Any CDM readers who live in Chicago should check this out- it’s a weeklong festival exploring/celebrating sound design, motion graphics, and the overlapping regions occupied by both.

In addition to the week’s worth of discussions and skillsharing classes, there will be two “showcase” nights, Saturday Jan. 19th and Sunday Jan. 20th. For those interested, I will be exhibiting two audiosculptural pieces, Octophonopod and Snowy Day during the event on Saturday. There’s a riduculous amount of talent on both nights, amounting to some of the most fresh and innovative people working in sound and motion graphics today.

[- Michael Una]

Circuit Bent Casio SK 1 from Gijs on Vimeo.

Note: we are temporarily having problems with Vimeo’s embedded video. (So is MAKE, evidently, so it’s not our fault!) Click through to see the video, or enjoy the lovely garbled characters if they’re there.

Regular followers of the music tech blogs know the wild and wonderful work of bender/inventor Gijs Gieskes (here or all over here), in which Casio keyboards get massive mechanical add-ons and Sega games become fuzzy, distorted video art. Phillip Torrone writes us to let us know MAKE has taken a closer look at the artist:

In the illustrious world of case-mods and console hacking, artists and makers are re-inventing the design and function of these ubiquitous consumer electronics devices by creating hybrid systems and creative artifacts that challenge the corporate status quo. Taking this credo to an extreme with his inventive hardware projects is Dutch artist and maker, Gijs Gieskes. From casting a Nintendo Gameboy in concrete in order to build a garden path with “GameBoy Bricks” to creating an analog version of the hated spinning cursor in the Mac OSX operating system with “Spinning Beach Ball of Death”, Gieskes’ work and live performances are an inventive look at how closely entrenched we’ve become in the world of glitchy hardware and scrambled noise producing machines. MAKE recently caught up with Gieskes to discuss his practice, philosophy, and exactly how important the current crop of hackable consumer electronics might be to future generations.

Modding consumer electronics devices into DJ tools with Gijs Gieskes

The author of the interview, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, is an artist himself, so for a little meta-interviewing, check out Regine interviewing Jonah for we make money not art.

Of course, if you’d like to challenge the likes of Gijs and think your bending kung fu is better, get applying to this year’s Bent Festival.

And if you’re in London, MAKE also points to what looks like a really cool toy bending workshop there. Let us know if any of you go!

Expressive technologies, like any other media, will say whatever their creators want them to say and do what their creators want them to do. Surveillance? Entertainment? Worship? Porn? You can count on all of the above, and everything in between.

Usually, when you talk about interactive multimedia software Max/MSP and real-world sensor inputs, you expect live music performance. Multimedia artists Matt Ganucheau, Kyle Machulis, and Kelly Moore took their project in a different direction, building a mannequin that would respond interactively to simulate female pleasure.

Donald Bell (aka electronic musician Chachi Jones) describes this among other projects recently shown at the adult-only tech fair Arse Elektronika (a reference to the artsier European new media show Ars Electronica).

It may sound like Weird Science, but Matt promises that Lisa’s technology is nothing mystical. A cutaway in Lisa’s back reveals a Make controller board that works as a hardware router for all the touch-sensitive sensors mounted on the mannequin’s more sensitive areas. A USB plug found on Lisa’s ankle connects to a nearby computer that handles the software end of things. Matt developed Moaning Lisa’s unique software using a visual programming language called Max/MSP. The program uses a neural networking algorithm to monitor all of Lisa’s sensors and determine her state of excitement, which in turn modulates both her volume and number of moans.

More on Donald’s new blog for CNET, MP3 Insider (which I think will be far cooler than that blog name implies):
Weird science: Lisa the foreplay robot [CNET MP3 insider]
Making the ‘Moaning Lisa’ [CNET crave]

Donald also shot a video, but its adult subject matter and mannequin nipples were deemed too hot for CNET. As I said, technology clearly has a full range of possible applications, so I’ll leave it to you to decide. I’m not necessarily building a Lisa, but I assume you can determine on your own whether you find this offensive and choose whether nor not to watch. Not-safe-for-work / those who don’t like nude mannequins and iPod-powered sex toys:

I’m a bit behind the eight ball … uh … Rubik’s Cube … on this one, but I think it is worth pointing to the arcane awesomeness of code artist Douglas Edric Stanley. Douglas solves a problem that has plagued humanity since the diabolical creation of the Rubik’s Cube: how can we play with this fun-to-move cube of blocks without having to (augh) actually match up all the colors? (Okay, maybe that problem only plagued me. Or didn’t really plague me, as I’d just fiddle around with the Rubik’s Cube and make interesting patterns.)

The answer: make a three-dimensional step sequencer using the Cube.

As seen on Music thing and (video) Audio Porn Central

I’m not sure I personally need a Rubik’s Cube interface, but I love the idea of three-dimensional sequencers, much as I enjoyed the (preposterous) notion of three-dimensional chess on Star Trek. (Side note. Spock, I suspect, would be equally unbeatable in a live P.A. set with a 1024×1024 three-dimensional Monome Cube.)

As it happens, the story of Douglas and the Rubik’s Cube is an interesting one. You can check out Douglas’ other wonderful creations:

abstractmachine Blog (he’s a wizard with Processing, the Java coding tool for artists)
abstractmachine Flickr set
Interview with Douglas Edric Stanley [we make money not art]

Mr. Rubik himself is equally fascinating — a Hungarian architect, engineer, interior designer, and sculptor who went back to academia, then started making games. Apparently, he’s now turning to architecture and digital games, meaning he can make us feel stupid all over again in a new medium. (Seriously, I’d love to see what Rubik’s Video Game studio turns out; as you’ll see, the Rubik’s Cube is just one of many brain twisters.)

Ernő Rubik

The ways in which people can reimagine the beloved turntable seems boundless. We’ve seen bass guitar turntables, computer scratching visualizations, turntable-controlled vibrating chaise longues, and turntables embedded in tree trunks as art installations. Still, there’s more:

TurntablistPC is an ongoing art project coupling a vintage turntable with a vintage PC, creating a hybrid, record-playing server that can be controlled remotely by remote websites around the world. It’s the creation of artist Mogen Jacobsen, and it’s currently being exhibited as part of a show called Webscape at the Art Museum of West Sealand, Denmark. What? You’re not planning to pass through West Sealand this fall? The museum still wants your help: embed a piece of code, and visitors to your own website will trigger manipulations of the turntable based on geographic position.

TurntablistPC Project Page
The TurntablistPC spins again! [Networked Music Review, my new favorite source for artsy music tech!]

Thanks to our artist friend Michael Una for tipping us off. I’m not sure I’ll be building anything of this sort soon, but what I do like about it conceptually is that it returns playback devices — increasingly abstract and virtual in the age of the iPod — to the realm of mechanical instrument. I think we may see all sorts of strange, new, hybrid digital/mechanical instruments in the coming years.

Of course, if you can’t figure out how to turn a turntable into a hybrid server art installation, you can always just don your black vinyl jumpsuit and strap your turntable to your back. I think Numark’s idea here was to somehow promote their turntables, but to me, they may have stumbled onto a new, futuristic couture in which we wear heavy objects as fashion statements. And for whatever reason, I’m game! (People could, you know, come up to you … I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine sorta thing?)

Making_sound grabbed this shot and sent it to our Flickr group; thanks!

Maybe it’s something about music making in the digital age, the alienation of music technology. Or maybe there’s just something fun about mechanical objects making sound on their own. Whatever it is, artists lately have been fascinated by mechanical instruments. Here’s yet another one:

French artist Saadane Afif makes sometimes-chilly installations out of musical objects, like a minimalist collection of guitars and amps, strummed by mechanical apparatus, in his piece Power Chords. Or, in art world-speak, he…

…works with notions of displacement and contrast. His pieces, vibrating with multiple meanings, function by using collusion as their driving force. He employs objects, scale models, installations, sounds, and writing to classify the unclassifiable and mirror-in the work of art itself - the dialog that arises between the viewer and the artist. This dialog is continuously fueled by various allusions and is infiltrated on every side by historic, psychological, social, and cultural elements.

It always has to be about displacement, doesn’t it? Always has to be the dialog between viewer and event? Darned art writers.

Anyway, in plain English he puts 13 guitars in a room and they play mysterious, ethereal strumming sounds as you walk through, a bit like a minimalist haunted Guitar Center.

Using old controllers in new ways, using new controllers in old ways … when playing live, having some controller gear is a must. Gustavo Bravetti sends video of himself playing Ableton Live using various novel controllers, live from Colombia. (That’s Colombia, not Columbia.)

Yes, you can wow crowds playing with laptops — especially when you perform synth lines with drumsticks. (Pity some of us are worse drummers than keyboardists; this solution would definitely not work for me!)

As it happens, Gustavo’s email hits the night of a MIDI controller “brain dump” at the Warper Party here in New York City. That’s tonight, Monday, at 7pm. It’s basically just an informal hang, but we can hopefully demonstrate the cooling effect of thinking about MIDI on this blazingly hot day. The event has something extra to recommend it: namely, me wearing some kind of absurdly silly hat involving a circuit board. I’m not even sure what this means yet, but I’ll be sure there are pictures so we can embarrass me internationally and not just locally.

Alternative controllers aren’t the only way to go. There’s also taking the controllers you have now, and attaching more of them, then programming them into a monster, eight-keyboard rig of M-Audio Oxygen8s so that partygoers can try their hands controlling Ableton Live. That’s what my co-host tonight at Warper, Matt Moldover, does with his Octamasher. Here’s a video from Austin, Texas. It shows anyone can get their hands dirty playing with Live.

Moldover

Music itself may be ephemeral, but it’s deeply connected to the spaces in which it’s performed and heard. You’ll notice that space all the more readily if it’s, say, a giant, cavernous grain silo, and you can access the space not only in person but over the Internet. And, really, you can’t call yourself an audiophile if you don’t have a grain silo handy for listening.

JollyRogered writes with this gem from the Audiooddities list. It’s a chance to hear an online performance of the digitally-connected grain silo, the Silophone:

Announcing a special online performance by Lee Rosevere, scheduled for July 16, 2007 at 9:30pm EST.

The performance will be an exclusive live internet event, where Lee will perform new original material from his home studio and stream it to the Silophone.

The Silo #5 is an abandoned grain storage facility in the port of Montréal. From the website:

Click To Play

Max/MSP visionary David Zicarelli is fond of saying that Max/MSP is really about numbers. You might hear music, but it’s number crunching that makes it all happen. Understand how to make the numbers work, and you can make your music and visuals do what you want. (Happily, this does not require a whole lot of math acuity, or I wouldn’t be able to do it. Instinct and imagination seem to be the best hallmark of Max masters.)

Lest you believe numbers can’t really make music, though, there are always bizarre and unusual examples of sources for Max projects. The latest comes to us from reader Stanley Ruiz:

Here is a clip of my audio-visual work presented at the 4th Asia-Europe Art Camp in Helsinki, Finland (June 2006).

I used the Philippines’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP per capita) as source to create sounds and manipulate video. GDP values were converted to MIDI data using a gesture-based sensor interface (the data is being sent as I move my hand). Converted MIDI values are then processed in a custom program written in Max/MSP. I used MIDIsense as sensor interface.

The output is an algorithmically composed music, as well as manipulated video (in this instance the video’s frame rate and contrast were manipulated).

… from Stanley’s blog.

(For more on sensor interfaces and MIDIsense, see our previous story.)

Okay, you can’t quite sing along, but Stanley is working on sonifying the GDP of other countries. Eventually, it should make the differences in affluence come alive in a way they might not on a bar chart. Got some unusual ways of working with numbers for music and motion? Let us know.

Chris O’Shea sends along his latest project, a collaboration with sound designer and composer Owen Lloyd called Drop Spin Fade. Part of the Future of Sound tour, Drop Spin Fade allows users to position, sculpt, and play with sound in a 3D environment using gestural control.

Drop Spin Fade

The music/sound environment: Through a series of iterations, Chris and Owen have started simple and built increasingly-sophisticated sonic control using the setup, manipulating granular samples by spinning and bouncing them around the space. It’s not just positioning at work here: you can actually shape the sounds you’re hearing by interacting with the geometric forms in the environment. Eventually, the designers hope to give users more compositional control, making this into a kind of 3D sequencer.

The guts behind the scenes: The work was built to showcase the Illustrious positional sound system, which can use positioning data to create 3D sound environments. For control, the project uses the Gametrak game controller hardware, which you may have seen used in inexpensive golf and other sport games. It happens to be a very nice gestural controller, as well, with extremely low latency when compared to video camera tracking solutions. Visuals and hardware interface are performed in Adobe Director, routing positional control to Illustrious via MIDI and playing a live sound patch built in Max/MSP via OpenSoundControl data. There will be yet another piece as work proceeds on support for the Nintendo Wii controller.

I’m actually quite surprised that more work hasn’t been done with 3D interfaces — though I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, as it’s extremely labor intensive! 3D has focused largely on positioning, but with powerful hardware and software capabilities bring 3D to the masses, 3D interfaces are surely next. Iterations and shared research are vitally important to any medium advancing, so I hope we’ll have more projects in this area. (I happen to be working on something different but related in the 3D space in my own research, which I’ll share when I’m ready.)

Previously from Chris O’Shea land: Muon Speakers, with Processing Visuals