April 9th 2025

Mock Funeral - defunct and short-lived website about abanonded computer music software

Mock Funeral was a very short-lived website I made back in 2020 to document my findings when exploring abandoned computer music software, primarily late 90's through early 2000's, inspired by certain artists and albums from around the period.

That period in electronic music is very dear to me, not only in experimental computer music but electronic music in general, although this is specifcally about that period in time, which has since perhaps been labeled "laptop music".

1. Backstory

In 2019 I found a link online to Bhob Rainey's Xynthi Supercollider 2 stand-alone patch from 2006, a patch that was made, visually at least, to emulate the EMS Synthi synthesizer from the early 70's, pin matrix and all.
I downloaded it and found out it didn't run on modern day macOS, but the "recordings" folder had three noisy samples in them and I realized I had to try this out somehow.

The following month I got a hold of a cheap, second-hand Powerbook G4 from 2002 with a completely dead battery. I spent quite a while burning install discs for OSX 10.3.9 and, for whatever reason, I also installed OS 9.2.2. I had run Windows on all my machines up until 2011, so I had never actually tried OS9, but I always wanted to.

"Mock Funeral" is taken from the fact that Apple did a, well, mock funeral for the death of OS9.

I was then set to explore a bit of old computer music software, and I obviously started with Rainey's Xynthi patch.

2. Xynthi (2006)

As said, Xynthi is a Supercollider 2 stand-alone patch made to emulate the 70's EMS Synthi synthesizers. It can yield some lovingly sparse tones and overwhelmingly abrasive noises.

I've used it on a number of releases since then, most notibly the following two:

The last being directly titled after the Xynthi interface; I sometimes forget I'm not playing a game of minesweeper.

Back then I wrote an email to Rainey asking about why it never got updated and to ask if he had a Paypal address I could share on the site.

Rainey wrote back:

I believe that the only reason it doesn’t work in the current macOS is the switch to only accept 64-bit apps. It may be possible to do a 64-bit build and have it work. What I’d really like to do is just host the code on GitHub, so that anyone who has a working version of SuperCollider could use the app. That’s a medium-sized project, since SC switched to .scd files instead of .rtf, many of the GUI elements have changed, and the fact that you can’t define classes on-the-fly in SC means that some custom classes would have to be converted to class-like structures like Events. A mildly nauseating set of tasks that I just haven’t had the time and stomach to get to. I do have PayPal at this address (lloydlyson@gmail.com). I think that, in the entire time since Xynthi was released, which is at least 12 years, one person has sent me a payment of around $10. Never make your target audience a bunch of experimental noise dudes if you want to make a buck :)

3. SoundMaker and SoundMagicFX plugins (1997)

The next software in line was Alberto Ricci's SoundMaker editor (68k and PPC) from 1997.

Through listening and reading about the approaches to software by Oval (Markus Popp) I was introduced to Michael Norris' SoundMagicFX plugins for SoundMaker. In an interview he writes about using it quite a lot and I thought that was interesting enough to warrent a look-see.
You might know the modern-day spectral plugins that Norris releases called the Soundmagic Spectal.

The SoundMagicFX suite of plugins are, quite surprisingly, still available for download on Norris' website, although he provides no support for them.

I downloaded them and realized the shareware plugins folder requires a password and registration code, so I reached out to Norris to ask if I could obtain them, but after all these years he had forgotten the password, which in itself is pretty amusing.

I instead reached out to Popp and asked if he had any insight into what it could be.

Not more than a day later he got back to me after having checked his old machines and provided me with the password.

I got permission from Norris to share these and they, for the sake of documentation, are provided here as well.

“Shareware Effects” bundle archive password:

chrysalis

Registration Code:

75279888

All of these processes in SoundMaker are offline rendering, which, if you're used to modern day workflows, can seem quite grating and terribly slow, but it really is worth being patient and to explore all these plugins in the pace that the technology allows.

Here's some audio examples of recordings processed using SoundMaker and the Norris plugins:

4. Interview with Stephan Mathieu by René Margraff

René interviwed Mathieu about his connection with older computer music software.

Mathieu's work comes highly recommended.

5. Abanonded site about abanonded software

Energies fluctuate and I suddenly got other things to attend to, so I never did more deep dives into OS9/OSX software that I wanted to share and since then I haven't powered the Powerbook on for quite a while.

I wanted to write about Ppooll, a suite of interconnected modules for Max/MSP, and CDP - Composer's Desktop Project, which was a big deal, for me, in electro-acoustic computer composition.

There even, for a brief while, was a CDP frontend for Reaper, which I used in the state it was in. It has since been removed and is no longer actively being developed.

I don't plan to update the Mock Funeral site any longer. But it was fun and I want to make sure it is available to others who might want to try it out down the road.

I know of some people who might have gotten some of this old software to run via emulation on current-day machines, but I never dove into it myself, so I can't help out with that.

The latest work I did using it was a small, personal project, where I tried to redesign the audio for a section of the fantastic Bladerunner 97 game, but specifically wanting to steer away from just retreading the original Bladerunner film's audio aesthetic, instead using SoundMaker and the Norris plugins to give it a sense of late 90's laptop-infused digital sheen.
I abanonded the project quite quickly, and most of the saved recordings I have are from sketches for the UI, when the player has to move about the locations.
SoundMaker featured a text-to-voice plugin, which was especially gritty, so I recorded it saying a few of the location names and tried to scramble it.
Not terribly useful, but it shows off some of the more granular processes in SoundMaker and the Norris plugin suite.

6. The past, the future

I really think there is a lot to learn from doing these kinds of explorations of old software, even if it can be very cumbersome and time-consuming.

Even if I can't provide much help, let me know if you need anything in getting this up and running.

Take care.