Welcome to the first issue of the Networked Music Review Newsletter, a monthly review of some of the content archived on Networked_Music_Review [to receive this via email, subscribe here].

NMR interviews an artist every six weeks and encourages its audience to ask questions about his/her work. Our first interviewee was Jason Freeman, who uses new technologies and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators. Miya Masaoka investigates the sound and movement of insects, as well as the physiological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body. She is available for questions until July 7.

Two important festivals were noted this month: The New York Electronic Art Festival (NYEAF), and the Mobile Music Workshop hosted by Steim and the Waag Society in Amsterdam.

The New York Electronic Art Festival is a month-long series of exhibitions, concerts and workshops that celebrate cutting-edge work at the intersection between art and technology. NYEAF opened on May 12th with installation art from eight digital artists who explore the poetics of sound and image/light through electronic media. It continues into June with numerous events including performances, workshops and paper presentations. For the full schedule, go here.

Régine Debatty of we-make-money-not-art reported on events at the Mobile Music Workshop. Among the performances, NMR reblogged the performance by TokTek, which according to Debatty wowed his audience. Her description reminds us of the Noise Band performances I attended in the ‘80s. TokTek began by playing an old vinyl of lessons of French, then “went wild with buttons, keyboards and knobs, later grabbed a joystick, then had a go at a guitar, kid’s toys, etc.” Also from the same workshop, NMR reported on two wearable items that make music: The Music Jacket from MIT and CosTune by researchers at ATR Media Integrations and Communication Research in Japan.

For those who take part in Second Life, here are two events of interest:

1) The Second Life Dorkbot meeting in the Odyssey Theatre that took place on Sunday April 15th, where Angrybeth presented a sound work in progress called the Height Harp. It “uses a sensor to detect avatars within a certain area, reads their height, and assigns a note.”

2) tone23, a musical ecosystem developed by Jay Hardesty, Drazen Bosnjak and Harris Skibell that creates original music variations and hybrids based on association among avatars.

Also featured were two music sites that encourage users to submit sounds and remix, rearrange and deconstruct works by others: 1) Splice, a new site still in beta but with a really cool feature in its browser-based sequencer. Songs can be assembled and mixed without ever leaving the browser. And 2) SoundTransit, a collaborative online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. SoundTransit operates under a Creative Commons contract.

Of the many individual performances and installations noted and still upcoming: Jeff Talman’s sound installations, Under Sound Under in Klatovy in the Czech Republic and Wave Shadows in Munich, Germany; Andrea Parkins’ FAULTY (per-objective) at Diapason in NYC, and Deep Listening Convergence in Troy, Hudson and High Falls, New York.

Finally, if you’re at all interested you can get the world’s “most interesting collection of mobile phone tunes” by musicians and artists at Tone Shared; and you can look to a future when your iPod becomes a powerful mobile musical tool by itself.