Olinda is a prototype digital radio that uses modular hardware that is customizable for each user. It has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. Six lights on Olinda show when a close friend is listening to the radio, using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC’s website for sharing ‘now playing’ information. Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network.

A friend will always appear at the same light, so you can write or draw on the radio to label it, and the lights are bright so you’ll know a friend has started listening from across the room. Continue reading

SoundWalk2008 - Call for Artists: Artists who utilize, in any manner, sound in their work are invited to submit to the Fifth Annual SoundWalk event to be held in Long Beach CA on September 20, 2008. Please go here for submission requirements and further information. Deadline: July 1, 2008.

Soundwok Artiject - Call for Participants: Take part immediately in a cutting-edge “artiject” in which the aesthetic consciousness of upstream sonifiers is mapped utilizing GIS technology. Continue reading

[Image: Upgrade! Montreal’s espaceSONO] The Comfort of Strangers at SoundNetwork’s Autonomous Village :: Part of Futuresonic :: Contact Theatre, Manchester, UK :: May 1-4, 2008 :: Open Call for Submissions of Audio Art Works :: Deadline: March 28, 2008.

SoundNetwork will be creating a brand new kind of social space close to the centre of the festival where artists and visitors alike can meet, relax and experience sonic art. Our cafe will be an exhibition and an exhibit. Continue reading

“If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in ‘livecoding’ draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these ‘distributive practices’ are worth extending today.

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. Continue reading

Riffworld.com is Somona Wire Works’ entry into the music collaboration and social networking space. here’s what they write about it:

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.
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You’re Not My Father, by Paul Slocum, [Requires Quicktime plugin] is composed of a sequence of recreations of a 10 second scene from the television show Full House, overlaid with sound loops from the scene’s original music. The crews who re-shot the scene were recruited through Internet message boards and Craigslist; each was paid $150. Instructions for shooting the scene and delivering the footage were issued to the crews. To-date, the project includes participants from Austin, Cincinnati, Chicago, Dallas, Denton, London, and San Francisco. Continue reading

My Space Sound by Sawako Kato [Requires Mac OSX, Flash Player, and a fast Internet connection] - My Space Sound is an audio popup book about the village called MySpace. The story starts like this: “Once upon a time … there was a village called MySpace. It is the era when so-called ‘Web 2.0′ is still a novelty…” Users can participate in the story by entering their MySpace URL, as well as by just browsing the story. In a world composed of both facts and fictions extracted from the database, the audience gets a chance to rethink the chaotic social network space. Continue reading

ItSpace, by Peter Traub, creates a network of pages within the social networking site MySpace. Instead of people, the pages feature everyday household objects from the artist’s house. Each page has a photo of the object, a description, and most importantly, a 1-minute piece composed of samples of the object being struck, resonated, and so forth. All the pages, or objects, are ‘friends’ with each other, so that visitors who discover one object may jump to the others to see their profiles and hear their sounds. Visitors to the site are invited to create new ItSpace pages with pieces made from their own household objects and link those in as ‘friends’ of the original set. Listen to an Interview >> 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

Visual Acoustics - a wonderful Java Applet, which allows you to play several instruments including Piano, Strings, Flute, Bass, Harp, etc. by moving your mouse on the canvas. You control delay, volume and pitch, and the program does the harmony. Combinations of low volume bass and flute or sax sound pretty nice. Thanks to Alexander Zakharov at http://weirdinstruments.blogspot.com/.