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.

PwRHm is an Avatar Orchestra work in progress that explores and embraces the sonic possibilities inherent in the frequency of the electrical currents that power most aspects of modern existence. The piece exposes the relationship between the harmonic series of the North American 60 Cycle AC current and of the European 50 Cycle AC current, and uses the breathing rhythms of the live individual performers, spread across 2 continents, to determine the dynamic between the relationships, sounds and movements of the virtual avatar players.

PwRHm uses 4 instruments created within the technical possibilities and limitations of the Second Life platform. The instrument sounds are made from sets of short sound samples of individual sine and square waves and field recordings of electric motors put together in a HUD (Heads Up Display) configuration by the Orchestra’s instrument builder, Andreas Mueller / Bingo Onomatopoeia. The sounds made by the players are therefore not streamed. Each avatar/player is playing, in real time, sounds through instrument controls visible on each of their computer screens to make the combined sound of the piece. The avatars also hold semi-transparent globes, or ‘receivers’, designed by media artist Sachiko Hayachi / Goodwind Seiling, that emit gradations of differently coloured particles according to the specific sound and volume they each play on their instruments. The set also includes two large blue water tanks that hold two of the players, and that provide illumination within the night sky surrounding the suspended virtual performance platform.

Program: Sarah Weaver with Weave Between the Body :: Avatar Orchestra Metaverse - PwRHm by Tina Pearson / Humming Pera :: Maria Chavez, avant-turntablist/performer :: ROMA: Economical and Effective.

Notes for Avatar Orchestra Metaverse performance PwRHm (2008).

Composer: Tina Pearson / Humming Pera, Victoria, Canada
Instrument Builder: Andreas Mueller / Bingo Onomatopoeia, Regensburg, Germany
Set Design: Sachiko Hayachi / Goodwind Seiling, Stockholm, Sweden www.e-garde.net

Performers for Avatar Orchestra Metaverse: Bingo Onomatopoeia (Andreas Mueller), Regensburg, Germany — Fernsing Llewelyn (Cathy Lewis), Victoria, BC, Canada — Free Noyse (Pauline Oliveros), Kingston, New York, USA — Goodwind Seiling (Sachiko Hayashi), Stockholm, Sweden — Gumnosophistai Nurmi (Leif Inge), Oslo, Norway — Humming Pera (Tina Pearson), Victoria, BC, Canada — Maxxo Klaar (Max D. Well), Regensburg, Germany — Miulew Takahe (Bjorn Eriksson), Solleftea, Sweden — Paco Mariani (Chris Wittkowsky), Regensburg, Germany — Zonzo Spyker (Viv Corringham), Minneapolis, USA, London, UK.

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.

As Mike at Garagespin says: It’s “kind of an interesting spin on the space touched on by music collaboration & social networking sites Kompoz, Light Speed Audio, eJamming Audio, SpliceMusic, and a bunch of others. They’re all pretty different — some focusing on loop-generated music, some focusing on pure songwriting ideas, and others focusing on live interaction. ” (Mike hadn’t tried it out yet and neither have I; still you might want to have a look.)

Riffworld recording software includes automatic track creation, loop recording, guitar-oriented effects, InstantDrummer, professionally recorded drum tracks, online music collaboration, and instant podcasting so you can broadcast any song created in RiffWorks – whether it’s a solo effort or collaboration – for the RiffWorld community to hear. You can listen to songs, get feedback about them, talk about what your fellow musicians are creating, and find other musicians to jam with.

Thanks to MikeB.

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 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.

When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free / Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating.

The digital artist handbook is brought to you by folly and has developed out of ongoing consultation with artists working with technology, which has shown a need for removing the barriers for artists to use digital tools. The project is supported by Arts Council England.

From August 2007 until January 2008, the editors of the Handbook were Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux of GOTO10.

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.

Every object and surface in our environment has a whisper; subtle tremors and vibrations that are usually undetectable to the human ear, produced by the activity and movement of daily life. What if these sounds were audible? How would that change our aural awareness, perception of space and attitude towards objects? Would it be possible to ‘compose’ our own soundtrack using our walls and objects as a new form of instruments? Madsounds is a proposal for a different appreciation of our environment, space and objects by making it possible to identify, combine and manipulate these sounds.

More projects from the RCA. [blogged by Cati Vaucelle on Architectradure]

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. Tones or melodies, instrumental, noise or pure vibrations, recorded or synthetic, these sounds all have a strong auditory character and are make for ‘calling’. The ringtones can easily be downloaded from the website. Sonic()bject was set up by Antoine Schmitt and Adrian Johnson. It will be shown at Video Vortex.2.

Program 4, Pump On … Go, for cello and computer user, takes the form of a computer game. It consists of a computer terminal for the “accompanist” with a second, duplicate screen that the cellist views to keep track of the pitches already played. The cellist improvises a series of small phrases throughout the piece. As the cello plays, the computer analyzes the incoming pitches and displays the equivalent color in a box at the top of the screen. It is the job of the computer user to watch how the colors change and, for each phrase, choose one of the colors that is displayed. The user then chooses that color from the spectrum in the center of the screen by clicking the corresponding box. This will in turn activate a band-pass filter with a center frequency equal to the color chosen. The computer user should try to accurately match the color but discrepancies between the pitch played and the color chosen are inevitable and are intrinsic to the piece. View full score. Listen:

The recording featured in the piece is a field recording of the main fountain at California Plaza at 350 S. Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

Finally, skinTones is part of SKIN! at Armory Northwest, presented by Newtown Arts. The opening is on October 12 from 6 - 10 pm. skinTones uses digital photographs of peoples’ skin, displayed on an LCD monitor, to control multiple audio oscillators. The frequencies of the oscillators are directly affected by the “tone” of the skin colors through photoresistors mounted in front of the monitor.

More about Thadeus Frazier-Reed.

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.

We covered socially-networked music creation sites in April, but recently came across another site where musicians can create profiles and record together online: Kompoz. Anyone can create a new project on the site and upload individual tracks to it in the MP3, WMA, or WAV formats. After choosing a Creative Commons license, you can invite other users to add tracks to your project. Or, you can search the site by genre, artist/member, talent/instrument needed, keyword, tag, and/or license type to join someone else’s. Every project has its own discussion forum where participants can post ideas and suggestions for the song.

Some social music creation sites let you record directly onto the site, but with Kompoz (and some others), you download tracks into your own music creation software and then upload your contribution to the site. Although this system isn’t as convenient as recording directly into the online project, it allows for higher-quality results and allows people to use familiar, full-featured software.

Check out the dub track “Psycho Riddim,” a project started by a Floridian who is “10 and just starting to learn to play drums.” Between his original beat and all of the stuff people are adding, it’s turning into a nicely fleshed-out track (the dub genre, with its repetition and layering, seems to work particularly well for this sort of collaboration).

Artists’ interests encompass generative art, self-made instruments, self-made film, audio visual performance, cracked electronics, new improvisation… all art that is committed to exploring beyond preconceived notions of human/technology interaction, and is dedicated to embracing chance factors (or “errors”) as a necessary and desirable part of the work.