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

xxxxx-workshops: [in]tolerance :: 29 January - 2 February 2008 :: Club Transmediale ::Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin.

xxxxx-workshops: [in]tolerance presents a series of constructivist workshops specially programmed for the ClubTransmediale 2008 festival, emphasising making and connection within the field of the existent. Workshops are led by international, field-expert practitioners, extending over realms of environmental code, noise, signal transmission, reception, and electromysticism. The workshops will utilise household materials and chemistry, readily-available electronics components, free software and the GNU toolbase. Continue reading

Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 17 (2007) - With an introduction by Nic Collins: My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo — is now available. With contributions by Bert Bongers, Eric Leonardson, David Toop, Peter Blasser, Phil Archer, Andy Keep, John Wynne, Richard Garrett, James Saunders, Richard Lerman, Brett Ian Balogh, César Dávila-Irizarry, Vic Rawlings, James Fei, John Bowers and Vanessa Yaremchuk, Guillermo Galindo, Jane Henry, Neil Feather, Robert Poss, Jeremy Hight, Kyle Lapidus and Tali Hinkis, hans w. koch, Kazuhiro Jo, Laura Emelianoff, Marc Berghaus, Bruce Cana Fox, Michael Duffey, Charles Stankievech, Juraj Kojs, Stefania Serafin and Chris Chafe. Plus new reviews from the Leonardo Reviews panel. Continue reading

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Simon Blackmore, Anthony Hall and Steve Symons are one of six artist groups that have been nominated for the Share Prize 2008. Blackmore, Hall and Symons have proposed an unique installed durational performance in the form of a furniture workshop. Using their unique hand-crafted technological tools, they will make dynamic audio through chopping, sawing and lathing. Continue reading

Open Space introduces a New Music Workshop Series facilitated by an array of local and visiting composers, musicians and sound artists, each offering their unique perspective on the creation of real-time music. All workshops are hands on, offer musicians of all abilities a place and time to explore their craft and practice in a group setting.

Workshop: Music Improvisation – gadgets and non-traditional instruments :: Presenters: Gayle Young, Jeff Morton, Tina Pearson :: Date: October 29, 7 pm, Open Space. Drop in fee - Focuses on alternate objects, tools and ‘instruments’, and discusses the authority of musical gesture. Gayle Young’s Amaranth and Columbine, tuned tubing, circuit boards, circuit bent electronics, circuit boards, no-input mixer, contact mics, toys, bells and other gadgets will be available to explore – and bring your own stuff. 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

The Breath Car by Matthew Brown is for beginner musicians just learning to handle horn instruments. It’s object is to help the beginner train their controlled breathing. The car is controlled by a mouthpiece. When the person blows hard it will steer to the right, and softer blowing will result in the car turning to the left. Much of the skill behind playing wind instruments requires good controlled breathing. The skills required for this gadget can significantly improve the controlled breathing, therefore improving musical abilities.

How does it work? The controller contains a MIDI breath controller which converts breath pressure to MIDI data. This is sent to MAX/MSP which converts MIDI to serial data. Serial data is sent via Bluetooth and PIC chip to a servo on the car which controls the steering. The forward and backward controls are hacked from a cheap toy car.

From an interview with Bert Schiettecatte about AudioCube by David Zicarelli. Bert Schiettecatte is the founder of Percussa, a music hardware and software company located near Leuven, Belguim. The company’s first product is the unusual controller system called Audio Cubes.

DV: If someone asks you to explain what the AudioCubes are, what’s the first thing you say?
BS: A tool for creating and performing electronic music and sound, which aims to stimulate creativity and lower user interface barriers.
DV: Can you give me an example of the kind performing interface I can make?
BS: If you use the AudioCubes out of the box as a MIDI controller, you can map relationships between the cubes and distances to trigger and continuous controller information. For example, Continue reading

Bodily Movement and the Music Theory Paradigm: The University of Oslo Department of Musicology is developing the Musical Gestures Toolbox, a collection of applications with useful features for video and audio analysis. The toolbox is built with Max / MSP / Jitter from Cycling ‘74, and will be available as standalone applications for Mac OS X and Windows, as well as the original patches.

It features: (1) Video capturing from USB/FW-cameras (2) Playback of video files (any QuickTime-readable format) (3) Adjustable resolution and playback rate (4) Brightness, contrast, saturation controls (5) Zoom, offset and displacement controls (6) Cropping functions (drag and crop) (7) Automatic cropping based on contraction (8) Computer vision analysis (9) Save snapshots and image sequences (10) Save video from the analysis (11) Contraction and centre of gravity (12) Audio analysis: spectrogram, sonogram, spectral centroid, noisiness, loudness… Continue reading