Why should Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion (and, well, their editor) go to a game conference? This year, in particular, the annual gathering of game developers in San Francisco means a real convergence of gaming culture and digital music and motion, of ideas about how interactivity can work (and the challenges of making interaction design creative), of generative and adaptive music and new cultures of digital media. Aside from that, of course, there’s no particular reason.

A quick look at some event highlights with which I’m involved:
Tonight (Wednesday) is the debut gala for Gamma IV, the creative game design challenge by the Kokoromi Collective. You can check out the winning games on the show floor, as well.
http://www.kokoromi.org/gamma4/

The games themselves offer plenty of inspiration for live visualists and people exploring new interfaces for music. But there’s also a music lineup alongside, with Starpause, Phil Fish, Moldover, Baiyon, Class Prez, and Future Boy. A big thanks to my mate Starpause for putting that lineup together; I’ll also be doing a short live set.

Unrelated to GDC (but working out nicely since I’m in town), Thursday night is a meeting of the illustrious Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group (BArCMuT), with a big, all-female lineup of creative artists finding expressive new interfaces for musical performance. I’ll be giving a lightning talk before the full program, so say hi if you’re around.
http://www.meetup.com/barcmut/calendar/12702241/

Friday night is the free evening of One Button Objects, a set of interactive art pieces that explore what can be done with a single button. I’ll be talking more about that later this week; it really wound up being a great exercise, and even if you believe in rich, expressive control for music, forcing yourself to work with a single button is nothing if not enlightening. I co-curated the show with Heather Kelley of Kokoromi.
Event details: One Button Objects: Kokoromi + Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Last week, what was intended to be a day of posts wound up being several days of updates on events centered around music technology and DIY creation. Here’s a birds-eye view of what we covered, some of the events you can catch in person, and some of what these events reveal.

It’s worthwhile just putting these posts in one spot so you can easily mark your calendar – and you can see, even in this small slice, the amount and breadth of activity happening now.

At STEIM in Amsterdam, I’ll be talking about the state of DIY and open source technology for musicians and artists, and what that means for creative people — both the potential and some of the challenges. So I’d be curious to hear your thoughts before I begin waxing poetic. Readers here aren’t shy, so let us know your concerns in comments.

Now, here’s your guide and calendar to DIY. Tell us what we’ve missed. I’m hoping to devote a permanent spot on Noisepages to an events calendar; anyone with slick WordPress/BuddyPress-based solutions, give us a shout.

The best new inventions.

Don’t miss web-savvy hacks and creations from the music hackday, including an all-JavaScript clone of a popular Nintendo handheld music tool, online Web tools that make musician’s lives easier, and fantastic combinations of Android phones, web listening tools, online data, and physical objects. Meanwhile, if you want to start your own project but don’t know where to begin, Austin is a hotbed of new DIY kits.

February 17. Amsterdam, NL. (event)

Handmade Music kicks off in Amsterdam at the STEIM research center. The action starts at 8p. I’m making a stop there on my way to Stockholm, and hope to provide documentation next week for the rest of the world. Details.

February 19. Toronto, Canada. (event)

Handmade Music hits Toronto.

What they teach us: Why is it a “great time to make electronic music?” Toronto’s organizers point to the fact that makers are spoiler for choice of platform, with monome and Arduino on the hardware side, and ever-more-mature Max/MSP and Pure Data on the software side.

February 28. Austin, Texas USA. (event)

Austin shares all their latest musical inventions, plus resources for those wanting to work on making noises with the Arduino.

What they teach us: beginners can get in on these events, with the aid of newbie-friendly workshops and easygoing, noise-making parties. Oh yeah, and the advanced folks can create terrific, usable music hardware.

March 8. Brooklyn, NY USA.

Handmade Music starts a new series at Galapagos Art Space, between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Details.

February 14, April 3, May 28. Porto, Portugal + worldwide. (call for works)

Digitopia seeks the best Max+Pd patches, dream ideas for musical inventions, and miniature music. I’ll be there in June 2010.

What they teach us: the twist here is making an open source hardware controller the prize, and sharing the how-to with the world. Plus, all the competition entries are required to be open source, meaning the competition itself generates tools for the community.

March 1 deadline; March 12 event. San Francisco + Worldwide.

One-button Game Objects challenges designers to make self-contained sonic and visual interactive art — all using just one button. If you can ship it to San Francisco, we can show it. And in March, we’ll be looking at other ways that just one button can make a musical interface. Call for works info.

In Anaheim this week, the music manufacturer trade gather to show their wares. But 8pm – 4am Friday night, we party.

“Wham Bam Thank You NAMM” has become an annual tradition, an unofficial afterparty of sorts for the first two days of the trade show.

This year’s lineup: John Tejada, Richard Devine, Flashbulb, Deru, Laura Escude, Scott Pagano, CPU, DJ Kero, Acid Circus, Derek Michael, Baseck, Eezir, Trifonic, DJ G Ov, Moldover, Henry Strange, and myself, among others.

Escaping from the Anaheim Convention Center doldrums, the event is held in the lovely, artistically-blossoming Los Angeles downtown. The Downtown Independent is a gorgeous space with a movie theater and rooftop for full audiovisual-party immersion. This year, we have a couple of new features with which I’m assisting on behalf of CDM. There’s a VIP lounge / “industry room” which will be filled with music toys. You need a NAMM badge to get in, but inside you’ll find some unusual sonic toys you can’t find on the NAMM floor.

Also in the spirit of going beyond NAMM, I’m moderating a panel on how people are using computers in performance, and how we can all make the future of music tech shinier, sooner. When you’re living in a cool-sounding year like “2010,” there’s really no excuse not to take matters into your own hands (oh, yeah, and maybe I want to make sure I’m on the same side as the evil robots when the bad s*** starts going down):

2010: It’s gonna be the future soon
A conversation on live electronic performance technique, and how to make music tech better

There’s no need to dream of futuristic, expressive live performance on computers. It’s here. And there’s no reason to wait for technology to improve: let’s talk about how to make it happen. Moderated by Create Digital Music’s PETER KIRN, this conversation with some of the artists at the edge of sound and live electronic music provides a glimpse into the ways people are working in 2010, and an open discussion about what we can do this year to extend our technique and make technology work better.

JUSTIN BORETA and edIT (Glitch Mob, etc.)
RICHARD DEVINE (Schematic/Warp), DSP mad scientist and composer
LAURA ESCUDE, violinist and music technologist
FLIPMU, the duo of Owen Vallis and Jordan Hochenbaum
MOLDOVER, Mojo controller creator, musical supervillian
DERU, composer and musician (Ghostly, etc.), recent Paris Opera Ballet score
BRIAN TRIFON (TRIFONIC), electronic musician and sound designer (Avatar)

and other guests

Hands-on "snap" demos of live rigs + topics of discussion:

Unusual interfaces, including graphical, touch, gestural, and multi-touch interfaces
Monome, Arduinome, MidiDuino and the Minicommand
Max/Max for Live, Reaktor, Pd, Processing, and other tools
Collaboration, synchronization, and open control
New Year’s Resolutions for making technology and performance practice better
…topics to be continued online
Followed by live performances kicking off a night-long party

Presented by Electronic Creatives, Dubspot and Create Digital Music

When: Friday, January 15, 2010, 8pm – 4am

Where: The Downtown Independent, downtownindependent.com

251 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 [Map]

What: Wham Bam Thank You NAMM [official site/artist bios]

Cost: $20; $10 discounted (21+)

RSVP: droidbehavior@gmail.com Information: 213-915-6120 Facebook: Event page

Note on NAMM badges: the NAMM badge gets you into the “industry room” and a discount on admission, but you do NOT need a NAMM badge to get into this party! It is 21+, though – sorry about that.

View Larger Map

Major kudos to the wizards of Electronic Creatives who’ve been a huge part of making the whole evening happen (whereas I largely get to just show up). That includes in particular the talented violinist, composer, technologist, educator, and creative mind Laura Escudé, who has worked with everyone from Cirque du Soleil to Carmen Rizzo; I hope we get to introduce more of her work.

Electronic Creatives “produces events centered around Ableton Live and new music technology coupled with envelope-pushing performances.” (I’m going to try to make sure not to interpret that last phrase as “making my laptop crash onstage,” okay?)

If you’re introducing or demonstrating new products at NAMM, and you’d like to be considered for CDM’s curated NAMM products guide, let us know. Incidentally, since I don’t represent the NAMM organization, that can mean anyone in LA around NAMM or otherwise timing announcements that week, whether or not you’re an exhibitor. One- and two-person shops are as welcome as big manufacturers, as always.

There is no charge to be in the CDM guide, excepting the need to have something cool. We can’t cover everything and want to avoid information overload, but we’ll pick some stuff we know CDM readers will want to know about.

Also, I will be in Anaheim for limited meetings during the NAMM show on Thursday and Friday. If you’d like to meet up (especially if you’re not exhibiting), please get in touch. I know I won’t be able to meet up with everyone I’d like to on this trip, but we can give it a shot.

Manufacturers/inventors, we want to hear from you:
For meetings or to get in our news coverage, I’ve set up a form:
CDM NAMM Meetings and Announcements [Google Docs; form embedded below]

CDM does not break embargoes, period. I’ll be working hard to make sure news coverage is timed; if you can get us materials early, that helps.

Interested in being a correspondent? I’m looking to enlist anyone interested in covering the show floor and getting photos of oddities and awesomeness, as well as talking to artist guests. If that sounds like you, get in touch. To put this another way, if we don’t get materials early, it’s very hard to get them up as quickly!

Keep your schedule clear: the big news is that we’ve got a major event coming up Friday night in downtown LA, and we’re talking to LA-area artists. More on that very soon.

Here’s the embedded form (you’ll need to click through to the site if reading inside an RSS reader):

Deru – Peanut Butter & Patience from Mush Records on Vimeo.

2010 is looking to be a terrific year for handmade computer music from Los Angeles. For one example of why, look to Deru, the composer and live electronic musician. His work continually grows more lush and more organic, drawing from musical strains as diverse as hip-hop and classical. And his upcoming album, “Say Goodbye to Useless,” takes all of that in. (Previously on Ghostly, Deru will release this disc on Mush.) I think it’s going to be a big year for warm, rich-sounding music.

Deru also has what looks like the CDM dream studio, neat, comfy, elegant, and packed with the best, most compact musical toys. If he doesn’t inspire me to work on my music, he may at least inspire me to clean my apartment.

Check out the exquisitely-animated video for Peanut Butter & Patience, top. Next, go into the studio to hear Deru talk about design, composition, and, perhaps inspired the California modernist institution of big glass windows, the picture-window frame as a metaphor for music making and sampling:

VISION NO. 3 :: DERU [Video by Mateo, at I am a Laser, which has loads of other goodies and free music downloads]

For more:
http://deru.la/ (too bad there is no such thing as a .ny domains…)
Deru press page, with a good summary of albums, shows, background, resume, etc.
TRASH_AUDIO interview + workspace tour

Side note: LA, you’re on notice. New York is going to bring it. Sure, our clubs don’t always have, erm, electricity, but – that only makes us stronger.

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!