dorkbot-nyc - David Steinberg, Christina McPhee, and Sam Pluta :: September 3, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Location One, SoHo. The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

David Steinberg: mobile music machines - Lots of interesting musical software have been developed more or less recently for portable videogames consoles (Gameboy, PSP, etc.), PDAs or other similar platforms. I’ll present many of these applications (for Nintendo Gameboy, Palm OS, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, Gamepark consoles, etc.), explain what’s needed to use them, who created them, what are the advantages and disadvantages of developing musical software for each platform and of course show some examples of what can be done with these new instruments. Continue reading

I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online for a little while now, and while it has a few interesting twists on standard MMO design, one thing really stood out for me, the music creation system available to every player.

Players can learn to play an instrument starting at low levels and what this does is that when the player chooses to take out their instrument, the keyboard switches to a configuration where specific keys are mapped to specific notes. For instance, 1 is C, 1 + cntrl is C#, 1 + cntrl + alt = C# up one octave, etc. In this way very specific chords can be created. Continue reading

LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible … is a collaboration between world-renowned composer / musician SAKAMOTO Ryuichi [videos] and TAKATANI Shiro, core members of the Kyoto-based internationally active art group dumb type.

While the genesis of this piece is in SAKAMOTO Ryuichi’s opera LIFE (first performed in 1999, for which TAKATANI Shiro created the video aspects), as is evident in the title’s “fluid, invisible, inaudible …” this installation revisits the resources of sound and vision in LIFE for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work. While LIFE was an experiment conducted in opera’s linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible … is a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience.
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The Netherlands Media Art Institute presents in collaboration with the 5 days off festival the exhibition (in)visible sounds :: open until July 14 - Tuesday through Saturday from 1:00 ­ 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month. Entry: € 2,50 (1,50 with discount.) :: Performances: July 4-8 in Paradiso, Melkweg and the Netherlands Media Art Institute :: Reservations: info [at] montevideo.nl.

Semiconductor (UK) :: July 4, Time: 8.30 p.m. For Brilliant Noise the most beautiful satellite images of the sun have been selected from an open access archive. The radiation intensity is translated into audio fragments so as to focus attention on the hidden forces of the solar system. A computer that ‘listens’ to audio files and is able to translate these into digital images, depending on the amount of resonance, is at the heart of the performance Sonic Inc: Where has the Future Gone? Continue reading

Jay Hardesty, Drazen Bosnjak and Harris Skibell are developing tone23, a musical ecosystem where music is the primary agent defining interactions between users. Music evolves in this environment based on the musical preferences and encounters of users. Implemented at hive23 in Second Life, it creates original music variations and hybrids based on association among avatars.

Music Rooms: The hive23 environment contains three rooms. Each room is associated with a separate musical stream that is determined by the avatars currently within that room. Each avatar is “tagged” with music they have chosen from a list of musical pieces, available outside the entrance to the three rooms. When an avatar enters or leaves a room, a new sequence of musical variations is produced for that room. These variations combine and rework parts from the songs identified with those avatars then inhabiting that room. Continue reading

Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra is a net of spatially separated mobile workstations, having local sound and integrated into wifi network. Continue reading

Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism made of audio cells. Every cell - consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker - listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole. Continue reading

The Heart Chamber Orchestra is a one-hour performance that literally creates music “from the heart”. The orchestra consists of 12 classical musicians of the Trondheim Sinfonietta and the artist duo TERMINALBEACH (made of Pure and Erich Berger.) Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition and visualization environment. Continue reading