All posts by barkhausen

Some Double-Ues and an Aitch

13 August 2019 barkhausen Leave a comment

There’s something called an “elevator pitch”, which is not a ball thrown in an elevator but a short sales pitch, a succinct description of a product. Those who know me probably recognise that while I may be articulate I’m not much of a salesman for my ideas.

So we’ve been making music for, what? almost four years, published hundreds of tracks on SoundCloud, have just finished producing our second CD, and we’ve yet to play a single live show. I do know we’re plenty ready to play live. So, mea culpa. I guess I’ve been more focused on playing and producing than marketing what we do. So again, mea culpa.

Who We Are

Barkhausen was originally set up as a collective, meaning that while it’s my band, I wanted to be able to bring other musicians into the mix now and then. And while some of the collaborations (such as those in Munich and Tokyo, see We’ve Been Busy) weren’t strictly “Barkhausen” in that we were all equal collaborators rather than they joining my band, the music we produced would still fit into what I think of as Barkhausen music. Very much so.

It occurs to me that this blog might not make clear who I am. I’m Murray Altheim, a Canadian who lived for many years in California, and after a few years in England moved to New Zealand in 2006 where I live in a small town about five minutes from the sea.

Since Barkhausen’s formation in 2015 there’s been one constant collaborator, my best mate Jason Tamihana-Bryce. Jason and I understand each other musically very well, and while there’s a tension between us due to our quite different temperaments and approaches to music, this tension has proven to be productive, not destructive. We also have a great time.

We’ve quite recently recruited a percussionist (who continues to insist he’s a drummer) named Karl Wagener. I’d been looking for someone who could, a bit like in a free jazz trio, provide an equal collaboration rather than a rhythm section, as I don’t want an underlying beat that would force us to follow it but rather, like Jason and I, someone who listens to what is happening and reacts with some sensitivity, contributed to the mix rather than attempting to (as a drummer) build an underlying rhythmic foundation. I think Karl and I have come to an understanding on this and the few sessions he’s played with us show real promise, i.e., I’m really enjoying what he’s bringing to the band.

What We Do

Over the past few years I’ve had the occasion to try to describe the music that Barkhausen makes. It’s not an easy answer. It doesn’t really fit conveniently into any genre, and while I don’t consider Barkhausen tracks showing up on top-40 radio, there are certainly venues where they could.

There’s some aspects of Free Jazz that make sense as a descriptive genre. Wikipedia’s page on the subject describes it as an attempt “to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes” with a preoccupation “with creating something new”. Yes.

The Ambient section in the Shibuya Tower Records is an entire aisle, many thousands of CDs. There’s a lot of music there that isn’t very ambient (at least not in the Brian Eno Music For Airports mold), and that’s probably where Barkhausen CDs would end up. I find that rather dissatisfying, as I resist the “ambient” label, largely because the music we make is a lot more active than passive, and I think of ambient music as largely passive listening.

Our music is not challenging in the way that Noise or other Experimental music is challenging: it’s not hard to listen to. We don’t sound like Ornette Coleman or Stockhausen or Yoko Ono or something Fluxus-like, but perhaps a bit like the collaborations between David Sylvian and Holger Czukay (labeled “ambient”!), some of the more experimental works of Bill Frisell or Ryuichi Sakamoto, or David Torn. Yes, this is some name-dropping of some of my (and Jason’s) favourite musicians, and it’s undoubtable that we’ve been influenced by them. But we don’t sound like any of them. By design.

I do think what we do requires quite active listening. There’s a lot going on in The Length of Heaven (our last album), and that comes from both our process (more on that below) and my editing (again, more below).

As an erstwhile painter the term “Abstract” is one that I like (and I’ve sometimes used it to describe Barkhausen), but when I search online for “abstract music” I don’t hear anything like what I would think of as abstract music. As abstract painting runs the gamut from Rothko or Pollock (Noise) to Vasarely or Euan Uglow (Math), and a great deal more, it’s not very descriptive. Or helpful. Historically there’s been Absolute Music and Impressionist Music, but these terms are too overloaded.

So absent a genre what in the end I inevitably do with my elevator pitch is to fall back on how we make our music.

How We Do It

We do have a few rules:

The music is entirely improvised.
We don’t plan anything. I’m not sure if this is because we prefer to improvise freely or because we simply fail at planning. I think the latter. The closest to a plan we ever have is to agree to start a track following an agreed-upon key and mode. Where it might go from there is unclear…
The recordings are made directly from our sessions, with no multi-tracking, overdubbing or post-production changes to the order or composition to what we played, except to trim sections that were repetitive, not-so-interesting, or didn’t otherwise contribute to the overall composition or feel of a track. You’re hearing what we played in the order we played it, just cleaned up. If the music sounds like it’s more than what two people might be able to create it’s because we have a lot of equipment.

Jason has a great talent for being able to quickly pick out the notes on a guitar fretboard for pretty much any key and mode, not just for Harmonic Minor, Pentatonic and Mixolydian but for many of the more obscure modes like the Enigmatic, Algerian and Hungarian Gypsy modes. I couldn’t possibly keep up with him in this regard, so if you see a laptop in front of me while I’m playing it’s not to play sounds but to give me some help with keys and modes using a web page Notes in Scale tool I wrote. This has also allowed us to explore some more unusual modes, such as Messiaen’s Modes of limited transposition.

The Technical Stuff

While it may not be obvious, Jason and I play guitars, sometimes basses. I also (rarely) bring a ukelele or banjo along. I sometimes use a cello bow, Jason several eBows. Jason usually has at least one guitar horizontal on a stand, ala Greg Malcolm. We have a lot of guitar pedals.

I’m generating two stereo pairs (four channels) into two Fender tube amps (a Princeton and a Vibrolux) and two DIs from a Eurorack Synth post-processor that runs into two Mackie 800 watt bass amps into two Gallien-Krueger 4×10 cabinets. Jason generates a stereo pair off of one Jansen tube amp and one Fender Princeton. Apart from the DIs everything is live mic’d.

When Karl is with us (or when I feel like adding some cymbals around my own rig), I’m creating a stereo pair as a submix off the percussion kit. The drums are Mapex, the cymbals mostly Zildjian Avedis.

We record live into a 16 channel Mackie analog mixer, mixing down to 6 channels (three stereo pairs) into a Zoom F4 digital recorder.

All post-production is done using Audacity on Ubuntu Linux. We send our work off to be mastered by Denis Blackham of Skye Mastering (yes, on the Isle of Skye), who does an absolutely lovely job.

…enough of that.

Why We Do It

The “why?” question… hmm. Compulsion? The answer comes back to that notion from the Free Jazz genre: the desire to create something new. I’ve played in Blues, Rock, and Rockabilly-Surf bands, and while that’s all fun (and this is no criticism of those genres) if I was going to go to all the trouble of recording and producing music, I frankly don’t think the world needs another blues band.

Nor could I possibly think I’m so fine a musician as to “compete” on musical technique (nor could I care to). I’m never going to be Stevie Ray Vaughn. But I learned from Bill Frisell that the best music a musician can create is one’s own. That notion of Bill’s was what actually got me to start Barkhausen.

So we’ve struck out for new territory with music that is our own. I hope you enjoy the ride enough to follow along…

Macintosh

Vintage Mac Virtual Machine

17 July 2019 barkhausen Leave a comment

This article is the third in a multi-part series related to the vintage Macintosh computers of the late 1980s, and why old software needn’t die, even if it is abandoned by its creators. ( 1 | 2 | 3 | Vintage Macintosh Resources )

[a work in progress…]

Released in 1986, the original Macintosh Plus could execute 700,000 instructions per second, or 0.7 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). That almost sounds fast until you compare it to my 7 year old iPhone 5, which runs at 20,000 MIPS or 20 Billion Instructions Per Second. My HP laptop has an 8 processor 1.8 GHz Intel i7 CPU running at around 54 BIPS (maxes out at 61 BIPS).

Okay, a lot of numbers. Point is, it’s not remotely taxing a contemporary computer (even a tiny computer like a Raspberry Pi) to emulate a vintage Macintosh. In fact, the emulator has to deliberately delay execution of machine instructions to run slow enough not to alter the behaviour of the emulated Mac.

Okay, I assume you’re reading this because you have some interest in emulating a vintage Mac on your own computer. I’ll describe below how to do this using the Mini vMac emulator, created as part of Paul C. Pratt’s Gryphel Project.

Requirements

That original Mac Plus had a whopping 1MB of RAM (Random Access Memory), upgradable to 4MB. It also had 128K of ROM (Read Only Memory) that contained all the core software that made it a Macintosh.

In order to open a Macintosh Virtual Machine (i.e., an application that emulates an early Macintosh), you’ll need

a customised executable (or “binary”) of the Mini vMac application, usually named “minivmac”, and
a ROM (Read-Only Memory) file corresponding to the specific Macintosh model you are emulating

Also important to note:

the Mini vMac executable and the Mac ROM file must both be in the same directory
you must have the right ROM for the Mac model you’re emulating, and it must be named correctly (see table below)

Fortunately, if Mini vMac starts up and can’t find the ROM file the error message will tell you the name of the ROM file it’s expecting.

The Mini vMac project hosts a Mac68k page listing all the Macintosh models and their corresponding ROM file names. I’ve summarised the ROM files required for each model below:

Model	ROM Filename
Mac 128K	Mac128K.ROM
Mac 512K	Mac128K.ROM
Mac 512Ke	vMac.ROM
Mac Plus	vMac.ROM
Mac SE	MacSE.ROM
Mac SE FDHD	SEFDHD.ROM
Mac Classic	Classic.ROM
Mac II	MacIIx.ROM

Getting Mini vMac

Rather than me reiterate the voluminous documentation that Mini vMac’s author has accomplished, you can find Mini vMac resources directly from the source:

the Mini vMac project page
the download page contains binaries for various operating systems
the Getting Started page has helpful documentation

There are also more Mini vMac links on the Vintage Macintosh Resources page.

Getting a Mac ROM

The contents of the Mac ROMs are copyright Apple Computer, so it’s illegal in some countries to distribute them as files. I’ll just point you at where you can find one (or a collection of them):

Download vmac.rom (139K) on sites.google.com. The site also contains information about Mini vMac and links to various sizes of blank Mac disks
Download Macintosh ROM Archive (52.5MB) from the Internet Archive
Download Macintosh ROMs (5.6MB) from Macintosh-ROMs on github
Download Old_World_Mac_Roms (49MB) from the All Macintosh Roms page at the Macintosh Repository

Starting Up

Once you have an executable and a ROM, place them in the same directory and start the executable. I generally work on a Linux machine so I built some executables for Linux. On Mac OS X you’d put the minivmac application in the Applications directory, along with the ROM file.

Once the emulator has started you’ll see the Mac icon waiting for a startup disk:

You then drag a Mac startup disk file (a .dsk or *.img file containing a System Folder) onto the window to start the Mac. If the disk contained a System Folder and things are successfully starting up, you’ll briefly see the happy Mac icon:

followed by the Welcome to Macintosh window:

…and then finally the Mac desktop:

Since we’re doing screenshots, to safely close down your Mini vMac session, select the Shutdown item from the Special menu. You’ll see:

…and then you can close the window.

The above screenshots are from that originally-sized 512 by 342 pixel Mac SE screen, the way things were in 1986. If that seems a bit cramped, it’s possible to modify the screen size. I generally run 1200 x 900 in full colour, as on a Macintosh II with 8MB of memory. But sometimes I like that tiny Mac SE window too.

The mini vMac project provides open source code that allows you to compile the minivmac application using differing command line options. It’s these options that permit you to select things like target operating system, model of Mac to emulate, screen size, etc.

Next Steps

I ended up downloading the source code of the project and repeatedly generating minivmac binaries for differing configurations, then renaming the resulting binary to a name corresponding to the configuration. That way I could try out a Mac SE with the original 512 x 342 pixel screen, or a 1024 x 800 pixel Mac SE FDHD, or a colour Mac II. There’s no magic here.

I noted that the Basilisk emulator has a Preferences screen to alter the configuration of the emulation. It occurred to me that I could make a HyperCard stack to do the same thing for Mini vMac. And I did. I’ll cover that next time.

[This article was written in 2019 using MacWrite 4.6 on Macintosh System version 7.5]

Macintosh

The Skull Box

14 July 2019 barkhausen Leave a comment

This article is the second in a multi-part series related to the vintage Macintosh computers of the late 1980s, about a HyperCard stack resurrected in 2019 from the memory of one made way back in 1990.
( 1 | 2 | 3 | Vintage Macintosh Resources )

My work partner Jerry and I had developed a habit of passing paper notes back and forth during our sometimes interminable team meetings.

Jerry had a very dry sense of humor, and after we’d been sitting in one of these meetings for a very long time he passed me a slip of paper with a small cartoon he’d drawn of eight skulls in a chocolate box, his commentary on our mutual plight.

This was circa 1990. Jerry’s job was to extract data from a large university database; my job was to process that data using what was at that time the most powerful desktop computer we could find: a Macintosh IIci with 8MB of RAM . The base price of one of these in today’s dollars would be about US$13,000, this for a computer that ran 6.3 MIPS (millions of instructions per second). By comparison, my 2013 iPhone 5s (which I purchased a few years ago for $265) runs at 20,500 MIPS. That’s about 3000 times faster for a computer that is 2% of the cost. Nowadays we of course take this for granted, Moore’s Law and all that…

Jerry was using COBOL to export data from the university’s “student master file”, extracting large (25MB!) text files where each student’s record was a 640 character wide line of columnated data that captured everything the university knew of their personal information, the classes they were taking, and their grades. There was actually only one student master file (the database itself), and it was changing constantly, so the university captured snapshots of the file five times per semester.

I processed the data using 4th Dimension, a Mac relational database†. It had a built-in programming language that I’d extended with a scriptable macro language. This was used to perform searches and generate indexes from the data Jerry supplied. I’d start a script on Friday as I left for the weekend and the Mac would chug away to generate about 450 Excel spreadsheets, finishing up sometime on Sunday afternoon. Nowadays that same processing would take less than a few minutes.

…and then came HyperCard

I’d been working on Macs almost since the first model came out in 1984. One of the things I was most enthusiastic about was a software program called HyperCard, which was distributed along with every Macintosh, as free software.

It’s a bit hard to describe the impact of HyperCard to those who haven’t seen or used it. HyperCard combined a graphics program, an object-oriented database, and software development environment in such a way that almost anyone could create their own applications, called stacks (following the metaphor of a stack of 3×5 note cards), enabling non-programmers to create software applications that were only limited by their creator’s imaginations (well, and the limitations of the computers at that time). People made their own recipe catalogs, address books, databases, animation stacks, tools to help them with all manner of professional, academic and hobbyist needs.

Creating the Skull Box Stack

That evening I started work on the HyperCard stack.

From Jerry’s sketch I drew an empty chocolate box, then created a new button and set its Style as Transparent. For the button I created a new icon to look like Jerry’s skull drawing. I made seven more copies of that button and placed them inside the chocolate box. This all within HyperCard.

I made a small handle icon and used that on a large Rectangle-style button as the lid of the chocolate box. I wanted to have the lid fly off when clicked on, then if a skull was clicked on it would bounce around on the screen. This meant that the HyperTalk script for animating the lid and the script to animate the skulls could be similar, apart from the bouncing.

The scripting was a bit trickier than I’d thought, but I delivered the finished stack to Jerry the next day. On a floppy disk.

While it’s certainly possible to do something like this nowadays as a web page with some JavaScript, the graphics application and web development prerequisites and the ability to upload and host a page are beyond the skills of most non-programmers, or at least what most non-programmers would ever bother to do… too much trouble.

By comparison, HyperCard allowed me to do this in one evening in an environment that melded both graphic tools and a simple, English-like programming language. HyperCard was admittedly more limited than a full-colour graphics application and a web development environment, but those limitations actually enabled it to be used by anyone. And it was fun.

Download the SkullBox Stack

The images posted here aren’t from that 1989 stack, which is sadly long lost to the floppy disks of history. Last week I used HyperCard and the vintage Macintosh emulator Mini vMac to recreate that 1989 SkullBox stack (from memory, i.e., my memory), with a few improvements. If you have a vintage Mac emulator available you can download a floppy disk file‡ and try it out for yourself:

Download SkullBox stack (disk image file, 131K)
Download SkullBox stack, HyperCard 2.3.5, System 6.0.8, utilities (bootable disk image file, 10.5MB)

The first download is a disk image containing only the SkullBox stack. The second download is a bootable disk and contains System 6.0.8 and a copy of HyperCard 2.3.5 so it can be used to start up a Mac emulator as well as run the SkullBox stack. You can even make your own stacks.

This article was composed using MacWrite 4.6 on an emulated Mac SE. Next time I’ll describe how to set up your own Mini vMac emulator.

Previous article: HyperCard Lives!

† interestingly, the developer of 4th Dimension, Laurent Ribardière, went on to develop Wakanda, a JavaScript platformto develop and run web or mobile apps. 4D is still available in 2019.
‡ *.img or *.dsk files can be drag-and-dropped onto an open Mini vMac window to be mounted as floppy disks. They can also be double-clicked on Mac OS X and Linux to mount as read-only disks. Linux only seems to recognise the *.img file extension (as application/octet-stream), not *.dsk. But of course you’ll need a vintage Mac emulator to actually open a HyperCard stack.