BLOOPERNET-FP: a serverless web drum circle | mykle systems labs
All my life I’ve been playing music and exploring the beautiful phenomena of sound, just for the love of it. And to make ends meet I’ve also been a software developer, which is a solid living that’s also kind of fun. For much of my life I was often frustrated about how to split time between creative stuff and computer stuff, but only about ten years ago did it occur to me to try to do both of those things at the same time. So now I’m a music engineer? A software composer? Something like that. I formed an entity called MSL, and under its umbrella I search for new ways to interact with music. It’s fairly esoteric, but I love where it takes me.
For instance: my friends and I sometimes like to strap synthesizers to our bicycles and ride around listening to them. To put it more pretentiously: we facilitate collaborative electroacoustic bicycle music! It’s a unique and lovely listening experience to become a point in a cloud of electronic noises floating through a city, and to maneuver within that group of sounds to change your personal audio mix. We’ve been organizing these bicycle rides regularly in Portland and occasionally in other places. We called the first one “The Bleeps And Bloops Ride,” and the name stuck.
Of course, these bleeps and bloops can get quite chaotic once you’ve gathered a couple dozen bicycles’ worth of them. And chaos can be fun! But in the last year of this project I’ve been exploring how to add an element of tempo to the cacophony. For instance, BLOOPERNET is a wireless synchronized clock for bicyclists, a hardware solution that puts out either a MIDI clock signal or an analog sync pulse that’s synced between all devices. Most of today’s small tabletop synthesizer toys can use one of those two types of signal to align themselves in time. Using BLOOPERNET on these sound rides has been a lot of fun! The bleeps bleep, the bloops bloop, it’s still all crazy and electro-synthetic, but the strict tempo makes us sound like we know what we’re doing, like some kind of alien marching band.
