Reversing the information flow in the opposite direction we find André Gonçalves ongoing Untitled #06 project, which also utilises the turntable, this time with a servomotor attached to the needle cartridge. Sound captured from a microphone is processed, then digitised into data and used by the servo to move the cartridge accordingly. The cartridge, which has an Indian ink pen attached, draws the audio events in real-time. The resultant visualisations have semi uniform spirgraphic geometries, and as André says ‘the drawings can be seen as histograms of the audio activity of a space during a certain period of time. In his biography André describes himself as an ‘empathy programmer with googlian self-education’, something many of us with an autodidactic learning will identify with.

Finally, it would be interesting to hear what one of André’s Untitled #06 disc visualisations, if drawn in graphite, would sound like on Caleb’s Graphic Music Sequencer. [posted by Paul on Dataisnature]

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYcp1_onRdo

Psychodrama: 13 Variations is funded in part by the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center and is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

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.

Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, and software programmer. In 1983, he founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve. He presently resides in New York City, where he composes, creates music software, and teaches computer music composition at New York University and Columbia University. He is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. He has composed music for Bang On A Can All-Stars, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, California EAR Unit, New Century Players, Ethel String Quartet, Electric Kompany, ARTE Quartett, and other ensembles. He is director of bioinformatics for the Gensat project at The Rockefeller University.

Georg Hajdu, born in Göttingen, Germany in 1960, is among the first composers of his generation dedicated to the combination of music, science and computer technology. After studies in Cologne and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. In 1996, following residencies at IRCAM and the ZKM, Karlsruhe, he co-founded the ensemble WireWorks with his wife Jennifer Hymer a group specializing in the performance of electro-acoustic music. In 1999, he produced his full-length opera Der Sprung. In May 2002, his Internet performance environment Quintet.net was employed in a Munich Biennale opera performance. In addition to his compositions, which are characterized by a pluralistic attitude and have earned him several international prizes, the IBM-prize of the Ensemble Modern among them, Georg Hajdu published articles on several topics on the borderline of music and science. His areas of interest include multimedia, microtonality, algorithmic, interactive and networked composition. Currently, Georg Hajdu is professor of multimedia composition at the Hamburg School of Music and Theater.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. The recent valorisation of collaboration within the arts, however, merely elides the basic condition of collaboration that all forms of production ultimately rely on in various degrees and arrangements. This can be seen as one part of the larger growth in service and communications industries whose ‘labour’ and ‘produce’ are primarily invested in the structuring and intensification of various collaborative exchanges, often minute and ephemeral, yet, when harvested on a vast scale, capable of generating seemingly endless amounts of surplus value.[1] Collaboration in the production of this ’surplus’ now extends beyond the contracted employees into the consumers themselves, who help define and create the products they themselves consume. This is exemplified in the proliferation of highly ‘personalised’ products and services, reality entertainment, and the social networks of Web 2.0, with the virtual world of Second Life notably combining all three factors.[2] Those artforms which most consciously valorise collaboration, as described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, merely echo this situation.[3] The social relations constructed by the artist in gestures of collaboration with audiences and others become spectacularised and commodified in forms that often do not return to those who created them but rather become tokens within the circulation of the art market.[4] In a funding system that prioritises social inclusion within the arts, like that of the UK, collaborative projects can tick the box that unlocks the piggy-bank of state patronage. In such contexts collaboration quickly becomes little more than a revenue stream.[5] Similarly, the rise of Relational Aesthetics accompanied the embrace of artistic practice by the commercial sector, often drawing upon the strategies of such art to enhance collaboration and ‘creativity’ within the workplace.[6]…” Continue reading All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill, Mute Magazine.

Cellar Door is an ambitious artistic enterprise: a colossal organism engendered by an original music score that distends through space and time. This mutant form of exhibition is guided in real time by a studio and an engineer located at the heart of the display; they activate the artworks, produce the assemblage of sounds, and prompt its accelerations and retractions.

Loris Gréaud belongs to a young generation of French artists, which has emerged over the last few years. His practice, however, is distinct from that of most of his contemporaries and is not what one would expect to see, hear and feel in an art gallery. Fluctuating between the fields of film, sound and installation, Gréaud was trained in a variety of disciplines while attending the famous Conservertoire de Musique in Paris from which he got expelled after setting up a recording studio: “A studio to stop music.”as the artist once stated. It was here where the artist also launched his own music label, Sibilance Production for the production and distribution of electronic music. Prior to his studies at the conservatory, where he was training to play the flute, Gréaud’s studies included filmmaking and some semesters of graphic design before he finally arrived at the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris Cergy.

Moving Forest of the PEOPLE’S FRONT is conspiring with KEIN.ORG and INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) in a call for an INSURGENCY act. The Russians took Moltke bridge. The prisoners took JVA Moabit. We take the prisoners. We are all 129a. The walls are blasted. The data are mined. The phones are tapped. The lives of others. We listen through walls. The cities of others. We walk through walls.

Moving Forest, conceived by Shu Lea Cheang (Plenum, nodeLondon06) and Martin Howse (xxxxx, nodeLondon06), is a 12 hour 5 act sonic performance operating with public wifi and mobile technology - an expandable citywide operatic manoeuvre / intervention. Derived from Kurosawa’s film version of Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, Moving Forest renders the film’s final sequences (12 minutes in length) into a 12-hour ’sonica’ of grand scale. Moving Forest reinvents a modern edition of a Castle Central (here: the House of World Cultures) and a city in revolt. Inside the castle, the downfall of the assumed power; outside in the city, the mobilised urbanites march with generated sounds of insurgence towards the imaginary Centre. Moving Forest collaborates with sound artists to compose acts and scores, at the same time, drafts a PD (pure data) conspiracy scheme, performing live with citywide performance transmitted by wifi.

[AKA the castle] is a temporal performance troop bringing together visual artists, writers, soundists, silk threaders, codedecoders,
macromikro, boombox mass, mobile agents, wifi fielders and urbanites to realize the 12 hour Moving Forest.

CALL for DS Revolt: go northwest 20 Allied Clearing House :: CALL for Radio Gun Revolt: Symphony of noise :: CALL for AIR: GAMEoverTAKEoverOVER :: CALL for transmission: autonomous transmitting units :: CALL for netstreams: Conspire and take remote control

CONSPIRE Transmediale08, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
KEIN.TV is a virtual, adhoc video production unit with a mobile internet connection via satellite
INURA a network of people in action and research in urban environments.

The above image is the score for two movements of Circalles, a 2007 composition by Martijn Tellinga, a Netherlands based sound artist and electroacoustic musician. Circalles is Tellinga’s second experiment with what he refers to as “Compositional Objects”, a term that resonates with his clinical manipulation of the clusters of modulating tones that populate these works. If the graphical representation of the work doesn’t make it clear how overtly spatial the composition is, it should be noted that the piece was originally prepared for presentation in an 8-channel environment (a stereo excerpt is available on Tellinga’s site).

I’m quite impressed with the correspondence between these score/graphs and the experience of listening to the work, beyond that I am also curious about the extremely architectonic language Tellinga uses to describe these projects. A choice moment from the statement for Node, the piece that preceded Circalles:

Manifest as the compositional undercurrent and categorical architecture, to compose becomes to interpret and articulate musically evocative and aesthetic form that is induced by these structural formations: the extraction of the particulars and the exploration of their structural interdependency.

Nothing sets my heart aflutter more than dispassionate music writing! I guess I can file “Compositional Objects” in my music-thinking toolkit alongside Sound Blocks and Unit Structures.

Be sure to check out Tellinga’s site as he has a provocative body of recordings and installations worth examining. [blogged by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]

The Icelandic new music ensemble Hestbak formed in 2003 as a brass-heavy improvisation collective. Under the influence of Aki Asgeirsson, who joined a year later, the band began experimenting with interactive technologies and the potential of animated scores to “conduct” performances of their compositions. A group recital last weekend, hosted by experimental folk singer Kria Brekkan at Brooklyn gallery Secret Project Robot saw the execution of several different pieces in which musical instructions, rendered as simple kinetic forms emanated in real time from a video projector for viewing by both ensemble and audience. Each piece in its unique way treated the passing of time as a stroll horizontally or vertically across the score, usually with a fixed point designated as the cue for performers to make sound.

Gudmundur Steinn’s “Volma” referenced the graphical interface of studio recording software, while Asgeirsson’s “Talfall” saw multiple strings of descending numerical values cascade along parabolic pathways. As each number disappeared off the bottom of the screen, a Hestbak member plunked its corresponding note on a piano, enabling a variety of casual rhythms and harmonies.

Performance of “Talfall” (Photo by Lisa Corson) Perhaps “Hvitasuo” by Pall Ivan Pallson demonstrated the direct potential of video scoring most effectively to the uninitiated. Before the piece, Pallson distributed plastic party cups and instructed the audience members how to position them in accordance to the length of slowly scrolling points in a diagram projected above. Then came the sound: a relentless swath of pure white noise, which morphed differently for each individual in relation to the distance of the cups to his/her ears.

Audience during “Hvitasuo” (Photo by Lisa Corson) While projected scores are nothing new to the experimental music community, graphic dataflow software like Max/MSP (and it’s free counterpart used by Hestbak members, Pd/GEM) puts the programming of flexible, interactive animation environments easily at the composer’s fingertips (Asgeirsson even has his own brand, GeMusE). This allowed for the display of versatility that made Hestbak’s concert such a strong example of the technique. - Nick Hallett, Rhizome.

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.