Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 – 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 – 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

Here’s what you’ll see:

A self-proclaimed “multi-hyphenate,” Liz McLean Knight–the sole woman behind Quantazelle–is thoroughly immersed in technology, fashion, music, and the often-surprising overlaps between. She will be demonstrating and discussing the art of “micro-sampling” and other swell digital music production techniques. Once she gets going, this whole thing might turn into a dance party.

Michael Una, an audiovisual artist whose work “investigates how vibrating waves of energy and human consciousness interact” will present simple-but-effective techniques for controlling audio software and hardware with inexpensive, commonly found devices like QWERTY Keyboards, video game joysticks, and bicycles.

In addition to the knowledge we’ll be droppin’, beer and pizza will be served. W3rd.

Dorkbot is the geeky cultural phenomenon that somehow spread from the Computer Music Center at Columbia University all around the world. Normally, the presentations tend toward general electronics, but custom wind instruments, laptop orchestras, and open source audio rearrangers are all on tap for a special all-music Dorkbot coming up this week. If you’re here in New York, you’ll want to mark your calendars for Wednesday, but thanks to the power of the Interweb, we’ll make sure you get the full experience virtually.

Here are the details (and for those of you everywhere else in the world, you’ll find plenty of additional information at each of these links):

The 6021st dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007, at 7pm at Location One in SoHo.

It’ll be full of musical dorkiness of the highest order, to start the year off right. Please bring snacks to share!

Featured the fragrant and marvelous:

Tomas Henriques: META-EWI and META-EVI (customized wind controllers)
The META-EWI and the META-EVI are respectively a modified EWI (Akai’s Electric Wind Instrument) and a modified MIDI EVI (Steiner’s Electric Valve Instrument), to which were added a whole new set of controllers based on sensor technologies. The goal of these two projects was to achieve specific innovative levels of performance techniques and musical expressiveness that go beyond what is currently possible to do with either a monophonic wind controller or a monophonic acoustic instrument and to take advantage of meaningful performance gestures and body motions that are naturally used by a performer of such an instrument. These modified instruments succeed at stretching the expressiveness and the range of musical gestures found on the original instrument allowing the musician to have a more complete and far reaching control of a great variety of meaningful musical parameters.

Dan Trueman: PLOrk The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). Dan Trueman, co-founder and director of PLOrk, will introduce the ensemble, describe its design and a number of the pieces written for it, and share video and audio recordings from recent performances.

MEAPsoft: MEAPsoft!!!
MEAPsoft is open source software for automatically segmenting and rearranging music audio recordings. It is aimed at musicians and experimenters who want to play with new ways to analyze, sort, and resynthesize audio fragments. MEAPsoft was developed by a collaborative group of students and faculty from LabROSA and the Computer Music Center at Columbia University. Members of the group will talk about the concepts behind the software and play lots of groovy examples!