“On lead synthesizer, a philodendron …” (And the crowd goes wild…)

Vegetation may not be the first association you have when thinking of electronic music. But two new albums, each released via Bandcamp, celebrate biological life of the green, leafy variety. One is a benefit compilation, with proceeds going to help trees and music inspired by that green goodness. The other uses plants as “performers,” generating its form from plant life in an installation and extended “live” release.

It seems a fitting time to think about trees and plants, as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere see the coming of summer. As I write this, outside my home office’s window, everything has become a calming canopy of maple leaves. And so, just as those trees have a chilling, soothing emotional impact, I confess that this is all really enjoyable music, gimmicks aside. The tree-themed compilation is not a bunch of aimless Earthy music; the plants are not, as you might assume, screechy noise. Instead, you get two full-length albums of terrific-quality ambient music.

Each also works to plant something living – literally. “Take to the Trees,” a compilation for Arbor Day, directs proceeds from sales to the Arbor Day Foundation for conservation and education. That means money from the release could protect and plant trees. The Data Garden Quartet is more literal: embracing the idea of “plantable music,” the ephemeral digital download code is printed on paper that can grow. For instance, on the recent “Cheap Dinosaurs” release, you get “hand-made seed paper with screen-printed album art and download code on reverse side.”

Download Cheap Dinosaurs, plant this art under a thin layer of soil in full sun to partial shade and add water. With proper care, blue lobelias will begin sprouting in the first two weeks and finally begin blooming about 4 weeks later.

Released on Sound for Good, a benefit label, “Take to the Trees” gives you four hours of music for a minimum of just US$1. The collection is eclectic, spanning fairly traditional ambient music to beats, breaks, and experiments. Some tracks sound influenced by the cadence of traditional Japanese music or Tibetan meditation. They evoke impressions of trees and forests, but often via electronic (even traditional analog) timbres, recalling the sensation of trees and experience as much as painting those scenes directly. There are epic, sprawling tracks and more compact, rhythmic compositions. Sometimes nature itself sneaks in, in jungles and mountain sojourns. More often, warm, fuzzy electronic pads glow like sunlight. Many, many artists participate, going far beyond the San Francisco scene, including our friend, technologist, blogger, and musician Mark Mosher. Jack Hertz, also a prolific blogger and performer, heads up the comp.

Artists:

John Koch-Northrup, Ian Boddy, Burning Artist, Chromasonic, Crystal Dreams, Todd Fletcher, Groupthink, HG Fortune and Inner Dreamer, inside/ outside, Oskar Menzel, Joe McMahon, Mesawzee Eagle, Mirada, Shane Morris, Mark Mosher, Mystified, redgreenblue, John Sherwood, Symatic Star and Tange.

http://sound4good.bandcamp.com/

If “Take to the Trees” is hours of human playing and human experience recalling the feeling of plant life, “Data Garden Quartet” turns to the plants to “generate” the score, in nearly two hours of extended listening. Blending minimalism and ambience, the product is a wash of sound, with waves of timbres crested by gentle buzzes, glitches, and hums, all in extended rhythms and cycles (sometimes recalling nothing so much as the occasional stroke of a Javanese gong).

The project looks to make natural phenomena audible, “information which we cannot perceive through our biological senses”:

The musical compositions you are about to listen to were generated by the electronic impulses produced by four tropical plants. This data, interpreted by humans with the help of computers, has been employed to organize sound into beauty perceivable by the human ear. While the means of producing this beauty can be described in technical terms, the natural creative force generating this experience is less apparent.

These 116 minutes were recorded during an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April, in a “quartet” of a philodendron, two schefflera plants, and a snake plant. (Images here are from that exhibition.) The team:

Sam Cusumano: electronics
Joe Patitucci: sound design
Alex Tyson: production, graphic design

More images, though I think my favorite of all is the wonder of the gawking young girl. It’s too easy for us to become jaded, and forget, sometimes, the magic of the things we make.

Quartet: Live at The Philadelphia Museum of Art [datagarden.org]
http://datagarden.org/about/

Data Garden also do an interview with Abigail Bruley for Creators Project:
Interacting With Plants To Create Polyphonic Music

Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores
unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog [PDF]

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/
http://www.toktek.org/
http://gieskes.nl/
http://www.niklasroy.com/
http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

We’ve passed from Record Store Day to Earth Day – and here’s the perfect segue. Having ventured into the woods to find a music release, now we can hear trees transformed, by way of sampling, into catchy rhythms. Our friend Diego Stocco, that evergreen source of creative timbres, now makes everything from trees to beans into sounds that are subtle and complex, full of personality and uniquely tied to their origin materials. There’s no real violence done to nature, either; you can make all of these noises with little more force than a small thundershower.

Remarkably, the video – shot as a promotional for Burt’s Bees – is all real-time. After-the-fact sampling manipulation is itself a fun activity, but there’s none of that business here; this is all improvisation, not editing or effects.

And that brings us to the real message of what Diego Stocco can do. Microphones matter, yes, but the real expertise here is not mic technique; it’s listening. Diego comes up with this great material because he’s had a lot of practice listening to the world around him. As the skill of his listening improves, so do his sounds, as though the planet unfolds new possibilities. (In fact, even the question of technical experience also comes down to the same idea: you’ll get better at mic selection and placement with more experimentation and listening closely to the results.)

Other examples he’s released in the past months drive that point home. In “Improv on a Plate,” the composer and sound designer plays a plate as though it’s an instrument.

I was about to cut a chocolate cake and when I moved the plate on the countertop I noticed a very interesting sound.
One side of the plate was free to vibrate because the tiles were not perfectly even, so by applying pressure with one finger and tapping it with another I was able to create some tonal beats.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
The recording setup was very simple, Røde NT5, Apogee ONE, Pro Tools 9.

At a recent workshop at Berklee, Diego gave this advice to students explicitly: listen. (The suggestion comes across in a way that to me resonates with the teachings of Zen Buddhism – and, indeed, the teachings of just about all teachers in all disciplines. Observation is essential.)

He illustrated that point with a case study: a taxicab with a funny trunk can be the beginnings of a piece of music.

One of the things that I talked about during my sound design lecture at Berklee http://bit.ly/y89Wtr was to listen to the world around you all the time.

There are many reasons, there could be something interesting happening from a sonic standpoint, you could enrich your sound vocabulary by building references, and most of the time you can create something useful out of that recorded material.

On my way back home, I took a cab from the airport, and I noticed that there was a strange chirping noise coming from the trunk. Of course, I recorded it right away : )
I took that sound, did some work on it and created this short sound designed piece.
You’ll hear the dry sound first, and then the sound designed version, enjoy!

I can think of no better way to celebrate Earth Day than with that reflection: listening to your environment, “organic” and man-made, and the world all around you will help you discover possibilities you’ve missed. That’s not just sound design: it’s a way of (better) life. Happy Earth Day; hope you’ve all had a good weekend.

http://diegostocco.com/

For more hot mic-on-tree action this Earth Day, here’s the 2009 video Music from a Tree:

If the last decades in technology were about speed, this decade promises to be about power. I don’t mean horsepower: I mean power as in electricity. From concerns environmental to practical, power is now a real variable.

After years of misreading Moore’s Law to mean that all technology would forever double in speed (that would be absurd, and wasn’t what he meant), even those lusting after gadgets have begun to think about power consumption, too. People want longer battery life and leaner energy bills – and psychologically, there is something more than a little ominous about watching an oil well spew petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico. New processor technologies are all about doing more with less, with the lower-voltage chips powering Intel netbooks and longer-life Intel laptops to the ARM architectures inside the iPhone, iPad, Android, and other hot-ticket pocket items.

Music’s part of that trend, too. It’s a natural evolution from production as a room – in the studio – to production anywhere, to production without wall sockets. Musicians are using those other mobile devices (iPhone, etc.), of course, but more conventional, music-specific hardware is getting in on the act, as well. Music industry giant Roland made battery power a feature of their exhibit at the NAMM trade show in January, showing off a whole orchestra worth of battery-powered instruments, and has a new generation of DSP that more easily runs on batteries. Rival Korg has found some of their hottest items, like the compact KAOSSilator, are the ones that you can run even away from a battery socket. And there are many other examples, including mobile recording and practice tools and coach class-ready MPCs. It’s not just about mobile devices: it’s about freedom from wall sockets.

All that is something busking musicians figured out long ago: if you can run on batteries, you can play music anywhere, including outdoors. But this isn’t just for buskers: it can mean impromptu music jams without digging out power strips, the ability to bring a few music gadgets onto a sofa and play with friends, or sitting in bed in the evening with some headphones working out musical ideas – no massive power bricks needed.

So, okay – what can you do on batteries? We’ve seen a number of mobile jams; the latest comes from a group in Spain. Juanjo Javierre writes:

We are five musicians from Huesca (north of Spain) We are member of a workshop called ART LAB Huesca. Last week we play a concert with instruments that works only with batteries: Omnichord, Otamatone, Tenori-on, Nintendo DS, Casiotone, Kalimba, IPad, Stylophone…. An unplugged electronic concert! It´s a joke but we are great fans from your blog and we want that you have the video.

It may be a joke, but it’s something I’m increasingly interested in. The ensemble they’ve entitled “Art Lag Geek Orquestra,” and you can see they’re having a blast. Now they just need a battery-powered mixer and PA, both of which are very possible.

art-lab geek from Art Lab Huesca on Vimeo.

So, I turn the conversation to you: what’s your favorite battery-powered device? iPhone? Casiotone? Got something not mentioned here? (Mobile field recording ought to get a nod, too.) Or do you find for live performance away from the grid, the key word is “generator”?

Reware your PDA from Hans-Christoph Steiner on Vimeo.

Give a hoot – don’t pollute with your old mobile gear. Make musical creations with it instead, powered by Linux.

Sure, there are wonderful things happening with mobile music applications on platforms like the shiny, new iPhone. But remember how technology was supposed to democratize access? Lots of us don’t have the money for a new iPhone or iPod. And how many of us have outdated Pocket PCs and Palms collecting dust? How many of these highly toxic devices get thrown away?

Linux to the rescue.

One of the biggest hits of my talk at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal was the mention of the Reware, a project by Hans-Christopher Steiner, who is doing research at New York’s Eyebeam. He has literally a box full of old PDAs – the kind a lot of people would give away at this point – which he has rescued in order to reuse as development platforms and musical devices.

There’s something just stunning about watching an old Pocket PC transformed into an interesting musical device. It’s like the feeling you get when you save a puppy with the help of a rescue / adoption agency, and instead of being put down, Buster turns out to be an agility champion. (Sorry. I really love dogs.)

Reware Project at Eyebeam

For a sample project, here you can dual-boot Linux on an old Palm:

Reware your PDA: dual boot Linux on a Palm TX from an SD card

Once you’ve done that, you can run your own creations and even Pd patches on your mobile. Even old iPods can work.

Pd Music Patching on PDAs

It’s a little trickier to recycle older embedded devices than it is desktop computers: for one thing, many of these devices lack floating-point calculation capability. (The FPU on the iPhone is one of the things that makes it so nice.) For fans of the multimedia environment Pd (Pure Data), the variant PDa (“Puredata anywhere”) is the solution. It rewrites signal processing as fixed point (integer) processing. It’s nowhere near as fast as a floating point-native Pd, and there are some other caveats, but there’s still a whole lot you can do with it. This is also good news for the currently-shipping Google Android handset, the HTC G1, which also lacks an FPU.

PDa 

Gunter Geiger is responsible for PDa, with help from lots of other folks. Now Hans is packaging all this stuff together to make it easier to run.

See it in Person; More Soon!

If you’re in the New York area, next week Hans is coming to Handmade Music to show off the work he’s doing. Check out the lineup on our new, evolving Handmade Music minisite:

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

That’s free, 7:30pm Thursday, May 21 in Brooklyn at 3rd Ward.

For fans of Android, I’ll be talking about development on Google’s own open source, Java-based mobile platform, which also runs the Linux kernel.

Android is itself getting ported to alternative platforms, again thanks to the magic of GNU/Linux and open source. Here’s just a small sampling:

Android Ports and Hacks Round-up

If Android also gives us native library access, it could become powerful for music. Even with just the 1.5 SDK, there’s a Java library for interactive music production. Both projects should cross-pollinate, though, because of the common Linux kernel between them.

If you’re not in the New York area, we’ll post details early next week about a live webstream. And we should have additional video after the event.

Hans and I are also working on getting Pd running on the BUG, which is both open-source software and hardware.

To round things out, here’s a video by Public Radio International’s Takeaway, showing how Hans is working with hackers doing other super-cool projects at Brooklyn’s NYC Resistor. It’s just one of many hacklabs sprouting all over the globe.

Humans Turning Up Volume In Oceans [NPR “Science Out of the Box”]

A new report shows the way in which sound travels through the ocean has been impacted by global warming. A growing community of artists are working in media like sound to address environmental challenges. But it seems the planet is making some “sound art” of its own. Curious to hear what people think of the report.

Digital music is extending more deeply into the physical world, thanks to sensors and robotics. The result: gorgeous acoustic sounds as part of the lexicon. When we last spotted Simon Kirby and the Found Electronics collective, they were taking the tangible interface out of electronic music and applying them to ambient sampled sounds out in the woods. Now, they’re talking to plants and channeling traditional Chinese instruments.

Found Electronics: Three Pieces Project Page

Simon writes with some of the details:

It’s called "Three Pieces", and it’s our attempt to create an interactive musical installation that is in keeping with the natural environment of the beautifully restored Victorian Palm House. Rather than use computers and a PA, we decided to try and build something completely acoustic. In the end, we’ve got a traditional Chinese dulcimer and 12 chimes spread throughout the plants and foliage of the Palm House. The instruments are played robotically, controlled by two Arduinos. Motion detectors and a soil sensor allow us to react to people in the space and to the state of the plants to remix the music we’ve composed especially for the installation. The result is a strange combination of traditional and modern, organic and electronic, nature and artifice. Despite being composed in advance, the music will never be exactly the same twice, in part because it will change in response to the environment and audience, and also because the robots are a combination of accurately machined parts (e.g. mechanical solenoids) and natural materials (e.g. bamboo canes).

The installation will be open from Saturday [June] 14th for two weeks. On Saturday 21st, there will be a performance in the Palm House by the band Found for midsummer’s day, and we are planning a Q&A session for the public sometime in the two weeks, to be announced on our website: www.foundelectronics.net

You might also be interested in the other work we’re doing, also on www.foundelectronics.net. For example, we’ve been developing a purpose-built combination of audio-looper software and controller, which is quite fun…

The “mood” of the musical robots is actually affected by the plants:

The moisture content of the soil changes slowly as the plants absorb water, while on a much faster timescale, the temperature changes in the building as animals, including humans, move about. The installation detects this living presence in the Palm House and the music changes accordingly. The robots react to humans, but their mood alters with the plants.

The show has been extended through July 13, so if you’re near the Royal Botanic Garden, you can go have a look!

Last month, I was lucky enough to head to a gathering of music and visual artists at the studio of artist Duncan Laurie in Jamestown, Rhode Island, accompanied by performances in Providence and Boston. Among the cast: Richard Devine, Josh Kay (Phoenicia/Schematic), Steve Nalepa, Todd Thille (Synesthete), Vidvox’s David Lublin, Josh Randall (Robotkid/Harmonix), Aerostatic, Brian Kane (former Emergency Broadcast Network), and Ooah (Glitch Mob).

And then there were the rocks and coconuts. Duncan Laurie and electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been sonifying natural signal sources, hooking up vintage radionics equipment and connecting rocks and bananas and such to signals. Richard and Josh brought along part of their formidable collection of modular equipment, and a great crackling, screaming analog racket resulted.

Fans of vintage gear, big knobs, and audiovisual mayhem will surely be jealous. (Photos above courtesy Todd Thille, Arrow.)

mind-meld.org

Flickr set 

Here’s co-organizer Todd Thille (aka Synesthete) describing the full event.

Mind Meld 2008 – Event Wrap by Todd Thille

Todd writes: The weekend of Friday the 13th marked the 3rd annual Mind Meld gathering at Duncan Laurie‘s Jamestown, Rhode Island studio. An incredible assortment of audio and video artists were assembled, ostensibly to relax, but with so much talent in one place, a show or two is inevitable.

Duncan’s three-storey studio sits atop Bull Point, surrounded by water on three sides. The studio was built entirely out of salvaged materials. Floors made of glass block allow light to penetrate up from the lower workshop, through the main room and into the laboratory on the top floor. It is on the top floor that Duncan and his electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been experimenting with sonifying signals from Nature. There is an impressive array of old Radionic equipment as well as a number of devices that Gordon has developed. The visual centerpiece of the lab is the "Music Machine", an 8′ tall cuboctahedron that was part of a GENESIS Bio-Entrainment Module, a bio-feedback device developed in the 1980′s. The machine is now host to Gordon’s Purr Generator. The purr generator is a device which generates a signal at approximately 25 Hz. This coincides with the frequency of vibrations given off by a “happy cat” and has long been thought to be therapeutic. External audio sources can be played through the machine.

Much of the activity at the studio in the last few years has been given over to exploring signals in Nature. Based on precedents set by Cleve Backster and T. Townsend Brown, plants and rocks are fitted with electrodes or have copper leads affixed to them. Small voltages present are picked up with a variety of test equipment, including Wheatstone bridges, rate of change convertors, EKGs, and the IBVA brainwave monitor. The resulting data streams are converted to MIDI and used to drive Ableton Live.

For the artists that have assembled each year, the draw of a fantastic location, strange nature research and wealth of information about Radionics that Duncan posses are too much to resist. This years gathering included mainstays; Steve Nalepa, a West Coast electronic musician, gaining attention with his forthcoming Flatlands CD/DVD and Bass Science, a dubstep project with MattB; Todd Thille ( aka Synesthete ), an Istanbul based VJ and multimedia artist currently engaged in designing new software and hardware for the explorations underway at Duncan’s studio; David Lublin, of Vidvox, makers of the popular VJ software VDMX; Josh Randall ( aka Robotkid ), a Creative Director at Harmonix by day, working titles like Rock Band and Phase; Aerostatic, the Brooklyn based couple Michelle Darling and Terry Golob, who’s style ranges from ambient to breakcore with some Seseame Street (both have worked at Sesame Workshop) in for good measure.

Newer faces included Brian Kane, a former member of EBN and the self described "Karl Rove of the art world, who was busy pushing his latest meme, Meat Water; Ooah, one of the members of rising stars, the Glitch Mob; Richard Devine, still recovering from a near death experience after a small wound on his foot, infected with staph, nearly destroyed his heart, came to reek sonic mayhem with a massive stack of modular synths; Josh Kay ( aka Jeswa ), who joined Richard in exploring the sonic possibilities of the studio, and a formidable force in his right as a member of Soul Oddity and Phoenecia and founder of Schematic Records; CDM’s own Peter Kirn rounded out the list of performing artists.

Through the work of Elizabeth Keithline and Nick Bauta of The Steel Yard and Firehouse 13, the audio visual extravaganza, "we’ll do it live" found a home at the Pell-Chafee center in downtown Providence. Two massive 40′ wide screens were hung from the three-story vaulted ceiling. Duncan and Aerostatic opened with an exploration of signals coming from a piece of granite (seen in their Rockstar short) and a banana. Peter Kirn deftly handled Kore for his 30 minute set with reactive visuals by Synestete. Brian Kane performed selections from his triple-head av masterpiece, HDADD. Robotkid and rndm threw down a bumpin’ av mashup. Nalepa and David Lublin got the party moving with Flatlands remixes, dubstep tracks and ethereal hand-held footage with Quartz Composer overlays. Ooah brought out the glitch hop with his Panty Raid and tracks from other Mob members. Richard Devine and Josh Kay double-teamed Traktor, bring the soundsystem down with meters in the red and finishing out the night with TapStereo.

The event picked up and relocated to Duncan’s studio where Richard and Josh Kay set up a wall of modular synths to plug into the different sound sources. Peter got busy writing an FFT patch in Processing and tried it out with signals coming from an onion and a lime. He also experimented with Gordon’s Bat Box. The rest of the crew amused themselves with Rock Band and chatting in small groups around the bar-b-gue that sprang up on the driveway.

The group started to disperse on Sunday and everyone but Richard and Josh Kay had left by the time that Steve, photographer Arrow One, Peter and I headed up to Boston on Monday night. We met up with Robotkid and Brian Kane for a show in Cambridge at Beat Research. There was a good crowd despite it being a rainy school night. Peter had much better control over his Kore set. Robotkid and I mixed visuals until Brian fired up his DVJ and played some of his AV pieces. Nalepa came in a pinstripe suit and tore up the room with Bass Science dubstep.

Peter and I started Tuesday morning at the new offices of Harmonix. We decided not to get sucked into any meetings and beat a retreat to the MIT Museum. There were good exhibits on deep sea craft, high-speed photography and sculptor Arthur Ganson.

The afternoon brought a visit to the studio of visionary painter Paul Laffoley. He had requested a chicken stuffed in a watermelon, potential racial slur aside, we obliged and hand delivered him a "chelon." Paul was in the midst of prepping for a 60s and 70s retrospective that is to be on display in New York in February. He was also hard at work on a Tarot deck. We parted with Peter afterwards and the 3rd annual Mind Meld came to a close.

Thanks to Todd Thille for writing up this report for CDM. Captions by Peter Kirn.

Tired of all those DIY electronics projects making an awful racket? This one is whisper-quiet. You may have to turn up your volume to hear it at all.

Project creator Andrew Benson (maker of many wonderful things for Cycling ’74) writes:

I just finished sewing together an FM synthesizer that lives on a wristband and is controlled by a little brown button that serves as a knob and a pair of small pressure sensors made from conductive fabrics. The whole thing runs off of an attiny45 chip, which is a really cheap AVR microcontroller chip that I’ve programmed with some FM synthesis routines.

It is a quiet little noise-maker, and is super fun to play with. All of the electronic connections (except for the little hand-routed PCB) are made using conductive thread. I’m still working on some finishing touches like strengthening the weak points with embroidery and providing slightly better protection for the circuit, but the functionality is all there. Let me know what you think!

Project blog post
Flickr set
More YouTube videos (this and other crazy projects)

As it happens, one of my favorite projects from the spring ITP show at New York University was the Square Band by Rory Nugent:

A wearable, portable square-wave synthesizer designed to be worn around the wrist so that he or she can be musically expressive whenever the moment strikes them.

Rows of buttons run along the underside of the wearer’s wrist for triggering of musical tones and a light sensor is available for shifting the pitch of the tones being played. This design allows for a form of musical expression that integrates itself very intimately with the human body. Tapping with the fingers plays tones and movement of the wrist and arm shifts these tones in pitch up and down.

Square Band @ ITP NYU Show Page
Rory Nugent Blog
As seen by our inestimable friend Collin Cunningham at the MAKE: blog

Solar panels? Fun, simple beat making? I’m sold.

Whether this appeals to you or not, you can bet that the growing availability, cheapness, and ease-of-use of small microprocessors will mean synths everywhere. Could be even cooler than that Dick Tracy wrist phone, after all.

But that got me thinking. I think for creative health it’s important to spend some time out waterskiing or birdwatching that isn’t musical time. But what about those time when you have music making to do and you have to reconcile it with pretty outdoors time? Have you found a mobile setup that you take with you to the park? Let us know. Maybe I do need one of those HP Mini-Notes like our friend Brad just picked up. Some micro PC, solar power … sounds rather nice, right?

And if you’ve got an image of you, a keytar, and a surfboard, or perhaps a solar array powering a mountain-top Reaktor programming session, send them our way!

Updated:

That didn’t take long! Here’s Soundfreaks playing, complete with keytar and Speedo, on a lake outside Munich. Nice one, guys. Now, I just need a waterproof computer…