Netrooms: The Long Feedback is a participatory network piece which invites the public to contribute to an extended feedback loop and delay line across the internet. The work explores the juxtaposition of multiple spaces as the acoustic, the social and the personal environment becomes permanently networked. The performance consists of live manipulation of multiple real-time streams from different locations which receive a common sound source. Netrooms celebrates the private acoustic environment as defined by the space between one audio input (microphone) and output (loudspeaker). The performance of the piece consists of live mixing a feedback loop with the signals from each stream.

To participate email Pedro at P.Rebelo [at] qub.ac.uk by the 1st of April and we will send you a PD patch. You can participate from anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. All you need to do is load the patch during the performance times and listen… You can make a sound, be silent, play music, talk to others and listen… but remember it’s a long feedback loop!

Technical Requirements:

- 1 laptop with Microphone (internal or external) and Loudspeaker (internal or external)
- Pure data-extended 0.39.3-extended
- Patch provided when you email us
- Broadband Connection with UDP and TCP ports 8100 open

Performances:

April 2, 2008 Berkeley, California - CNMAT, University of California Berkeley :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

April 4, 2008 Stanford, California - CCRMA, Stanford University :: The performance of Netrooms: The Long Feedback is integrated in a concert of music from the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The piece will begin at 8:30pm (PDT)

Filling Vessels is a multi-channel sound and light installation / performance inspired by Alvin Lucier’s Empty Vessels. The installation is dependent on interaction with feedback generated within the installation space. It functions as an audience-navigable space in which people can explore the effects they have on the sonic and visual events that take place within it. It is also a performance environment within which musicians use their instruments to interact with and influence the resultant combinations of sound and light: Tom O’Doherty (visuals), Argeo Ascani (saxophone), Eric km Clark (violin), Aaron Meicht (trumpet), James Moore (guitar).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0yKCdpUDnE

circadia is a multi-channel installation that explores how synchronization may emerge amidst various independent bodies. Glass jars with embedded speakers are distributed throughout the room and are treated as separate bodies. The sounds they produce are generated via quiet feedback produced by each vessel. In this way, the space, and the subtle acoustical effects the audience has on that space, create shifting, delicate balances between sustained sounds and small
discrete pulses.

About Diapason: Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia was founded by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring in 2001 and its program builds on the efforts of Schumacher’s previous sound space, Studio Five Beekman, founded in 1996. Diapason is the sole venue in New York City and one of few internationally dedicated to the presentation of multichannel sound installation where composers and sound artists can realize their work for an interested public. By providing an optimum listening environment, two high quality multi-channel sound systems, a regular audience, and a place for experimentation, Diapason seeks to engage composers and the public in dialogue about the place of contemporary music and sound practice in a broader cultural context. Diapason is supported by NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Kirk Radke, and by generous individuals. Diapason is a 501(c)3 organization.

The piece takes its name from the snake which forever eats its own tail. It is most often seen as the principle of eternity and indeed of the universe itself. But it also represents a feedback loop, and hence the mind of the subject viewing it. In the centre of the Belltable gallery is a microphone, standing alone. A hum of energy fills the space, textured noise emanating from a number of radios scattered throughout. The celebrant enters, bearing an additional radio. As he approaches the microphone the sound becomes more complex; a controlled feedback loop establishes itself in the system. Movements are minute; each fractional change in position of his body subtly alters the texture of the enveloping sound.

The cybernetic feedback loop is the simplest model for human consciousness. A mechanism consisting of a microphone, radio transmitter and radio receiver is enough to instantiate this model in a confined space. The celebrant becomes an intimate part of the equilibrium, representing the integration of mind and body, without which consciousness cannot exist.

This project has been supported by Daghdha Dance Company.

Helen Thorington: Miya, you were trained in Japanese court music as well as contemporary music and I understand have expanded on the playing techniques of the koto – first by using extended techniques, but more importantly, by building a Laser Koto. For those who don’t know, can you tell us about the koto and how you developed it? What is the Laser Koto and how does it work?

Miya Masaoka: Sometimes various events, thoughts and inspiration converge in particular ways, and evolve over a period of time, I would say this was the case for the Laser Koto. For many years I had been trying to develop ways of extending the koto electronically –and continue to do so— and along these lines I was an aritist in residence at STEIM in Amsterdam and worked with Matt Wright at CNMAT to develop ways of building an interface for real time processing and sampling using gestural controllers and other ways of capturing and modifying sound. We recorded and mapped 900 koto samples that could be accessed in various ways.

As for the array of light sensors on the Laser Koto, years before I had used an array of four infra red light beams across my body in insect performances, and also had used ultra sound beams across the length of the koto in Monster Koto to trigger and process sound. One direction this work turned, was recalling training in Gagaku, and the use of gestures in Gagaku, and how physical embodiment of sound was manifested in the movements of hands, arms and fingers, signaling the manner in which the music was to be perceived, the social class and regal nature that such gestures had the power of conveying. Eventually, the Laser Koto became the embodiment of the gestures alone. I coined the term “Japanese aural gesturalism” for the purpose of trying to describe this approach.

Donald Swearingen, a composer and instrument developer, built the array of light sensors, as well as custom faders. Oliver DiCicco built the laser mounting, both of which stand on tripods. The technology is very simple, and involves four light sensors and one infra-red sensor for continuous control. Then the hands break the beams, the samples are triggered, and the infra-red sensor, and process the samples in real time. I am currently building a new version of Laser Koto using the Arduino board, which is very inexpensive and relatively easy to use.

Helen: Your early performances like “What is the Difference between Stripping and Playing the Violin?” for electro-acoustic orchestra, erotic dancers and prerecorded tape from a symposium on the sex industry, were often controversial. What was your intent? Did the controversy help or hurt your career?

Miya: It’s hard for me to evaluate if some piece of work hurts or helps, but I must say that it isn’t something that I am concerned with, as my decisions to do a piece are not based on what helps or hurts. Perhaps I should pay attention to such things, but alas I have on blinders in that area. At the time, there was a serial killer of mostly prostitutes, and the killings were not receiving the kind of media press that there would have been if the women had been, say, middle-class women and in a different line of work. The piece strived to address these issues, and the commodification of music and sex, and to draw some parallels and trapezoids.

Helen: Your work for birds, planes and cello, where the cello plays “second fiddle” to the sound of airplanes and over 150 species of migratory and native birds makes me think that you really are interested in challenging and changing perceptions of what is, and isn’t, music. Is that your focus?

Miya: I think now there is a broader range of a listening experience, as sampling, Garage Band and YouTube, etc., are part of everyday experiences, and with the newly available technology, sound as a medium has become more accessible to everyone. In any case, there is a long history of the blurring of music and sound, from the Italian Futurists, musique concrete, to John Cage and the long tradition of walks listening to insects in Japanese culture. In “Birds, Planes and Cello“, there is a formal construct created by the flight schedule of the San Diego airport. As the planes increase their frequency from the early morning, they build up into a kind of crescendo and climax of air plane roar, which in turn the birds seem to respond to, with their bird roar as well. I would never have thought that the flight schedules would have such a compositional quality.

Helen: I have been impressed with your work with inter-species interactions. I wonder if you would tell us how you became interested in this and what made you think of other species as potential live performers?

Miya: Hmmm… I have always been interested in insects, the sounds of insects, and the hobby of having crickets as pets, and the way that social insects communicate and organize their societies in hierarchical structures. I was also thinking about the idea of the body, race and gender, and wanted to illustrate the body as a blank canvas upon which societal constructs are created and assigned. Cockroaches are social, not everyone’s favorite creature, and these from Madagascar make an incredible sound that sounds generated from a white noise filter. When I heard them, I immediately wanted to record their sounds and use them in a piece. Then I thought, why not use the actual bugs in the pieces, and have them create the composition with their movements? So when the roaches wander around on my body, while I’m lying on a table, their movements break the laser beams, and their amplified, pre-recorded sounds are heard in the space.

Helen: Sam Prestianni, writing in The New York Press, called you “The Queen of Bees”. How do you work in performance with a thousand honeybees? With Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches? With a Philodendron?

Miya: Wow, let me think about that. As for the bees, I collaborated with a bee keeper named Marc Mass who would bring his demonstration hive in an acrylic demonstration box that he brought to county fairs. We recorded the bees on my body in the studio, and had footage projected onto various walls in the space. The sound of the bees would be amplified from the acrylic hive. Occasionally, some bee would come right up to the microphone and solo really loud, and then there would be the hum of the hive. In some of these performances, I used software developed at the University of Montreal called B Software coincidentally, which was an early spatialization software. I was trying to create a hive environment where the audience was surrounded by the sounds of the bees moving around. Then I would play plucking sounds and buzzing sounds on the koto, and follow a score that included these various elements. There were many versions of the bee pieces, with many different and wonderful musicians participating as well.

Helen: Do you take a different approach with the Cockroaches than the honeybees? With the Philodendron than the Cockroaches? Tell us about the projects you’ve done with them?

Miya: Well, the Philodendron is a plant, and plant activity is more difficult to monitor, record, and make manifest to the the senses, eyes and ears than say, insect sounds and activity. But it can be done! With plants (see Pieces for Plants), and I also use many semi-tropical houseplants, the data sonification is trickier, as the plants in general tend to be more static, not as mobile, and seemingly to just be sitting there, when in fact, their physiological response to their environment is strong and immediate, approximating qualities of sentient beings. Compositionally, the challenge is to create interesting music from raw data. I tried to constantly and simultaneously alter the interactivity of the parameters of pitch, resonance, density rate of change so as to keep the sonified interactions with me and the plant dynamic and not predictable as the piece progresses. The question arises as to how much to mediate the data, and how much to keep the data close to the original output of the source, whether it’s plant, brain, or whatever else is getting monitored.

Helen:What is the audience’s reaction to your use of other species as performers?

Miya: It has varied widely. Everything from threats of a citizens’ arrest and picketing by an organized group that protested the use of “nudity and insects” at the University of Riverside, to total indifference, and everything in between.

Helen: On your website you mentioned your experience at Lincoln Center, when audience members returned again and again to be with the philodendron and talk about their experiences with plants. It made you realize that you “were brushing the surface of deeper questions — our complex role as humans in a diverse, inter-dependent biological environment, and the potential for communication with plants that has not yet been discovered.”

Do you think that your work with other species alters your audiences understanding of our relations with them? Is your interest primarily musical – in changing perceptions of what is, and isn’t, music — or are you hoping to suggest that the traditional practice of categorizing other species limits our understanding and our possible interaction with them?

Miya: Absolutely, my interest is musical first, or course, and in the course of events of pursing meaningful musical endeavors, trying to satisfy my curiosity related to sound, nature, societies, language and gesture. If there is a side effect that encourages a deeper way of thinking about ourselves as human beings and our inter-connectedness to our environment and planet, then that makes me very happy.

Helen: Do you plan to introduce another species into your music in the near future?

Miya: Not at the moment, but one never knows…

Helen: You’ve also composed works that use live and prerecorded brain waves, medical equipment including EKG, EEG, and fetal heart monitors. Tell us about the project, Naked Sounds, for instance, and how you used the body in it.

Miya: I wanted the sounds of the human body to create a hidden orchestra of sounds… I contacted hospitals for donations of medical equipment, and I received an EKG machine, and two dopplers that amplified the sound of the blood coursing through the veins. I contacted David Rosenboom, the guru of bio-feedback in music for advice on brain monitoring equipment and methods. I also experimented with amplified stethoscopes, anything I could get my hands on. We had a “medical team” that consisted of Robi Kauker, Thomas Day, Gennifer Hirano, and I hope I’m not forgetting someone…t he patient whose body we harvested the sounds from was Saiman Li. I used various strategies with the brainwaves and sounds for the piece including: Superimposing the brainwaves over a Grand Staff, and having an ensemble, the SF Sound Ensemble, perform the score… also using a midi interpretation of the waves being generated by the patient, and finally, the raw sound from the micro-volts of the brain activity amplified and processed.

helen: What are your plans for the near future?

Miya: I’ve been fabricating surface mount LED’s (smaller than a grain of rice) and am designing an LED kimono with more than a thousand LED’s that can respond to the environment, almost like an organic being, and also like a soft, low resolution video display.

Helen: Where can our readers hear your music?

Miya: There are some downloads on my website, and also CD baby, and other places as well: www.miyamasaoka.com Thank you so much, Helen Thorington, for your interest in all this!

Helen: Thank you Miya!

Botborg present live audio-visual performances using a complex feedback web, consisting of audio and video mixers, screens and camera. In this web, sound and vision are blended into a self perpetuating synaesthesia of interdependent colour and rhythm, generated (in real time) entirely by device feedback.
All performances are completely improvised and no outside source material is used in addition to the no-input feedback system. Botborg performances fuse sound and light into intensely visceral experiences which do not fit into the established categories of cinema or music, and explore the boundaries of analogue and digital technology; art and science; reality and magic.

Botborg is a practical demonstration of the theories of Dr Arkady Botborger (1923-81), founder of the ‘occult’ science of Photosonicneurokineasthography - translated as “writing the movement of nerves through use of sound and light”. Botborg claim that sound, light, three-dimensional space and electrical energy are in fact one and the same phenomena, and that the capacity of machines to alter our neural impulses will bring about the next stage in human evolution. [VIA]

Sky Ear, 2004: This non-rigid “cloud”, made up of several hundred glowing helium balloons will be embedded with mobile phones. As visitors to the event call into the cloud to listen to the distant electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics), their mobile phone calls will change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud will alter the glow intensity of that part of the balloon cloud. Quicktime video: 19 MB

Japanese Whispers, Tokyo (2000): Similar to the children’s game known as “Chinese Whispers” or “The Telephone Game,” this project looks at how a message is changed by being passed from one mechanism to another–in this case the cellphone.

Cellphones are laid in a circle and calls are initiated from one phone to another in a variety of patterns with differing results. The sound degrades at each step as it is transformed from analog to digital and back again, emphasising the circular nature of communication. The iterative process of the feedback loop amplifies miscommunications inherent in the transmitting of information. Quicktime video: 9.2 MB

Infinitum Ad Nauseam, Tokyo (2000): The project is a video/audio performance installation which requires the explicit participation of the audience. Essentially, the system uses video and audio feedback to create sounds (from images and movements) and images (from sounds and movements). 4 video cameras, 4 video projectors, 2 video mixers and an audio mixer are used to initiate a massive feedback loop of video-video, video-audio, audio-video and audio to audio. This creates dynamic real-time images and sounds in “conversation” with the visitors or performers. There are no pre-recorded images and no computerised images used in the installation. Videos>>

Changing Faces of Gesture, Tokyo (2000) with Charlotte Boye-Christensen (Choreographer/Dancer): The performance consists of one person and 2 to 4 large video projections. Using a simple video feedback system (where a video camera is pointed towards the screen upon which its image is being projected) coupled with an audio feedback system, complex images are created in realtime which are manipulated by the performer’s movements. Images created resemble reflections in a puddle; these can be coloured using filters on both the cameras and the video-projectors. Furthermore each projector can be separately controlled to multiply the effects and simulate everything from a solitary dancing figure to a bustling crowd of people. Videos>>