It is time for the next RJ sprint, this time in Barcelona Spain.

Paul Brossier will host the event on his terrace in the middle of cuitat vella the old part of Barcelona. We will inspect the location next week and review it for setting up tents where we will also sleep. So actually it is very possible that we will be hosting one of the first sprint camps ;-) RJ will provide travelling costs and accomodation (either tent or hotel… lets see) for 10 people. We are mainly sponsoring PD people who also have a musical background. If you are interested, please let us know!

Find more information here.

Paul Brossier is one of those developers who have a phd in physics. Coding is a necessity to think and not a job. Besides being lead developer of RJ he is the founder and driving force of Aubio. Aubio is an open source sound analysis library which is really doing a decent job. RJ is using bits and peaces of it and we support development on it. Now last week Paul managed to get aubio included in the latest release of Ardour which is an open source digital audio workstation. This is great news and i hope that we will all be able to push sound analysis to the next level. Congratulations Paul, well done!

people keep asking us for updates about what we do and what is happening here. Now i let guenter and paul explain it to you. Here is a short record from our irc channel:

[23:13] gige: I once had to hack a linux driver to disable that feature
[23:13] gige: like 15 years ago though …
[23:15] piem: gige: mmh, i doubt it’s hardware, we would have noticed it before, no?
[23:15] piem: enum { kAudioSessionCategory_UserInterfaceSoundEffects  = ‘uifx’, kAudioSessionCategory_AmbientSound              = ‘ambi’, kAudioSessionCategory_MediaPlayback              = ‘medi’, kAudioSessionCategory_LiveAudio                  = ‘live’, kAudioSessionCategory_RecordAudio                = ‘reca’, kAudioSessionCategory_PlayAndRecord              = ‘plar’
[23:15] piem: };
[23:15] piem: oops
[23:15] piem:
[23:15] gige: well, maybe it didnt exist before
[23:16] gige: how is the latency
[23:16] gige: ?
[23:16] piem: still big
[23:16] gige: if there is some latency, then its not direct through
[23:16] piem: yay, good point

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A while ago Christian Lutz sent me a statement from Shigeru Miyamoto which was published on times.com. Besides several other clever things he was saying:

“…I see the experience of interacting with your reality in a way that you normally can’t as a great source of entertainment.”

Wow… this sentence struck me because Realityjockey does exactly that. It creates the experience of interacting with your reality in a way that you normally can’t.

Actually i think entertainment has always something to do with a reality which normally is not your’s. No matter if it is a story told, a movie watched, a song heard, your mind is always switching into a reality which is not your’s in that very moment. This experience is a source of entertainment.

The interfaces between these realities are getting more and more advanced. It used to be human voices which evolved into instruments, big orchestras and finally little black boxes which produce music. Human expression evolved into theaters, pictures and movies.

One of the most interesting interfaces to interact with your reality in way that you normally can’t is certainly the Wiimote, Nunchuck or WiiFit. I guess many of you have seen posts about the latest WiiMusic release, if not, here is an excellent story about it. With WiiMusic Nintendo is adding not only an excellent title to augmented reality games but also to music games. This is increasing the awareness of the whole market and of course very good news for Realityjockey ;-)

Here is a little report from the RJSprint this weekend in Bizau.

First of all we are not many but we are good ;-) Damian Stewart is really doing a great job in thinking about how to musically arrange and compose in RJ. We came up with a composing paradigm and are currently doing the first compositions based on this. I am really happy about the quality of this all. Paul is working on the famous firmware2 and just got the RJTrack downloader to work, Amaury is crazy in analysis and Roman is working on the accelerometer.

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We were looking for a fast and simple way to create RJ-tracks and found it in PD. Guenter speaks PD better than Catalan so it was not much of a job for him to get a number of PD objects to work with RJ. PD is wonderful, we think right now it is the right tool for RJ.

Once RJ is released, everyone who is able to do PD will be able to produce RJ tracks. For the next weekend we are inviting a couple of PD people over to Austria for an RJ sprint. We hope we will get a lot of input about how they are leveraging RJ and we will adjust the RJ player and protocol in sprinting speed according to their needs. We are planing a second sprint later this month or more likely in the beginning of August.

Let us know if you think you could contribute in this sprint. We are still looking for good musicians.

This winter i called my friend guenter geiger and we were chatting about getting the RJ project as a consumer format for interactive music to the Iphone.

Since we are the kind of guys who are not just talking about things, we got iphones, we set up a small team, we did a lot of thinking, we did a lot of hacking and we did a lot of organizing. Now its summer and we are about to release the whole show.

Really, we should have started blogging much earlier, but you know how things are when you are busy. So lets sum up the last couple of month in one post and lets try to keep the posting up and running.

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