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Kasparov vs. Deep Blue VideoJune 29th, 2009A video recording of my piece “Kasparov vs. Deep Blue”, performed in Eagle Rock on June 26th, 2009. Garry Kasparov was played by Kyle Evans. C.B. Hsu was played by Richard Xin. The enthusiastic boy in the foreground is my nephew, Benjamin. More details about the piece can be found in this post.. Cranks, Cams & Computers TonightJune 26th, 2009
I just finished setting up my installation piece for tonight’s concert in Eagle Rock. It should make for some crazy cacophony, in a room full of creative contraptions. I can tell from last night’s sound check that my two pieces are definitely on the hi-tech end of a spectrum that ranges from gloriously low tech (wooden cams push down the keys on a pair of old harmoniums) and ingeniously hands on (some really interesting circuit bending devices) to abstract and cerebral (my own Whitney Music Boxes). There is also going to be some brilliant virtuoso musicianship on display as well, with performances by the Newtown house band. The concert will end with a performance by the San Francisco Crank Ensemble, a group of musicians who play handcrafted sound sculptures which are operated by cranks. The room will open at 6pm (with a set of installation pieces) and the formal concert begins at 8pm. Hope to see you there! Note that the address has changed from the originally announced location. It’s about 5 blocks south of Swork near Eagle Rock Blvd. GLAD (Greater L.A. Agency on Deafness) Full details here. UPDATE: Video of the performance can be viewed here. Musical Chess DetailsJune 14th, 2009A few have asked for more details about my hybrid chess/music system, so here we go.
To recap a previous post, I’m working on a performance piece for the June 26 Cranks, Cams and Computers concert in Eagle Rock. In this piece, two performers will reenact a famous game of chess (Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, 1997, Game 6). As they play, a computer program I’ve written monitors each move, and tries to figure out the best possible move to make in response. During this analysis, it produces music on the fly. The music is a fairly literal translation of what the computer is thinking. The music for each move lasts about 10 seconds, but represents only a fraction of a second of the thinking the computer was doing. When the next move is made on the board by a performer, the music from the previous move’s thinking is interrupted, so we can hear the thinking for the following move. The chessboard the players are using is a Novag Citrine, which is a wooden chess board with internal electronics and magnetic pieces. The board has a PC serial interface, which is connected to my computer via a serial-to-USB adapter. My program converts chess information to music by producing MIDI notes. Each MIDI note has 4 elements that I can control, based on various aspects of the chess analysis: pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration. The triggering of the notes, and those parameters is based on the computer’s chess search. CHESS SEARCH As the computer evaluates which move to make, it searches a tree in memory, using something called the minimax algorithm. This tree starts with all the possible moves the computer might play. Each of those moves leads to a node (a branching point), from which branches all the possible moves the opponent might play in response. Each of those moves leads to a new node from which branches all the possible moves the computer might make in response, and so on. After 5 or 6 branchings (or look-aheads) the computer evaluates each of the moves (5 moves ahead or so) based on various factors, the most significant being how much material has been lost or gained. As it backtracks through the tree, it chooses a move for each branching point, assuming that the opponent will make the worst possible move (or the best move for the opponent) — minimizing the score and that the computer will make the best possible move — maximizing the score. Hence the name “minimax”. This would be a lot clearer with an illustration: you’ll find one here. As the computer searches this minimax tree, it produces MIDI notes, which correspond to the moves that are being evaluated. Since the tree has a branching factor of about 30 (there are typically about 30 chess moves each player can choose from), only the first 3 or 4 levels of the tree are converted to notes (this produces about 30^4 or about 800,000 potential notes per move). For the deeper levels of the tree, which produce potentially enormous numbers of notes, only moves which are considered interesting (which produce high or low scores) are heard as notes. Since those interesting moves are often the same, regardless of the moves that led to them, (so called “killer moves”), these deeper levels often take the form of an ostinato (repeating note) pattern. When it isn’t ostinato, the chess board is more unstable and a variety of moves lead to very different outcomes. There are two different triggering systems used, depending on which side is playing, white or black. For the white side, I play the tree nodes in the order in which they are encountered (a depth-first search). For the black side, I play the different levels of the tree simultaneously (closer to a breadth-first search) which produces a more contrapuntal style, with each tree level having a different simultaneous melodic line. PITCH The pitches of the notes, are based on the the chess moves that are being considered as the computer searches the tree. Each chess move consists of a source and a destination square, such as E2-E4. Rather than actually playing an “E” to represent the square E2, I’ve assigned unique ascending chromatic pitches to each of the squares on the chessboard, with A1,B1,C1… being the lowest notes, and …F8,G8,H8 being the highest notes. Since there are 8×8 or 64 squares on the chessboard, this gives us a range of 64 notes, or a little over 5 octaves. The notes are transposed a little higher when the computer thinks white is winning, and a little lower when it thinks black is winning. They are also transposed an octave or two up or down, to fit within the range of the instrument that is playing them, as necessary. When the players make their moves on the chessboard, those moves are played loudly with both the source and destination squares heard, as a kind of announcement. Then, as the tree is being searched, only the destination square are used for most moves, since there are thousands of notes being produced. TIMBRE The timbres of the notes are controlled by selecting different MIDI channels on my sampler, which, for this piece, holds 15 different instruments. There are three instruments which are used by both opponents (bass, piano and congas) and the remaining 12 instruments are split between the two opponents, with white (Deep Blue) getting more percussive sounds, and black (Kasparov) getting more string and wind instruments. As each move is made, 3 or 4 instruments are chosen randomly from the ones available to that player. A different instrument is used to represent each level of the search tree. LOUDNESS and DURATION High levels of the search tree (closer to the root) get louder and longer notes. As we go deeper into the search tree, the notes get faster and softer, so that we can play more of them as they multiply. Here’s an excerpt of the piece that I recorded a few weeks ago. At this time, some of the logic I described above was not yet in place. After the Eagle Rock concert, I’ll post a more recent recording of the piece. The Voynich ManuscriptJune 5th, 2009
I’ve been fascinated with the Voynich Manuscript for years, since first reading about it in David Kahn’s book The Codebreakers. Today’s xkcd comic provides a nice introduction. Musical ChessMay 21st, 2009
For the concert, I have engaged the services of two performers who are going to reenact a famous match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer (shown below). My piece is called: Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, 1997, Game 6
As the performers play this historically significant chess game, the first match in which the world human champion lost to a machine under tournament conditions, my musical chess system will analyze the moves, and you will hear the analysis. Since my own chess software is not nearly as good as Deep Blue, I have named it “Shallow Brown” — you figure it out! Coincidentally, “Shallow Brown” is also the title of a sea chanty (perhaps inspired by the bilge water being pumped while it was sung…). There have been an enormous number of challenges involved in making this system work, and much work remains. While solving the myriad technical issues, I haven’t had much time to work on the musicality of this piece – but I have a few more weeks to go yet! With that disclaimer out of the way, I offer a brief audio sample of my chess engine, as it thinks about a chess position. Shallow Brown – The Musical Chess Engine Here’s a longer sample – about a minute from the middle of the Kasparov/Deep Blue game, after I did a little work on assigning different instruments to the two opponents. Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, Excerpt Kasparov gets mostly string sounds, and is heard more from the left channel. Deep Blue gets more mallet instruments, and is heard more from the right. I play the Deep Blue analysis a little deeper into the look-ahead tree, which produces more rapid-fire (and robotic-sounding) ostinati. This piece is just one of a number of interesting new works, all inspired by machines of different kinds, to be performed, Friday Evening, June 26th in Los Angeles.
Here’s a Facebook Event Page I’ve set up for the concert. I should mention that in addition to the chess piece, I’m also working on an installation of a number of my Whitney Music Boxes for this show. So… if machines, cranks, cams, pianolas, and strange musical machines turn you on, and you’re going to be in the Los Angeles area — keep the evening of June 26th open! UPDATE: VENUE CHANGE Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, there has been a last minute change of venue for Friday’s show, originally scheduled for Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock. New Location: GLAD (Greater L.A. Agency on Deafness) This is just a few blocks away from the original location. UPDATE: Video of the performance can be viewed here. Wired MysteriesMay 6th, 2009
Wired is one of many magazines that has been noticeably suffering from the downturn in the publishing industry, and I had allowed my subscription to lapse a few months ago. This issue, which was guest-edited by J. J. Abrahms, is full of fun little puzzles, and articles about mysterious things, such as the Georgia Guidestones. Even the logo font on the cover has been improved for this issue (I wish they’d keep it!). Apparently, the puzzles in this issue go a little deeper than they appear on the surface. I imagine the puzzle solvers who visit this website (even those who are not regular Wired readers) will enjoy this issue as well. Check it out! On a related note, I recently picked up 23 volumes of the Time-Life series, Mysteries of the Unknown, on Ebay, for a song (about a dollar a book). The production values in those old Time-Life books was remarkable, especially when contrasted with the shape the publishing industry is in today. BarCamp LA this weekendApril 29th, 2009I’ll be at BarCamp LA this Saturday, attempting to initiate a music-nerdery session that covers such topics as MIDI control in Processing, Mechanical Music and Process Music. I may also do a session on Mind Reading with Google, or Flickr Hacks, if there’s sufficient interest. If there’s something special you’d like me to cover, such as making the perfect Tomato Sauce, or making Twitter Bots, let me know… More info on BarCamp here – there are sessons on both Saturday and Sunday in Culver City… UPDATE: The presentation was mostly impromptu, and a lot of fun – here’s a photo from Jonathan Strauss :
My first Barcamp was awesome! You should come check out the next one. Happens twice a year… The little red piano now has it’s own twitter account, by the way… Mirror MorphsApril 23rd, 2009I found this old video of mine while looking at some old backup CDs. Back in the early 90s, while playing with Gryphon Software’s “Morph” software, I accidentally stumbled upon a technique for making a still photograph or painting look like a hologram. The basic idea is that you make a mirror image of the photo, by flopping it horizontally in Photoshop. Then you morph from the original to the mirror image, using still-image morphing software, matching the left-eye to the flopped right-eye (which now looks like a left-eye), and so-on. The result is that the image in the photo looks like it is turning it’s head slightly, as you can see. There’s a point in the middle of the sequence where the face is completely symmetrical. One of my earliest tests of this method was done with an image of the Mona Lisa. It also works nicely with the portraits on currency. Composer seeks Chess MastersApril 22nd, 2009
I’ve been posting the above ad at local chess clubs in Los Angeles, in preparation for a June concert in which a live chess game will be translated into music. Contact me if you have leads. Thanks! Make your own music box kitApril 11th, 2009
So I found a supplier in the UK, called Grand Illusions. They actually carry two models, including one with a larger number of tines (20 tines covering a 2 1/2 octave diatonic range ). Naturally I got the big one, and a packet of extra blank strips. :) Now I’m wondering if I can use my Mindstorms parts to build a Lego robot that will punch the holes and turn the crank, so I can automatically convert MIDI files to music box strips… We’ll see. Right now I’m just having fun making stripey patterns. UPDATE
I found it helpful to place dots on the paper with a red marker first, so I didn’t have to do too much thinking about alignment when punching the holes. When I was done punching the holes, the table was littered with little notes. |
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A few friends recommended I check out the May issue of Wired, so I finally picked up a copy at the airport today. They were right — this is the best issue of Wired I’ve seen in a few years!
Well here’s my first hand-punched piece (aside from the stripey pattern shown above) : A little music box etude based on an old piano piece of mine. Took about an hour to plan and an hour to punch.