The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can they create?; how can they physically control these sounds?; how do they compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do they organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

In its first year of PLOrk’s existence, composers and performers from Princeton and elsewhere developed new pieces for this unprecedented ensemble, including Paul Lansky (Professor of Music at Princeton), Brad Garton (Director of the Columbia Computer Music Center), PLOrk co-founders Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, and several graduate students. They have made extensive use of a new music programming language created by Princeton graduate student (now assistant professor at Stanford University|CCRMA) Ge Wang, called ChucK, which allows the performers to develop new code in performance. In their first major performance (April 2006, Richardson Auditorium) we were joined by the renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, legendary accordianist and composer Pauline Oliveros, and the exciting young percussion quartet from New York City, So Percussion. PLOrk was featured in the April issues of the MIT Press Technology Review and Wired Magazine, and performed at the Dartmouth College “Orchestras of Sameness” festival in May 2006.

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.

Online submission: Web entries accepted from around the world for the Web showcase. Limited entries will be chosen to compete live — To compete for the prizes, those entries must be present at Yuri’s Night Bay Area, Saturday, April 12. Submit DIY music performance projects – using custom software and/or hardware – for a live performance battle at the Yuri’s Night Bay Area party on April 12, sponsored by Yuri’s Night and createdigitalmusic.com. Compete for awards including a Yamaha Tenori-On grand prize.

BACKGROUND: In science fiction and science fact, music has been central to finding a common language to speak to the universe. Music from Bach to gamelan has traveled into space on the Voyager spacecraft. In the digital age, musical interfaces are also often the best way to understand how to interface with technology and information.

Musicians have led many of the most innovative digital technological breakthroughs — the first digital synthesizer (at Bell Labs in the 50s), breakthroughs in modular electronic systems (modular synthesizers of the 60s), pioneering advances in digital storage and processing, unusual wireless interfaces and gestural controls decades ahead of the Nintendo Wii, and touch- and multi-touch tools years before the iPhone and Microsoft Surface. But that’s all in the past. This is a design challenge for the future. We want to hear the best, most forward-thinking, generally coolest, Second Space Age-worthy instruments and digital music interfaces. If aliens land — as they did when met by a classic ARP synthesizer in Close Encounters — we want to be able to give them a great show.

How to enter: We’re looking for designs of “instruments” — whether self-contained, electrically-powered devices or hardware interfaces for computers. That can include tangible interfaces, physical computing, hacked hardware, custom-built synths and electronics, and other gadgets. These must use at least some custom software and/or hardware.

You are limited to one computer and one input device — but the “input device” can be as complex as an interactive table. If that sounds vague, just remember — ultimately, the judges and audience decide. Wow them, and all will be well.

Artists must sign up in advance. We will have a limited number of slots. The best proposals will be chosen by the staff of createdigitalmusic.com to compete in San Francisco at Yuri’s Night.

Set up, plug in. You’ll have a limited set up time.

Play. You have three minutes to perform.

JUDGING: A panel of judges with expertise in music and interaction design will judge the entries — and are encouraged to be biased by crowd response. (If you’ve got friends, tell them to cheer really loudly.)

AWARDS: Winners will be announced at Yuri’s Night, with a grand prize winner and honorable mention awards for each category.

http://yuricdm.com
http://yuricdm.com/2008/03/19/futuristic-music-design-challenge/
http://yurisnightbayarea.net/

N.I.P. artists at Pixelache 2008 Helsinki are: Teresa Dillon (UK), Kathy Hinde (UK), Torsten Lauschmann (UK), Ivan Franco (PT), Rudolfo Quintas (PT), André Gonçalves (PT) and Tom Verbruggen (NL).

‘Burning the Sound’ by Rudolfo Quintas & André Gonçalves (PT): ‘Burning the Sound’ is a sound performance about the nature of rituals, power and control. It uses fire from a regular fire lighter to subvert patterns of rhythm, exorcising the sound as a spiritual strategy. Fire was probably the first technology to exist and is knowledge based and ritualistic. Within ‘Burning the Sound’ digital, new media and ancestral technologies fuse to question contemporary strategies of invisible control. The aim of the performance is to push the ritualistic primitivism, gesture and body to technological mediated computer sound performances.

Rudolfo Quintas is a software designer, visual artist and founding member of the SWAP project who works in the field of augmented performances and interactive installation. For the piece ‘Burning The Sound’ he has been collaborating with mixed media, visual and sound artist André Gonçalves to create a dynamic visual-sound-scape, which are based on the movements that Quintas choreographs in real-time, using lighters and computer vision techniques.

André Gonçalves will also perform his piece ‘Resonant Objects’.

‘Air Stick’ by Ivan Franco (PT): Instrument maker and musician Ivan Franco. ‘Air Stick’ is a new musical instrument, created by Franco, which is ‘played-in-the-air’ (similar to a Theremin). The instrument, built using proximity sensors, allows for real-time control between hand-position and active sound manipulation.

BOP, UK: BOP are Teresa Dillon and Kathy Hinde. Since early 2007, they have been performing together and combining their backgrounds in live art, theatre, visual arts and music. As BOP they create experimental visual-sound pieces, with a theatrical, punky twist.

TokTek, NL: Musician, instrument maker, hacker and visual artist TokTek, eclectic electronic style has been described as ‘illogical hardware bending’. The outcomes or electronic ‘songs’ are played via hacked joysticks and various objects (plastic toys, records etc) to create dramatic live compositions, which break down into delicate and tender sound moments.

‘Crackle Canvas’ by Tom Verbruggen (NL): Musician, instrument maker, hacker and visual artist Tom Verbruggen (aka TokTek) has become well known for his individual ‘Crackle Canvas’ series. Drawing on his fine and visual arts background, Tom went into music but was asked one day if he would ever make any more ‘paintings’. This lead him to think about making sound-paintings, which is where the ‘Crackle Canvas’ series started.

‘Self-Portrait as a Pataphysical Object’ by Torsten Lauschmann (UK): Self-Portrait as a Pataphysical Object is a kind of chandelier created from audio adapters and cables with a single small bulb at the centre. An object in its own right, the chandelier, could hang in the lobby of the Kiasma as a representation of Lauschmann’s humours and DIY aesthetic, which draws on the everyday and subtle nuances of human relations.

Glasgow-based artist, Torsten Lauschmann originally trained as a photographer and film-maker but currently works across various media. For example, he has performed as a VJ and solar-powered busker known as Slender Whiteman, created a film about the a street lamp’s function in consumer society (Misshapen Pearl, 2003) and launched World Jump Day (2005), an Internet campaign, which attempted to reverse global warming through a synchronized single jump across the globe. His most recent work Piecework Orchestra (2007) is an orchestra of machines, which Lauschmann controls to create sound-compositions has been created using everyday house-hold objects (hoovers, washing machine, leaf blowers). This brief selection of Lauschmanns work, demonstrates the breadth of his practice, which focuses on everyday, human behaviours, gestures and emotions.

Bioluster is a large-scale tactile interface that offers simple, yet not immediately obvious, methods of triggering different series of sound samples. This unique interface, created with RFID & Flash technology, is paired with materials and shapes that leave the audience with a tugging sense of unwarranted nostalgia for a system that has never existed. This project has grown out of Trainor’s long use and exploration of RFID as an artistic medium to examine our changing physical relationship to computing.

Bioluster premiered on December 8, 2007 at Strange Things People Do With Electricity, an art exhibition at 911 Media Arts Center curated by Dorkbot/Seattle.

Accelerator Group is a variable group of artists, programmers, choreographers and others who collaborate to create performances, artistic prototypes, installations, and other works that explore emerging technologies in the context of material interfaces and components. Members reside in Seattle and New York with distance collaboration a key element of their creative process. Current experiments include using Flickr as a communication and documentation tool.

NIME: New Interfaces for Musical Expression - NIME: a graduate course at ITP :: In the sixth annual NIME, students will perform on a series of newly designed electronic instruments that aim to keep the “live” in live performance of digital music. Presented by ITP instructors Jamie Allen and Gideon D’Arcangelo.

Computer music is usually played with a keyboard and mouse. Laptop musicians often sit at a desk and give performances that are little more than watching someone engage in “office gestures.” The idea behind NIME is to go beyond the mouse and keyboard, beyond even piano keyboards and drum pads, and develop performance tools that make the most out of the new opportunities that digital music offers. NIME students answer questions like:

- “What will the next generation of musical instruments look like?”
- “What will they be able to do that traditional instruments can’t already do?”
- “What aspects of traditional instruments will we want to retain in digital instruments?”

Over the course of this year’s 14-week course, students are developing projects such as an musical weaving loom, a instrument made of speakers that feed back and make glorious noise, an augmented rocking chair, a musical abacus and a host of others.

http://www.exitart.org

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. This information, along with a record of the player’s movement through the map, is used to generate music. The music follows the underlying structure of the game, revealed gradually as the player progresses through it; the branching, recursive, rhizomatic structure of the game is recapitulated in the generated sound.

Among the goals of the Frotzophone is to explore the dual meanings of the words “play” and “map.” Is “playing” an instrument the same as “playing” a game? What happens when the act of playing the game is the same act as playing the instrument? Is the “mapping” of interface to action the same as the “mapping” of a virtual space? What happens when the map of the space itself serves as the basis of the interface mapping?

The goal of the Protein project is to create a set of creative audio/visual toys you can play with anywhere you go, running on portable devices. The idea is to get several “modules” running together and that you can manipulate at the same time to create live sound. Protein [ DScratch ] - audio manipulation software for Nintendo DS - DScratch is the first module (or “protein”) made using Protein engine - it’s a little audio manipulation software running on DS which ables you to play with an existing .wav file or recorded audio sample; you can pitch it, scratch it, rewind, mute and apply effects on it. Moreover, DScratch sends MIDI through wifi connection, which ables you to control external applications, like VJing software as I do, and can be motion-controlled.

The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings. This medium informs the audience by visualizing the different aspects of the crowd that is otherwise anonymous to each other. The audience listens to a sound collage made of the voices of people telling where they are from and if they can go back or not. As users of the system, we hear words as they are explicitly spoken to the system. The information is used to create a visual representation (based on audio analysis) for designing visuals that display patterns of activity at these location.