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.

Olinda’s hardware interface already joins the base unit with the friends module. By buying extra modules – or by making their own using the open interface – listeners can adapt their product over time, perhaps adding a remote control or recording. The Olinda pamphlet gives a few ideas of where this might be taken.

With thanks to blog.makezine.

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. If you are a Southern California based or linked sound artist, experimental musician and / or composer, you are invited to participate in the first part of a unique sound art and music research artiject and study, conducted by Dr. Chung Shih Hoh and Marco Schindelmann that will involve the mapping of the dynamic social networks and aesthetic consciousness of Southern California artists involved in sound art and/or experimental music. The results of this study will also serve as material for a sound installation for SoundWalk2008. Your participation in this project is not contingent on your submitting to or taking part in SoundWalk2008.

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. Where ever you sit to drink your coffee, eat your cake, and talk there will be access to audio work (by means of headphone outlets inserted into the furniture) or a local network that allows you to experience and interact with sonic art work on your own laptop. In addition there will be live performances at our Binary Jam event showcasing some of the best emerging talent in live sound art and experimental music.

SoundNetwork are inviting submissions of stereo (and mono) audio work to be shown as part of The Comfort of Strangers headphone exhibition. With respect to the theme of the festival, The Social, we are only seeking work created by collectives, groups, ensembles or any other kinds of collaborations from anywhere around the world. We especially welcome submissions from registered members of the network and would encourage you to register with us on our website. Work made by individuals will not be accepted for this exhibition.

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.

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.

As Mike at Garagespin says: It’s “kind of an interesting spin on the space touched on by music collaboration & social networking sites Kompoz, Light Speed Audio, eJamming Audio, SpliceMusic, and a bunch of others. They’re all pretty different — some focusing on loop-generated music, some focusing on pure songwriting ideas, and others focusing on live interaction. ” (Mike hadn’t tried it out yet and neither have I; still you might want to have a look.)

Riffworld recording software includes automatic track creation, loop recording, guitar-oriented effects, InstantDrummer, professionally recorded drum tracks, online music collaboration, and instant podcasting so you can broadcast any song created in RiffWorks – whether it’s a solo effort or collaboration – for the RiffWorld community to hear. You can listen to songs, get feedback about them, talk about what your fellow musicians are creating, and find other musicians to jam with.

Thanks to MikeB.

Although the commission money has been exhausted, Slocum is still accepting submissions. If you are interested in participating, read the PDF document on the website. Your footage will be added to the video sequence online and exhibited in future gallery exhibitions.

About the Process: In an email he wrote to Helen Thorington (January 11), Slocum describes the difficulties he had finding participants for the project:

Originally I was posting on Internet message boards for Full House, fan film making, and other related topics offering $80 for each completed video, hoping I could get about 18 videos. But nobody was taking the offer so I increased it to $150 and accepted that I had to reduce the number of videos. I ended up having the best results with Craigslist. You can’t post an ad to multiple cities, so I rotated the ad between different locations.

I gradually built a list of people willing to participate, which was complicated to maintain since people frequently expressed interest and later stopped responding to my emails. Most participants did not meet the deadlines I set. I received the first video in early November, and the last three in early January, less than a week before the launch date.

He then goes on to describe the formal challenges he faced:

Originally, I’d wanted the voicing of the dialogue to be so close to the original that it would maintain the hypnotic rhythm of the mockup loop I had created. I specified this in the documentation, but nobody could do it well enough, and the sound from the reshoots didn’t maintain the rhythm of the original concept. I was concerned that the piece wouldn’t work until I had the idea of overlaying the original audio onto the reshoot audio. This maintained the rhythm and emphasized the room reverb (and space) from the reshoots.

I found that the key to making the piece work out was subtle changes. Very slight timing changes made a big difference, equalization of audio, selection between two slightly different takes… Also some of the reshoots did not work aesthetically, but after a lot of experimenting I found that changes in color saturation of the clips could fix problems without changing much about the original authorship of the reshoot. I could bring out colors in dull clips, and control overly complex clips. I also discovered that the transition from under-saturated clips to over-saturated clips can be interesting.

You’re Not My Father is included in Slocum’s solo show “More House” which opens tonight at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, 5020 Tracy Street, Dallas, Texas.

You’re Not My Father is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Slocum is a musician and new media artist living in Dallas. Computers and computer culture are often the medium and subject of his work. Some of his projects are “The Dot Matrix Synth”, an 80’s dot matrix printer with re-programmed firmware to transform it into a musical instrument, “The Century Callback Project”, a phone number that calls you back 8 times in a century, and “The Time-Lapse Homepage”, a video made with HTML. He is also half of the “Tree Wave” project that creates music and video with obsolete assembly-language-programmed computer and video game gear. Paul is the director and co-founder of “And/Or Gallery” in Dallas, a gallery that specializes in new media artwork. Some of Paul’s performances and exhibitions include Transitio MX in Mexico City, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Deitch Projects, and Eyebeam in New York, Le Confort Moderne in France, README 2005 in Denmark, and The Liverpool Biennial.

“My Space Sound is the result of my fieldwork about MySpace, with some help from my friends. It is just a tiny point or node in a huge social network, and it is a starting point rather than an accomplishment. This is just my story, and I am curious to know your story. My Space Sound is the artistic observations and everyday sketches of the imperfect processor named sawako about the state of networks and individuals.”

My Space Sound is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

As a musician, Sawako Kato has recently made a name for herself with her own unique combination of field recordings and DSP combined with a noticeably feminine touch. As a new media artist, she created “2.4GHz Scape,” which explores the urban WiFi signal scape; “ishi ~ listening stone,” a sound art piece that uses a crystal radio and stones, and an ephemeral timeline drawing with Max/MSP/Jitter.

Sawako has solo releases from 12k, and/OAR and Anticipate, She has collaborated with a wide range of musicians such as Taylor Deupree, Andrew Deutsch, Kenneth Kirschner, Taku Sugimoto, Toshimaru Nakamura, asuna, Ryan Francesconi and Jacob Kirkegaard; and has performed in Tonic, Diapason, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Monkey Town (NYC); MUTEK Festival (Canada), Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA), Batofar (Paris), Kunstraum Walcheturm (Zurich), offsite, Apple Store Sinsaibashi (Japan); m12 (Berlin), Glade Festival, Resonance FM, ICA (UK); and other venues in the US, Europe and Japan.

ItSpace is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Traub is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia. He received his Master’s in Electro-Acoustic Music Composition from Dartmouth College in 1999. After that, Peter moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he worked as a software engineer for five years. While gambling his daytime employment on internet startups, he spent nights composing at Stanford’s CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). His music and internet-based sound art works have been played and exhibited internationally. His interests at UVa include music that utilizes computer networks, virtual and real spaces, multi-channel composition, and the exploration of alternative and open-source software systems for composition.

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.

We covered socially-networked music creation sites in April, but recently came across another site where musicians can create profiles and record together online: Kompoz. Anyone can create a new project on the site and upload individual tracks to it in the MP3, WMA, or WAV formats. After choosing a Creative Commons license, you can invite other users to add tracks to your project. Or, you can search the site by genre, artist/member, talent/instrument needed, keyword, tag, and/or license type to join someone else’s. Every project has its own discussion forum where participants can post ideas and suggestions for the song.

Some social music creation sites let you record directly onto the site, but with Kompoz (and some others), you download tracks into your own music creation software and then upload your contribution to the site. Although this system isn’t as convenient as recording directly into the online project, it allows for higher-quality results and allows people to use familiar, full-featured software.

Check out the dub track “Psycho Riddim,” a project started by a Floridian who is “10 and just starting to learn to play drums.” Between his original beat and all of the stuff people are adding, it’s turning into a nicely fleshed-out track (the dub genre, with its repetition and layering, seems to work particularly well for this sort of collaboration).