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.

Sam Pluta: data structures/monoliths ii (for chion) - Video samplers. Software as musical scores. Data structures as musical materials. Copyright laws. Data loops. Why Chewbacca is not in the OS X spell checker. Blocks of sounds. Laptop improvisation. And Michel Chion. All this and more will be discussed as Sam Pluta presents his work, data structures/monoliths ii (for chion).

Christina McPhee: Shake Stations - California-based filmmaker and artist Christina McPhee is ‘outback’ in earthquake country this summer, shooting HD video at Parkfield, California with new media installation artist DV Rogers (New Zealand / Sydney). DV is building and activating a major land art work- a hydraulically activated, remote -sensor activated seismic intervention table. DV’s PIEQF installation reacts to mini-tremors and shakes in realtime.

Following DV and crew as they install the project this summer and fall, Christina’s documentary takes on the gradual installation of the table as an elaborate time-based performance, with ironic and playful resonances to land art and the highly saturated dramatic space of sixties nouvelle vague (new wave) film. Via abstract drawing, experimental video and photomontage, Christina makes performative recordings at generative ‘moment-tensors’ where biological systems clash and meet with technological, and often security-challenged, sublime landscapes at the urban edge.

At places of emergence, at folds or ‘tesserae’ in landscapes of latent energy, her methods involve meditative engagement in remote sites like Parkfield, and also this year at live geothermal plants over the San Andreas Fault, next to the declining aquifer of Salton Sea, near the Mexico / California border. Her work slips past the indexical to trace dynamic loops between biological and technologically emergent states, making connections between human traumatic memory, disturbed terrains, and bare life.

The Society of Composers, Inc. (SCI) announces a Call for Participation in the 2008 SCI Student National Conference to be held October 10-11, 2008 at Ball State University, Muncie, IN (http://www.bsu.edu/music/). Student and Student Chapter Members are invited to submit compositions for performance consideration and/or proposals for paper presentations, lecture recitals, or panel discussions.

Score Submission Guidelines

Composers may submit up to 2 scores for consideration. There is no established limit on duration but feasibility of performance will be a consideration. Available performing resources are listed below, but composers are encouraged to bring their own performers. This conference will emphasize technology (http://www.bsu.edu/musictech/): Laptop Improvisation, Internet Improvisation, Video/Mixed-Media, and Electroacoustic Pieces (up to 8 channels).

All submissions must include the following:

1. Contact Information (name, phone number, email, street address)
2. Brief Biography (250 words or less)
3. Maximum of two scores. Title, Name, and Duration should appear on the first page of each score. Include a specification of any technical requirements, especially for electroacoustic works. Works for which no score is necessary can include this information on the cover of the recording or on a separate page.
4. CD Recording (strongly encouraged). CDs should be clearly labeled with the Composer’s Name and Title of Work. MIDI realizations will also be accepted.
5. Statement agreeing to attend the conference should a work or works be accepted. Also indicate if you are able to provide your own performers.
6. SASE if you wish for your score to be returned.

Alternatively, submissions may be made via the internet. Electronic submissions should be sent to benjamin@williamscomposer.com and include the following:

1. Contact Information (name, phone number, email, street address)
2. Brief Biography (250 words or less)
3. Maximum of two scores in PDF file format. All files should be named “Last Name - Title”. Title, Name, and Duration should appear on the first page of each score. Include a specification of any technical requirements, especially for electroacoustic works. Works for which no score is necessary can include this information in the body of the message.
4. MP3 Recording (strongly encouraged). All files should be named “Last Name - Title”. MIDI realizations will also be accepted.
5. Statement agreeing to attend the conference should a work or works be accepted. Also indicate if you are able to provide your own performers.

Available Performing Resources

• Conundrum: Soprano, Flute, Clarinet and Piano (http://www.conundrummusic.com/)
• Woodwind Quintet
• Woodwind Trio
• Any Solo/Combination from the following:
  • Flute, Oboe/English Horn, Clarinet, Bassoon, Saxophone (multiple)
  • Horn, Trombone, Tuba/Euphonium
  • Percussion (multiple)
  • Harp, Guitar
  • Piano, Organ, Carillon (4-octave)
  • Violin (1), Viola, Cello, Contrabass
  • Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, and Baritone voices

Digital-audio pieces can incorporate 8 or more independent channels (moveable speakers) as well as video.

Proposal Submission Guidelines

SCI welcomes proposals for papers, panel discussions, workshops, demonstrations, and other types of presentations.

Papers are limited to twenty minutes. Panels, workshops, and other collaborative sessions could take up to one hour. Proposals may deal with any aspect of composition and new music, including but not limited to, compositional techniques, career development, music technology, music preparation, performance supervision, cultural and stylistic context, and musical aesthetics. Of particular interest are proposals that deal with issues facing student composers.

Proposals for papers may be sent by post or email and must include:

1. Contact Information (name, phone number, email, street address)
2. Brief Biography (250 words or less)
3. Abstract of approximately 250 words. Methodology, goals and conclusions should be clearly stated. Please include a short description of your expertise or experience with the topic.
4. Specification of any technical requirements for the presentation.

Other proposals should include a one-page description of the event. Suggestions about who will participate in a specific panel or group are welcome and should be included on this page. Otherwise, proposals should adhere to the previous guidelines.

Contact Information

Benjamin Williams, Composition Fellow
School of Music
The Ohio State University
110 Weigel Hall
1866 College Road
Columbus, OH 43210
benjamin@williamscomposer.com

VJ Übergeek takes to the streets of Aberdeen with keyboard, air mouse, gamepad, dancepad, and special mobile office furniture, for new adventures in pseudoleisure. Let your hair down! (But keep it out of the keyboard, please…) CyberSpaceLand Mobile Edition is presented in conjunction with the “No Time to Lose” exhibition at Peacock Visual Arts, curated by Milena Placentile.

Where does work stop and leisure start?

American artist Amy Alexander observes that people seem to always be working, even when we’re playing, because the tools of work have become the tools of leisure, thereby making leisure virtually indiscernible from work. She describes coffeehouse culture as consisting of lattes and laptops and club performances looking clerical, with laptops replacing guitars, drums, and other “thrashables”.

For No Time to Lose, she brings the humorous, public space art performance CyberSpaceLand into the streets of Aberdeen for an outdoor intervention that may just inspire a revolution …

Cyber-musician and Berklee faculty member Neil Leonard is organizing another evening of the latest in sonic arts at GASP, a space devoted to promoting collaboration between disciplines and fields in the contemporary cultural landscape. Sonic Arts @ GASP features beat de-constructions, circuit bending noise and realtime video by Berklee Music Synthesis students and alumni. Performers include London laptop maestro Gadi Sassoon, Somerville’s own guitar player and electronic artist Katie Amaral, and New Hampshire-based sound artist Eric Miller.

It all happens this Friday, June 6, at 8:00 p.m. at the GASP Gallery, 362-4 Boylston St., Brookline, just one block from the Brookline Hills stop on the Riverside branch of the Green Line. Suggested donation is $10, or $6 with a valid student ID. Email galleryinfo@g-a-s-p.net or call 617.418.4308 for more information.

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.

David Tagg - Waist Deep Seas of Milk (review) New York musician, David Tagg, has seen The Future of Modern Guitar. And this sonic seer’s astral projections are sumptuously spread across the ambient expanses of Waist Deep Seas of Milk, though all trace of twang, pluck and strum is dissolved in FX haze and spun out in endless echo returns. Review by Alan Lockett.

Favourite Places (review) Everyone has a favourite place, whether cosy internal retreat or cherished patch of Great Outdoors. Forest, bathtub, museum and alley find common cause on this audio-document from Audiobulb, compiling ten pieces representing selected artists’ Favourite Places. Captured field recordings blend with musical treatments to make mementos enfolding inspiring source within inspired composition. Review by Alan Lockett.

Hectic Tenuous - Chic Nerve (review) Starting with flanged, panned scratching (ala fingernails, not decks), this solo CDR from The Caution Curves laptop lady Rebecca Mills, is an eleven track melange of textures, echoes, drones, processed field recordings and even the occasional bit of singing! Review by Mark Francombe.

La Ciutat Ets Tu - Tomasz Krakowiak (review) La Ciutat Et Tu surrounds the listener with evolving percussive transformations in timbre. The compositions have a circular unwinding quality, never abrasive and utterly hypnotic. Tomasz Krakowiak is a Polish-born percussionist now living in Toronto, Canada. Having collaborated with the likes of Kaffe Matthews, John Oswald, Phil Minton, Otomo Yoshihide, Gert-Jan Prins among other. Review by Derek Morton.

Love City by Dsic (review) Dsic, also known as Greg Godwin, is a Bristol-based noise artist that employs a wide range of influences and sound sources. Love City and the miniDsic EP, both released through Lf Records, weave their way through noise, drone, glitch, ambient and microsound. Review by Alex Young.

Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn - Still Life (series) (review) The internally themed Rothko-esque cover art of the Still Life series could stand as a semiotic of Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn’s sound, with its slow-shifting tones that spread across a spartan canvas - ostensibly static swathes that reveal micro-variativity on deeper insertion. Review by Alan Lockett.

Of Memory & Dreams - Bill Thompson (review) There is a trajectory that many improvised electro acoustic performances reach, which although unique in every given context, often manage to take you to a zen like point where you become one with the signal and phase in and out of listening to the development of structure or dynamic of the work. Review by Roger Mills.

Three Rooms - Steve Peters (review) Sound artist Steve Peters’ recent CD, Three Rooms documents three of his site-specific installations. The three pieces succeed without reference to the installations for which the pieces were originally composed, capturing the quiet reflection of the original locations. Review by Caleb Deupree.

imposition emerges from translation, a series of pieces which were developed, in turn, from overboard, our first essay in ambient poetics. imposition uses the same texts and procedures as translation. It continues an investigation of iterative, procedural removal from one text or language to another. During the performance, four passages from the source texts of imposition will be presented in any one of three shifting states: surfacing, floating or sinking. A passage will also be in one of three changing language states: German, French or English. If a passage sinks in one language it may, for example, surface in another.

imposition now distributes these states over the internet in order to enable a networked transliteral and musical performance. imposition’s main display shows the four transliterating passages on a large projection and broadcasts their states via a server on the internet. Anyone with access to a set of twelve distinct QuickTime ‘listener’ movies may download and play them on their computer. While the main movie is running, listener movies will track one of the four passages, but will do so in a single language (as selected at download time by the participant who plays the ‘listener’) while reflecting the ‘buoyancy’ of the passage to which it listens. These movies also play looping musical samples of human vocalizations which harmonize both with the main display and with other linked and listening movies. The selection and triggering of samples also reflect their linked passage’s buoyancy. For performance or installation renditions of imposition, a number of participants with laptop computers may be distributed amongst the audience. These laptops will each play their listening movie networked with the main display by wireless connection over the internet. - John Cayley

The music for imposition is ultimately generated by events arising out of the transformations that occur within the text. These are the chance operations - themselves composed through John’s programmed impositions - which govern how various predetermined features of the audio will ultimately play themselves out. More >>

Credits: John Caley (writing, concepts, text-generation, programming); Giles Perring (composition, sound design, recording, post-production); Melanie Pappenheim (vocals); and Douglas Cape (advice on visual media, additional recording)

A distributed laptop performance between SARC’s own BLISS (Belfast Legion for Improvised Sights and Sounds) and Göteborg’s Academy of Music and Drama laptop ensemble, Sweden. This networked performance explores techniques and strategies for improvised electroacoustic music over the internet.

The Legion does not prescribe its sights or sounds; they are the product of digital and contra-digital networks of gates, tables, switches, speaker objects, cabling and data… The Legion is not a band – we don’t play weddings – but we like playing in the network! This event is a co-production between SARC and the Siren Festivalen för ny music. The performance will include works by Justin Yang and Alain Renaud. Related article.

CTHEORY: You have mentioned before that the problem with some realtime performances of laptops is that the result(s) can be easily dismissed by the listening public as “spacebar music”. Do you feel that performing your own compositions from your laptop is a sufficient way to engage a concert audience?” Continue reading The Microsound Scene - An Interview with Kim Cascone by Jeremy Turner, CTheory, 2001.

Ikue Mori moved from her native city of Tokyo to New York in 1977. She started playing drums and soon formed the seminal NO WAVE band DNA, with fellow noise pioneers Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. DNA enjoyed legendary cult status, while creating a new brand of radical rhythms and dissonant sounds; forever altering the face of rock music.

In the mid 80’s Ikue started in employ drum machines in the unlikely context of improvised music. While limited to the standard technology provided by the drum machine, she has nevertheless forged her own highly sensitive signature style. In 2000 Ikue started using the laptop computer to expand on her already signature sound, thus broadening her scope of musical expression. She has subsequently collaborated with numerous improvisors throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, while continuing to produce and record her own music. Current working groups include MEPHISTA with Sylvie Courvoisier and Susie Ibarra, projects with Kim Gordon, the duo project PHANTOM ORCHARD with Zeena Parkins, and various projects with John Zorn.