I’ve been asked to review my new ZOOM. Your wish is my command.

What is it?

It’s a portable 24 track sound recorder made by ZOOM, best known for their hand held field recorders. It’s about the size of a portable typewriter and has some of the same ‘recently archaic’ / ‘I am a hipster’ vibe about it. If you know about PortaStudios you’d see this as the latest refinement. There are 8 balanced inputs fed into three banks of 8 channels, mixed down into a stereo pair. Tracks are either audio streams, or sample playback – both are really just WAV clips triggered either by time position or bar/beat. Understanding that is key to knowing what you can do.

A sensible review is here.

I have a DAW. Why would I want this?

This doesn’t replace your DAW. In fact ZOOM supply a copy of Cubase for you. Use the ZOOM running on batteries to multi track record when away from your studio, then copy to the DAW for finishing. Or plug the ZOOM into a USB port and directly record up to 8 inputs at a time. The recorder is not too expensive and having an 8 in audio interface + Mackie controller means you’re getting two uses out of it.

If you’re intending to buy some of the new breed of cheap synthesisers that are coming on the market you are going to need a way to plug them all into your DAW. Most of them are designed for real time jamming with friends and you’re not going to make nice ‘one at a time’ multi-track recordings.

My intention is different. I want to take music that I’ve made on my DAW and transfer it to the ZOOM. Now I have a 24 track recording I can perform live. This is a sexed up version of how I used to make music on an 8 track tape recorder.

Why did you buy the 24 track?

The 8 track R8 looks pretty fine too, but I figured that for the price difference I might as well triple up. I’ll likely use only 8 channels for gigs and now and then want maybe 12. The R16 is older and has less features so not worth it.

When looking for ZOOM pictures I found this. Maybe it’s important.

How can I see what I’m doing?

You can’t. You have to listen. That’s kind of the point, because DAWs tend to work with visual information, where this is just a ‘tape recorder’. I’m not saying that’s better. It’s just different. Even though the machine is larger it still uses a screen about the same size as a H4n, and you are going to have to learn to push little buttons on a control panel.

In the recordings I have done so far I was impressed how quickly my brain and fingers went back to a tape recorder way of thinking. This is what I want to explore. If you have not used a tape recorder it may be pointless.

How might you perform on the r24?

First of all there’s the faders. You can grab them and mix.

BUT I’ve noticed that the machine has limited brain power and while you can tweak and twiddle there can be a subtle delay. So your style would need to be less than frantic.
BUT apart from the faders and mutes the controls are not physical. Panning and EQ require assignment – select track, menu, turn big knob.
BUT 8 tracks are seen at any one time. And your faders are not motorised so they have to pick up the sound level.

Then there’s the sampler. There are buttons to push under each track. Any recorded clip, any length, can be fired off by pushing the button. The sample will be triggered on the beat, which is good if you are trying to do an Ableton Live style set. I will most likely turn off global quantize so my loops can be out of time.

A simple sequencer is there to fire off your samples according to a grid. I see no way to send MIDI to the ZOOM, even just to supply a BPM clock. When connected by USB to sequencer it receives MIDI Clock. It’s designed to hand over any of that kind of fancy stuff to a DAW. There’s a hack below that means you could record time code.

How does this compare to other portable mix solutions?

It’s better than my original PortaStudio!

I looked closely at Auria + an interface for the iPad and decided against that because (a) I am resurrecting a specific technique I once used with my tape recorders and (b) 8 track balanced in to iPad ain’t cheap. Really I’d say Auria might be the better solution if you wanted a portable DAW. Especially as the mix can be automated, something the ZOOM doesn’t offer.

Samplr on the pad is a really excellent ‘tape looping’ tool and if you have a pad then you really should own it. It’s like 8 tape loops with plenty of bend and stretch – and it’s automated. About the only thing on the pad that isn’t a toy version of the real thing. I decided on the ZOOM because I already have the pad and want to have a different paradigm that mixes both looping and streaming sound.

The ZOOM weighs much less than a laptop and has the real connections. I like the idea of performing with it, but you should check out AKAI’s MPC drum boxes as an alternative. You could always add a laptop if you like.

What is the quality like?

Probably it’s not excellent but it sounds like what you put in is what you get back, which was never the case for my Fostex B16! The actual machine is pretty nice. It’s light weight but it’s solid. Like a Roland box.

Any bad points?

You are not getting a full DAW. This is not Pro Tools HD. Capice? But like any tape recorder you still have to bounce down real time.
The transport is not instant. AB looping has a gap.
Only stereo out (but see below).
No panning or EQ knobs. The effects are limited (but hey – there are effects).
No MIDI.
Some people have found that ZOOM recorders in general have a small drift and will lose synch over a long recording time. (Whereas open reel tape recorders were always perfect and I’m the president.)

Any hacks?

You can send a stereo/mono track out the headphones jack. Use that for SMPTE?

http://www.henkybacker.com/2011/10/the-hidden-output-of-the-zoom-r8-and-r24/

I recently attended a lecture by Professor Lewis Lancaster in which he described his collaboration with what he calls ‘Long Data’. Best if I first quote from a 2011 paper about the process:

Blue Dots

This project integrates the Chinese Buddhist Canon, Koryo version Tripitaka Koreana, into the AVIE system. This version of the Buddhist Canon is inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage enshrined in Haeinsa, Korea. The 166,000 pages of rubbings from the wooden printing blocks constitute the oldest complete set of the corpus in print format. Divided into 1,514 individual texts, the version has a complexity that is challenging since the texts represent translations from Indic languages into Chinese over a 1000-year period (2nd-11th centuries). This is the world’s largest single corpus containing over 50 million glyphs, and it was digitized and encoded by Prof Lew Lancaster and his team in a project that started in the 70s.

OK, so a young academic who studies East Asian Languages is put in charge of documenting a 166,000 page book that’s been translated from ancient Indian to Chinese over 1000 years. The biggest book, the oldest copy. For the first 6 or so years he reads it. Reaching some kind of crisis as I think you would, he decides that reading it was not going to get anywhere. So he talks to Samsung and they help him digitise it. He feeds it into a computer and adds metadata behind each glyph (where it sits on what page and so on).

So now you have 50,000,000+ glyphs stored in memory. (Which reminds me a bit of the 9 Billion Names of God). What do you do with that? At this point I was a little cross with taking a text and chopping it up into ‘Big Data’ cubes, but he seemed to be an honest prof so I waited for the explanation.

He had the computer make all the glyphs blue, and the one glyph, one word, he made red wherever it appears. So he can see patterns. He can ‘feel it’. He picks another word, feels how they are ranged closely, or far apart, intuits a problem. He asks the computer to plot a graph of how often those words appear together over the 1000 years of transcription. There are peaks as new words are developed and then discarded. There’s two peaks that seem oddly similar, but 200 years apart. The computer has found that pages have been accidentally jumbled up about 500 years ago.

The AVIE is the 3D environment built first at Kunst Kamp, now with a bigger version over at City University of Hong Kong. The Blue Dots were fed into the system so that Lancaster could walk through the book, touch any dot and read the glyph right there.

It is charming, and rather like a short story by Borges. But similarly it’s like the infamous German Video Artist who when asked about his work said ‘It is 4 minutes long and in colour’. The computer has seen the book as a whole, it has not seen what the book says. I think that when Lancaster sadly dies the computer will fall mute. It’s a jotting, the structure is in the brain of the man who knows which way to walk and touch.

There is a monk in Korea I am sure that can walk through the actual plates that hold the book and see it – just like Lancaster sees it now. He doesn’t know that the pages are mixed up. He might not really care.

There were other examples and discussion but one part really got me thinking – about Obama’s first presidential speech and how it was seen as far more effective than his second, and how a computer analysis found that in it he employed a rising repetition; a circle of introduction, point, point, point, re-phrase, affirm, affirm, affirm, summarise. This circle apparently can be found in The Book as well.

When Lancaster asked the audience how else could the data be visualised, it was immediately obvious to me that (a) Obama was using church sermon patterns that (b) you would also expect in a religious text and (c) are found also in the epic poems of antiquity because (d) it is easier to memorise text if it is sung because (e) the part of the brain that handles music is a long term storage processor. Which is why we teach children with songs. Do Re Mi.

That is, you can sing songs you heard and recited years ago, and will until you die because that how the brain lays down text for long term storage – connected with tonal ‘meta data’. Even the profoundly senile can sing a song. Music soothes the savage breast but it also parses language and dare I say, the kind of vague and intuitive information that ‘Big Data’ is supposed to offer.

I stuck up my hand and asked – wouldn’t it be better to sonify the data? Because music recognition is a powerful pattern recognition system? He kind of looked like I’d said rubber baby buggy bumpers. It’s a hunch, prof, it’s just a long shot, that bird songs and big data have more in common that you think. People used to track game and find water and know when winter was coming because of nothing in particular but everything at once. Maybe that’s what brains do that computers can’t.

Before the Dean got too anxious I told an anecdote about Silliac and LeapFrog, which made it all about computers again, which made it alright.

But I still got that hunch.

Pause a moment: It’s a magazine that’s apparently been missing in a warehouse since 1985. On an iPad. OMD is on the cover.

OK, alright, fine. I’ve had my say but the consensus is we all want to go backwards 25 years. Everything since then was a horrible mistake and time to stock up on vinyl and Moogs. I remember some great things that happened over those years, but hey, it’s your party.

And frankly you might be right. Because what else is on offer?

Hear me out – it gets somewhere. My current teaching is in screen and sound production. I just did the lecture about three act structure, Syd Fields’ Paradigm and so on, critiqued the first shot of their documentary as encapsulating the arc of the narrative blah blah. When the kids look me up online to find out what films I made they find a computer game, some ‘video art’ and a bunch of old records. What? Where the hell are my three acts? Rotten old structuralist wanker.

Last night I was guilting on Derivative Touch. I own the damn thing, and every few weeks get the time to yet again practice Networking my TOPs and CHOPs with a few SOPs here and there to get my rotating doughnut on. Touch is more arcane than the Catholic Church and I attend it driven by the equivalent moral panic. After confession I feel a great sense of accomplishment making my doughnut wiggle. Then the inevitable question – how does this express anything? I can project on a building – how does this express anything? I can track people’s movement – how does this express anything? That’s what makes it so unfulfilling to learn New Media tools (yes, let’s cut the crap – New Media is back out of the coffin) because they exist in an artistic void. No one ever cried over a MaxMSP patch. The tools prefer to exist in that moral void – like scientists working on the atom bomb. You can do things.

I just bought VENTUZ, which is a live video system for broadcast and kiosks. Other users include FOX Television, NFL, Microsoft. It’s not without a learning curve but it avoids fuss and bother. I can get the doughnut in VENTUZ in a few minutes, because it doesn’t ‘award exploration’ or ‘open ways of working’ instead getting you to a result. The difficulty, the self flagellation, the athletics of New Media are minimised. Straight away you get to the result. And the result is the problem.

Here’s my dilemma. I’m charged with guiding and developing audiovisual coursework for the coming years and I really fucking care about it. It’s been put to me that ‘film’ and its equivalents are no longer the business of a university, music gets handled elsewhere, that ‘electronic media arts’ and the ‘creative industry’ are on the rise. We have ISEA coming up and reading through the programme I find this:

Participants will intellectually and tangibly explore the possible roles that visualisation can play in imagining the future, using this exploration to reflect critically on existing visualisation practices. By adopting emotive approaches, the hope is to elicit new insights into design practices in data visualisation that challenge present representation forms. Participants will use paper prototyping techniques to develop descriptions of personal utopias. These descriptions will be examined in group exercises to mine them for ‘data stories’ – imaginary data sets which exemplify or illustrate their particular utopia. By sketching visualisations for such data sets, we will discuss the language, aims and claims of visualisation processes.

Which I concede is a harsh example. Allow me to wonder aloud at ‘adopting emotive approaches’. Is that like feeling something and acting on it? Who out there wants to tell a ‘data story’? Silly old ‘film’ used to offer personal stories and emotions and I think we’ve again confused process athletics for results. The really weird thing is alongside the obsession with process, there’s anxiety about skills. ‘Participants will use paper prototyping techniques’. Does that seem kind of ‘with one hand tied behind your back’ to you? New Media was rightly faulted for being fetishistic about technology – one definition was that it was anything computer based. At the turn of the century the word ‘digital’ was plunked in front of all and sundry – we slavishly avoid it now, to the extent of ‘paper prototyping’. But the techniques are still there and the highlight work of the festival is 100 percent digital technology – probably made in Derivative Touch. Obsessing over something is bad, whether positively or negatively.

I seem to find myself not too different from the subscribers to Electronic Sound, but I have a lot more hope.

I made a computer game for all kinds of reasons but one of them was to tell a story in much the way my old songs tell stories. I actually don’t care much for three act structure, but I care for characters, personalities, archetypes if you follow that idea. My game had a story about two women; a young ‘project manager’ that strays into weapons manufacture, the other a kind of genie, a spirit that is ‘farmed’ by the other and takes revenge. The story is never made as clear as that, because it’s an opportunity. This is the great power of computer games, to offer a narrative when it suits the player, more like a book than a film.

There are some games in ISEA. None of them have an implied narrative, as far as I can see they’re all variants of geocaching which is studiously and frigidly level design only. What is so distasteful about games?

Look at the main artwork.

Monumental and architectural, on a scale grander than the human ‘participants’ who are seen like those cut-out people used by architects to flesh out a building design. Constrained, avoiding any display of passion. Driven by data, unlike abstract art which is a distilled act of personal will. ‘Big data’ – the blurring of personalities into a ‘cloud’. The negation of personality.

Here is Ikeda’s more recent work. The description quietly notes that ‘performers will appear in his piece for the first time’. They are silhouettes but it looks like at least one member of the New Media dares to bring a human back into their data visualisation. Who knows, one day they might even allow a face telling a story. We grow up.

So there’s a clue where to go next. Sure, let’s move away from the rails and the acts and all that linear lineage. The beginning, middle and end don’t matter any more. Syd Field is a patch around old rules, we can throw those rules out. But let’s continue to keep the human scale of film. Let’s not require conflict as the engine of a narrative, cooperation is harder but we can do it. We should allow passion to make a mess. We should not fall into neoclassicism, all white marble and tasteful curves.

We can say the word ‘digital’, it won’t kill you. Hell ‘data’ is just a cousin.

But at the heart of it is: art is not sport, not athletics. Just because the public purse is often shared between these goals, there is no need to make art festivals into sports carnivals.

OK. Maybe I know what to do…