Andrew Turley writes to share his microfiche-to-MIDI music maker, which he shared at the Maker Faire. The idea: take the humble library microfiche, and translate light and dark values into MIDI, fed to a Casio keyboard. Sound like a random idea? Well, it would be — except Andrew happens to be in a band called Microfiche. (Check them out on MySpace.) None other than IEEE Spectrum — yes, from the IEEE standards body that brings us stuff like FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) — got hands-on with his project; IEEE Spectrum’s Josh Romero named it one of his favorite musical projects at the faire.

Maker Faire Highlights: Making Music the Hard Way [IEEE Spectrum]

Andrew has more impressions of the Faire on his blog Pillowsopher:

I’ve been there for the last two days presenting some of my projects, such as:

• Unicorn Vs. Dolphin
• my stomp pad
• $2 multitouch instrument (based on the water-in-a-bag design by Erling Ellingsen)
• Rock Band Keynote
• the Microfiche Machine (light to MIDI converter for the band Microfiche)
• the LED VU Meter

Cool, but I’d love to do this with microfilm — especially with the film cranked up to full speed. Wheeeee— click, click … crap. Film came off the spool. (What, am I the only person who’s done old-fashioned library research?)

More Maker Faire Videos

Make: Blog’s resident musicologist Collin Cunningham has a video with more of the music projects at Maker Faire:
Musical interfaces @ Maker Faire from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo.

Anyone else with fun Maker Faire reports, do send them our way. Sorry I couldn’t make it this year — but I’ll take this opportunity to finally edit all this footage I have from Yuri’s Night Bay Area, for more Greater San Francisco DIY Musical Goodness!

Despite the name, the Bent Festival this year promises to be about not only circuit bending, but DIY sound in general. (Circuit shaping? Circuit straightening? General circuitration?) Our friend and CDM regular Mike Una has put together fantastic art installations for Minneapolis. Workshops in NYC and LA dig into the mysteries of sensors and tubes, the potential of video bending, and giant, battery-powered noise to drown out the rest of the world. And there are gobs and gobs of performers.

Like the North American air currents, Bent begins in the West, moves across the Heartland, and into New York City. (Okay, actually, when I first reported on this year’s Bent, the dates were different, so pay attention!)

LA - April 17 - 19

New York - April 24 - 26

Minneapolis - May 1 - 3

And lest you think Bent isn’t as Bent this year, there’s still a Furby Orchestra to cap it all off.

Bent Festival site has the whole scoop, plus Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever else you crazy kids use today. (Hey! Where’s the AOL keyword?)

If you make it to any of the festivals and document — or if you’re playing/presenting — do share.

If you want new ideas about design and interaction, ask a musician. Before the Wii remote, the iPhone, Microsoft’s Surface, and Minority Report, musicians were trying oddball ideas for music performance. That hasn’t slowed down, either, from the futuristic and space-y to down-and-dirty acoustic techniques. We’ve got quite a gamut coming up for our madcap, sound and noise-packed hour of competition happening this Saturday at NASA’s Ames Research center during Yuri’s Night, and we’d love to share them with everyone online.

For starters, here’s the rundown of the projects with links to project sites and artists, and all the judges:

Futuristic Music Design Challenge: Meet the Competitors, Judges

Join the event on Facebook

The projects: the Bubblegum Sequencer (previously on CDM), The Box custom hardware with colored lights + Reaktor ensemble, the surface-temperature tangible interface table Weather Report (previously on CDM), the strange polygonal Kromatron wireless instrumental interface, the Thimbletron gloves-as-samplers with lab coated performers project (previously on CDM), the bicycle wheel and analog tape Looping Pedal (previously on CDM), the computer-powered musical saw WaveSaw, the 28-string just-intoned microtonal casmolyra, the turntablist custom software ammoBox and the GrooveStep DS pattern maker (previously on CDM).

I’m also pleased to announce…

The judges:

• Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine (in my opinion, anyway) and creator of the MPC60 for Akai, plus recent creations — and he plays the mandolin
• Liz Enthusiasm, lead singer of Freezepop (check out their albums or just play a Harmonix game) and evidently an expert on Dr. Pepper
• (Matt) Ganucheau, a mastermind of Yuri’s Night’s music and art, a composer and sound designer (and teacher of sound design for games), an electronic musician, and creator of the NSFW "foreplay robot" Moaning Lisa
• … and yours truly as emcee

Speaking of Roger Linn, Tom at Music Thing just posted an auction on the pre-Akai prototype.

Hopefully we’ll get to do some quick interviews with the judges, as well, for Planet CDM. Stay tuned on yuricdm.com.

Hello from Ground Control: this week, I’ll be coming to you live from CDM’s micro-blog for Yuri’s Night Bay Area, ground zero for the global space rave celebrating human exploration of the cosmos. CDM’s challenge: to bring all the goodness up close and personal to you, from California to wherever you are on Planet Earth.

Watch the minisite now, during the event, and in the couple of weeks following at:

http://yuricdm.com

or subscribe to the yuricdm.com RSS feed.

Yuri’s Night needs special nerdster love for a number of key reasons — a huge lineup of music, art, and science, plus a special CDM event and booth:

• Music: The likes of Amon Tobin, Tycho, Christopher Willits, and many others … and our friend Ganucheau, too
• Motion: Interactive installations and visualists everywhere, including our man Joshua with his incredible Wii-powered SuperDraw, built with Processing
• Space and Science and Games: Here’s where I get especially excited — it’s an event on the airfield at Ames Research Center, not typically a place non-NASA employees can go, and we actually get to play there and listen some of the world’s top scientists. And Will Wright (creator of SimCity, Sims, and the upcoming Spore with its generative music) will be there, too, just in case your geek circuits weren’t overloaded yet.
• CDM @ the Hangar: We’re running a special Futuristic Music Design Challenge competition, and we’ll have the CDM booth for much of the evening where various musical / visual makers will be showing off their inventions (with more of our friends elsewhere at the event). So stop by and say hi.

How nerdster-chic is this: a global convergence of the exploration of space exploration, ecological savvy, technological innovation, and musical-motional performance, in honor of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launching the first-ever human flight into space? Described as “Cinco de Mayo” for space, Yuri’s Night is a 35-nation cosmorave. It was big last year. It’s going to be much bigger this year.

What’s all this space stuff got to do with music and motion? Everything: music and visual performance are a big part of this party, as Sun Ra-loving, space-inspired, Space Age technologist artists push creative tech. (Amon Tobin is headlining, Will Wright is keynote speaker.) Winter Music what? I want my space fiesta.

Attention, Cosmonauts

CDM is involved, and you can be, too, wherever you are in the world:

Friday we’re pleased to co-host a party with trash_audio and vjkungfu.tv in Mid-City Los Angeles. If you’re in LA or visiting NAMM in Anaheim, you won’t want to miss this - Richard Devine headlining, terrific music and live visuals, and workshops.

If you don’t know the other two sites, by the way, trash_audio (featuring Richard, Justin, and Deep Element) is a fantastic blog that regularly profiles creative workspaces for music. vjkungfu.tv, helmed by VJ momo the monster, has in-depth video tutorials for live visualists; we hope to feature it more on createdigitalmotion.com in the near future.

Here’s the lineup:

1. MAKE + MINGLE. 8:00pm.

• Bring your own DIY music or motion creations and other hardware toys and geek out with an international crowd of hipster-nerdsters! All projects welcome (space first come, first served — think small, bring portable speakers if you can
• Put together free kits to make your own ribbon controllers without soldering
• Learn how Bryant Davis Place (future-tense-cpu) built his own DIY VJ sequencer for M8 using the Lemur multi-touch controller.
• Learn about the wonders of wireless MIDI sync in AV Performance with Acid&Bass&Momo producing a live remix of Karate Kid.

2. MIX + MASH. 9:30pm.

RICHARD DEVINE
The Deep Element
Justin McGrath
Liz Revision (Quantazelle)
Moldover
dj halon (Fake Science, False Profit)

Visuals:
Image8nineteen (Mat Hale)
Momo the Monster
Peter Kirn

Synths and space: they go together like chocolate and your mouth, like Sun Ra and aliens. So, it was with a heavy heart that I had to report the electronic awesomeness of Yuri’s Night, the party in celebration of space exploration at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Telefon Tel Aviv, Plaid, and circuit-bent Touch & Tells and keytars were there, but I was not. And maybe neither were you.

 NASA Yuri’s Night Rave: Space is the Place

Enough of that, though. Organized Matt Ganucheau writes to say this year will be bigger, better, “twice the art and twice the music.” 2008 will make 2007 look like a side party at Burning Man. So, in the interest of making sure your calendar is marked and your project is submitted, here’s a call for works — and hope to see you there.

CDM is on the road to California! If you’re at NAMM, mark your calendars now.

In addition to our full coverage of the NAMM trade show (covering new and odd music things with video, photos, and sound), we’ve got a party planned. (Whoo!) Attending / playing / organizing: myself, the wonderful audioist Liz McLean Knight, and the also wonderful visualist Surya aka momo the monster, to whom we owe the space and the LA magic. Full details soon, but here’s a teaser:

Where: Basswerks, a hip but comfy gallery/studio at 5411 W Adams Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90016. (Directions)

When: Friday, January 18, eight to late

What:

• a handmade music night, for people to come and show-and-tell DIY music projects informally and just hang out, whether hardware or software, as we’ve been doing with Etsy and Make in NYC.
• a chance to swap demo discs, as seen in Chicago. (don’t forget to check resources for making great demos)
• a lineup of great music and live visuals from LA, CDM, and the world. Cash bar available.

Who: You, if you’re in the LA area for NAMM or local — all are welcome. RSVP will be up soon; stay tuned. And that includes our friends among the vendors, etc., who will be desperate by then to escape Anaheim hotels for the city.

Contact us now if: you have a project you want to bring for handmade music and if you’re interested in playing music or visuals for a short set — no guarantees, but we may have a couple of slots open; if not, there will still be time to play around during the handmade music time.

And we’ll be roaming the NAMM floor, too, so anyone wanting to schedule a meeting, do get in touch.

Contact us

Los Angeles readers, Surya Buchwald aka Momo the Monster writes to let us know he’s taking on the Circuit Bending Challenge live and in person, with a workshop. So if you were feeling squeamish about the challenge and want some assistance, this good be a great opportunity. Please help spread the word, wonderful Californians!

Join us for our Next Share.LA!
October 28th is the Circuit Bending challenge, as posted on Create Digital Music. The challenge is to buy a lo-tech music toy, hack it and document it, and upload the results all in one day! Tell you what - I won’t penalize you for buying your toy early or using one you already have. Never circuit-bent anything before? Don’t know anything about electronics? Great! I’m quite an amateur myself, but I know enough to help you get bending - and I’ve got the tools and parts you need. Directions on the Basswerks site.

Share.LA

If any other municipalities want to organize similar events, even informal ones, let me know and I’ll update here. But events aren’t strictly needed, nor is even more than one person: you are your own event. (That’s what I keep telling myself, for sure.) We’ll all be sending good bendy vibes for the next few days.

Posting to Flickr

Got photos? Upload to Flickr under the tag circuitbendingchallenge. (Don’t forget to add them to the CDMu group, too.) Evil Paul is already up there with some items he scored for a mere US 50 cents to $2.00. And that’s the idea: not just making something cheap, but actually salvaging something fairly worthless to others and making it art / something you’d want to keep.

I’m in Meatspace largely at the moment, with a weekend packed with events at the Maker Faire. There are plenty of DIY music and motion projects here, and they’ll all be within spitting distance of my booth. Add to that performance events Friday and Saturday, and it’s looking like a great weekend. If you’re not in the Bay Area (which, yes, 99% of you aren’t), expect to see the virtual translation of all this meaty goodness soon. Some of these projects are also suggesting some how-to tutorials, so I’ll be working on that, as well. If you are here, note that the Friday and Saturday night events have no cover, a trend I hope to continue whenever CDM World Tour happens.

Here’s the quick summary of events:

Friday Night: Robotspeak 8 PM - 11 PM, 589.5 Haight Street at Steiner, music/visual lineup with discussion (flyer after the jump)

Saturday Night: CDM + Make team up for the Chips + Music + Fish party
Chips + Music + Fish details @ Makezine.com
Confirmed lineup: Pineresin, Starpause, Chachi Jones, Steve&Derek, Zaxxon Spacecase, Barney the Theremin Wizard, myself, and live visuals!

(The as-always-fantastic design comes to us by way of our graphic maker Nat.)

All weekend long, Maker Faire!
Maker Faire page, San Mateo County Event Center

Real posts should pick up again once I return, so thanks for your patience.