In the latest example of kinetic, sound-producing sculpture, an Arduino-controlled organ of moving cans makes eerie, beautiful descending noises. Jakub Koźniewski, a member of the panGenerator collective, sends in details of that group’s work, sponsored in this case by the stuff in the cans:

Kinetic audiovisual installation for burn
displayed during burn Selector Festival 2011

Movement of the cans is controlled by 9 independent servos connected to the Arduino board while the sound is purely analogue – air pumped by 9 ordinary mattress pumps blows into the “whistles” at the top of plexiglass pipes. Tone is modulated by the current position of the can.

Lots of soldering, gluing, screwing, cutting and coding

Worth viewing as it sounds really terrific; I’d love to hear it in person. The additional music bed is nice, as well: it’s Krzysztof Zimmermann, from the label Few Quiet People.

Thanks, Jakub!

You may have seen it already as it makes its viral rounds, but an advertising video for Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo is a poetic model of how musical events are encoded, whether through means tangible or digital.

A track of pitches makes a wooden ball into a mallet, traversing a track as it is driven by gravity. The keys of that track become a xylophone, the traversal of space sequencing notes in time, and you hear Bach Cantata 147, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” While there’s a clever take on a trill, the only disappointment is that we don’t get polyphony – I’ll let you work out the Rube Goldberg-style machination necessary to make that happen. This being Bach, though, a single line itself contains contrapuntal motion and sounds just beautiful on its own.

But it’s also remarkable how the idea of Bach, the essence of the musical information, can be so neatly encoded in a simple machine. Computing, after all, owes its very existence to tangible, mechanical constructions first developed for textile manufacture. We get punchcards because these devices were built for automated clothing makers, containing logic in mechanical form. MIDI is often derided for being simplistic, but in that same simplicity is the elegance with which we can store a musical idea – a simple representation of relative pitch in time is often enough. And whatever the source, there is a relationship, as in this video, between the simple stored event and the complex sound that can result once triggered by that event.

As you watch the track extended through the forest, you also see the way in which a single melody line is spatial. There, against a forest, there’s a wonderful sense of the conceptual against the organic, artificial thought against a deeper universe.

Oh, and, uh, you’re supposed to by a phone or something, but I’ll ignore that part since most of us aren’t even in a part of the world that’s getting the phone.

It is, however, all real. Filmed in Kyushu, Japan, it’s the work of acclaimed director Morihiro Harano, who insisted on doing all of this record in the field. In fact, it’s too bad we don’t know more about the recording, as that in itself is a story — and requires careful balancing of natural sounds to create the final mix. There’s more information in a lovely blog post by Lia Miller, for The New York Times:
Doe, Xylophone, Cellphone

Also, great headline. A doe’s a deer, a female deer, right?

While not the intent of the ad, I know I’ll return to this image the next time I’m reflecting on encoding music, scores, time, and space. And maybe I’ll be fortunate to do so in the woods.

Thanks to Liz McLean Knight (Quantazelle) for the inspiration.

And, via Nick Inhofe, a making-of video is available for viewing!

In a responsive, real-time sculpture, the simple sonic qualities of a rainstick become electronically enhanced. Rainlith, a “kinetic sound art” work by Rui Gato, makes the rainstick itself robotic, its sounds transformed in space in a way that is itself sculptural. Responding to movement in the space using Microsoft’s Kinect, the apparatus is a geektastic brew of just about every tool you could imagine involved in this sort of construction.

The artist shares full details, reproduced here in both English and Portugese – and Rui, thanks for sending this in:

Rainlith 2 – Kinectic sound art piece.

On Rainlith, the primitive naturally granular sound of a big rainstick gets explored in real-time by cyber-age sound manipulation tools.
It’s an interactive piece in witch the movement of the audience’s body activates an electric motor, making a reflex movement on the structure that embraces the instrument.
The sound of the rainstick is captured and processed in realtime, and sent 24 meters above, filling the empty space of a old industrial cereal container. The reverberated acoustic mix is then received back by the audience in the spot right below the opening of the container.

Na peça Rainlith o som primitivo, naturalmente granular, de um pau de chuva é explorado por ferramentas modernas de sound design, em tempo real.
É uma peça interactiva em que o movimento do corpo do público activa um motor eléctrico, provocando um movimento reflexo na estrutura que sustenta o instrumento.
O som captado em tempo real é processado e enviado 24 metros acima, enchendo o espaço de um silo de cereais industrial. A mistura acústica reverberada é absorvida pelo visitante no local imediatamente abaixo da abertura do silo.

hardware:

microsoft kinect
arduino duemilanove
H-bridge (hand made)
24v 6A DC motor
CPU
zoom H4N
FM emitter / receiver
ion ipa3 portable speaker

software:

MAX/MSP
Max for Live
OSCeleton
OpenNI
Nite
toxiclibs

agradecimentos especiais:

Nicola Henriques
Susana Luiz
Luís Pereira
Paulo Carocinho
André Sier
Daniel Coimbra
Ruben Santos

By the way, if you’re intrigued by the potential of Kinect, be sure to read sister site Create Digital Motion for more. Just today, we have news of a new version of EyesWeb that could be relevant to musical use:
EyesWeb, Powerful Computer Vision Software for Windows, Adds Kinect Support, Fixes, More

Digital or analog, the essence of recording and production is the act of representing. One thing becomes another; one medium stores information about another. That representation can also be physical, tangible, and visible. In a sculptural pianola, Akko Goldenbeld turns the Dutch city of Eindhoven into a pianola roll, so that the landscape of buildings and streets acts as a physical musical score. I think it raises some questions about whether translating the one into the other obscures the experience of a city rather than clarifies it, but that would discount the act of watching it: with the visual connected to the sound, one begins to see the topography of the resulting music.

From the description on the video:

The tall buildings in the city centre have a heavy touch; the low-rise villas to the South create considerably gentler sounds. Akko Goldenbeld has a very personal way of looking at, or rather listening to the city.

He has created a scale model of Eindhoven and assigned it the role of sound recorder; the buildings create a score. Placed on a revolving wooden cylinder the buildings set little hammers in motion that play the keys of a piano. And turning and turning, the city makes its voice heard: from loud to soft, long to short, high-pitched to low, traslating the urban developers’s three-dimensional reality into an aural experience. Stadsmuziek (City Music) makes you tune in to the ensemble-playing that is environemental planning.

Via a terrific blog dedicated to data visualization (and, here, sonification) and their relation to design, Infosthetics. (Say that three times fast. Infosthetics sells aesthetic sensibilities by the seashore… Yesth, indeed. I’m glad this is a blog and not radio. It’s eight minutes past the hour. This is CDM.)

Granular synthesis, as described by Iannis Xenakis, imagined sound as constructed from elementary elements. In the work of Zimoun, elementary sonic grains are physical. An undulating wall of cardboard rubs surfaces against one another to form a chorus of sound. Cotton balls roll against boxes in throaty clouds of sound. Wires wriggle like some sort of insect antennae. Below, the newest video of his work, in which cardboard petals form an animated wall of rustling noise.

The results, powered by simple DC motors in kinetic musical action, recall some kind of natural, organic colony. Assembled in structures sculptural and architectural, this is real-world synthesis, constructed mechanically in motion.

The work is elegant, graceful, and witty, not cold and aggressive as are so many sound works. The sounds can be delicate – even assemblages of electric fans.

Zimoun is a Swiss artist whose work has been presented around the US and Europe. He also records music, some of it in surround.

http://www.zimoun.ch/

I hope to see these works in person; if they’re this moving in Internet videos, I can barely imagine seeing them up close. I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.

Handmade Music is a community get-together, Science Fair, noise-making happening, and party for people making things that make music. We return to NYC on Sunday, August 29 at 7p. Our new Manhattan home is Culturefix, a new electronics boutique, gallery, and tapas bar on the Lower East Side.

This month, we welcome a classically-trained guitar duo using their instruments to play games, an original string-modeling instrument, a sonic dodecahedron sculpture (really), artists using game chips, and more. Last-minute creations are always welcome.

If you’re in New York, we definitely hope to see you Sunday night. And wherever you are, it’s my pleasure to introduce some of the artists we have involved.

Presented with our friends at Make Magazine, Etsy.com, and XLR8R.

THIS SUNDAY, August 29, 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM (come at the beginning, or miss stuff!)
In Manhattan, at 9 Clinton St
COMPLETELY FREE
(cash bar/food… and you might decide to buy some designer headphones, just be forewarned)

Facebook page

That’s right. “Look at this ****ing nerdster…”

Modal Kombat: Guitarists Playing Games

David Hindman and Evan Drummond describe their act, coupling classical guitar training with a love of games:

Guitar Hero Is Dead: Guitarists Use Real Guitars to Control Video Games in a hybrid concert / public video game battle

Forget about using a plastic guitar to mimic your favorite band. What if you could use a real guitar just like any other video game joystick — and thrash your opponent while you create original music?

Two classically-trained New York City guitarists calling themselves “Modal Kombat” have hacked into classic video games Pong, Tetris, Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart. This month at The Boulder International Fringe Festival, they’ll make their characters move — and battle against each other — with a flurry of guitar-plucking.

The show is a video-game battle/performance-art hybrid that’s open to the public. The goal is to demonstrate that real guitars — or other musical instruments — can be viable video game controllers.

About Modal Kombat:
Modal Kombat is a NYC-based performance group consisting of Yale School of Music alumni David Hindman and Evan Drummond. For the past five years, they’ve performed public guitar-controlled video game battles at various venues in Europe, New York City, and around the U.S.

Before the game Guitar Hero was released, Hindman was an NYU grad student, developing hardware and software that allowed real musical instruments to control various types of existing console video games. In 2004, he created the system that became the basis for Modal Kombat shows. At each show, various musical pitches, volume levels, and other musical parameters are programmed to trigger each character’s movement, such as Left, Right, Punch or Jump.

http://www.modalkombat.com/

Smomid: Original String-Modeling Instrument

Nick Demopoulos has devised his own instrument from custom hardware and software:

The Smomid is a homemade midi controller. It’s name is an acronym for “String Modeling Midi Device.” It is made with the use of several membrane potentiometers, knobs and switches.

http://www.nickdemopoulos.com/smomidelements/smomid2.html

Neurohedron: Nonlinear Sequencer, Dodecahedronal Sculpture

Handmade Music favorite Ted Hayes brings a novel modal hardware/software combination, part original application, part original sculpture, as presented at the NIME research conference:

Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous. More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.

The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer. The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron. With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.

Neurohedron: First working video!! from Tedb0t on Vimeo.

Lots and lots of additional information (including more videos, documentation explaining the process and software design, and the NIME research paper):
http://log.liminastudio.com/projects/neurohedron

Presented by Pulsewave: Chip Music Open Mic

For some of you, I imagine that a world that has tasty New York beers, organic tapas, and chip music playing is pretty close to heaven. The good folks of New York’s famed Pulsewave series team up with us to provide us handheld chip music.

Thanks to the awesome Peter Swimm for making this happen.

Featured:

Square Wail: Square Wail is Matthew and Rebecca Kenall running an assortment of handhelds. They like fat beats with old timey melodies and try to infuse their music with such. Hailing from Seattle they are coming to the East Coast for the first time (except for once when Rebecca had a layover at JFK).

2010 Aug 10 – OMG Franz – Brooklyn – Dapantz from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Walking Like We Were Shot Through Our Heads by DaPantz

DaPantz (seen in video, heard in SoundCloud above, and with his own free EP):

Uptown New York’s satirically named DaPantz has been known to shout “BX HOLLA BACK” with reckless abandon. Often eschewing structure in favor of mood, he creates chaotic industrial, hip-hop and Latin flavored dance-punk on the Nintendo Game Boy. Using the homebrew cartridge LSDJ, DaPantz fuses heavy beats and a dissonant use of melody with the more unsettling side of the human psyche, creating the soundtracks to your nightmares (but reminding you that it’s okay to dance to them).

January 2010 – Kris Keyser at Bar Matchless from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Kris Keyser is just another guy with a Game Boy. Having hopped from instrument to instrument in his over 10 years of music making, Kris has finally found his perfect match in the portable powerhouse known as Little Sound DJ. In his relatively short time in the chip scene, Kris has jumped from relative unknown to relative known,playing chipscene institutions I/O and Pulsewave and making countless feet move and brains melt. Kris looks forward to a 2010 release on Cheese’N'Beer.

AdamGetsAwesome has been spreading beer-fueled mayhem across the world since 2008. Using the LSDJ program on the Nintendo Game Boy, Adam creates melodies ranging from the sickeningly sweet to the hauntingly atmospheric, always bringing a healthy dose of PARTY to every performance. His debut EP “AGA” is not only the inaugural CNB release, but also an exercise in actions befitting his namesake. Party.”

Website/free EP download: http://adamgetsawesome.com/album/aga

Phototheremin Chorus

Registration is now closed for the workshop, but we’ll be inviting creators of our phototheremin kit, designed by Eric Archer after an original design by Forrest Mims, to come play their instruments – boys, girls, adults, and kids.

Check out the kit.

The Party

View Larger Map

Sunday August 29
7:00 – 10:00 PM (come early)
Culturefix details

Yes, it’s free.

Yes, kids are allowed. (just not at the bar)

RSVP on Facebook.

Works For Turntable from Stephen Cornford on Vimeo.

Digital sound, and electronic sound in general, can become abstract. In fact, sound itself can be abstract. So there’s something beautiful about rendering sound as something kinetic, mechanical, and physical. Watch the hypnotic works by Stephen Cornford, top; as the video progresses, the pieces deepen in subtlety. (Thanks to Richard Devine for spotting this one.)

Cornford isn’t the only artist finding new sonic frontiers in the turntable. From a recent event in San Francisco sponsored by our friends at MAKE Magazine, artist Walter Kitundu talks about his own fascination with the turntable and other sonic projects.

Exploratorium multimedia artist, instrument builder, and birder extraordinaire Walter Kitundu talks about his work: he shares the staggering breadth of his work, ranging from a multitude of turntable-based instruments to shadow paintings, and to finish gives a premiere performance on his brand new instruments, a digital kora.

That’s just one video at an event that also included digital music software artist Ge Wang and acoustic instrument maker Krys Bobrowski. Youngsters at the event also got to solder contact mics and go experiment in the space – a nice idea, and one I hope we exploit for an upcoming Handmade Music Night (here in NYC, but elsewhere, too). I have my own preferred quick-and-dirty Radio Shack contact mic procedure, but if anyone has other ideas, pipe up.

Well worth checking out the whole event – and nice that they shot high-quality video.
Open MAKE at the Exploratorium: Exploring sound

Meet the Makers: Walter Kitundu from Learning Studio on Vimeo.

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.

Digital technology has transformed the listening experience. But there’s little in the way of physical artifacts of that act, and a diminished sense of humanized relationships to an individual being at the other end. From modern radio to Internet-streamed playlists, our listening world is DJed by automated robots in streams that flow through generic, mass-market speakers. The object and the content lack the design intention that imbued, for instance, the gorgeous radio sets of the early 20th Century and the personalities that narrated the programming.

Armed with a lasercutter, designer Matt Brown has a novel concept for how to redesign the act of listening. From the creator’s blog Real Tomato:

For this system, you would have a speaker with an rfid reader, and laser-cut paper radios with rfid chips inside. The radios themselves are designed by musicians, charities, brands, and designers. When the paper radio is placed over the speaker it changes the radio station to what the artist has chosen. Other noises and interactions can be programmed in too. Alec Baldwin’s radio for example could politely ask everyone to turn their lights off from time to time. People could have the paper radios around their house in different rooms. The supremes radio might be a better living room station. This system tries to add a little bit of fun to internet radio, and give people a connection with the artists they choose. The radios themselves would hopefully be cheap and collectible little sculptures, each one accessing unique stations.

The artist, D.A.R.Y.L., is a recent alumnus of Sweden’s Umea institute of Design.

I think we need a new, specialized Creative Commons license that describes “Great Concepts I Probably Won’t Get to Developer Further so Please Go Run with It With Some Credit to Me.” (Okay, maybe with a shorter name.) I love the possibilities this project suggests, if for no other reason than the beautiful sculptures created with the lasercutter.

The works themselves are printed out a single sheet and assembled. THat demonstrates some of the power lasercutters can provide, and the promise they hold for localized production of objects. (Use eco-friendly recycled paper and inks, and this is a consumer product that doesn’t deliver a dropkick to the planet.)

I just interviewed Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy, and he told me saw a survey that showed some 80% of music journalists listen through music via the built-in speakers in their laptops. That would be terrifying if true – I’m not certain that it is – but regardless, I think there is a clear need to rethink listening processes and objects.

Check out the post and the blog for more inspiring images. Via the wonderful Saturn Never Sleeps blog by Rucyl Mills and King Britt.

Sonoridades Líquidas [Liquid Sounds] from Rui Penha on Vimeo.

Wonderful work in sculpting sound into beautiful handmade electronic-acoustical instruments is pouring out of Portugal. Now we get to see more of that work – and if you are in Portugal, you can share in person at a new event.

The Handmade Music project and community has found its second home – Porto, Portugal, at the massive Casa da Música! The first event will be held Tuesday, July 21. (Full announcement, English/Português).

De hardware a software feito em casa até circuit bending, kits personalizados ou instrumentos acústicos originais, todos estão convidados a aparecer na Casa da Música pelas 21h30 para montagem de instrumentos. Pelas 22h abrimos o evento ao público geral – a entrada é livre e recomenda-se -, ocupando a Digitópia e a zona do bar do Foyer Sul. Contamos convosco!

To celebrate the new party, organizer Rui Penha sends over a survey of some of the instruments and sculpture that are being homegrown in Porto. And yes, even first-time-creator high school students can make fantastic work (see after the jump). At top:

An interactive installation made for Casa da Música – Porto, Portugal – with João Ricardo de Barros Oliveira and Luís Girão. Shown here is the algorithmic composition and synthesis patch I made in Max/MSP and the Arduino-based sensor system, co-developed with Luís Girão.

Lula · robotic Hang player from Rui Penha on Vimeo.

This robotic Hang player is called Lula (Squid).
It was, designed, built and its algorithm was created with a group of teenagers participating in a four-day workshop called OrCA – Orquestra de Computadores e Autómatos (OrCA – Orchestra of Computers and Robots), at Casa da Música – Porto.
It was made with picaxe, servos and ultrasonic sensors.

Correntes Sonoras from Serv. Educativo Casa da Música on Vimeo.

João Ricardo constrói instrumentos-esculturas a partir de materiais das mais diversas origens: pedaços de metal, bocados de madeira corroídos pelo tempo, objectos usados e danificados, provenientes de contentores do lixo, da rua, da natureza. As esculturas têm sons complexos, poéticos, muito diferentes do habitual e são um desafio à imaginação, aos sentidos e às convenções daquilo que é um instrumento ou daquilo que é música.

A ExposiSom [Correntes Sonoras] explora diversos espaços da Casa da Música e é concebida como um percurso de descoberta da arquitectura e da relação do som com o espaço que ele habita.

Sonoridades Líquidas from Serv. Educativo Casa da Música on Vimeo.

A ExposiSom [Sonoridades Líquidas] estabelece uma ponte entre a escultura sonora, a música e a arte digital e permite a descoberta do edifício da Casa da Música através de um percurso onde o público interage com o conteúdo sonoro, transformando assim a Casa num mega-instrumento. A ExposiSom [Sonoridades Líquidas] usa um conjunto de cerca de 50 objectos idênticos [esculturas sonoras] que servem de «interface» com um computador. Explora-se a ideia de elicitar sons ou algoritmos que geram som, a partir de um estímulo muito simples: a vibração causada por uma gota de água que cai sobre uma pele de um instrumento de percussão.

We hope to send out some resources for folks working to plan Handmade Music in other places, too. Here’s the running list of locales we know have expressed interest – and yes, I’ll be following up with you folks later today!

• Machester, UK
• (city TBD) North Carolina, USA
• Toronto, Canada
• Argentina
• Chicago, USA
• Berlin, Germany
• San Francisco, USA
• Joinville, Brazil
• Greece
• Los Angeles, USA
• Washington, DC, USA
• Austin, TX, USA
• Detroit, USA
• Boulder, CO, USA

Not on the list and interested in organizing an event? Fill out the form on Google Docs.

Stay tuned for coverage of the upcoming NYC and Portugal events here.