For my inaugural post to this blog, I’d like to write about something I’ve been thinking about lately, and hopefully begin a discussion on it. Namely, what to make of geotagged audio samples and recordings. In case you’re not familiar with the term, geotagging is the practice of assigning geographic coordinates to a piece of media like a recording or photo as a form of metadata. In one incarnation, such as on the Freesound project, geotagged samples are layered over Google maps, allowing one to zoom in on any spot on the planet and potentially find samples tagged to specific geographic locations. As numerous startups and one very large corporation (beginning with a ‘G’ and ending with ‘oogle’) have realized, the commercial potential of geotagging is huge. But we hear less about its scientific potential and, of importance here, its aesthetic potential. Continue reading

The T-Stick is a gestural musical controller designed and built by Joseph Malloch of the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. The first prototype was completed in 2006, a second (wireless) T-Stick was completed in early 2007. Two more will be completed by August 2007.

The T-Stick grew out of a collaborative project undertaken by Malloch and composition student D. Andrew Stewart, and also out of collaboration with performers as part of the McGill Digital Orchestra project. So far, the T-Stick has been performed publicly six times, the last at NIME 2007 in New York City. Continue reading

Oculog is a new system for performing electronic music where a video-based eye movement system is used to control the sound. The work of Juno Kim, Greg Schiemer and Terumi Narushima, all of the University of Wollongong, Australia, Oculog was presented as a paper at the NIME 2007 conference. It is a project in progress.

Musical control, traditionally dependent on and conditioned by the muscular responses of performers who hold and touch their instruments, is here expanded to include electronically sensed choreographed music. Oculog is not the first to use biological signals – you can read about earlier efforts in Kim, Schiemer and Narushima’s paper, “Oculog: Playing with Eye Movements” presented at the NIME 2007 conference. Continue reading

One of the most compelling performances at the NIME 2007, Concert 1, in New York City this past week was EyeMusic v1.0, an eye-controlled composition. The project makes use of an eye tracking device (the LC Technologies Eyegaze Communication System) that reports where the performer is looking on the computer screen, as well as other parameters pertaining to the status of the eyes. It reports these data in real time to a computer program (written using Max/MSP/Jitter) which then generates and modifies sounds and images based on these data. Continue reading

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SessVJ04I[/youtube]

A demonstration of a musical instrument Zane Van Dusen and Pauline Oliveros developed for people with Cerebral Palsy. More info can be found here and here. [via]

loopArena, a project of Jens Wunderling, is an agent-based, generative, music interface for live performance of loopbased computer music. On a touchscreen, the user is able to control eight MIDI-Instruments such as synthesizers or samplers (soft- and hardware) and a drumcomputer in a playful way.

Every element of the interface is an agent, which means it is enabled to act autonomously. The agents are programmed to generatively alter the music loop, help the user create harmonic melodies and at the same time to inspire the user and animate him to interact with the agents. Continue reading