infrequently i post these days. ¶

stAllio! featured in WIRED (UK)

i dropped a couple hints on facebook yesterday, but i might as well stop being coy about it: there's a short feature about me in the latest (feb 2011) issue of wired magazine (UK edition):

they contacted me a couple months back about doing a feature on my advanced databending with wordpad. it turns out they had mentioned me on their website in august, but this is my first mention in the print edition.

the feature is on a two-page spread next to an article about a lumberjack, so they sent me a photo of the lumberjack and had me glitch it in wordpad. i also sent some fairly in-depth answers to their questions... which of course were then condensed into ~300 words, but that's the magazine business for you.

i haven't actually read the piece, since i don't have a copy of the magazine yet, and they haven't posted the article online, though they may in the coming days. (they have posted the spead, as you can see above, but it's too zoomed out to be legible.) my buddy hellocatfood will be sending me a couple copies soon, so i may eventually post the article here if the wired folks never do. ¶

things that bug me about V: the series

tuesday night, ABC aired the second-season premiere of V: the series. like bionic woman, another ABC show from a couple years back, V is a reboot of a campy sf show from decades past... and as with bionic woman, i really wanted to like this show, but its lousy execution makes this difficult.

(coincidentally, at the same time ABC was airing the V premiere, syfy was airing the final episodes of caprica, a show with nearly pitch-perfect execution. it might be interesting to compare these shows in more depth, but that's for another time.)

don't get me wrong: V isn't uniformly terrible—it's had just enough clever twists to keep me watching in the hopes that it will improve. but its flaws are so deeply embedded into the heart of the show that this will probably never happen. let's go over some of them:

the counterterrorism/resistance plot was introduced too early. this one is representative of how problematic the show is from root up. we live in a post-9/11 world, and this is a show about the earth being occupied by alien invaders, so it's natural that the producers would want to explore themes of what it means to be a terrorist, when armed resistance is justified, and so on. (themes that were excellently handled in season 3 of battlestar galactica, i should note.) in fact, i'd be disappointed if V didn't get into those subjects. but there's a right way and a wrong way.

in the original '80s miniseries, the resistance movement forms naturally as the earth's inhabitants start noticing that the alien "visitors" aren't what they claim to be. this was played pretty heavily as a nazi metaphor, down to the visitors wearing red jumpsuits and having a logo that looked suspiciously like a swastika. the producers of new V smartly swap this for a terrorist insurgency metaphor, but in their haste they stupidly introduced this plotline in the pilot episode. in order to make this work in the story, this means that the resistance movement is fully formed even before the aliens arrive on earth! worst of all, we're told that the resistance was initially formed by alien sleeper double agents years earlier. so not only is the insurgency introduced too early, but the human race doesn't even get to start its own resistance movement. apparently the aliens are superior to us in that way, too.

the characters are boring and two-dimensional. even the characters who should be interesting are dull as rocks. an FBI counterterror agent who ends up becoming a terrorist sleeper agent? should be interesting, right? wrong: she's the dullest character on the show. a priest who struggles with his faith as he finds himself being drawn into morally compromising situations? snoozeville! an alien assassin who falls in love with a human and ends up with the resistance? yawn. these characters sound cool on paper, but onscreen they're, well, flat. and don't even get me started on the nondescript terrorist guy.

the sets on the alien ships are laughably bad. has there ever been a show with CG that was so obviously CG? perhaps i should've put "sets" in quotes because i've seen more convincing green screen on late night with conan o'brien. the ship's interiors utterly fail at looking like realistic 3d spaces and instead look like something out of a video game.

everyone calls the aliens "V's". ostensibly the aliens are called "visitors" but everyone—and i mean everyone, even the visitors themselves—calls them V's, every time. who the hell talks like that? in the real world, people would alternate between terms: sometimes saying visitor, occasionally saying V, or occasionally using slang insults or slurs. but there is no slur against the visitors; not even a "those alien scumbags". have none of the writers ever seen alien nation?

the garbage about visitors not having human emotion. this is by far the most laughably absurd aspect of the show: the visitors are concerned about becoming tainted by "human emotions", which they claim not to have. as if emotion were some sort of infection that can spread virally (across species, no less). indeed, those visitors who are shown to be "good" are the ones who've been contaminated by emotion, and the ones who are "evil" have not. there is no gray area.

one reason i'd been anticipating this show was that i was hoping for a more sophisticated take on the visitors. i wanted something akin to the battlestar galactica revamp, where the cylons were depicted as flawed, complex people who struggled with difficult moral issues and sometimes chose the wrong path—in other words, they were very human, despite technically being machines. but not the visitors: they're evil conquerors, and the only ones who have any sort of moral conflict are the ones who've somehow developed emotions after spending too much time with humans. this is human exceptionalism; the worst kind of hocum ("only the human heart will save you!").

(lest you bring up a comparison to dr. spock and the vulcans on star trek, it should be noted that the vulcans aren't incapable of feeling: they actually have deep emotions that they train themselves to suppress. this is a far cry from the visitors, who have supposedly never even been exposed to emotion before coming into contact with humans.)

stupidest of all, the writers don't even think through the logical ramifications of what this would mean. love and affection are clearly shown to be human emotions that the visitors don't innately possess. yet ana, the leader, has a keen enough understanding of the human heart that she manipulates her daughter into starting a relationship with a human boy who's important to the invasion plan. even if ana had studied enough to be aware of this thing called love, how could she understand it well enough to manipulate people to the extent that she does?

and while i'm at it, visitor reproduction makes no sense. at one point, ana decides that she needs an army of soldiers for her invasion plans (why she didn't think of that before reaching earth isn't discussed) so she lays many thousands of soldier eggs. this suggests that visitor sexual reproduction is similar to insects on earth, and ana is the queen. if so, then ana would presumably have many thousands if not millions of direct offspring. yet on the show, other than the soldier eggs, ana is depicted as having only one offspring: a daughter. and though we meet ana's mother in the season 2 premiere, these three are the only visitors who are depicted as being related to each other in any way.

then there's the issue of male fertilization and gestation. if the soldier eggs required fertilization, this is never shown nor discussed onscreen. ana simply lays the eggs in what amounts to a huge pond, and they start to grow. yet ryan, one of the "good" visitors, somehow manages to impregnate a human woman, and the fetus gestates inside her womb. the fact that they shouldn't be able to procreate is portrayed as a big deal on the show, but when you think about it, it becomes even more ludicrous. even ignoring the fact that we're talking about a cold-blooded reptile impregnating a warm-blooded mammal, an egg-laying reptile and a creature that bears live young can't reproduce. even assuming that the human "skins" worn by the visitors are sophisticated enough to have working genitalia, this just does not compute. unless the visitors are somehow capable of both egg-laying and bearing live young, which is ridiculous.

apparently the issue of visitor reproduction will be a theme of upcoming episodes, but i can't imagine how they can come up with a coherent explanation given these discrepancies.

so there you have it. a show with great potential, but so marred by lazy writing and sloppy thinking that it's probably unsalvageable. i'll keep watching, at least for now, but i'm torn between hoping that the show will somehow overcome its flaws and waiting for ABC to put everyone out of their misery by canceling it. ¶

worship the glitch

peter "sleazy" christopherson passed away the other day. he was a founding member of not one, not two, but three pivotal industrial bands (throbbing gristle, psychic tv, and coil) and a member of/collaborator with several others. his work was a major influence on me—coil was one of my favorite bands of all time, and his other projects were up there, too—so i knew i needed to do something to commemorate his passing.

"worship the glitch" was the title of an album by ELpH vs coil (ELpH was a glitch music side project), so it seemed only natural to carry that over into a glitch art context.

this piece is also available on society6. ¶

new stAllio! material!

earlier this year, i got an email from nerdcore rapper/producer th' mole, requesting a remix in my post-mashup style. so i downloaded a couple of his albums—including an advance copy of his brand-new-just-released album superman vs gremlins, and assembled this bad boy:

stAllio! ft. th' mole - a spell to kill dancefloors

th' mole is having a contest related to my remix, where you could win a copy of his new album. (my latest album, of course, is a free download.)

completists and audio collage fans will also want to get their hands on the new 50/50 compilation, curated by jon nelson of some assembly required. it's 50 tracks, each 50 seconds long, and features tracks by the bran flakes, silica-gel, orchid spangiafora, realistic, value village people, and many more! ...not to mention a track by stAllio! ¶

video: stAllio! live at gli.tc/h

a couple weeks back i attended gli.tc/h, a glitch art festival/conference in chicago. i performed saturday night, with improvised video accompaniment by rosa menkman and vade. here's some video of that performace, shot by evan meaney:

advanced wordpad editing explained

so a couple weeks back i mentioned that i was experimenting with a new databending technique that i call advanced wordpad editing. but wtf does that mean, and what is going on in these images?

as i've discussed extensively in the past, when you open a bitmap image in microsoft wordpad and then re-save, it creates a distinctive warping effect i call the wordpad effect. wordpad, thinking the data is inappropriately formatted rich text, tries to "fix" the formatting of the file, corrupting the data in a recognizable (but often surprising) way. but what exactly is going on? pietjepuk666 was the first to solve that puzzle, in the comments:

I've found that Wordpad does at least two things to a binary file; it replaces byte 07 (ascii: BEEP) with a space , and it replaces every lonely 0A or 0D (line feed and carriage return respectively) and also 0B (vertical tab) with the bytes "0A 0D". So the rate of glitching is probably dependent on how dark the picture is, since low bytes like these give dark pixels (i suppose).

this is pretty much right, except in my experience the replacement value is actually 0D 0A, not 0A 0D. (not that it makes much difference here.)

the change from 07 to 20 (space) isn't very noticeable to the eye. it just replaces an almost-totally-black pixel with a slightly-less-black pixel. but every time wordpad replaces a 0A, 0B, or 0D with 0D 0A, it adds one byte to the file. these added bytes are ultimately what causes the wordpad effect—this is why wordpadded images always warp to the right, why the trick breaks fragile formats such as JPG, why darker (but not pitch black) images bend more than lighter ones, and so on.

knowing exactly how the wordpad effect works enables you to take control of the process by specially pre-treating the files before feeding them to wordpad, so that they bend in the way we want to. this can be achieved by altering the file with a hex editor before opening it in wordpad.

the first step—as well as the initial proof of concept—is to strip out any existing 0A, 0B, or 0D bytes from the file. i replace them all with 09, which is close enough that you can't spot it by eye, but you could use 0C, 0E, or whatever. this ensures that the file won't bend anywhere where you don't want it to. (don't delete these bytes; that would cause the image to warp in the opposite direction... a sort of anti-wordpad effect, if you will.)

the next step is to "add" 0A, 0B, or 0D bytes to the file in specific areas (really replacing bytes one at a time, not inserting them—the actual adding will come later when opening it in wordpad) so that it will bend where you want it to. this may sound simple, but it actually involves a lot of math. you need to calculate the y pixel range where you want the file to warp, and convert those to percentages in order to determine the byte range where you want to work. and if you're working with a multichannel non-interleave file, you need to do this for each color channel—not to mention calculating where each channel begins and ends. plus, you need to add lots of bytes to get any significant warping—hundreds if not thousands.

another aspect you may have noticed about my advanced wordpad work is the way it doesn't just warp, but also unwarps. the color channels warp out of phase with each other, but then they coalesce back together. this never happens with the standard wordpad effect, so how is it accomplished?

since wordpad warping is caused by added bytes, the obvious way to undo the warping is by removing bytes. to get color channels back in phase, you need to remove (almost) exactly the same number of bytes as will be added to the file. yes, this means you need to track precisely how many 0A/0B/0D bytes are in the file, and delete exactly that many bytes. i typically do all this manually, one byte at a time, counting in my head as i go along. it's tedious, but it works. if you were a programmer, you could probably write scripts to help with this process.

once all this is done, finally the file is finally ready to be run through wordpad. if you did your math wrong, or miscounted, you may end up with something like this:

oops! i lost count there and my color channels didn't sync up right. (i was eventually able to fix this one.)

working this way raises a number of questions about matters such as whether a "glitch" can be controlled, and so forth. but the most obvious questions is probably what the hell is the point of using wordpad if you're also using a hex editor?
after all, you could just use the hex editor to insert bytes and forgo using wordpad at all.

so why still use wordpad? at first, i needed to do it that way to prove that i had unlocked the mysteries of wordpad, so to speak. i keep doing it that way because i like the romanticism of using such a thoroughly incorrect application, and because the term "advanced wordpad editing" has a nice ring to it—ironically overtechnical... as if there's anything advanced about microsoft wordpad. ¶

advanced wordpad editing

maybe you've already noticed, but my latest databending experiments build on everything i've learned about the wordpad effect in order to actually control how and where images bend:

check out the whole set here. i'll probably add more gradually as i make new ones.

and don't forget, benders: gli.tc/h starts wednesday in chicago! i'll be there, and i'll have copies of my true data 12" for a special event-only price of $5 each. i hope to see you there! ¶

stAllio! @ gli.tc/h conference chicago, oct 2

i can finally announce that i will perform october 2 at the nightingale theatre in chicago as part of the gli.tc/h conference!

here's the lineup for the show:

Jeronimo Barbosa (Recife, Brazil)
Andrew Bucksbarg (Bloomington, Indiana)
Ben Baker-Smith (Chicago) w/ Evan Kühl (Madison, WI)
stAllio! (Indianapolis, IN)
Anton Marini & Aerostatic (New York, NY)

check out the gli.tc/h schedule for more info on gli.tc/h events! (the preliminary schedule is up now; hopefully more details will be filled in soon.)¶

google street view glitches revisited

google keeps its street view reasonably up-to-date by refreshing it periodically, sending around new trucks with new and different cameras. this means that the street view glitches i found back in 2007 have long since disappeared.

but new trucks means new opportunities for glitches, as i discovered while digitally wandering the streets of indianapolis.

these glitches seem to involve a stitching error between the cameras at eye level and those pointed at the ground. if something happens to be physically close enough to the camera at near-ground level, it can end up pretty distorted:

a similar effect can be seen higher up—between the eye-level cameras and the ones pointed toward the sky—though it's less likely there'll be anything up there:

this last one's a real chance moment—a leaf fell on the camera:

update: click through the images to go to flickr... i've added street view links for most of them so you can see the glitches in their "natural" environment.

also, here's one more fun one:

a huge smash is out now!

now is the moment you've been waiting for! the new stAllio! album a huge smash—the long-awaited full-length follow-up to mash smarter not harder—is now available for free download!

a huge smash is 11 tracks of glitchy post-mashup madness. it picks up directly where mash smarter left off, as i smash pop music into increasingly smaller pieces and then weld them back together in new and innovative ways.

this is a completely free download—it's not on itunes and there's no "pay what you want" feature. all i ask is that if you enjoy the album, please share it with your friends. post it on your facebooks, your twitters and reddits, or whatever it is kids do these days. i'm giving this to you for free, and all i'm asking is that you copy and paste the link a few times. that's a price you can't beat! ¶

the wordpad effect and pixel brightness

i got a new computer in the past few months and was looking for an excuse to confirm whether the wordpad effect still works in windows 7 (it does, if slowly). so i figured i'd do a quick experiment to test a hypothesis discussed in the comments of part 1 of my databending primer—that the amount of warping caused by the wordpad effect is dependent on the relative brightness (or darkness) of the source image.

for my source image, i used variations of the same image: text on a solid background. i tried both white text on black background and vice versa, with the text at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% opacity. the black text on a white background showed no warping at all, regardless of opacity. this was consistent with similar experiments i've tried in the past, but still a bit puzzling.

the images with white text on a black background did warp, and hinted at a pattern. [all originals were saved in photoshop raw format, non-interleaved. all images are hosted on flickr; click to go there.]

100% opacity:

75% opacity:

50% opacity:

25% opacity:

pure white (100%) on black warped, but just a little. reducing the text whiteness to 75% produced considerably more warping, and reducing to 25% produced more still. this would suggest a pattern of the text warping more the darker it gets, but that wouldn't explain the result for 50% opacity, which is less warped than 75% or 25%.

since the black-on-white experiment was a bust, i figured i'd try a couple more, this time with solid black text on a gray background.

75% white:

50% white:

25% white:

the results are roughly analogous to those from the white-on-black images: 75% white warps more than 50%, whereas 25% warps most of all.

clearly, it would seem that the source image brightness has an impact on warping, but it's not as simple as darkening an image to make it warp more. ¶

greatest orchestra hits

here it is: the premiere of the new video from a huge smash!

a huge smash will be released for free download on september 14 at badtaste4life.com. ¶

a huge smash is coming september 14

it's a moment years in the making: a huge smash, the full-length follow-up to mash smarter not harder, will be released for free download on september 14!

as i wrote in the original announcement:

a huge smash picks up where mash smarter left off, and from there the samples get shorter, the edits come quicker, and the sound gets distinctively glitchier. this will be the most ambitious stAllio! release ever, and the musical culmination of everything i've been working on for the past several years, as the seeds that i planted in mash smarter come into full bloom.

also, look out for the first (and perhaps only) video from a huge smash, coming in early september! ¶

re-affirming our constitutional principles

shorter gary welsh: the first amendment doesn't apply to muslims, because they are evil and want to destroy america. ¶