Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.
Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.
Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.
RJ Valeo (Isomer Transition) is offering some music – join us for what it’s like when computer musicians lounge around and relax.
Reminder: we’re meeting Saturday in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District to chill out, hear some music, and share strange and wonderful and hacked hardware controllers for Ableton Live as part of DubSpot’s Live Sessions tour. If you’re in the NYC area, you won’t want to miss out on music-controlling ironing boards, handheld controllers, and folks like RJ Valeo (Isomer Transition) above.
But if you’re not in New York, DubSpot and CDM are working together to make sure the weekend gets videoed, and we’re doing some work online.
Friday afternoon I’m chatting and answering questions as I work with the Live API to hack in OSC support for Live, and build a simple app for Google’s Android phone (which can be ported to other platforms, as well). irc://irc.freenode.net/cdmblogs
Join the Noisepages Ableton Live hacker group for bleeding-edge discussion of some of these topics, too: http://noisepages.com/groups/ableton-hackers
(I’ll be doing some link dumps with resources later today)
And Sunday, I’ll be giving a workshop about some controller secrets, with more to come online. (Sign up with promo code CDM for a discount if you happen to be registering at DubSpot; otherwise, hang out here.)
Handheld eggs, ironing boards, machinedrums, phones … live setups can involve all sorts of oddities, especially among the rabid (in a good way) Ableton Live fanbase, and we’ll be showing them in NYC. Saturday night, we’ll chill out after Dubspot’s day-long workshop with a free, open party in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District at 675 Bar to explore some new musical interfaces, have a few drinks, meet each other, and hear some new sounds. [Facebook RSVP]
For more on the whole week’s events with Dubspot, see our previous post.
Confirmed lineup:
Isomer Transition (aka RJ Valeo) doing some superb-quality techno with lots of knobs and a machinedrum + Ableton Live
Sound artist Ranjit Bhatnagar with a musical MIDI ironing board (pictured below) controlling Live, as seen at Handmade Music (at which it was covered by Wired.com)
Track Team Audio’s Michael Hatsis showing some tweaked-out Live control in action – hopefully including his APC40 hacks and monome patches.
Me, playing a set with control TBD – possibly Lemur and/or my Android phone
The “beater” application is really quite nice, and follows with a lot of handheld-style, gestural controllers we’re seeing lately. That could mean that soon we could have some sort of software layer that works with any of these controllers — substituting, say, a Wii or mobile phone. Here’s a great video from the ITP show (the bi-annual exposition of the work of interactive technology students at New York University):
Knobs and faders can be rigid. Fancy multitouch devices can be expensive. But for the cost of a webcam and some spare materials, you can build computer interfaces with objects around the house, thanks to the power of open source software.
In just one day, a group of artists in the CDM community, from Austria and Germany to New York to Australia, got quite a lot working with tangible interfaces. At top, Michael Schieben and Christophe Stoll experimented with using soda bottles to control software like Future Audio Workshop’s lovely Circle. (Ableton Live works, too – as does any MIDI software.) As Precious Forever, these guys are responsible for some of the best UIs in music software, from FAW to recent Native Instruments designs, so it’s lovely to see them experimenting with this idea.
As you add more people to the mix, you get ideas you might otherwise never have imagined, from a game involving blocks of the Tokyo skyline to an interface built into floor toms.
We also got a lot of real-world data on what works, what needs work, and what causes trouble for beginners, which we’ll be documenting. (Adam and Martin from the Trackmate and reacTIVision projects, respectively, were both tuned in to see progress and provided lots of help – and are also collecting that data to improve their own documentation and libraries.) More commentary on all these side benefits, as well as a discussion with visitors from Argentina on the scene around the world, at Create Digital Motion.
And for connecting Trackmate to MIDI and working with Processing, lots of tips are available on Michael Schieben’s noisepages blog: http://fritzcrate.noisepages.com/
So, what’s next? You can join discussion and brainstorming for how to proceed, and how to get in on another hackday (formal or ongoing), even if you missed the first. Stop by the Tangible and Multi-Touch Interface group on noisepages: Tangible + Multi-Touch noisepages Group
Our noisepages community is still in “alpha” state, but it’s usable – we’ve just fixed avatar uploading, which was the biggest problem. We’ll have more features, functionality, and improvements down the line, as well as more extensive documentation for how to get started. But if you’re a bleeding edge sort of person, join up free and give us some advice on what you’d like out of it.
I look forward to more work on these projects. Stay tuned for more, including some additional documentation (I’m developing some stuff around my own project).
Ableton Live enthusiasts, you take very seriously what gear you plug into your laptop sets. We’ve seen painstakingly-created DIY controllers like the arcade button hardware below, and bizarre oddities like calculators and arcade cabinets and blenders and Osterizers (above). So, in celebration of New York installment of the Dubspot Ableton Live 8 Tour, Saturday, June 27, we’re going to get together in a fantastic space and have a little Live party. And we want to see what controllers you’ve made.
If you’re coming to town for the Live Tour or are in the New York area, we’d love for you to show some of your creations. Built or customized your own controller? Got your Wii remotes and webcams running your Live set? Built your own special Reaktor / Pd / Max / Python creation to customize your Live performance? Invented some hardware that works with Live? We’d love to see it. It’s a week that includes some of the most skilled Live minds in the planet presenting, plus celebrity appearances by the likes of Richie Hawtin, Scientist, and others. So we expect that even though this is last-minute, this could be a fun chance to get together.
If you’re interested, just sign up below or head directly to the Google Docs form. This is an informal, relaxed venue with drinks and finger foods. (Check out the recent New York Magazine write-up.) The idea is to bring along some headphones or small speakers and show things off in the catacomb-like former stables (and former sex club) nooks of this fantastic bar, meet up, relax, and get to know each other. We’ll also feature a live performance or two; if interested, let us know what your stuff sounds like.
The event will be open to the public; stay tuned for more details on this and the event itself.
And if you want to learn how to use controllers intelligently with Ableton Live – from the cheap and accessible to the weird – I’ll be teaching a workshop at Dubspot on Sunday 6/28.
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