Handmade Music Brooklyn :: March 8, 2010; 7:00 pm :: Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY :: “Free: Musical sewing machines, gestural controllers, touch-based hexagonal music hardware, trumpet-inspired A/V instruments, and electro-country honky-tonk — another party+variety show+science fair of the latest, oddest DIY music making tech.” (Peter Kirn)

Science fair, party, variety show - Handmade Music celebrates unusual DIY creations in music, with people who make their own tools to make their own music.

This month, Galapagos Art Space means a stage, a bar, and a huge lineup of free music: Continue reading

Jam Session @ 3rd Ward Brooklyn :: October 15, 2009, 7:30 - 10:00 pm :: at 3rd Ward, 195 Morgan Ave, Brooklyn, NY

[image: Wearable sonic dress with felted patch cords - patch cord by Sarah and Lara Grant]

The party celebrates the people making original tools to make original music, this one another grab bag of unusual inventive sonic technologies. Such as:

GREAT TIGER is an electro rock duo from Brooklyn. They get the party started with the help of The Box, a homemade MIDI controller made out of arcade buttons. Taking inspiration from Daft Punk to Deep Purple, GREAT TIGER fuses themselves into your brain with the help of bright lasers and poison-gas fog machines. Continue reading

Tone Matrix is a simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16-step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlying wave-map. The sound generation is basically a polyphone synthesizer with a simple delay with a varying read-offset to make the tones vibrating in the end. It’s fun to play with.

From Andre Michelle: After uploading it on my laboratory the run began. I am counting more than 250.000 impressions, endless feedback, suggestions and even videos on Youtube. I will definitely put the sequencer in our AudioTool. But don’t expect an update before autumn. We are trying to make 1.0 a serious music application with sequencing, automation, modulation, audio-tracks, synthesizers and what not. So there is no time to enhance this little toy. But I have added at least Clipboard support to let you save your pattern to sequence of numbers. Unfortunately the audio output is very glitchy when the context-menu is running. Continue reading

UPIC is a computerised musical composition tool, devised by the composer Iannis Xenakis. It was developed at the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu) in Paris, and was completed in 1977. The name is an acronym of Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu. Xenakis used it on his subsequent piece Mycènes Alpha (1978), and it has been used by composers such as Jean-Claude Risset (on Saxatile (1992)), Takehito Shimazu (Illusions in Desolate Fields (1994)), and Curtis Roads.

Physically, the UPIC is a digitising tablet linked to a computer, which has a vector display. Its functionality is similar to that of the later Fairlight CMI, in that the user draws waveforms and volume envelopes on the tablet, which are rendered by the computer. Once the waveforms have been stored, the user can compose with them by drawing “compositions” on the tablet, with the X-axis representing cumulative duration, and the Y-axis representing pitch. Continue reading

ALESSANDRO BOSETTI: MASK/MIRROR:: January 26, 2009; 7:00 pm :: Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center :: 596 Broadway #602, New York City.

Mask/Mirror (M/M) is a sampler-based software tool created using Max/MSP that processes recordings of spoken language in real time. In performance, the composer uses samples of his own voice to create an ambiguous situation of being interrupted by himself all the time and of having to resort to all possible resources to keep making sense. The sampler follows both sound and meaning criteria in sorting, organizing and processing samples and formulating utterances. Continue reading

Noise performers extraordinaire, The Loud Objects, and Dr. Bleep have teamed up to create the first being of pure noise!

The Bit Blob is a digital noise maker that’s controlled by connecting its contacts together, allowing you to bend your way through unlimited sonic madness. You can also connect LEDs, audio outputs, or other Bit Blobs between control pins!

Comes with hookup wires, output jacks and LEDs.

Thanks to Bleep Labs

From Wired Magazine: Signal Patterns: A Socially-Networked Music Personality Test by Eliot Van Buskirk (December 16, 2008):

Ever wonder what your “music personality” is like? Signal Patterns is offering an online test that plays a variety of music clips and asks the listener to rate how much they like “this type of music.”

The test takes about five minutes, after which your musical personality will be profiled using 14 attributes, the sites in an equalizer-like format. You can share your results and compare them against friends who have also taken the test by linking Signal Patterns to profiles on Facebook, Flickr, imeem, Last.fm and MySpace. For more, click here

javoice: See with sound - see with your ears! Free soundscape synthesizer and sequencer! This fully interactive page allows you to draw your own 64 × 64, 16 grey-tone image and immediately hear the corresponding 64-voice polyphonic visual sound being synthesized on the fly! See and hear how The vOICe mapping works for your input. The 64-channel sound synthesis maps the image into an exponentially distributed frequency interval for a one second visual sound.

Furthermore, you can view sound waves, sonify existing images, train for audiovisual synesthesia, perform on-line composing, make visual sound animations and create spectrograms (sonograms, sonagrams). Continue reading

iSAW and Subtropics present a celebration of the work of one of Miami’s rising stars, composer Jason Freeman and the unveiling of his new work Sound Microscope, commissioned by iSAW. Recommended footwear: flip flops :: September 28, 2008; 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. :: Light Box Theater, 3000 Biscayne Blvd, Miami :: Tickets here.

Sound Microscope is a simple interactive web application designed by Jason Freeman and Mark Godfrey for exploring the inner lives of sounds. A pan-and-zoom interface (similar to online map services) isolates small fragments of a sound file in time and frequency space, bringing structural subtleties and hidden details to the aural foreground. It is intended to help students (or anyone!) learn about the visual representation of a sound and its frequency components while encouraging them to listen in new ways and from new perspectives. Continue reading

HARVESTWORKS Digital Media Arts Center :: Presentation by STEIM’s Takuro Mizuta Lippit :: 596 Broadway, Suite 602 (at Houston St), New York, NY 10012 :: Tel: 212-431-1130 :: http://www.harvestworks.org :: Subway: F/V Broadway/Lafayette, 6 Bleeker, W/R Prince :: July 17, 2008;6:30 pm.

Takuro will introduce the general history of STEIM, from its start in the late 60s as a collective of composers, improvisors and musicians to a research lab, artist in residence and venue for adventurous live electronic arts. Later he will demo his own performance set up consisting of a turntable, dj mixer, self-built USB controller and Max/MSP. Crossfader-triggered sampler “cut n play” and right-hand usb interface “audile” are some of the unique modules that he has designed to seamlessly integrate live sampling into the flow of turntable performance. Continue reading