TABLACENTRIC is thrilled to present Ajay Kapur, whose work revolves around one queston: “How do you make a computer improvise with a human?” Using the rules set forth by the north Indian classical tradition, Ajay strives to build new interfaces for musical expression by modifying the tabla, dholak and sitar with added microchips and sensor systems, while building robotic musical instruments which can be programmed to perform along with the human performer.

Ajay Kapur is the Music Technology Coordinator at California Institute of the Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Music and Psychology with a focus on Intelligence Music and Media Technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor in Science and Engineering Computer Science degree from Princeton University in 2002. He has been educated by music technology leaders including Dr. Perry R. Cook, Dr. George Tzanetakis, and Dr. Andrew Schloss, combined with mentorship from robotic musical instrument sculptors Eric Singer and the world famous Trimpin. A musician at heart, trained on Drumset,Tabla, Sitar and other percussion instruments from around the world, Ajay strives to push the technological barrier in order to make new music.

When Brandtsegg suggested the idea to Aas in 2003, Aas responded “I really would like to hear the Flounder sing”. Brandtsegg’s installation makes use of a loudspeaker technique in which the sound is transferred to the metal in the sculpture. The natural environment, and especially the tidal stream, inspired Brandtsegg to program several variables which different sensors record from their surroundings.

The music is influenced by light level, temperature, moon phase, water level, water direction, and local time. Brandtsegg also composed different themes for days of the week and each of the twelve months. The sensor data and the sound signals are streamed — via the Internet — from Inderøy to Trondheim, where a computer processes it and sends it back.

At the Flounder website, you can follow the audible development of the work over a span of 10 years (2006-2016). You can listen to the composition in two versions – the sound played through the sculpture, or the “raw” version. Go here to learn more about the project.

Sculpt is work for sensor gloves, interactive electronics and interactive projected image that explores the relationship between synthetic sound and synthetic image through the tactile nuance of human gesture.

Robert Griffin Byron won the A.B.C. Young Composer’s Award in 1995. Since then, Byron’s chamber music and orchestral works have been heard all across Australia, the United States, and Asia. His work has been performed by the most of Australia’s state orchestras. To date, Byron has received four commissions. In 1997 the West Australian Ballet commissioned the score for the ballet Orlando. In 1998 Future Films commissioned a soundtrack for an art film by Glen Eaves called Structures. The score won the A.B.C. Young Composer Film Award in 1999. Also in 1999 the Australian Ballet commissioned the full-length ballet Mirror Mirror. In 2002 the Ensemble Arcangelo commissioned the chamber work Kaleidoscope, with support from ArtsWA.

In addition to these commissions, Byron’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (Cobalt) was premiered by Michael Kieran Harvey in 1999 at the Calloway Auditorium, U.W.A. Byron’s dance work, Enlightenment, premiered in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Black Box Theater in 2004. Byron collaborated with Choreographer Liz Shea and Lighting Designer Robert Shakespeare, exploring interactive lighting, interactive sound, and choreographic movement. Byron gained second place in the Australian National Harp Composition Competition in 2004 for the work The Moon Methinks Looks with a Watery Eye. In 2006 Byron’s acousmatic work Hip or Hype? was performed at Pixerations in Providence, Rhode Island. His most recent work Swarm, for Perriott Ensemble and Interactive electronics, was premiered by the Boston-based group Dinosaur Annex in 2007.

Byron’s electronic works have been performed at numerous conferences, including the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Melbourne (2002), Perth SPECTRUM conference (2003), Western Australia Converging Technologies conference (2003), SEAMUS conference in San Diego (2003), THRESHOLD at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (2004), and Midwest IDEAS Festival (2004, 2005, and 2006). Byron won first place in the audio section at the 2004 and 2005 IDEAS Festivals.

Byron earned his B.Mus. from Edith Cowan in 1997. In 2000 Byron received a Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer’s Fellowship-in-Residence, where he continued his studies. He earned his M.M. in Computer Music Composition from Indiana University while on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006. At Indiana, Byron won the 2005 Dean’s Prize for Electroacoustic Composition. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in multimedia art at Brown University.

SignalPlay is an interactive installation that employs wireless sensors to control a spatialized sound environment, allowing participants to explore a distributed collaborative system. Unexceptional.net is a web-based application for visualizing and sonifying network, database and player information of a multi-modal online role-playing game. Sonic Panoramas utilizes image sonification, immersive projection and camera-based machine vision to allow users to create an interactive musical experience from panoramic landscape imagery. Datascape is a periscope-like system for the visualization of geographic information. This system allows users to explore a 3D topography and musical soundtrack that are generated from geospatial information such as marketing demographics.

In addressing the impacts of digital technologies on culture, these artworks employ the very technologies being investigated. Through the production and exhibition of this work, I hope to engage the public with these important issues and to help shape the ways that technological methodology embeds itself in our world and in our daily experience.

The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings. This medium informs the audience by visualizing the different aspects of the crowd that is otherwise anonymous to each other. The audience listens to a sound collage made of the voices of people telling where they are from and if they can go back or not. As users of the system, we hear words as they are explicitly spoken to the system. The information is used to create a visual representation (based on audio analysis) for designing visuals that display patterns of activity at these location.

This unique solo-show is a multi-media revelation of the human voice and its unimaginable intensity. Ten years research into human body movement, multi-sensory perception environments and digital processing has brought about this exceptional show performed by Julie Wilson-Bokowiec. Bodycoder - Voice is part of an ongoing experiment in connecting body movements with sound, intertwining the sensual with the sonic. The experiments render the voice multidimensional and examine how the natural movement vocabulary of the body can become an expressive medium and create and manipulate sound.

Only the energy, breath and raw fractured tonalities of the voice are employed to populate and animate the sound scape of Hand-to-Mouth. Mouth / Larynx and the hands of the performer engage in intimate dialogue in an act of sonic puppetry and ventriloquism.

Bodycoder - Voice features the Bodycoder System © the first generation of which was developed by company formally know as Electronic Dance Theatre in 1995/6. The primary expression functionality of the Bodycoder System is Kinaesonic. In terms of interactive technology the term Kinaesonic refers to the one-to-one, mapping of sonic effects to bodily movements. There are no pre-recorded soundfiles used in the live pieces of this program and no sound manipulations external to the performer’s control.

The program includes The Suicided Voice created in residency at the Banff Centre Canada, and Etch created in residency at the Confederation Centre for the Arts PEI Nova Scotia.

HAND-TO-MOUTH (for performer/vocalist, the Bodycoder System & live MSP) - Only the energy, breath and raw fractured tonalities of the voice are employed to populate and animate the soundscape of Hand-to-Mouth. Mouth/Larynx and the hands of the performer engage in intimate dialogue in an act of sonic puppetry and ventriloquism. This dexterous piece of sound manipulation is an overture to the full embodiment of sound manipulation in the following pieces.

AMERA (Tape: Electro-acoustic music)

THE SUICIDED VOICE (for performer/vocalist, the Bodycoder System, live MSP, video streaming & computer graphics). In this piece the acoustic voice of the performer is “suicided” and given up to digital processing and physical re-embodiment. Dialogues are created between acoustic and digital voices. Gender specific registers are willfully subverted and fractured. Extended vocal techniques make available unusual acoustic resonances that generate rich processing textures and spiral into new acoustic and physical trajectories that traverse culturally specific boundaries crossing from the human into the virtual, from the real into the mythical. In The Suicided Voice the voice, transformed and re-embodied within the interactive medium, becomes a fluid originality that is defined only by its own transmutations.

CHIMERA (Tape: Electro-acoustic music)

ETCH (for performer/vocalist, the Bodycoder System, live MSP, & computer graphics) - In ETCH extended vocal techniques, Yakut, open throat, overtone and Bell Canto singing are coupled with live interactive sound processing and manipulation. ETCH calls forth forna – building soundscapes of glitch infestations, howler tones, clustering sonic-amphibians, and swirling flocks of synthetic granular flyers. The visual content for this piece is created in a variety of 2D and 3D packages. In ETCH video content is manipulated on the screen by the performer using the same interactive protocols that govern sound manipulation. Visual content is mapped to the physical gestures of the performer and its live manipulation forms a significant part of the piece. As the performer conjures extraordinary voices out of the digital realm, so she weaves a multi-layered visual environment. In ETCH sound, image, and gesture combine to form a powerful ‘linguistic intent’. Etch was created in residency at the Confederation Centre for the Arts on Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia.

TECHNICAL & AESTHETICS

BODYCODER - VOICE features the Bodycoder System© the first generation of which was developed by the artists in 1995/6. The Bodycoder interface is a flexible sensor array worn on the body of a performer that sends data generated by movement to an MSP environment via radio. Movement data can be mapped in a variety of different ways to the live processing and manipulation of sound. All processed sound is derived from the live and acoustic voice of the performer. The Bodycoder also provides the performer with real-time access to processing parameters and patches within the MSP environment as well as control over the sensitivity of sensors. In this way all vocalisations, decision making, navigation of the MSP environment and qualities of expressivity are selected, initiated and manipulated by the performer. The primary expression functionality of the Bodycoder System is Kinaesonic. The term Kinaesonic is derived from the compound of two words: Kinaesthetic meaning the movement principles of the body and Sonic meaning sound. In terms of interactive technology the term Kinaesonic refers to the one-to-one, mapping of sonic effects to bodily movements. In our practice this is usually executed in real-time. There are no pre-recorded soundfiles used in the live pieces of this program and no sound manipulations external to the performer’s control.

SpherAleas is made of a half-spherical structure and of an evolutionary device which makes man, image and sound interact thanks to digital tools. The machine becomes the creator’s ally to produce pictorial and sonorous shapes. This space is ideal for collective performances; it accommodates in its center a constellation of visible shapes, spinning sound loops and luminous vibratory elements. Each participant gives himself up to this sensitive complicity cradled by flows of random emotions, justifying its necessity by the sole intensity of the present meeting. The scenography is designed for complete immersion of the spectator thanks to interactive sensors, a multipoint sound diffusion, a video projection system (180°), within a half spherical membranous architecture. A specific scenography and device was created for Aleas: original virtual music software/instrument.

Aleas: original virtual music software/instrument- In French Aleas meaning hazards and risks. Aleas arose from a reflection about how to materialise / draw sound with 3D images. It is a synthesis software, treating sounds and abstract images, able to create a dialogue with reality by using tactile sensors. It thus creates an interactive, sensitive relationship with the audience. Aleas allows the performer to create, modify, observe and manipulate moving 3D shapes. By manipulating the sensors, the performer can continuously intervene on the whole structure by playing with the different variables: order, side-by-side positioning, overlapping, speed, rhythm, harmonic pitch… Thus, by positioning new materials, users create sustained tunes made of rhythmic relationships animated by subtle temporal intervals.

The performer appropriates the system as they create particular processes of repetitive polyphony where parts overlap then disappear into hypnotic swirls. They determines the future of the artwork by experimenting with infinite orchestrations. They easily control the tune thus generated: a direct relation between man, image and music. The Aleas interface reveals
visual and sound performances to spectators. They see and hear on live various handling of the duet. Indeed, during interventions, the sound takes shape in the circular space of projection. Here the musical intervention is also an invitation with contemplation.

Myriads of visual and sound shape are accumulating in hypnotic sound superpositions Each performance offers a new dialogue or visible duel. In the opposite of the standard vjaying and djaying performances, the spectator follows exactly the musical and visual evolution as well as the performers. Here, all is revealed and linked. The duel reveals moments in complicities, doubts, errors, chaos… but which constitute the source of creation of these micros-universe. The Random concept developed by John Cage is also has source of inspiration for their artwork. Each performance offers a multitude of possible made by minimalists elements. [via Network Research]

Bringing together 3 Software’s - VVVV, Max/MSP and Reason the WiiWiiWiiWii thesis project provides a system allowing for a set of Wiimotes to become a syneasthetic musical instruments. WiiWiiWiiWii looks like fun – it uses the Wiimote and Nunchuk to produce sounds and their graphical counterparts. The representation of sound comes in the form of a branch like structure with ‘notes’ growing from it – a kind of real time evolving organic score. [blogged on dataisnature]

WiiWiiWiiWii was produced by Claudio Midolo, Edgar Castellanos, Natan Sinigaglia & Pedro Mari.

In 2006, the »lab award« was introduced and will again go to one of the most innovative exhibits. lab 30 will also introduce a novelty this year: visitors can join workshops where robots, pixel images and sensor-guided machines will be construed and where gameboy software will be developed.

For lab 30 2007, 100 presentations from all over Europe, Island and Kanada reached the city of Augsburg’s cultural department Kulturbüro. Many of those presentations featured digital artists, experimentalists and sound modellers who before had shown their work at festivals such as Transmediale, Berlin, Ars Electronica, Linz or Sonar Festival, Barcelona. The team of curators, consisting of taskmaster Elke Seidel (Kulturbüro Augsburg), Prof. Robert Rose, Hans-Christian Grimm, Peter Bommas and »sound scout« Manfred Genther, has chosen 35 installations, sound experiments and visuals that can now be visited, looked at, played, worked on or experienced live on stage in three densely packed festival days.

Already legendary are the IndieTronica Club Nights at abraxas Nordflügel which feature electronic web sounds, hand-made song structures, ingenious soundscapes and digitally animated tracks, all of them presented in a structure that moves between DJing, computer live performance and analogue showcase.

The structure is derived from typical action-landscapes that develop in a house: a fabric of larger scale bodily movements in a corridor or room, together with smaller scale movements around a sink or a drawer. This carefully choreographed set of movements of bodies, limbs and hands are inscribed on paper bands as cuts (an uncut area corresponds with the bodily movement, a first cut through the middle corresponds with limbs, and finer cuts correspond with movements of the hands and feet).

We staple the pre-informed paper bands together at the point where they have the most connective potential and as a result curvature emerges. The outcome is an arabesque of complex intertwining lines that is both a reading of movements on various bodily scales and a material structure since the paper curves stand upright in cooperation with each other. We only have to sweep these lines sideways to marry the open structure of lines with the closed surface of the ground. This results again in a three-dimensional porous structure which is very similar to the structure that is obtained by the combing, curling and parting of hair. We digitize this paper analog-computing model and remodel it into the final structure of interlacing vaults which sometimes lean on each other or sometimes cut into each other.

In the house-that-is-not-a-house we position 23 sensors at strategic spots to indirectly influence the music. This system of sounds, composed and programmed by sound artist Edwin van der Heide, is based on moiré effects of interference of closely related frequencies. As a visitor one does not influence the sound directly, which is so often the case with interactive art. One influences the real-time composition itself that generates the sounds. The score is an evolutionary memoryscape that develops with the traced behavior of the actual bodies in the space. The Son-O-House is one of our typical art projects which allow us to proceed more carefully and slowly (over a period of three to four years) while generating a lot of knowledge that we apply to larger and speedier projects.

NOX: Lars Spuybroek with Chris Seung-woo Yoo, Josef Glas, Ludovica Tramontin, Kris Mun, Geri Stavreva and Nicola Lammers

Public artwork for Industrieschap Ekkersrijt in collaboration with composer Edwin van der Heide