We’re here today not just because people like synths, or electronic music, or even music itself, but because the advancement of technology depends on kids learning about science and math.

That was certainly the history of Bob Moog himself. What he got as a student opened up the doors to the knowledge and interests that gave the world Moog synthesizers. Dr. Moog himself long credited his education – as a youngster at Bronx High School of Science in New York City, studying physics at Queens College, Colombia, and Cornell, and even making kit Theremins and discovering electronics – for what would come. Look to any other synth pioneer, or modern inventor or software developer, and you’ll find a similar story.

That’s not to say we need to turn the entire population of the planet into synth builders. But what music technologists do inspires science just as science inspires music. A lot of the young boys and girls who played with Theremins – or, later, Moog synths – went on to advancements in everything from space exploration to medicine. People accomplished amazing things motivated in part by the politics of the Cold War. Imagine what we could do motivated by the desire to do new things – and make new sounds.

All of this makes the mission of the Moog Foundation vitally important. Led by Bob Moog’s daughter Michelle and an elite crack team of synth experts, they’ve already begun reaching kids in schools around Asheville, North Carolina and Jamaica. They’re using synths as a window into science and physics. (Waves underly huge amounts of the universe, and it’s tough to find a better way to understand those waves than playing an electronic musical instrument.)

A funding drive to take this local project national is about to run out of time, and it’s well short of its funding goal. So now’s a great time to look at the project and consider giving even a small amount of support.

You’ve got only a little time left: at the end of Thursday March 1, just before midnight, Eastern time, this fund drive is over.

There are two important things you should know.

First, the Moog Foundation is not associated with Moog Music, the private company started by Bob that makes products like the Voyager and Moogerfooger. The Moog Foundation is entirely independent, and not-for-profit. Science (science!), not selling Moogs, is their mission, and they’re driven by your support – not sales of gear.

Second, since it’s awesome to get swag along with your feelings of good will and acheivement, yes, we’re going public TV/radio fund drive here and telling you that you’re going to get some excellent stuff to commemerate your contribution and fill your studio (or the bumper of your car, if you’ve got one) with synth love.

Marc Doty, who has been involved with developing the curriculum, tells CDM more. (Marc is known recently in these parts when, in a bizarre instance of devil’s advocate, I wound up advocating analog synths and knobs and he iPad apps, all leading to some good discussion and I thought some nice insights.) He explains the mission of the project, and details the curriculum:

Bob Moog pursued his passion for musical instruments through his talent for electronics. As a result, his work changed the landscape of electronic music history, music history, and even history in general. The application of his creativity and innovation has resulted in tools and knowledge that inspired thousands from multiple generations.

It is the belief of the Bob Moog Foundation that the spirit of creativity and innovation evinced by Bob Moog has the power to continue to inspire; not just in regard to music, musical instruments, or electronics, but also in regard to creativity and innovation in general. We live in a time where unique and inspired approaches to problem solving make the difference between mediocrity and brilliance, and where a fresh outlook has the power to revolutionize thinking. Just like Bob’s work inspired a revolution in thinking.

Bob was an educator, so what better way to spread his legacy than through education?

Doctor Bob’s SoundSchool is a curriculum designed to portray the science of sound through the magic of music. It was authored in 2011 by a variety of skilled professionals who had been inspired by the work of Bob Moog, and is the result of their combined knowledge, talents, experiences, and inspiration. It focuses on the physics of sound, and delivers scientific content in an innovative and inspiring way consistent with aspects of Bob’s pursuits, as well as consistent with successful educational practice.

At the core of the curriculum is “The Wiggle.” The Wiggle is a creative way to portray the nature and behavior of sound which can be effectively and accurately demonstrated without simplification or generalization to students of all ages. The focus of the curriculum is the portrayal of the life cycle of the wiggle; how sound is generated, how it interacts with its environment, how it travels, how it is changed, and how it is perceived.

The curriculum is divided into 7 different sections; 5 of which address the nature and life cycle of The Wiggle. Using a variety of tools and media (including tuning forks, oscillators, and even real theremins!), the nature of sound is explored and revealed. The way sound is generated, the way it moves through various media, how it can be converted into electronic form, and how it it can be observed and measured are all covered in detail and in creative and compelling ways which are consistent with the multiple various learning styles of students.

One aspect of the curriculum is the “chain of sound.” This is a fun and creative set of cards which portrays sound in various ways from its origin to its perception that can be arranged in multiple configurations to portray the life cycle of the sound wave. Students can employ creative thinking in their arrangement of the cards, and the rules of arrangement help students understand the physical behavior of sound.

Currently, the curriculum is being implemented in Asheville City Schools at the 2nd grade level, which is the age at which the state standards suggest that the physics of sound should be introduced. This implementation is a test run where we fine tune our efforts through a process of measurement in regard to the effectiveness of the curriculum.

We are currently engaged in an Indiegogo campaign which will hopefully fund our efforts to expand Dr. Bob’s SoundSchool nationwide.

Marc Doty
Archive and Education Specialist

P.S. People still bring up our little interchange about the Animoog. It has been the source of a variety of interesting conversations! Thank you for that opportunity!

Thanks, Marc.

Among the prizes, pictured here: a Moog Voyager Select Series Synthesizer signed by Moog-inspired artists including Brian Eno, Moby, Wayne Coyne, Edgar Froese, Passion Pit, Chromeo, Ghostland Obervatory and many other bands who performed at Moogfest 2011. The Moog Foundation says donors can also win a VIP weekend for two to Moogfest 2012 featuring a stay at the breathtaking Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa in Asheville, NC and a pair of VIP tickets to Moogfest 2012.

But those nice bonuses aside, I think it’s worth noting that the entire impetus for the project came out of an outpouring of letters and support following Bob Moog’s death. It’s something we saw at CDM, and it’s fantastic to see out of what was initially grief, something new blossoming.

More information:
http://www.indiegogo.com/Bob-Moog-Foundation-Dr-Bobs-SoundSchool
www.moogfoundation.org
Photo gallery of Moogfest Voyager: http://bit.ly/wYY9mZ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/MoogFoundation
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BobMoogFoundation

And to see this in action, don’t miss:
Pilot Program of Dr. Bob’s SoundSchool Begins

In the latest take on sonifying data in musical form, iPhone app Astro Cantus plots star data from the universe as musical notes. It turns the the sphere of heavens above the Earth into a massive piano roll.

Co-founding developer Rocky Alvey, according to the creators, dismantled a music box as a kid, and that music box notion (yet again) is a big part of the concept here. What’s notable is that the app’s sonification does indeed represent not only the stars themselves but some of the data – spectra of the stars are translated into pitch. And there are a lot of stars in there.

The musical representation itself is a bit limited: you get either chimes or a piano playing a pentatonic mode, and some control over spectrum and magnitude. Speaking as a composer who has occasionally played with it, that’s the challenge with this sort of work: making musical paradigms represent the data is no small obstacle. But the developers also say this is just a (very pleasing) first step, with more interactive features and live modes and additional sounds and scales to come.

http://astrocantus.com/
US$1.99 on the App Store

Amusingly, I’m writing this as my KCRW music stream is playing Bill Frisell’s cover of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” Which is more compelling as a commentary on the world? I’m not sure.

Nothing’s gonna to change my world.

Thanks to West Latta for the link; via TreeHugger’s Jaymi Heimbuch:
iPhone App Creates Music from Stars and Galaxies

Need a new mic to play with? Maybe you should raid your kitchen pantry.

London-based musician Leafcutter John writes us to share a detailed tutorial on cooking up new mics from common household ingredients:

Real Sound Cookery – Make a contact mic with baking soda and cream of tartar. [leafcutterjohn.com]

That in turn is inspired by a terrific, detailed video by our friend Collin Cunningham for MAKE:Magazine (Collin’s also been a regular at our Handmade Music series in NYC).

The result: you’ve got the material to do some field recording or experimental sound design. Leafcutter John shares a bit of hands-on experience working with the thing, and has a sample recording up on SoundCloud:
First recording using Rochelle Salt piezo crystal made from baking soda and cream of tartar by leafcutterjohn

Also, and I don’t say these words very often, here’s a brilliant YouTube comment:

wait… mounting the crystal in place… THIS IS HOW THE BLACK MESA INCIDENT STARTED! :O

(Google it if you don’t get it.)

More great info from Leafcutter John:
Leafcutter’s DIY Steel Can Hydrophone & Preamp. Step-by-step guide
Shit I’m a Geek / The joy of Piezoelectricity [good background on the above]

(Side note: preamp is the really important part of the hydrophone equation, which I managed to screw up recently. Stay tuned for my tale of how to do it right, after I actually do it properly. DIY electronics is no fun, anyway, if you don’t occasionally completely botch it.)

Full disclosure: I love waves. Analog, digital, acoustic, we’re talking vibrations in sound (and other substances, as well — and light). I don’t think you get into this area without having a certain wave addiction. If you love waves, you could easily get lost in exploring videos of vibrating guitar strings and pondering the physics of the string.

This story begins not with how guitar strings actually vibrate, but a curious phenomenon when combining the regular oscillation of the string with the rolling shutter of a CMOS digital camera — namely, the iPhone’s. To accurately capture motion, you need to record an image all at once (or at least come close). Rolling shutter or line scan as exhibited in a CMOS camera sensor like the iPhone is a side effect of the capture being scanned from top to bottom, so the bottom portion of the image is saved later than the top. That causes motion to skew across the image. (Long before digital, people played around with the same effect in analog video and even using film photography – all you need is something moving and a way of capturing the image that moves gradually in a different direction.)

When the regular oscillation of the scanning combines with the oscillation of what you’re filming – as with a vibrating guitar string, or the rotating propeller on an airplane — the two frequencies effectively phase, causing some curious distortion. In the case of the guitar, this means seeing the appearance of standing waves that, while they can occur in nature, don’t occur on any conventional guitar. (You can also think of the basic effect as aliasing, as seen optically when video shutters capture the frequency of rotation of a rotating car wheel in such a way that it appears to move backwards.)

As with many concepts in physics, it’s all easier to see than explain, so I’ll turn it over to some terrific videos. I’ve contrasted two at the top of the story; here are more examples.

Below, a high-speed camera operating at 600 and 1200 frames per second, played back 20x and 40x, respectively, slower than you’d see with your naked eye.

And here’s another example of how that might appear on a camera like the iPhone:

Of course, that means – fodder for our sister site Create Digital Motion – potential for more creative abuse, beyond the mere novelty.

What’s also amusing is the heated discussion this triggered as the iPhone video went viral. Read some angry comments – and some solid science among them — at Reddit:
Guitar string oscillations captured on video [reddit.com]

I’m glad people don’t behave (yet) in person the way they do on the Internet.

In person: “Excuse me; I think your fly is open.”

On the Internet: “That guy’s fly is open. He doesn’t even know his fly is open. That’s bullshit. I mean, what kind of person leaves their pants just *(&$#ing open like that? Look, look, look at his open fly. I’m never talking to him again. I’m not even going to wear pants from now on.”

(Seriously, happily, many of the comments are perfectly polite and well-informed!)

School’s out for just about everyone, but I’m going to remember to file this away for the next time I have to explain sound vibration. Now, back to the beach, or wherever you’re relaxing.

Thanks to Alexander Chen, from whom I lifted this via Google+. (See his own work on CDM here and here. Alex is just the kind of person I want to see this, as he’s been working with the aesthetics of vibrating strings! So, hurrah, Google+…

Want to see hundreds of pieces of music kit from keyboards to oscilloscopes, plus some 1500 mini-Theremin toys for students, coupled with US-wide education to help introduce young people to science? That’s the idea behind a grant proposal by the Moog Foundation. The Foundation’s MoogLab teaches science through sound – a worthy cause. Not only was Bob Moog’s life in electronic music ignited by discovering the Theremin, but many of today’s generation of scientists and thinkers were raised on electronic sound kits a few short decades ago. Without the same exposure to science and sound, young boys and girls may not get on the same path.

If you like the idea, the project needs votes. Michael Gallant (formerly an editor Keyboard Magazine, still a contributor) writes with this update:

We are up for earning a $250K grant to take electronic music instruments into schools to teach under-served kids science via the Moog Foundation’s MoogLab program. The catch is that we’re ranked #92 now by public vote and we need to be #1 or #2 by the end of December in order to win the funding.

Voting is daily; that is, vote early, vote often. Voting every day in December gives the project you want better chances.

More information:
http://www.refresheverything.com/bobmoogfoundation

The Refresh Everything grant aside, I’d love to hear more discussion of how to bring electronics and sound to young people around the world – your ideas are certainly welcome.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

At the World Science Festival in June here in New York, specialists – including musical specialist Bobby McFerrin – gathered to ask what in music we humans hear universally, versus what is culturally specific.

Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

You can watch a series of five video highlights, but the one above is perhaps the most striking. (I believe it’s already more than made the rounds around the Interwebs, but, well, we can say we were all busy creating digital music.)

Notes and Neurons videos

It’s funny just how low the average person’s opinion of their musical ability can be. Ask an average “non-musician,” and they’ll often claim to be deaf to rhythm and pitch. Push the issue, though, and typically you’ll discover quite the opposite. Listen as the crowd laughs at discovering they all share some basic intuition about how pitch works. These are, after all, science and neurology types, not musicians.

Ah, you say, but this is just a crowd in New York. And most of us interact only with people in our own cultural circles. For me, that means people surrounded by pop music, Western harmony and counterpoint, chord changes derived from Protestant hymns — the lot.

What’s wonderful is that certain basic rhythmic and pitch elements – belying rich complexities of psychoacoustic phenomena underneath – do indeed seem to be universal. To me, that profound universality says something about what we share as human beings. At the same time, it makes me even more interested in all of the local details. When playing Balinese gamelan, some Western-trained musicians literally turned up their noses because they said the results sounded “out of tune.” Like a pungent flavoring in a foreign food, they discovered something unfamiliar. (I wonder if they would have the same reaction to sambal.) Of course, the underlying pitch systems are related to pentatonic (and heptatonic) pitch collections. And the same thing that disturbed one person has excited other musicians – not simply because it’s exotic, but because it can speak to something deeper in our hearing that we don’t get from other music.

Anyway, thanks to (noou) for this story, via IRCAM’s Eric Boyer; it really made my day. And it should certainly spark (ahem) some interest in neurology and the brain. Or, as I’m going to start saying whenever coming across something like this,

“Larry, what the hell just happened here?”

…and a bunch of bananas (footage from the Theremin Center, Moscow).

Via the Pd list, though, it seems that the next NK workshop will go somewhere else altogether: music with microorganisms. Really – you’ll need a USB microscope. It’s electronic music in a Petri dish.

I could try to explain, but I’ll leave it to the description by organizers Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar Koenig:

Overview–Experimental make-workshop with multilayered outcome for people interested in sound, DIY-biology, microscopy and interaction of living microorganisms. Knowledge in physical computing, video and sound processing, electronics and puredata is welcome, but not compulsory.

Description–In this workshop the experiments will take place in close-up view of microorganisms (e.g. water bears aka tardigrades, amoebae and collected organisms from urban environments), which appears to be a world by itself. Maybe due to the scaling and the amplification of a microscope, but maybe also due to all parameters of imagination that the microcosmos provokes. Growth and behaviour of these microscopic animals remind us of our own micro-macro-development. With the image and the movement of the organisms, the participants are encouraged to collect inspiration and bridge video and sound to what they experience with these small ?"animalcules?", as termed by their first observer Leeuwenhoek in 1677.

The participants will learn how to work with the usb-microscopes and hack webcams to be used as microscopes, observe the behaviour and motion of the waterbears and other microorganisms, find sounds from the lab equipment, hack into electronic devices to integrate into bioelectronic culture devices and build habitats for the animals. Also they will discover sounds from the different instrumentation and utilities of the laboratory. Recycle and compose arrangements for Lab-visual and
Lab-sound scapes and benefit from a cross fertilization between the whole (scientific) equipment (you can bring your own too!) and an artistic metaphorical language. The outcome can be a video with a microscopic soundtrack, a living object with singing waterbears, a performance with laboratory sounds, or an openLab Hackteria installation.

Material needed–The participant should bring their own laptop/computer, a webcam with an adjustable lens and some general lab stuff they have access to. Material available various labware, glassware, petri-dishes, usb-microscopes, microorganisms, soldering stations, electronic parts,
arduinos etc..

H a c k t e r i a & l a b h a c k i n g with Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar koenig

Saturday 30 May – Wednesday 3 June 2009, 12.00-18.00 daily

Location: NK / ElsenStr. 52 (2.Hof) Berlin, Germany

Telephone: +49 (0)176 20626386

Course Participation fee: 100 euros

Registration is required for this workshop and can only be done via

email to: enka_nkATgmxDOTde

Please register early to ensure a place. Places are limited to 16.

I know most of you can’t make it to Berlin, but perhaps this will spawn (breed?) other ideas.

Found via the Pd mailing list.

Exclusive Free Mix: Amon Tobin, Back from Space

Exclusive Free Mix: Deru

And here are the direct links to listen / download:

Download the Amon Tobin Yuri’s Night mix [contains NSFW audio samples]

Download Deru’s Free Mix

Updated! If you were having problems with the links, it’s because I made a mistake generating URLs with Amazon S3, and some browsers (IE and Safari but evidently not Firefox) get picky. It should be fixed now.

For more on Amon Tobin, our friends at Current TV have this interview on the Foley Room album — not exactly news, but inspiring stuff, nonetheless. Anyone who’s a found sound sound design fan (as I know many of you are in your own work) should get a kick out of it:

Let us know what you think of the music in comments. (Truly — thoughtful criticism is welcome as well as praise.)

Hello from Ground Control: this week, I’ll be coming to you live from CDM’s micro-blog for Yuri’s Night Bay Area, ground zero for the global space rave celebrating human exploration of the cosmos. CDM’s challenge: to bring all the goodness up close and personal to you, from California to wherever you are on Planet Earth.

Watch the minisite now, during the event, and in the couple of weeks following at:

http://yuricdm.com

or subscribe to the yuricdm.com RSS feed.

Yuri’s Night needs special nerdster love for a number of key reasons — a huge lineup of music, art, and science, plus a special CDM event and booth:

• Music: The likes of Amon Tobin, Tycho, Christopher Willits, and many others … and our friend Ganucheau, too
• Motion: Interactive installations and visualists everywhere, including our man Joshua with his incredible Wii-powered SuperDraw, built with Processing
• Space and Science and Games: Here’s where I get especially excited — it’s an event on the airfield at Ames Research Center, not typically a place non-NASA employees can go, and we actually get to play there and listen some of the world’s top scientists. And Will Wright (creator of SimCity, Sims, and the upcoming Spore with its generative music) will be there, too, just in case your geek circuits weren’t overloaded yet.
• CDM @ the Hangar: We’re running a special Futuristic Music Design Challenge competition, and we’ll have the CDM booth for much of the evening where various musical / visual makers will be showing off their inventions (with more of our friends elsewhere at the event). So stop by and say hi.

Fortunately, we’re not alone — the good peoples of Current TV will also be covering the event, and if your blog / Flickr stream / Vimeo account gets involved, let us know. We’ll put it all up on yuricdm.com — our first time trying a minisite for a special event, so we welcome your feedback.

Are you going to San Francisco? We’re still looking for someone to video the competition — please email me immediately if interested. My name is "Peter", I’m at "createdigitalmusic.com" — see if you can work out my email address. Alternatively, use the contact form. We’re also looking for informal Flickr photographers, writers, and other coverage, so give us a holler if you’re going.

And remember:

Event schedule

Tickets information

Directions

I have to say, it’s really a pleasure to do this — not only for us, and for the artists and thinkers involved in the event, but for NASA and the space exploration community. Aside from music, space exploration (human and artificial) was always a major passion and inspiration for me growing up. I personally can’t think of a better reason to throw a party, especially as we think about the significance of technology on Earth.

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.

In other words, the self-judging prefrontal cortex — the part you can easily model as a set of computer software rules — switches off, but another area of the brain hits overdrive. And “self-initiated” is exactly what’s lacking in computing technology.

But this has another implication, now that so many of us use computers in performance. For one, the lack of initiation from our computer companion means computers may be fundamentally unsatisfying as accompanists or “duets,” no matter how many rules or interactive behaviors we stuff into them. Maybe we don’t have to view them that way — maybe we should think of them as an extension of composition or an instrument. After all, a person with a laptop is usually a solo artist.

But the other likely implication is that, as many readers here have noted, we need to set up computers in ways that allow us to shot down part of the prefrontal cortex when playing. That’s a complex thing: you want your software to help you get into the zone. It doesn’t mean not thinking — quite the opposite. It means taking away distractions, partly feeling good enough about a performance to be able to stop the “self-monitoring” behavior, and partly giving yourself enough to do, musically, that another part of your brain actually has to work harder to proceed. Readers noted earlier this week that music notation can be musically distracting — not surprising, given many musicians make the effort to memorize a piece for exactly this reason.

But in addition to shutting down one section of your head, you want to activate another. That could also mean that tools that automatically limit your playing to specific scales, while they seem to make things easier, prevent your brain from reaching the level of activity when you feel the most inspired — like failing to make an exercise cardiovascular.

Thanks to Richard Lainhart for sending along this article (via the Electronic Music Foundation list).

How do you get into the zone playing live — particularly if you do use a computer?