It’s music production. It’s … lasers. If you’re in the LA area, you’ll want to be there. If not, let us know in comments what you most want to see covered / interviewed / videoed for CDM.

DubSpot’s Live 8 Sessions Tour heads to Los Angeles this weekend, for a set of workshops, performances, and demos on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ll be out with the crew, and hosting with DubSpot a special interactive performance lounge Sunday night.

Sunday night will feature generative audiovisual art made on iPhones, and laser-powered, open-source gestural controllers and a laser installation that responds to motion and sound, plus Christopher Willits, Kid Beyond, Irwin, myself, and a lot more.

The weekend workshops: The artist lineup includes legends from a number of genres, including Scientist, Kid Beyond, Daedelus, Justin Boreta (Glitch Mob), Thavius Beck, and Christopher Willits. Other names you may not know have their own resume in sound design and performance (Irwin), producing and education (Steve Nalepa), mastering technique (Daniel Wyatt), and business (Barry Cole). Sunday, monome virtuoso Daedelus and I will talk about controllers, performance, and sampling technique, I hope going well beyond Live to design and playing technique in general. Passes are $110 for one day, or $195 for the weekend. Watch for a similar series in Austin, Texas this month, and other cities TBD, or for everyone else, stay tuned to CDM and DubSpot.

Ableton is a co-presenter, and Live a jumping-off point, but the topics really wind up being about more than any one tool. You’ll find deeper questions about composing, sound design, mastering, business, performance, controllers, and design in these discussions. I hope to work with some of my artist friends and DubSpot to bring more of those conversations to the CDM readers worldwide.

Want a free pass? One free pass awarded by the end of the day Thursday to the first person in comments to … write a really quotable comment about why you need a free pass. (Sorry, it’s the best I can come up with; I have to sleep and leave for the airport shortly.)

Los Angeles Tour [DubSpot]

Sunday night – $5 benefit Interactive Performance Night + CDM 5th Anniversary PARTY CDM turns five this month, and we’ll be kicking off a series of parties in LA, Boston, and New York. For $5 (all proceeds go to the sustainable charity NextAid), catch a night of audiovisual performance and bleeding-edge musical and visual inventions:

• Featured live performances by Kid Beyond, Christopher Willits (Ghostly International), and Irwin
  , with surprises through the night
• Open laser instruments: Open-source, gestural laser music controllers you can build, presented by Meason Wiley (www.cyclespersecond.net)
• 3D mobile music: iPhone-based performance live, synchronized three-dimensional audiovisuals by generative artist Aaron McLeran (Electronic Arts – Spore)

9:00 pm
SUNDAY, November 8
Los Angeles, CA
$5 / free for tour attendees
King King Hollywood | Directions
Facebook page

Full disclosure: The author is currently providing consulting services to DubSpot, and DubSpot’s Live Tour is a CDM advertiser, though there has been no compensation for this story or for my appearance in LA. (In the interest of disclosure, I’m happy to be spending my weekend being involved with the event!) – Peter Kirn

dubSpot, the West Coast + East Coast music technology training center is doing an eight-city tour of the US to talk about Ableton Live 8 and the Akai APC40 controller. They’re enlisting some of my favorite people to do the workshops. I like the curriculum: it’s not just “here’s how to use Live,” but a real focus on music production, finishing actual music, and pushing the envelope with live visuals, onstage performance and controllers. We also have a $25 discount exclusively for CDM readers if you want to attend.

I want to thank dubSpot for helping sponsor CDM this month – their support makes possible our own free tutorial content and artist coverage slated for later in May.

The tour kicks off this week in San Francisco, but will travel to other US cities soon (dates to be announced; stay tuned).

The artists doing the instruction are some folks whose work I particularly enjoy:

• Jon Margulies, author of Ableton Live 7 Power among other things, and the person doing the Live 8 curriculum here in NY. And like me, Jon is a secret Medievalist (he’s played early music at Spoleto).
• Moldover, “Moldy” to his friends, co-founded the Warper series in NYC and the new LoveTech party in SF, and has become notorious for hacking Novation keyboards and espousing controllerism.
• Christopher Willits is an utterly brilliant guitarist capable of morphing the instrument into all kinds of sounds, for those of you who don’t know his work. And he’s been doing a lovely series of tutorials for our friends at XLR8R TV.

… plus a powerful roster of artists: Funkaid for Africa, Dub Mission, Jason Short, Dub Gabriel, and Barry Cole.

The workshop is $125 for one day or $225 for both. If you are lucky enough to hail from sunny San Francisco, dubSpot is also offering a $25 CDM discount if you head to their site via this link:

http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

But we’ll have more for the rest of the world, too – I’m playing with the Warper crew on the sidewalk in front of dubSpot NY in June, and we’re working on a way of doing a live stream to the CDM planet from there. Stay tuned.

Saturday night, there’s a huge convergence of wonderful people in Los Angeles. The lineup looks terrific (music: Speakers, Sahy-Uhns feat. Bucc Rogerz, Eli Walks, Owen Vallis, Counters, D-Funk), and there will be a new iteration of the Brick multi-touch table which we’ll be seeing here on CDM soon. Flyer below; watch MySpace for address details.

Sunday, there’s a free design workshop/demo by the creator of Where’s the Party At, the open source sampler, at Machine Project.

Rest up and enjoy.

Google has responded to widespread concerns about political ads, particularly those promoting California’s Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban prior to last week’s US election. On one hand, I think their answers on policy and placement are incomplete. On the other, it looks like the upshot of this will be better tools for publishers to make their own decisions, which to me is fundamentally what the issue is about. For now, it’s a waiting game until promised improvements appear.

(If you’re bored by this discussion, don’t worry – we’ve got lots more music tech-specific stuff to talk about. But I know it matters to at least some of you directly, including music/music tech publishers out there.)

The response is on Google’s Inside AdSense blog, as posted at the end of the day Friday.

Political ads on AdSense sites

See my previous posts here on CDM. I posted these items because this issue hit music tech in a big way, from individual bloggers to big commercial press outlets – and advertising support is often used to describe what future revenue could look like for musicians:

Google AdSense Fails on Relevancy, Control, Policy, and Google Says Nothing

Google Ads Disabled; Your Partner is Your Business

In fact, the fact that readers didn’t universally agree with me – either on the political issues or my own spin on what this meant for publishers – only proves my point. You need individual publisher control of ads, just as you need human beings controlling editorial content. (If search engines alone told you everything, I don’t think we’d have any regular readers of anything.)

It’s worth reading Google’s complete response, but let’s evaluate it based on my original complaints – relevancy, policy, and publisher control:

Relevancy

Google confirms what we suspected, which is that “placement targeting” allows “advertisers to find sites serving a specific audience, such as "Males ages 18-24." Their answer isn’t entirely satisfactory here, though. For me, at least, the political ads didn’t appear in Google’s tool that’s supposed to review placement-targeted ads. And it’s clear that in this case placement-targeted ads aimed at an audience clashed with niche-specific sites that didn’t want political ads. Unlike a contextually-targeted ad based on a keyword (like “synth” or “recording”), the relationship to site content was unclear. If that had been something like cool sneakers, people probably wouldn’t have cared, so I have to agree with other publishers who felt that even basic publisher controls limiting political ads could be a remedy.

It’s still a mystery which audience Prop 8 supporters targeted. Given the amount of money spent on this campaign, maybe “all of them” is close.

Policy

Google still stands by its political policy, saying that “Google’s advertising system does not favor one political position over another.” But they offer absolutely no explanation of why Proposition 8 ads were consistent with that policy. Google explicitly says ads “advocating against” a group of people aren’t allowed, and even lists sexual preference as one of their “protected groups.”

Let’s flip this around. Proposition 8 opponents have now targeted Mormons and called for a boycott of the entire state of Utah. I understand their rationale – the Church of Latter-Day States funded campaigns in favor of the marriage ban. But to me, I wouldn’t want anti-Mormon ads on my site any more than I’d want ads against gay marriage. This kind of advocacy is not something I personally believe in, and quite frankly, I know we have Mormon and gay readers alike. I respect them, and I want advertising to respect them, too. That’s not just to be “nice”; that’s how I would conduct myself outside of the site, as well.

I can only imagine that Google has chosen to apply the standard of advocating “against” groups very narrowly. But to me, such a standard works only if it’s applied liberally. It’s pretty hard to imagine that an ad supporting a gay marriage ban isn’t implicitly an ad advocating against homosexuals, just as it would be hard to imagine an ad supporting a boycott of Utah isn’t implicitly advocating against the Mormon church. That’s not a judgment of either argument – but I personally wouldn’t want that kind of advocacy on my site, and if Google doesn’t apply this standard in this case, where do they draw the line?

The bottom line to all of this is, publishers need control to make their own call.

Control

Putting all your faith in Google, of course, is asking for trouble – whether Google means well or not. So to me, the answer from Google AdSense that overrides the rest of these issues is on publisher control.

We’ve heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we’re working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we’re working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We’ll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can "set it and forget it," while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.

Now we’re talking. If publishers had adequate controls, differences on policy and concerns about certain kinds of placements wouldn’t have to come to people dropping AdSense altogether.

The only issue is, of course, for now this is just a promise – the improvements in the service aren’t here yet (though “next couple weeks” is promising as a timeframe). I’ll be watching for these controls to appear, because I think that the Prop 8 battle aside, this has profound implications for the future of advertising.

At the same time, I still think this illustrates why competition is important – both from competing services, and from publishers selling their own ad space. Interestingly, part of the problem is that AdSense has actually gotten quite good. I saw some kneejerk reactions around the Web (comments here, links elsewhere) suggesting I was nuts for even suggesting this was an issue, because their take was that AdSense was useless. I think what they’ve missed is that for sites with reasonably well-optimized content and keyword relevancy that connects to Google’s ad inventory, AdSense isn’t a bad solution, at least as a complement to direct ad sales. (AdSense is rarely as valuable as direct sales – for CDM, for instance, it’s basically just some background revenue that defrays hosting costs.)

But there’s no question in my mind that competition makes any service better. I’m still waiting on proposed alternatives from Microsoft and Yahoo. But even users threatening to leave AdSense clearly got their attention. And, frankly, that’s how this whole thing is supposed to work.

The ad-supported Web could be part of what allows music technology information and musician-made content to be free in the future. But the more this area grows, the more these kinds of debates over how ads are chosen, priced, and delivered will become important.

Thursday night, Owen Vallis is the guest at the Ableton Live User Group Las Angeles, downtown at SAE. He’ll be talking multi-touch goodness, like the amazing Brick table he’s worked on with Jordan Hochenbaum, as well as the potential of the Arduino-Monome clone Arduinome project to which he’s contributing. I’ll be there. 8p, free; see the flyer.

There are also some non-public meetings going on while I’m there that should also bring good things your way, so stay tuned!

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.

Fortunately, we’re not alone — the good peoples of Current TV will also be covering the event, and if your blog / Flickr stream / Vimeo account gets involved, let us know. We’ll put it all up on yuricdm.com — our first time trying a minisite for a special event, so we welcome your feedback.

Are you going to San Francisco? We’re still looking for someone to video the competition — please email me immediately if interested. My name is "Peter", I’m at "createdigitalmusic.com" — see if you can work out my email address. Alternatively, use the contact form. We’re also looking for informal Flickr photographers, writers, and other coverage, so give us a holler if you’re going.

And remember:

Event schedule

Tickets information

Directions

I have to say, it’s really a pleasure to do this — not only for us, and for the artists and thinkers involved in the event, but for NASA and the space exploration community. Aside from music, space exploration (human and artificial) was always a major passion and inspiration for me growing up. I personally can’t think of a better reason to throw a party, especially as we think about the significance of technology on Earth.

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:

California, here we come: If you’re anywhere near greater San Francisco, you’re going to want to clear your calendar on April 12 for Yuri’s Night Bay Area at NASA Ames Research Center. It’s the main party, right in NASA’s Earth-bound back yard. There’s a massive musical lineup and various live visuals and interactive installations, plus space geekery galore, and Will Wright (he wowed NASA’s real-life space scientists with his procedural virtual cosmos in his upcoming game Spore). Buy those tickets while they’re still available.

We need help, Californians! Photographers and videographers, we can use your help covering the event. Like much of this event, it’s volunteer-only, but if you send me a link to some of your past work, I can help secure an official press pass for CDM; if you’re a pro, I’m happy to help promote your work. Drop me a line. I can’t get press passes for everybody, so definitely send some samples — and everyone else, we’ll have a group on Vimeo and Flickr.

Online coverage: Stay tuned to CDM for the latest on how visual and sonic technology and artists are connecting to outer space. We’ve got a new, dedicated site in collaboration with the folks running the flagship Yuri’s Night Bay Area — yuricdm.com — so we can talk to the artists and cover all the projects.

In your part of the world: Wherever you are, you can launch your own Yuri’s Night party. Host a party and register it with the global network (see how to party info). It’s a bit late, theoretically, but we’ve thrown together some cool CDM events in short order and we’ll help you promote your event here on CDM. Judging by Google Analytics, I know we have a lot of CDM readers in London, Sydney, Paris, Chicago, Berlin, Melbourne, and Seattle. (No, really — in that order. Go figure. Moscow’s there, too — #42, getting beat by Atlanta, Georgia, so I think we need some Cosmonauts getting involved.)

Hello, Ames Research Center!

Yuri’s Night will be happening worldwide, but the lineup for the Bay Area flagship event is looking terrific. Amon Tobin joins Tipper, John Tejada, Lusine, Scuba, Digitonal vs. Posthuman, [a]pendics.shuffle, Deru, Tycho, Mr. Projectile, Dr. Toast and our friend Ganucheau — and that’s just electronics. Live vocal/instrumental music includes Freezepop (as made infamous by various Harmonix games), avant-garde cello and guitar, and the 17-member marching Gamelan X, among others. Game maker Will Wright joins NASA astrobiologist Jonathan Green and eco-friendly scientists.

We’ll be posting updates to the lineup at yuricdm.com — you’ll hear about it there before anywhere else. Check out the lineup so far, but I know of some interesting installation and art pieces that aren’t there yet.