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.

Artists Gijs Gieskes’ sequencers are almost like physical, mechanical software, an expression of musical structure in object form. As such, even as they make strange sounds, they become musical sculpture. His latest Servo Sequencer combines optical and mechanical process, as frequency circles spin on a turntable and tone arms float above them.

The Servo Sequencer is built for exhibition use – meaning, yes, he’s brave enough to let you play with this contraption. Sequence the arms using buttons, then adjust the volume mix and placement of each arm using the joystick.

Serv Seq from Gijs on Vimeo.

This project is unusually well-documented. Gijs provides complete specs, the script that controls the arms, and even a little web app that generates those lovely patterns.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=serv-seq

But for those of you near the Netherlands, you should go check this out in person. Updated: The piece will be part of an exhibition in Breda through August 23, with multiple opening events featuring local artists from Eindhoven and Breda, plus live performances and concerts including Gijs and his talented brethren and neighbors.

Here & There Exhibition, mu.nl [Info in English]

The events:
Opening Part 1:
KOP, Breda
Thursday 25/06 08.00 pm

MU, Eindhoven
Friday 26/06 08.00 pm

(It’s a bit confusing as the events swap between Breda and Eindhoven — there’s a second opening Saturday July 25. Gijs explains “the first [opening] is in breda (thursday), then a day later (friday) in eindhoven, where my machine will be. and then a month later its the other way around.”)

You know, Breda. Like, right … here. We’ve got a number of readers in the area (whom I suspect know more or less exactly where this is); let us know if you make it!

If you’re interested in generative and algorithmic music – music that evolves organically rather than being pre-composed in start-to-finish linear fashion – you won’t want to miss this site. Nodal is a free (for non-commercial use) app for developing generative musical systems and transmitting MIDI. You’ll need a Mac (PowerPC/Intel) to run the software, but even if you’re on Windows or Linux, you’ll find a number of interesting research papers on the site. vinayk writes:

The program is called Nodal – osx only, BEAUTIFUL interface, and FREE, it does a bit more sophisticated things but I basically plugged the output into sculpture – and it sounded amazing… well worth a look! And if anyone can tell me how to sync this to live or logic then i’d be much obliged!

Since it sends MIDI, it’d also be interesting to use this hooked up to visuals or triggering clips in Ableton Live.

Nodal Project Page, Tutorials, Examples, Research [Monash University]

I’ll be giving this a try soon. If you know of other generative software and research we should be checking out, perhaps we can put together a full round-up.

See also Noatikl / Mixtikl, from Intermorphic – developers who built the ground-breaking Koan generative system for Brian Eno. And we’re getting close to the release of the game Spore, which will feature a new generative engine and Eno’s composition.

noatikl: New Generative Music Engine, So You Can Rock Out Like Eno

Generative iPod? Deep Modular, Generative Music System Bound for iPhone, Phones, Windows, Mac

(Note that we learned this week that Mixtikl is not coming to iPhone in the immediate future. It’s available on plenty of other platforms, however, and if you’ve got a Mac for both, let the generative music making commence!)

Mari Kimura is an experimental string player extraordinaire, regularly venturing to the edge of what’s possible at the meeting of acoustic and electronic technology. GuitarBot is a “guitar”-playing robot (perhaps more reminiscent of a shamisen), an invention of Eric Singer, founder of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. The two meet above in a lovely video – not new, but well worth watching any old time, as reminded to us by Richard Swelling’s Etherbomb blog. Mari writes in comments on YouTube:

HI, Mari here. For those wondering what’s happening: Behind the white box, there is a Mac and an audio interface. I am running a software MaxMSP, which is LISTENING to the pitch. loundess and the timing of the violin. The ‘patch’ I created in Max contains certain interactive instructions such as "listen to the E (highest open string on the violin)". For example in the beginning, if you listen carefully you notice when I play above E, it stops. Iinteractions change in predetermined time frames.

It’s a reminder that, technology aside, the key ingredient in electro-acoustic music is great musicianship.

Quite nice stuff! And the video is shot by my friend Liubo Borrisov; Liubo, if you’re out there, say hi.

On display in Chi-town: giant pods to fill rooms with sound, and a man in a sound-induced, hypnotic blizzard of milk. (Yes, they have winter in northern Illinois.)

Snowy Day at MGFest 2008 from Michael Una on Vimeo.

Octophonopod at MGFest 2008 from Michael Una on Vimeo.

Behind-the-scenes commentary is available on Mike’s site, not to be confused with the domain-squatting personals site that you get if you leave out the hyphen. (Will, someday, an entire romantic community be devoted to Una Love? I wouldn’t rule it out.)

One lesson learned: milk can be incompatible with electronics.

Reel to Wheel is a massive sound-making device built from bicycle parts and a dismantled reel-to-reel tape deck. Move around the absurdly over-sized controls, and its analog inner workings groan and creak their way through recorded sound. Move the wheel at the right speed, and you get an effect quite like scratching — or, since it’s tape, it’s really “scrubbing.”

Reel to Wheel Project Page, with wonderful hand-drawn illustrations featuring Hank the Dummy.

The project, shown last weekend at the Maker Faire, is the creation of Sasha Leitman, Steven Backer, Jesse Fox, and Jen Carlile at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), which had their own booth full of musical interfaces and goodies. Like an equally Biggie-Sized string instrument, Reel to Wheel delighted adults and terrified children with its elegant impracticality. If it seems like sculpture, that’s because it is. In the installation version of the same work, the hardware is part of a Rube Goldberg-like configuration of bikes on mannequins and full-sized stationary bicycles.

This work also suggests that this site has stumbled upon a really bizarre, evolving musical meme. Look at the elements:

Bikes. Our friend Flip Baber created a new arrangement of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in December, recorded on bike parts. Much to our surprise, this story landed on Digg and launched to the most popular CDM story ever (promptly devastating our server), and Flip wound up on television and national radio. As it turns out, quite a lot of our readers are interested in music made with bikes, including bike ensembles, symphonies, and bikelophones, and bikes that control music and graffiti and inspire a young Frank Zappa.

Reel-to-Reel DJing: Because no one can beat-match on reel-to-reels like BBC Radiophonic Workshop wizard Delia Derbyshire.

So, I’m a little terrified that we’ve hit upon some strange statistical anomaly that seems to be tapping us directly into a musical world entirely based on tape and bicycle technology, but I’ll go with it.