April ReSiDeNt Show: New Works, New Instruments, New Artists :: Featuring new works by Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Schneider and Simon Morris :: at LEMURplex, 461 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, between 9th & 10th Streets :: Friday, May 2nd :: 8 pm - 11 pm :: $5 at the door

Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist and improviser-composer from an eclectic musical background. As singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using custom sound processing of voice and other instruments. Besides her composing and improvised projects, she co-leads the digital chamber punk ensemble What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton (http://www.whatbat.org) and has collaborated/performed with Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Continue reading

Freestyle SoundHack - a workshop and performance with Jessica Thompson :: January 26, 2008; 1 - 5 pmM :: p|m Gallery, 1159 Dundas Street East, Suite 149, Toronto, Canada.

Freestyle SoundKits are wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment. Freestyle SoundHack is a collaborative performance in the form of a workshop. During the performance, the artist will give her project to the public by teaching workshop participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, to distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose. Material fee: $20 (full kit), $10 (kit-amp). Continue reading

Noisy Instrument by Jun Murakoshi - What has not been done by using rapid prototyping technique? My answer is making sounds. It must be difficult to make music but it could be possible to make noise. When you put a seashell on your ear, you can hear something strange noise. It is noise but it makes us feel good. This product is a wearable instrument for listening the noise like seashell makes.

Jun Murakoshi was born in 1978 and grew up in Saitama, Japan. He obtained a Master of Engineering in Industrial Design, at Chiba University, Japan. He completed his MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2007.

Soft Architecture: WYSIWYG - As an extension of the research work conducted with the Topological Media Lab (TML), Sha Xin Wei and his team are creating textile objects such as wall hangings, blankets, scarves, and jewelry that create sound as they are approached or manipulated. These sonic blankets can be used for improvised play.

A phonetic pun on the old acronym for What You See is What You Get from the era of the Graphical User Interface, WYSIWYG (for wearable, sonic instrument, with gesture) draws on music technology, dance, children’s group games, textile arts, and fashion. Created first and foremost to sustain social play for people of all ages, WYSIWYG allows players to express themselves whether enjoying time in a park, dancing at a club, passing the time during a long car trip, or just playing at home. Continue reading

Enter the percussive world of odbol, AKA Tyler Freeman, AKA the man behind DrumPants. Imagine a pair of slacks, now picture those slacks being laced with Piezo transducer triggers which receive audio that becomes MIDI data (similar to how traditional drum triggers function). Now, imagine those triggers being hooked into a brain of some type, say… a drum machine.

Are you getting the picture yet? DrumPants! Yes, now tapping on your legs will produce more than just the dull “thwack” of struck flesh — it will create a symphony of percussion rivaled only by Neil Peart (and maybe Jon Theodore). Actually, odbol’s design isn’t really that revolutionary, since it’s kind of like sticking regular triggers in your pockets, and frankly, as much as we’d like to be complimentary to the little dude, he ain’t that great of a drummer. Still, kudos for the effort, and when he comes up with the sub-derma triggers, we’re all ears. Check the video after the break to see Tyler rocking the trap kit.
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Remember my post detailing several prototypes developed at the course of Fashion & Technology at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University? There was one project missing, a spectacular luminous dress that pulses according to the rhythm of the music. My over-zealous spam filter had eaten the student’s email. Calle Rosenqvist sent me the info about her Beat Dress again and here’s the gist of our online dialogue:

What’s the tech behind all those pulses, sound beats and bursts of light?

The dress i sew is sewn in 4 layers of cloth. Underneath it all is a very simple jersey-dress design. On that dress there are 10 detachable patches, all equipped with 10 leds each (a total of 100 leds). From each of these patches there is a wire attached to a battery, which is hidden in a pocket on the very front of the dress. Continue reading

Sustainable Energy Arts: An exhibition of alternative energy and energy aware musical instruments, jewelry, and more :: Greylock Arts, 93 Summer Street, Adams, MA 01220 :: September 14 – October 28, 2007 :: Opening: September 14, 5:30 – 8:30 pm.

Works include: Leif Krinkle’s human-powered Krinkle-O-Tron, Rory Nugent’s solar-powered Xylophone, Alice Planas’ and Leif Krinkle’s solar-powered Jewelry, Andrew Schneider’s solar-powered Bikini and more.

Gallery Hours: Works in the storefront are visible at all times; Works in the gallery can be seen by appointment.

Hearing Sirens :: June 11; 1-2:00 pm :: Digital Arts Weeks 2007, Zurich.

Hearing Sirens is an ongoing performance project for portable horn loudspeakers. The work of Cathy Van Eck, Hearing Sirens is based on two of the applications of the word siren. The siren is both a mythological woman, having the body of a bird and the head of a woman as a noise maker, used to warn in emergency cases. The sirens as bird-women were known in Antiquity for their beautiful singing. It was unable to resist them and most of the men who heard them did not survive. The siren as a noisemaker is used to warn people for emergency cases and can therefore be seen as a survival tool. It uses a rotating disk with holes, to create its characteristic sound. Cathy uses both as an acoustic, visual and conceptual starting-point for this piece. Continue reading

Undercover, by Dana Gordon, is a blanket which contains a system of 24 wireless speakers and provides a special physical sound experience. It allows you to enjoy the vibrations of the speakers on your body and provides a private mobile soundscape. The blanket has an embedded array of small speakers that can receive a wireless audio signal via a Bluetooth connection. This audio signal can be beamed from any kind of audio device, such as mp3 player, television, computer, radio, etc. The volume controllers were designed in a way, which suits the blanket’s natural cuddling behaviour. The upper corners (A.K.A ‘the blanket’s ears’) control the volume - (pull the right one for higher volume and the left one for lower). [via]

Merging music and mobile technology indicates promising future developments in a rapidly emerging field. The walkman, the mobile phone, and the iPod have already integrated music into users’ social and geographic erratic locations and they have also reshaped users’ urban landscape experience. With ad hoc networking, Internet connection, and context-awareness, mobile music technology offers countless new artistic, commercial and socio-cultural opportunities for creating, listening and sharing music. But which new forms of music interaction lie ahead in this context? Takuya Yamauchi, reasearcher at Keio University, with his professor Toru Iwatake, a well known electronic media composer, explores one of the possible paths with Sound Jewelry, a sound installation supported by spatial sensing system within a Personal Area Network (PAN). Continue reading