Objects Sing at ItSpace - Shower heads, down pillows and folding tables make music at ItSpace, an interactive sound project created by composer Peter Traub. Short pieces of music are composed from recordings of these everyday household objects being struck, again and again. Producer Jesse Dukes brings the story for HearingVoices.com. You can listen to the NPR storyhere.

1972: Stockhausen on “sounds”

On January 29, 2008, WNYC’s RadioLab focused on Départs, David Lang’s composition for Salle des Departs — where families go to say goodbye to their loved ones at Hospital Raymond Poincare in Garches, France. This unique space was designed by Italian artist Ettore Spalletti in 2003; it also contains a musical soundcape by British artist Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), which you can listen to at the end of this blog. Continue reading

Microclimates III-VI is a sound installation and concert. The installation plays in almost complete blackout so that the ears focus on the tiny details in the sound. A 3-D sound-space is created using 3rd-order ambisonics spatialisation projected over 16 loudspeakers. The playing duration and arrangement is designed for each exhibition context. The concert version combines spatialisation performance with pre-programmed spatial information.

Natasha Barrett uses a recording technique following the acousmatic composition heritage. Here composing begins at the sound recording stage, improvising with less conventional recording techniques and capturing a spatial and spectral microphone ‘performance’. Continue reading

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Radio Killed the Video Star - Call For Entries by Laboratorio 060: Laboratorio 060 is a collective based in Mexico City. As part of an exhibition of this group at the Cue Foundation in New York, the group is launching a worldwide call for collaborations for a musical composition that will be learned and performed by the three members of this collective on the day of the opening and later transmitted on the radio in New York.

Radio Killed the Video Star seeks to alter the homogeneous process by which entertainment is constructed and disseminated in our image-saturated media world. The ideal entries for collaboration should come from composers and musicians who may be interested in disseminating their work and in having their works interpreted by Laboratorio 060, an artist collective without any professional musical experience as part of this conceptual project. Continue reading

60×365 (sixty by three-sixty-five) is an experimental new music podcast by composer David Morneau. Every day for a year, Morneau will compose a new sixty-second composition and post it online at 60×365.com. This project commenced on July 1, 2007, and will conclude June 30, 2008, resulting in just over six hours of new music in sixty-second installments.

For this project, Morneau is exploring a wide variety of musical styles and techniques, including musique concrète, sine wave synthesis, digital sampling, 8-bit constructions, process music, acousmatic composition, and post-techno beat manipulations. Each daily post brings something new and different, a constant variety. The daily deadline means the works sometimes lose their preciousness as they become explorations in process and method for Morneau—with his form or his audience—as much as they are works of art. Continue reading

Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, and computer music programmer. In 1983, he founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve. Doctor Nerve joins the furious energy of rock with intricate composition, some of which finds its origins in rich software systems of his own design. He presently resides in New York City, where he composes for Doctor Nerve and other ensembles — including the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet and the multimedia improvising trio Shadow Puppies (with Hans Tammen and Kurt Ralske) — programs music software, and teaches computer music composition at NYU.
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