Exploring the connection of the mechanical to sound, UK-based artists Stephen Cornford and Paul Whitty make reclaimed tape machines into instruments. All images courtesy LEAP.
In performance and art, sound and music constantly pull against the formless abstraction of the computer, to find physical expression and realization. In physical control, in tangible production, and in exploration of space, artists explore techniques new and old to refine the still-youthful medium of electronic and digital sound. That adventure is at the heart of a new series at a gallery space in the heart of Berlin, LEAP – the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, at Alexanderplatz.
I’m pleased to announce that CDM will be partnering with this new performance/exhibition series, entitled BodyControlled, as a media partner. In the shadow of Berlin’s Fernsehturm (TV tower), we’ll get the chance to share the work of an international roster of artists with everyone else, both in live streams and other documentation, as we look at some of the more experimental threads in electronic music today. (I like the symbolism there, at least, now broadcast over the Internets instead of via the air.) Berlin, like my previous home New York, is a convenient international crossroads, a place where you can find face-to-face some of the work from other parts of Germany, Europe, and beyond.
And I think we’re going to have a real blast kicking the series off this Saturday night, 8pm Berlin time November 26. The premiere of the series begins with installations and performances that manipulate spaces, real, virtual, and imagined. New works make noises with reel-to-reel tape, code, mechanical percussion, and more. I’ll be playing a live set with Pd, producing granular architectures from the harmonious sounds of piano and synth. And a highlight promises to be Robert Henke (of Monolake and Ableton fame, among other things), performing an epic 12-hour performance from just before midnight to morning the next day. (That leaves ample time for visitors to slip off to Berlin’s legendary club scene – or a nap – then see how things have evolved after dawn, if you so choose.)
Here, we take a first look at some of the artists, whose work can be sculptural, challenging, and adventurous. In the first preview videos, we see artists working with the mechanical qualities of tape and robotically-driven percussion to make sounds in physical space. A diverse program is slated for the coming months, too, so I can promise some diversity in ideas and aesthetic. The lineup:
Performances on the 26th November:
Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty (UK)
Peter Kirn (US)
Robert Henke (DE)
Installations until 2nd December:
Stephen Cornford (UK)
Julian Oliver (NZ)
João Martinho Moura (PT)
Robert Mathy (AT)
Additionally, a recording of Robert Henke’s performance will be played as part of the installation
Let’s have a closer look at some of the upcoming work: Continue reading »
Dig into humanity’s past, and alongside the earliest tools, you’ll find some of the earliest instruments. Designing objects for expression seems to be an essential part of civilization.
Martin Kaltenbrunner, a co-designer of the Reactable tangible music interface, is also a professor in Interface Culture at the Linz University of Arts in Austria. There, in the land of Mozart and Haydn, he works with students to explore what interface design is.
So, when I got to spend some time with Martin in New York in September, I was interested in more than just the flashy coolness of the Reactable, the futuristic table-with-blocks interface for music. We got a chance to talk about instrument design generally. The funny thing about the Reactable is that it is closer to the experience of working with a modular synthesizer and oscilloscope than anything else, with the sense of physical connections of sound to object you’d get from classic synths. It is something unique, truly, but that’s its pedigree. Continue reading »
As an addendum to yesterday’s teaser of the Evolution multi-touch keyboard, readers send along a couple of other examples. Andrew McPherson has a terrific example of an add-on, multi-touch, capacitive surface that can go on any keyboard (so, basically the same idea).
Description:
This video demonstrates a set of capacitive touch sensing piano key tops which mount on top of any existing piano or MIDI keyboard. The key tops sense up to three touches each by position and contact area, letting the performer continuously and polyphonically shape every note in multiple dimensions. The system connects to a computer by USB and uses OSC for flexible communication with a wide variety of synthesis software.
See also the paper published on the design, and of course, the video. (Thanks, Andrew! Nice work – will we see more?)
From Vol 14, No. 2 Summer 1990 issue of Computer Music Journal, none other than Bob Moog joins Berklee’s Thomas L. Rhea to evaluate keyboard instrument design, and specifically refers to touch overlays on the keys (via resistive, not capacitive sensing).
“Evolution of the Keyboard lnterface: The Bøsendorfer 290 SE Recording Piano and The Moog Multiply-Touch-Sensitive Keyboards.” (A PDF is available, albeit not a … legal one. Thanks for the tip, Dan!)
And as for the Evolution, the release date will be Wednesday, November 23. Simon Kemper explains, “In just 2 days we will answer all your questions. Also there will be some more videos and tutorials. We also offer a software to control and individualize the evo. It is called “COMM” and makes everything between MIDI and OSC possible. So mapping the evos touch sensors to poly-AT, and so on, is also no problem.”
There are definitely some skills to pick up here, but that’s true with any alternative instrument. I’m eager to try one of these out.
A new design launching this week should appeal to keyboardists who want both more expressive touch control and a keyboard – without sacrificing one or the other.
Yes, yes, multi-touch on tablets does indeed give your fingers access to continuous control for added expression and pitch. But there’s a reason keyboards evolved keys: tangible feedback about where pitches are, and the ability to control dynamics with pressure (itself with additional mechanical tangible feedback) just isn’t matched by touchscreens.
We’ll be looking on an ongoing basis at how you can take the flexibility of those touchscreens and match them with more tangible controls. But here’s one example: the German-engineered Evo keyboard really is a conventional keyboard, with all the advantages therein, but combined with capacitive touch on every single key. In other words, it navigates around the very tradeoffs of which I was recently critical in iPad developments, namely, additional expression coming at the expense of tactile feel. (I got some pretty intense criticism for things I said in that article which remain, to me, fairly obvious: a tablet is not a device you can play with your eyes closed, and – in its present form – no matter how hard you hit it, you can’t control dynamics.)
Of course, this does require buying specialized hardware, and it’s a controller only – unlike that tablet, you’ll still need a sound source and (at least for some tasks) a display, both of which are integrated in the tablet. But it is a compelling alternative that introduces a different set of possibilities for playability.
In fact, it’s also not the first time designers have thought in this direction. All the way back to the Martenot, keyboard designers have looked for ways to bend keys or add additional continuous expression – polyphonic aftertouch being the most common (though still relatively rare) solution. But none of those inventions could build on the accessibility of touch on the keys. I’m curious to see what playing this feels like; fans of getting away from the piano keyboard and all its history entirely will likely (and fairly) scoff, but for those of us who want to merge our piano background, something like this merits consideration.
Here’s how the creator describes it; I hope to catch up with this invention soon in person. Continue reading »
Between conventional knobs and hardware controls and “magical” tablets, might we yet see real action in a third category of controller? Keith McMillen Instruments, makers of the SoftStep foot controller and K-Bow controller, are now venturing into fingertip territory. The QuNeo is a “crowd-sourced” project with apparently some open components, available now in preorder form on Kickstarter.
We’ve seen touch controllers that, in terms of basic form factor, followed similar design directions as the QuNeo but that didn’t take off. M-Audio (then Midiman) got only as far as the prototype phase with the Surface One; Stanton’s SCS series went into production but apparently didn’t take to the market.
The KMI design promises more, with velocity response, continuous pressure, and color LED feedback on each sensor. The addition of actual pressure/velocity sensing, and a design that gives you some tactile feedback on where the controls are, would set it apart from a device like the iPad, which has no such usable pressure response and an undifferentiated surface.
The controls themselves:
251 multi-color LEDs
16 square pads each with X/Y, velocity, and continuous pressure (that should map nicely to rolls, etc., or using them as melodic pads)
In the midst of all this talk of intangible digital intellectual property and arcane licensing and Internet policy, there’s something comforting about thinking of music and art as something you make with your hands and give to someone. It was a discussion of that – even in the context of technology – that first led me to the discussion of “Handmade Music.” (Tip of the hat to my friend, Etsy’s Matt Stinchcomb, with whom this discussion has crossed the Atlantic from Brooklyn to Berlin.)
Via Cool Hunting, here’s an old-fashioned way of making a music object. The music is on vinyl; the book is carved into blocks and hand-printed. Any sense of nostalgia or twee hipness is instantly forgiven once you see the results: the book looks absolutely gorgeous. Kids will have to compete with their parents to get it.
Two stories in a single canvas-covered volume that reads from the outside covers inward, ending at the center. There, a two-song 70 gram 7″ vinyl inside a hand-cranked copper block printed sleeve.
Stories written, illustrated, carved, and printed by Micah Middaugh at Cavern Lantern Wonder Welding (Jordan River Valley, Mich.)
Songs by Breathe Owl Breathe
The story sounds wonderful, too. As CH’s James Thorne tells it: Continue reading »
If you haven’t been following the (excellent) coverage elsewhere, just how bad is the “Firewall of the United States,” the draconian Internet dystopia misguided legislation in the US proposes to create?
That legislation is so vague, so far-reaching, so poorly-designed, that it potentially threatens all kinds of sites musicians regularly use. And little wonder: a backwards legislation process in the US has locked out the very Internet and tech companies that have until now been glimmers of hope in a stagnant US economy.
The crux of this issue is the impact on legal sites, and democracy and speech online. For an alternative view, the MPAA argument is that existing Digital Millenium Copyright Act safe harbor provisions would continue to exist under the new legislation, thus protecting legal sites – like this one. However, I find compelling the arguments of speech and legal policy advocates who point to differences in the way the enforcement mechanism works here, which could potentially invalidate that safe harbor and shift undue burden to publishers before they have time to respond.
Social networks, file sharing services, and other tools we use (lobbyists, for instance, call out even things like MegaUpload as “rogue”) are endangered.
The presumed answer, that “you’ll be fine if you have nothing to hide,” is the worst kind of defense for what can only be described as bald-faced censorship. Because complaints are guilty-until-proven-innocent, because the legislation is too broadly worded, the net effect is that any site publishing online could be brought down by a simple complaint – even from a competitor or aggrieved party. The history of “snitch”-based censorship of all the worst kinds is littered with cautionary tales of what happens when that’s the standard.
And that’s to say nothing of the potential for higher costs, negative growth, and legal burdens on the entire Internet service ecosystem on which sites like this one depend, not to mention new DNS security chaos triggered by turning the US – still the largest Web consuming country – into something that resembles China, Iran, and Syria.
An alliance of people who claim to speak in the name of musicians, content creators, and copyright holders are right now proceeding on a course that would destroy a lot of the most innovative tools that protect your livelihood. They have some reasonable intentions in mind – a justifiable fear of big sites that flaunt copyright rules to share anything. But they extend that into a policy that unjustifiably expands its reach to legal sites. That’s why:
Google / YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites that have helped us spread the word about our music are opposing it, afraid it could shut the entire sites down or usher in a new, more censored, shrinking network. (Heck, even LinkedIn and Mozilla are worried, and a site that shares resumes hardly seems the kind of “rogue” and pro-infringement villain the record industry keeps trying to paint as its critics.)
Kickstarter, the tool that has helped artists fund themselves and do preorder sales, is opposing the bill for fear a single instance of infringement could block everyone’s projects.
Tumblr, a key publishing platform used by many musicians and artists, warned its users via a dashboard that the legislation threatened their ability to express themselves online. Tumblr has a specific call to action.
Democracy activists worry that this silence voices of democracy around the world by blocking the tools they use to get around censorship (ironically, by creating similar censorship in what had been a country with online freedom).
The ultimate irony: because the SOPA legislation would block DNS and not IP addresses, it would do little to stem actual piracy of music and video. Instead, it threatens the freedom of the artists themselves to use these tools. Continue reading »
Peter Kirn
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James Grahame
Primus Luta
michaeluna
Kim Cascone
Ben Long
Tom Whitwell
John Jacobus
Chris Stack
Marsha Vdovin
Markus Schroeder
Matt Earp
Kristin Trethewey