How nerdster-chic is this: a global convergence of the exploration of space exploration, ecological savvy, technological innovation, and musical-motional performance, in honor of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launching the first-ever human flight into space? Described as “Cinco de Mayo” for space, Yuri’s Night is a 35-nation cosmorave. It was big last year. It’s going to be much bigger this year.

What’s all this space stuff got to do with music and motion? Everything: music and visual performance are a big part of this party, as Sun Ra-loving, space-inspired, Space Age technologist artists push creative tech. (Amon Tobin is headlining, Will Wright is keynote speaker.) Winter Music what? I want my space fiesta.

Attention, Cosmonauts

CDM is involved, and you can be, too, wherever you are in the world:

As an addendum to why trying to make computer models musically creative can be so disastrous, maybe the problem is we fail to understand what creativity is.

Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one’s performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated.

Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising [scientificblogging]

That’s just one study, and I won’t pretend to be an expert in neuroscience. But what the scientists are describing is awfully close to the nuanced way jazz musicians will describe improv. It’s not not thinking. But it’s also not self-monitoring. It’s something else.

Proprietary systems like FreeHand’s awkwardly-named MusicPad Pro Plus (Pro Plus, eh?) have offered digital manuscript paper for some time. But the idea there is you buy dedicated hardware; the MusicPad Pro Plus is US$899. With tablet PCs starting at about the same price, and the convenience of having your mobile computer also be your music notation, it seems like the convergence of the manuscript page and the computer isn’t far off.

Enter MusicReader for Windows XP and Vista. It runs just US$69-99; bring your own laptop. Better yet, bring your own tablet PC and you have a form factor that fits naturally on a music stand and can be marked up with digital ink. Turn pages with a tap or foot pedal.

Sheet Music 2.0 [Wired.com, via the tablet lovers at GottaBeMobile.com]

With the ultra-thin machine on its way (witness new ultra-thin laptops from Apple and Lenovo, and upcoming low-power, tiny chips from Intel), the future looks even better. Here’s a video of the system in action, lest you think this would never appear in the real world (suggestion: you may want to mute the sound, as the background score is a bit …unnecessary):

Mac users, looks like you’re booting into Boot Camp for now. Too bad Apple still doesn’t think we want a tablet.

Reading notation is good fun, but what if you could write it, too? A little-noticed, open-source tool from researchers at Brown University does just that on Windows Tablet PCs, and even made a brief, official appearance as a Microsoft PowerToy. The recognition is surprisingly satisfying once you learn the shortcuts, which resemble Palm Graffiti strokes. Finally, in 2005 the developers added MIDI export, making this a potentially useful tool. If there’s someone out there with a newish Vista tablet, I’d be curious to know if this still works on modern machines.

To me, the ability to write as well as read makes things far more interesting. But for about a hundred bucks — well, plus whatever your tablet PC cost — you’ve got digital music paper right now.

Music Notepad for Tablet PC

Does any of this actually matter to you? Blogger Tom Whitwell asked that of his readers, and found the answer is, well, sorta:

Can Music Thing readers read music? [Music Thing]

Any CDM readers who live in Chicago should check this out- it’s a weeklong festival exploring/celebrating sound design, motion graphics, and the overlapping regions occupied by both.

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]

Your ears and mind are incredibly sensitive to tiny details of sound. Result: if your operating system can’t keep up with sound output for any reason, you’ll get a noticeable “glitch” in the sound — and that’s a big deal. Windows Vista promised to be “glitch-free” in development, later reworded to “glitch-resistant” or “glitch-resilient.” Then it shipped, and a lot of us noticed it was, well, just plain glitchy, at least at the beginning of this year when Vista met up with half-finished, buggy drivers.

All operating systems will glitch under certain circumstances, though, and the causes are many. Microsoft has a great post on their Vista Team Blog today from Steve Ball, who seems to be a really sharp guy and has a great handle on how Vista can continue to improve in terms of audio performance.

An Overview of Windows Sound and Music “Glitching” Issues

Well worth reading, whether you’re a Windows user or not. (Linux and Mac can absolutely encounter the same issues, and as you look through the full list of possible causes you’ll see why.) There’s quite a lot missing from this discussion, but the blog promises this is part 1 of 2, and you’ll find some more meat in the discussion in comments.

I did enjoy this description of why we’re so bothered by glitches:

My colleague on the Windows Sound team, Larry Osterman, also pointed out to me recently that humans are actually “hard-wired” to be disturbed by audio glitches. In an exchange about this topic, Larry observed that audio glitches are more obvious than video glitches because the ear’s tuned to notice high frequency transients — his visceral example of this idea is an image of a stick snapping in the woods behind you as an audio event that wakes you up before a bear wanders into your path.

I think I have the same visceral reaction to software bugs. (Help! A bear!)

I’m writing this from Vista right now, and I have to say, I found all kinds of reproducible glitching problems early on. But now, various hotfixes and driver updates better, Vista’s audio performance is running really smoothly for me. I think the major culprit on Vista in the early months of the release was video drivers, an issue which for me, and many others, has finally been fixed.

Footsteps from the abyss of total unawareness, musician and musicologist Clive Wearing has two lifelines: love and music. Suffering from an amnesia that robs him of nearly all memories beyond a few seconds, these bring him back from a waking death and become life and being itself:

“I picked up some music,” Deborah wrote, “and held it open for Clive to see. I started to sing one of the lines. He picked up the tenor lines and sang with me. A bar or so in, I suddenly realized what was happening. He could still read music. He was singing. His talk might be a jumble no one could understand but his brain was still capable of music. . . . When he got to the end of the line I hugged him and kissed him all over his face. . . . Clive could sit down at the organ and play with both hands on the keyboard, changing stops, and with his feet on the pedals, as if this were easier than riding a bicycle. Suddenly we had a place to be together, where we could create our own world away from the ward. Our friends came in to sing. I left a pile of music by the bed and visitors brought other pieces.”

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has offered insights into the mind and consciousness before; here, he gives us a glimpse from an extreme world of just how important our experience is in all our minds. And if this doesn’t make you want to practice — in fact, realize what a profound experience that practice is — nothing will.

A Neurologist’s Notebook: The Abyss - Music and amnesia. [The New Yorker]

Thanks, Wally, who adds: “music is about being in the present - that seemed to be the thrust of things, and it was beautiful to read how this man who lives only in the present, with no remembrance of what happened just moments ago, was able to build his life around that. Ironically, after reading that story, i thought to myself — I will always think of this story whenever i listen to music or work on music.”

The original Monome 40h music (and other media) controller has been replaced by new models, led by the new 256, a 16×16 grid. The buttons are smaller, retaining the approximate size and form factor of the original, but you get more buttons, a wooden case, and other improvements. Pre-orders are set for September 26. Lots more info on the Monome site, but most of all, I want to share two things of beauty. First, there’s Kelli’s gorgeous box design, which may qualify as the prettiest musical instrument packaging I’ve ever seen. (I think it needs a Mycelium-inspired Processing sketch to go with it.)

Second, there’s Brian (tehn) playing a really lovely piece entirely built of Wurlitzer samples. I’m really into his musical imagination, and the instrument design seems to perfectly compliment it.

tehn with two fifty six from tehn on Vimeo.

I think we’ll get to see Brian (hopefully also Kelli) and the 256 in person at the next Handmade Music night from CDM, Etsy Labs, and Make, on Thursday, September 27. I’ll be sure to get some photos and/or video, as well. Locals, keep your eyes peeled for coverage in the next issue of Time Out New York of that event — quite a lineup we’ve got emerging (and, of course, as always everyone is welcome to show up with projects and surprise us).

Last night, we hosted our second “Handmade Music” night at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn, together with Etsy.com and Make Magazine. It was awesome. (Or, as Wesley Willis would say, “Handmade Music Night really whoops a camel’s ass.”)

Highlights:

Speaking of going beyond traditional instruments like keyboards, the urge to reinvent pitch interfaces continues. Via comments, we’ve got some additions. tripmastermonkee points us to this demo by DJ Woody on the Vestax Controller One, the turntable with pitch control and pitch buttons seen previously on CDM:

Sure, there are other ways of acheiving the same result (there usually are), but there’s something wonderfully material about seeing it done on a turntable, and the results sound really unique. PS: said it before, but will say it again, Scratchworx is an awesome DJ web publishing powerhouse.

And if you just can’t get enough Theremin cover tunes:

As digital musicianship grows, it’s critical to have places like Robotspeak. This small, basement-level music shop on San Francisco’s lower Haight is a brilliant music tech boutique by day. On regular evenings, it becomes a venue, packing in fans of genre-bending electronica. Walk off the street, and you feel like you’re in someone’s basement — someone with lots of toys and a great affection for throwing great musical parties.

I got to play Robotspeak last month on a program with some terrific players: the legendary Daedalus, armed with the prototype device that inspired the Monome, the fabulous Chachi Jones, and the sonic explorations of acoustic ensemble Pineresin. Thanks to the power of video, we can share a little bit of that performance with you, complete with discussion of the tools. Tools are not incidental, either: it’s great to see the range of ways people approach exploring sound and performance, even in this small cross-sampling of artists.

My favorite video it the outtakes, but I’ll resist the temptation to start with that — suffice to say, yes, all of us laptopists face the same problems. Be sure to look to the end for that one.

I had an incredibly great time — there’s nothing like being in a really supportive venue, one that values musicians taking some real risks. Now, the videos: