SONIC RESIDUES :: Exhibition and Concert :: Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY :: Until May 12, 2008.

The Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture and Technology (cDACT) at Stony Brook University presents the Sonic Residues Festival, April 29th to May 12th, 2008, Stony Brook University.

The Sonic Residues Festival will develop subtle and complex spaces of auditory experience, organized loosely around the theme of the remainders left by vibrations in time and space. Continue reading

The Olympics are not simply a matter of fun and games. They are a multi-national media spectacle that–as we’ve seen in recent protests–can arouse and galvanize political action. The event’s organizers pitch it as a zone outside of politics, but of course issues of national identity, human rights, autonomy, economic might, and foreign policy all coalesce around the Olympics. While much of the current attention to these matters is directed at Beijing, groups in Montreal and London are already forming to address the impact that the arrival of the famous torch (ceremoniously relayed in a model invented by the Nazis to promote a strong image of the Third Reich around the 1936 Berlin games) will have upon local communities. Continue reading

Voice & Void -Rachel Berwick, Joseph Beuys / Ute Klophaus, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, John Cage, VALIE EXPORT, Anna Gaskell, Asta Grőting, Christian Marclay, Melik Ohanian, Hans Schabus, Nedko Solakov, Julianne Swartz, Cerith Wyn Evans :: April 19 - June 8, 2008 :: Opening: April 18, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Galerie im Taxispalais, Maria-Theresien-Str. 45, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria.

The group show Voice & Void is dedicated to the representation of the human voice – and its absence – in the visual arts. The voice and its fading away, speech and the loss of speech, both the presence and the immateriality of the voice, the relation between the voice and corporeality as well as sound and image are only a few of the many aspects addressed in this exhibition. Continue reading

Common Music Notation in Max/Msp with MaxScore with Nick Didkovsky and Georg Hajdu :: April 16, 6:30 - 9:30 pm :: Class Cost: $50 :: HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Arts Center, 596 Broadway, Suite 602 (at Houston St), New York, NY. For details, or to register go here.

MaxScore currently exports to MusicXML so you can load your scores into Finale and Sibelius. MaxScore also exports to the GNU LilyPond automated engraving system. MaxScore was programmed in Java Music Specification Language by Nick Didkovsky (but requires no Java programming to operate). MaxScore was commissioned by “Bipolar - German-Hungarian Cultural Projects.” Bipolar is an initiative of the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany. Continue reading

Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia presents Alessandro Bosetti and Christian Kesten’s Mask/Mirror, a performance :: March 29, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Diapason, 882 Third Avenue (between 32nd and 33rd Street), 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY.

A few months ago I wrote a note to myself: “Try to create a mask that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything” and kept wondering what that could mean until I started to imagine Mask/Mirror. Mask/Mirror a sampler to process recordings of spoken language in real time… The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and in formulating utterances. Continue reading

Bernhard Leitner: TonRaumSkulptur / Sound Space Sculpture (1968-1973) :: Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin :: February 1 - March 24, 2008 :: [info] :: [video] :: [bernhard leitner website]

Sound Spaces are not just spaces in which sound can be heard. Rather, it is sound itself that creates the space and its special qualities. Therefore the experience of hearing not only enables us to experience the space around us, they can also make it possible to experience physical space as an “inner” space. Bernhard Leitner’s work leads us to a quality of sound (as space) that remains concealed within stimulus streams. It shows the potentials of sensual experience that we are barely conscious of because they are either lost or have remained unknown as possibilities. - Cathrin Pichler Continue reading

“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

John Zorn’s improvisational game meets musical composition, Cobra is based on a loosely structured set of rules controlled by Zorn as ‘prompter’. Working with a set of cues [as notations] on cards, and sets of basic rules corresponding to those cues, Zorn sets off an indeterminate play of instrumentation and improvisation. The basic form of the Cobra games works as follows: Continue reading

“A musical notation is a language which determines what you can say; what you want to say determines your language.” [Cornelius Cardew, 1961]

BibliOdyssey is a blog that deals in archival images from obscure sources (usually old books). Typically, it presents old scientific diagrams, pattern samples, anatomical studies, ancient maps or just anything that has a strong visual attraction combined with a sense of the obscure and arcane. All told, it is a delightful image resource for anyone with even a slight sense of the magical.

Today’s post on the visual context of music is of potential interest to Generator.x readers. It deals with unconventional visual forms of musical notation, from the illustrative to the conqrete, from the ancient to contemporary. It should prove intriguing and well worth the time to indulge in both the images and links provided. From: Art from Code - Generator.x

Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music :: September 7 – October 20, 2007 :: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, NYC :: Opening Reception: September 7, 6-8 pm :: Curated by Alex Waterman, Debra Singer, and Matthew Lyons.

Exploring the intersection of drawing and sound, this show includes experimental scores by more than twenty contemporary composers who relinquish traditional musical notation in favor of their own invented visual systems of pictorial or “graphic” elements. Continue reading