Reversing the information flow in the opposite direction we find André Gonçalves ongoing Untitled #06 project, which also utilises the turntable, this time with a servomotor attached to the needle cartridge. Sound captured from a microphone is processed, then digitised into data and used by the servo to move the cartridge accordingly. The cartridge, which has an Indian ink pen attached, draws the audio events in real-time. The resultant visualisations have semi uniform spirgraphic geometries, and as André says ‘the drawings can be seen as histograms of the audio activity of a space during a certain period of time. In his biography André describes himself as an ‘empathy programmer with googlian self-education’, something many of us with an autodidactic learning will identify with.

Finally, it would be interesting to hear what one of André’s Untitled #06 disc visualisations, if drawn in graphite, would sound like on Caleb’s Graphic Music Sequencer. [posted by Paul on Dataisnature]

TABLACENTRIC is thrilled to present Ajay Kapur, whose work revolves around one queston: “How do you make a computer improvise with a human?” Using the rules set forth by the north Indian classical tradition, Ajay strives to build new interfaces for musical expression by modifying the tabla, dholak and sitar with added microchips and sensor systems, while building robotic musical instruments which can be programmed to perform along with the human performer.

Ajay Kapur is the Music Technology Coordinator at California Institute of the Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Music and Psychology with a focus on Intelligence Music and Media Technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor in Science and Engineering Computer Science degree from Princeton University in 2002. He has been educated by music technology leaders including Dr. Perry R. Cook, Dr. George Tzanetakis, and Dr. Andrew Schloss, combined with mentorship from robotic musical instrument sculptors Eric Singer and the world famous Trimpin. A musician at heart, trained on Drumset,Tabla, Sitar and other percussion instruments from around the world, Ajay strives to push the technological barrier in order to make new music.

Seven octaves, 84 discrete tones, all at once all the time, a history of western music as played back in its entirety as one incessant chord. This drone, this filler of space and monster of the twelve-tone scale, is unrelenting in its ever pervasiveness. As a pneumatic sound engine, the Omnisound Generator allows for remote placement into the machine via air coupled headphones. Monitoring the insides with stethoscopic precision, hear its heartbeat, its scream, its infrasonic rumblings and the wind rushing by. ALL SOUND ENGINES ARE GO!

[2] The Live Room - Transducing Resonant Architecture

“The Live Room is a temporary site specific installation, distributed across the exhibition space, in which machines fuse into architecture combining forces of action into form, structure and space. In this project, small acoustic intensifying devices are used which are mounted to the structure of the building, engaging the architecture and running impulsive energy throughout. The system is designed to produce sound and vibration in direct relation to the building and the dimensions of the space.

The Live Room utilizes seismic induction equipment to activate the interior (or exterior) surfaces of the site and create a large scale “tectonic charging” by means of vibration. By using a variety of transducing devices and signal generation equipment, Bain can effectively “tune in” a space by delivering its resonant frequency to its different parts.

Normally we think of sound as waves of energy traveling through a medium (such as air) on its way to the ear. Because the molecules are more spread out, gasses like air are in fact less efficient mediums for sound to travel than liquids or solids. Therefore the solids which make up most architectural forms can be thought of as very efficient conductors of vibro-acoustic energy. Though these electro-mechanical devices don”t actually produce their own sound, the energy they impart changes the surfaces into what, in essence, are an infinitely large acoustic radiators or speakers. By using multiple transducers, the room can be driven with energy which is derived in response to the shape and material makeup of the room.

Buildings, human bodies and all other materials, have their own particular resonant frequency. If this frequency, also known as the value of efficient excitation, is accurately located, it is possible through mechanical means to literally “ring” the material, like striking a bell. If this “ringing” is reinforced through a feedback system, it is possible to produce a phase aligned addition to this wave form where potentials are present for the material oscillate out of control. In 1898 the inventor Nikola Tesla was working with similar energy imparting devices which was said to be so small “you could put it in your overcoat pocket.”

“I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound.

I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher.

Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That”s all they ever knew about it.” (Nikola Tesla, 1935)

This notorious event was said to have also produced a similarly intense sympathetic vibration two blocks away from Tesla”s laboratory.

Mark Bain’s notion of “transient architecture” describes a system of infection where action modulates form and where stability disintegrates. The Live Room project seeks to intensify these sites with hybrid-machines, fusing architecture with dynamic systems. This act of “site charging” is intended to create resonating spaces which are normally thought of as static. This action is an attempt towards the liberation of tectonics from typical inertial limits; where resonant structures vibrate in sympathy to induced frequencies. With this work, Bain suggests a model for transducing architecture, i.e. defining the space with external influences of a vibro-kinetic nature.

The Live Room in addition generates infrasonic sound, i.e. sounds at frequencies below the threshold of hearing which still affect the body and perception in ways which can seem unpredictable. There is a subtle strangeness to this project which revolves around the production and injection of these unique low frequencies. When the body comes in contact with infrasound and vibration, unique phenomena develop. Parts of the body can be excited through differing frequencies allowing the spaces within to be felt. Certain feelings and tendencies can also be elicited, whether it is nausea, headache, the gag reflex, or the urge to defecate. These physical responses have induction components which relate to certain cycle rates. In the Live Room, a common occurrence related to the vibration is the effect on the vestibular system and the sense of orientation and balance. When positioned on active floor panels a feeling of shifting horizon may be felt. While standing, balance can be altered and suddenly your perception is that of surfing the architectural plane.

The Live Room constructs a topological space composed of virtual objects which haptically interface with the audience. By interacting with the cycling wave forms the visitor is occupied, infested with frequencies, modulated by vibrational energy and imparted with the volumetric sensibilities inherent within the body. The audience are the activated objects, traversing the site and feeling the liveliness of themselves, others and the space within.” From The Art of the Accident by Arjen Mulder.

Mark Bain works on the interface of acoustics, architecture and actions of conceptual / experiential integration. For some time Bain has been involved in an ongoing research into the area of sound and architecture and how sonic events condition bodies and buildings they occupy. Sculptural aspects of sound are also investigated in the way resonant materials can define structures in space. Other installations involve living systems and investigative devices, which position the viewer into rarified experiences. In this work, he designs hybrid apparatuses, which engage both locations and the viewing public. These are not necessarily products in themselves, but rather tools developed which lead to certain ends. His research can be thought as a kind of divining, a loosening, or search for living entities, defining a presence within that which is normally thought of as static and dead.

Best known for his work on, around and about the violin, Jon Rose is a global performer, presenting his group and solo projects regularly in over 30 countries. He brings over 25 years experience pioneering the use of digital technology in live music performance to the Ball Project and this Festival outcome Sphere of Influence. The ball as symbol is universally recognised. A ball flying through space has an inherent mystery; it replicates our lonely and insecure position in the universe. To sport fans, the ball verges on being a sacred object. Ball games, especially in this sport-obsessed city, are nearly a religious rite. The earth is our favourite ball - our future on it less than certain.

After the sun has set at Federation Square, a huge white ball is pushed, heaved, thrown, and rolled around in a game – or is it a ritual? As this two and a half metre ball moves, it sings, it speaks, it screams. It’s a clever ball: its motion can manipulate both sound and images. The music it makes includes sounds from the environment and vocal samples composed by Rose and sung by The Song Company and Aku Kadogo, while Hollis Taylor plays the live violin obligato. As the ball spins, it juggles with words of wisdom, power and warning. The ball, aided by purpose-built interactive technology, has evolved from an object to a virtuoso multimedia performer.

From Rose’s website:

The use of games of chance to determine musical content has fascinated composers as different as Mozart in his Musikalisches Würfelspiel, Stravinsky in his stage works based on card games (also his neo-classical wind Octet of 1923), Cage throughout his entire career, and John Zorn in his ‘game pieces’ (which are in essence structures for improvisers). Richard Strauss spent much of his time playing skat (not improvised jazz vocals but a version of the card game whist); Schoenberg and Britten were very keen on tennis; Prokofiev was a chess master; Mozart was often to be found at the billiard table; Percy Grainger was outstanding at Badminton and possibly the first recorded jogger - sometimes running from concert to concert (once accompanied by 100 Zulu warriors) and even running from stage to back of concert hall and back again, when he had too many bars tacet in a blockbuster piano concerto.

Outside of western music of course, most societies have had their practice of music integrally linked to every ceremonial necessity of their social activities - from birth to death. Also, in many non-western cultures the idea of music without physical movement (dance) would have seemed strange, if not perverse.

Functional music, cultural replacement

In Australia, we live in a country that has the oldest surviving practice of gebrauchsmusik - it is only 50 years since the chief elder of many Aboriginal groups still knew how to sing into existence every significant animate and inanimate object, the keys to survival. It is unlikely that such sophisticated and rich cultures of aurality will ever exist again. But anybody who has ever witnessed an Aboriginal Australian Rules tournament in the Northern Territory will know that ‘footie’ has gone some way to filling the physical (if not the spiritual) cultural void left by whitefella destruction. This game may have been invented by Victorians, but the Aborigines of the north have seized it with both hands and feet and made it their own. If ballet was this good, I’d go every night. Unfortunately it is for blokes only; it also (sadly) has no music. The women have to make do with basketball or must stick with painting; but there is cause for optimism, painting is still often accompanied by song.

What is it about the ball?

A ball flying through space has an inherent mystery; it replicates our lonely and insecure position in the universe. Any young child seems to recognise the universality and truth of the ball. It’s global. All children, even those who show little interest in games or sport, respond to this user-friendly object. Add the random qualities of the oval ball to our philosophical observation, and we approach notions of twentieth century physics - the Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Mechanics. The oval ball may adhere to Newtonian gravity, but its chance bounce-ability gives lie to Einstein’s own belief that ‘God does not play dice with the Universe’. To football fans the ball verges on being a sacred object; the ball game - a religious rite. Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of the Liverpool soccer club, was once asked if football was a matter of life and death. ‘No’ he said, ‘it’s more important than that’.

New musical forms

A casual listen to the programmes of concert hall music, jazz festivals, rock spectacles, or other mainstream genres in 2005 will inform you that very little has changed in the way that most music is structured. There seem to be very few new forms for music (content is an equally unadventurous story, but let’s not go there). In classical music, they still haven’t got over the sonata form; in jazz they still unthinkingly play the head, the solos, and the head again. In electronic dance music, there is no form; you basically switch it on, mix it with something else, then switch it off again at the end (if you’re lucky). Most team games in sport provide a set of fixed macro and mobile structures that can be utilised as a formal basis for sonic compositions. A composition can utilise the basic parameters and agreed dimensions of place, time and space, to notions of technique, base strategy, flexible game plans, sportsmanship, or fooling your opponents (theatre?). All the codes of team games such as football, volleyball, basketball, and netball have the adaptive potential for setting up musical structures with satisfying yet unknown sonic outcomes - in fact I am suggesting that the practice of sport is akin to many methods of group music making such as Gamelan or the antiphonal singing that grew out of the European Renaissance. In the interactive badminton game PERKS, I thought that it would be enough just to have two adequate badminton players simulating the game. As it turned out, the best musical result was achieved by the best players (both in technique and commitment) - faking it wasn’t possible.

The ball project

The project will consist of a series of compositions utilising the structures of team sports (such as netball and quadrugby - otherwise known as murderball) and incorporating at least four custom made balls (an Australian Rules football; a Volley ball or Net ball; a huge 3 metre plus ball for a gallery space; a small kindergarten friendly ball). The balls will be fitted with pressure sensors and accelerometers providing continuous controller data streams via radiophonic transmission for interactive software driving audio and visual content. Some games will generate visual and text commentary on the nature of competition and tribalism, and be accompanied by string quartet obligato. Other games will function on an abstract level, concentrating very much on the essence of what it is that makes the ball such a powerful object and icon in our culture. The music generated by the ball will include original composition for sampled choir (The Song Company), the sounds of the body, physical exertion, and the sounds of electronic transmission. A composition for violin and juggler, using the same interactive ball technology, is also planned. This, I hasten to add, is not an exercise in touchy-feely therapy but the rigorous development of a hybrid art form.

A short history of ball games

The Meso-American ball game Pok-A-Tok has been around since 3000 BC; players used their elbows, knees and hips to get a small rubber ball through a hoop. Being an ersatz war situation (like most ball games since), the losers were often summarily executed. In North America, the Indians had their own version of soccer called Pasuckuakohowog. When the British turned up in the 1600s, they noticed similarities to their own crazed inter-town ball tournaments (which often lasted several days). The pitch could be over a mile long, the teams consisted of as many players as possible, the ball or bladder was stuffed with anything animal or vegetable - including body parts of a recent enemy (with grass as the ubiquitous filler), and the games were always extremely violent affairs. The Chinese can also lay claim to the origins of soccer. Around the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC, during the Han Dynasty, the army trained by kicking a ball into a smallish net. Almost everyone, including the Greeks and Romans it seems, had their ball games.

Ballspeak

The Age of Enlightenment sowed the seeds of humanity’s salvation in giving us most of the useful ideas that we associate with a modern rounded society - a franchised democracy, rational behaviour, social equality, wonder at (as opposed to ruling over) the natural world. However it couldn’t contain the grab for empire and the pathological exploitation of natural resources - which continues unabated. The Enlightenment has also not prevented the recent backward summersault to about the 12th century as our species’ insecurity and evermore desperate plight on our little planet is highlighted in the current burst of reactionary religiosity.

The moon, the earth would be balls in existence and travelling through space whether we were here to observe them or not. Unlike most of our cultural language-dependent notions like money, democracy, religion, etc - playing with a ball-like object could well have existed before language. It is an ontological artefact like none other whether it be a rolling stone or a pig’s bladder. After all a wild dog will perceive a moving ball as prey and play with it without understanding the rules of either physics or soccer. Once set in motion, a ball object seems to take on a life of its own. For all intensions and purposes, in the eyes of the wild dog, the ball is alive. The domestic dog can be trained to fetch the ball. But no dog, domestic or wild, can understand what a goal or a try is. Nor does an animal understand that our continued existence on this small finite ball is tenuous - we should however.

Blow the whistle.

Metaphors of music

Music as food, or politics as music, abound throughout literature, but a spontaneous look through the sports pages of The Guardian and the culture pages of The New York Times a few years ago revealed the following:

‘For the first 45 minutes, they could find no way through the Hammer’s defence; Dicks, often at walking pace, conducting the orchestra with the Croat, Pilic, as leading violinist. Only Carbone looked to have the wit to break the tempo. West Ham’s game was too fancy for its own good at times; Dicks would play the 1812 Overture, but a minuet through midfield seems to be Harry Redknapp’s preferred melody and, on this evidence, they don’t play it well enough.’

‘The program for Saturday night’s Alice Tully Hall concert described the ‘most distinguishing features’ of The Double Tenth Junior Hight School in Taichung, Taiwan, as ‘the experimental music class and female volleyball team’. The place must therefore be positively jumping with experimental music, and has to be a major force on the Taiwan volleyball circuit, since its orchestra - which were the point of this concert - was most engaging.

The Ball Project is supported in a two year fellowship (2006/7) by The Australia Council, and with generous help from STEIM, Amsterdam.

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

TurntablistPC is on show from September 21 - November 25, 2007. We need your participation! All you have to do is place a small piece of html code on your website. The code does not interfere in any way with the experience of your website. However, it WILL make the record spin physically miles away at the museum. Please find the code and further details below. We are looking for people maintaining websites anywhere in the world, so please forward this message to other relevant parties.

Participants are kindly asked to send an email to WEBSCAPE curator Andreas Broegger (ab[at]vestkunst.dk) stating the address of the web page to which you have uploaded the code.

The Art Museum of West Sealand will list your site among the participating websites in the museum space and on the WEBSCAPE
exhibition website. (If you prefer not to be credited, please state this in your email).

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

All we need from your website is a so-called “counter-hit”. This is automatically generated when someone visits your website if you place the following line of HTML-code on your site (preferably at the bottom of your most visited page). This is the code: NOTE: I HAD TO MAKE IMAGES OF THE CODE FOR IT TO APPEAR ON THIS BLOG. DO NOT USE THESE IMAGES; JUST TYPE THE CODE:

Please note: ONLY use the above code if your position is EAST of Denmark.

If your position is WEST of Soroe, Denmark please use this code instead:

This is the exact code to be included, depending on your position. If in doubt the city of Soroe is at 11.5561 East / +11 degrees 33′ 21.96″.

Your position will decide whether the TurntablistPC will spin the record clockwise or counter-clockwise. If you are near the TurntablistPC, it will only scratch the vinyl. If you are far away, it will play a whole section of the record.

On a projected world map visitors to the museum space will be able to follow the online traffic triggering the sound.

We ask that the code remain on your site throughout the exhibition period (until November 25 2007).

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

What does the html code do? The above code places a tiny “invisible” image (a transparent GIF-image) on your website when someone visits. Neither the image nor the html code will interfere with the appearance of your website nor with the visitor’s experience. The code and the image are a mere 700 bytes (0.7Kb) in total. Participation does not pose any security risk whatsoever, nor is any personal or otherwise sensitive information stored.

If you have any doubts about technical issues, please contact WEBSCAPE curator Andreas Broegger at ab[at]vestkunst.dk

WHAT EXACTLY IS TurntablistPC?

TurntablistPC is a telematic hybrid of a turntable (a grammophone) and an old personal computer. Installed in the museum space, the TurntablistPC will play a vinyl record whenever someone visits one of the participating websites around the world. A video projection of a world map will show where the participating website is from, thus generating a map of global participation for the visitors in the local museum space.

More info and pictures of TurntablistPC are available here.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Mogens Jacobsen is a Danish artist who has exhibited widely in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Japan, Brazil. More info at www.mogensjacobsen.dk.

ABOUT WEBSCAPE: TurntablistPC is featured in WEBSCAPE: ART IN THE VIRTUAL LANDSCAPE, an exhibition of web-based art installations at the Art Museum of West Zealand 2007. The exhibition features work by artists Tomas Th*fner, Mogens Jacobsen, Bosch & Fjord, and Susan Collins.

A dramatic warming trend has been experienced by the Arctic over the last decade that may accelerate global climate change. The N. installation expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote region and addresses the importance of the region to the global ecosystem. Data and images for N. have been provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Arctic research program. A portion of the raw sound material used in N. comes from live sferics (short for atmospherics), electromagnetic transmissions of lightning from the INSPIRE VLF (very low frequency) receiver at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. N. also makes use of a custom, open source object for Max / MSP called Datareader created by Andrea Polli and Kurt Ralske.

Artistic Collaborators:

Joe Gilmore is a sound artist living in the North of England. He is co-founder of rand()% a net radio station which streams real-time generative music. His music has been released on various labels including Line, Melange and Alku.

Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. She works with city planners, environmental and atmospheric scientists and other experts to look at the impact of climate on the future of life both locally and globally. Her most recent work, Atmospherics/Weather Works focuses on understanding storms through sound.

Scientific Collaborator:

Dr. Patrick Market is an assistant professor in the Department of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri. His areas of interest are in Synoptic and Mesoscale Dynamics. He is currently funded by the National Science Foundation to develop a forecasting procedure for convective snow events in the central United States.

Right now, most people’s experience with geotagged media is through a browser interface like Google maps or the Google Earth application, or a web-based piece like Sound Transit. Google Earth in particular uses the concept of overlays, in which anyone can, through Google’s API, create a unique series of data points/locations to overlay onto the Google Earth map. This overlay can contain geotagged media, text, links, etc. and it is a useful concept to extrapolate to what I see as happening in the CyberTracker and ‘Sonic Graffiti’ examples. These, in using the same metaphor, create an overlay onto the real Earth. In ‘Sonic Graffiti’, listeners in proximity to sonic graffiti pieces will hear them through a playback device. With CyberTracker, given a wireless internet connection, one could potentially access the data on the wildlife sightings at the actual points of the sightings. Teri Rueb’s ‘Core Sample’ does something along these lines in its use of GPS to play back audio depending on where the listener is along sound walk. All geotagged media, by nature, contains this potential.

The point of departure for another discussion is in the ramifications of this virtual ‘overlay’ we are superimposing onto our physical world. Assume for the moment that we will soon all have mobile devices that will allow us to deposit and access geotagged media anywhere we can get a wireless connection. At the moment that this becomes commonplace, we will begin to build a permanent virtual overlay of media onto any and every point on the planet at which someone decides to leave some imprint of their presence. As time passes, this overlay will become more dense and complex, and at any given tagged point, one will be able to go back through that point’s history of data: for example, someone takes a picture of a glacier in Glacier National Park and tags it and uploads it at that point. Five years later, someone else at that location sees the picture on their device and is suddenly confronted with dramatic change in that glacier’s size. As another example, consider the possibility of a specific location in some city tagged with years of photos, audio recordings, text messages, and so forth. Any visitor to that point could access media from thousands of perspectives left at different points in time.

The terms ‘cyberspace’ and ‘virtual reality’ were the buzzwords of the mid to late 90s. Now, ten or so years later, the virtual world we spend so much of our time in – often in front of a computer and not interacting with the ‘real’ world – is being stretched over our physical world in such a way as to create a ‘hybrid reality’ in which we will always be connected and always moving fluidly between physical and networked interaction and communication.

I am, as usual, curious to know what you think. What other outcomes could you envision from our current technological trajectory? What aesthetic possibilities arise in such a ‘hybrid reality’? Have you had ‘hybrid reality’ experiences as described above, and if so, did you think of them as such when you had them? Perhaps most importantly, what questions does this make you ask?

“Silophone makes use of the incredible acoustics of Silo #5 (an abandoned grain storage facility in the port of Montréal) by introducing sounds, collected from around the world using various communication technologies, into a physical space to create an instrument which blurs the boundaries between music, architecture and net art. Sounds arrive inside Silo #5 by telephone or internet. They are then broadcast into the vast concrete grain storage chambers inside the Silo. They are transformed, reverberated, and coloured by the remarkable acoustics of the structure, yielding a stunningly beautiful echo. This sound is captured by microphones and rebroadcast back to its sender, to other listeners and to a sound installation outside the building. Anyone may contribute material of their own, filling the instrument with increasingly varied sounds.”

Musicians have created pieces for the Silo in the past, but in this event, an exciting element that makes this even more unique is the fact that anyone who is at the Silophone website can contribute to the concert, either by playing recorded content provided by the websites users, or by phoning or uploading individual sounds. These sounds will be heard simultaneously with Lee’s performance, making it a truly unique performance.

To call the Silophone from North America: 1.514.844.5555 From the rest of the world: 001.514.844. 5555. Wait until the second ring, then start talking.

The results of the show will be recorded and released via archive.org. [via Create Digital Music]

Abstract: In this paper we report on the current state of the newly established Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), a collection of 15 meta-instruments each consisting of a laptop computer, interfacing equipment, and a hemispherical speaker. Founded in the fall of 2005, PLOrk represents the first laptop ensemble of its size and kind, and brings together many of our research and aesthetic interests as musicians, composers, and computer scientists. Here we chronicle the first steps of the ensemble, including details about the technology, the music, compositional challenges, and what we have learned in the process.

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta instruments (see Bahn and Trueman, 2001, and Bahn, Hahn, and Trueman, 2001, for more about meta-instruments). Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, and others), and software developed in the ChucK and Max / MSP languages / environments. The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a fifteen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network? The ensemble represents a culmination of research and practice in the areas of live computer music performance, group improvisation, spatialization, the physical modeling of instruments and their patterns of sound radiation, computer music programming languages and real-time performance, and computer music pedagogy. […]

If you can tolerate Fox News, here’s what they sound like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3at6Ggvg79I