I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music.

A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off on lots of different stylistic vectors, but glued together by the notion of key and pitch. Let’s let contributor Joshua Saddler explain this – and the holiday album – as well as share some of the music. If you celebrate Orthodox Christmas or more generally the idea of “Holidays” (ahem), or if you just like good music, you can overlook the fact that the latter arrives a bit late on the Western calendar. But both albums are terrific, and I suspect the approach to the music in key, to sharing samples and field recordings, could well be an inspiration in your own music-making endeavors. Sometimes rules are liberating.

If you want to get a jump start on musical New Year’s resolutions, I can think of nothing better. Joshua writes:

The monome community has released not one, but two albums for the holidays. Both are freely available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com

The first, MCRPv11 (Monome Community Remix Project, volume 11), was released mid-November, five months after the MCRPv10 album (which CDM has previously covered).

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/mcrpv11-all-keyed-up-edition

As with all MCRP albums, there are guidelines and a theme. Participants submitted a field recording and a short instrumental sample in the key of G/E-minor. The participants then chose as many samples as they wished from the shared pool (though they couldn’t use their own samples), and had a couple of weeks to assemble their tracks. Sounds ranged from falling rocks to ocean waves to modular synthesizers to toy ukeleles and dogs barking. From this pool emerged fifteen startlingly diverse tracks.

Have a listen, and head to Bandcamp for downloads in any format you desire:

I appreciate the chance to see Joshua’s process in video:

I’m pretty pleased with how my contribution, “mnml autmn,” turned out:

mnml autmn by ioflow

I sequenced bits and pieces from four samples with Renoise (in some cases using single-cycle waveforms…so it still counts, even if it sounds nothing like the original!), exported sections to loops, and performed them live with rove (http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:rove) on a monome 128. I recorded and rearranged the resulting segments using Ardour3‘s timeline view. The tracker and the traditional DAW actually worked well together. As I’m the sole Linux musician on the album, composing and arranging takes much longer using free software than more common tools like Ableton Live. Things that took me hours are probably three-click operations in Live. Still, by having to strike out on my own, I learn so many new things each time I sit down to create…it’s worth the occasional frustration at not being able to do things the easy way, using the same process as everyone else.

The second release is the annual Monome Community Christmas Album volume 2, made available on December 21.

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/monome-community-christmas-album-volume-2

This project had much more leeway; no hard-and-fast rules about samples or themes. I ended up forgoing the monome entirely for this album, instead improvising an original acoustic piano piece:

gloria by ioflow

http://soundcloud.com/ioflow/gloria

There were fewer participants for MCXAv2, since it began immediately after MCRPv11, but the quality of the tracks is still extraordinary. Warm neo-retro-loungetronica. I’ll be listening to it year-round, not just in December.

Me, too. And perhaps you, as well:

Thanks, monome-ers!

http://monome.org

You’ll find plenty of contact mic tutorials floating around the Web, but bassling (Jason Richardson) – working with a learned technique – has what I think is a really nice example, one that sounds really good. It’s easy to do, but unlike a popular tutorial (and one I’ve tried myself), you won’t wind up dis-assembling a Radio Shack piezo speaker. The result is an inexpensive, versatile microphone that will happily go places your conventional mic won’t, giving you new possibilities for sampling and sound design.

bassling credits his source:

This technique was taught to me by Alan Lamb when we worked together as part of the 2006 Unsound Festival. He’d developed this approach for recording ‘the wires,’ a large-scale aeolian harp modeled on telegraph poles he recorded in Western Australia.

Full tutorial:
How to make contact microphones [Bassling / Selectronica blog]

Here’s what it sounds like:
Piezo contact mic demonstration using a biscuit tin as a hand drum by bassling

I’d love to hear from readers: have you built contact mics? Which technique worked best for you?

And, if you try this one, any suggestions on various suppliers for the piezo crystal part itself? (Particularly in the US, Germany and continental Europe, UK, Japan, other places we have lots of readers.)

More:
Creme Dementia’s handmade bottle cap mics, on GetLoFi
Tutorials on the “Radio Shack” approach (though I like the one above better):
furious contact microphone assembly
Make a DIY Contact Microphone

The possibilities of a microphone and the world are limitless, so as this week we looked at a recording of music made with playgrounds, a mic, and Ableton Live, readers responded in kind with a fantastic spectrum of sampling-inspired, real world-produced musical wonder. From comments, a few examples:

Diego Stocco, a favorite sound designer on this site, ventures in his latest installment into a dry cleaner. Clean, wrinkle-free clothes and great music – see, you don’t actually have to choose. See top.

“Vega” by CDM reader Cordovan Music (Gregory Reeves), is an eerily-lovely ambient score made from LA’s freeways – and perhaps an ominous, if beautiful, portent of a lot of us driving on said freeways for NAMM in January.

Vega by Cordovan Music

From the experimental and minimal ambient release “Photic”, “Vega” is made entirely from field recordings taken on Los Angeles freeways.
About the album:
Gregory Reeves is a Los Angeles-based electronic artist, composer, and musician. His work can be heard on A&E, History Channel, FUEL TV, Universal, EA Games and many more. His sound art and installation work includes pieces for the Gaffa Gallery, Sydney, as well as creating a soundscape for the huge geodesic dome at the Peats Ridge festival in Australia, New Years eve. Electronic releases under various aliases have received winning reviews in XLR8R, URB, JazzTimes, and Rolling Stone. Remixes include Bob Marley and the Wailers (“One Love” from “Roots Rock Remixed” on Tuff Gong/Quango), Sarah Vaughan, and others.
“Photic” is a collection of minimal, generative ambient works. “Vega” is made entirely from manipulated field recordings taken on Los Angeles freeways. “Dark Field” uses convolved urban sounds to create a brooding ambient soundscape (the piece was originally composed for the DUOscope multimedia installation in Sydney). “Anemone” was created using undersea video footage to generate musical events, while “Haiku in C” is based on classical Japanese Gagaku music. For fans of Brian Eno, Murcof, and Loscil

Reader Cillian John, in the more pedestrian-friendly city of Stockholm, looked instead to escalators.

On and on by cillianjohn

He writes:

The urban environment is full of inspiring noises. I particularly enjoy the mechanical rhythms you hear all round.
The rhythmic element of this track is a field recording of escalator I recorded while on a trip to Stockholm.

Audiovisual remix superstar Pogo, aka Perth, Australia-based Nick Bertke, is embarking on a mission to “remix the world” as has inspired the headline of this post. Check out the spectacular results, and perhaps even get involved (thanks, BenAlex):

http://www.pogomix.net/remixing-the-world/
Kickstarter on Tibet

(I’m awaiting further details, but I am personally angered by the apparent mistreatment of Bertke which recently resulted in a 10-year deportation from the United States of America – and even that only after seemingly-extreme prison time and detainment that required the intervention of the consulate of New Zealand; you can follow on his blog. I’ve been deeply frustrated by the apparent targeting of artists, whatever the requirements of the law, in the US and Canada. More on that soon; anyone with expertise or experience in these matters, I’d love to hear from you. I feel it’s worth bringing up, as I’m sure that someone would have done so in comments as this story has spread.)

I’m sure there are many, many other examples, but this seems to me a nice place to begin – and fertile ground for inspiration to make something yourself.

Sonic and musical inspiration are never far away, especially with a microphone in hand. For the latest example, Ableton Live meets a local playground.

Jason Richard, aka “bassling,” used field recordings in the park to compose a track. He writes:

I’ve been recording playgrounds and remixing the sounds in Ableton Live to create tracks. To help people understand what they’re hearing, I’ve been making short videos showing some of the process.

It’s an idea I’ve had in mind for a while and the centenary is deadline to work towards. I’m inspired by the Italian Futurists and Alan Lamb, who mentored me in 2006 as part of the Unsound Festival.

The playground is part of a series of videos of local playgrounds, intended to celebrate the 2012 centenary of Leeton in New South Wales, Australia. (That’s southeastern Australia, for the uninitiated.)

More information:
http://bassling.blogspot.com/

It’s really nice having the video to serve as a guide to the music, I think. So, what field recordings have inspired you? Let us know.

Need a new mic to play with? Maybe you should raid your kitchen pantry.

London-based musician Leafcutter John writes us to share a detailed tutorial on cooking up new mics from common household ingredients:

Real Sound Cookery – Make a contact mic with baking soda and cream of tartar. [leafcutterjohn.com]

That in turn is inspired by a terrific, detailed video by our friend Collin Cunningham for MAKE:Magazine (Collin’s also been a regular at our Handmade Music series in NYC).

The result: you’ve got the material to do some field recording or experimental sound design. Leafcutter John shares a bit of hands-on experience working with the thing, and has a sample recording up on SoundCloud:
First recording using Rochelle Salt piezo crystal made from baking soda and cream of tartar by leafcutterjohn

Also, and I don’t say these words very often, here’s a brilliant YouTube comment:

wait… mounting the crystal in place… THIS IS HOW THE BLACK MESA INCIDENT STARTED! :O

(Google it if you don’t get it.)

More great info from Leafcutter John:
Leafcutter’s DIY Steel Can Hydrophone & Preamp. Step-by-step guide
Shit I’m a Geek / The joy of Piezoelectricity [good background on the above]

(Side note: preamp is the really important part of the hydrophone equation, which I managed to screw up recently. Stay tuned for my tale of how to do it right, after I actually do it properly. DIY electronics is no fun, anyway, if you don’t occasionally completely botch it.)

Compose and sound designer Diego Stocco, seen often in these parts, has an endlessly-inspiring approach to inventing new timbres. That process of, as he puts it, “bringing music into the process of creating sounds” is sometimes destructive – as in, sawing an instrument in half destructive. It seems often at the edge of obliterating the object, but sliced thinly onto the side of unleashing its auditory potential. Sometimes, it’s gentle, putting an ear to the world. But his work is always exploring new frontiers of possibility.

Diego himself comes to the microphone to explain his philosophy and background in a fantastic interview launching a new video series, entitled Take, produced by the LA-based FIDM Digital Arts:

Take 5 with Sound Designer Diego Stocco [FIDM Blog; more digital artists and directors and such to come in that series]

Diego also sends CDM some of his latest work, an eerily-ethereal reconception of the sound of a filling oxygen tank, which becomes in turns percussion or vast, imagined space calliope.

Here’s the musical soundscape, a cinematic composition from layers of the single sound:

Diego Stocco “Oxygen Tank” by DiegoStocco

And the source recording on which the piece was exclusively based:
Diego Stocco “Oxygen Tank Original Noise” by DiegoStocco

Diego tells CDM:

This is sound design/cinematic piece I created out of the noise of an oxygen tank while being refilled. It makes all sort of interesting overtones because of the high pressure. This piece is more about sound designing the noise into different elements rather than playing parts with the tank.

I didn’t add any other sound to it, everything comes from sound designing these noise snippets [as embedded above.]

More Diego Stocco goodness:
http://diegostocco.com/

or search CDM.

A merry band of complementary filmmakers, photographers, and musicians, a curated ensemble perfectly fitted to the landscape, are heading to remote Iceland to make images and a musical soundtrack inspired by the landscape and its people.

Photographers Tim Navis + Kim Høltermand and film collective Scenic are heading up the visual component, while composer and electronic producer Deru has assembled the musicians. Improvisation is intended to be a guiding force, say the creators. With the assistance of a community organized on Kickstarter, it’ll also be crowd-funded. In addition to the obligatory, pretty photo book and prints and boxed set of music, they also propose to share behind-the-scenes glimpses of the process, which crosses from the LA area to Danish architect-descended photographer Høltermand.

For fans of richly-sonic, thoughtfully-composed and designed electronic music, the music lineup looks fantastic. Aside from Deru, you get:

Shigeto (Ghostly International)
Loscil (Kranky)
Goldmund (Unseen)
Asura (NonProjects / Leaving Records)
Tycho (ISO50 / Ghostly International)
Joby Talbot
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Take (Alpha Pup)
Thomas Knak/Opiate (Co-Producer of Björk’s Vespertine)

Other artists are TBD.

But don’t listen to me; go grab Deru’s fantastic first single. [direct download link]

What does speed sound like? Sound designer and electronic musician Joseph Fraioli, aka jafbox, was charged with giving a campaign just that feeling. The spot, directed by Aaron Duffy and promoting Google’s Chrome with some clever tricks and photography, has been a huge award winner in sound design because of just how masterfully he pulled off the job.

First, the accolades:

winner of the 2011 cannes lion bronze award for sound design
winner of the 2011 clio gold award for sound design
winner of the 2011 one show silver award for sound design
d&ad 2011 in book nomination for sound design

But now, I wanted to hear from Joseph just how he built these sounds, as they could provide inspiration to people working on commercial jobs like this as well as music.

And it turns out, while the sounds are short, Joseph has plenty to say:

Can you tell us a little bit about how you produced these sounds? Any particular techniques? Sounds that had surprising sources?

One of the more challenging Foley elements was the loading of the potato gun. For this I disassembled a bicycle pump, filled it with water and let it dry a bit it so when I compressed the pump I could get a squeak sound as well as the movement of the valve for the sound of the potato being stuffed into the barrel. I also reused this prop for one phantom (slow motion) shot sound where the potato is being launched from gun, in this case I reassembled the pump and added a small plastic nozzle at the end to get a compressed, more energetic ascending accent sound layer for the potato moving down the gun chamber. On “sound waves”, the most challenging part of the design was the synthesizer sound itself. Getting a clear sonic representation of the real time and phantom shots of the synthesizer required a lot of experimentation with different waveforms and pitches. Nothing was post pitched; instead the waveform, envelopes and register were altered on the nord lead 2 synthesizer for the scenes.

My favorite technique I got to use on this project was developing the design elements for the phantom shots. What I really love to do with this kind of footage is instead of pitch down and time stretch real time sounds, ill use source material that is naturally closer in pitch and time to what is happening on screen. With this technique I am able to retain a sense of intricacy, body and texture in the sounds that compliment the physics of the actions, whereas if you were to pitch and time stretch the source, the overall fidelity and detail gets lost. For example when the potato gun fires in real time it’s a pretty loud and harsh pop, much like an interior 9mm gunshot. When the potato gun fires in the phantom shot, instead of just pitching it down and stretching that sound out, I used are a military tank firing directly followed by a close up recording of a large roaring fire and shaped the fires envelope to what the picture was displaying of the blast. The only place where pitch manipulation was used was for the phantom shots of “lighting”. But instead of just straight pitching the tesla sounds down what I did was pitch them down just a bit and run them through a subharmonic synthesizer which recreates the sound one octave lower out of sine waves and makes it feel really powerful and dangerous.

In order to convey speed, it must have been necessary to reduce sounds to a single gesture, to try to convey more in less time?

Yes, but not just to convey speed, but also to keep clarity in the story. Keeping the design clean and impactful was really important with this project, especially since sound is the only thing supporting the visual to tell the story. Like with all projects, I wanted the audience to be entertained by the overall experience. To me the best sound design is that which supports the emotion and story of the picture without overstepping what the picture is asking for. This way sound adds another dimension to the experience and within that ill find a pocket to make interesting designs with purpose that are relevant to the project, all the time being mindful of the overall composition.

What are some sources of inspiration in sound design that lead you in your work?

For me, the most inspiring thing is developing new processes and recording new sounds. And beyond that combing and transforming those processes and recordings to further create something new and unique inspires me. Every project is different and a new challenge which I find inspiring as well.

Tell us a bit about yourself – who you are, and how you wound up doing this?

I had started my career in sound as a recording artist under the alias datach’i making experimental electronic music. Through word of mouth of my album releases I was contacted by the museum of modern art in New York to create sound for an installation. Through this process I realized that the sound design oriented experimental music I was creating was really I scoring pictures I had in my head. Working to picture gave me that feeling like I found what I was looking for. I went on to release 10 albums, toured etc while gaining contacts in the industry. From there I freelanced with a lot of sound / music houses for 4 or 5 years before starting my own company called Jafbox Sound where I aim to bring feature film quality and innovation in sound design into all types of advertising.

Find out more:

Joseph’s official site:
jafboxsound.com

And the project page for this work:
http://www.jafboxsound.com/works/view/479

Zoom’s R8 promises to be everything you’d ever want to take with you on the go in one device. If they’ve pulled it off, it could be more invaluable in your backpack than even your computer. The R8 is a little bit of everything: stereo recording, multitrack editing, a 2×2 audio interface, an 8-voice sampler (complete with little pads), a drum machine (seriously), an effects box with modeling, a guitar tuner, a metronome, and a MIDI control surface. The big surprise: all of this is compact and lightweight and runs without a wall wart – USB power or batteries will do the trick.

I could talk dimensions, but I like Zoom’s way of describing it: “small enough to fit in a guitar case.”

Basic specs:
Recording and editing. Up to 24-bit, 48kHz recording of two simultaneous tracks. Mix up to eight tracks. Undo/redo. And if you forget your mic, there’s a built-in stereo mic, as we’ve seen on previous Zoom project gear. Record on SD for up to 32GB of space.

Onboard I/O. It’s simple, but significant for something this small: you get two balanced combo XLR – 1/4″ jacks for inputs, phantom power, and one channel has a Hi-Z switch for guitars and the like. Output is on two 1/4″ jacks.

Audio interface and control surface. The I/O and faders and knobs don’t go to waste when you’re connected to a computer via USB; you get 2×2 audio operation, plus a MIDI control surface. (I’m not sure if that’s class-compliant for iOS / Android / Linux, but I’ll find out.) Both the mixing and transport functions are active with your DAW on the control surface side.

Sampler, “rhythm machine.” Sample, loop, time-stretch, and trim samples which you can trigger along with track playback for quick composition. It’s no rival for a full sampler – sampler controls have to compete with mixing and editing controls, and it appears functions like slicing aren’t included – but getting this on a budget mobile project studio is pretty nice. You also get a 10-kit drum machine (or “rhythm machine,” as they prefer to call it), with step sequencer and phrase variations. The drum kit doesn’t appear to function with recorded samples, but … again, come on, your Portastudio didn’t do this, at least not without a separate drum machine plugged in.

Insert and send-return effects and amp models. 146 effect types are included, as well. You can use them to add a quick amp model and effects as you record your guitar, or add them live when the box is functioning as an audio interface.

Utilities. Guitar tuner. Metronome. There’s also Windows and Mac support, USB 2.0-speed file transfer of your WAV files from your sessions, and a footswitch input with optional footswitch accessory. Pop in four AA batteries, and you can run for up to five hours, say Zoom. There’s also a copy of Cubase LE included.

Full specs and features are up on the Zoom Japan site:
http://www.zoom.co.jp/products/r8/features/

Questions for Zoom? Want to see a review – and if so, any requests for how it’s conducted? Let us know.