Voltage from Bam Studio on Vimeo.

Oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your modular robots have a little too much fun and your rig erupts into a fireball.

But then, modular synthesis fans – you understand, nonetheless.

William Paiva sends us his work as one of the animators and writes:

Hi everybody. I’m a reader of both Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, and I’ve just uploaded to Vimeo and to YouTube a short animation film about robots and synths. I think you might like it. Reards.

And you have crazy, crazy dreams, man. Brilliant work. Here’s the team:

Directed by:
Filippe Lyra e William Paiva

Produced by:
Barros Melo Animation Studio

Director of photography:
Filippe Lyra e William Paiva

Animation:
Filippe Lyra
William Paiva
Marcio Vieira
Felipe Soares
Leo D.
Tony Farias

Design:
Filippe Lyra
Marcio Vieira
Felipe Soares
William Paiva
Natalia Franca

Illustration:
Filippe Lyra
Marcio Vieira
Felipe Soares
William Paiva
Natalia Franca

Editor(s):
William Paiva
Leo D.
Filippe Lyra

Sound:
William Paiva e Leo D

Music:
William Paiva e Leo D

Just like modular synthesizers, people connect with each other in order to achieve diverse objectives. In Voltage, robots, half-human and half-synthesizer, powered by a huge amount of energy, connect to each other in an electric and chaotic trance.

Be sure to check out William’s blog. [in Portuguese, which may get named as 2009's Language of Awesomeness on CDM.]

What happens when you put all the digital and electronic tools you love together into one groove session? I expect it probably looks something like this video. Welcome to the new digital music age: DIY electronics, vintage digital tech (Game Boys), and modern computer tech (Monome as Arduinome clone, Max/MSP, and shiny MacBook) all coexist. And a fair bit of what you see if a modern hybrid of old and new paradigms, like the thoroughly modernized Tracker Renoise. Thomas Margolf says “Greetings from Rotterdam” and writes,

We made a first Jam using the new GorF step-sequencer, Arduinome, max msp patch ‘Soyuz’, a Gameboy running LittleSoundDJ, LSDJMC2 Gameboy Midi-Interface, Renoise, Ableton Live and a Nord Micro-Modular. It’s the first session with a fresh soldered GorF.

Lovely stuff. Keep on soldering and jammin’, folks. Okay, tagging this story is going to take … a lot of tags.

You’ve seen plenty of live rigs with mile-high stacks of keyboards and sound modules. But this setup is different: one of the world’s best bands is using an elaborate setup of software synths. Binding it all together is one of the most sophisticated software configurations I’ve ever seen, the fruits of labors by of our friend Jonathan Adams Leonard – a talented musician and technologist – in Kore 2. I wouldn’t exactly recommend this kind of setup to anyone else; it involved pushing Kore to its bleeding edge. But Jonathan’s walk-through of the hardware and software programming for this show is an inspiring one. (For us mere mortals, Jonathan does have a fantastic, free collection of modular tools for Kore, built and editable in Reaktor.)

Jonathan goes through every gory detail of the setup on our special Kore minisite. We’ll have more on Interpol’s tour soon to follow up:

Behind the Scenes with Interpol: Obsessive Details of Hardware, Kore Software Rig [Kore @ CDM, kore.noisepages.com]

And in addition to the software, there’s the rich hardware setup, as assembled by Chad Miller (Lenny Kravitz), assisted by Ally Christie (QOTSA, Mogwai). Yes, these are some of the best techs on the planet, working hard for one of the biggest bands. Good stuff. I wish I could have been in Gdansk, Poland (seen below).

Giving all the credit to Ron Grainer seems a little unfair; while Grainer composed the melody, most of the features of the Doctor Who theme itself were in fact the work of gifted pioneer Delia Derbyshire. Whereas Howell could actually play parts live, Derbyshire had a much harder task: painstakingly piecing the sounds out of repeat passes of tape, with only the simplest test tone generators and processors to produce sounds. Ironically, I think there was a far greater gap in the way synthesizer sounds were produced between 1963 and 1980 than 1980 and 2007, even if Howell brags about a “very modern synthesizer” that can play “8 notes at a time.” It’s cheaper now, but programming most synth patches hasn’t changed in the least. In fact, the CS-80 had more accessible hardware for programming, and never had to contend with OS X updates. Out of tune slightly? Erm, yes … but that’s cool, right? (Better add that to your software emulation. I’ll make no argument for superiority of value or weight. And I’ll make myself feel better by routing through some digital effects.)

See my two year-old roundup, though many of the sound links are now broken:
Doctor Who Theme: Behind the Scenes, Hear the Themes