One example of this (shown in the top two images above) is as follows:

Vibrating motors cause glass plates, on which various materials are placed, to oscillate. The vibrations move the materials and the frictions caused by this generate sounds, which are amplified via contact microphones and edited through DSP (Digital Signal Processing). Through a multiple channel speaker system amplified sounds are projected and reassembled into new sound architectures.

The artists’ aim is to selectively:

…mix between living structures continuously generated or evolving by chance and chain reactions on the one hand, contrasting with specifically delimited and contained space, in which these events are allowed to happen. Our compositional intentions are manifesting themselves through our deliberate containment and cautious monitoring. Thus, we are not busying ourselves with chance factors and generative systems in order to discover unexpected results, but rather to attain the vitality aspired in the compositions.

Untitled Sound Objects as an installation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P4FJxbS3GM

Untitled Sound Objects as a performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoB1zvJupY4

Untitled Sound Objects exhibited autonomously
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiIb_ki8Tc

[blogged by Garrett Lynch on Network Research]

Online submission: Web entries accepted from around the world for the Web showcase. Limited entries will be chosen to compete live — To compete for the prizes, those entries must be present at Yuri’s Night Bay Area, Saturday, April 12. Submit DIY music performance projects – using custom software and/or hardware – for a live performance battle at the Yuri’s Night Bay Area party on April 12, sponsored by Yuri’s Night and createdigitalmusic.com. Compete for awards including a Yamaha Tenori-On grand prize.

BACKGROUND: In science fiction and science fact, music has been central to finding a common language to speak to the universe. Music from Bach to gamelan has traveled into space on the Voyager spacecraft. In the digital age, musical interfaces are also often the best way to understand how to interface with technology and information.

Musicians have led many of the most innovative digital technological breakthroughs — the first digital synthesizer (at Bell Labs in the 50s), breakthroughs in modular electronic systems (modular synthesizers of the 60s), pioneering advances in digital storage and processing, unusual wireless interfaces and gestural controls decades ahead of the Nintendo Wii, and touch- and multi-touch tools years before the iPhone and Microsoft Surface. But that’s all in the past. This is a design challenge for the future. We want to hear the best, most forward-thinking, generally coolest, Second Space Age-worthy instruments and digital music interfaces. If aliens land — as they did when met by a classic ARP synthesizer in Close Encounters — we want to be able to give them a great show.

How to enter: We’re looking for designs of “instruments” — whether self-contained, electrically-powered devices or hardware interfaces for computers. That can include tangible interfaces, physical computing, hacked hardware, custom-built synths and electronics, and other gadgets. These must use at least some custom software and/or hardware.

You are limited to one computer and one input device — but the “input device” can be as complex as an interactive table. If that sounds vague, just remember — ultimately, the judges and audience decide. Wow them, and all will be well.

Artists must sign up in advance. We will have a limited number of slots. The best proposals will be chosen by the staff of createdigitalmusic.com to compete in San Francisco at Yuri’s Night.

Set up, plug in. You’ll have a limited set up time.

Play. You have three minutes to perform.

JUDGING: A panel of judges with expertise in music and interaction design will judge the entries — and are encouraged to be biased by crowd response. (If you’ve got friends, tell them to cheer really loudly.)

AWARDS: Winners will be announced at Yuri’s Night, with a grand prize winner and honorable mention awards for each category.

http://yuricdm.com
http://yuricdm.com/2008/03/19/futuristic-music-design-challenge/
http://yurisnightbayarea.net/

Performativity, Ideologies of Liveness, and Listener-Consciousness in Electronic-Music Performance featuring Mark Butler: In DJ sets and laptop performances, an unprecedented level of technological mediation comes into conflict with the expected “liveness” of performance. As a result, musicians frequently express various techno-performative anxieties in explanations of their performance approaches. In particular, they are concerned that the audience experiences a performance, one that is imbued with a sense of live presence, rather than simply the playback of a recording or the clicking of a mouse. They work to convey this “presence” in a number of ways, which include dancing, other significant physical gestures, and the use of carefully selected electronic hardware. The audience responds in kind, thereby completing the liveness of the event. This talk will address these issues in both theoretical and analytical terms, drawing material for discussion from interviews and field recordings made in Berlin in 2005–2007.

Mark Butler is a music theorist with interests in popular music, rhythm and meter, music and sexuality, musical meaning and aesthetics, and the history of music theory. Butler’s research integrates theoretical, historical, and anthropological approaches to music, with particular emphasis on the use of ethnographic methodology to address music-theoretical questions. His book Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Indiana University Press, 2006) explores the rhythmic and metrical organization of electronic dance music from the measure to the complete DJ set, drawing upon field research with audiences and creators of electronic dance music as well as musical analysis. His current research includes a book focusing on relationships between technology, improvisation, and composition in electronic–music performance.

His instrument was a wooden wine crate filled with custom-made circuitry and six joystick-like levers. Allen called his tool circuitMusic, and it emitted a throbbing, old-school sound — the sort of sound that’s often called “feedback laden” when in fact it was more like he was exploring the feedback, simultaneously navigating and lending shape to the noise. (There is additional coverage of the event, including photos, in an August 2007 disquiet.com entry.)

The music got more abstract as his set went on, and Allen’s hand-crafted instrument provided a comforting focus throughout. Each of its six joysticks was paired with a single headlight on the front of the box. That trigger system, in a highly economical manner, provided helpful signals to the audience: visual orientation amid the increasingly self-obscuring sounds. In a world of ever more powerful technology, it was downright inspiring to experience the sort of communication that could be accomplished with a simple on-off switch.

It’s no surprise that Allen’s skills in communication in regard to electronics and electronic music are not limited to stage performances. He’s taught classes in such subjects as “Performing Technology,” “New Interfaces for Musical Expression,” and “Sensor Workshop” at New York University and Pratt Institute. And after finishing up an early-2008 residency at Eyebeam in Manhattan (eyebeam.org), he’s relocating to Newcastle, England, to help start a new Masters program in Digital Arts with Atau Tanaka, formerly of Sony Paris. “The Masters,” he explained via email, “will be held in coordination with the Newcastle Culture Lab, headed up by Sally-Jane Norman.” (More info at ncl.ac.uk/culturelab.)

Allen took time recently to talk about the tool he played at Galapagos, the implications of musicians crafting their own instruments, the intersection of academia and the electronic arts, and the politics of 8bit music, among other things.

Marc Weidenbaum: When I saw you perform at Galapagos in Brooklyn last summer, you used one machine for the performance, and it was something you’d designed yourself. I’m very interested in musical instruments created by musicians. Could you describe what it was and how it functioned?

Jamie Allen: The rig you saw is a piece called “circuitMusic.” It’s really very simple — it’s a set of square waves built with raw electronic components, inside an old wine box. I have a few ways of varying resistances in the circuit — photo-resistors, force-sensitive resistors, and regular old potentiometers. Each of the square waves is coupled to a set of very bright light-emitting diode arrays, such that whenever a new oscillator is thrown in, a light comes on. There are six sound elements, and six lights.

I really started this piece out of a frustration with the possibilities for improvisation in electronic music. I wanted something I could get lost in while performing. I wanted something that wasn’t just moving through a set of presets or known “fields” I had created prior to a show; circuitMusic often surprises me, as does the incredibly positive reaction I get to the simple on/off “visualization” it provides the audience.

Weidenbaum: You’ve taught courses related to electronic music at a variety of schools in and around Manhattan. I imagine these schools each has a different take on music and technology, and I was wondering what you’ve learned about different scholarly takes on the field.

Allen: The often surprising thing about music in academia is that the spectrum of motivations is really broad. There are many communities, viewpoints, conferences, styles, and philosophies represented. Coming to accept this as a cultural reality when I first became involved was a bit of a challenge for me, actually. I come out of playing in bands, in bars, etc., primarily for the rawness and fun of it — the blood-and-sweat school of music. So I came to computer electronic music with a kick-ass “let’s fucking do this thing” kind of motivation. I had a real problem accepting any motivation other than those that were a direct reaction to the lack of relevancy I perceived in the computer and experimental music scene. As is often true, I’ve mellowed out a lot, because, as I am now quite fond of saying, “Hell, it’s only music.”

There are scholars who approach technological, musical, and other creative decisions as a kind of scientific “problem” to be “solved.” There are a lot of people out to do a lot of things so they can be “first” at it. There are also far too many music-technology scholars in higher learning who use academia a kind of hustle or dodge, or to bolster a failing “commercial” music career — whatever that means these days.

The best work, and best teaching I think, comes from people who are primarily interested in music as a method of communication, enhanced and elaborated through technology. In Manhattan, like anywhere else, you find that certain schools and departments do have certain emphases in this regard, based on who’s running them and what their personal motivations are.

Weidenbaum: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the whole 8-bit world of music-making — is that at all where your head is at?

Allen: I’ve always loved the sound of the square wave, which is the timbral indicator for what we think of as “low-fi” or “chip” music. It’s also fitting that mathematically, the instantaneous change from one signal level to another — the Heaviside function, the basis of a square wave, really — at least theoretically, contains all frequencies. That thought alone contributes to my understanding of these somewhat harsh tones as very warm, welcoming, and somehow enveloping.

I’m also sure, as I’ve heard many people comment, that there is a kind of flashback adrenaline rush that comes from hearing these sounds. A good portion of our generation grew up getting their kicks with a side order of these square-wave-based game sounds, so there’s a sense in which it’s just taking you back to that time you kicked your brother’s ass at Impossible Mission on the C64. A happy time, indeed.

Anyhow — I’m not much of a scenester, but I do have a duo with Michael Horan called “Season of the Bit” where we remix and DJ Commodore 64 tunes. The Blip Festival just happened here in New York, and I was really hoping to catch way more of it than I did…

Weidenbaum: I agree there’s a flashback quality to those sounds, and the way musicians and artists — from Scott Johnson’s I.F. Stone transcriptions to Christian Marclay’s use of old video footage and record albums — employ sounds of the past definitely expects that as part of the audience’s reaction. But as the years go on, lo-fi, 8bit music is attracting an audience with no first-hand experience with that original sound. The result is a kind of second-hand nostalgia. This new generation grew up on much more advanced games — do you understand what they get out of 8bit?

Allen: You’re right — this “flashback” quality is certainly not the only motivation for low-res soundscape work — just an often-cited one.

If you’re the kind of person that thinks all decisions are political — like me — you can also think of the use of lo-fi hardware and software as somewhat of a subversion of technological culture. That’s certainly one of my motivations for doing this kind of work. Our culture at the moment values technological advancement and refinement at a level that can sometimes feel dehumanizing, overstated, and boring. There’s a slickness, perfection, and inevitability to the trajectory of ever-higher-resolution-everything we’re on right now that is apparently frustrating to a good number of people’s creative process, particularly in music. This is perhaps why a lot of people compare the 8bit scene to the punk scene, in terms of motivation. The elements you get to lay your hands on in “state of the art” music studios can really suck all the play and fun out of making music.

Weidenbaum: And, to follow up, do you see a music movement based on more recent gaming systems, along the lines of machinima — in which footage of video games is edited to create short films — coming along?

Allen: Certainly — a lot of my students are interested in the effects current video-game culture will have on the musical landscape. What I find interesting is that there are generations of people out there assuming that all their media is interactive, malleable, and essentially a dialogue of some sort. Most of the creative music game developers out there — Toshio Iwai and Harmonix, for example — are already using game platforms to deliver high-level musical decision-making to the masses. I would say that Harmonix’s FreQuency (2001) and Nintendo’s Electroplankton (2005) are existing examples of “musical machinima” tools — although there is certainly room for further exploration and openness in these systems.

Weidenbaum: Of all the different music-making devices you’ve created, do you think any of them might have a wider audience among your fellow musicians — that is, would any of make it in the marketplace as manufactured instruments?

Allen: I think one of the real powers of the configurable prototyping systems available to the electronic artist today is that you are freed from these ideas transferability and permanence in the standard sense. You can pretty much make an entire instrument system, play it once, take it apart, reconfigure it and then play it the next night. Perry Cook, a fantastic guy, technologist, and musician up at Princeton, once said, “Make a piece, not an instrument or controller.” This has wonderful repercussions musically, politically, and socially. In music, there is the new idea of a kind of sketchy, design-oriented approach to performance and compositional process. Politically, we may actually help to break down hegemonic and hierarchical music and art structures in the West that have been so dominant for far too long. It is hard get to the heart of what educational pedigree, for example, even means for self-built instruments that are entirely reconfigurable or performance-specific. Socially, we can think of instrument creation as beginning before the level of “player” and oftentimes blurring the ranks of composer, performer, instrumentalist, and audience.

Needless to say, the marketplace affects everyone’s outlook and work in a broad sense, but it’s not at all a part of my conscious thought process in the creation of music or performance.

Weidenbaum: Which comes first, the music or the instrument? Do you create instruments with a certain sound in your head, or do you create instruments and then, when they’re done, see what kind of music they can make?

Allen: I’m really interested in process, first and foremost. There’s a transparency and directness of communication that I strive for in performance and music. Instrument design is often a way of rendering limitations and facilities into a physical object. Objects are also, arguably, inherently performable, so it can be a way of translating and communicating otherwise obscure processes to other people. Like anyone, I have sounds and sequences and patterns that appeal to me for one reason or another, as in the aforementioned case of square waves. What I find most satisfying, though, is the translation of process as a way of sculpting someone else’s experience in real time.

Weidenbaum: If I am overemphasizing the academic aspect of your work, please tell me so, but I want to ask one additional question about that area. One thing that academia has in its favor is continuity. There’s a tradition, a literature, a practice, or a variety of practices, within each field. Are there performance, or computer-science, or music communities, within academia that you particularly see yourself in the tradition of?

Allen: I really think of myself as a life-long student, and so I think I naturally gravitate towards educational environments. I have a serious addiction to learning new things and being exposed to new ideas. I don’t have a lot of academic aspirations in the more traditional sense, so I can’t really say that there’s a particular history I’m interested in trying to get myself written into.

I do think relationships to specific histories in academia, the arts, performance, and music are changing. I find a lot of electronic and digital artists are less and less concerned with their practice as a “modernist” or “minimalist” or whatever — and more and more concerned with project-specific appropriateness, relevance, and context dependence, which is really very positive all in all.

This has a lot to do with the distributed contexts in which creative works exist these days. An artist can have one piece that looks at something from a certain motivation — say, deconstructionist — and another piece that looks at it from another — say, collagist. There’s no conflict because both “communities” can be addressed through the same varied distribution channels available to the artist. This all reminds me of music-listening patterns in the post-digital music age, to some extent. You don’t ask people, “What kind of music do you listen to?” anymore, because listening patterns are so diverse. Similarly, I don’t ask people, “What kind of artist are you?” because I know they’ve likely got a long list of interests.

So… what kind of artist am I? Well I’m a “post-post-modern- avant-garde-romantic-digital- experimental-conceptualist,” with a limp. [posted by Marc Weidenbaum on Disquiet]

Snowy Day at MGFest 2008 from Michael Una on Vimeo.

My work investigates how vibrating waves of energy and human consciousness interact. I utilize traditional musical instruments, handbuilt analog electronics, video processes, digital synthesis, and repurposed objects to build harmonic wave patterns. These patterns are projected into physical space, creating a unique and temporary audiophysical experience. - Michael Una

Octophonopod at MGFest 2008 from Michael Una on Vimeo.

Lifton’s computer interactive environments were exhibited throughout the UK and Europe, and were used in electronic music performances. He was also a member of the experimental music group Naked Software during this period. In 1976, Lifton collaborated with Richard Lowenberg, Jim Wiseman, and Tom Zahuranec on the feature film The Secret Life of Plants. One sequence documented Lifton’s Green Music (which had previously been exhibited at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1975). According to Lowenberg, Christopher Bird, co-author of the book, The Secret Life of Plants offered his help and his basement lab facilities. Ultimately, the film only included a very small section of Green Music, which has been described as follows:

Over the course of four days in June 1976, while open to the public, six large plants in the center of the glass Plant Conservatory in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, produced an audible, live digital music score, based on bio-electric sensing of their responses to light, temperature, movement and other physio-environmental factors (using gold needle electrodes at the base of the stem and root). Amid the ‘tropical garden’ stood a five foot high rack of audio and digital processing systems, including the just purchased, Altair 8800, which John was constantly (re)programming in Machine Language.

From 1974 to 1977 Lifton taught graduate students at the Royal College of Art in London, in both the departments of Environmental Media and Design Research. He moved to Telluride, Colorado in 1977 where he currently lives and works. He co-directed Other Minds with Charles Amirkhanian from 1988 to 1991. Lifton is a founder of the Telluride Institute and is currently developing the Center for the Future in Slavonice, Czech Republic.

Both Green Music and The Secret Life of Plants were part of Psychobotany: Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Human/Plant Communication, an exhibition at Machine Project, LA (2007). Read this prescient interview - Composing in the information age - by Chris Meyer, Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1992. [Thanks to Paul Brown]

Related projects: Akousmaflore and Pieces for Plants.

Shawn Decker’s Artist Statement: Initially educated as a composer of both instrumental and computer-generated music, my work has gradually evolved from primarily performance and tape-based music composition to installations intended for galleries or other spaces, as well as to interactive performance works which make use of a variety of electronic media. My current work, which involves a variety of physical and electronic media, is positioned at the intersection of music composition, the visual arts, and performance.

In my most recent work, I have become increasingly interested in the processes found in nature and in other large and complex systems, and the potential of computer programs to model or simulate such systems within time-based artworks. I have also been quite interested in creating media installations which are physical and tactile in nature, which are grounded in objects and in the creation of environments which are integrated within the gallery spaces they are presented in, and which create immersive situations which echo those found in the real world.

Within my most recent interactive installations and performances, patterns of behavior are fixed and defined only by the algorithmic process specified within the computer program embedded within a micro-controller which is typically part of each work. These algorithmic processes are designed to simulate the manner of operation of physical and natural systems. This ongoing investigation of computer-mediated processes - both as a means of producing work, and more recently as the form of the work itself - has been central to my interest in the use of computers for creative purposes.

I have also recently become increasing dissatisfied with the electronic production of sound via conventional speakers (stereophony) and have been investigating the use of mechanical and other “direct” sound production techniques that may be controlled by a computer program,. These techniques include the use of small motors to strike metal objects, piano wires, etc. and are often kinetic in nature. Due to the physical nature of these works the distinctions between sonic, visual, and spatial elements begin to blur. Another related approach I am taking is the investigation of the use of speakers in a more “raw” mode than usually used in stereophony – as single sound sources that may be summed together in sufficient quantities to form spatially immersive environments.

The use of simple mechanical devices such as surplus motors, inexpensive piezoelectric speakers, etc. also certainly has a modestly subversive anti-high-tech element to it that pervades my entire aesthetic. Rather than being interested in creating complex “high tech” systems (for instance, complex robotic systems) I instead focus on the complexity of interactions between many simple, even common, machines. In other words, I am interested in building robotic systems in an environmental /sociological manner.

Shawn Decker is a composer and artist who writes music for live performance, electronic tape, and for film and video soundtracks, and works primarily with interactive computer-based performance and with sound and electronic media installations. His work has appeared in a variety of settings ranging from small galleries to large concert halls, and has been heard on NPR, the European Broadcast System, PBS, and the Learning Channel. Recent commissions include the first permanent public sound installation ever installed in Finland, a piece for the Chicago Saxophone Quartet which has been widely performed in the US and Europe, and an interactive live-electronic score for a major work by the Mordine and Company dance ensemble. Mr. Decker also has performed with and composed for the acclaimed new music ensemble KAPTURE. In addition to writing and producing music, Mr. Decker is an Associate Professor in the Art and Technology and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to his creative work, Mr. Decker also writes and lectures, and was recently the chair of the 1997 International Symposium on the Electronic Arts. Mr. Decker received a Bachelor’s degree in music composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Master’s and Doctor’s degrees from the Northwestern University School of Music.

Symphony for 54 Shoes is a kinetic artwork that involves 27 pairs of shoes collected from a variety of second hand and thrift stores. Each shoe has a toe and heel tap used in tap dancing attached to it. The shoes move or dance independently of each other. The mechanical motion of tapping is created using solenoids (tubular magnetic sensors) that move up and down when activated by a switch. Each switch, 52 in total, is controlled by a microcontroller and software that activates the sequence of the tapping of the shoes.

This project continues my exploration of non-screen based computer technology to create works that interact with, confront and/or incorporate the physical world. I try to bring the complexity of the real world and experience into the digital experience, to complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, to create works that situate themselves in the world in rich sensory, tactile and sonic ways. I am interested in the idea of tender, even pathetic, technology, to use technology for ends that are not necessarily productive in the usual sense of the word.

wade is a public art project that is presented within an existing network of over 100 wading pools in Toronto, Canada. Sonar consists of a large sculptural cloud of mist in which the public is invited to enter. Sound is activated as people move through the mist and played back on speakers situated outside the perimeter of the wading pool area. These live sounds are amplified, modulated and delayed in real time.

The concept of this artwork is conveyed by its title Sonar - an apparatus that transmits high-frequency sound waves through water and registers the vibrations reflected from an object. In Sonar we invite the members of the extended Toronto community to re-experience these social spaces in order to reinvest in the notion of shared public experience.

Bachmann is the co-editor (with Ruth Scheuing) of Material Matters, a critical anthology on the relation of material and culture and has a chapter in a new anthology, The Object of Labor (ed. Joan Livingstone and John Ploof), published by MIT Press, 2007. Ingrid is a founding member of the Interactive Textiles and Wearable Computing Lab of Hexagram and is the Head of The Institute of Everyday Life. She is currently Associate Dean, Research and International Relations in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Bachmann is currently a guest on -empyre-.