Apropos the Bat House Project I posted on Networked Performance yesterday, here’s Alvin Lucier’s Vespers. It was published on a Sonic Arts Union LP (Electric Sound, Mainstream) in 1971. In the Liner Notes, Lucier wrote:

“I would like to pay my respects to all living creatures who inhabit dark places and who, over the years, have developed the art of echolocation (sounds sent out into an environment returning as messengers with information as to shape, size and substance of the environment and the objects in it). I am envious of the astonishing acuity of such creatures — dolphins, certain species of nocturnal birds, and bats, particularly those of the family Vespertilionidae, the common bat of Europe and North America. Continue reading

Share Festival & 02l > Outside Standing Level @ Transmediale Festival Berlin 2008 presents: The Special Player, augmented environment in algorithmic contextualized music and The Shaidon Effect DJ Set Event Session at C-Base Berlin, Rungestrasse 20 - 2. HH - 10179 Berlin.

The Special Player is an interactive performance in the context of transmediale 08 - conspire. Involving a sophisticated responsive motion tracking environment, four contemporary dancers and its visitors, The Special Player explores a massively disquieting conspirative narration. Continue reading

LEMUR announces ReSiDeNt, a major new residency and performance/installation series :: Open Call for Submissions: Deadline: December 17, 2007. Artists from all performing and installation disciplines are encouraged to apply, including musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers, video artists, interactive installation artists, performance artists, multimedia artists and others.

In January 2008, LEMUR will inaugurate ReSiDeNt, a unique new creator-in-residence program, hosted at LEMUR’s Brooklyn space in Park Slope. Each month, we will award three artists a month-long residency at LEMUR, enabling them to create a work utilizing LEMUR’s resources, including robotic musical instruments, MIDI audio/video controllers, video projection and tracking system and more. Each group of residencies will culminate in a public show at LEMUR at the end of the month. Continue reading

Flock, by Jason Freeman :: December 6-8, 2007 :: Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, Miami - during the Art | Basel | Miami Beach festival. Advance tickets are now on sale.

Flock is a full evening performance work for saxophone quartet, conceived to directly engage audiences in the composition of music by physically bringing them out of their seats and enfolding them into the creative process. During the performance, the four musicians and up to one hundred audience members move freely around the performance space. Continue reading

Bodycoder - Voice :: November 22, 2007; 7.45 pm :: Watermans, 40 High Street, Brentford, London.

This unique solo-show is a multi-media revelation of the human voice and its unimaginable intensity. Ten years research into human body movement, multi-sensory perception environments and digital processing has brought about this exceptional show performed by Julie Wilson-Bokowiec. Bodycoder - Voice is part of an ongoing experiment in connecting body movements with sound, intertwining the sensual with the sonic. The experiments render the voice multidimensional and examine how the natural movement vocabulary of the body can become an expressive medium and create and manipulate sound. Continue reading

Flocking Orchestra (aka DT1) by Tatsuo Unemi and Daniel Bisig: DT1 is an interactive installation that employs flocking algorithms to produce music and visuals. The user’s motions are captured by a video camera and influence the flock’s behaviour. Each agent moving in a virtual 3D space controls a MIDI instrument whose playing style depends on the agent’s state. In this system, the user acts as a conductor influencing the flock’s musical activity. In addition to gestural interaction, the acoustic properties of the system can be modified on the fly by using an intuitive GUI. The acoustical and visual output of the system results from the combination of the flock’s and user’s behaviour. It therefore creates on the behavioural level a mixing of natural and artificial reality. The system has been designed to run an a variety of different computational configuration ranging from small laptops to exhibition scale installations.

Sometimes a keyboard for control is not enough, you require a tangible interface to communicate with your parameters. Recently the importance of the midi controller with generative systems has been proven, but a new kid on the block is the Wii controller (Wiimote). Designed for gaming but easily hackable to control your favourite software – be it Processing, Max/Msp or VVVV. Its motion sensing capability in 3D space is perfect for mapping into your X, Y and Z’s resulting in a fun and novel way of controlling your animations

Bringing together 3 Software’s - VVVV, Max/MSP and Reason the WiiWiiWiiWii thesis project provides a system allowing for a set of Wiimotes to become a syneasthetic musical instruments. Continue reading

Dene Grigar’s Virtual DJ Networked Performance has been developed to allow two geographically-removed performers to interact simultaneously with Steve Gibson’s piece, Virtual DJ. With the help of the programmers from APR, Inc. a version of the tracking software has been developed to allow positional information to be delivered over a high-speed network, thus allowing the users at each site to hear and see the results of the remote person’s motions. The network performance between Gibson and Grigar was tested in the summer 2005 between Gibson’s studio at the University of Victoria and Grigar’s lab at Texas Woman’s University. Continue reading

The Octopulse shows that noise is music. With this cuddly ‘alien bagpipe’ you can control analogue sound synthesis through unconventional means. The ‘tonetacles’ of the Octopulse react to movement and light, transferring movements into information for an analogue synthesiser to convert into cacophonous noises. Continue reading

One of the most compelling performances at the NIME 2007, Concert 1, in New York City this past week was EyeMusic v1.0, an eye-controlled composition. The project makes use of an eye tracking device (the LC Technologies Eyegaze Communication System) that reports where the performer is looking on the computer screen, as well as other parameters pertaining to the status of the eyes. It reports these data in real time to a computer program (written using Max/MSP/Jitter) which then generates and modifies sounds and images based on these data. Continue reading