Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christoph Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christoph immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christoph’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

Play this track:

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.

OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.

All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.

OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)

A $50 synth that makes neat noises is fun. But a $50 synth that has a proper housing, audio jacks, and can be MIDI controlled — that’s a whole lot better. So readers were wowed last week as we saw the work MrBook did with his Gakken SX-150.

Now, by popular demand, MrBook shares his techniques with specs, instructions, and code. This isn’t a bad project to get started with if you’ve been thinking of doing something on these lines.

The basic ingredients and process:

• Find the connections on the synth for audio and control, using contact points on the board
• Build a simple circuit that adds MIDI input (control) and audio output – schematic on his site. It’s not a tough circuit at all — this could be fun soldering practice.
• Add the Arduino, the open source, dirt-cheap, accessible microcontroller project board, and some code MrBook has written for you.

That should be fun even for relative newcomers – provided you have basic soldering chops. If you want to get more advanced, there’s room to modify the Arduino code to do fun stuff, or, as MrBook is doing, add a standalone Arduino sequencer or the like to drive your synth in hardware alone. (While I’m still on a crusade to do OSC for stuff that talks to computers, I think MIDI should absolutely be used for what it’s good add – connecting hardware.)

You can also have some fun with the casing. (Someone needs to mod the drab colors on the Gakken, too, I think.)

If you do a project and document it, do let us know! And we’ll be watching for more from MrBook.

You can get your SX-150 kit from our good friends at MAKE. (Nope, I’m not getting any cash for saying that. Hmmm… okay, I need an affiliate account, don’t I? Make?)

SX-150 synth mod instructions, schematics and code [MrBook]

Via Collin Cunningham at MAKE, MrBook has a lovely rig with a modified Gakken SX-150, the synth kit that sells for US$50 in the States and has even been seen as a free add-in with Japanese magazines. He’s added MIDI control and a digital audio converter, and put it into a housing, which makes for a quite-playable instrument.

Really terrific work! Of course, a few thoughts:

• We need an OSC-compatible synth. (Anyone out there?)
• I love you, Live, but this looks like a perfect job for Numerology (for its modular sequencing) or Renoise (for tracking).
• Looks like more controls would make this even more self-contained.

Gakken sx-150 arduino hack number two: Adding MIDI and Audio out

If you have synth projects like this, we’d love to see them.

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
• Ted Hayes’ EggBeater wireless shaker for rhythms, built in free software Pure Data and used (in this case) with 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):