Ivory tower, let down your hair.

And Herr Monolake has been kind enough to let us share ten minutes of that live performance. I heard this duo in Berlin, and it’s stunning in person, but you can get a feel for Robert working live even in the stream. See also Tarik Barri talking about how he does visuals and works with Jitter, at top, courtesy the fine folks of Cycling ’74. Have a listen, have a look, and then get your Google ready for all the artists Gina scopes out below. -PK

Every year, Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) puts on Modulations, a concert showcasing some of the best music that comes out of the CCRMA community.

The night was rich with electronic music both danceable and cerebral, and gorgeous visuals were supplied by Mary Franck and Tarik Barri. Visiting professor Robert Henke headlined the event this year, playing under his moniker monolake, with long-time collaborator Tarik Barri manipulating visuals live. Henke is teaching a class at Stanford on composition called “Sound, Structure, and Machines“, while Barri is working with Atoms for Peace.

Carr Wilkerson has put on Modulations since its first year at CCRMA in 2007. The first Modulations was actually in New Orleans and a concert for electronic musicians at Tulane University.

Photo from the 2005 Modulations in New Orleans, LA. Source: Carr Wilkerson

The vision for Modulations at CCRMA was similar: break out of the ivory tower of academia, and connect with the community at large. CCRMA holds many concerts throughout the year, open to the public and usually well-attended, but always on campus either at the program’s building (which, to be fair, is pretty killer) or at the new Bing Auditorium. Modulations is the only event thrown by CCRMA in San Francisco, a city whose music technology community is rapidly growing in many directions.

This was the first year that Modulations ran for 2 nights, April 6 and 7 at Broadway Studios in North Beach, San Francisco. Previously it was held at CELLspace in the Mission District, as well as the Compound and SOMArts. CELLspace recently closed its doors but will reopen as Inner Mission SF.

Both Saturday and Sunday were structured to flow from more ambient, avant-garde computer music to modern live electronica. Kurt James Werner’s piece “First Cyclical Redundancy Check” explored glitches both visual and auditory. He used a technique I call “meta-Jittering” to produce his visual effects, using Jitter functions on the Max patch and MATLAB script GUIs themselves.

Kurt James Werner plays his MATLAB + Max/MSP + Jitter creation. Source: Gina Collecchia

He played on a home-brewed circuit bent Yamaha PSS-270 with some samples from his 2012 album Schism Method.

RVNG artist and PhD candidate Holly Herndon performed with a huge range of live vocal processing techniques for her set, featuring works from her new album, Movement.

Holly Herndon performs with live vocals at Modulations.

Luke Dahl played a live set alongside industrial animations by Mary Franck.

monolake closed the night both Saturday and Sunday, performing Ghosts. He played a large part in prescribing the speaker configuration at Modulations, featuring a large, 4-channel Meyer sound system for the front of house, an 8.6-channel circular configuration of speakers hanging above the stage (adding spatialization via Ambisonics), and 2 monitors on stage. He used an iPad running Lemur and 2 Doepfer MIDI faders to perform Ghosts live.

Downstairs, student projects from the CCRMA class Music 250B were installed throughout the room. These installations were experiments in reverberation, many using transducers to create amplifiers out of the unexpected.

A phone was wired up to a sink to route sound.

Transducers on metal flowers create unique timbres.

Jeffrey Rowell’s “pendulum guitar” magnetically induced amplitude modulation.

“Room in a room” by Romain Michon suspended springs in a hand-welded cart and processed the signal with a Raspberry Pi.

Other artists who presented were Jennifer Hsu, Locky, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, Mike Gao, Myles Borins, Tim O’Brien, Eoin Callery, Colin Sullivan, Alexandra Hay, and Luke Iannini. SF-based artists Wobbly and Sutekh played at Modulations in 2011. Christina Chatfield and Tarik Barri headlined in 2012.

Robert Henke performs his new work Stanford Dust on May 23 and 24 in Bing Studio on campus, and again with his Sound, Structure, and Machines class at the CCRMA Spring Concert on May 28, at the same venue. Tickets: May 23 ($10), May 24 ($10), May 28 (FREE).

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/
http://ginacollecchia.com/

Standuino π [pi] synced with frauAngelico + microGranny from standuino on Vimeo.

Once the stuff of noise art oddity — isolated electronic experiments staying mostly on the test table — the DIY instrument is starting to find friends and form ensembles. And so it is that Czech instrument design mad scientists Standuino have assembled a clever little suite of open boards, happily chirping and glitching and droning together in musical harmony.

So, before we start delving into the esoteric number theory of the new “π” drone synth, behold as their three creations play together in the video at top. There’s even sync. And a groove. An exceptionally odd groove, but a groove nonetheless. This is what KORG’s Volcas are like in a really strange alternate universe. (In that universe, KORG doesn’t worry about exposing raw circuit boards on the outside of the case. And maybe everyone wears their underwear on the outside of their pants, like superheroes.)

Back to π, though. It has a manifesto worthy of the illuminati. And it makes sounds that resemble someone on the hidden Rebel base tuning in their radar. Or maybe of a rave with the Borg. (Yes, I’m mixing Trek and Wars. Blame J.J. Abrams and Barack Obama.)

Here’s what it sounds like:

I especially love the handmade carry case. This is something that is missing in a lot of commercial products.

Now, who’d like a nice slice of pi?

π is infinite transcendental number. It represents circle – the symbol of unity, universe and spirit. The limited edition of this very special instrument is mysterious as π itself. It gives you infinite ground to explore. You can`t get total control of it. You rather have a partner that can find your needs. There are 3 different randomizers to get deep into its sound possibilities and patchable clock sequencer. It is field for exploration in the mathematical world of sounds … and circles.

Lost? Okay, they also share these stats:

several oscillators, wavetables and synthesis types
settings accessed by randomizers
4 presets
patchable clock sequencer
internal clock or MIDI clock divider
MIDI input
UV leds
numbered limited edition

As I understand it, there’s lots of Arduino magic powering all the variants of their boards. And then they start mixing and matching clever and weird interface conventions to make instruments that are unpredictable, unstable state machines that tread a line between tuning in sounds and creating musical surprise. But the results are clever. More on the experiments with my own soon.

Enjoy:

http://www.standuino.eu/musical-instruments/pi/

In the exciting world of Things That Aren’t An iPhone, Moog Music have announced, out of the blue, a version of their popular Animoog synth for BlackBerry Z10.

Animoog for BlackBerry Z10

In a tweet to CDM, Moog Music reflected, “The more creative tools artists have the more music the world will have.”

I couldn’t agree more. But platforms have posed some serious hurdles to making development pay off for independent music software makers, with technical hurdles that can make performance a challenge. If BB10 is something different, that’s good news.

These kinds of ports aren’t necessarily so odd. A lot of the most significant code in a music app is DSP code that’s portable from one hardware platform to another. There’s still a lot of effort in working with native APIs on those platforms, even if the UI is rendered largely in technologies like OpenGL or Web renderers – more so if not. But then, that becomes a question of the resistance level of the platform itself: will it be pleasurable or painful to do that work, and will you be able to verify the results? (On Android, for instance, it’s often been the latter where things fall apart – the APIs are nice enough on paper, but don’t always work reliably on the myriad devices people actually own, sometimes breaking down altogether.)

In this case, Moog touts that they are “the 1st leading synth manufacturer to introduce a high-powered music creation tool” for the new platform. That’s a slightly dubious honor, and probably doesn’t need so many qualifiers; I don’t know of any other music devs going after BlackBerry. (Though I’d be happy to be corrected – any CDM readers developing for the Z10?) The big question will be not whether Moog is the first, but whether they’re the last.

In any event, someone who did get one of these phones now has a great synth to try out. And perhaps others will follow.

Speaking of Android, it doesn’t appear there’s much news to report from Google IO. There is one session covering high-performance audio, with a nod to OpenSL ES. I hope to find out what the presenters there are talking about, and if the new Nexus version of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 – or Samsung’s own OS build – will support the low-latency audio profile for Android. We saw that a full year ago, and since haven’t seen other devices.

In fact, the presence of Animoog on BlackBerry before Android seems yet another negative endorsement for Google’s platform, which has been – rightfully, I think – widely maligned by frustrated audio developers.

I’ll let you know when any of you should bother glancing up from your iPhones and iPads.

What if patching, as on screen, involved physical unit generators you could connect with cables? KK Chau sends this project that answers that question. It’s modular at the lowest possible level – each box with one or two knobs, doing just one thing. And the sound? The sound is … uh, awful, actually. In a fun way.

Not much info, but there’s not too much to say – this is analog patchable insanity. As the creator puts it, it’s intended to “let people to make MSP/Pure Data-type synthesising logic in analog world.”

Out today, Arpeggionome is the iPhone follow-up to an iPad grid instrument, making lovely, elegant cascades of notes from a screen full of circles. The work of San Francisco-based electrical engineer Alexander Randon, it’s especially nice to see not just the app itself, but the music the developer makes with his own tool.

Watch the video, and you’ll get a feel for how he makes his creation musically expressive.

Evidently inspired by both the Tenori-On and the community of monome apps, Arpeggionome has a number of features that set it apart from other tools. It’s tough to find iPhone apps that are as handy as iPad apps, given its smaller size. But here, there are some clever touches.

Parameter changes are quantized – a move Alexander says was inspired by Ableton Live. That makes the app well-suited to beat-driven music, but also more practical to handheld idea sketching.

MIDI support (available via a $4.99 in-app upgrade) is robust, with MIDI clock sync and external MIDI triggering. You can even trigger whole patterns via MIDI, a nice addition for live performance. That makes this usable in larger rigs in a way some apps (cough, iMaschine) still aren’t, and extends the playability of even the pocket-able iPhone version.

Parameter view knobs have a smart touch adaptation: Alexander notes that you can “drag-down and release” and “reset the knob to its stored value with the pattern.”

Also included:

• X-Y matrix triggers patterns across pitches and speeds, hence the dizzying streams of notes you hear in the demo.
• Accelerometer/tilt for pitch band and volume.
• 15 touch knobs.
• Lots of included presets, or build from scratch.
• 240 notes per second in the Performance Matrix, with adjustments for start note and rate.
• MIDI (via in-app purchase) for everything: Virtual MIDI (between apps), CoreMIDI hardware interfaces, MIDI over Bluetooth, and MIDI over WiFi.

There’s in-built documentation, and the whole tool is built with the free Pure Data library (to which I helped contribute in some modest way) libpd.
Alexander also sends along some nice words as a reader, to which I say, those of you working on this really do inspire one another with your ideas, so all of you can take some credit for seeing concepts spread through music making. (He also gives nods to Ray Wenderlich and StackOverflow as iOS development resources!)

$.99 through this month (and in-app MIDI is cheaper than normal, too); full price will be US$2.99.

But let’s hear some of Alexandernaut’s music, too, ethereal, moody music, tightly quantized and taking apparent inspiration from eerie video game scores of yore. It’s available free on Bandcamp, and you can listen here:

– and, of course, he’s put together an all-Arpeggionome record, also free on Bandcamp.

http://alexander-randon.com/music/

The apps, including a Music Hack Day version that became the sophisticated Pro app for iPad and now this:

http://alexander-randon.com/arpeggionome/

CDM and yours truly team up with Berlin arts collective Mindpirates next week for a learning event we hope will be a little different than most. The idea behind the gathering is to combine learning in some new ways. The evenings begin with more traditional instruction, as I cover, step-by-step, how you’d assemble beat machines, instruments, effects, and video mixers using free software (Pure Data and Processing).

But, we’ll go a little further, opening up sessions to hacking and jamming, finally using the event space at Mindpirates to try out ideas on the PA and projectors. By the last night, we’ll all get to play together for the public before opening things up to a party at night. I know when I’ve personally gotten to do this, I’ve gotten more out of a learning experience. Getting to do it with the aim of creating useful instruments and beats and visuals here, then, I think makes perfect sense.

Working with free software in this case means that anyone can participate, without the need for special software or even the latest computers. (What we’re doing will work on Raspberry Pi, for instance, or old netbooks, perfect for turning small and inexpensive hardware into a drum machine.) No previous experience is required: everyone will get to brush up on the basics, with beginning users getting the essentials and more advanced users able to try out other possibilities in the hack sessions.

If you’re in easyJet distance of Berlin, of course, we’d love to see you and jam with you. In trying to keep this affordable for Berliners, we’ve made this 40 € total for three nights including a meal each evening and a guest list spot on the Saturday night party.

But I hope this is the sort of format we can try out elsewhere, too. If you have ideas of what you’d like to see in this kind of instruction – in-person events being ideal, but also perhaps in online tutorials – let us know.

Create Digital Music + Mindpirates present: Laptops on Acid
Facebook event

Pre-registration required; spots limited – Eventbrite
Register while spots are still available!

(fellow European residents, I’m as annoyed at the absence of bank transfer/EC payment at Eventbrite as you are – we’re working on an alternative, so you should email elisabeth (at) mindpirates [dot] org to register if you don’t want to use that credit card system!)

Canadian Col. Chris Hadfield, aboard the International Space Station, has done what you would probably want to do if aboard the high-flying orbital outpost: make a music video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” And he works “Soyuz” into the lyrics. (Thankfully, he refrains from making it “Colonel Chris.” The only complaint: a shame it can’t cut between the ISS and Mission Control.)

Colonel Hadfield, if you can hear us and have a moment, we’d love to hear how you produced the recording. Not that zero-g means too much for sound production – though I imagine keeping the mic steady becomes a new concern.

Update – David Bowie band veteran Emm Gryner worked on the track’s production, and she explains a bit of how it came about on her blog:

The task was in front of me. I came up with a piano part. i then enlisted my friend, producer and fellow Canadian Joe Corcoran to take my piano idea and Chris’ vocal and blow it up into a fully produced song. Drums! mellotrons! fuzz bass! We also incorporated into the track ambient space station noises which Chris had put on his Soundcloud. I was mostly blown away by how pure and earnest Chris’ singing is on this track. Like weightlessness and his voice agreed to agree.

May 12, 2013: Space Oddity in Space

Description:

A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

With thanks to Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran, Andrew Tidby and Evan Hadfield for all their hard work.

Find out more:

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield?­­fref=ts
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/po­­sts/p/pub

The astronaut himself also writes his own music, and performed a touching duet with Canadian artists back on the ground, including a bunch of kids and the Barenaked Ladies. It’s especially nice to hear him put in song his feelings about seeing his homeland and getting to work on a space project driven by cooperating nations, rather than competing ones:

Watch the video above as astronaut Chris Hadfield, from aboard the International Space Station, performs “I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)” with Ed Robertson, the rest of the Barenaked Ladies and the Wexford Gleeks from Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts, who were all at the CBC studios in Toronto.

The song, which was written by Hadfield and Robertson in partnership with Music Monday, CBC Music and the Canadian Space Agency, explores what it’s like to look down on the Earth from outer space. It will also be the official song for the 2013 edition of Music Monday, which takes place on May 6.

Whether in orbit or on the ground, I hope we remain in a music community that still believes in the future, that Space is the Place.

Event listings you can play: Beatguide’s guide to electronic music events combines event metadata with listening.

If it’s music events, what your calendar really needs is a play button.

A funny thing happened on the way to the online music world. Roughly a century after the music recording revolution, we’re all newly concerned with getting into venues with other human beings.

The problem is – and there’s no nice way to say this – the tools out there just aren’t very good. Facebook’s popularity is unquestionable, to be sure, but it still doesn’t cater to music needs with its event listings. And beyond that, there’s a scattered landscape of different tools, none of which seems to answer basic needs.

Beatguide is just getting started this week, but it seems to have hit upon a nice combination. Focused on electronic music events, the formula is simple. Start with a city (Beatguide launches with Berlin), then see events by date, cost, and genre.

Then, you get the difference: you can listen to any of the events. After all, what ultimately determines if you want to go to a music event is what the music sounds like. (That should be painfully obvious, but that makes it all the more frustrating how many sites have gotten it wrong.)

It’s also telling that this is a music startup in Berlin. SoundCloud’s shadow looms large over the endlessly-hyped tech scene in the German capital, suggesting that this isn’t so much the best tech center in Europe so much as it is a good place to start a creative company. Accordingly, local tech blog Silicon Allee picks up the story with a nice profile.

Beatguide delivers event listings through a handy Web interface as well as a mobile app. It’s a pleasure scoping out music events just by listening to a feed. The music, for its part, comes from SoundCloud artist listings – another reason those SoundCloud accounts turn out to be a must for musicians. Obviously, this service’s relevance is limited to geography, though that itself is an appeal (especially for those of us receiving hundreds of event listings each month on Facebook for cities we can’t reach). But the founders promise other cities in the near future, following Berlin. Event submission at the moment is primitive: there’s an email address for the moment. But with easy sorting and music listening, I’d say this already bests rival Resident Advisor for listings. (I still wholeheartedly endorse Resident Advisor for its great editorial content, but I find I’ve spent less and less time with its calendar.)

To me, though, the story is a bit deeper than the particular implementation. So much of the focus on streaming has been whether artists can get revenue from it. As that answer continues to be a depressing, resounding “no,” it seems to me that a more significant question is whether it can get warm bodies to live events.

In a (very non-electronic) genre, the excellent American public radio show Mountain Stage ends each program by imploring listeners to go out and see a live show in their neighborhood. It seems the proper message for any “stream,” whether by radio or Internet.

Add a “play button” to the calendar is a good start.

Check out Beatguide if you’re in Berlin, visiting, or curious:

https://beatguide.me

Beatguide’s Brendon Blackwell tells us a bit more about what to expect in coming days:

Tomorrow or the next day we will have the form up for people to add events.

We always thought it was strange that the promotion of events never included the music, so that’s where it began.

We will also be releasing a widget very soon, which can be placed on Facebook or other blogs which will allow people to see the details of events and play the music from the page it is shared.

All you will to do is share the url of an event and player will load in.

Sounds good. Having watched the early genesis of SoundCloud before it blew up, I really wish this service the best – as I’d like to use it myself, as artist and listener alike.

Oh, and impressively, it’s already working for an event I’m playing a week from Saturday:
https://beatguide.me/berlin/event/mindpirates-void-x-offline-20130513

This week, at Germany’s re:publica conference – an event linking offline and online worlds – I addressed the question of how musical inventions can help predict the way we use tools. I started all the way back tens of thousands of years ago with the first known (likely) musical instrument. From there, I looked at how the requirements of musical interfaces – in time and usability – can inform all kinds of design problems.

And I also suggested that musicians don’t lag in innovation as much as people might expect.

I thought about whether I wanted to post this as a video, as it’d be more structured if I wrote it as an article. But it occurs that some people might like to hear me talk off the cuff, “ums” and all, and those who did could provide some feedback. I really never give the same talk twice; I’m constantly revising my thoughts and part of the reason is being challenged by feedback. (Yes, as blogging may seem a solo monologue, in my experience it’s more like a feedback loop, not an echo chamber. Otherwise, I wouldn’t keep doing it.)

Full description:

http://13.re-publica.de/sessions/how-music-can-predict-humanmachine-future

From HAL to Wiimotes and Kinect, musicians have predicted the future of machine/human interaction. Because music connects with time, body, and emotion in a unique way, they test the limits of technology. Now it’s time to work out what comes next.

What’s going on here – how did musicians manage to invent major digital interaction tech before anyone else? Before the iPad, the first commercial multi-touch product was built for musicians and DJs. Before the Wii remote, musicians built gestural controllers, dating back to the early part of the 20th century. Before the moon landing, Max Mathews’ team of researchers taught computers to make music and sing, inspired HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and may have even built the precursor to object-oriented programming. Music’s demands – to be expressive, real-time, and play with others – can test the limitations of technology in a way people feel deeply, and help us get beyond those limitations. Music technologist Peter Kirn will explore the history of these connections, show how those without any background in music can learn from this field, and examine how musicians may be at the forefront again, as they push the boundaries of 3D-printing, data mining, online interaction, embedded hardware, and even futuristic, cyborg-like wearable technology. Even if you can’t hold a tune, you may get a sense of how to get ahead of those trends – before HAL gets there first.

Finishing research for a talk at Genève’s Mapping Festival, I came across this gem from comments on Create Digital Motion. It’s the innovative Lumigraph, an interactive light experiment by visionary film and animation pioneer Oskar Fischinger. The sci-fi film looked ahead to what the music of 2071 might be like, in 1964′s The Time Travelers. To their credit, goofy love lounge aside, the reuse of Fischinger’s abstract light project isn’t far off from music in 2013. (And, hey, whatever puts you in the mood.)

Fischinger, for his part, almost certainly wasn’t thrilled with the use of his creation in this manner. But, then, part of the reason it makes sense today is because Fischinger’s abstract animations have had such a profound impact on computer animation, that now it’s second nature to combine visuals with music in the way the made-up Lumichord does. The groovy music comes from Richard LaSalle, whose prolific scoring career included the likes of the Wonder Woman TV show.

Consider: you could actually play this performance, and dress the way these folks are, at your local av festival. Time traveling, indeed.

But if you want to see this the way Fischinger did intend, the terrific Center for Visual Music is working to preserve his work and others, and could use our support. They have a 1969 performance by Elfriede Fischinger that better represents how the instrument was intended.

And Oskar Fischinger was happy to let you “play” the light as instrument:

Oskar called his invention a “new Color-Play instrument…The instrument is played by HAND and produces the most fantastic color display – but controlled direct through the Player.”

Inspiring stuff.