Antigone soundtrack excerpt + june release

It’s been a crazy week or two. I’ve spent most of them in lovely little Istrian town that locals call Savičenta (but it’s officially Svetvinčenat / Sanvincenti) working on music with Matija Ferlin for his latest solo performance called Staging a Play: Antigone.

It was extremely inspirational and the work went smoothly and fast enough to arrive at final sonic composition with more satisfaction and confidence then when things get stressfuly complicated at the last minute.

I was inspired a lot by the original story by Sophocles, its permutations and stagings through time, but also by Matija and Goran Ferčec‘s way of approaching the text and decontructing it. I went looking for some kind of musical source material and found it in Michael Tippett‘s ‘A Child of Our Time‘, which was written in late 1930s and inspired by events surrounding a violent pogrom against Jewish population in Germany—called Kristallnacht.

The questions of humanity and ethics in the story of Antigone and the events that inspired Tippett drew an interesting and powerful connection across time and space for me. This lead me to a work process where sonic basis is taken exclusively from “A Child of Our Time” but then further processed and reworked into minimalistic but emotional ambiences to fit Ferlin’s ideas of “suspended states” and “frozen masks“.

After feeling this much confidence about this musical material and thinking a bit, I decided to release an mini-album or an EP by the end of this month based on the work that went down in last two weeks. There is still quite some work to do – I also have an idea to convert the music into SuperCollider patches and then offer these as an open source code for anyone to build upon.

But in the meantime, or as some kind of a “private studio visit exclusive to patrons“, in other words an early access, here’s a 18 minutes collage made from music recorded for the Ferlin’s solo “Staging a Play: Antigone” just for you.

 

 

Thank you for your support so far. Please tell your friends that you are a patron to the arts and that they can be too!

With gratitude,
Luka

PS: if you are in Ljubljana this weekend, warmly welcome to the Slovenian premiere of Matija Ferlin: Staging a Play: Antigona at Stara elektrarna.

Use of Creative Commons as emoji on Mastodon instance

Couple of weeks ago mastodon instance “Mastodon.ART” added icons from Creative Commons project to the arsenal of custom emojis to be used in toots (posts). One user wondered if this use is legally correct, so after some discussion I sent an email to Creative Commons about it and after a week or so got an answer. I’m replicating this correspondence here to put their answer in perspective.

Continue reading →

Stylish & Mastodon: fixed number of columns

How to have a fixed number of columns visible on your mastodon instance using stylish for Firefox or Chrome (or Chromium):

 

Install Stylish add-on/extension:

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish-custom-themes-for/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

 

Add new style:

Find Stylish ‘manage styles/preferences/settings’ – in Ff’s Add-ons or Chrome’s Extensions. Click “Write a new style”, enter new name for your new style (name of your instance for example), then under “Mozilla format” click “Import”.

paste this into the wide white area (change toot.si into your instance domain):

Click “overwrite style”. Then click “Save” in the left column. You can then edit the number of your columns as desired in this code (see the comment in the code above). Always click save and check the site in the other tab.

 

 

 

Mastodon & Toot.si 2018

Mastodon je trenutno največje svetovno svobodno in decentralizirano mikroblogersko omrežje temelječe na odprti kodi. Projekt nima centralnega strežnika temveč je mreža več kot 3000 neodvisnih vozlišč (instances). Ta omogočajo življenje in povezovanje raznolikim skupnostim, katerih člani so svobodni, da odločajo o pravilih mreženja. Uporabnikov je že več kot milijon in pol.

Luka Prinčič (Kamizdat/Emanat) bo predstavil širši kontekst in trenutni razvoj decentraliziranih in federiranih omrežij (Fediverse & The Federation), bolj podrobno Mastodon projekt in slovensko Mastodon vozlišče Toot.SI. Ta instanca (https://toot.si) je nastala jeseni 2017, vendar še vedno čaka na slovenske uporabnike. Družbeno mreženje je lahko spet svobodno in naše!

datumi

3.4.2018 ob 19h: Ljudmila – OSMO/ZA
x.4.2018 ob ??h: Vetrinjski dvor, Maribor

povezave

https://joinmastodon.org
https://toot.si
https://medium.com/tootsuite

V nastajanju:

  • povzetek
  • prosojnice (slides)
  • posnetek

The Federation, Mastodon, Toot.Si presentation

(this is a draft version with mainly links and notes)

Problems

(with centralized, closed silos’d social network platforms)

Decentralization and the federation

Mastodon

Mastodon as software:

Moderation, blocking, silencing, suspending

instances:

Administration

 

How to use

AI Dystopia, data-farming…

ffmpeg: audio visualization tricks

Often one wants to share audio online, but it seems like video as a format has many more options: mastodon, twitter, facebook, youtube, all allow to upload video, but not only audio. Here are some ffmpeg tricks, how to add interesting video to your audio file, often autogenerated visuals. All the code is supposed to be used as one line without line-breaks.

 

Audio Vector Scope

The code above creates a mp4 video file with a vectorscope nicely centered inside a 854×480 (480p) video. If you need a 1:1 video, just exclude the pad part:

Documentation on ‘avectorscope’ filter is here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#avectorscope. One can play with zoom and other options to produce desired form.

 

Show waves

more options: http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#showwaves

Showspectrum

Above code will create almost completely desaturated spectrum of the audio sliding from right to left. Again, there are various options to tweak, see here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#showspectrum-1

 

Histogram

Documentation: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#ahistogram

 

Static spectrogram

Sometimes you want to just create a static image.

Above one is in two steps. More info here: http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#showspectrumpic

 

Drawtext

Add text to any of the above with a “drawtext” filter. More options here: http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#drawtext-1