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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[Image: dataplex by Ryoji Ikeda] Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics 2.0 :: October 29, 2007; 8:30 p.m. :: Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR :: Tickets are sold one month in advance.

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in New York City. His work focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. It exploits sound’s physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology to the utmost limit, he has been developing particular “microscopic” methods for sound engineering and composition. Continue reading

Yolande Harris is a composer and media-artist working with sound, image and space in a technologically extended environment. She proposes a radical notion of the score in her ongoing Score Spaces research project and uses technology in her work as the means through which to understand the electronically extended spaces we inhabit.

Understanding the relations between sound, image and space through technologies of communication and navigation, has been the central focus of Yolande’s work over the last ten years. She explores the intermediary role of the score, both as practical and conceptual tool and as an open imaginary situation for communication. In the works entitled Score Spaces Yolande has developed numerous audio-visual performances and installations, written theoretical texts such as Inside-Out Instrument, and led workshops for composers, sound artists, architects and designers on this spatial approach to composition, in particular the European Meta-Orchestra. Continue reading

Score Spaces Workshop: Call for Participants :: Deadline: September 27, 2007 :: Workshop: November :: 19 - 24, 2007 :: Hosted by Intro | In Situ, Maastricht :: Led by Yolande Harris :: Guest Speaker: Jacob Kirkegaard :: Guest Performance: Spin with Yolande Harris and Hilary Jeffery :: webmaster[at]stichtingintro.nl

A Score Space is a spatial approach to musical composition in an electronically extended environment. This collaborative, cross-disciplinary workshop will address the following issues: (1) How can the practice of musical composition integrate the techniques and ideas of sound, image and space? (2) How can the musical score be transformed for the practice of electronic instrumental music and media art? (3) How can interactions between sound, electronics, the body and space expand the musical instrument? Continue reading

Leonardo in Locarno; a concert by Emanuel Pimenta :: Locarno, Switzerland :: September 16 - 23, 2007.

The Italian historian Marino Vigan recently announced an astonishing discovery: the Swiss city of Locarno has the only extant building designed by Leonardo da Vinci. The city invited the composer Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta to create a new concert to celebrate the 500 years of Leonardo’s architectural project. Pimenta based his new piece on Leonardo’s drawings, which were transposed into virtual environments. The music will last for seven days and will be performed in the most unexpected places of the city. The audience is invited to take a walk and discover the different sounds. Participation is free and a map will orient the auditors through the spaces where the music is performed. The concert is made in association with ALCHIMARTE of Locarno and ASA Art and Technology of London. Continue reading

Morphopoiesis - A general procedure for structuring form by Panyiotis Kokoras [From earlabs.org]: Composers have always needed tools to craft their music and theorists need a methodology to analyse compositions. This paper examines a theoretical framework for a general procedure for structuring musical form.

Abstract: Composers have always needed tools to craft their music and theorists need a methodology to analyse compositions. This paper examines a theoretical framework for a general procedure for structuring musical form. It studies the organising principles of the internal attributes of a musical work that give a unit its specific identity, the functional relationships between it and other units, and the ordering and direction of those units. Continue reading

Sabine Breitsameter interviews contemporary German Composer, Frank Niehusmann, in the July AudioHyperspace. Niehusmann is one of the composers who began to use podcasting early — in May 2005. It was then he began composing ’small forms” — 3 minute compositions almost every day — and rather than storing them on his hard drive, he uploaded them to the Internet.

You can listen to Frank Niehusmann’s Day Tracks here. “Day Tracks” are a series of compositions in the context of musique concrète, industrial and noise music, Elektronische Musik, sonic art, Klangkunst, Hörspiel and ars acustica: compositions with originally recorded machine sounds, sounds of nature, sounds of social life and sounds from musical instruments including synthesizers and drum-computers and all kinds of edited samples from the whole range of Frank Niehusmann’s archive of sounds.

The Musicians, by Julia Burns [with Ardrian Hardjono and Balint Seeber] :: 17 June - 18 August, 2007 :: Beta_space, Cyberworlds Gallery - Ground Floor - Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

Drawing from the work of David Rokeby, ‘The Musicians’ is an early prototype, interactive artwork that utilizes cinematography and sound to engage audiences via invisible touch pads. Users are encouraged to play notes or compose music by directing the two professional musicians as they jam filmically, the audience members directly impacting the artwork via their movements. The aesthetic aim of The Musicians is to visualize the emotional influence the audience members have over the characters onscreen. Amidst witty commentary and pre-programmed repertoires, the musicians play to draw audience members into the museum space and then attempt to hold their attention by empowering the user with the ability to direct their activities. Continue reading

In the June 13 issue of NewMusicBox there’s an excellent article on Noah Creshevsky and his style of Hyperrealism. For those who don’t know Creshevsky, he was trained in composition by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano Berio at Juilliard; he is the former director of the Center for Computer Music and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College.

Creshevsky defines hyperrealism as “an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment, handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive.” Continue reading