My Favorite 2009 Listening

My opinion – we’re enjoying a new golden age of music. The proliferation of available music production and distribution tools driven by the Internet have unleashed a complete torrent of creativity that may very well be unprecedented. The problem now is not seeking out rare finds, but trying to figure out which of the gazillions of options to spend precious time and attention on. Luckily, we’re also seeing great people stepping to the fore to help find good music. My favorite resources for finding new tunes lately have been the ever wonderful John Gilbreath, now on radio five mornings a week at KBCS, and two great NPR offerings, the Blog Supreme jazz blog and the All Songs Considered web site and podcast. I spend a fair amount of time listening to Accujazz Radio on the web, which has a great selection of different jazz channels to pick from. I’ve also used the lists on emusic a lot. Other great local sources to follow have been trumpeter and bandleader Jason Parker’s One Working Musician blog and Twitter feed, and all the good work happening at KEXP.

So that’s how I find music, but what have I found that I liked this year?

• Allen Toussaint – The Bright Missisippi.

  The New Orleans r&b icon goes further back to the sources of New Orleans jazz and finds the spirit still burning bright.

• Visqueen – Message to Garcia

  Lots of late ’70s New Wave influences get modernized in Rachel Flotard’s fine return to power-pop-punk form. I hear echoes of Blondie, the Ramones, Joan Jett, and the Cars, underneath the fine writing and singing. This one I find addictive.

• Jason Parker Quartet – No More, No Less

  Local trumpeter, blogger, and tweeter Jason Parker put out this fine release this year, and it’s been in heavy rotation in my household ever since. Nothing revolutionary or outré, but fine jazz from some of Seattle’s best young lions. Support your local jazzers!

• Miguel Zenón – Esta Plena

  OK – so he’s both a MacArthur (who said he’s “at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century”) and a Guggenheim fellow, on the faculty at the New England Conservatory, and he’s not yet 35 – you can tell he’s a real slouch. Zenón’s Earshot concert at the Triple Door was a 2009 highlight for me, and this album where he delves deep into the plena rhythm of his native Puerto Rico is at once modern and traditional, and swings hard with sweat, brains, and joy.

• Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society – Infernal Machines

  When I was a kid in the ’70s Don Ellis was the hip big band. This is much (MUCH!) better. Darcy James Argue is reinventing the big band tradition, with a healthy dose of indie rock and a steampunk aesthetic that is intensely appealing. He writes a great blog, too!

• Ben Allison – Think Free

  Fine moody, cinematic jazz from bassist and composer Ben Allison along with a good crew of co-conspirators including violinist Jenny Scheinman, who’s showing up everywhere these days. I also like his Think Free Project, where he’s encouraging musicians and film makers to use his compositions as a springboard for creativity and asks them to post the results.

• Chick Corea and John McLaughlin – The Five Peace Band

  Fusion Lives! The old guys can still play rings around most anybody, and are clearly having a ball with an all-star band composed of Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, and alternating drummers Brian Blade and Vinnie Colaiuta. Better than a quadruple shot Americano!

• Booker T. – Potato Hole

  Speaking of old guys, Booker T. is another one not content to rest on his considerable laurels. He gets together here with the Drive By Truckers and some lead guitar from Neil Young and produces a fine modern set of greasy, soulful instrumentals.

• Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood – Live from Madison Square Garden

  More old dudes! I’ve always had a weakness for Steve Winwood’s soulful voice and great songwriting, and it’s great to see him get back together with Clapton in what is essentially a Blind Faith reprise. The songs are mostly terrific and the band is in a solid classic groove. Get your ’60s nostalgia on!

• Mark Isham + Kate Ceberano – Bittersweet

  This was a discovery from eMusic. Mark Isham is a West Coast jazz and film musician who plays trumpet, and Kate Ceberano is an Australian pop singer. In an era where every pop vocalist seems to feel the need to issue an album of jazz standards, this one stands out for its smoky atmosphere and understated elegance. If you walked into a nightclub and heard this you’d have a very fine evening indeed. Okay, they’re both Scientologists – what’s up with that, anyway?

• Fly – Sky & Country

  Lyrical, spare, almost introspective chamber jazz that stakes out its own territory. Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier (who’s one of my favorite current bassists), and Jeff Ballard explore the sax-bass-drums trio format, which I know from experience is not easy. Beautiful music that deserves more than a casual listen.

• Passion Pit – Manners

  Fun! Poppy! Synths! Beats!

• Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics – Inspiration Information 3

  The London-based jazz-funk-hiphop collective perhaps best known for being DJ Shadow’s backing band get together with esteemed Ethiopian musican Astatke and cook up a hard grooving melange that is a blast to listen to, but hard to not move to. Pan-global-funkalicious-jazzy-afro-jazz!

There’s lots more from 2009 that I haven’t caught up with yet – Bill Anschell and Brett Jensen’s duo offering, Phoenixs’ Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca, Vijay Iyer’s Historicity, Henry Threadgill’s Zooid – This Brings Us To, Vol. 1, and so much more – and here comes 2010! So much music, so little time. What are your 2009 faves that I should check out?

How did we do on our 2009 predictions?

Here’s the score from the predictions made at our 2008 New Year’s Eve Party for the year to come – I’m scoring on a 0-10 scale:

Tom – one car company will go under. – Score: 0, but only because of federal intervention.
Ed – Keith Richards will die. Score: 0 – Keith Richards will outlive us all.
Jeannie – Economy will not recover. Score: 5 – Depends on who you ask (or whether you’re currently working).
Michele – Sara Palin will disappear to raise her grandson. Score: 5 – she disappeared from the Governor’s office, only to return in our nightmares as a trashy book author and darling of the lunatic fringe.
Michele – Michael Jackson will die. Score: 10. Wow. Prescience in our midst.
Oren – Seattle will have another snow event this winter. Score: 0. What a stupid prediction.
Tom – BB King will die. Score: 0. BB King will live almost as long as Keith Richards.
Michele – Katie will decide to go to grad school. Score: 0, as far as I know.
Chris – We’ll pay less for gas (on an overall average) than in 2008. Score: 10, check it out here.
Manny – They’ll discover that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are one and the same person. Score: well, come on now.

And finally – the prediction on how many games the Mariners will win:
Oren: 80
Tom: 74
Marcia: 76

Score: The M’s did better than any of us dared to predict, finishing the year at 85 wins and 77 losses. Just wait till this year!

Check back in a few days for our 2010 predictions!

Where 2.0 Online – Jeffrey Powers on iPhone vision

Jeffrey Powers, Occipital – Computer Vision and the iPhone Camera

All about getting the iPhone to do the things Iron Man’s helmet can do. REcognize faces and structures, show objects in augmented reality fashion, using the camera. They created RedLaser, a vision-based barcode scanner.

Getting started. First need to interface with the camera. UIImagePickerController – the interface with the camera. Need to check for camera, because iPod Touch doesn’t have one.

Snapture – pinch to zoom in live image capture. Uses CameraViewTransform to do the transform.

RedLaser – can handle blurry barcodes. That matters because the camera doesn’t have autofocus until 3gs. Custom overlay – puts UI on top of the live camera image. Rapid screenshot captrue – currently requires an unpublished function. Image processing – ignores gray scale. Cleans up images. How do you access raw pixels in code? Use DataProvider to read the pixels.

Future of iPhone computer vision – still can’t access video frames. Can’t show objects on top of screen shots for vision-based augmented reality. Mobile computer vision will eventually become a part of most apps we already use today.

Where 2.0 Online – More on iPhone sensors

Derek Smith (SimpleGeo)- augmented reality SDK for the iPhone

3 important technologies – camera, location, and compass. With data from location and compass can plot objects. Can calculate bearing and distance of objects from the device of an object. Device will be at origin of graph. That’s the first stage. The viewport (what the device can see) is the second stage. The third is sizing the objects according to distance. Implemented in OpenGL ES for you. Most of the UI framework doesn’t gel with OpenGL so you have to get creative. If you work in 2D you have to implement your own pipeline, but you can use the standard UI framework.

This was not a very together presentation, but the SDK looks like it will be very interesting when it gets released.

Nicola Radacher – Mobilizy –

example of wikitude client.

GPS signal – accuracy can be bad due to city density or fog. What can you do to improve it? One way is image recognition. Take a picture, send it to a server, compare to data in database, correct user’s location. You need a lot of data for any big city.

What to do if there’s no compass – Calculate position through GPS signal changes. Don’t need user feedback, but it’s inaccurate. Alternatively, ask the user to help – tell them to adjust the phone to point north, for example, or point it to the sun (not good in Seattle!). More accurate than GPS (perhaps), but still not great.

Alok Deshpande (loopt) – CoreLocation in Practice

Nice abstraction built on several technologies. Shields you a little bit from having to worry about which technologies are available. It’s a subscription model. You can specify accuracy and how often you want to be updated. You’re then sent location events with location info. What accuracy do you need? How frequently do you need to be notified of changes? Tradeoff is response time and battery use vs. accuracy. Example: Where’s my car? Simplest way to start is with MapKit framework instead of CoreLocation. Supports showing a user’s location. To do anything more substantial you need to use CoreLocation itself. Probably want to set user’s location to as accurate as possible and continuous update (as they’re walking to the car).

Nick from Skyhook Wireless

CellID, WiFi, and GPS. Skyhook uses WiFi to calculate location. Available on many platforms.

Cell – Universal, 150-700m accuracy, 1-2 sec response, low power.
WiFi – Urban indoor/outdoor, 20-40m accuracy, 1-5 sec time to fix, low power
GPS – Outdoor/ limited indoor, 10m accuracy, 1-60 sec time to fix, medium power

Typical GPS receivers need -140dBm or better. Most cannot decode below -145dBm, or -155dBm with assitance. 140dBm = 10(-14)mW.

WiFi positioning – scan for signals, trilaterate to determine location. in iPhone reports lat/long to CoreLocation

They drive around collecting wifi signal fingerprints then calculate AP position by reverse trilateration.

Martin Roth (Reality Jockey)- Augmented Audio – A new musical world (the mic as sensor)

http://rjdj.me/

What is RjDj? a reactive music player. Reactive music? it changes with your environment and actions.

Uses PureData – visual signal flow programming language to do the input processing.

iPhone has a number of audio frameworks. Media Player gives you access to iphones library. Av Foundation Framework gets you up and running. Audio Toolbox framework plays audio with synchronization capabilities, access streams, convert formats,etc.

Audio Unit framework uses audio processing plugins

OpenAL framework – meant for games.

Where 2.0 Online – Alasdair Allan

I’m participating in O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Online conference – fall 2009 – the topic is An emphasis on iPhone sensors.

First up is Alasdair Allan – http://www.dailyack.com/ – author of a book on iphone programming. The sensors in your iphone.

GPS (core location) – abstraction layer in front of different methods. Abstracts cell towers (12km falling to 1-3km), Skyhook wireless (approx 100m), GPS (approx. 40m). Have to check if location services are enabled first. iPhone simulator will always report location of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

Distance filter – can set to update based on distance of a change, so you don’t get so many update messages.

Can set desired accuracy using locationManager.desiredAccuracy

Delegate methods:locationManager gets messages when location changes – new location and old location.

Accelerometer – measures linear acceleration of device – roll and pitch, not yaw (except iphone 3gs if you combine with magnetometer) x=roll, y=pitch. 1.0 = approx 1 gravity. z=front side up or front-side down. 0.0=edge-on to the ground.

Declare view controller class UIAccelerometer instance. Start the accelerometer. Can set update frequency (e.g. .1 sec) – can calculate orientation from that in radians.

Magnetometer (digital compass). Combining heading info (yaw) with roll and pitch, can determine orientation in real time. Only 3gs has this, so important to check whether heading info is available in core loocation with locationManager.headingAvailable.

Magnetometer is not amazingly sensitive – 5 degrees is good for most purposes. Check to see that new heading is >0. Returns magnetic heading, not true. If location services are enabled, then you can also get true heading.

Heavily affected by local magnetic fields.

Camera – you can have the user take a picture and grab it.

Proximity Sensors – turns device’s screen on and off when you make a call – infrared led near earpiece that measures reflection. UIDevice object. Sensor has about a 3.5 cm range.

phonegap is an open source framework for building web apps that become native apps on iPhone and android. http://phonegap.com/

Alasdair recommends the iSumulate app from Vimov.com to be able to simulate acceleromater events in the iPhone SDK – http://vimov.com/isimulate/sdk

Run static analyzer (in xcode in snow leopard) to check your code before shipping to Apple – because they will.