The Avatar Orchestra will be performing at the Deep Listening Institute Women and Identity Festival Concert :: April 17, 2008; 7:30 PM :: Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), New York, New York.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a group of composers, performers, and media artists living in Europe, East Asia and North America who explore together the interactive possibilities of the Second Life online virtual reality platform to create works with open, interactive and possibly “infinite” elements. The Orchestra works with ideas that challenge conventional practices of creating and performing music, and finds new ways to conceive of and erase notions of identity, place, social, cultural and sexual identity, and the roles of composer, performer and listener. Continue reading

Shinichi Takemura is a designer who uses technology in an attempt to enable creativity. He believes technology should not be used to stop people thinking, but rather to enable potential in humanity. Aqua Scape is one such example. This website invites the viewer into another world, where they can be involved in situations across the globe. The viewer can listen to various sounds of water from around the world, in real time. Takemura believes that listening to sounds in real time can change peoples emotional responses, and that the Internet is a platform to unite global citizens. This website becomes a unique dynamic experience, that can never be the same, rather than a static source of information. Takemura has transformed the function of a website and is working at using the internet to facilitate change.

Riffworld.com is Somona Wire Works’ entry into the music collaboration and social networking space. here’s what they write about it:

Using the RiffWorks desktop recording application, up to four musicians can connect and collaborate on a song simultaneously. As a layer records, it instantly streams to other players’ running RiffWorks. As the Riff loops, other players can add more. All contributions are saved on RiffWorld.com and can be opened later for further collaboration.
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BubbleBeats to launch February 6, 2008 at 7 pm :: Location One in Soho, 26 Greene Street (between Canal and Grand), New York City :: Free/open to the public.

The musician Beck said in a recent interview that it would be cool if people could take his songs and “play them like a videogame.” Jason Van Anden’s newest project, BubbleBeats.com makes his dream a reality, and then some. Based on technology he originally invented to enable robots to interact improvisationally, anyone can visit and combine colorful bubbles filled with music (or other sounds) to create new living compositions. Jason and musician Nat Hawks will be presenting the beta version of BubbleBeats to the early adopters at Dorkbot NYC. Visit dorkbot.org for more info.

The Digital Artists Handbook [see Working with Sound] is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies. Continue reading

Duncan Wilson created OTTO with Manolis Kelaidis at the Royal College of Art.

OTTO (Greek for ‘ear’) is a device that makes hidden sounds audible. This is achieved via a thin polymer piezoelectric contact that senses weak vibrations and plays them as a sound through an integrated speaker. OTTO can be positioned on almost any surface through a combination of suction and magnets. By placing several units on different objects, one can select and create a new sonic experience and a form of ambient music appreciation, thereby utilising our space as a multidirectional audio platform. Continue reading

The mobile telephone is one of the first electronic objects that large numbers of people have personalized with sound. The ‘ringtone’ has become a familiar personal insignia. For both composers and users it provides a unique opportunity to do something with sound. The mission of Sonic()bject is to take advantage of this common interest and to let users become acquainted with never previously heard and experimental sound.

The artists that Sonic()bject has selected for devising new sounds and ringtone compositions are professionals from all over the world who are involved in creating with sound: audio designers, audio artists, contemporary composers, classic or electro, jazz, pop … real “sonic objects” that have their roots in the history of auditory art. Continue reading

Thadeus Frazier-Reed: Routes, Program 4, Pump On … Go, and skinTones: routes is a community web sound art piece in which visitors download software for recording / creating sound. The software, which can run on any Apple computer, records sound into a buffer that loops continuously, recording new sounds on top of the old sounds. The user should run this software on a laptop and record as they go, giving an aural picture of their day. Visitors to the website can listen to up to thirty recordings. Each visit or page refresh will choose a random set of thirty recordings from the list. Continue reading

From blog.wired.com, Kompoz: Socially-Networked Music Creation by Eliot Van Buskirk, September 26, 2007.

Social networking is an activity in and of itself, but as the preponderance of applications and widgets on social networks indicates, things get a lot more interesting when there’s something to do other than adding friend after friend. For specialized activities like making music, it makes more sense to create an entire social network centered around the activity than to embed an application in an existing network. Continue reading

half/theory represents a loose collective of Australian and New Zealand artists and researchers involved in experimental music, emerging artforms, education, and esoteric research. half/theory provides extremely cheap web server space as a platform for representing some of the many dedicated and unique projects from Australia and New Zealand that would otherwise remain in obscurity. The half/theory shop provides a central marketplace for the world to obtain works by people in the collective. It is intended that the majority of these works will be self-published, sometimes in handmade or numbered editions, and only available in small quantities. half/theory was established by improvising musician and website administrator Scott Sinclair in 2003. Continue reading