Call + Response :: April 25-28, 2008 :: A Series of Events hosted by Candice Breitz :: Mudam Luxembourg, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, L-1499 Luxembourg :: Please register online before April 10! Booking is essential due to limited seating.

Creative innovation has always relied, to some extent, on the logic of call-and-response, a phrase that Breitz borrows from musicologists, who use it to describe the interactive quality that is key to musical experience in various oral cultures. Mudam warmly invites you to share your ideas with a group of artists and thinkers as they explore the logic of call-and-response and reflect on strategies of artistic appropriation and creative recycling during a three-day line-up of performances, panels and discussions. Continue reading

Objects Sing at ItSpace - Shower heads, down pillows and folding tables make music at ItSpace, an interactive sound project created by composer Peter Traub. Short pieces of music are composed from recordings of these everyday household objects being struck, again and again. Producer Jesse Dukes brings the story for HearingVoices.com. You can listen to the NPR storyhere.

“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

The Digital Artists Handbook [see Working with Sound] is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies. 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

BliK an interactive installation and networked musical composition method based on collaborative “Web 2.0″ principles. The composer / participant types directives / keywords - referencing one of the LEMUR ModBots - into a blog post to create a musical score. The LEMUR ModBots are a set of single-function percussive bots that work as a percussion ensemble. They reside at LEMURplex in Brooklyn, New York. Some are scrapers, some are shakers, some strike different surfaces. They each have their own name, for instance, “bucket” and “shake.” By typing “bucket shake shake shake,” into a blog post, the user causes both bots to improvise algorithmically, with the shake being 3 times more present in the section than the bucket. The user controls the tempo by typing keywords such as ‘fast’, ’slow’, and ‘medium’. Continue reading

SYMPOSIUM 4: Audio Extranautes: Flux, Distance, Sociability :: December 17-18, 2007 :: ENSA Villa Arson, Nice :: Ping the Vatican workshop :: December 19-21. Details concerning registration here.

The principal objective is to investigate questions concerning the local, social and collective aspects of interaction between physical and digital space (Internet, telephone etc), expressed through experimentation in current digital audio practices. Audio Extranautes, new perspectives on acoustic space via electronic networks, opens several axes of research developed jointly by the two laboratories: Continue reading

The mobile telephone is one of the first electronic objects that large numbers of people have personalized with sound. The ‘ringtone’ has become a familiar personal insignia. For both composers and users it provides a unique opportunity to do something with sound. The mission of Sonic()bject is to take advantage of this common interest and to let users become acquainted with never previously heard and experimental sound.

The artists that Sonic()bject has selected for devising new sounds and ringtone compositions are professionals from all over the world who are involved in creating with sound: audio designers, audio artists, contemporary composers, classic or electro, jazz, pop … real “sonic objects” that have their roots in the history of auditory art. Continue reading