The Harmonic Center of the Universe from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

This beautiful, meditative installation of choreographed lights and sound, by way of Rucyl and Saturn Never Sleeps, is the creation of Chris Harvey, Olivia Robinson, & Jesse Stiles. The Harmonic Center of the Universe evidently narrowly escaped destruction last year during a thunderstorm, but perhaps Art is as much repair as it is creation.

Artist Jesse Stiles specializes in such light shows. There’s a clear connection to the polytropes of Iannis Xenakis, with its own cascades of choreographed light – a reminder that lights can still have a place, even in an age of projection. He also writes experimental pop songs and does sound and music for IMAX films. (Yeah, Jesse, you’re someone we need to meet.)

Along similar lines, we saw the gorgeous balloon and music collaboration of Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder, ATOM, last year in Montreal. What strikes me about all these works it that the lit object and sound appear to fuse to an extent that these become either musical sculptures or a kind of sequencer in physical space. It’s remarkable that the digital can make musical structure more virtual, more invisible, or more physical – almost without consideration one way or another.

RFID tags may have negative privacy associations when they’re used without someone’s knowledge. But embed these simple identifiers intentionally, and they can be a cheap, flexible way of tagging the world around you. Add OSC support with a free tool, and you can make anything into a basic music controller. That’s what Martin Kaltenbrunner – best known for his work on the ground-breaking ReacTable music table – has done with his own free software. It’s simple enough that you can easily make use of it, or take it as an opportunity to brush up on OSC and Pd.

This sort of odd, out-of-the-blue example is the perfect illustration of why OSC matters. Quietly, gradually, OSC is describing the world around computers in intelligent ways. In contrast to MIDI, with its resolution limits and arbitrary categories (vibrato rate?), OSC can standardize anything. What previously required advance standardization can now be truly open and even improvisational. The old way of standardizing: go in front of some sort of committee for approval. (RFID tags for music? Not likely.) The new way: go ahead and do the implementation, gather feedback, and if it works, other people will follow your specifications to ensure their stuff works with yours. In this case, Martin plans to add the RFID tagging to his TUIO2 protocol, which made what would have been just a cool one-off project (ReacTable) into a viral phenomenon of work with touch and tangible input. Martin writes:

There’s not really a name for it, but there’s a growing scene around advanced musical performance. Once the domain primarily of academia, the notion of creating novel controls for music – from felt to monomes – is gaining traction across many scenes, and firing up a larger-than-ever, global population of makers.

That’s why I’m excited to be part of the in/out Festival tomorrow here in New York. Sure, chip music lovers have Blip next week, and circuit benders have Bent. But In/Out is all about 16-bit-plus, not 8-bit, and not a circuit will be bent. Here’s a look at the lineup – good reason that you’ll want to be there tomorrow if you’re in the NYC area, and some folks to check out from the east coast-US scene if you’re not:

Workshops: There’s still space in the workshop lineup; you can hit the whole lineup for $25.

• Reaktor drum machine construction with Kid Sputnik
• Jitter visual performance with Kedaar
• Felt and fabric as musical interfaces with Sarah and Lara Grant
• Describing music in code, messages, with Processing and OSC, with me (and yes, working on an online curriculum for this very soon, in time for a course I’m teaching in the spring at Parsons!)
• Max for Live with max4live.info’s Michael Chenetz

Performance: By night, we’re playing from 7p on with live audio and visuals:

• Switchboard Operator aka Lori Napolean, playing a telephone switchboard
• tehn aka Brian Crabtree spinning elegant, reflective music on his invention, the monome
• Kid Sputnik aka Daniel Battaglia, the Reaktor guru and live musician
• makingthenoise, the rocking beats from the creator of 7up for monome
• Ocular Noise Machine, an experimental multimedia ensemble including Jay Smith of Livid
• Kedaar working with custom Jitter visuals, !INCLUDE of Track Team Audio doing live visuals, and myself visualizing for Brian

All at The Tank, 354 W. 45th between 8th and 9th Avenue.

So, for the 98% of you not in NYC, let me know if there are specifics you’d like covered on CDM from these workshops and artists. In the meantime, here are some quick goodies to listen to and play with from the lineup:

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.

Take a weekend, and make something: that’s the challenge behind the Music Hack Day, which joins a growing phenomenon of events built around collective creation. (CDM held its own tangible interface hackday online, which I definitely hope to follow up soon!) Initiated by Dave Haynes of music sharing service Soundcloud, the Hack Day has already hit London. Many of the events were Web app-based and focused on consumption rather than creation of music, but we also saw a chordal synth plug-in and beer bottle percussion instrument.

The Berlin Hack Day, which wound up earlier today, offers still more projects focused on the creation side of music hacking. Having Ableton and Native Instruments as sponsors likely helped the mood. And as you’d expect from one of the world capitals of creative hacking, Berliners don’t disappoint.

Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even worked out a way to turn NI’s Maschine into a rhythm game, complete with Street Fighter sounds.

I’ve got some of my favorite projects here, but see also an eyewitness report (in English and Italian) at Audio News Room:
Just back from Music Hack Day Berlin
… and keep your eye on the wiki:
Berlin Hack Submissions

xylobot run by monome from robb on Vimeo.

Monomist Rob Böhnke and Ramsey Arnaoot created one of my favorite hackday projects so far: a monome-controlled robotic xylophone. The ingredients: one monome grid controller, one Java application for step sequencing to the output, one Arduino open source controller board, and one terrific xylophone “robot” made of an array of servos that strike the bars of the instrument. Oh, and some hot glue and wood, of course.