LD9: Live and Direct Listens III - NetPD CD 1 (Dub Area) - Massively Multiplayer Online Music

Click, download, listen! Live and Direct number 9 (Live and Direct Listens ep #3) has arrived. It's 48.9MB, and 56:10 long. In it, I featured an album composed in real time on the Internet by a group of musicians collaborating with some software called NetPD. NetPD in turn relies on PD, which is a graphical programming language particularly suited to music synthesis and composition, but also extensible to video and other forms of data, hence the name "Pure Data".

The album is "dub" in style, featuring samples and loops that wind here and there at the whim of the collective controlling them. I played most of it, sans the last bit, which I had to cut for time constraints whilst on-air. If you wish to listen to it, you can find the whole thing here as an mp3. It's 72.1MB and 1:18:44 long, and the bit that I cut starts at 1:08:03 and goes till the end.

If you're interested in playing around with PD, you should check out the main site listed above as well as other sites on the PD webring. PD comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux flavors, so chances are it's compatible with your hardware. There's also a book, which gives some of the philosophy and context of PD's development as well; you can download the whole thing in pdf format here. Wrap your mind around the idea, install PD, download some other people's patches (PD programs are called patches), and then give it a whirl. It's free, you're bored, go create something!

As always, feel free to let me know what you think. In the future (given a large enough listenership) I'd love to do an experiment in live radio where you, the listener get to influence the music going live on the air. Whether this is via a web browser which interfaces with PD behind the scenes, or some such similar arrangement, I think it'd be fun.