What is essential or new to the craft of fabricating electronic music? Who are we, today, as digital artists?

As a certain natural sameness descends on some computer-based music performance as the medium matures, artists at gatherings like next week’s In/Out Festival push out toward the fringe. And like the shifting pixels in Rosa Menkman’s imagery, these events indicate an emerging – sometimes glitchy – self-image of a scene.

In/Out hits New York Friday, September 17 – Saturday, September 18. The workshops on offer attack convention head-on. Sarah and Lara Grant make their circuits out of felt, crocheted sensors, and other fuzzy, furry, soft things. Rosa Menkman, above, turns file formats themselves into a medium. (Rosa’s workshop description alone might blow your mind.) Philip Stearns makes digital circuits from the most basic of elements.

You can attend the festival for US$15-25 if you’re in the New York Area. Disclosure: I’m one of the artists playing. But don’t let that stop you. Workshops and talks are mostly free.

http://inoutfest.org/2010-schedule

But if you’re hiding out in New York on this 9/11 weekend or anywhere in the world, here’s a brief audiovisual portrait of this gathering of boys and girls and their work, as well as a crackling, humming track from Protofuse (France) for CDM readers, for play or WAV download via SoundCloud.

And wherever you are, they offer an opportunity for audiovisual reflection.

From Some of the Artists

Jeff Thompson (NYC) makes a cascade a lovely sounds, lit by flashlights, in a Texas Firehouse performance. Check out his collection of contact mics.

Stephen McLeod (Toronto), aka Island Dweller, turns frying an egg into a pulsing, ambient wonderland. (No word yet on whether Mimosa music might accompany; I think I may need to schedule a brunch and propose and duet.)

Music for Cooking: Eggs from Stephen McLeod on Vimeo.

Look out, keyboardists: using CV/gate control, drumsticks rule over musical input in the the work of jredsmyth/Smyth:

CV Gate Control – Drum Triggers – In/Out Fest 2010 from Jred Smyth on Vimeo.

Chromatic Textures by Unearthed Music, below, feeds layers of shadow and light as video feed into the Gestural Music Sequencer (available for Mac/Windows download), their real-time generative music software, for a fused audiovisual experience:

Chromatic Textures from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

And for some dancing, here’s mtn (Making the Noise), a prominent creator from the monome community, making electronic collaboration by feeding his work through Lukas Johnson’s rig for additional sonic manipulation. From a performance at Boston’s Music Ecology:

mtn live @ music ecology Boston Part III from makingthenoise on Vimeo.

Workshops at In/Out show the range of perspectives on music technological technique, from bare-bones CMOS music to Brian Crabtree (of monome fame) talking about open source, from a future that looks like the spaceship-worthy Protodeck…

protodeck first demo from Julien Bayle on Vimeo.

…to one main entirely of felt. (See Lara Grant’s thesis blog for technical details, or Rhizome for a studio visit with sisters and makers Sarah and Lara.) It’s difficult to read online, but these things are absurdly fun to play.

For more work by France’s Protofuse, here’s an extended live set:

protofuse at Apero Codelab #8 fest from Julien Bayle on Vimeo.

Finally, as promised, here’s a download for CDM of Protofuse’s Pulse:
Protofuse – Pulse by cdm

So, to sign up and buy tickets:
http://inoutfest.org/

And stay tuned for more artist goodness and how-to’s right here.

Electronics and code and whatnot are great fun, but a lot of people want to know, how can they add actual, physical motion to a project? I’ve rounded up the last few odds and ends from the London Music Hackday organized in the offices of The Guardian, and came across Alistair MacDonald and Mr. Duck’s Percussion Machine, which uses Arduino with servos to strike beer bottles.

Here’s the perspective of the non-techie on the affair from the newspaper’s music blog:
Beats and geeks at Music Hack Day

Of course, I’ve heard from at least a couple of people that for this audience, you’re not entirely ready to do all your work in the cloud. APIs. Yawn – the computer musician audience still is happiest with as much CPU power as they can muster, live sound making in native code on a local machine, and, you know – rocking out. But that to me is a bit interesting in itself.

Also from the hackday:

While the Arduino is ideal for hard projects, software projects turn to the fuzzy textile-friendly Arduino LilyPad. (Side note: the LilyPad turns out not quite the perfect tool for all occasions, and a discussion of all soft electronics may be what’s next. But it is a good starting point.)

Rain Ashford used the LilyPad to make an interactive felt cat named TwinkleStarduino. Just don’t cross the streams – er, threads: “Yep – all the components are connected by conductive thread – none of these must touch each other or you’ll get a short circuit – which is a challenge in itself ”

Rain’s blog post discusses some of the challenges of the project and some of the things that went wrong, which I quite like. (One of the goals I set out for our own music hackday last month was to break s***.)

Musichackday 2009 – my hack: TwinkleStarduino [I like cats]

For fans of RjDj, the interactive music engine for the iPhone and iPod touch, here’s an example of the sort of work you can hack together in a day with the help of patching environment Pd:

ShakeNRoll by ookoi

Lastly, photos by organizer Dave Haynes:

And yes, it sounds like the EchoNest is interested in doing a hackday here in America. And with the help of the site we’re building, noisepages, we definitely plan more hackdays on CDM, too, with a CDM-style focus. Stay tuned.