Tenori-on musical instrument demo
The newly released Tenori-on, developed by Toshio Iwai for Yamaha, has been mentioned on several blogs. But I particularly liked this short demo from engineer Yu Nishibori. Tenori-on is a 16-channel, 16-layer music sequencer, with a modernized 8-bit-ish sound. I particularly liked the visual feedback that the interface provides — deleting, moving and setting [...]
The Art of Sampling at MCASD, CA
SOUNDWAVES: THE ART OF SAMPLING :: MCASD LA JOLLA :: SEPTEMBER 23 - DECEMBER 30, 2007 :: Selections on view through May 4, 2008.
Sound has played a significant role in the development of modern and contemporary art, from the visual references of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in the early 20th-century to the aural experimentations of Nam June Paik and John Cage in the 1960s. Soundwaves: The Art of Sampling looks at a specifically late 20th-century manifestation of the conjunction of art and sound, and features artists in MCASD’s collection, such as Tim Bavington, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Sean Duffy, Julio Cesar Morales, Dario Robleto, and Steve Roden, who appropriate the musical process of sampling in their work, either through the incorporation of found sound or through visual and material references.
Download and listen to the Soundwaves audio tour on your MP3 player.
Image: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Untitled (series #3), 2001, set of 3 inflatable plastic pools, 3 pumps, water, 93 assorted bowls, water, 21 stem glasses, 3 immersion heaters, Clorox. Museum purchase, International and Contemporary Collectors Funds.
Thanks to Rhizome and William Hanley.
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Oct 8, 2007, 5:10PM
Baby Love [Sydney]
Baby Love by Shu Lea Cheang :: October 1 - November 2, 2007 | Mon - Sat | 10am - 12pm & 2pm - 5pm :: Free :: Carriageworks, Sydney.
Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.
Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.
The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?
Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:11AM
Pocket Gamelan
Several posters were presented at the Mobile Music Workshop yesterday afternoon, a good opportunity to discover new projects and have a chat with their author.
Pocket Gamelan (PDF), developed by Greg Schiemer and Mark Havryliv, couldn’t make it to Amsterdam on time (seems to be somewhere in the caring hands of the post) but that won’t prevent me from mentioning it. The interactive musical interface allows non-expert performers to create microtonal music using bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. Players swing the handsets on the end of a cord in a circular trajectory. As the phone is swung it produces audible artefacts such as Doppler shift and chorusing which are generated as a bi-product of movement. The device works like a network of operations in which melodies and the speed at which they’re played can be altered.
Pocket Gamelan, draws on Schiemer’s “Tupperware Gamelan” instruments of the 70s and 80s. The custom-made electronic instruments, housed in plastic kitchenware, were designed for non-expert players and used in dance and performance (via.)
Image.
Related: the 1999 performance Improvisation for Two Altered Telephones.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on May 6, 2007, 10:35PM
The Last Tag Show - *Pash
“The Last Tag Show, a live “net performance,” took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centered around tracking its users’ music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation, through wikis, in the creation of artist profiles.
The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM’s technical structure to pull off a 24 hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow’s profile page. These were no ordinary songs however, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers they appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include “Moderator,” “Hannah,” “Voiceover,” “Instructor,” “Marck,” “Zita Vass,” and “Gregg,” with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters take the role of a musician in Last.FM’s data-centric view, each of them have a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.” Continue reading The Last Tag Show by Nathan Lovejoy at Furtherfield.
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on May 2, 2007, 9:46AM
Sound Art for Sound Lab
Soundart for SoundLAB - Edition V :: Call for proposals :: Theme: soundSTORY :: deadline 1 August 2007
SoundLAB -is currently preparing its fifth edition and is inviting soundartists, musicians and composers to submit one piece of soundart using sound (music) as a tool for storytelling.
In 2004, SoundLAB was launched as a corporate part of the global networking project [R][R][F]200x—>XP - on the occasion of BEAP - the Biennale of Electronic Art Perth/Australia 2004. Soon thereafter it started acting on its own as an environment for sonic art.
Edition IV was launched in October 2006 under the title “memoryscapes” and included 144 artists and 235 soundart pieces dealing with “memory and identity”; it became a part of the media art show selfportrait - a show for Bethlehem - a show for Peace - which is currently running at MACRO - Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Rosario/Argentina
Edition V has the theme: “soundSTORY” and explores “sound” as a tool for storytelling. Therefore besides the soundart piece itself, the story the piece tells has a particular relevance.
Call for entries
1. Theme: soundSTORY
2.. one single work of soundart may be submitted
3. exclusive soundformat: mp3
4. max. duration 10 minutes
5. each submission has to accompanied by the story behind
6. the artist/author keep all rights on the submitted soundwork and story
6. the work to be submitted has to be posted on a webpage for download, including artist bio, and story
7. the complete entry form including the requested info material has to be submitted via email
8. each submitter is obliged to answer the questions of the interview
Each serious interview will be included no matter, whether the submitted work is selected or not
9. Deadline: 1 August 2007
Entry form
artist/author
# full name
# email
# URL
# short biography/CV (not more than 300 words in English)
# interview (English only, please download the questions here)
http://downloads.nmartproject.net/SIP_interview_project_invitation1.pdf
http://downloads.nmartproject.net/SIP_interview_project_invitation1.doc
Work
# title (one work only)
# year
# duration
# URL for download
# story (no more than 1000 words in English)
Confirmation/authorization: The submitter declares and confirms that he/she is holding all author’s rights and gives permission to include the submitted work in “Soundlab” until revoke. Signed by (submitter)
Please send the complete submission, including artist bio and story in plain email, RTF file format or WORD. doc to:
soundlab[at]newmediafest.org
subject: Soundlab edition V
.
# Deadline: 1 August 2007
SoundLAB Editions I - IV can be visited at http://soundlab.newmediafest.org
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 19, 2007, 2:44PM
Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans
LEMUR presents Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans :: LEMUR’s First Annual Commissioned Works Concert :: May 31-June 2, 2007 :: 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center.
Featuring Pop Musicians They Might Be Giants, Punk cum New Music Composer JG Thirlwell (Foetus), Electronic Music Pioneer Morton Subotnick and Jazz Trombonist and MacArthur Fellow George Lewis, Performing Live with LEMUR’s Robots; plus Solo Works for LEMUR Robots by R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson.
LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots presents its first concert series consisting entirely of works commissioned for LEMUR’s musical robots. The program, Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans, will be performed during a three-night run, from Thursday, May 31 through Saturday, June 2, 2007, at 8 pm each night. The series will take place at the Mainstage Theatre at the new 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center. Robosonic Eclectic is presented as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival (NYEAF), a month-long celebration of cutting-edge electronic music performed at various venues from May 12 through June 10, 2007.
Four commissioned works, each with a live performance component, serve as the backbone of the evening, alternating with works that the robots will perform solo. Composer/performers for the live pieces are John Flansburgh and John Linnell (They Might Be Giants), JG Thirlwell (Foetus), Morton Subotnick and George Lewis. These works will feature live performances by the composer(s) of the piece, plus special guests. Pieces for solo robots by R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson will also be performed by the robot ensemble.
Tickets are $20 and available online now from Brown Paper Tickets.
LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists developing robotic musical instruments. Founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR creates exotic, sculptural musical instruments which integrate robotic technology. LEMUR’s philosophy is to build robots that are instruments as opposed to robots that play existing instruments. LEMUR’s growing ensemble includes over 50 robotic instruments. GuitarBot, an electric stringed instrument, is comprised of several independently controllable stringed units which can pick and slide extremely rapidly. ModBots are a large collection of modular percussion robots in a variety of styles and functions, including beaters, singing bells, and shakers. The Ill-Tempered Clangier is a robotic xylophone-like tubular bell instrument which clangs percussive melodies on forty-four tuned metal pipes. ForestBot is comprised of a forest of egg-shaped rattles sprouting from long rods that quiver and sway over onlookers. TibetBot is designed around three Tibetan singing bowls struck by robotic arms to produce a range of timbres.
They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell) Combining a knack for infectious melodies with a quirky, bizarre sense of humor and a vaguely avant-garde aesthetic borrowed from the New York post-punk underground, They Might Be Giants became one of the most unlikely alternative success stories of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Musically, the duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell borrowed from everywhere, but their freewheeling eclecticism was enhanced by their arcane, geeky sense of humor. They Might Be Giants released their eponymous debut in 1986, and the album became a college radio hit. Two years later they released Lincoln, which expanded their following considerably. Their third album, Flood, worked its way to gold status. They celebrated their 20th anniversary in summer 2002 with the release of their first children’s album, No! Early in 2005, Here Come the ABCs and its accompanying DVD were the band’s first releases for Disney Sound.
JG Thirlwell: The inscrutable JG Thirlwell was dropped on this planet some time ago to bestow sonic majesty, chaos, violence & beauty and cunning linguistics on an unsuspecting earth. A Brooklyn-based Australian ex-pat, Thirlwell has used many names for his many visions: Foetus (and its many name variations), Steroid Maximus, Clint Ruin, Wiseblood, DJ OTEFSU, Manorexia and Baby Zizanie. His multitude of influential recordings under the name FOETUS and variations thereof, has amassed a rabid world-wide cult following. Over the course of more than a dozen albums he has stretched from yearning orchestral soundscapes, meticulously organized chaos, electronic swathes, blistering big band pastiche, crunching hard rock and even inventing stupefying collisions of genres and forms with a raw emotion and irresistible musicality. More recently JG has also branched out into audio installations (the freq_out project curated by CM Von Hausswolf, with whom he also conducted an audio workshop at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt), DJ-ing (as DJ Otefsu), has appeared in an opera (Der Kastanienball in Munich in 2004, directed by Stefan Winter), has scored a cartoon series for The Cartoon Network in the USA (The Venture Brothers), and recently completed a commission for Bang On A Can. In 2005, he wrote his first commission for Kronos Quartet, which premiered in 2006.
Morton Subotnick: Known as a grandfather of electronic music, Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre. In addition to music in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, theater and multimedia productions. Currently, Subotnick holds the Mel Powell Chair in Music at the California Institute of the Arts. He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.
George Lewis: MacArthur Fellow George Lewis is currently Edwin H. Case Professor of Music at Columbia, having previously taught at UC San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. He has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in
the “Interarts Inquiry” and “Integrative Studies Roundtable” at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). A member of the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. An active composer, improvisor, performer and computer/installation artist, Lewis has explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. His artistic work is documented in over 120 recordings and has been awarded by a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, 1999 Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
R. Luke DuBois: R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and is the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
J. Brendan Adamson: Brendan Adamson’s compositions and interactive works are informed by the superhuman performance requirements of works by Conlon Nancarrow and others, but employ recently developed capabilities of such robotic instruments as modern self-playing pianos, recent automated organs, and musical robots created by LEMUR. As an undergraduate student, Brendan presented his “impressive compositions” (The New York Times) at Juilliard’s first ever all-robot-performed concert, RoboRecital. In addition to numerous performances in the United States, his music has been performed by robots at international festivals around the world, including those in Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Mexico, and Japan. Brendan holds a Bachelor’s degree in music composition from the Juilliard School. A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, past teachers include Nils Vigeland, Christopher Rouse, Mari Kimura, and Milton Babbitt.
Robosonic Eclectic is presented in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center. Works by George Lewis and Morton Subotnick are commissioned by LEMUR and Harvestworks with support from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund.
LEMUR is supported by generous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and Arts International. See http://lemurbots.org for more information.
For more information, contact info@lemurbots.org. For press information, contact Gayle Snible at gayle[at]lemurbots.org.
ALSO DON’T FORGET! TRANZDUCER.004 Friday, April 27th 8-11 pm
This month’s acts
* R. Luke DuBois and friend(s): Local new media celeb + >= 1 special guest(s)
* Marek Choloniewski: Krazy sensor music from Krakow
* Ellis & Aguilar Duo: Bass, percussion and electronics
LEMURplex: 461 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, Between 9th & 10th Sts. $5
TRANZDUCER is LEMUR’s music, art and performance series hosted by Eric Singer, Jamie Allen and Tristan Perich.
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 27, 2007, 1:20PM
Music textile
Music textile is a large tactile interface for playing electronic music.
Navigable score on music textile XYi
The XY position of the performer’s hand contact moving onto the surface of the fabric is transmited to a computeur via a 12 Bytes resolution Midi card. This allows 4000 by 4000 points resolution. Two conductive fabrics are fixed on a frame, each one weaved with conductive threads in a different direction. When the performer presses any point of the textile instrument, the upper layer connects with the fabric underneath and the current eletrical value is sent to the computer. 
The videos on the website are pretty impressive. Image gallery.
Developed by Vincent Roudaud and Maurin Donneaud.
Check out the interface during Malaupixel in Paris, the installation will be exhibited at Confluences, on April 16 to 21, 12h-21h.
Related: Sonic Fabric, a musical dress made of textile woven from 50% pre-recorded audiotape and 50% cotton; Sonic City, a wearable piece that enables people to compose music in real time by walking through the city; etc.
Via a place to bookmark/del.icio.us/add to your rss feed: Bioject, Jean-Baptist Labrune’s blog.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 10, 2007, 10:34PM
Soundbytes - Part 2
Yesterday in Soundbytes - Part 1, i gave a brief overview of the art works installed on the ground floor of the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg (Germany) for the Soundbytes - electronic and digital soundworlds exhibition.
Let’s just get to the level below:
Akitsugu Maebayashi’s Metronome Piece is one of the highlights of the show for me. The artist went for a walk around Oldenburg bringing along a metronome. The clicks produced by the instrument work as ’sonar’ which detects information of spaces, and the echoes of tick-tick were recorded binaurally through microphones in the artist’s ears.
In the exhibition room, there’s a table, a chair and headphones. As you walk near the chair the light dims and you’re left with the sound of the metronome. Take the headphones and the experience becomes utterly strange. While you can still perceive the tick-tick (or people coming down the stairs above your head) coming through headphones, you’re suddenly wandering the streets of Oldenburg on the steps of Akitsugu Maebayashi. You hear people walking by and talking under the rain, a truck passing, etc. The first time i even looked behind me to check who was there (no one of course, just an audio illusion). Another layer of space and time was overlapping with what was going on around me.
Harar (annicca), by Thomas Köner (of the Banlieu du Vide fame), is projected in the adjacent room. The work is part of the Péripheriques trilogy which shows patterns in the moves of people in the streets and detects stories in their faces. The videos were shooted in 3 different cities (Harar, Belgrade, and a favela in Buenos Aires), original sounds from the filming location blend with imaginary sounds.
Annina Rüst was showing Rock ‘n’ Scroll, a sound remixing system which allows anyone to use the computer as an acoustic instrument for interventions into wifi-equipped public space. Both mobile phones and computers are connected using a VOIP software. The sound itself is a combination of standard macintosh and windows sounds, as well as sounds included in the Skype software, and pre-made drumloops. There’s also a delay effect that depend on how good the connection is.
There were free softwares to take away!
The person who starts the performance has the most control (over the drum loop and the right mouse-button to turn on the microphone while turning off the rhythm.) Other participants function mainly as triggers. But no one has a total control over the whole performance.
Image fluctuat
A computer was showing the website of micromusic, a low-tech music community initiated by carl (Gino Esposto), wanga (Paco Manzanares) and bacon (Michael Burkhardt), famous for their performances and compositions that use Gameboys or vintage Atari consoles. The micomusic.net website reflects their objective to build an online community where visitors can listen to and download music and chat.
There are two other projects which i like a lot but i’ll pass rapidly on them as i’ve blogged them before:
Jens Brand is showing G-Turns, the online version of the G-Players series, in an IKEA setting complete with price tags and a carpet with a wave-like pattern.
Visitor can lie in Kaffe Matthews‘ Sonic Bed and enjoy the sound properties of experimental electronic music throughout their body. There is also a video of the “making of” of the piece.
In conclusion i’d say that the exhibition is really good. There’s the fun, the loud, the introspective, the obscure, the aesthetically absorbing. It is not meant to be exhaustive but it gives an adequate overview of the many ways in which artists engage with sound materials these days. I guess i’ve been very lucky to visit the show on a quiet Thursday afternoon, i was able to enjoy each piece on my own without having to queue to be able to lay on the bed or having any sonic experience interrupted by other noises.
Flickr set.
At the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg, extended until April 29.
Related: Invisible Geographies: New Sound Art from Germany, an exhibition about the “physical” topography of sound at the Kitchen in New York.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 11, 2007, 12:49AM
Sounds Surround Us
We live in a remix culture. Our modes of communication are, to some extent, predetermined by software and interfaces that presuppose a tendency to copy and paste. Musicians’ remixes are often released simultaneous to the original track, now, and even the word ‘remix’ has attached itself to the name of soft drinks, food products, cinematic sequels, and other cultural artifacts. Arguably, this condition has been perpetuated by digital artists, from pioneering DJ’s to filmmakers, to net artists. The conditions of remix culture form the basis of the SOUND//BYTES_ exhibition on view through April 15 at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art, in Oldenburg, Germany. The show features installations, performances, presentations, acoustic walks and interventions in the City of Oldenburg which ‘offer the visitor manifold possibilities to question echoes, sounds, rhythms, frequencies and electro-magnetic fields and to perceive everyday situations acoustically in a new way.’ The artists’ works help us to rethink what constitutes a unit of sound, and the ontologies, politics, and aesthetics of the ways in which these ’sound bytes’ work together. Jens Brand, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Yunchul Kim, Thomas Koner, Christina Kubisch, Akitsugu Maebayashi, Kaffee Matthews, micromusic, and Annina Rust present projects that employ laptops, gameboys, electromagnetic fields, record players, GPS readers, radar, ASCII code, radar, a metronome, and other devices to capture and transmit sonic phenomena often overlooked and under-recorded. Together they not only rethink acoustic space, they also contribute to a new environment in which to consider the social life of sound. - Marisa Olson
http://www.edith-russ-haus.de/english/soundbytes.html
Originally from Rhizome News
reBlogged by michael on Apr 2, 2007, 7:00AM
