When we last saw Onyx Ashanti, he was speaking of a grand vision to remake himself into a music-performing Tron. Now, the elements of that vision are coming together, with a crowd-sourced funding campaign that ends today, Friday. Update: Apparently after seeing this story, IndieGogo extended the funding deadline for five days, with the new deadline Thursday, December 1.

I knew Onyx back when he was playing more conventional wind controllers. Now, that fingering arrangement is freed from the virtual wind instrument, handheld and movable through space. Because of the plans to open source everything he’s making, you might yourself pick up that hand controller – or, if you’re like Onyx, go full-tilt with physical training to make your body do new things and a carbon fire, full-body prosthetic transformation.

Onyx has been at auditions for the main TED (the big one, not TEDx), experimenting with a beatbox configuration, and honing alien-like futuristic human reinvention with the help of artist Christopher Logan, aka Loganic. Loganic makes the art, then prosthetic engineer Uli Maier – with doses of carbon fiber – translates those notions into physical form. And the whole thing is mobile; Onyx draws on his busking background to take this thing wherever he goes.

Initially built as an open/proprietary hybrid, the new system is increasingly open source from the ground up, from customized Linux-based software to Pure Data (Pd) patches to open source designs for the molds. The wearable system can be 3D printed. Plans for the system also were featured in Make Magazine.

It’s actually quite a lot to digest, but Onyx has been posting videos, the most recent and illustrative of which I’ve included here. And because there’s a lot to do physically, from personal training to buying clay to engineering the prosthetics, Onyx is relying on crowd-sourced funding. In place of Kickstarter, which has specific requirements for minimum funding and other restrictions and requires US-based banking, he’s opted for IndieGogo.

If you invest just a few dollars, you at least get music; with successively larger donations, Onyx throws in his software, custom artwork and posters, t-shirts, or starting at US$500, the custom hardware itself for your use.

The IndieGogo campaign ends Thursday, December 1:
IndieGogo: Beatjazz System

– but we’ll be in touch with Onyx on an ongoing basis, so let me know if you have questions for him or want to watch this continue to evolve.

Videos showing the making of the elements of the system:

Above: New visualizations in 3D have vastly expanded the now-Pure-Data-based audio system with heads-up displays worthy of the spacesuit. Below: Some of the beautiful concept artwork produced for the project.

IndieGogo Campaign

Previously: Onyx Wants to Make Himself Into Helmeted, Wearable-Music-Tech Tron, With Your Help

Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the work of London/Seattle/New York Web agency Distilled, pulling genre births from Bass Culture, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life,The All Music Guide to Electronica, and Wikipedia.

Having just edited a book entitled The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music, I find it extremely interesting to watch in this visualization the way in which European synth pop and Jamaican dub can become, at once, vessels for a lot of these other musical idioms, just in terms of their ability to carry musical ideas across geography.

What is peculiar: this is more a selection of a few threads than it is any kind of comprehensive history, and many of those threads in turn trace backwards from a few modern styles more than they do forwards over those 200 years. If you accept that, though, there’s still something interesting to watch. Even hand-picking a few genres shows some fascinating connections.

But before I say any more, I think any methodology here will raise questions, and I’m as interested in reader questions as I am commenting myself. Mark Johnstone of Distilled has offered to answer questions, so from the intricacies of how the data visualization and mapping work to thoughts on how one untangles this musical history, I’d love to start a conversation.

Specifics of the genres aside, I think it’s the geographical connections that are in many ways the most interesting – all the more so as we can inexpensively get on trains and planes, cross increasingly-open borders (with some admitted major caveats), and be somewhere altogether different – or do the same from the comfort of our chair. Appropriately, I now see Thomson are a travel/vacation agency.

Discuss.

How Music Travels – The Evolution of Western Dance Music [Thomson blog]

Interactive Music Map [Thomson]

Alexander Chen, he of Kinect hacks and subways turned to strings, is back with another string visualization. Built in the browser (an interactive version is available), this work makes a visual accompaniment to Bach’s First Prelude from the Cello Suites. If you read music notation fluently, you may find the score itself suffices, but even so, the math to make this work – and the dance of circles across strings – is compelling. Alex, whose day job is with Google’s Creative Lab, talks to us a bit about the mathematics and process. First, his description:

baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites. Using the math behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.

Built in: HTML5 Canvas, Javascript, SoundManager
Made while a resident at Eyebeam

CDM: How did you settle on this particular visualization of this famous work? And how did you work out the maths, that is, why this specific number of dots, the distance from the strings, and the length of the strings themselves?

Alex: When I listened to the opening of the Bach, where it repeats the same bar twice, it made me think of a call and response. So I immediately pictured two wheels that echo each other, instead of just one wheel with four dots.

Figuring out the symbolic string lengths in pixels was a fun research project. I wanted explore the simple math behind string length. I learned that you can derive an entire chromatic scale just by using two fractions: 2/3 and 1/2. These correspond to the fifth and octave intervals. It’s called Pythagorean tuning. I stumbled onto this great little worksheet [PDF link] which seems to be intended for students.

Were there other things you tried, any failed experiments?

There were important learnings. It used to begin playing the piece right away. I started the opening tuning animation as an afterthought while I was preloading the strings. But that sequence became really critical.

What’s your sense of the music now having done this? Did it change your hearing of the piece

A lot of music visualization these days is linear, like reading a score. Logic’s editor, or even games like Guitar Hero, all follow that structure. And there’s a reason for that, as it’s convenient, for both computers and humans, since we can read it (and edit it) like a book. But I wanted to try something different. I think some of the magic of watching a performer is seeing such subtle, intricate finger movements produce such moving sounds. When I watch these strings morph, it feels more like the computer is performing, not just checking off notes one by one.

Seeing the Bach Prelude in groups of 8 notes gives me a bigger picture view of the piece. Instead of focusing on the individual notes, you can see each bar as a group. The strings start shifting very subtly, but as the piece builds, the strings seem to be panicking to me, shifting more rapidly. The computer is not expressive. All notes are played at equal volume. But the notes themselves, the data of the song, is inherently expressive.

http://blog.chenalexander.com/
http://twitter.com/alexanderchen
http://www.baroque.me/ [interactive - grab the ... circles ("grab the balls" doesn't sound quite right)]

You might imagine sound in space, or dream up gestures that traverse unexplored sonic territory. But actually building it is another matter. Kinect – following a long line of computer vision applications and spatial sensors – lets movement and gestures produce sound. The challenge of such instruments has long been that learning to play them is tough without tactile feedback. Thereminists learn their instrument through a the extremely-precise sensing of their instrument and sonic feedback.

In AHNE (Audio-Haptic Navigation Environment), sonic feedback is essential, but so, too, is feel. Haptic vibration lets you know as you approach sounds — essential, as they’re invisible. The work of Finland-based DJ/VJ Matti Niinimäki, aka MÅNSTERI (“Mons-te-ri”), the project is part of research undertaken at SOPI Research Group at Media Lab Helsinki. Like some sort of sound sorcerer, the user is entirely dependent on movement, feel, and sound as they move unseen sound sources through space. (More technical details below.)

It’s labeled, as always, “proof of concept.” The creator promises more videos to come; we’ll be watching as this evolves, as it looks terribly promising.

Below, “Tension” is a fair bit simpler, in which users walk through a space and control synth parameters. (“You are the knob,” one might say, though I don’t suggest shouting that at someone you don’t know. They could take it the wrong way.)

More descriptions:

AHNE

This is a demonstration video of AHNE – Audio-Haptic Navigation Environment.

It is an audio-haptic user interface that allows the user to locate and manipulate sound objects in 3d space with the help of audio-haptic feedback.

The user is tracked with a Kinect sensor using the OpenNI framework and OSCeleton (github.com/​Sensebloom/​OSCeleton).

The user wears a glove that is embedded with sensors and a small vibration motor for the haptic feedback.

This is just the first proof-of-concept demo. More videos coming soon.

HEI Project 2011
SOPI Research Group
sopi.media.taik.fi/

Aalto University School of Art and Design

AHNE – Sound and Physical Interaction

Tension

A brief video showing Tension. An interactive spatial sound installation for multiple users.

A person enters the space and a generative sound is assigned to that person. The sound pans around in the 6-channel speaker system following the user in the space.

Up to 5 users can use the installation at the same time. Each person modifies the other sounds based on the distance to the other users. The closer you are to other people the more the tension in the sound increases.

Tension – Sound and Physical Interaction

Side note: watching these two videos makes me want to consult with someone on non-verbal expression, posture, and stage presence. That criticism is mounted at myself – I could use it. Perhaps we need an all-physical, unplugged music event for laptopists, controllerists, and electronic musicians. And I can at least say I’ve had some experience in this, working in the dance program at my undergraduate alma mater, Sarah Lawrence. Anyone game? (Sounds like something we could do while CDM is in Berlin in the fall.)

For their part, the Finnish research facility is working with dancers, along with Nokia Research Center. (Sadly, I can’t find documentation.) But I think interesting things happen when us non-dancers learn movement technique, too.

Drasko Vucevic, Toronto- and Santa Monica (California)-based sound designer and artist/composer, is apparently not only interested in playing alone. His upcoming interactive installation at Toronto’s Royal Music Conservatory will have an audience jamming along live via Twitter. And the artistry is crowd-sourced, too – with a range of artists already onboard, Drasko is calling on musical and visual artists (read: you) to be involved with sounds and visuals.

Drasko has sent along extensive notes, so I’m going to let him speak for himself:

I am working through both Drastic Music and Eksperimental (my companies) to create an interactive installation experience for this year’s TEDx Toronto conference taking place at the Royal Music Conservatory.

I am also doing an interactive music performance – an audio visual performance with a complete 3d/visual journey, which allows the audience (physical and digital) to collaborate with me by triggering audio and video elements in real time through their tweets.
So far, I have a few great artists contributing their time to create some beautiful visuals for this first of its kind interactive real-time jam.

Installation [Call for Audio]:
The installation concept is based around redefining collaboration. We are doing this by using real-time data (motion, color, sound, light) and tweets relating to TEDx to trigger, control, manipulate and compose audio elements on our back-end audio library (ableton). This is all happening through Processing, Max 5, Arduino, Ableton.

The massive back-end sound library contains loops, melodies, soundscapes, fx, you name it – produced by some great artists. The beauty of this is also that artists which have never before collaborated, will be remixed and mashed up solely by the audience, in relation to key words, discussions, movement, etc.

So far, the artists contributing audio content are:

Yoko K
Trifonic
Richard Devine
Drumcell
Audioandroid
David Della Santa
Darrin Wiener
Audionerve
Box of Toys
Lodewijk Vos
Matt Davis
Adrian Ellis
Andrew Lauzon
Drasko V

Performance [Visual Call]:

As I mentioned, my performance will be very interactive, musically and visually. Both audio and video elements will be triggered based on tweets in real time. I have some great visual artists contributing their time, such as Murat Pak, Yongsub, Charlie Vicetto, etc, but am looking for more, to create elements for the performance. They would of course get the great exposure of TEDx brand, be mentioned everywhere online, and will be in the final video spread throughout blogs once we launch the digital music version.

So how does the call for works … work?

The TEDxToronto conference is on September 23. Here’s how all the pieces come together for that and how to submit:

Musical system uses a massive library of sound structures – loops, melodies, fx, soundscapes and more – triggered and manipulated solely by tweets (relating to TEDxToronto) and motion, color, sound and light within the RCM venue.

Over 12 compositions will be recorded on the day of the conference. The arrangement, structure and sounds used will depend only on the key words used in tweets, the types of emotional replies, and physical interactivity within the venue.

Beauty of having some great artists be remixed and mashed up by the general public, in a very subliminal way. (again – Through their emotional replies, and physical movement)

This posting is a call to artists who may wish to apply to contribute their audio content and be a part of the soundtrack we will create that day. They should contact drasko (at) drasticmusic (dot) com with a link to their portfolio and we will take it from there.

Our installation progress may be followed on my personal site (drasko-v.com) or via Drastic Music or Eksperimental blogs.

We plan to expand the installation idea and bring it online for an ever-changing musical universe manipulated by truly organic methods (digitally and physically).

Interested to see how this will all come together. We’ll be watching. If you submit, and if you attend, let us know how it goes.

More on Drasko:
http://drasko-v.com/

Working in open source code for any platform, Brazilian artist and developer Jeraman has produced a charming project that imagines musical interfaces in dynamic, whimsically-simple sketches. Like doodled knobs, cartoons of guitar pedals, interactive devices on the touchscreen control musical activity.

And because it’s open, cross-platform code, everything from a computer-powered multitouch table to an Android tablet could get in on the fun. Jeraman explains:

It is a digital musical instrument that allows the control of real-time recorded loops through collaborative performances based on relationships between sketches and sounds, intended to be ludic and playful.

Developed in Processing and OpenFrameworks, it mixes multitouch technologies with the interaction metaphor of guitar pedals, by using a FTIR DIY multitouch table – built with PVC tubes, tapes… – with a modified old keyboard as pedal, following a high-end / low-tech approach.

Here’s an example of performance using an early prototype. By the way, sorry for the poor musical quality… I’m not a professional musician!

The project is also open source and the code, that may allow the instrument to be ported to others plataforms like Android, iPad and cardboard boxes (yes! using this http://sethsandler.com/multitouch/mtmini/), will be released soon.

This is possible due to the independence of the gui module (developed in processing) and the looper module (developed in openframeworks).
for the communication between both, it was used OSC protocol.

Some pictures can be found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeraman/sets/72157626935130739/

For further informations, check this site (sorry, in Portuguese):
http://jeraman.info/illusio/

It’s a fascinating-looking project! Do keep us posted, Jeraman — and readers, if you happen to play with the code, let us know! Oh, and never apologize for Portuguese – it’s a gorgeous language!

See also some nice examples of Jeraman’s previous work:

See, previously:
Robotic Twitter Songwriter Generates Tweet Poetry

“You had to be there.” Live performance has always been dictated by being present in a particular place, at a particular time. Now, the same is true of an interactive album produced by brothers Hays and Ryan Holladay, aka Bluebrain.

Both a two-man band and a two-man development team, there’s no clear dividing line between “coder” and “musician” for the artists on this project. But the only way to hear the work is to physically go to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall, and begin walking around. The satellites that populate the GPS received in your smartphone, currently on iOS but with an Android release planned, realize the work. You, and your device, then, participate in a kind of performance. The album is the first of a series; New York’s Flushing Meadows, site of a World’s Fair and a failed Olympics bid, is next.

The Washington Post‘s Chris Richards talk with the two artists; I’m quoted as the story pans back to look at music technology in general:
Bluebrain make magic with the world’s first location aware album [Washington Post]

It’s well worth a full read, as the artists describe some of their intentions, and claim they’re uninterested in this as technological gimmick. Richards also explains the experience of hearing the work, since not all of us can go to DC:

Approach that crazy-looking thing while listening to “The National Mall,” and you’ll hear a keyboard weep. Get closer and digital cellos begin to trace a regal melody. Closer. There’s percussion. Keep going. The volume creeps up. The drums push toward anarchy. Walk right up to the monument, press your hand against the cool, smooth stone and listen, as if the obelisk were a giant radio needle receiving some riotous transmission from deep space.

At one point when Richards interviewed me for the story, he asked me point blank whether technology’s greater impact has been on distribution or production. Caught off guard – it’s a question so fundamental I hadn’t really thought to choose – I found myself choosing production. After all, while distribution has been profound, the advent of recording, not the advent of the computer, is the fundamental breakthrough. But with computer music software, the ability to re-imagine what music actually is has taken the grandest leap since the gramophone.

Ironically, though, Bluebrain are taking the same approach to conventional recording technology as they are the new smartphone – they’re intervening to ensure music is limited and local. A “surprise” record release earlier this year not only went straight-to-vinyl (see previous editorial here), but required that you go to an actual store in the DC area.

In vinyl, the approach is an intentional throwback. In digital, it suggests a new way of making music for a space with a device as the medium rather than live performance.

There have certainly been locative digital works before this one, but I couldn’t think of one that was introduced as an album in this way. Then again, if the idea is worthwhile, it may prove worth repeating.

Follow Bluebrain’s work via their blog and site (and you may have to literally follow it, geographically):
http://bluebrainmusic.blogspot.com/
http://bluebra.in/

And do point us to other examples of locative work – including anything that might challenge their claim of being first, at least for our historical benefit.

When a brainy, abstract audiovisual act can elicit some laughs and cheers, you know something is going right.

Euphorie, the live music and projection act by François Wunschel, Fernando Favier, and stage designer Pier Schneider of the collectives 1024 Architecture and EXYZT, isn’t brand new. But in the cavernous, packed Usine C at Montreal’s Elektra Festival earlier this month, it surely shone. Inside that booming rehabilitated factory, sound and video elements seemed to just click, the happy result of months of development, practice, and iteration meeting a highly appreciative crowd. Projectors and software, props and vocals, laptops and electric sounds were all jamming together like a band should. Part inventors, part musical performers, the duo are finding the sweet spot between technological magic and live jam.

The French duo of François and Fernando start slow, with a somewhat timid doodle on a projection screen. But that doodle grows into squares and boxes, as monochromatic projection across multiple scrims immerse the performers in electric-light scaffolds or showers of pixellated sparks. And then the neon guitars come out, and it’s on.

Conceived as a set of individual songs, each set piece couples simple musical compositions with visual elements, mindful in each of an inventive sound-to-image relationship. The pairings are traditional, but performed with a conviction and charm that’s irresistible.

The projector-and-laptop, doodle-and-geometry combinations might be as familiar as the instrumentation of a rock quartet; the achievement of 1024 Architecture is making them actually rock. A couple of darker numbers get into some strange lyrics and a creepy talking head, but in more spare, economical moment, the duo manage to hit upon something elusive: wit. There’s a sense of humor and liveness to the whole act, a sense that the artists are comfortable poking fun at themselves, or at least in being ceaselessly sincere and unpretentious. There’s even a sequence that takes on a game mechanic; the silliness paradoxically completes the illusion of being immersed onstage. Tron-style, Daft Punk-like EL wire suits seem slightly tongue in cheek, but in the midst of all this drawing and playing and screaming solos on guitars, you really do get the sense that the players have lept into the computer. It’s a real entry into the digital world, too, minus any Disney Hollywood trickery.

The duo and their set designer are also extremely clever in their use of minimal stage dressings to get a maximal immersive effect. Using three translucent scrims spaced across the stage, combined with basic translation and rotation effects in the 3D software, they produce surprisingly-convincing illusions of onstage depth. It’s not even really quite projection mapping: rather, it takes advantage of fairly conventional stage effects that, thanks to human perception, are also highly effective.

In a late number, shouting the names of programming languages and software tools (Objective-C! MySQL!), the duo almost goes a bit nerdcore – or at least would top my list of “bands to write a theme song for CDM.”

None of this really comes across in the videos, which to me is partially satisfying. It really feels like a live act; something happens between audience and performer. That said, it’s worth looking through their documentation and exploring their other, impressively-prolific collaborations.

1024 Blog
Euphorie Project [FR]
1024 Architecture Cite

Here’s a great behind-the-scenes / interview video by Le Cube (French-only):

These videos are rougher, but come closer to the performance I saw:

Tests, early performance documentation, and rehearsal videos get you a bit closer to the work, including this fascinating neon-guitar which I think really stole the whole show. (They’ve obviously been practicing, as they were far better at playing these at the Elektra show than they were in the early test videos or even some of the performance videos online. Touring, practicing, and audiences make a huge difference – it’s a good thing.)

Stay tuned to Create Digital Motion for more on the mechanics behind the projection techniques here. The goal of CDM for me is to have in-depth technical information on music and motion – each of which are fundamentally specific by nature – while the actual artwork straddles the two media.

Updated: Lyrics The lyrics to the song in their set:

We’re the Knights
Of the Lambda Calculus
Members of the Teraflop Club
Some call it bogus but its just
a computer Virus

Google Apple Adobe
Facebook of death
Evil company
HTML CSS PHP
MySql Objective C
Z++ my philosophy

Ebola Pixel
Digital Virus
Network Collapse
Computer Crash

We wanna byte
Your net economy
Its gonna be a binary tragedy
because …

Digital musician and artist Josh Silverman began the Synplode process with something familiar – a checkerboard. Play a game of checkers on its computer vision-equipped playing field and beats and loops triggered in Ableton Live generated a responsive soundtrack for the game. But as it’s evolved, Synplode has become a general-purpose musical grid. Whether with little robotic insects (the Hexbugs here) or full-sized human persons, the grid can turn any space into a dynamic, interactive dance floor. (I think I may actually prefer those cute little bugs to the people and dancers and whatnot. Robot rave, anyone?)

I prodded Josh to write up more description of what’s going on, so he’s created lots of documentation on the project Website.

The basic interaction:

At the start of the Synplode demo video, it is easy to see that a wave passes over the basic projected grid, flashing one column at a time, each containing 8 trigger regions. When a participant (or microbot) is present on a region, it is activated. When the wave intersects with an activated region, it causes a Synplosion, expressed through a splash of color and a distinctive sound. In the grid, each row represents a distinctive color and pitch or audio sample.

The basic ingredients:
1. Computer vision in OpenFrameworks, the fully open-source, artist-friendly C++ toolkit inspired by Processing.
2. Ableton Live, triggering clips in Set Mode and modulating them with MIDI effects and racks.

For more detail:
How it Works (details, in particular, of what’s happening in Ableton)
Why it Works (some of the thinking behind the interaction)
Synplode Project Page

Josh first demonstrated this system publicly at our Handmade Music series here in New York, and this is just the kind of experimentation and iteration I like to see. Here’s the original, checkerboard version:

The armies of the earbuds are everywhere, as people – since the dawning of the Walkman – tune out their surroundings. What if, instead, your surroundings became soundtracks? That’s the question posed by a mobile app research project, partnering between New York’s Times Square and a creative team at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

UrbanRemix invites users to capture geo-tagged sounds with a free iOS and Android app, then to string them together into sound compositions on the Web (as seen above):

Download the app
http://urbanremix.gatech.edu/
Map + remix interface

There’s a great write-up in the local press here in New York:
Times Square Noise Gets Turned Into Music [DNAinfo.com]

You may have seen this project before – it’s been in trials for some months – but a contest to produce music with the tools is coming to its conclusion.

It’s doubly amusing as I expect New Yorkers are largely the ones focused on trying to tune out these very sounds. (Noise complaints are the most common calls to New York’s 311 city help line, by a large margin, and hopefully not just during CDM-sponsored Handmade Music events.)

It suggests some of the creative and practical use of geo-tagged, mobile field recordings. But I’m struck in particular by seeing paths drawn through the city map as a kind of interactive score – see my rant on the topic of notation’s future, or better yet, play with this interface as it makes the point better than I can in words.

Try it out, and let us know what you think. Field recordings and found sound are nothing new, but they still raise the question: can this change how you hear, or how you respond to your environment?