CDM World Tour: catch up with Mike and Liz in Chicago, and Peter and Jaymis in Perth and Brisbane (Australia)!

Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 - 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 - 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

Reel to Wheel is a massive sound-making device built from bicycle parts and a dismantled reel-to-reel tape deck. Move around the absurdly over-sized controls, and its analog inner workings groan and creak their way through recorded sound. Move the wheel at the right speed, and you get an effect quite like scratching — or, since it’s tape, it’s really “scrubbing.”

Reel to Wheel Project Page, with wonderful hand-drawn illustrations featuring Hank the Dummy.

The project, shown last weekend at the Maker Faire, is the creation of Sasha Leitman, Steven Backer, Jesse Fox, and Jen Carlile at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), which had their own booth full of musical interfaces and goodies. Like an equally Biggie-Sized string instrument, Reel to Wheel delighted adults and terrified children with its elegant impracticality. If it seems like sculpture, that’s because it is. In the installation version of the same work, the hardware is part of a Rube Goldberg-like configuration of bikes on mannequins and full-sized stationary bicycles.

This work also suggests that this site has stumbled upon a really bizarre, evolving musical meme. Look at the elements:

Bikes. Our friend Flip Baber created a new arrangement of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in December, recorded on bike parts. Much to our surprise, this story landed on Digg and launched to the most popular CDM story ever (promptly devastating our server), and Flip wound up on television and national radio. As it turns out, quite a lot of our readers are interested in music made with bikes, including bike ensembles, symphonies, and bikelophones, and bikes that control music and graffiti and inspire a young Frank Zappa.

Reel-to-Reel DJing: Because no one can beat-match on reel-to-reels like BBC Radiophonic Workshop wizard Delia Derbyshire.

So, I’m a little terrified that we’ve hit upon some strange statistical anomaly that seems to be tapping us directly into a musical world entirely based on tape and bicycle technology, but I’ll go with it.

In cased you missed it in comments, music-with-bikes resources continue to pour in. If you haven’t found yourself inspired to make music with bikes yet, this should do the trick.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, here are some great thoughts on using the bike as a music controller:

Discussion: Bicycle as a Max/MSP interactive controller [Cycling '74 Forums; thanks, Vlad!]

Reader Michael Una has rigged his bike (above) with magnets and magnetic switches to control a mounted drum machine. The result is a wildly whimsical bike noisier than any bells and honkers could ever make possible: (Mike, if you have a link to that NPR interview once it’s posted, do send it!)

Michael Una Beat Bike

While this is perhaps best-suited to Create Digital Motion, Adam Matta (above) makes art using his bike, Jackson Pollack style. This is all-analog, but it reminds me of the Bikes Against Bush graffiti bike, which used a wireless connection to trigger computer-controlled, custom (non-permanent) paint patterns. It got the talented artist, Joshua Kinberg, in trouble with the law (nothing like bikes, political protest, and graffiti to rile up the NYPD). Adam’s work is more abstract, and might get you started in a digital or non-digital kinetic art project of your own:

Adam Matta Bike Art [thanks, Daryl!]

And added to the compositions for bikes, Mauricio Kagel has another piece of music. I think we need something new, then, like a Segway Symphony.

After the jump, my personal favorite: Frank Zappa playing bicycle music on the Steve Allen show. Or trying to, anyway; Steve Allen is kind of a jerk here and keeps cutting him off, because he seems to miss the point. Best line (paraphrasing here):

How long have you been playing bicycle?

About two weeks.

Listen to the beautiful whistling sound he gets out of the handlebars. Technically not “digital music” but note that what a lot of these projects have in common is amplification. The microphone unlocks all kinds of hidden sonic worlds not experienced in previous centuries, just by making the inaudible audible.

The Bicycle as Musical Instrument turns out to be a surprisingly powerful meme. Last week’s story on the Nutcracker Suite, reconstructed from sampled bike sounds has unleashed links to a whole universe of music produced on bicycles.

The Bike Show, a weekly podcast and radio show from London’s art radio 104.4 FM, happened to do a full podcast episode on music made with bicycles just last week (something in the air, I suppose):

20 November 2006: experimental music and the bicycle, via the all-bike blog Velorution

The Bike Show MP3 Podcast

Best of all, the podcast features artist/composer Stephen Schweitzer’s fantastic Bikelophone, pictured at top. This bizarre assemblage of gear features not only tuned bike parts, but touch-sensitive panels, keyboards, a 16-channel mixer, bells to ring, a bowl to put stuff in and amplify, a PowerBook … ah, well, let’s just let Stephen try to explain all that’s going on:

Bikelophone [Mouse over for component descriptions]

Flip Baber noted that it would be difficult to perform on bicycles without a whole lot of instruments and players. Sure enough, people have done just that. The Bike Show folks are hoping to challenge Londoners to a Tour de France performance of Godfried-Willem Raes’s Second Symphony for ‘Singing Bicycles.’ If you’re not in London or can’t wait, the piece can be performed with just 12 bicyclists. I think this could be a great way to annoy the New York Police Department: want to crack down on our Critical Mass bike rides? Get ready for some en-masse bike performances!

Symphony for Singing Bicyclists

Impromptu symphonies aside, there are a number of regular bike ensembles. The Levenshulme ensemble plays their bikes live, and even uses this specially-adapted bike-instrument, pictured here (from flickr):

Levenshulme Bicycle Ensemble (via velorution again)

And, from CDM comments, yet two more bicycle ensembles’ music, reviewed by Carbusters magazine:

Carbusters Review of Portland Bike Ensemble and Bul Bul Velo

Bul Bul samples, as did Flip for his project; the Portland Bike Ensemble actually plays bikes as strange amplified instruments in improvised ensemble performances:

Bicycles are stood upside down, wired for amplification through various microphones, and played with a beguiling and surprising array of inventive techniques. Spokes are plucked like the strings of a harp, spinning wheels are touched with microphones to produce ethereal otherworldly tones, and cranks are turned with metronomic regularity. The result is an ambient soundscape just this side of cacophony, a mechanical jungle inhabited by curious and expressive machines calling to one another in an organic language.

Still more via comments: the Triplets of Belleville score (thanks, Eliot — great work on hack-a-day, mate!), and a bicycle sound remix project (which, since it’s open source, I suppose you can still go and remix, even if you can’t get on the CD):

Put together by terrific Vancouver label Ache, Project Bicycle is a concept album, with each track created using a common sample of a bicycle making noise. The record is dedicated to promoting the environmentally-friendly transportation method of bicycling, and while it doesn’t really make me want to jump on a bike and jet it to the corner store for a handful of licorice laces, it is a very solid sampling of experimental electronic music from the scene’s current citizens.

-Project Bicycle review on indieville

Thanks, Holotone!

Any bike performers we’ve missed? Play a little bike yourself? Let us know.

More Bikes:

Part III: More Musical Mayhem, Instant Art with Bicycles

Part I: Nutcracker Suite Played Exclusively on Bicycle Parts

Thought every twist on Tchaikovsky had been exhausted in holiday seasons past? Think again: San Francisco-based composer Flip Baber (aka johnnyrandom, pictured) writes to tell us about a compositional challenge that made him turn bike parts into instruments:

I was recently approached by award winning advertising agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to do a composition for their client, Specialized. Specialized is a bike manufacturer and they needed some Christmas music, but with a twist: They wanted me to create the music from only bike sounds. They didn’t even know if it was possible, so they left the song choice up to me to see what I could come up with. Since Jingle Bells is a little overdone this time of year, I thought Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” would be a great alternative. At first I didn’t think it could be done, but as I recorded sounds from my road bike and mountain bike it started to take shape. Here’s the instrumentation and score:

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy

Glockenspiel & Clarinet melody = spokes.
Cello & Violin pizzicatos = plucked derailleur cables.
Triangle = disc brake hit.
Percussion = shifting, coasting, finger over turning spokes, chain pulls, braking, clipping into pedals, back-spinning, air out of tires.

Even knowing what’s being used, it’s pretty unbelievable once you actually hear the results:

MP3, Specialized Nutcracker Suite

Johnny Random composer site (reel, bio, more music)
Specialized Bicycle Components

Updated: Specialized has posted the video that goes with this. Watch through to the end for a sound-by-sound rundown of what each sample is.

Alternative transportation never sounded so sweet; perhaps bicycle part instruments will be the next big thing. Proof there’s little you can’t do with digital sampling. Flip says the visuals are on the way; stay tuned and let us know if you’ve got any questions for the composer. Updated: Flip fills us in on some of the details on the recording process …