What do you do if you can’t find an instrument that you can play the way you want? In the digital domain, you can just invent one.

So, when Brooklyn-based artist Nick Demopoulos wanted a controller that’d allow him to articulate digital instruments more like a guitar and less like a keyboard, he built his own expressive touch controller. It uses arrays of touch-sensing strips on a guitar body. A future version, he says, will incorporate 6 “strings” (touch strips).

New York-based literary/culture quarterly BOMB Magazine shot a video in which Nick walks through his creation.

Nick has also played our Handmade Music series in New York, at Culturefix. (See documentation of that event, from 2010.)

Videos of Nick playing:
http://www.youtube.com/user/nicnut210?feature=mhee

Lots of stuff on SoundCloud, too; I enjoy the rhythms in this one:

Whispers in the Water by Nick Demopoulos

http://soundcloud.com/nickdemopoulos

It occurs to me looking at this, too, that if you could improve the sensing accuracy and physical feedback from the touch strip, you could radically improve the instrument. It’s really the quality of these kinds of sensors that will have the biggest impact on future instruments – that is, the fundamental ideas about these controllers are out there, and now implementation means everything.

Thanks for sharing your work, Nick!

“This sounds crazy. I want to see this. I think I may have to see this to understand what you mean. But I want to see this.”

David Dodson, journalist, writer, and electronic musician (“Primus Luta” and, most recently at our Handmade Music series, Concrete Sound System), has just told me he wants to cover New York’s Unsound Festival, the Polish-based electronic and “advanced” music festival.

Only he wants to cover it … fictionally.

There’s a love story. There’s drama. There a bits of review, interwoven with a story. In place of the usual omniscient narrator that we find in music journalism, delivering pronouncements about the State of Music from on high and dissecting the programming, we hear reflections on the work the way you do when you’re actually there – snippets of commentary from friends outside the venue, internal monologue in your head. But these thoughts come out of the heads of made-up protagonists, who then rub shoulders with the real characters spotted at the event. (Warning: if you were at Unsound, you might make a cameo.)

It’s trippy, disorienting, frequently comical, and for me, at least, leaves me half-guiltily aching for more.

It’s worth reading all the excerpts in order in the blog format in which we’re able to present them, but a few examples to whet your appetite (or, if I’m lucky, give you some idea what the heck I’m talking about):

There are drops of sweat on her lashes when Gisella finally opens her eyes. She looks at Lil’ Man who is smiling like a man who knows he’s done good. She smiles back licking the presperation off her upper lip only slightly suggestive. Lil’ Man notices but turns to give an nod to Chancha for keeping her there with him on the dance floor. Only two other ladies, who probably arrived with Chancha, could keep up with the cumbia influenced rhythms. It didn’t keep others from moving to the beat, but even with her eyes closed, Gisella knew they had been the center of attention.
“Let’s go get some air,” she says into his ear before leading him through the crowd.
As they walk down the corridor where people are still waiting to get in, Lilo comes behind them from the back room.
“Oh my god,” she says. ”I don’t know who’s on now, but whoever was doing the last set in the back room just made my night.” There are more people outside waiting to get in and small groups gathered in nicotine circles. ”You missed him playing Madonna.”
“No way,” Gisella replies as they walk toward the curb where she recognizes Praveen and Sougwen.
“But did you see Dave Q voguing behind his laptop?” Praveen asks over hearing Lilo’s enthusiasm. The guy standing next to him responds by striking a pose.
“Do you know Dave?” Sougwen asks Gisella.
“Only by reputation,” Lilo says extending her hand.

…or…

“While I don’t feel cheated,” Lilo says between sips of wine, “I do feel like I missed something. I mean it was Morton Subotnick, the Buchla was there, and he performed Silver Apples on the Moon, but something was missing.”
“He didn’t patch live,” Lil Man says.
“Yes, that is it isn’t it?” Lilo thinks about it taking a sip. ”It’s funny how laptops throw everything off.”
“You couldn’t really see what he was doing,” Gisella chimes in. ”You could see it all working but you couldn’t see the work.”
“He had a controller near the laptop,” Lil Man notes. ”He was doing something with that.”
“Yeah,” Lilo says after another sip. ”I mean you have to think, why wouldn’t he use a laptop? Can you imagine how hard it must have been to create Silver Apples back in the sixties, let alone perform it. Even now with the technology we have it’s an amazing achievement.”
“Most def,” Lil Man affirms.
“But I do wish he had pulled at least one patch cable,” Lilo adds before finishing the glass.
“Most def.”

…or…

The sound of an ambulance trails off behind her. Suddenly a female voice moves in only to be accompanied by at least ten different iterations of the same voice. They are all being manipulated diferently and floating around the space. Gisella closes her eyes and could see the voices sweeping, like ghosts in a haunted house. It was clearly the Pamela Z piece, but the description didn’t really do the effect of it justice. The title and even the description made it sound out of place. What did “The Star Spangled Banner” have to do with horror? But listening to Pamela Z’s deconstruction and recomposition of voice in the surround space, at this point Gisella recognizes, Pamela is the first artist to truly create a scene from a horror movie. So why was she thinking about sex?

Author David Dodson explains the project:

I’ve been thinking of moving back into fiction writing for a few years now, but fiction that deals with real historical places and events. A few years back I wrote a novella entitled “The Moshi” which placed characters in the middle of New York during the black out of 2003. When working with fictional characters it’s always interesting to think about how they respond to ‘real life’ situations.

For “Above the Threshold” I wanted to really embrace that. Rather
than create a world in which the characters can do whatever I saw fit, I decided to create the characters and place them in our world to see what they’d do. I started out with a very simple premise – a female lead working in the music industry attends the 2011 Unsound festival. I then attended the festival myself and ‘observed’ how my characters acted within the settings that the festival presented.

During the course of the festival I penned over 50k words of this
storyline, and in essence watched the plot unfold. It will be some
time before the full piece is ready to go to print, but I’m offering
up some excerpts from it on the CDM partner Noisepages site. These excerpts may or may not end up in the final draft, but will give some glimpses of the characters, the festival and how the two came together.

I only wish fictional characters could inhabit all the events we attend. I suppose, in fact, they could.

The full work, emerging in blog form:

Above the Threshold

Handcrafted CD covers for records and mixes, meditative music made in game engines, handheld chip music creations, analog light synths and drone labs, VL-Tone classical music, and more surprises are coming to New York on Sunday, October 10. (Austin, Texas gets its own event, making noisemakers and ring modulators.)

We promise music you can dance to, music you can’t, and tapas (at least in NYC).

And on October 10, a little secret will finally be revealed to Manhattan and the world.

If you’re a citizen of The Internet, we’ve got lots of sounds and creations to explore here on The Web from the comfort of Your Home – scroll on below. There are even great projects you can build anywhere in the world.

For New Yorkers, the lineup on Sunday:

• Immersive music made with game engines, featuring foci + loci (Tamara Yadao + Chris Burke) doing strange and wonderful things with the likes of Halo and Little Bit Planet.
• Drone labs and analog light synths by master electronic sonic maker Peter Edwards, Casperelectronics.
• Classical music on Casio VL-Tone in a cameo by the amazing Annabelle Cazes.
• Chip music by PULSEWAVE, hosted by Peter Swimm. UPDATED – confirmed Rhinostrich +
  exilefaker
• Make + trade handmade CDs (see our separate article, posting tonight). Bring your music or Creative Commons-licensed / public domain mixes.
• A surprise. Or more. At least one.

October 10, completely free
4pm, FREE workshop on handmade music mixes – RSVP | Facebook
7-11pm, party, live music performances, general noisemaking (Facebook)

Presented by CULTUREfix, our new favorite home on the Lower East Side, complete with fantastic tapas, drinks, and drool-worthy electronics

Location

Here’s a first look at the projects, starting with a live performance I’m told gives us a loose sense of foci + loci — hoping to see even more Sunday.

foci + loci – Front Room Gallery June 2010 from glomag on Vimeo.

Drone Lab V2

From Austin – Three Projects You Can Build

That’s right, you’re not from Texas? Texas wants you anyway. Even if you’re nowhere near the Lone Star State, here are three projects you can build/buy — and yes, we’ll need to compile a full guide to all these great projects.

If you are in Austin, Texas, don’t miss the event Sunday, October 10. (We’ll have to Skype from NYC to Austin!)

Handmade Music Austin #12

The projects…

Ring Modulator, Mickey Delp’s great-sounding project, also available as a US$45 kit ($75 assembled)

Ring Modulator
Original prototype with schematics

SimSam, an $8, beginner-friendly noisemaker (complete with specs, the lot).

PicoPaso, a Forrest Mims Atari Punk Synth-inspired stepped tone generator. Schematics + purchase info at Bleep Labs.

It’s almost impossible to come upon an electronic musical colleague – indeed, regardless of their personal genre – without some lament of the state of dance music. But electronic sound has long depended on the connections between experimental and dance, all the vibrations that can move people.

Don’t complain – do something. Reaching across national borders, some people are doing something to make dance music better.

Biatch Corp makes its connection between Colombia and New York, and for the last three years has put together a label and a successful series of parties. Whatever your stylistic tendencies, there’s something to learn from their international strategy, one born in Colombia that uses New York as its cultural broadcast center. Alvaro Bueno tells CDM:

We basically liked the idea of being facilitators (first as party promoters, now as a label) of good dancefloor music and some of the artists we are been sharing in this healthy ecosystem of Techno that is being formed, artists like fong+Julio own the Sheik n’ Beik series of parties, Vadim is the head of Less, Deepak & Dieter are the bosses of Hidden Recordings, Thomas Hildebrand is part of Brooklyn-backyard parties called Backseat-buzz. We like collaboration and how synergy keeps scene healthy.

Another artists we have in past and current releases are vets like South african Brendon Moeller, Hamburg’s Ascii.Disko, Jussi-Pekka hailing from Finland and Perc, who lives in London. Bleepolar, Nicolas Ovalle, Karraskilla and Me (Pito) are the South-American quota of the label, probably is there that resides the path for a more flavorful music in techno, a more organic one. Nico is from Uruguay and we Colombians.

Now celebrating three years in action, Biatch Corp has a new compilation out entitled “Auditoria” coming out on Saturday. Karraskilla, Ascii.Disko, and Peter Corvaia, all of whom have done releases with them in the past, are included, but so are various other friends and locals. Thomas Hildebrand from LA is a highlight for me among others, as his work with found sound and field recordings adds other textures to his work.

This weekend, I’m in Boulder, Colorado for Communikey, but the Biatch Corp is doing a party back here in New York. And wherever you are, there’s the release, plus a free live mix by Karraskilla.

Karraskilla Auditoria Set by KARRASKILLA

Direct download link [SoundCloud]

More information:
http://www.biatchcorp.org/
Auditoria Release Page [Music + Party; warning - audio auto-plays]

Free and open source software is nothing on its own. Like any technology, it’s the users and the community around it that make it meaningful. Musical practice grows out of culture and community; so does music technology.

I’ve heard lots of people buzzing about Expo74, the Max/MSP/Jitter conference in April, and rightfully so – it’s the first major Max event of this kind, and the format looks very cool. But free and open source lovers also have upcoming events in both North and South America.

Pdcon is the third international convention of Pd users, following Austria 2004 and Montreal 2007. It’s like the Olympics of Pd, in other words. (Insert Michael Phelps joke of your choice here.) Brazil has already staged a national event on Pd, and have generally demonstrated themselves as being ridiculously cool and tech-and-art-savvy. They’re looking for more support for international travel, so anyone who can help with that, it’d help make this truly international and democratic.

The event is July 19-26 in Sao Paolo. There’s also still time to submit works; the deadline in March 15.

Pdcon09

For SuperCollider fans, there’s a combination of a workshop series in New York at Harvestworks and a big symposium at Wesleyan. Unlike Pd, SuperCollider began as commercial software. In my view, it’s the most modern and complete code-based language for sound.

Event highlights – at Harvestworks:

• Beginners’ intro (Saturday 4/4 day, repeating 4/6 evening): Nick Collins, Dan Stowell, and Jan Trützschler will get you started.
• Intermediate workshop and tips (4/5 day) with the same cast
• “Just-in-time” programming – synthesis and live coding with Powerbooks Unplugged (4/7 day, 4/7 evening)
• Full-day clinic with flexible topic (4/8 day)

Details on Harvestworks’ site (also pasted below)

Symposium at Wesleyan, 4/9-12:

• Launch of The SuperCollider Book, MIT Press
• Keynote by original SuperCollider creator James McCartney
• Talks, workshops, performances, installations

SuperCollider @ Wesleyan

The call for works is closed. But hey, anyone up for a little CDM party in either Middletown or New York? I think there needs to be a SuperCollider dance party.

Wesleyen also has a special place in my heart as a center of gamelan music; if we got really lucky, there could be some sort of SuperCollider Klenegan. (SuperKlenegan?)

Harvestworks workshop details:

SuperCollider workshops will be offered at Harvestworks in New York in early April, in the run up to the 2009 SuperCollider Symposium (see info about the symposium below) to be held at Wesleyan. This is a rare opportunity to learn from some of the SuperCollider developers themselves. SuperCollider is an incredible environment and programming language for music and audio. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server. SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an actively maintained and developed open source project. It is used by musicians, scientists, and artists working with sound and audiovisuals.

All workshops require attendees to bring their own laptops; tutors will assist with installation on OS X (10.4 or later recommended) and Windows as necessary (SC also runs on Linux but it’s assumed you’d have compiled and installed it yourself in advance of the workshop if you’re using that platform).

Location:
Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center
596 Broadway, #602
New York, NY 10012
Subways: F V D B 6 Broadway/Lafayette, R W Prince, 6 Bleecker

The workshops being offered are:

1) Saturday 4th April: Beginners day (11am-6pm). A friendly introduction to SuperCollider for absolute beginners, aimed at artists and musicians. Aside from a little familiarity with the digital arts, no prerequisites, though some prior exposure to computer music (perhaps through Max/MSP or Csound) may be helpful. (led by Nick Collins, Dan Stowell, Jan Trützschler) $100

2) Sunday 5th April: Intermediate workshop day (11am-6pm). For those with some experience, but wanting to refresh and broaden their SC skills. Topics will include sound synthesis and analysis, interaction via GUI and controllers, generative and network music, SC programming tips and tricks and SC architecture. We will also be adaptable to participants needs, can take requests for topics, and have some general question and answer sessions. (led by Nick Collins, Dan Stowell, Jan Trützschler) $100

3) Monday 6th April evening (7-10pm). Beginner’s evening session. A friendly introduction to SuperCollider for absolute beginners, aimed at artists and musicians. Aside from a little familiarity with the digital arts, no prerequisites, though some prior exposure to computer music (perhaps through Max/MSP or Csound) may be helpful. (led by Nick Collins, Dan Stowell, Jan Trützschler)

4) Tuesday 7th April daytime (11-6): Abstract pressure cookers and virtual steam machines: Just in time programming in networks.
Not tweaking machines, but writing letters: Programs that program programs, machines that recombine structures. Replacing their parts, in effect writing their user manual at runtime. Instead of giving in to pressure to become virtuosos, we listen how the machines take the pressure Рfrom spooky action at a distance to new exploring logics of distributed noise music. A collective workshop for live coding, sound synthesis, randomness in order. (led by Powerbooks Unplugged: Alberto de Campo, Echo Ho, Hannes H̦lzl, Jan-Kees van Kampen, Julian Rohrhuber, Renate Wieser) $100

5) Tuesday 7th April evening (7-10pm). Compact version of Tuesday daytime session (led by Powerbooks Unplugged) $50

6) Wednesday 8th April daytime (11-6) SuperCollider Clinic. Flexible topic sessions, following participant needs, adaptable to all intermediate levels (beginners would find Saturday or Mon night helpful before this workshop). Developers will be on hand to answer questions, to present on special topics, and to demonstrate projects and works built with SC. (led by an all star cast of developers) $100.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed never to make anything as cool as 17th Century keyboard makers.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announces (via its Twitter feed, no less) that it has gotten its Musical Instruments collection online. Over 800 inspiring objects of all kinds are available with photos, maker information, and historical notes, making this an extraordinary tool both for serious research and discovering wonderful designs.

The best place to start is the Musical Instruments department page, which includes links to highlights, how to find the gallery in the Museum (believe me, you may need that), publications, and other details. You can also search the database, picking out a keyword like “drum.”

Incredibly, this is only a fraction of what the Met has in their collection. The department has 5,000 pieces from every continent except Antarctica, with pieces dating back to around 300 BC, from Stradivari’s violins to rare African percussion.

Of course, seeing instruments isn’t nearly as meaningful as hearing them. The department offers concerts through the year, including an annual concert on its 1830 Thomas Appleton organ. Sadly, the works database doesn’t include sound samples yet; perhaps that can be the next step. (Anyone feeling generous and want to donate to them?) But this is the one case in which an art museum audio guide is a must-have; you can hear descriptions and brief sound samples when you visit the collection here in Manhattan.

Digital instrument makers and software designers often look only to the future or the recent past for inspiration, which is a pity: there’s plenty to learn from historic instruments. As a keyboardist, of course, my favorites tend to be the collection’s wildly imaginative keyboard instruments. One of my favorites of the museum is the 1598 Claviorganum, pictured above, which built an organ and a virginal into a tabletop chest of drawers. I always thought the idea of being able to pull a virginal out of a piece of furniture was somehow magical. It seems there’s no better time than 2009 to resurrect some of these ideas as people build their own instruments and digital technology allows new flights of fantasy. Bring on the Neo-Baroque Digital Age.

Updated: The museum sends us this video of a Strad performance, in case you want to know what a highly valuable instrument sounds like.

The concert violinist Eric Grossman performs the chaconne from the Partita no. 2 in D Minor by J. S. Bach (1685 – 1750) on a violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1717. The instrument — one of three by Stradivari in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection — is named “The Antonius” and comes from Stradivari’s so-called golden period (about 1700 to 1720).

Violin, “The Antonius,” 1717
Made by Antonio Stradivari (Italian, 1644 – 1737)
Cremona, Italy
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Annie Bolton Matthews Bryant, 1933 (34.86.1a)

And the Timeline of Art History has a bit on sixteenth century violin makers, in case you’re not an expert.

Minitek is a massive “electronic music + innovation festival” coming to New York this weekend. If you’re anywhere in the area, I definitely recommend finding a way to get out here. And if you’re far away, stay tuned, as we’re planning some epic coverage here on CDM. The events are split between Midtown Manhattan and the eccentric shores of Coney Island (above).

The music lineup includes some big names — think Richie Hawtin, Magda, M.A.N.D.Y., Audiofly, Audion (big highlight for me), Adultnapper, Heidi, Guy Gerber, and the like, with Francois K closing out the evening. But for those of you whose tastes tend in the more experimental, there’s quite a bit of that, too.

Under the “innovation” category, we’ll see works like James Patten on the tangible Audiopad interface, Norman Fairbanks jamming on the Tenori-On, Audiocube players, and more. There’s also a big lineup of generative visuals for the nights; we’re covering that on our sister site Create Digital Motion. You’ll also be able to chat up record labels and play with the tech during the day in the village on Coney Island.

Minitek Festival Site; ticket info (you will want to get a pass if you can!)

Set times are finally up, though that includes only the main acts, not the innovation. (I know some of the, ahem, “innovators” so when they find out themselves when they’re playing, I’ll pass it on!)

Details are constantly coming in, so you can watch the blog or mailing list on the site. And yes, Astroland just closed, but Coney Island’s other rides are up, in case you want to hop on the Cyclone between sets. (Artists playing, if anyone wants a CDM interview on one of the rides, I’m game. I think it’s be fun to do an interview mixed with screams on the coaster.)

Tangible Roots

One of the projects I’m most excited about is Roots, a new music/visual interactive installation for the Brick interface. Co-creators Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis took home a Tenori-On the last time they ran into CDM (video of that after the jump); this time they team up with London-based designer Memo Akten for some beautiful generative visuals. (They’re also behind the Arduino-based Monome clone we saw a couple of weeks ago.) Here’s a short teaser video; we’ll have more on this after the weekend.

Roots Multi Touch Tangible Installation Teaser from BricK Table on Vimeo.

And that’s just a taste of one of the innovation day projects, every single one of which have gotten a mention (or three) somewhere in the pages of CDM in the past (really)!
Here’s Jordan and Owen in the heart-stopping finish to CDM’s Futuristic Design Challenge, in the moments that won them the Tenori-On prize we gave up.

Brick Table @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008 Lightning Round from BricK Table on Vimeo.

Yo! Earth to useless hipster: this is New York. We used to have real crime here, not you jacking someone’s external FireWire box. Jeez.

I’m a little late on this — the crime took place April 4 at Galapagos’ Bunker party (formerly at Tonic).

Matthew Dear’s harddrive was stolen @ Galapagos [Brooklyn Vegan, via Dance Tracks Digital]

Some jerk in comments on DTD says, "Who cares hwo mucgh creativity is therein blippy tracks that lst 45 minutes." [sic] Aside from Pete’s complete inability to spell the easiest words in the English language, he’s risking some major bad karma by writing that — well, unless he plays with theft-proof wax cylinders, that is.

For reasons that escape me, this whole incident sends the Brooklyn Vegan rock-loving crowd into a frenzy of anti-computer, pro-guitar rhetoric. Yes, that must be it — God Himself took Matthew’s hard drive, because playing music out of computers is the Devil’s work. The classic “FireWire Smite” move.

“The storage device that you just removed was not properly put away before being stolen from this computer. Your set may have been damaged or lost. In the future, please play a banjo, or risk eternal damnation. Greetings, Professor Falken. Shall we play a game?”