Some psychedelic HPRIZM sounds to get you through your weekend:
PROJECT-Xmp3 by HPRIZM

And it’s worth revisiting Anti-Pop Consortium’s podcast for our friends at XLR8R Magazine:
http://www.xlr8r.com/podcast/2010/10/anti-pop-consortium

What’s a bit unique about this event is that it couples digital music with visual art (with, you know, actual paint) and teaching. NYU’s Hip-Hop Education Center” is a collaborator, teaching people young and old the craft of hip-hop music.

Invisible Instructions Exhibition + Micro-festival Site
Dubspot Blog Post

Psychedelic solstice Tuesday, anyone?

What if a competition didn’t just encourage entrants to try to make a better product? What if it encouraged friendly rivalry between makers to produce entries that were also shared across the community?

That’s the idea behind Digitópia’s upcoming series of competitions, now entering its third year. Digitópia itself is based in Porto, Portugal, at the Casa da Musica. But even if Portugal isn’t exactly in your neighborhood, entrants and onlookers alike can benefit from shared, open sourced contributions.

In fact, even the prizes itself are open projects. The simple, anthropomorphic-looking controller above is a free project. It’s dead-simple, a combination of an IKEA salad bowl, a potentiometer, and ultrasonic distance sensors. But as a result, it’s also inexpensive, simple to use (particularly with the addition of Digitópia’s custom-developed software), and a flexible starting point for further work. (Actually, handling multiple ultrasonics is a bit tricky, too, relative to things like infrared, so that’s a particularly nice addition.)

First up: Max and Pd patchers, your pride is on the line.

Think your Max/MSP or Pure Data multimedia patch is the most original around? Prove it. An international competition will find the best patches, and all of them (whether made in Max or Pd) will be released under a free software license. A panel will judge the results, led by Pedro Rebelo, composer, digital artist and Director of Education at the School of Music and Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast. New deadline: February 14. (That’s right, polish off your best patch, send it into battle, and then take your pumped-up sense of masculinity / femininity out for a fantastic Valentine’s Day dinner.)

There are other competitions, too. The third-annual Musical Miniatures Competition is looking for musical works or “gestures” of 15 seconds or less. (If you’ve ignored other calls for works, this one should leave you no excuse.) The sounds will be licensed under a Creative Commons license for freesound.org, adding to that communal repository of sounds. Bram de Jong, legendary developer and freesound.org guru, will judge the results. Deadline: May 28.

Produce the best sound or the best patch, and you get the controller above and accompanying software. But the for third competition, you get the futuristic controller of your dreams. You submit the idea, and Digitópia builds the results. The entrants are judged on “innovation, originality, feasibility and inclusive potential.” (Yes, it needs to be feasible in order for them to build it — no electronic music equivalents of The Homer.)

Oh, yes, and the Dreams Competition has me as the judge. Deadline: April 3. Keep a dream journal.

The beauty of all of this is that these are contests that give back. We’ll have sounds, patches, inventions, and hardware documentation for the prize and the entrants; stay tuned as that documentation becomes available.

Speaking of getting something out of this for yourself… don’t have any dream ideas? No good at Max and Pd patching? For an absurdly-cheap €15 for three whole days of seminars, Digitópia will teach you patching skills in these two tools. Jeez, for that price, you could afford a flight to beautiful Portugal and still come out ahead. No details on the new seminars for spring up yet, but I’ll put up a notice when they are. (I’m also teaching a seminar at Digitópia the first week of June.)

Digitópia Competitions 2010

Digitópia – Platform for the Development of Digital Music Communities

Amanda Ervin makes elegant noise-making apparatuses from simple circuits, and is able to share that process with her students (see her classes among 3rd Ward’s Circuits lineup). She’s going to show off some of her latest creations at the open showcase of Handmade Music Brooklyn, our monthly party + science fair + musical performance + ruckus. (More details soon on Handmade Music events that are springing up worldwide, thanks to the hard work and creativity of the DIY music community!)

What really impresses me about these projects is that Amanda has made both the project and the curriculum – that is, she can teach you to make these, too! It’s often easier to make something for yourself alone than it is to make it reproducible, so I do admire that in a design.

If you’re in the New York area, you can catch the event free, Thursday evening September 17. (Directions) If not, we’re working with 3rd Ward on ways to translate the educational experience online.

Here’s a musical excerpt from Amanda, as well:
Animal.mp3

Handmade Music info: More on Amanda’s work (with additional sounds and videos) on our Handmade Music site:

Handmade Music Brooklyn: Amanda Ervin’s Circuits, Open Call

Want to contribute your work? If you can make it to NYC this month, we’d love to present your work. All projects, all media (electronic, acoustic, hardware, software), and all levels of functionality (working, partially working, in-progress, completely broken) are welcome!

Handmade Music 9/17 Call for Works [Google Docs form, also embedded after the jump]

We talk about tools a lot, but it’s really learning how to make tools expressive in your productions and performances that matters. DubSpot, the music tech production and DJ educational center here in New York, brings its multi-city Ableton Live Sessions tour to its hometown for several days of parties and workshops. If you’re in NYC and on a budget, we have a discount on the paid events and also some free events you can check out. If you’re not in NYC, we’re working on bringing free video coverage to the global CDM community shortly after the event.

This really isn’t a pitch for Live, either – part of why I’m excited to be able to hang out for the weekend is that I expect to learn quite a lot from some of the world’s most skilled Live users and producers.

Headlining the event is none other than global techno star Richie Hawtin – the Minus impresario some of our readers love to love and others love to hate. I hope we get to hear more about his unique Plastikman live rig – see the controller at top, with more details from our friends at visualist corps Derivative, whose TouchDesigner live visual tool powers 3D imagery in those sets. Hawtin will join in a conversation with Ambivalent about what the Minus musical process is about. Hawtin and friends will also play a real gem of New York’s club scene, Love on MacDougal Street – it’s a fantastic space that lives up to its name.

On the dub side, Scientist aka Overton Brown, one of the world’s real stars of dub, a King Tubby protégé out of Jamaica, will return us to the roots of electronic dance music and show off his own take on the use of this technology. Scientist and Dub is a Weapon play Le Poisson Rouge and Scientist will close out the Live Sessions with a dub battle versus Badawi.

KJ Sawka – Hell, Yes, Chops

Before we get into the lineup, here’s just an example of how cool the faculty of this event is – KJ Sawka. Sawka is, of course, what we dream of in live laptop music. His musicianship is fantastic unplugged (see a rooftop set video, apparently sponsored by PBR), so the laptop becomes simply an extension of that.

KJ Sawka will have a full Drums workshop on Saturday as part of the paid program. If you’re new to Live, though, he’s doing a free intro on Thursday evening.

Here’s what to see and how to get the exclusive CDM discount.

By the way, if you’re in Los Angeles, that’s the next stop on this tour; stay tuned for details.

Schedule, Free Events, and Discounts

Thursday

7-9p, FREE KJ Sawka Live 8 clinic, 675 Bar
9p Funk Aid for Africa benefit release party, 675 Bar

Friday: Richie Hawtin @ Love

Saturday

11-6: Ableton Live and Production Sessions: The first day focuses on moving a project through the production process, with KJ Sawka talking live recording of drums, DJ Kiva and Jon Margulies on developing and finishing materials, and veteran engineer Daniel Wyatt on mixing and mastering. The day finishes up with a chat with Richie Hawtin and Ambivalent.

6:30-9p FREE CDM Live Lounge party Saturday evening, we meet up at former sex club / former horse stables (really) turned chilled-out Meatpacking District lounge 675 Bar. We’ll have some surprise unusual Live controller rigs and music.

Sunday

11-6: Performing with Live, Live Onstage: The second day of workshops focuses on live performance, with Jon Margulies, DJ Rupture, and myself talking about working with performance-ready live sets, controllers, and Akai’s APC40. (With Jon covering the APC, I’ll focus instead on alternative and unusual controllers.) Barry Cole of Blue Mountain Publishing will go a different direction entirely – how to understand licensing and distribution and actually make money on your tracks.

7-9p: Scientist will talk about miking and live setup with Dub is a Weapon – and will mix them live.

9p: DubSpot Sessions party, Le Poisson Rouge, with live and DJ performances from Scientist, Dub is a Weapon, Badawi, Kiva, Rupture, etc.

CDM DISCOUNT: Enter promo code ‘CDM’ for $25 off the tour, or follow this link:
http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

The weekend is US$225 for both days ($200 after our discount); $125 for one day.

Here’s a wrap of what happened in San Francisco:

And if you’re there, do come say hi! It’s always nice to meet readers.

I still love the idea of soft circuits: electronics packaged in soft form factors instead of hard. It’s a big challenge — for one, you need some soft fabrication skills along with electronics skills, and then you have to contend with keeping your electronics happy in a soft (warm) place, which is the opposite of what they tend to like. But when you make a huggable calculator synth, it’s all worth it.

Our friends Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain of Monome fame write to let us know they’ve got spots in their felt circuits class at the awesome Machine Project in LA. Brian sez: "this year we’re making small contact mic amplifiers with a bent freakout capacitive touch point. it’ll be great fun." (East coasters, we’ll have to have them do the same over here, huh?) If you’re in LA and have the time, have a good time and take some project photos!

Felt + Circuits Workshop

Previously:

Felt + Circuits, for Sound and Enjoyment, From Happy Sheep

For more plush circuits, here’s a show in Nova Scotia featuring stiched sonic works, including a radio — but it looks like they don’t work. Functional electronics, even better, I say.

And for fans of the Monome, head over to Create Digital Motion today:

Monome as Visual Controller

Processing Class in New York, Online: Art From Code, For Non-Coders [Create Digital Motion]

It’s on CDMotion rather than CDMusic for a simple reason — Processing is especially well-suited to visuals, 2D and 3D. But there is audio and MIDI support in there, as well, and while it’s not exactly Java’s strong suit, certain applications do benefit from this approach in music. (It works nicely with everything from Monomes to Arduinos, too.)

Actually, on that note, I’d be especially interested to hear if anyone is using Processing for musical applications. Let us know in comments. And there are slots free for the class, so do sign up if interested. (If you’re outside NYC — realizing that’s, um, the HUGE majority of you –  watch for an announcement soon for how we’re sharing some of this information online for the rest of the world.)

Harvestworks also has a terrific-looking Max/MSP/Jitter intensive in March, but I don’t know how many slots are still open, and it will require US$1275 in tuition.

Image by the awesome eskimoblood, a great source of Processing inspiration!