International Image Festival: Media Art Monographic Show :: April 13-17, 2010 :: Bogotá, Columbia :: Call for Participants — Deadline: March 5, 2010.

The International Image Festival, conducted by the Department of Visual Design of University of Caldas, Manizales (Colombia), is a meeting and debate space on issues related to electronic arts, digital audiovisual creation, digital and electro-acoustic sound, and rising relationships among art, design, science and technology. The Ninth International Image Festival will be held from April 13 to 17, 2010 and will develop the following activities:

International Seminar / Soundscapes / Cinema (and) Digital Workshops /Exhibitions / Special Events / Presentation Design and Creation Continue reading

BoulderPavement is an online multimedia journal. Volume 1, Issue 1 features work from and beyond The Banff Centre, centered around music and nature. It includes: an interview with composer John Luther Adams & percussionist Steven Schick; artwork by Peter von Tiesenhausen, poetry by Jennifer Still; memoir excerpt by climber and author James Perrin; an audio interview with artist Kate Hartman; and more.

Explore the issue here. Follow BoulderPavement: http://www.twitter.com/boulderpavement ; Follow The Banff Centre: http://www.twitter.com/TheBanffCentre.

Lemurs Over Laptopia: Will new performance interfaces rejuvenate live electronic music? asks Thomas Bey William Bailey on Vague Terrain:

For roughly 160 years since Richard Wagner published his Artwork of the Future, Western audio culture has been forced to take sides on the issue of music and its relation to the other arts: should music be just one element in a fully-integrated artistic program, or should ‘absolute music’ unfettered by lyrics (let alone other sensory effects) run the show? … Continue reading

How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from Stalin to Frampton to Bambaataa by Dave Tompkins:

This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach — from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech” — music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets. The result is an amazing chronicle of postwar music and culture, filled with unexpected and surprising encounters. Continue reading

Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear by Steve Goodman :: ISBN: 9780262013475 :: Publisher: MIT Press Ltd

Sonic Warfare sends a shudder through the hidden underbelly of sound. With uncanny brilliance, Steve Goodman writes through the depths of sub-bass to bring together noise weapons, pirate radio, and the philosophy and politics of rhythm in a vivid new evocation of the power of sound.
–Matthew Fuller, David Gee Reader in Digital Media, Goldsmiths, University of London, author of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture

In the beginning, there was rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman surveys the soundscape in the midst of which we live today, tracking its various guises, from Jamaican dub Continue reading

From Pedro Rebelo’s Blog :: Network Performance issue of Contemporary Music Review Vol.28 Nos 4/5 August/October 2009 Out Now:

This issue of Contemporary Music Review is in itself a network of different materials and approaches which attempt to provide ‘nodal’ views on performance in the network. From the theoretical to the anecdotal, from the score to the historical timeline each article focuses on a particular view of the network, addressing practices which are sometimes new and other times instances of dreams and fantasies of centuries.

Continue reading

Introduction to Ardour FLOSS Manual is now online.

Ardour is a full-featured, free and open-source hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation program suitable for professional use. It features unlimited audio tracks and buses, non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo, and anything-to-anywhere signal routing. It supports standard file formats, such as BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF and CAF, and it can use LADSPA, LV2, VST and AudioUnit plugin formats.

The Introduction to Ardour FLOSS Manual is a free (gratis/libre) tutorial-style book, which introduces the program without expecting a vast knowledge of computers or sound editing from the reader. This FLOSS Manual was largely written by workshop participants learning the software themselves, over a one week period during a session led by Derek Holzer at the moddr_lab/WORM in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Continue reading

Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality by Martha Mockus — a new book from Routledge Press ::

From the author: This book selects important compositions by Pauline Oliveros from 1960 to 1985 and listens to them sounding out lesbian messages of creativity, community, love, and sexuality within Oliveros’s specific social and conceptual milieu. I am inspired by her observation, quoted on page 1, that “it’s funny to listen this way” precisely because it enables a closer engagement with the material and ideological conditions of Oliveros’s music. With each piece I seek to get inside the sounds—how they are produced and their guiding aesthetics—and articulate how I hear them within North American feminist and lesbian contexts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Work in lesbian theory by Terry Castle, Audre Lorde, Sue-Ellen Case, and Teresa de Lauretis as well as lesbian fiction by Dorothy Allison, Jane Rule, and Monique Wittig provide the reverberant spaces within which my listening takes place. Continue reading

[Image: Cover of Brian Eno’s 1974 album “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”] Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics by Geeta Dayal, Rhizome.org:

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking… a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Continue reading

From The Miracle of Feedback by Mario van Horrik in hz-journal:

People may use feedback occasionally, as a small part in a bigger whole, like guitar feedback in pop music. That’s not what this is about. We are using feedback as a conceptual basis for our work. We are searching for the ‘bone’ of sound. We are not scientists, so our characterization of types of feedback maybe not be accurate or complete; however it is based on our practical experience. The types of feedback that I am acquainted with are:

• Direct acoustic feedback: direct contact between speaker and sound source (for instance when you place your electric guitar against the speaker box).
• Indirect acoustic feedback: the process that takes place through the air (microphone in front of speaker) Continue reading