Friday we’re pleased to co-host a party with trash_audio and vjkungfu.tv in Mid-City Los Angeles. If you’re in LA or visiting NAMM in Anaheim, you won’t want to miss this – Richard Devine headlining, terrific music and live visuals, and workshops.

If you don’t know the other two sites, by the way, trash_audio (featuring Richard, Justin, and Deep Element) is a fantastic blog that regularly profiles creative workspaces for music. vjkungfu.tv, helmed by VJ momo the monster, has in-depth video tutorials for live visualists; we hope to feature it more on createdigitalmotion.com in the near future.

Here’s the lineup:

1. MAKE + MINGLE. 8:00pm.

• Bring your own DIY music or motion creations and other hardware toys and geek out with an international crowd of hipster-nerdsters! All projects welcome (space first come, first served — think small, bring portable speakers if you can
• Put together free kits to make your own ribbon controllers without soldering
• Learn how Bryant Davis Place (future-tense-cpu) built his own DIY VJ sequencer for M8 using the Lemur multi-touch controller.
• Learn about the wonders of wireless MIDI sync in AV Performance with Acid&Bass&Momo producing a live remix of Karate Kid.

2. MIX + MASH. 9:30pm.

RICHARD DEVINE
The Deep Element
Justin McGrath
Liz Revision (Quantazelle)
Moldover
dj halon (Fake Science, False Profit)

Visuals:
Image8nineteen (Mat Hale)
Momo the Monster
Peter Kirn

DETAILS

View Larger Map

Cost: FREE (cash bar)

When: Friday, January 18

Where: Basswerks, 5411 W Adams Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90016 (323) 939-2535

RSVP:

Facebook event page

or….

A/V Mixer: Unofficial CDM NAMM Afterparty

Friday, January 18 at Bassworks

1 person interested:

CDM is on the road to California! If you’re at NAMM, mark your calendars now.

In addition to our full coverage of the NAMM trade show (covering new and odd music things with video, photos, and sound), we’ve got a party planned. (Whoo!) Attending / playing / organizing: myself, the wonderful audioist Liz McLean Knight, and the also wonderful visualist Surya aka momo the monster, to whom we owe the space and the LA magic. Full details soon, but here’s a teaser:

Where: Basswerks, a hip but comfy gallery/studio at 5411 W Adams Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90016. (Directions)

When: Friday, January 18, eight to late

What:

• a handmade music night, for people to come and show-and-tell DIY music projects informally and just hang out, whether hardware or software, as we’ve been doing with Etsy and Make in NYC.
• a chance to swap demo discs, as seen in Chicago. (don’t forget to check resources for making great demos)
• a lineup of great music and live visuals from LA, CDM, and the world. Cash bar available.

Who: You, if you’re in the LA area for NAMM or local — all are welcome. RSVP will be up soon; stay tuned. And that includes our friends among the vendors, etc., who will be desperate by then to escape Anaheim hotels for the city.

Contact us now if: you have a project you want to bring for handmade music and if you’re interested in playing music or visuals for a short set — no guarantees, but we may have a couple of slots open; if not, there will still be time to play around during the handmade music time.

And we’ll be roaming the NAMM floor, too, so anyone wanting to schedule a meeting, do get in touch.

Contact us

Continuing our performance series, with assistance from Make Magazine and Etsy.com, we had some special guests last Sunday at openhousegallery in SoHo, New York: the Mister Resistor Ensemble. Headed by Ranjit Bhatnagar, the inventive sound artist who brought us robotic Theremins and MIDI ironing boards, this group of students from Parsons is lucky enough to spend a whole semester building fun instruments with hardware and software. The results are clearly experimental, but that’s the point. Some informal video clips:

Handmade Music: Mister Resistor from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

A big thanks to our beverage sponsor, Function Drinks, and the lovely venue, openhousegallery New York, for making the event possible!

In this case, students and far more to do than simply show off a nifty gadget, science fair-style. They had to turn them into music. Divided into smaller groups, they came up with various inventive approaches covering a range of sounds. (I can imagine, given time, people finding ways to play jazz covers of Caravan or re-orchestrations of Mozart, given enough effort and musicianship.) The lineup:

D.V. Caputo: percussion-controlled speech synthesizer, and homemade video synthesizer
Ji Yeon Choi: microcontroller-based synthesizer controlled by optical proximity sensor; circuit bent toy keyboard
Daniel Herskowitz: tape bow "violin": cassette tape loops attached to a violin-like bow to be played by hand
Hsiang Ju Hung: vocals, modified vocals (singing through voice-changing toys), homemade slide guitar
Glendon Jones: homemade overtone "cello"
Kan Yang Li: mobile robot with optical sensor to play tunes; conductive socks linked to microcontroller synth
Meha Pande: homemade drums.  Meha is a trained tabla player
Michael Perkins: sine wave interference synthesizer made from 1960s electric guessing game, microprocessor, electronics
Elie Stevenson: toy robots, circuit-bent
Ramsay Stirling: miked plucked strings and rainstick
Samuel Strick: the Beat Grinder: crank-operated mechanical MIDI sequencer
Ohal Wofford: electronic synthesizer with optical controls
Yelena Avanesova: modified cassette walkmans and homemade tape loops

Ranjit shares some details on how the class was put together and some of the juicier projects that students made:

Yelena was actually "scratching" cassette tape by applying finger pressure to motors and pulleys in her vivisected walkmans.

Glendon’s overtone cello had the pickups (an old humbucker, I believe) on the opposite side of the bridge from the bow, and fingered and bowed the strings to emphasize the overtones rather than the fundamental. The two strings (piano strings! because the instrument is too long for guitar or bass strings) were usually tuned to within a few cents of each other to produce beats.

One of Elie’s circuit-bent robots bit the dust just before the performance, but he put the other robot to fine use.

Sam’s Beat Grinder was partly inspired by a book of simple mechanical automata I lent him: <http://www.cabaret.co.uk/education/book.htm> I need to remind him to bring it back to me! By the way, Beat Grinder is the best name ever.

Speaking of books, we did a lot of exercises in class from Nic Collins’ excellent book Handmade Electronic Music: <http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_routledge_handmade/> Ohal’s optical synth and my electric bassoon and one of D.V.’s tone generators were all based partly on Collins’ circuits.

It was interesting to me that circuit bending didn’t end up being a big part of the students’ final performance. They enjoyed the circuit-bending labs in the class but most of them went on to make stuff from scratch, whether acoustic, microcontroller (arduino in every case), or discrete circuitry. I also liked that good old magnetic tape showed up in several designs. (Glendon was also working on a tape-based instrument but ended up concentrating on the overtone cello.) The class was originally advertised as a circuit-bending class but I tried to encourage experimentation with (miked) acoustic instruments by devoting a few labs to that kind of stuff.

Elsewhere:

Parsons Students Rock Out at Handmade Music Event [Matrixsynth]

Mister Resistor [Networked Music Review]

Event Photos by Melissa Hom, fotki.com

We have a special guest performance for the next Handmade Music party, organized by CDM in New York with Etsy.com and Make Magazine. The Mister Resistor ensemble features various musical oddities — electronic and acoustic — created by students at Parsons The New School for Design.

Mister Resistor – the video from ranjit on Vimeo.

Mister Resistor Preview 1 from ranjit on Vimeo.

The course is taught by Ranjit Bhatnagar, who’s been a regular at Handmade Music with robotic Theremins, MIDI ironing boards, and other alternative instruments. Ranjit explains how the course works:

Background: for the last few years I’ve been teaching a studio class in Parsons’ department of Design & Technology (that’s the multimedia & physical computing department). The class is called Mister Resistor, and it’s about making homemade instruments and performing with them. I introduce the students to circuit bending, simple acoustics, synthesis, and the like, and get them making and playing their own instruments. The “final exam” for the class is a public concert. Last year’s class did their concert at the Flux Factory gallery in Queens, in the midst of a giant sound sculpture I’d worked on.

I know we have other instructors out there, so if you use similar techniques in your class (or would like to), let us know about it!

I’ll be flying all the way from Australia back to New York to co-host Mister Resistor on Sunday at another installment of Handmade Music. Various other reasons this one is special:

• I’ll be hosting a free workshop using a ribbon controller electronics kit from PAiA Corporation. Even the kits are free to makers, until we run out. (More on that kit and how to get it wherever you are soon.) You can do the whole thing without soldering, even if you’ve never done this before.
• We’ll have free beverages, supplied by Function Drinks.
• It’s in Manhattan, not in Brooklyn — our friends at Etsy Labs hooked up a fantastic space in SoHo called openhousegallery, 201 Mulberry Street near Spring Street.
• It’s in the afternoon (2-5p), rather than at night. And you can still catch the NYU ITP show Monday. (Just go; you’ll understand.)
• As always, if you’re in town, stop by and bring your own projects for show and tell if you like. (Hint: they don’t even have to function properly. We’re relaxed like that.)

Once again, that’s Sunday, 12/16, 201 Mulberry Street in SoHo, completely free, you’ll hear great music, and you’ll learn to make electronics without soldering even if you never have before.

Invite and ensemble details + music, misterresistor.com
Handmade Music Event on Facebook

Speaking of events, there’s been so much awesomeness and I’ve been so very much in Australia that I’ve gotten way behind, so apologies about some cool events I didn’t get up. I would be remiss, though, in not pointing to another ensemble, partly because you can go while I’m in a 747 over the Pacific, but mostly because I hope by second semester we’ll have massive battle of the band competitions between these things. NYU’s own NIME ensemble after the jump.

Oh, and to the 95% of readers not in New York, a calendar for CDMworld is definitely in the works so we can share the love.

From our friend the insanely busy Jamie Allen:

NIME @ Exit Art
475 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY
In collaboration with R. Luke DuBois’ ‘Algorithmic Composition’

Thursday, December 13, 2007
Performances 8PM-11PM
Installations begin at 7PM

NIME: New Interfaces for Musical Expression.
NIME: creating new performance tools for digital music.
NIME: a graduate course at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

In the sixth annual NIME end-of-semester performance, students will perform on a series of newly designed electronic instruments that aim to keep the “live” in live performance of digital music. The NIME performances are presented by ITP instructors Jamie Allen and Gideon D’Arcangelo. ITP students from R. Luke DuBois’ “Algorithmic Composition” class will present installations and performances as part of the evening’s proceedings.

Computer music is usually played with a keyboard and mouse. Laptop musicians often sit at a desk and give performances that are little more than watching someone engage in “office gestures.” The idea behind NIME is to go beyond the mouse and keyboard, beyond even piano keyboards and drum pads, and develop performance tools that make the most out of the new opportunities that digital music offers.

NIME students answer questions like:
- “What will the next generation of musical instruments look like?”
- “What will they be able to do that traditional instruments can’t already do?”
- “What aspects of traditional instruments will we want to retain in digital instruments?”"

Over the course of this year’s 14-week course, students are developing projects such as an musical weaving loom, a instrument made of speakers that feed back and make glorious noise, an augmented rocking chair, a musical abacus and a host of others.

NIME at ITP

http://itp.nyu.edu/nime

Jamie Allen 347-563-5941, jamie@nyu.edu
Gideon D’Arcangelo 917-750-6950, gideon@nyu.edu

ITP

http://itp.nyu.edu

George Agudow 212-998-1891, george.agudow@nyu.edu

EXIT ART
475 Tenth Avenue (at 36th Street)
New York, NY 10018
(212) 966-7745
info@exitart.org

http://www.exitart.org

Handmade Music, the semi-regular evening of DIY musical oddities brought to you by CDM, Etsy, and Make Magazine, will mercilessly descend upon yet another peaceful Brooklyn evening. Expect an informal, free party + show and tell + science fair featuring self-made electronic musical projects.

Already confirmed for the lineup:

• The MIDI Pick, a pressure-sensitive DIY digital guitar pick by Roy Vanegas


• Mystery musical controllers from Eric Singer, the mind behind the world-infamous LEMUR, an educational outlet in Brooklyn and collective of musical robot/electronics-creating artists
• Theremin-playing robots and possibly other surprises from series favorite Ranjit Bhatnagar. (See the Theremin robots in action, covering Gnarls Barkley. If we’re really lucky, Ranjit will bring his students. Students, if you’re listening, we’d love to have you there!


• David Brynjar Franzson with a generative piece using custom software built in Max/MSP

And I’ll have a new iteration of my video/gesture-controlled musical creation, which allows users to virtually navigate musical structures via a webcam/DV cam. Going to keep working on that until it develops into something, then share how to do it, hopefully. I may have a surprise or two, as well, in addition.

But that’s just the beginning of the lineup, because part of the lineup can be … you.

Share Your Work in Person

As always, we welcome projects in progress to show off and share. Got something brilliant? Got something partly finished? Got something completely broken you can’t figure it out? Bring it out. I know we had at least one person from the circuit bending challenge in the greater NYC area, so of course we’d love to bring some of that into meatspace / the real world.

Share Your Work Virtually Around the World

I’ve felt bad that we can’t involve the global CDM community, much of whom, as it happens, don’t live in the NYC area. (A remarkable number of you are in Australia and Norway.) So, the circuit bending challenge video submissions worked so well, we’re going to open up the event to virtual projects on the Interwebs. Got an unusual music project — even one in progress — you’d like to share? Send us photos and/or embeddable video links by Thursday morning New York time or so, and we’ll feature it here on the site and hopefully (if wifi is cooperative) even have a “kiosk” going at the party. Best way: drop us a line on the CDM contact form.

Fair game: circuit bending, chiptune – vintage gear, DIY controllers, handmade software (code, Reaktor – Max – Pd patches, SuperColldier, whatever), hacked hardware, the works.

Drop by!

As always…

Where: Etsy Labs (blog)
325 Gold Street, 6th Fl.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(the building has a big clock tower on it. Do NOT put too many people in the elevator! Read the sign!)

Subway: Take the A/C/F to Jay St. or B/M/Q/R to DeKalb.
Map

When: 8:00pm – whenever

Cost: FREE (light refreshments provided; feel free to bring some more)

Bring stuff if you like, or just come to hang.

See also the Moonmilk YouTube page for more. Yes, the robot struggles a bit with the Theremin … but then again, so do I.

We’ll be getting up close and personal with this bot this Saturday at the Etsy Halloween party, along with me working on some ghostly video-controlled music and various other oddities and surprises. And we’re just one part of a whole, wild Halloween fiesta courtesy Etsy Labs and friends. Come out if you’re free, and if you’re in other parts of the world, expect some project details soon. (Not to mention our big CDM holiday this weekend, which is the Circuit Bending Challenge, on Sunday.)

Come As You Aren’t: Etsy Labs Halloween Party [Storque @ Etsy.com]

Ranjit had a really lifelike robot that played violin beautifully, but I made the mistake of giving it a Voigt-Kampff test and it’s been a little, erm, odd ever since. Think that’s Crazy? This is:

“People have used it as a drum machine, sequencer, as an egg timer…” said Crabtree. The open-source software can be used and altered by anyone.

Crabtree and Cain assemble most of the Monomes at their loft, a daunting process that involves countless hours of wiring and soldering. A new Monome, the 256, was about to be released to the public when we visited. Crabtree assembled one for us on the spot.

Watch closely for some videos of Brian’s performance from the CDM Handmade Music event, co-hosted with Etsy.com and Make Magazine. I have some videos I’m going through from those events, too; not fantastic but I’ll post soon.

This Handmade Life: A Moment with the Monome [Etsy's The Storque online mag]
Monome-tagged stories on CDM

By the way, if you’re curious about 256 assembly, there are some interesting updates over on monome.org.

First: according to Wikipedia:

Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.

Second: It’s quite easy and fun, and you’ll be able to produce interesting results very quickly.

Third: To kick things off, I’m going to defer to the esteemed Reed Ghazala, considered by many to be the Father of today’s movement. Y’know, like how James Brown is the Godfather of Soul?

The circuit-bent instrument, often a re-wired audio toy or game, is an alien instrument: alien in electronic design, alien in voice, alien in musician interface. Through this procedure, all around our planet, a new musical vocabulary is being discovered. A new instrumentarium is being born.

Reed has an extensive primer on the science and art of circuit bending. He lays out some safety guidelines, tool recommendations, principles to follow, and his site has many fine examples of “finished” products.

Getlofi.com is an ongoing chronicle of interesting bent projects, innovative techniques, performance videos, and interviews with benders around the world. A must-read.

Make Magazine’s Bre Pettis has a fun video tutorial on circuit bending with Justin Gerardy : link. They highlight a good technique for exploring possible bends using just your fingers.

A host of links related to circuit bending, including how-to’s, examples, and discussion groups can be found at Cementimental’s resources site.

John Hollis has some good tips for interesting bends, including advice on how to create audio loops and how to alter a circuit’s internal clock.

And, if you’re not itching to fire up your soldering iron yet, here are a few inspirational videos of completed projects. Some are simple, some quite complex, but they all start with the desire to play and experiment:

Here’s a simple toy with a pitch/speed shift bend connected to a photoresistor for light-controlled tweaking:

This is a nice modification of a “talking” toy:

In this video the bender added an extra circuit to the toy, in this case an oscillator, to control some of the functions:

Lastly, here’s a project I did last year- attaching a “christmas light timer” to a toy drum pad, thereby “automating” the drum hits into a sequenced pattern:

Enjoy.

Other stories from CDM on circuit bending

The number one reason, for me at least: tons of bend-able toys and devices can be found very cheaply at secondhand and thrift stores.

Which brings us to this:

The premise is simple:

1. Wait until October 28th with growing anticipation.

5. Document the process and end result, then upload it to the internet in some fashion- Youtube, Flickr, etc, all with the tag “circuitchallenge.” (and createdigitalmusic, of course)

6. The Circuit Master and myself will gather the results and feature them here and at www.getlofi.com.

The winner will receive, um, a token prize of low value, to be decided later. Something though. And we’ll publish your picture on the internet for the universe to see.

Of course, it’s not about winning, oh no. It’s about getting off your keister and bending some circuits!

Never bent a circuit before but always wanted to? Now’s your chance!

So mark your calendars now, and hit up the forums here at createdigitalmusic.com with any questions.

*EDIT: Rodney from Tiger Claw Records has agreed to donate a few Circuit Bending Compilation CDs as a prize, and I’ve got a stack of CDs from FutureKomp to give away as well. If that isn’t enough incentive to get out there and bend on the 28th, you’re in it for the wrong reasons!

**DOUBLE EDIT: The Squarewave Parade has agreed to donate a parasite for the contest! Totally awesome.

***TRIPLE EDIT: HighlyLiquid has donated one of their MIDI kits for the contest! So cool!

Collin Mel brought some wonderful soundmaking projects to Handmade Music last week. Face-to-face community is a beautiful thing (if loud, crowded, and prone to elevator failure — I like to think the Etsy elevator was slashdotted). But it’s also nice to keep up with Web documentation of projects. Collin’s got a great blog with updates on his latest, and some lovely Flickr photos. Included: boxes with lots of knobs that make sounds, and giant, clear, tube-shaped enclosures. And extra points for hacking together an amp and calling it “Ol’ Crappy.”

He also has some nice words about the Thursday party, which I hope will help inspire setting these up, even informally (invite a few friends!), in other parts of the world:

What made this event extra fun for me was the fact that it was the first time I was able to demonstrate some instruments I’ve been working on to a very supportive and interested community. I have to say, the positive feedback I received (regarding the atari tube in particular) warmed my heart. I have spent so much time learning the language of electronics over the past few months – toiling over wire and solder – that I almost forgot how good it feels to see someone else enjoy something that I’ve made. What I see as a noisemaker with a couple of knobs on it becomes an instrument once someone else picks it up and begins to play. That is a very good thing.
A big thanks to everyone who came out to the event – Hope to see you again soon.

A Heart-Warming Night of Noise
Narbotic [Collin's blog]