LIVERPOOL will host the Open Source City Micro- Festival:: a micro-festival of open source practice in the production of media art and music :: June 20th to 22nd 2008 :: 40-42 Slater St, Liverpool L1 4BX.

folly and SoundNetwork are kicking off the Summer with an exciting collaboration bringing a micro-festival of art and music to Liverpool, as part of the European Capital of Culture.

Liverpool has a strong history of doing innovative things with electricity, from the birth of the power grid (Sebastian Ferranti) to the early computer games industry (Psygnosis, Ocean, and ZTT). Liverpool also has a formidable musical legacy inevitably centered around the pop phenomenon of The Beatles but which spans every musical genre from classical to electro. Continue reading

The Echo Nest Analyze API is a tool that can enrich your software’s understanding of musical recordings. It uses a perceptual model of human listening to generate detailed descriptions of a song’s structure and musical content. Given any musical sound file, the analysis engine outputs global musical track information such as tempo, dominant pitches and timbre, key, time signature, energy, etc. It also segments the sound file into large sections (such as verse, chorus, bridge), beats, and smaller time slices. Each segment is described in terms of pitch, timbre, and loudness content. The engine then segments a musical track into small time slices, each representing a perceived “sound” (a note of a piano, a syllable of a vocal line, etc.). Each segment is then described in pitch, timbre and loudness. This information can power performances, visualizations, and games with the ability to respond to a wide range of nuances in the music they use. Continue reading

Stanford’s laptop orchestra, with their Mac books programmed to create sound, notes, and music, performed last Tuesday night, April 29th, at Stanford University in a musical collaboration with China. Assistant Professor Ge Wang, brought the idea of a laptop orchestra to Stanford this year. Previously a graduate student at Princeton, where the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) was founded, Professor Wang developed a new music programming language called ChucK, which has been used extensively by PLOrk. The language allows the performers to develop new code in performance. Continue reading

The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is an exploration of a real-time collaborative composition local network. All of the performers have identical performance/composition programs — a custom flexible step-sequencer — that invite play with rhythmic cycles of various lengths and timbres. The real fun starts, however, when the players begin spying on their neighbors, secretly, via the network, and stealing their ideas with the click of the mouse. Unplanned structures begin to emerge, like oil on water, as riffs propagate and evolve, sometimes returning unrecognizable to their creators. Continue reading

World Science reports that musical genes may be coming to light. In their April 30, 2008 Special to World Science, they report on a first small study that suggests that musical ability is partly genetic and may share evolutionary roots with language. Finnish scientists say they’ve found “approximate locations in our genome where genes affecting musical talent may lie.” The study was made on 254 individuals from 15 Finnish families, all with some musical talent. It was published in the April 18 advance online issue of the Journal of Medical Genetics.

RASTER-NOTON SHOWCASE :: Thursday, May 15, 2008 :: SIGNAL + solo sets by Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, and Byetone :: Presented by Non-Event, Basstown, and the Goethe-Institut, Boston ::Middlesex Lounge :: 315 Massachusetts Avenue :: Cambridge, MA :: (617) 868-MSEX :: Doors: 9pm, Show: 10pm :: 21+ Admission: $10

SIGNAL is a Raster-Noton supergroup, featuring Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), and Frank Bretschneider. The trio performs intense, hypnotic music to a spectacular backdrop of graphical information that reveals the complex geometry of the sounds in play. Most of their sound sources are taken from a huge memory bank of music from long jamming sessions dating from the earlydays of Raster-Noton. These are processed and folded into a taut and energetic web of rhythmic clicks, bristling static, and deep bass pulses that are unexpectedly sensuous and undeniably funky. Their most recent album, Robotron, was released in 2007 on Raster-Noton. This will be SIGNAL’s Boston debut.

mp3 of Signal, Robotron: http://www.raster-noton.net/download/rn-69_robotron/02_Ermafa.mp3 Continue reading

pure:dyne News - Who is pure:dyne for? pure:dyne is for everyone! pure:dyne has been adopted by artists, schools, media arts centers and their local communities as a common, complete GNU / Linux platform for Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) art production and education. pure:dyne is used by communities across Europe and the world for recording and manipulating sound, making live visuals, creating interactive media in installations, and more.

Through pure:dyne for everyone, pure:dyne will reach out to more people - noobs, artists, local users - in a year-long programme of system development, documentation, user support and special public events with partnering media arts centers across the UK. Continue reading

Psychodrama: 13 Variations by Melissa Grey - Featuring: Harold Jones / The Antara Ensemble and The Orchestra of Agincourt conducted by Edwin Gonzales :: April 25, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY.

A performance including live chamber ensemble, electroacoustic soundscape and projected video, Psychodrama is a multiple re-scoring of the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho. Continue reading

Common Music Notation in Max/Msp with MaxScore with Nick Didkovsky and Georg Hajdu :: April 16, 6:30 - 9:30 pm :: Class Cost: $50 :: HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Arts Center, 596 Broadway, Suite 602 (at Houston St), New York, NY. For details, or to register go here.

MaxScore currently exports to MusicXML so you can load your scores into Finale and Sibelius. MaxScore also exports to the GNU LilyPond automated engraving system. MaxScore was programmed in Java Music Specification Language by Nick Didkovsky (but requires no Java programming to operate). MaxScore was commissioned by “Bipolar - German-Hungarian Cultural Projects.” Bipolar is an initiative of the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany. Continue reading

“We all love driving down a open road with music on the car radio, at times there seems to be an almost magical synchronization between the music playing and the passing landscape, the speed, the hum of the motor, sounds harmonize with the machine…” This was the impetus for Peter Sinclair’s AutoSync. With AutoSync, the music played on the car HiFi is generated entirely by the car itself: vibrations of the car on the road, recognizable movements (accelerations, gear changes, bends etc.) and the passing landscape. Continue reading