RASTER-NOTON SHOWCASE :: Thursday, May 15, 2008 :: SIGNAL + solo sets by Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, and Byetone :: Presented by Non-Event, Basstown, and the Goethe-Institut, Boston ::Middlesex Lounge :: 315 Massachusetts Avenue :: Cambridge, MA :: (617) 868-MSEX :: Doors: 9pm, Show: 10pm :: 21+ Admission: $10

SIGNAL is a Raster-Noton supergroup, featuring Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), and Frank Bretschneider. The trio performs intense, hypnotic music to a spectacular backdrop of graphical information that reveals the complex geometry of the sounds in play. Most of their sound sources are taken from a huge memory bank of music from long jamming sessions dating from the earlydays of Raster-Noton. These are processed and folded into a taut and energetic web of rhythmic clicks, bristling static, and deep bass pulses that are unexpectedly sensuous and undeniably funky. Their most recent album, Robotron, was released in 2007 on Raster-Noton. This will be SIGNAL’s Boston debut.

mp3 of Signal, Robotron: http://www.raster-noton.net/download/rn-69_robotron/02_Ermafa.mp3 Continue reading

Vaibhav Bhawsar wrote the following on A-bog: Udder-Utter is an instrument that utters syllabic sounds derived from the Devanāgarī alphabet, which is used to write Hindi and other Indo-Arabyan languages. It’s playability is inspired by the gestures involved in milking a cow. The sounds that this instrument utters are intended to be a mix of discrete and continuous in nature and are rhythmic due to their syllabic / phonetic origins. I see the Udder as an instrument for constructing and rupturing meaning through its playability, by using syllabic sounds to construct monosyllabic meanings and imagery to extract formal elements. Continue reading

Here’s an aquatic take on Alvin Lucier’s classic “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening.” Over on the freesound.iua.upf.edu website — a community where users share field recordings – an audio document of a shower has expanded into a collaborative series of recordings, each displaying how the original shower sounds when a recording of it is played in other bathrooms.

The effort may seem mundane or peculiar, or both, but it’s very much in the tradition of Lucier’s explorations of how enclosed spaces have their own intrinsic sonic properties, and of how sound degrades with successive reproductions. Continue reading

Visit pank.tv (click on DNA)to see a video and hear the sonification of GENE - LUXR :: ORGANISM - VIBRIO :: FISCHERI TRANSLATION - CNA :: It’s a one-minute sample and quite beautiful.

According to the very limited information on the site, DNA, mRNA and Protein sequences are translated into MIDI to generate the sound and control the image variables in realtime. When presented in live performance a MIDI controller is used. The gene information and sequences are available here. Other audio samples are available here.

Gridjam is a real-time, geographically distributed, networked multimedia event. It is an experimental project that brings together a visual artist, composer, musicians and computer scientists, while using the new high speed international LambdaRail network. Gridjam will demonstrate real-time, low latency, interactive, distance computing through the complexity of the live, partly improvised, 3D visualized, musical performance, being both a world-class work of art and a research project into high performance collaborative network computing. Continue reading

Andrea Polli is a digital media artist living in New York City. Her current works are hybrid (art/science) collaborations with atmospheric scientists to develop systems for understanding storm and climate data through sound - a process called sonification. Recent collaborations include: Atmospherics/Weather Works, a spatialized sonification of highly detailed models of storms that devastated the New York area; Heat and the Heartbeat of the City, a series of sonifications of actual and projected climate in Central Park, the heart of New York City and one of the world’s first locations for climate monitoring (a Turbulence Commission); and N., a real-time multi-channel sonification and visualization of weather in the Arctic. Continue reading

Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild by Eric Alan Kabisch [PDF]: ABSTRACT: This paper presents motivation and documentation of four technologically enabled artworks. These artworks explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography. A framework is provided for analyzing these works of art. This framework addresses the impacts of technology as a three-part cyclical process that includes (1) sensing elements of the environment, (2) analyzing and creating narratives from the captured data, and (3) the propagation of these methods and representations back into the world. Continue reading

Ground Breaking - Experience Past Landscapes in Grains and Pixels by Paul Adderley & Michael Young: In this installation, a computer explores and represents nearly 10,000 years of soil records, revealing them in different colours and perspectives.

Landscapes reflect the lives and histories of the people who live in them. Scientific analysis of the soil can be used to examine how people lived in the past and provide lessons for future management of landscapes in extreme or fragile environments. We invite you to become part of the shifting scenes of the Sahel in image and sound and reflect upon its presence and history… Continue reading

Echologue, by Orkan Telhan, is a public interface for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. The goal is to build a medium that can reflect its surroundings like a smart mirror, highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. The interface senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output.

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. Continue reading

Divertimento Ritmico for Two Synthesizers - Two Locations, and One Acoustic Network of Four Channels by Net vs. Net (Juan-Pablo Cáceres @ Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) & Alain Renaud @ Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC)) :: November 9, 2007, 8:00 (PST) pm, CCRMA Stage, Department of Music, Stanford University, Stanford, CA :: and Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

This piece is a structured improvisation that explores multi-channel feedback delays on the network. The delay path between Stanford (California, USA) and SARC (Belfast, Ireland) is used as a variable feedback comb filter for each of the four channels. Continue reading