Finally found a use for the NY Times from Bill Orcutt on Vimeo.

Ever wondered what a web site sounds like? Not the words, but the actual data on the site itself? Here’s a Lily application that let’s you “play” the data in a web page like an instrument.

When the patch starts, the browser enters a DOM inspection mode and mousing over a DOM element highlights the node. Clicking on a node writes the element’s data (its innerHTML value if it’s a text element or the binary data if it’s an image) as a sound file and the file is then loaded in a quicktime player in the patch. The sounds can then be triggered using OSC messages. While a DOM element is “playing”, the browser scrolls to and highlights the element with a thick black border.

In the video, I’m spazzing out on the NY Times homepage using the monome controller, but the demo should work with any OSC enabled controller. Sound conversion code based in part on a javascript port of the baudio project.

More information available at lilyapp.org

OTTO (Greek for ‘ear’) is a device that makes hidden sounds audible. This is achieved via a thin polymer piezoelectric contact that senses weak vibrations and plays them as a sound through an integrated speaker. OTTO can be positioned on almost any surface through a combination of suction and magnets. By placing several units on different objects, one can select and create a new sonic experience and a form of ambient music appreciation, thereby utilising our space as a multidirectional audio platform.

Every object and surface in our environment has a whisper; subtle tremors and vibrations that are usually undetectable to the human ear, produced by the activity and movement of daily life. What if these sounds were audible? How would that change our aural awareness, perception of space and attitude towards objects? Would it be possible to ‘compose’ our own soundtrack using our walls and objects as a new form of instruments? Madsounds is a proposal for a different appreciation of our environment, space and objects by making it possible to identify, combine and manipulate these sounds.

More projects from the RCA. [blogged by Cati Vaucelle on Architectradure]

According to the very limited information on the site, DNA, mRNA and Protein sequences are translated into MIDI to generate the sound and control the image variables in realtime. When presented in live performance a MIDI controller is used. The gene information and sequences are available here. Other audio samples are available here.

Landscapes reflect the lives and histories of the people who live in them. Scientific analysis of the soil can be used to examine how people lived in the past and provide lessons for future management of landscapes in extreme or fragile environments. We invite you to become part of the shifting scenes of the Sahel in image and sound and reflect upon its presence and history…

Soils can store information recording the way people have affected the land over thousands of years. Microscopic fragments of different objects found in the soil can tell us about past landscapes. The colour, size and number of fragments offer further clues about the management of landscapes. The latest advances in visual and sonic technologies allow us to illuminate and make audible these ancient landscapes. Sounds of the Sahel, and sounds made afresh are recalled and shaped by the computer using scientific information taken from the soil itself. The Sahel in Africa is an area at the fringe of the Sahara desert. It is one of the world’s most marginal environments yet is home to over 50 million people. With a dry season lasting eight months of the year and unreliable rainfall, survival is hard for farming communities. Climate change is keenly felt in the Sahel. Understanding how people managed this landscape during past periods of climate change is essential in developing successful responses to future changes.

Live Algorithms [PDF] by Tim Blackwell and Michael Young, Depts Computing and Music, Goldsmiths College, London:

“The EPSRC-funded Live Algorithms for Music (LAM) research network is establishing an inter-disciplinary community of musicians, software engineers and cognitive scientists. Our aim is to investigate autonomous computers in music.

The use of computers in live music is not new; the fields of generative (algorithmic) composition and live electronics are of particular interest to LAM. A key discriminator between these is the degree of interaction with the performer. Interaction is intrinsic to live electronics: a performer may jam with commercial or custom software; a ‘laptop-as-instrument’ paradigm, in which the computer is controlled directly. Another approach links players of traditional instruments with computers: incoming sound or data is analysed by software and a resultant reaction (e.g. a new sound event) is determined by pre-arranged processes. Such ‘reflex-systems’ can accompany performance but might also utilise stochasticity to effect surprise; as determined by organizational decisions made by the composer /designer. We would term such a system ‘weakly interactive’ because there is only an illusion of integrated performer-machine interaction, feigned by the designer. Algorithmic composition generates music off-line, although can be used in real-time.

Algorithms from such fields as fractals, chaos theory, neural networks and evolutionary computing have been exploited by composers for their patterning properties.1 Such systems are not interactive, since all the parameters needed for sound generation are pre-determined. In contrast, strong interaction is exemplified in the human-only practice of ‘free’ improvisation. This music rejects top-down organisation (a priori agreements, explicit or tacit) in favour of open, developing patterns of behaviour.2 Social theories describe experiences with a sense of certainty, and with a unified artistic intent, as ‘becoming situated’. An ‘interactional semiotics’ has been proposed, stemming from Meade’s idea of emergence: an ensemble as single entity exhibiting self-organising behaviours (see 1. for references).

LAM is interested in computer systems that might interact strongly with musicians, in both a supportive and a creative capacity and the research agenda is a marrying of algorithmic music, live electronics and free improvisation. Properties of human performance – and therefore of a live algorithm (LA) - include strong interactivity, autonomy, innovation, idiosyncrasy and comprehensibility. Strong interactivity depends on instigation and surprise as well as response. Individual decision-making is immediate, necessary and basic: when to play or not, when to modify activity in any number of parameters (loudness, pitch, tone quality), when to imitate or ignore another participant, when to ‘agree’ the performance is concluding. When to make a decision. And why. Without the capacity to innovate, listeners would lose the belief that the LA was truly engaged with the performance instead of merely accompanying it. The iterative, generative, idiosyncratic world of algorithmic organisation must be accessed, but the mechanical and the predictable must be avoided. It is the ability to innovate that distinguishes automation from autonomy. It is not hard to generate music of great complexity. Harder, though, is to ensure that these contributions are comprehensible to fellow performers in real-time who might be hearing these ideas for the first time. (But an incomprehensible, opaque system can be contrasted with a transparent one where the association between input and output is too trivial.)

Such considerations show the research goal is prescient, but there are reasons to believe that it is imminent too. The authors’ own Swarm Music/Granulator systems implement a model of interactivity derived from the organisation of social insects.3 These systems embody our idea of a proxy environment which holds meaningless sonic events. The system (human or machine) explores the environment, discovering and manipulating found sonic objects. Long term organisation can develop, just as it does in termite nest construction. Within this framework, we envisage a modular system comprising of analysis (P) and synthesis (Q) functions which interface and interpret the sonic environment and relay parameters to a hidden patterning algorithm (F) (analogous to listening, playing and musical thinking enjoyed by a human performer). This picture integrates interaction with algorithmic composition and exploits recent developments in real time music analysis/synthesis.

The network has some 70 members, including representatives from France, Portugal, USA and Australia. Activities include an open meeting and two network workshops each year. Each event features invited speakers, contributions from LAM project teams and performances. The next meeting will be December 19-20 2005, with an international conference in December 2006. LAM warmly encourages AISB readers to participate: please see www.livealgorithms.org.”

1. E. Miranda. Composing Music With Computers. Focal Press, 2001
2. T.M.Blackwell and M.Young. Self-Organised Music. Organised Sound 9(2): 123–136, 2004.
3. T.M.Blackwell T.M. and M.Young. Swarm Granulator. Applications of Evolutionary Computing EuroWorkshops 2004, Proceedings, LNCS 3005, Springer-Verlag (2004) 399-408

“it is not an impression of paintings or photographs of a composer. it reads a score from an image data directly.”

You can listen to the Mona Lisa music and other compositions here. There are instructions on the site — How to create your RGB Music.

Thanks to http://infosthetics.com.

I sat down, dug my hands into the sand and started inching down the slope, feet-first like a giant caterpillar. Nothing happened. Sure, sand was moving, but all I could hear were gentle burping noises emanating from the sand beneath my feet with every push. I checked no-one was watching (imagine the humiliation of coming all this way and not hearing a thing) then dug my arms deeper into the sand and sped up. This sucker was going to sing if I had to dig up half the dune.

Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. I had shuffled just a metre further down the slope with a good sand avalanche going, when it began. The burping sound suddenly transformed into a low growl, as if a thousand yogis hidden beneath the dune had started chanting “Om”. It felt like the ground itself was vibrating with the sound and it grew louder and louder.

You can listen to the sound on the video below. There are different opinions about what makes the dunes sing. Nathalie Vriend and Melany Hunt, at the California institute of Technology, Pasadena, have been working on an explanation. In a paper published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, they outline their theory, “suggesting that sand acts like a wave guide in which individual vibrations constructively interfere to produce a louder tone. The surface of a dune then amplifies the vibrations, like a giant loudspeaker.”

But two French researchers, Stéphane Douady and his former PhD student Bruno Andreotti, have competing theories about singing sand dunes. Vriend and Hunt’s theory refutes theirs… so let’s just say the music of the dunes is a subject still up in the air.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw2V0CHgQV8

With thanks to Geoff Manaugh and BLDG BLOG.

In Music for Rocks and Water three performers play water and a variety of rocks, which are dripped, drizzled, poured, rolled, rocked, brushed, rubbed, stacked and even tickled. Sometimes the rocks are played underwater. Listen:

Jiku (excerpt) - for wobbling rocks and air bubbles in water

Umi (excerpt) - for sand and granite rocks

Leonard will premiere a new work from her forthcoming Tides: Estuary project at the 2007 International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music in Boulder, CO on October 13, 2007. A collaboration with visual artist Rebecca Haseltine, the installation and compositions are based on tidal flows in estuaries; the instruments include water, sand, mud, seaweed, rocks, and shells.

The Medical Museion has invited the sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard to create a new work, which will focus on the problematic arising in Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the body. Kirkegaard has turned his listening ear inwards – to his own ear – and by using specially developed listening equipment, he has captured the micro activity which the hair cells of the ear broadcasts. Listen to some of his music here.

Ruiz is planning to create more using GDP data from other countries. When played side by side - the disparity in sounds and images will be heard and seen. Countries with higher GDP will generally have higher notes or pitches, while countries will low GDP will sound bassy with low frequencies. Brighter video and faster frame rate will also be exhibited by more affluent countries, while the reverse is true for less affluent nations.

Stanley Ruiz is a media artist, industrial designer, and part-time musician working at the intersection of art, design, media,and technology. His recent works deal mainly with the manipulation of sounds using a participatory approach through human and object interaction. He holds a BFA degree in Industrial Design from the University of the Philippines and a Graduate Diploma in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College, the City University of New York.

Other links:

Sound Economy on youtube
Sound Economy powerpoint presentation
Sound Economy PDF
Algorithmic Composition on wikipedia