“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

“Panzer” is beyond any mobile studio you’ve ever seen. It’s basically a tank with speakers and a cockpit containing beat-making gear. (Mackie mixer, Roland sampler, Akai MPC, Korg KAOSS, as near as I can see, plus … the machinery to drive the tank.)

From the description:

Minidumper, Holz, Stahl, Kunstharz, Glasfaser, Audioequipment, Sound
2011

And to make sure it’ll fit in your garage:
H 250 cm x L 350 cm x B 140 cm

Nik Nowak, born in Mainz and based here in Berlin, has a whole portfolio of re-imagined speakers and motorcycles and flames and I’m glad I’m not a curator or art critic because I would be tempted to use phrases like “installations made completely of awesome.”

Nik, if you’re out there, please tell me you still have this and can drive it out to an event. Otherwise, I’ll come to you. Just don’t shoot … or … boom or whatever.

I was going to add the images to this story, but I’m not sure I want to see a takedown notice from Nik. It might actually set me on fire.

Also, Alesis IO Dock: eat your heart out.

http://www.niknowak.de/
http://www.niknowak.de/images/panzer.htm

Alternatively (thanks, Beetlenaut):

Working with music in software means thinking a bit like a music box maker, using sequences to create note and rhythm machines. Nick Rothwell sends a project in which he literally engages the mechanical music box, with rotating electro-magnetic discs and a set of digital devices that recall their 19th-century predecessors. The designs are modular, interconnecting with one another into a little music box ensemble. And in another sign of the influence of the design of the monome, they explicitly nod to that hardware and its community as an aesthetic cue. (I have to admit, though, I’m more envious of this than the new arc.)

At the heart of the piece is a custom-made electro-magnetic rotary sequencer. Melodies are stored on a series of interchangeable, acrylic, 10” disks embedded with small magnets arranged in a regular circular grid. In the same way vinyl records are located on a turntable these disks are centered on a spindle and rotate over a ‘play head’ made up of a line of magnetic field sensors – effectively replicating but superseding the set of pins on the revolving cylinder that pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb in the traditional device. Additional units are ‘daisy-chained’ to each other via single cables and include a self contained and controllable sound source (to hear and effect the musical output) and an animated representation of a dancing ballerina automaton – realised as a modern-day interpretation of the praxinoscope (the successor to the zoetrope – the popular visual parlour toy of its era – but which improved on it by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors).

Inspired by the design of the second generation monome.org controllers these modular components draw on their minimalist design aesthetic and utilise a similar restricted material palette of walnut, brushed aluminium, translucent acrylic, and orange LEDs.

Nick aka Cassiel is part of the Monomatic trio, which:

…was initiated in 2007 as a collaboration, experimental playground and halfway house between the work of Anthony Rowe of squidsoup – art, research and play in creative interaction design using sound, physical and virtual space – and Lewis Sykes then of The Sancho Plan – a progressive audiovisual collective who explore the realtime interaction between music and video. Monomatic has since evolved and the current line up now includes Nick Rothwell a.k.a Cassiel – a composer, performer, software architect, programmer and sound designer.

http://www.monomatic.net/modular-music-box/

The work was shown as part of London’s Kinetica, an exhibition of kinetic art over the weekend.

Rotating music box-style wheels is an elemental design in musical machines, which means there are countless works one could mention here. I’ll leave that to comments, though, because I imagine you’ll think of a few examples I haven’t. Fire away.

Here’s an early visualization Nick did of an unrelated project, rendered in Max for Live. I love the circular visualization; I’ve played with some similar sketches myself in Processing, but not in Max. Like a wheel inside a wheel…

What could audiovisual art made for tablets look like? Some dismiss the results as “toys.” The creators of Thicket embrace that very role. Thicket, the product of electronic A/V artists Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, is intended as a kind of immersive distraction, filling the screen of an Apple handheld or iPad with clouds of abstract color and ambient sound. Free of controls or widgets, playing with Thicket is a bit like sticking your hand into a mist, more gently responsive than overtly interactive.

It’s also lovely, and – for the moment – free. As an experiment, Josh and Morgan are offering up Thicket free of charge on the store, meaning those of you with appropriate devices can try it out as you read.

http://apps.intervalstudios.com/thicket/

A lot of what you read about iOS development and the new “app” markets in general tends to blur into generalities. You’d also be forgiven for assuming the “app” is a gold rush even for avant-garde digital artists. Instead, the picture from Morgan and Josh is subtler. They concede their work may have niche appeal, and view the iPad and iPhone not just as a hot, new market, but as part of a longer narrative of audiovisual expression.

Along the way, they’ve got some tips for learning to develop software, reflections on how interaction can work and why even a baby can play with their creation, and some insight into how their project worked as musical, visual collaboration and not just software creation.

If you had to classify Thicket, how would you describe it?

Morgan: Thicket is a toy. We can get a little more descriptive and call it an audiovisual toy.

Josh: I’d call it portable moving artwork…

What was the original impetus for the idea behind Thicket? What sparked this particular, somewhat abstract notion of how you might interact with sound and image?

Josh: I had been talking about making something for iOS for over a year, ever since Apple released the first SDK, but had been unable to find the time. The impending release of the iPad and Morgan’s interest provided me with the motivation I needed to actually start something. We decided to choose from favorite moments of our past collaborative efforts and find something we could make pretty quickly. Thicket came from one such moment in the “Unsimulatable” DVD/performance that accompanied Morgan’s first album, Airships Fill the Sky. We had referred to this moment (fondly) as the “ball of string”. That particular moment came from multiple experiments and jam sessions with my superDraw program and Morgan’s Ripple program. That was the seed, and once we had that seed, using the unique features of the iOS devices to alter/enhance/affect what was happening seemed fairly natural.

Morgan: My approach to sound for Thicket comes out of a desire to piggyback on the natural ways people want to touch Josh’s graphics. I didn’t want to have any sort of fiddly controls — knobs, sliders, buttons, menus. I simply wanted to sonically respond to the natural, casual interactions which Josh’s visuals encourage. Typically, music apps for mobile devices have a number of controls — buttons, sliders, knobs. And they use simple XY position as a primary source of musical or synthesis parameters. Neither of those input sources — control widgets, or xy position — is compatible with the natural way one wants to interact with Josh’s visuals, so I had to use some different sources of music input — finger speed and multipe touches. I’m really interested in finding other gestural means of input which play nicely with the control of visuals.

While it began on handhelds, Thicket really seems to benefit from being on the tablet form factor on the iPad. What does that device mean to you as a canvas for work?

Josh: It’s a pretty exciting device to work with. As we’ve improved it over the year, we’ve found that we are more and more focused on the experience on the tablet rather than on the phone.

Morgan: I don’t want to discourage anyone from using Thicket on a phone. We’ve made sure the phone experience is solid since the first version. But I’ll admit that Thicket really shines on the iPad. I was a reluctant iPad buyer. I only bought one because Josh forced me to! But now that I have one, I’ve developed quite a passion for it. It’s a seductively humanizing and ergonomic little machine. It’s very book-like, which is a good sign. There’s a reason books are the size and shape they are. Their form has been under development for hundreds of years. The iPad allows us to reach people when they’re in that curl-up-with-a-book mode: relaxed, comfortable, attentive.

Back when multimedia CD-ROMs were what some artists saw as the future (which wound up being both wrong and right, depending on how you look at it), I remember Morton Subotnik talking about his vision for this stuff. He described these devices as a kind of “chamber” experience – the personal quality of them being a strength. What does it mean to the two of you to be able to distribute work to someone on a mobile computer, and not only in a performance or gallery?

Morgan: The mobile art experience has been around as long as radio, so I’m not sure I consider Thicket revolutionary in that sense. I’ve been making music recordings for years which most people experience in solo settings. However, the community aspect of art-making is very important to me. I love performing, and I love what happens when you get a crowd of people together. If we want to test out the “chamber experience” analogy, we can compare the experience of using Thicket to the experience of listening to live (western classical) chamber music. When you listen to the chamber music, you’re out in some sort of venue, you’re setting next to people, probably strangers, you’re in a public place, physically participating in something collective and cultural. Using an app on your own, no matter how artistic that app is, doesn’t have any of that meatspace cultural thing built in to it. The Smule folks have done a great job of allowing you to interact over the Internet with other people using their apps. But I still place a lot of value on getting people physically together in the same space, experiencing the same sounds, the same sights, the same vibe, and actually being interact with one another in the physical world. I’d love to find ways to create software which encourages more connection between people. But on the other hand, sometimes it’s good to recognize what things software is good for, and when it’s time to be a little more old-fashioned.

Josh: I think the most exciting aspect of these devices for me (besides the general human augmentation that all of them increasingly offer us) is their potential to augment the way we communicate in an artistic way. I’ve been exploring this in my performance based work for a while now (performance that involves the audience in new ways, like the multi-user art show earlier this year), but I’m really excited to approach it even more organically, more like little ad-hoc multi-player games that happen to create something aesthetically compelling.

We’ve also seen Thicket adapted to a gallery installation (at TEDxBrooklyn) and theoretically it could be used in live performance. Is this something you’ve been able to perform with, as well? Do you think it’s possible to build a piece that could be both your performance tool and something an end user can pick up?

Josh: I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with how Thicket can be framed (sometimes literally) as a piece of art on a wall. The iPad itself is just big enough to be framed and hung, and people seem to really enjoy interacting with it this way. Another fun use I’ve discovered for it was projecting it on the ceiling for my 4 year old daughter as a moving night light. Thicket was never really designed to be a performance tool, although it’s arguably started to move in that direction. Building a performance tool that is still fun and accessible for everyone, while giving more focused users the flexibility they need, is one of my goals for the next year. I’m not sure whether that will be Thicket or something new, but will definitely be approaching it as something I will use myself for my own performances.

Morgan: I’m wary of allowing Thicket to become too much of a tool. I’d rather make it a better toy. Performers need tools, not toys. For now, I’ll be sticking with Ripple, my performance/composition software for my own music. And trying to make Thicket an easier, richer, and more delightful world to explore.

Game designers have long thought about challenge, reward, and even failure states. And as a result, some of their creations are truly long-form — it’s not uncommon for someone to complain about a 20- or 30-hour game being too short. One of the criticisms of art on devices like the iPhone has been that thing tend to become quickly-digestible toys – perhaps calibrated to the kind of interaction design artists have done traditionally. How do you respond to that criticism? How did you tackle questions of states of interaction in Thicket?

Josh: Being a fairly avid gamer, and having just read a profile in the New Yorker about Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo’s Mario creator) I’m really excited about the intersection between art and games. I know this topic is a bit tired, but I’m approaching it from the art side rather than the “gamer” side, and that’s interesting to me. While Thicket isn’t a 20-30 hour experience (though it could be argued that its open ended-ness makes the experience ultimately unquantifiable), making Thicket a deeper experience has been one of our major goals this year. (I think we’re definitely on the right track with our 2.0 update that hit in November.) Games that allow players to be creative in how they play, from open world games like Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, to games where traditional goals can be accomplished in a variety of ways (Bioshock, etc.), to games where creativity is part of the game itself (World of Goo, Noby Noby Boy, Captain Forever), have offered players deeper experiences and replayability. I’m really excited to see these two worlds collide, and possibly try to experiment with that collision in my own work.

Morgan: I am decidedly _not_ an avid gamer, though Josh diligently continues to try and convert me. But I’m intrigued by the idea of guiding a user experience, creating some sort of progression a user (or player) travels through. On the other hand, I’m not sure that’s necessary. There’s room in the world for idle playthings with no specified goal. Take those little magnetic Buckyballs, for example. They’re simply fun and satisfying to play with. They’re wildly popular despite the fact that they’re completely open-ended, with no challenge/reward/failure built in to them. A difference between that toy and Thicket is the range of what you’re able to create with them. We’ve been getting regular suggestions from users asking for the ability to add their own sounds and pictures. I have no idea how we would do this. But it may be that what people are really asking for is greater control, a greater range of end results that they’re able to produce. I’d like to come up with ways to do that without losing the casual, playful spirit that Thicket has now — and without adding any sliders!

Working on Thicket meant collaborating not only aesthetically, but technically. How did the two of you work together, especially as you were in different cities?

Josh: There was (and is) a weekly video chat where we discuss our status, what we’re doing… and we’re of course using an SVN [Subversion version control system] on the technical side to share code. Surprisingly, collaborating technically across a long distance has been quite painless.

Morgan: It’s pretty easy for sound and visuals code not to step on each others’ toes. We have a shared set of data we can examine for things like touch position and speed, and mode changes. Other than that, we’re pretty much in our own sandboxes code-wise. We did do a bit of coordination to syncronize mode changes to tempo. As Josh mentioned, a shared code repository — the Subversion software in our case — is absolutely indispensable.

I know a bit about your coding background – Josh having worked in Processing/Java and Flash, Morgan in SuperCollider. What was the process of learning iOS development like? How was the learning curve? Any lessons learned you can share?
Josh: It definitely has been harder than I thought it would be. Coming from [Flash/Flex] ActionScript and Java, I feel like I had to learn three new languages at once: Objective-C, Apple’s Cocoa Touch framework, and OpenGL. Learning about pointers and handling memory was a big challenge. I would highly recommend the (FREE) Stanford iPhone Application Programming course available on iTunes: It was a huge help for getting started and I still am kind of amazed that you can audit a very well put-together class like this for free.

Morgan: I’ve been comparing the move from higher-level languages to the lower-level iOS environment to stepping out of a go-cart and in to a helicopter. Not only was I learning new languages (C, Objective-C, C++), I was dealing with raw audio data for the first time. Honestly, I’m still in the steep part of the learning curve, though things are beginning to feel a little easier. It’s pretty difficult to simply figure out how to send raw audio data to the speaker, which is necessary if you want to do any dsp. This example project helped me quite a bit with that:
http://sites.google.com/site/iphonecoreaudiodevelopment/remoteio-playback

Morgan, you ultimately decided to code sound from scratch. This was your first project to do that, correct? What led you to that solution, and how did you approach it?

Morgan: Without rolling a significant amount of my own code, I would have been limited to very basic techniques — file playback and looping, pretty much. Most of the audio in Thicket is based just on manipulating loop lengths and playback start points. But even though the techniques I use are quite simple, I wasn’t able to find a higher-level sound library which could do exactly what I needed. Also, I didn’t want to get locked in to something which wouldn’t be flexible enough for me in the future. Unless there’s a really powerful tool available which I’m confident I can grow in to for a very long time, I’m more working at low level and building more things from scratch.

Josh has talked with me a bit about how he feels the iTunes App Store and the Apple ecosystem on iOS, for all the criticism it has garnered, has really made Thicket possible. What was it that drew you to iOS? What is it that Apple is able to provide for you, in terms of hardware, software, development experience, or user experience?

Josh: Apple really does have excellent documentation and support for their SDK. That’s one of a number of reasons why we chose to develop for iOS. Another reason is actually the small number of devices that iOS runs on: from a development perspective, it makes things much easier to test… Then there’s the solidity of the Apple’s hardware and multitouch implementation in general.

Morgan: I like the way the Apple devices and OSs look and feel. It’s a dumb emotional judgement, but sometimes you’ve got to follow that. I also like the fact that people using Apple devices are really into their apps. I wanted to be part of that party.

Do you think there’s potential on new platforms – ranging from Web app stores to Android or Windows and Linux tablets – to do the same thing? Or is there something Apple was able to do for you that was unique? Is there anything those platforms can learn from Apple?

Morgan: We chose Apple in large part simply because that platform seemed to be where the action was. I think we probably could have built Thicket for another tablet platform and the product would have been fine. But I also think fewer people would have downloaded, and we wouldn’t have felt encouraged in the way that we were. We might not have made the version 2 update, which has been much more successful than version 1. At this point, for us to transfer time and energy away from iOS development toward another platform, we’d need to see someone else having significant success selling artsy apps. It’s too big an investment to try another platform simply as an experiment. When we see another app store really taking off, on a device which we can feel some love for, we may reconsider.

How has this business of selling an “app” worked out for you? And why try going free?
Josh: I wish I could say Thicket’s paying the rent, but it’s really not. I think the (emerging) art market on the App store is relatively new, and harder to find (as Apple doesn’t give us a real category in the App Store). The fact that they have a Generative Art & Sound category in their 2010 “best of” list [iTunes link] (which Thicket happens to be in!) suggests this may change in the future. We never really expected it to do well financially and are pretty thrilled when people seem to like it. Making it free is an experiment of sorts. It allows a lot of people who wouldn’t ordinarily try Thicket to do so.

Morgan: I had very low expectations for how many people would be interested in Thicket, and they’ve been clearly exceeded. I’m excited that (a modest number of) people are actually spending money on our art! Sales are much better for Thicket than they’ve ever been for any recorded music I’ve released. Originally we thought Thicket would be a sort of experimental, niche product, and we’d price it a bit high. It seems to have a bit wider appeal than we expected though, and a lower price allows us to reach more people, while still making some money. Going free for the holidays is a way of testing just how wide the appeal is.

Have you seen other interactive creations – on iOS or elsewhere – that you’ve found inspiring?
Josh: I’ve mentioned a couple of games that I play; here’s more stuff.

For PC: Windosill (really everything by Patrick Smith, AKA Vectorpark, is just amazingly beautiful.)

Superbrothers have also inspired me quite a bit…

Machinarium is also really good.

Interactive artwork I’ve been inspired by this year on iOS: Uzu, Sonic Wire Sculptor.

Games (also iOS): The Incident, Acrobots, Enviro-Bear (also on Android)

Morgan: I think BubbleHarp is great. I love the butterfly effect aspect of it — tiny differences in the way you set it up result in huge differences in what you see. Bloom is classy and beautiful, and was a great example of how to create a sequencer without forcing a bunch of fiddly controls on a user. Using Uzu makes me feel like a god.

What’s next for your collaboration (or personal projects)?
Josh: Both of us want to continue to make Thicket better. It’s becoming an outlet for artistic experimentation for ourselves, and we are seriously considering how to involve others as well. Additionally I have lots of ideas and I’m hoping to also release a bunch more software next year: some artistic, some performance based, some more game-like.

Morgan: The next thing we want to try with Thicket is in-app purchase of new modes. It will be really satisfying to have this platform we can be continually adding to. I’m a bit anxious to start devoting a bit more energy toward live performance. I don’t want to get so stuck inside the iPad that I forget that I was once a performing, travelling musician.

Thanks to Morgan and Josh for the insight. See also a superb interview, with code, at the always-excellent Disquiet, which focuses on the sonic and compositional aspects of the app…

BEING DECIMAL: THE ANTICIPATORY PLEASURES OF THE THICKET APP [Disquiet / Marc Weidenbaum]

For more interactive iOS goodness, also free, try Josh’s Snowdrift – not that certain people associated with the East Coast of the United States, or London, among other places, really need an app for that at the moment.
Snowdrift @ iTunes

Marvim Gainsbug: the Twitter based Song Composer from jeraman on Vimeo.

It should come as no surprise, but Twitter can compose existential nihilistic poetry.

Just ask the creepy, detached voice of Marvim Gainsbug. The robotic, generative songwriter will produce a “song” from Tweet keywords of your choice. And be prepared for some finger snaps at the end of his beat-poetic recitation.

The evil genius of this work is the product of a duo from Recife, Brazil. Details:

Marvim Gainsbug is a musician, singer and composer, created in 2009.

His main influences are Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Dylan, the Brazilian Northeastern Musician, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Alan Turing, Deep Blue, HAL, Wintermute and Marvin, the paranoid android.

Marvim Gainsbug is a software that acts based on Twitter, implemented to compose and to play songs, with music and lyrics, in real time.

The tweets are transformed in verses which are interpreted by Marvim with his singular voice. The melody, the harmony and the rhythm are directly linked with the words of the verses.

Developed in Processing, using Sphinx4, FreeTTS and Twitter4j libraries, by Jeraman and Filipe Calegario. For further informations, visit myspace.com/marvimgainsbug

Even the harmonies, melody, and rhythm are generated algorithmically from the tweets themselves.

Thanks to co-creator Jerman for sending this our way; see:
http://jeraman.info

More photos:
Marvim Gainsbug @ Flickr

What can you do with a button? What circuits can you bend? What software and hardware can you construct? Want to meet up with myself and fellow makers from the DIY music and visualist communities? I’m touring and looking for new works, we have one call for one-button objects that (if you can ship it) can come from anywhere in the world, plus upcoming events in New York, San Francisco, and — this month, Amsterdam at the planetary music tech hub that is STEIM.

STEIM + Handmade Music Amsterdam (Netherlands, February)

Handmade Music is beginning in Amsterdam. To kick things off, I’ll be visiting the legendary STEIM research center. The event will be open to anyone with inventions and self-built hardware and software you’d like to share. We’ll plug in and make a raucous noise. I’m really quite looking forward to meeting folks from this area.

When: Wednesday, February 17, 8p – ?
Where: Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Cost: FREE
STEIM Hotspot Lab Event Page

I’ll also do a short presentation of some work TBD; more on this next week.

If you’re attending and want to share what you’re bringing in advance or make sure you see me, use the CDM contact form.

One-Button Objects Call (SF + World, March)

What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we’d like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design. To celebrate the arrival of their Gamma game event in San Francisco, art game collective Kokoromi is teaming up with Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion to launch a call for ONE-BUTTON OBJECTS.

So, sorry monome — too many buttons (unless you want to make a one-button monome, that is). The one-button game objects will incorporate a single-button-centered design and inspiration from the world of gaming into unique creations. Read up more on our sister site:

Call for Works: One-Button Game Objects
Then send your submissions for the gallery show in San Francisco to onebuttonobject@kokoromi.org
(see also Kokoromi
Receipt deadline: March 1

If you’re in the NYC or San Francisco, we’re looking to do some informal hackdays to play with buttons, HID interfaces, Arduino and microcontroller platforms, and the like — we just need a hackerspace to host us. And if you’d like to do that elsewhere in the world, let us know and we’ll promote it.

And of course, be sure to attend Friday, March 12 at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts if you’re in the Bay Area or attending the Game Developer Conference.

Handmade Music Brooklyn Returns; Your Inventions, Live Artists Wanted (NYC, March)

Handmade Music in its hometown of New York is being rebooted. We’re launching new workshops, new hacking, and a new quarterly performance series at a proper performance venue, Galapagos.

That means we need you.

For the quarterly party, we’re continuing to look for people to bring in your own creations. If it runs on a netbook, if you have headphones you can bring, if it’s made out of wood and you can play it, if you can plug into a portable amp and make some noise, if it’s a circuit-bent toy with built-in speakers, it’s a welcome guest.

But we’re also looking for live artists in the greater New York area who incorporate DIY instruments, hardware, software (and even wearable interactive costumes, if you’ve got them) into your act. We’d like to hear who’s out there. We can’t invite everyone to play, but that’s all the more reason to hear about what people are doing.

If you have a project or act to consider, send them here:
Official 2010 Handmade Music NYC Call for Works

The first event is Monday, March 8. Doors open 7p, live acts start 8p.

As an addendum to the last story, Ivica Ico Bukvic sends along an example of the [myu] Max/MSP + Unity game engine combination in action. Here’s the surprise: Unity isn’t generating visuals. Instead, Unity simulates ripples created by movement in the space, and builds physical models that are sonified and spatialized by Max/MSP.

Speaking of work involving art museums and the combination of Max and Unity, VJ Anomolee notes in comments his own work with the pairing. Lightbent Synth is an in-progress piece with alternative controllers and sensors that produces sound with a novel visual representation (sound’s very quiet in this preview — more hopefully once it progresses):

Lightbent Synth from VJ Anomolee on Vimeo.

Ivica explains the top work:

This past fall [myu] had seen its first real-world implementation in an exhibit that was a part of the grand opening of the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA (http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/). The exhibit utilized [myu] as part of an interactive aural installation titled "elemental." An online tech
demo video of the installation, including written synopsis is available also via Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA-9BOgc1gk. Below is a brief synopsis of the installation:

"elemental" interactive communal soundscape premiered in November 2008 as part of the Revo:oveR collection commissioned for the grand opening of the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA. The Youtube video focuses primarily on the technical aspects of the installation. Using Max/MSP/Jitter, a homebrew IR webcam with fish eye lens and a LED-based IR spotlights, entire 24×36-foot exhibit space is converted into an aural sandbox giving visitors an opportunity to generate and shape the
ensuing soundscape. Positional data of up to 20 visitors is forwarded to Unity3d using [myu] Max-Unity interoperability toolkit developed at DISIS (http://disis.music.vt.edu). Unity is used for physical simulation of ensuing ripples and the resulting data is sent back to Max for spatialization across a 12-channel (4×3) ceiling-mounted speaker array. Driven by communal interaction, virtual ripples refract from each other spawning an algorithmically generated aural fireworks. The exhibit ran non-stop for approximately 5 months until March 2009.

Bonus video below: an early prototype that did include visuals. After days of looking at emulated knobs and faders, it certainly does speak to some of the possibilities for musical interface and expression.

Surveying toys at a previous Handmade Music night.

Handmade Music, the monthly celebration of DIY musical instruments, electronics, and software hits its new home at East Williamsburg’s 3rd Ward tomorrow night, Thursday 12/11 7:30-10:30p. [Directions] Here’s a glimpse of a couple of the projects expected tomorrow night.

If you’re not in the NYC area, you can come visit us online at 8:30p Eastern time and hang with the crafty community denizens of Etsy.com:

Etsy Virtual Labs [not updated as I write this, but check in tomorrow]

If you are in the NYC area:

1. Workshop: We have more workshop spaces available in Michael Una’s workshop. For the cost of parts, and even if you have zero electronics experience, you’ll leave with a finished Beep-It optical Theremin! Walk-ups are okay if we have room, but to be safe, pre-register today:

http://beepit.eventbrite.com/

And it’s got a new form factor, as seen at right.

2. Projects to bring: If you’ve got a project you’d like to bring, just bring it! If you want to give us some warning, fill this out today:

Call for Works Form [Google Docs]

3. Facebook us: You can also RSVP on our Facebook page

4. Snacks/drinks! We’ll have pizza and (for a nominal fee, if you’re of age) PBR’s, and if the weather’s nasty, hot chocolates

Project previews

Handmade Music is a pot luck supper for everything from Max patches to strange acoustic instruments, so we never really know what will show up. Here are a couple of projects that are coming, though:

Electronic Glockenspiel, Michael Sperone

Glockenspiel with microphone pickups which go through a max patch which expands the range of the little 2.5 octave instrument to a full 5.5 octaves, as well as adds other features not present on a glockenspiel.  It almost sounds like a glockenspiel/marimba/vibraphone hybrid.  The project is also starting to experiment with interfacing with max/msp in new ways.

Plink Jet, Andy Doro + Lesley Flanagan

Plink Jet is a robotic musical instrument made from scavenged ink jet printers. The mechanical parts of four printers are diverted from their original function, re-contextualizing the relatively high-tech mechanisms of this typically banal appliance into a ludic musical performance. Motorized, sliding ink cartridges and plucking mechanisms play four guitar strings by manipulating both pitch and strumming patterns like human hands fingering, fretting, and strumming a guitar. Plink Jet is designed to play itself, be played, or both.  The result is an optionally collaborative performance between both the user and Plink Jet, with the user choosing varying levels of manual control over the different cartridges (fretting) and string plucking speeds (strumming).

http://www.andydoro.com/plinkjet/
http://www.seseyann.com/plinkjet/

Updated: Andy decided the Plinkjet was a bit too bulky to bring – though it’s worth watching the video to check this thing out. Instead, we get other surprise wonders – a networked sound device and a cube whose sounds shift as you pick it up and move it around:

http://www.andydoro.com/sonicube/
http://www.andydoro.com/nbo/

And while I don’t have any documentation of it yet, Ted Hayes is bringing this:

A floatometer is a simple wireless (XBee) accelerometer in a watertight plastic ball that floats on water and controls synths…

More expected! Stay tuned!

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]

A full week of buzzing digital media creation will be showcased starting Tuesday, January 15th through Monday, January 21st 2008, at several venues downtown Chicago.

MGFest 08 features two world-premier theater screenings, multiple post-production studio tours, audio/visual art exhibits, a/v performances, six days of motion design / sound design / and motion programming classes.

These events celebrate creative minds and bright ideas within the emerging media landscape. Whether your a hard-core geek, a dedicated composer, a designer, film-maker, artist, engineer, programmer, educator, aficionado, prosumer, hobbyist, or just someone who likes being close to the creative community, mgFest is for you. The festival has become a destination for creative professionals from all over the Midwest and the nation by attracting the meshwork of companies and individuals that surround creative motion-picture design.

Socialize at one or all of the night events while experiencing multimedia art, video and sound in synch. Watch some of the past years most creative shorts or travel thru alternate dimensions in video art. Come mingle with local art directors and advertising executives, or discuss the technical operations of a professional edit bay and graphics shop with seasoned veterans of the industry. Listen to panels on the newest advancements in delivery technology affecting every media professional. Attend cutting edge classes of your choice within the realms of motion design, sound design and programming. Awaken your creativity at the Imagination College.

( Design | Sound | Code ) .: in motion

Check out mgFest.com for the most current festival information. 

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!