Before evolutionary adaptation comes mutation. Some of the weirdest stuff, in other words, could be the future – just ask biology. That was the conversation I had with folks like artist Rosa Menkman in Old Amsterdam (the one in Holland). So, as we gather back in New Amsterdam (NYC), we get a chance to celebrate the unusual.

Wherever you are in the world, here’s a look at some of those new mutations: a sewing machine converted into a musical instrument, an expressive audiovisual instrument borrowing ideas from the trumpet, and an electro-country band that covers classic honky-tonk American hits.

If you are in the sliver of our audience who live in the NYC area, of course, you can catch these folks live in a variety show-meets-science fair format. We don’t charge admission for the weird, and you can buy beer. Thanks to our new home at Galapagos Art Space, the NYC edition of Handmade Music can offer a proper stage and a lineup of live performances, along with the noisemaking and friendly atmosphere.

Live, Monday, March 8
Where: Galapagos Art Space, DUMBO Brooklyn [directions]
When: Doors open 7p
Cost: FREE
Highlights online for the rest of the planet here, later

Augmented Sewing Machine + Ensemble

Circuit Bending Orchestra: Lara Grant at Diana Eng’s Fairytale Fashion Show, Eyebeam NYC / SML from See-ming Lee ??? SML on Vimeo.

Lara Grant’s Augmented Sewing Machine, entitled “16TH AND MISSION,” takes the workings of the device and transforms it into musical control. Contact between needle and fabric and onboard switches and knobs (with help from Arduino and Max/MSP) make it a novel controller.

Lara joins myself and Matt Ganucheau providing additional electronic sounds (and possibly a surprise DIY creation or two from me), forming three quarters of the ensemble we formed to play a wearable technology fashion show. The Fairytale Fashion show, by Diana Eng, is documented below by MAKE’s/Adafruit’s Phil Torrone, with our group’s live (PA) music in the background. (See also an extensive photoblog of the designs by designer-technology See-ming Lee.)

fairytale fashion 2010 from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Missing but rejoining me next week in San Francisco is Lara’s sister Sarah Grant. Together, the Grant Sisters work on conductive fabric sound. If you’re interested in how to work with textiles in sonic electronics, they’ve promised to share more of what they’re doing:
http://fsp.fm

The TOOB: An Audiovisual Hypertrumpet

How do you build on the idea of a trumpet? Give it digital control and control over audio and visuals, of course:

Arvid Tomayko-Peters plays The TOOB – a unique wireless electronic wind instrument that gives the performer a vast but intuitive and malleable range of sonic material, allowing creative freedom in solo or group improvisation. The instrument senses breath, finger pressure, tilt and acceleration and utilizes sound captured and processed on the fly to create expressive soundscapes ranging from comic to tragic to “a force of nature” and abstract live video.

At top, a recent short audiovisual improvisation recorded on the instrument, provided to CDM by the artist. The TOOB even made an appearance at SIGGRAPH, the geektastic visual conference. More information:

Short live video from SIGGRAPH:
http://arvidtp.net/music.php#siggraph2009

How it works:
http://arvidtp.net/portfolio/instruments.php

Performance with the TOOB:
http://arvidtp.net/portfolio/index.php#toob

And here’s what the creation looks like. Notice the clever use of a project enclosure, tubing, and force sensing resistors. (Getting the job done always earns bonus points in my book.)

Owen Lake, Electro-Country, and New Handmade Instrument Designs

They call it electro-country. This isn’t modern, top-of-the-charts, watered down Nashville pop. Think covers of classic 1950s honky-tonk, covered on modular synths and custom electronic instruments. The instrumental lineup for Owen Lake:

Owen Lake (jeff snyder) – voice and manta
Penny Hunt (kate soper) – voice and synthesizer
Tommy Byrd (matt hough) – voice and guitar
Frank Arnold (spencer russell) – bass
Buck Flash (alex ness) – live video

But alongside his love of country music, bandleader Jeff Snyder moonlights as inventor. His Manta is a fascinating new small-run, boutique touch controller with a hexagonal layout. I had been meaning to check out the Manta anyway. (Its design has caught the eye of folks like Cycling ’74 engineer Darwin Grosse, one of the key minds behind Max.) Now I get to see it in person, with a full electro-country band behind it. Expect a full report thereafter.

Just don’t get too rowdy with the beers and start tossing them at the band in excitement, like that scene from The Blues Brothers. (Ah, though maybe we should put all these players together and try to cover “Stand By Your Man.”)

The hardware project:
http://www.snyderphonics.com/

The band project:
http://www.owenlake.com/

Gesture-Controller Exploration, by Matt + Lisa

Gesture-Control Deomonstration from Mouse & the Billionaire on Vimeo.

M Bethancourt wowed us at a previous event with an elegantly-designed gestural controller. Such devices are hardly new, fundamentally, but the GCe3 is beautifully refined, in a gorgeous wood housing. Since then, Mouse and the Billionaire (aka Matt + Lisa, though I’m not sure which one is which) have been practicing – because it’s not only the invention of the thing, but practicing on it to get good. Here’s what they’re up to:

The Gesture-Controller Exploration is a study of innovative musical instrument / controllers that investigates the relationship between movement, physical space and musical performance. The most recent incarnation, the GCe3, combines a musical software suite built in Max/Msp with an intuitive physical form to create a rich musical experience. Dipping, swinging, swaying, tilting, and turning the The Gesture-Controller sends signals to the computer running the audio software, informing its sound-making functions. This allows for a more satisfying performance, leveraging the power of the computer and helping the electronic musician to use physical means to create and manipulate digital electronic sounds in new and interesting ways.

http://www.mouseandthebillionaire.com/gce/
http://vimeo.com/tag:gesturecontrolexploration

The Event

Event details

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

on Facebook

Bonus! Saturday we’re hanging out with Babycastles, the indie arcade, and the folks of Loud Objects, chip-programming sound scientists. Bring a soldering iron (if you own one; if not, it’s a worthy investment), and stop in for hacking controllers and making one-button objects. Previous details | on Facebook

Through the power of skin-safe conductive ink, Scottish electronic artist Calvin Harris has collaborated with a team to make a synthesizer out of himself and a group of models in bikinis. That’s just fine, Calvin – now what are you going to use for your remaining two wishes?

The project is the creation of Calvin, Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon at Sony Music Entertainment, and four masters students at the Royal College of Art Industrial Design program who created the conductive ink: Bibi Nelson, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt Johnson. Johnson programmed the interface and music: two Arduinos provide the analog-to-digital connection between the ink-human circuitry and a computer. Patching environment Max/MSP then deals with the data and translates to MIDI, and musical materials are sequenced live and “performed” into Ableton Live. As seen on Engadget and sent in by a number of readers (thanks!) as well as the creative team that did it.

Team member Steve Milbourne writes us with full details and extra behind-the-scenes shots. I wanted to know how they put this together and if there were any false starts or experiments necessary to get it right. He responds:

We read about the conductive ink ‘Bare’ that the students at the RCA (Royal College of Art) had invented and we thought it was pretty cool. We wondered if we could make some kind of musical instrument from it, so we spoke to Calvin and asked him if he’d be up for collaborating.

After quite a bit of mulling over various methods of doing it, we decided to try and create a choreographed routine where people touching hands would close the circuits and trigger sounds somehow.

With the help of the guys from the RCA we began to draw a schematic for the synth, and conceptualize how it would operate, we eventually decided on a layout and that we’d control it using MIDI, by connecting the paint ‘electrodes’ to an Arduino which connects to Max/MSP. This then controls individual tracks in Ableton, and in the live mode automatically quantized them on the fly as the performance took place.

Behind the scenes it was two days of setting up, testing, and working out the routines before the day we filmed it. On the day we spent the morning letting the dancers rehearse and get the timing more or less right (so the notes were quantized into the right places at the BPM running in Ableton, a bit slower than the original track, but dancing at 140bpm was a little difficult for them!) and then we filmed several takes before we got one we were happy with.

False starts, well it took a while to get it all together. At times it seemed like it might not be completely possible. The conductive ink worked better on some people than others (due to a lot of scientific variables such as… how much salt they have in their body, how sweaty they were etc), but the RCA students went through a number of different variants of the paint to get it exactly right.

We messed around with painted pitch bends as well as ribbon controllers on peoples arms – which actually worked too, but we couldn’t fit them into the performance as they weren’t ‘quite’ reliable enough. Cool though.

As to Calvin’s other wishes.. I’m not sure what more you can ask for than a human synthesizer made up of 16 attractive girls in bikinis!

Fair enough!

In the interest of gender balance, I can think of a few female electronic artists who certainly deserve to turn the tables on the roles here, however.

The ink itself is fascinating, and winks and nods about models aside, it’s terrific to see electronics getting closer to the human body and physical movement. For more on the ink and how it’s used:

http://www.bareconductive.com/index.html

More on Calvin Harris:
http://www.calvinharris.co.uk

Photos courtesy Sony; used by permission.