image: David Dunn J.A. Deane and David Dunn in “an evening of expansive sonorities” :: May 8, 2010; 8:00 pm :: SF_X (Santa Fe Complex), Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Utilizing new electroacoustic instruments of their own design, J.A. Deane and David Dunn present an evening of expansive sonorities that explore leading edge improvisation and scientific sonification. Combining their unique skills ‘as significant figures in multiple contemporary music traditions (jazz, free improvisation, classical new music, electroacoustic composition, sound art, biomusic, early music, world music, and microtonal performance), this duo presents music that draws upon new understandings of both ancient and modern insights into the fundamental nature of sound to effect human consciousness. Continue reading

Coincidence Engines by [The User]: The first two works in the Coincidence Engines series are subtitled One: Universal People’s Republic Time, and Two: Approximate demarcator of constellations in other cosmos. These two installations approach the idea of “co-incident” events from complementary perspectives. Coincidence Engine One (watch) assembles a large number of unsynchronized clocks whose combined ticking sounds produce an unusual and intriguingly organic sonic environment. Coincidence Engine Two (watch) develops a sophisticated synchronization control and amplification system around a group of specially-modified clocks that enables the artists to articulate audio-visual compositions by programming and sequencing the clocks’ ticking behaviour.

The notion of concrete sound, and the specificity of the listener’s relationship to sound sources in space are central to [The User]’s approach. Continue reading

Analogous Interactions @ International Computer Music Conference :: June 1-5, 2010 :: New York City :: Call for Works — Deadline: December 31, 2009.

Analogous invites proposals for presentation at Analogous Interactions events for the International Computer Music Conference, taking place at Stony Brook University, in association with New York University, and the Electronic Music Foundation of New York City. Works should explore the intersection of computer music and emergent phenomena — including, but not limited to, generative sound- and video-works, performative ecologies and installations, live-coding and musical improvisation, reality-based games and social experiments, biomedical hacking and new technology, artificial intelligence and chaordic systems. Continue reading

The Blackest Flux featuring Yutaka Makino:: December 10, 2009, 8:00 - 10:00 pm :: AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media, 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA.

The Blackest Flux is an experiment toward abstraction of space/body. By using acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena, it creates a state of disorientation and a series of tactile movement of sound masses over space.

Yutaka Makino is an artist and researcher currently based in Los Angeles. He seeks to amalgamate the historic precedents of computational composition and science, involving research in non-standard sound synthesis, spatial perception, acoustics, collective behavior, complex dynamical systems and emergence. Continue reading

dorkbot-nyc - David Steinberg, Christina McPhee, and Sam Pluta :: September 3, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Location One, SoHo. The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

David Steinberg: mobile music machines - Lots of interesting musical software have been developed more or less recently for portable videogames consoles (Gameboy, PSP, etc.), PDAs or other similar platforms. I’ll present many of these applications (for Nintendo Gameboy, Palm OS, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, Gamepark consoles, etc.), explain what’s needed to use them, who created them, what are the advantages and disadvantages of developing musical software for each platform and of course show some examples of what can be done with these new instruments. Continue reading

This past spring at the University of Virginia, a first-time joint class was offered that brought graduate students from the Virginia Center for Computer Music (VCCM) together with undergraduates in the School of Architecture.The undergraduate Robotic Ecologies class merged with the Emergent Systems in Music graduate class, and was co-taught by professors Jason Johnson (architecture) and Matthew Burtner (music), with assistance from music graduate student Troy Rogers. I had the opportunity to participate in this exciting new venture between our departments. The goal of this year’s class was for students to create and fabricate “performative spatial and acoustic instruments that sense, compute and interact to/with emergent atmospheric inputs.” The class’s group collaborations resulted in three new robotic sonic-spatial instruments. Movies and descriptions of the instruments are provided below. Descriptions were provided by the groups and video footage was provided by Jason Johnson. Continue reading

I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online for a little while now, and while it has a few interesting twists on standard MMO design, one thing really stood out for me, the music creation system available to every player.

Players can learn to play an instrument starting at low levels and what this does is that when the player chooses to take out their instrument, the keyboard switches to a configuration where specific keys are mapped to specific notes. For instance, 1 is C, 1 + cntrl is C#, 1 + cntrl + alt = C# up one octave, etc. In this way very specific chords can be created. Continue reading

LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible … is a collaboration between world-renowned composer / musician SAKAMOTO Ryuichi [videos] and TAKATANI Shiro, core members of the Kyoto-based internationally active art group dumb type.

While the genesis of this piece is in SAKAMOTO Ryuichi’s opera LIFE (first performed in 1999, for which TAKATANI Shiro created the video aspects), as is evident in the title’s “fluid, invisible, inaudible …” this installation revisits the resources of sound and vision in LIFE for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work. While LIFE was an experiment conducted in opera’s linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible … is a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience.
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The Netherlands Media Art Institute presents in collaboration with the 5 days off festival the exhibition (in)visible sounds :: open until July 14 - Tuesday through Saturday from 1:00 ­ 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month. Entry: € 2,50 (1,50 with discount.) :: Performances: July 4-8 in Paradiso, Melkweg and the Netherlands Media Art Institute :: Reservations: info [at] montevideo.nl.

Semiconductor (UK) :: July 4, Time: 8.30 p.m. For Brilliant Noise the most beautiful satellite images of the sun have been selected from an open access archive. The radiation intensity is translated into audio fragments so as to focus attention on the hidden forces of the solar system. A computer that ‘listens’ to audio files and is able to translate these into digital images, depending on the amount of resonance, is at the heart of the performance Sonic Inc: Where has the Future Gone? Continue reading

Jay Hardesty, Drazen Bosnjak and Harris Skibell are developing tone23, a musical ecosystem where music is the primary agent defining interactions between users. Music evolves in this environment based on the musical preferences and encounters of users. Implemented at hive23 in Second Life, it creates original music variations and hybrids based on association among avatars.

Music Rooms: The hive23 environment contains three rooms. Each room is associated with a separate musical stream that is determined by the avatars currently within that room. Each avatar is “tagged” with music they have chosen from a list of musical pieces, available outside the entrance to the three rooms. When an avatar enters or leaves a room, a new sequence of musical variations is produced for that room. These variations combine and rework parts from the songs identified with those avatars then inhabiting that room. Continue reading