Austrian Composer Peter Ablinger has transformed a child speaking so that it can be played as MIDI events on a mechanically-controlled piano, making the piano a kind of speech speaker. Via Matrixsynth, the readers at Hack a Day get fairly involved with how this may be working.

It seems not quite accurate to describe this as vocoding in the strictest sense, so much as a simple transformation to a (much) lower frequency resolution – that is, the 88 keys of the piano. Ablinger, for his part, describes the events as “pixels.” It’s pretty extraordinary that without a bandpass filter, you get something approximating the noisy sibilance of the speech, but this seems to be the result of having lots of events (that is, lots of resolution in terms of time). Edit: Listening again, the short answer to how you can hear so much of the voice through the piano seems to be, you can’t; the original is almost certainly mixed in. It’s nonetheless an interesting effect, and I’d like to hear the piano on its own. In other words, the basic process is, 1) convert the sound spectrum of the recorded voice to a series of MIDI events, and 2) play back the translated MIDI file. You can see that the MIDI playback is accomplished with Pd (Pure Data) running on a Windows Linux/KDE netbook, though it’s not clear what was used to do the original conversion. (The screen shot with side-by-side audio and MIDI appears as though it may be for demonstration purposes, only.)

Correction: The work is absolutely done in custom software developed by the composer in Pd (Pure Data). It’s an ideal tool for the job, and free and open source. I wouldn’t dare try to replicate the results here, but this is fantastic inspiration for playing with sound in Pd.

One Windows tool that’s capable of the job is TS Audiotomidi, as observed by Hack a Day spacecoyote. Whether or not that’s what’s at work here – and it may well be – that utility is itself interesting. Edit: Yeah, far more likely the whole thing was done in Pd. And Pd should be up to the task.

TS-AudioToMIDI

Of course, this is to say nothing of the lovely work done on the mechanical piano. It’s a beautiful piece. Here’s hoping some government bureaucrats got the message of the declaration. Now, we just need a chorus of something really loud – say a thousand trumpets – shouting out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Drum machines with tubes: from Wurlitzer’s classic SideMan to a new prototype, drum machines can make tubes rock even harder.

What happens when adept sonic inventor Eric Barbour of Metasonix makes a drum machine out of clever circuits and vacuum tubes? Well, in the creator’s words:

“It makes noise … a lot of noise.”

Yes, while MPC and LinnDrum creator Roger Linn works out for himself just what people want from a “workstation” drum machine, Eric is whipping up prototypes that make a racket.

Donald Bell aka Chachi Jones captured the Man of Metasonix at a RobotSpeak demo over the weekend. Eric was there to show off commercially-available products with raunchy names, like the AssBlaster and Wretch Machine. But he also brought along this unique tube-based prototype, which clearly stole the show. See the full Flickr set for more:

Robotspeak Metasonix demo [Chachi Jones @ Flickr]

Here’s another video – that’s Eric’s voice explaining a bit of how this works, with a beautiful view of those tubes.

Now, before you get too excited about this, there’s no word on whether this prototype will ever see the light of day. So, please don’t flood Eric’s email with requests asking for the thing. I have a huge amount of respect for his talent as a designer and, um, with the rest of the bloggers have basically made the guy hate me because we make you want stuff he doesn’t necessarily want to make.

Hmmm… actually, if it means that we might get to buy this drum machine, maybe that’d be worth it. So, you know what? Go ahead. Bug him. I can take some hate. I can always order mine under a pseudonym.

Tubes through History

Vintage vacuum tube drum machine from Donald Bell on Vimeo.

Another interesting twist of Eric’s presentation was the discussion of vintage, tube-based drum machine, as in the Wurtlizer SideMan. This early product, likely the first commercially-available drum machine, was a monster rotary mechanical sequencer, driven by a belt motor, with tube ringing filters to generate the sounds. See the video above, also by Donald, for Eric’s explanation of why it’s best to leave this dinosaur to extinction.

As impractical as these designs are as hardware, I think it’s actually easier to take them as inspiration for software – with no FCC to worry about, and something quite a lot more portable than a SideMan.

Other tube / mechanical drum machines to share, or historical notes on the SideMan? Share in comments…

Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christopher Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christopher immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christopher’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

Artists Gijs Gieskes’ sequencers are almost like physical, mechanical software, an expression of musical structure in object form. As such, even as they make strange sounds, they become musical sculpture. His latest Servo Sequencer combines optical and mechanical process, as frequency circles spin on a turntable and tone arms float above them.

The Servo Sequencer is built for exhibition use – meaning, yes, he’s brave enough to let you play with this contraption. Sequence the arms using buttons, then adjust the volume mix and placement of each arm using the joystick.

Serv Seq from Gijs on Vimeo.

This project is unusually well-documented. Gijs provides complete specs, the script that controls the arms, and even a little web app that generates those lovely patterns.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=serv-seq

But for those of you near the Netherlands, you should go check this out in person. Updated: The piece will be part of an exhibition in Breda through August 23, with multiple opening events featuring local artists from Eindhoven and Breda, plus live performances and concerts including Gijs and his talented brethren and neighbors.

Here & There Exhibition, mu.nl [Info in English]

The events:
Opening Part 1:
KOP, Breda
Thursday 25/06 08.00 pm

MU, Eindhoven
Friday 26/06 08.00 pm

(It’s a bit confusing as the events swap between Breda and Eindhoven — there’s a second opening Saturday July 25. Gijs explains “the first [opening] is in breda (thursday), then a day later (friday) in eindhoven, where my machine will be. and then a month later its the other way around.”)

You know, Breda. Like, right … here. We’ve got a number of readers in the area (whom I suspect know more or less exactly where this is); let us know if you make it!

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.

It’s not just the guitars: he’s made his other work into musical installation. Lyrics is a radically different take on the artist retrospective: the artist is gone, and instead digital music reinterpreting his work takes its place. Lyrics are printed in bold Helvetica on the walls, and commissioned texts are reinterpreted by commissioned composers, as colored lights lead the audience around to headphones.

Good stuff, and fertile ground for those imagining new venues for music. Now, excuse me; my phone is vibrating with multiple meanings.

Gelerie Michel Rein on Exhibition
Power Chords, monograph
Seen in the lovely Artkrush 63

You know how drummers tap desks, objects, and anything around them incessantly, often unaware of the fact that they’re doing it, until people get annoyed? Well, now you don’t need a drummer around: you can program a Game Boy to do the same thing.

Jowan Sebastian has built a brilliant, elegant application for Game Boys called kBANG. Wire up a Game Boy to other objects — like solenoids, simple mechanical devices that can perform a tapping action — and you’ve got a real-world drum machine. Enough glitchy beats: physical objects become percussion.

kBANG: Game Boy Drum Machine

Here it is in action:

If you want to try this yourself, he has posted a ROM, but you’ll be on your own building the interface.

Related:
music albums and synths on Game Boy, a tracker-style music app for Nintendo DS, and, very much along these lines, how to build a mechanical “sequencer” controlled by Game Boy.

Thanks to Pedro Marques for the heads-up!