From Sarah and Lara Grant, we have a dress that makes music, with tube-like apparatus made of felt for connecting sound, modular fashion. From the raucous duo Great Tiger, we get a homebrewed arcade controller Ableton Live that mashes loops into dance music with a quick button push. Yep, it’s Handmade Music time again in New York tomorrow Thursday. If you’re anywhere in the area, come on down – and feel free to bring your own projects and/or expect some surprise technological appearances. If not, we’ve still got some MP3s, visuals, and how-to information to share.

If you do make it to Brooklyn, we can promise some behind-the-scenes demonstrations, noise, at least one live set, and free, ice-cold Colt 45s while they last.

Read on for event details, a preview of the projects, and videos and downloadable MP3s from Great Tiger.

Wearable Patch Cords in a Sonic Dress

Sound artists, inventors, and designer sisters Sarah and Lara Grant present an in-progress audiological fashion experiment involving patch cords made from felt. (I love the gorgeous conceptual drawing.) They’re working with a dancer to make this into a performance, and we get to see the work evolve before our eyes.

the title of the piece is ‘Audiotrails’, playing off of the word ‘entrails’, since as you’ll from the drawing attached, we are designing a dress that has several felted cords coming out from the gut which will act as patch cords. These patch cords connect to different parts of the garment to produce various noises and effects.

What we will be bringing is an example of our patch cord concept in the form of a felted swatch and a concept drawing of the final piece, which we have not completed, but hope to present either next month or the following at handmade music. We will be talking about our process and answering any questions based on that. Sarah and I had been envisioning our set up on a table in the smaller room, since had not been planning to perform and since our goal has been to show our progress of a project that would take a couple months to finish.

Here’s a look at one of the coils, a felted patch cable that can then become part of the garment:

Sarah Grant has also done fascinating research into what she calls “felted signal processing,” in which textiles can themselves become active sound elements.

Push the Button: DIY Arcade Controller for Ableton Live and the Button-Mashing Music of Great Tiger

That’s button mashing in a good way. Inspired by games, fast push-button moves and combos, and electronic music, the duo Great Tiger has built a custom rig for mashing samples in Ableton Live.

The custom arcade controller, looking like what happens when an 80s arcade cabinet and the monome have a love child, was featured on the DJ blog DJ TechTools. (Worth reading that article for lots more technical details from the duo.) This video by Great Tiger gives a behind-the-scenes look at how the hardware is used with Live and how it’s put together.

Here’s Great Tiger live in action at Brooklyn’s Red Star:

Free Great Tiger MP3 Downloads

Great Tiger were kind enough to share a couple of their fun tracks with us, so you can grab them wherever you are.

Great Tiger on MySpace | Facebook

Come Visit Us

RSVP to handmade@3rdward.com OR
RSVP on Facebook

Handmade Music’s Brooklyn edition is held at 3rd Ward in East Williamsburg, a brisk ride on the L train out of Manhattan.

FREE, as always
…plus FREE Colt 45
7:30-10:00 pm, Thursday, October 15 (arrive by 9 or you’ll miss a lot)

Presented by CDM with our friends at MAKE, Etsy, and XLR8R

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If you’re in the New York area, tomorrow night we have another noise-making get-together at the lovely 3rd Ward. The event is free, and we have free Colt 45.

Amanda Ervin is the featured guest this month; see one of her circuits above. Her designs are intended to be something that other folks can make, so they could be an excellent starting point for the project you’re dreaming of. (And once you get sequenced events down, of course, you can assign them to whatever sounds or visuals you like.)

Thursday, September 17
7:30 – 10:30 pm
FREE
3rd Ward in East Williamsburg; Directions
With the support of Etsy.com, Make Magazine, and XLR8R.com

Full details:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

And on Facebook:
Handmade Music Night

Nice blurb on myopenbar.com

I’ve given up on live streaming from the event because we can’t get a reliable connection, but we will have documentation for CDM on the projects afterward.

Amanda Ervin makes elegant noise-making apparatuses from simple circuits, and is able to share that process with her students (see her classes among 3rd Ward’s Circuits lineup). She’s going to show off some of her latest creations at the open showcase of Handmade Music Brooklyn, our monthly party + science fair + musical performance + ruckus. (More details soon on Handmade Music events that are springing up worldwide, thanks to the hard work and creativity of the DIY music community!)

What really impresses me about these projects is that Amanda has made both the project and the curriculum – that is, she can teach you to make these, too! It’s often easier to make something for yourself alone than it is to make it reproducible, so I do admire that in a design.

If you’re in the New York area, you can catch the event free, Thursday evening September 17. (Directions) If not, we’re working with 3rd Ward on ways to translate the educational experience online.

Here’s a musical excerpt from Amanda, as well:
Animal.mp3

Handmade Music info: More on Amanda’s work (with additional sounds and videos) on our Handmade Music site:

Handmade Music Brooklyn: Amanda Ervin’s Circuits, Open Call

Want to contribute your work? If you can make it to NYC this month, we’d love to present your work. All projects, all media (electronic, acoustic, hardware, software), and all levels of functionality (working, partially working, in-progress, completely broken) are welcome!

Handmade Music 9/17 Call for Works [Google Docs form, also embedded after the jump]

Showcasing amazing projects is a good thing. But we know that no creation emerges fully-formed. They start from nothing, with lots of mistakes along the way. You get help and ideas from other people. And you need time.

So this month’s Handmade Music in Brooklyn we’re declaring an Open Lab. Got a kit lying on your shelf, waiting to get made? Got a half-finished project that needs fixing? Just want to hang around some musical and visual DIYers and see what they’re up to? And just need a few hours to make some progress? That’s the idea.

Software projects, hardware projects, gear hacking, circuit bending, coding, patching in Reaktor or Pd or Max – it’s all welcome.

We also have a very special guest this month in the form of Morgan Packard, a talented multi-instrumentalist and computer musician (video at top, with live visuals by superDraw creator Joshue Ott). At 7:30p, Morgan will show off his free Ripple musical environment, built on the powerful open source SuperCollider code-for-sound platform. It’s a great chance to see what SuperCollider can do, how a scratch-built environment can open up musical possibilities, and what you can do with Ripple yourself.

Full details: Handmade Music Brooklyn: Open Lab, Featuring Morgan Packard’s Musical Code [handmademusic@noisepages]

Facebook Event Page

The whole event runs 6:00p-11:00p at 3rd Ward Brooklyn. As always, it’s completely free. Be sure to bring your projects and the tools you’ll need; we can provide power, a PA, space, and other folks to hang out with. And we can help give you an excuse to set aside a few hours of time.

We’ll also be taking notes on how the setup works, as we know this may be something other Handmade Music events want to try in your neck of the woods.

Enough of all this nonsense about how the Western Empire is crumbling. In our new “world” in which Mumbai is as powerful a cultural compass as Berlin or New York, one thing is guaranteed: it’s going to be a great party.

One stalwart Western-based advocate of a more pluralist electronica scene are the folks at Indian Electronica. Pumping out regular live events, podcasts, radio streams, and festivals, the crew is keeping music south Asian-flavored and eclectic. They’re truly inclusive: previous festivals spotlighted the likes of DJ Spooky, artists who are not connected to India by birth but love the music. It’s “Indian” in a loose sense, covering the thread of musical influence instead of just the geography.

The good news is, the excellent Indian Electronica Festival is returning with dates in New York, Toronto, and Vancouver. (Sadly, Mumbai didn’t make the list this time, but North America gets a good dose of great music.) They’re looking for artists to sign up, too, and possibly even other sessions.

http://www.indianelectronica.com/
http://www.indianelectronica.com/festival

Part of why I still like the term “electronica” is that the history of electronic music is by its very nature trans-cultural, eclectic, and global. Those are buzzwords, I know, but in this case I think they’re backed up by actual reality – by music spreading instantly across thousands of miles to the other side of the planet. It’s odd to me that people malign Berlin’s scene and history for being somehow restrictively bound in Germanness. It was Berlin’s pioneers who were smart enough to bring over artists from North and South America, from Detroit and Sao Paolo, and to arrange cultural intersections that changed the course of music.

But anyway – back to the music. The video quality is poor, but here’s the kind of highlight of their previous festivals, from Mumbai in 2007. Tablatronic Violence is the duo of Amsterdam-based tabla player Heiko Dijker and Sharat Srivastava, Hindustani musician who plays both strictly classical music and rock, as well as teaching Indian Violin in Glasgow. It doesn’t get much more international than this.

Electronics and synths are hard and you can’t hug them; plush animals and toys and blankets and pillows are soft and huggable. And we won’t even get started on the slightly-absurd gender associations of soft textiles and hard, toxic electronics. Or at least, so goes the traditional assumption.

But increasingly, designers are becoming interested in soft design. So in a last-minute addition to Handmade Music NYC, Richie Brown has added plush instruments – a ring modulator and two synths, which in turn can be patched together. They’re instruments you can hug. (Next step: make the connections soft, too, I think.)

As this was happening, by coincidence I was checking out a project called felted signal processing [Flickr set], using conductive soft materials for sound. That project is the work of Sarah Grant, and something I hope to cover more. We’ve also seen felt used as a very practical material for a surface and keys on a synth project (with a hard enclosure), and none other than monome creators Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree did a feature story here on CDM on their felt + circuits project.

Don’t get me wrong: making electronics work with soft things is a significant challenge, and sometimes feels like trying to make an airplane fuzzy. I hope we’ll work on some community documentation and collaboration here – and perhaps we’ll even have a soft-themed hacklab online and with handmade music.

One superb reference: CNMAT’s wiki, particularly the Materials section.

Check out Handmade Music NYC

Squeezable instruments are just the beginning. Handmade Music Brooklyn for July is, quite literally, our biggest, craziest lineup ever.

If you are in the NYC area, be sure you don’t miss Handmade Music tomorrow night (Thursday).

Complete lineup at handmademusic.noisepages.com
RSVP on Facebook or email handmade@3rdward.com

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CrudBox by Steven Litt at ITP from Core77 on Vimeo.

How much performance power can you pack in a briefcase? What if you could have a magic box that did whatever you wanted?

That’s the question asked, in various different ways, by the artists we’re showcasing at this month’s Handmade Music NYC, Thursday evening 7/16 in Brooklyn. It’s a free event if you’re in the New York area, and we’ll be bringing as much of the work to you online around the world. Full event details:

Brooklyn, July 16: Suitcase Sequencers, Handmade Loopers, APC Hacking, Shake That Egg

Facebook event/RSVP

Join the global Handmade Music group on noisepages

The projects:

Sequence everything: CRUDBOX / STEVEN LITT
The CrudBox is an original hardware step sequencer in a briefcase, which plugs into and sequences everything from cassette decks to power tools and turns them into musical patterns.

Looping hardware: LOOOP-R / RUI PEREIRA
Looop-R is a musical, visual, hardware, software instrument.

Shake the beats: EGGBEATER / TED HAYES
This wireless, egg-shaped controller lets you mash loops, control filters, and play music using live gestures.

Ableton hacking: AKAI APC40, HACKED / MICHAEL HATSIS
Live laptop fans, take note: the commercially-available Akai APC40 Ableton Live controller warped to make new musical performances possible.

Handmade Music is FREE and, as always, made possible by our hosts at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward creative space, plus our friends at XLR8R Magazine, MAKE Magazine, and DIY marketplace Etsy.com.

Handmade Music’s Brooklyn home:
http://www.3rdward.com/handmade-music/

Handmade Music in NYC and (soon) around the world, @ CDM’s Noisepages:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com

Claude VonStroke plays Billie Jean, NYC from Dancetracks on Vimeo.

Michael Jackson fever may have already put you into overload, but 24-hour news channels aside, there’s still something powerful about the musical legacy people leave and the way it can become a shared experience. It’s something ineffable, well beyond the reach of words – but it can be something you get from a musical moment.

So you can imagine the feeling in the room Saturday night at New York’s summer-only Water Taxi Beach when Claude VonStroke played his own edit of Billie Jean. dancetracks got some video footage, but they tell us that the feeling in the room barely comes across in the video — a crowd going wild like New York’s clubland hasn’t seen in ages. (VonStroke owns Dirtybird and Mothership and is making his own mark on the American musical scene.)

VonStroke apparently finished his club-friendly edit on Amtrak from Boston down to New York the day of the gig, working entirely in Ableton Live.

It was striking to me, too, to hear from guys like Quincy Jones, whose work had one of the greatest impacts on the sound of the 20th Century of anyone, talking about Jackson’s musical talent. It’s tough to know, sometimes, what to make of Michael Jackson the person – least of all when he’s a distant celebrity. But as the global reach of music spreads further and further down the long tail, and as we even wonder if this kind of superstardom will ever happen again, at least the impact of the music is without question.

Claude VonStroke Plays Billie Jean, Club Goes Crazy [dancetracksdigital.com]

Reminder: we’re meeting Saturday in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District to chill out, hear some music, and share strange and wonderful and hacked hardware controllers for Ableton Live as part of DubSpot’s Live Sessions tour. If you’re in the NYC area, you won’t want to miss out on music-controlling ironing boards, handheld controllers, and folks like RJ Valeo (Isomer Transition) above.

Full details
Facebook event

But if you’re not in New York, DubSpot and CDM are working together to make sure the weekend gets videoed, and we’re doing some work online.

Friday afternoon I’m chatting and answering questions as I work with the Live API to hack in OSC support for Live, and build a simple app for Google’s Android phone (which can be ported to other platforms, as well).
irc://irc.freenode.net/cdmblogs

Join the Noisepages Ableton Live hacker group for bleeding-edge discussion of some of these topics, too:
http://noisepages.com/groups/ableton-hackers
(I’ll be doing some link dumps with resources later today)

And Sunday, I’ll be giving a workshop about some controller secrets, with more to come online. (Sign up with promo code CDM for a discount if you happen to be registering at DubSpot; otherwise, hang out here.)

Handheld eggs, ironing boards, machinedrums, phones … live setups can involve all sorts of oddities, especially among the rabid (in a good way) Ableton Live fanbase, and we’ll be showing them in NYC. Saturday night, we’ll chill out after Dubspot’s day-long workshop with a free, open party in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District at 675 Bar to explore some new musical interfaces, have a few drinks, meet each other, and hear some new sounds. [Facebook RSVP]

For more on the whole week’s events with Dubspot, see our previous post.

Confirmed lineup:

• Isomer Transition (aka RJ Valeo) doing some superb-quality techno with lots of knobs and a machinedrum + Ableton Live
• Ted Hayes’ EggBeater wireless shaker for rhythms, built in free software Pure Data and used (in this case) with Ableton Live
• Sound artist Ranjit Bhatnagar with a musical MIDI ironing board (pictured below) controlling Live, as seen at Handmade Music (at which it was covered by Wired.com)
• Track Team Audio’s Michael Hatsis showing some tweaked-out Live control in action – hopefully including his APC40 hacks and monome patches.
• Me, playing a set with control TBD – possibly Lemur and/or my Android phone

The “beater” application is really quite nice, and follows with a lot of handheld-style, gestural controllers we’re seeing lately. That could mean that soon we could have some sort of software layer that works with any of these controllers — substituting, say, a Wii or mobile phone. Here’s a great video from the ITP show (the bi-annual exposition of the work of interactive technology students at New York University):

The ironing board I’m also, as always, excited about; I’ll be working with Ranjit (and his dogs) tomorrow to try to map it intelligently, and we’ll be sure to share our results for everyone.

And here’s some nice work by Isomer Transition – I love that RJ can cover the gamut from dance-y to experimental.

If you’re in NYC, be sure to join us and bring friends – the event is free and open from 6:30-9:30pm, and 675 Bar has a range of tasty treats and drinks and looks like the basement you wish you had. (Hey, it’s NYC, so we just share a basement.) See the New York Mag review.

And, as a last-minute reminder, tonight (Thursday) 675 is also host to a free workshop on Live 8 with the insanely-talented KJ Sawka. We should have some video from this event (and a lot of the rest of the weekend) for the World Beyond New York. See Ableton’s announcement of tonight’s user group.

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And you can also follow my Twitter or the CDM Twitter on Saturday and through the weekend.

A History of Ableton Controllers

While I don’t think it’ll be done in time for the workshop I’m teaching Sunday, I’m compiling a history of Live controllers. There are too many alternative controllers in the world to cover, but over the years at CDM we’ve seen Live is a popular choice – even if only for prototyping, prior to building your own system. Nominees?