Mobile computing has already had an enormous impact on music making. A modern phone or tablet (and yes, most often, these come from Apple) is capable of out-performing a lot of dedicated hardware and easily runs the synths and workstations that required state-of-the-art desktops just a decade or so ago.

But what if this same computing power – low-energy, low-cost chips – could be in other music gear, too? They could offer significant advantages. Bare boards, while on their own not quite road-ready, can wind up in music-friendly housings. (Think stompboxes – without stomping on your phone, or buying a big, silly dock.) You’ll never have to sign a contract with a phone company to get one, or stop your latest song sketch to take a call. And they could be significantly cheaper: the Raspberry Pi isn’t quite ready for mass consumption yet, but it has already begun shipping at US$25, meaning the entire computer costs what a phone car charger might.

In fact, much as the original personal computing revolution took computing to masses of new audiences, this could extend music computational power worldwide. We’re not just talking strange DIY software, either – these boards run Linux, meaning a lot of off-the-shelf music software will “just work,” including even some fine commercial entries.

If you’re ready to stop dreaming and start making music, now’s a great time. CCRMA at Stanford in the United States and STEIM in Amsterdam, NL have each been working on development. STEIM even has a workshop scheduled for June, taught by Edgar Berdahl (CCRMA) and Florian Goltz (DE):
Satellite CCRMA: Interactive design with open embedded computers

The instructors offer some great inspiration about what this is all about in their description:

These small computers combine the connectivity of a laptop with the computational power of a high-end smartphone; however they are less expensive than either and fit inside a cigar box. We will dedicate much of the workshop to prototyping new functional artworks, for example: musical instruments, effects processors, interactive installation works, and anything else you can imagine that requires high computational power in a small, inexpensive footprint.

In the broader sense this workshop deals with interaction design: What happens when human behaviours meet those of machines?

But even if you’re not able to get to California or Holland, you can give the software a try. The BeagleBoard is now supported by a custom distro; the Raspberry Pi seems a logical next frontier once it starts shipping. With Pd (Pure Data) included, you can even copy-and-paste instruments and effects like synthesizers, step sequencers and drum machines, and granulators built by a broad community – even without necessarily being a master patcher yourself. (And then, when you do want to modify the way it functions or sounds or gets controller, you can.)
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~eberdahl/Satellite/

It’s not all beginner-friendly yet, but these hacklabs seem the perfect way to begin to move in that direction, as more people test the solutions, gather data on how different patches perform, and make tweaks and write documentation.

Matt Moldover takes on Native Instruments’ Traktor Kontrol F1 in a hands-on demo; NI reportedly gave him a weekend to see if the “controllerism” advocate could do something interesting with their hardware/software combo. The resulting video really gives some insight into what controllerism is all about: the fundamental notion here, whatever you wish to call it, is relying more heavily on live sampling and real-time manipulation, to make this more of an instrumental performance and not just a DJ set. That’s part of what I admired about the direction of the F1 earlier on. And here, sampling in particular comes to the fore – all within what is essentially DJ software.

Rather than comment too heavily, though, the best illustration of Moldover’s style comes from seeing both this F1 video alongside a live performance with his own, custom-designed MOJO controller. (The latter is available as a custom build from 60works – and means that Moldy himself was more or less in the business of building what NI, too, had on offer.)

I was present at the performance at STEIM’s Patterns + Pleasure Festival in the fall. The first half is a bit more experimental – and, how shall we say, STEIM-y? The jam gets going halfway through. In the end, you can do the same sorts of things with Traktor and F1 as with Ableton Live, and with these two controllers. That’s not to say the workflow is the same in the two tools; it isn’t. It’s really a matter of Matt bringing his own musical style and idiom to the two tools, which is, after all, the whole point.

I’ll be interested to see what other musical expressions may be possible. Whatever tool you choose, there’s a chance to genuinely practice. So, this is what Moldover did with one of his weekends. What will you do with yours? Have a good one.

F1 Product Page

http://moldover.com/

“So,” you say, “I’ve got a … and I want to connect it to a … to make music. How do I do that?”

One strong answer to that question, if you’ve got a Mac, is junXion. Developed by the landmark audio research laboratory STEIM – a hotspot in Amsterdam that for years has been imagining new ways of making music by connecting things to other things – it got a big update recently.

It takes lots of the inputs you might imagine (joysticks, mice, touchscreens, MIDI, OpenSoundControl, audio, Arduino-powered hardware and all of its sensors, and video sensing) and connects it to a lot of the outputs you might imagine (using MIDI or OSC). You can set up rules in between the input and output to make that connection musically meaningful.

OSC input and output wasn’t entirely optimal in past versions; a total rewrite now makes it work with useful OSC sources like the iOS TouchOSC and Lemur apps. You get nifty new Actions, like remote mouse control. You can use a Nintendo Wii “Wiimote”‘s infrared-sesnsing capabilities and vibration support. If you’re using video, you can now support multiple “blobs.” And the whole app promises to run faster and look better, with more help tags in the UI, and added stability.

75 € for the full version. You need Mac OS X 10.5 or later, including the latest 10.7 Lion. (Upgrades for version 4 are free; Lite users can upgrade for 60 €.)

http://steim.org/product/junxion/

Of course, talking about this doesn’t really make much sense; it’s better to see it in action. We have a whole bunch of videos from the folks at STEIM showing features like Wii and joystick control and video sensing from a camera – plus a couple of fascinating demo/tutorials submitted by users.

Let’s watch, shall we?

Via https://vimeo.com/steim/videos

Far from the walls of STEIM, though, intrepid users have concocted their own demos. Here’s a look at controlling Reason with a Wiimote:

Here’s a live performance, also controlled by Wiimote, in the modular live environment AudioMulch. The creator writes:

A basic soundscape in AudioMulch controlled by two Wii remotes via JunXion IV.

Buttons in Wii Remotes control: start and stop buttons, presets of the main mixer, transient parameter of the granulator, frequency of the pulsecomb_1 (processing the drum), a junxion-timer controlling the volume of the granulator.

X-Y-Z accelerators control: 10 harmonics of a frequency generator, parameters of the rissettone

And yes, a camera can be a Theremin:

Got your own solution using junXion – or another tool? We’d love to hear about it.

See also two fine Mac-only tools:
Osculator [Much like junXion, supports nearly anything as an input, adds advanced OSC routing]
ControllerMate [not music-specific, but very powerful modular game input utility]

In fact, what’s largely missing is easy solutions on Windows and Linux, though you can roll your own with a free tool like Pd, which also supports HID, Arduino, video, and the like.

From behind the long-gone, so-called “iron curtain,” nearly-lost musical innovation is beginning to become available. But perhaps more than any geo-political change, the power of an Internet-based community hungry to share knowledge is making national borders that once isolated information melt away.

Earlier this week, I shared reflections I wrote up for Amsterdam’s STEIM on the significant of DIY Music. But one group of artists, the Standuino team from Brno, Czech Republic, really exemplified that spirit. First off, their hardware is utterly brilliant and eminently practical, an Arduino-based platform on which they’ve made it easy to create and modify designs, and share useful tools like the sampler they demonstrated for us in Amsterdam. Secondly, they’re international – the performance brought together a Brazilian, Czech, and Dutch artist in their presentation. Third, they took “DIY” straight to the transportation, hitchhiking all the way from Brno to Amsterdam to be part of our performance, for which we’re all incredibly grateful!

The Standuino crew emphasize that they also wish to make the innovation of the Czech people more visible to the rest of the world. You know Bob Moog or Morton Subotnick, for instance, but do you know the name Standa Filip?

You should. The maker of extensive DIY instruments, interactive work, robotic installations, and new media, Standa (hence Standuino) is inspiring a new generation of artists – first in the Czech Republic, eventually in the world. Those artists, led by Standuino, are recreating some of his work, as well as making new work that carries on his spirit.

Check out the videos here to see him talk about his history and play his instruments, then learn more – and find the Arduino-based hardware designs, which I’ll cover more next week – at the Standuino site:

http://www.standuino.eu/

But there you go – from Rio to Singapore, once I hit publish, just about anybody can learn what it was like to be a lone DIYer in Communist Czechoslovakia – then go find open source ideas with which they can make music from the new generation of creators in the Czech Republic, in a matter of seconds.

Yeah, we overhype the Internet. But that’s pretty damned awesome. I’m going out in the sunshine now for a bit, because that’s awesome, too, but I’m pretty happy that I get to make this my day job. And thanks to you for making that possible, because with you as a reader, none of this would be true.

Why DIY, anyway? As we prepare for a special Handmade Music afternoon hosted by Amsterdam’s STEIM research center, my co-curator Takuro Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff) asked me to answer that question. Here’s what I wrote for STEIM’s international Patterns and Pleasure festival.

“Do it yourself.”

In the world reshaped by recording, in which music is ubiqiutously available on demand and even bare-bones DJing qualifies as “live” entertainment, the act of just making music surely qualifies as “DIY.” Add the fact that distribution, promotion, and booking of music often falls increasingly on the artists themselves, and it’s hard to see any part of music that isn’t DIY.

So, given all that, what would drive artists to make or modify their own musical tools? One might as well ask why make music in the first place. (Because you can? Because it’s fun? Because it’s the most satisfying way to realize an idea or feeling – often the two together?) I believe some of the separation between “music” and “tools” or “gear” or “technology” is arbitrary. That independence is itself a recording-centric notion, in which musical content as artifact is imagined as independent from how it was made. During the process of production or performance, they’re inseparable. The evolution of musical practice, meanwhile, is intertwined with the technology of playing and representing music. Musical instruments in archaeological records appear alongside the first human tools. Those instruments, like the musical materials themselves, are vessels for expression of human thought. We can make our body an instrument, via percussion or voice, but as with so many other elements of our human life, we extend that body through invention.

When you play an instrument, whether a flute or an interactive music software patch, what you express is mediated both through musical language and the tool. I know as a child, it was what first drew me to music: I could press my fingers to the keys and hear something very much other than what I could produce myself. It’s easy to see the connection to the synthesizer and the computer.

When you want to realize (or discover) new musical and sonic ideas, then, it’s necessary to become involved with the way in which those sounds are produced. As composers for acoustic instruments and voice, you dive into the realms of harmony and rhythm, but also the mechanisms of the instruments and standard and extended techniques. Working with the computer, you employ interfaces – whether simulated knobs or code or graphical representation – to realize your ideas. With electronics, wires and resistors and diodes become compositional. With both, the container you fashion, the handcrafted cases or user interfaces, becomes part of the musical identity you design.

There is no such thing as an instrument built from scratch. To quote Isaac Newton (in words adapted by countless electrical engineers and computer scientists), “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” We inherit a great body of knowledge and tooling. Whether a commercial DAW or a modular development environment or the circuit that makes a filter, we connect with the ideas, imagination, and expertise of generations of engineer-artists. Notably, we lost Max Mathews this year, whose lasting legacy, even more than breakthroughs in computer synthesis, may be his influence on decades of students and colleagues in chasing the limitless potential he saw in digital sound. Thought is the greatest technology there is.

I think we can easily become overly worried about the rise of digital tech. Computers and electronics are here, and for all their dangers – misuse and toxic waste being foremost among them – they are fundamentally a compilation of human ideas. If you like people, you’ll like computers and circuits when you get to know them. We can also become overly concerned with “new”; the great implication of the maturity of electronic sound technology to me is that we can begin to go from novelty to repeatability and expertise. That’s not to discount discovery; it’s simply that discovery can’t exist in a void. At the same time, in our appetite for mastery, we can devalue the novice. I’m excited by seeing projects that don’t quite work yet, that are only at the stage of technical demo or proof of concept, because to me it’s seeing the first steps on a path that could lead a musician into years of practice and refinement. It’s seeing the chicken popping out of the egg. Potential is stimulating when you believe it has a future.

Here, designing one’s own instruments is much like learning to play an instrument. You repeat the ideas of others, just as you repeat the sounds of others when you learn a musical scale. You make sounds that, at first, are, well, awful, but that then grow up. Whether arguably innovative or not, you make discoveries that are inherently personal. And the degree of that progression is dependent in large part on learning from others, playing with them and sharing their experience. As people share that experience, in the end there are breakthroughs to the genuinely new. Collective progress is what allows those individual eurekas.

With economies from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam slowing, with growing unfilled demand for the ability to actually make stuff and not just push abstract numbers around, and with technical problems that demand solutions literally to ensure our survival, all those strange noises we make take on a new meaning. Tools and technology enabled our civilization; now we need them to make humanity sustainable. Silly sounds and musicians’ racket and din may seem distant from that. But we can sing this necessity as a song. We can celebrate the spirit of experimentation by making things that make immediate noise. A bridge or a jet plane isn’t a great place for experimentation or on-the-job learning; music is the perfect playground because errors are always okay. If any community could help encourage free innovation in our culture, music is a strong candidate; today’s young synth builder could be tomorrow photo-voltaic breakthrough. And even if not, we’ll make a wonderful noise.

“Open source” and the “Web” are significant tools to make sharing expertise easier, but at the fundamental level, it’s simply “sharing” that matters. And this is where music’s makers and inventors are helping resurrect the principles of music as community. We have to share ideas and sounds to be able to move forward.

We do it ourselves, together.

In late September, CDM travels to Amsterdam and the legendary STEIM, a hub for research and experimentation in electro-acoustic music. The Patterns + Pleasure Festival will explore live electronic music practice and more, from controllerist laptop musicians like Edison and Moldover to the likes of sculpture-trained artist Nina Boes working with drawing and video instruments. The afternoon of September 28, we’ll have an open celebration of DIY electronic music culture with a special installment of Handmade Music.

If you’re in the Netherlands or nearby, we hope you’ll stop by. And if you have something you’d like to share, for show-and-tell, performance, and mingling with artists participating in and attending the festival, we have an open call for works.

You can see our video from last time. The video doesn’t really convey what a blast we had. Don’t be afraid by the crackles and whistles, either; I love that there’s a range of sound in electronic inventions, from the crackly experimental to instruments that work in more conventional contexts, too.

This installment already promises to be far bigger. I can’t wait. And if you’re far from the lovely winding canals of Amsterdam seen below, we’re working on extensive coverage so you can feel like you’re there from anywhere on the planet.

Here’s the call for works; feel free to spread it around:

Open Call:
Handmade Music at STEIM

As part of the Patterns + Pleasure Festival
28 September 2011
14:30 – 17:30
Frascati Theater, Amsterdam
Deadline: Friday 9 September 2011

Hosted by createdigitalmusic.com and STEIM; curated by Peter KIRN with Takuro Mizuta Lippit

Attention, makers of things that make music! Be part of an open laboratory, a science fair-style show and tell of work. We want to see your creations, including but not limited to:

Custom circuitry
New custom synthesizers
Creative controllers
Open source hardware and software
Audiovisual software
Original acoustic and electroacoustic instruments
Sound art/sculpture
Circuit-bent designs
Instruments and composition and performance tools made with game technology, mobile technology, Kinect cameras, and the like

The essential element is that you’ve built something yourself, in hardware, software, or both.

Please be prepared to show a self-contained presentation of your work. Some display/projection and amplification will be available, but we encourage you to bring your own displays and speakers if you can.

We will setup works for show-and-tell style exploration, as well as brief (5-minute demos) and short (5-10-minute), variety style performances and jams. We’ll also lead a discussion with artists and engineers, and encourage you to meet other makers and exchange ideas and techniques.

We are unfortunately unable to provide expenses for travel, so you will need to provide your own transportation to and lodging in Amsterdam. All projects will be covered on createdigitalmusic.com.

Please submit:

1. Your name, as you’d like it to be listed
2. Your project name
3. If applicable, a link to a project site
4. Photos of your project (a link to Flickr, Picasa, blogs, etc. is fine)
5. (Mandatory) Video and or audio documentation of your project in action (Vimeo, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.)
6. Space requirements
7. Technical requirements (power / audio / safety concerns if applicable)
8. A brief description (two sentences is fine) of your project.
9. If you wish to propose a performance, please describe in short how you perform with your tool.
10. Your contact information, so we may respond

Submission form:
http://cdm.fm/pt99dq

We prefer to capture information on the submission form, but if you have difficulty with it, please email peter (at) createdigitalmedia [dot] net directly with the subject ‘STEIM HANDMADE MUSIC’

patternsandpleasure.com

The first law of musical robotics: rock hard.

We’ve seen plenty of robotic musical experiments, but finding a robot that can seriously shred is another matter altogether. Meet the robotic string instrument, Poly-tangent, Automatic (multi-) Monochord – let’s just call her PAM. Built by Expressive Machines Musical Instruments, a group of University of Virginia PhD students and composers, PAM is capable of creating raucous musical performances like the one above, by composer and EMMI member Steven Kemper.

Musical robotics is cool, but it also hasn’t evolved much technologically in fifty years. It’s gotten cheaper and more accessible, but the fundamental design hasn’t changed – and that accessibility hasn’t translated into widespread use.

Now, the EMMI crew, in anticipation of a residency at Amsterdam’s famed STEIM research center, are hoping to take robotic music to the next level. MARIE is a project to put robotic music in a form that you can easily take on the road. They want to make the project open, so others can benefit, complete with schematics and code.

There are several aspects that make the MARIE project special beyond just road-ready design. The new instruments are intended to be more modular and controllable, to make the robotics as flexible as classic MIDI and analog modular gear has been. They also benefit from acoustic sound creation, controlling columns of air and physical strings instead of just digital or electrical models as on synths.

To fund their vision, the EMMI crew have started a Kickstarter project. You get something in return from your investment, including even training on robotics and good, old-fashioned instruments like the sax and bassoon. (That should put to rest any fears that these guys want a robot-only musical future.) Here’s how they describe their work:

MARIE are a set of virtuosic and expressive music robots that are portable, reliable, user-friendly, and fit within the dimension/weight limits for international checked baggage. In other words, these are music robots for touring musicians. The hope of EMMI and the EAR Duo is that the usability and portability of MARIE and similar music robots will finally push this powerful technology out of research labs and onto stages around the world. Within this aim, the entire project will be publicly documented online and the source code and hardware diagrams all provided as public knowledge for other enterprising musicians and technicians to construct similar robots.

EMMI-ers, I hope you keep CDM posted as you go. It looks like a very worthy project indeed.

Fundraiser for MARIE, open music robots for touring musicians [STEIMblog]

Expressive Machines

MARIE: a virtuosic band of robots made by and for musicians [Kickstarter]

How much can you do with a suitcase full of soundmakers? Quite a lot, as it happens.

The 20th Century gave sound two great achievements. One was the successful modeling of filtering in digital software form. The other was the production of the electronic filter, first in quartz crystal form. Today, all of those advancements are available in cheap, often battery-powered devices that fit in the palm of your hand. Spurred by yesterday’s discussion of sonic mobility and battery power, Sasa Rasa points us to the recent work of Chris Carter (of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey fame).

Chris has built out a set he calls “Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons,” featuring a suitcase rig of noisemaking gadgets. Among other devices, this includes a new experimental, DIY noisemaker kit that came out of a collaboration with Dirty Electronics / John Richards. The setup, and accompanying performance, were recently the featured item at an event at Amsterdam’s STEIM, a hub for experimental sound. The contents comprise a veritable guide to what’s useful in mobile music making, without resorting to mobile phones or similar devices, and without, even, any use of MIDI.

Below, one of the setups, combining specialized and custom electronics with some familiar sound objects.

He describes a sample set using the rig on his blog, proudly entitling it no MIDI no keyboards:

I generated some rhythms using two [KORG] Kaossilators – going through two mini KPs, and manipulated some bass loops with a Korg KP3 pad. I had a Chimera BC16 synth (the LFO and the ADSR) voltage controlling a BC9 synth and two Eventide stompboxes. I synced and beat matched on the fly using ‘tap-tempo’ buttons on the Korgs and Eventides.

Equipment shown:
Two Kaossilators, two mini Kaoss pads, a KP3 Kaoss pad, a Tom Bugs WOM synth, Chimera BC8, BC9 and BC16 synths, two Zoom PFX-9003 effects, an Eventide Modfactor, an Eventide Timefactor, a Dirty-Carter E.S.G.I synth, a portable Edirol mixer and a Zoom H2 for recording.
No MIDI, keyboards, laptops or desktop computers were used.

Here’s that set recorded to his Zoom H2 mobile recorder:

no MIDI no keyboards by chris_carter

Is there an advantage to working this way as opposed to assembling a similar arsenal of tools in a computer? Not necessarily. But maybe that’s part of the point: whether you assemble a set of hardware sound boxes, some custom circuits and DSP processing in hardware, a Pd or Max patch on a computer, or a set of effects, you’re engaging in what is fundamentally the same process. The fact that you have all of these choices means there’s really no excuse for not finding some set of tools with which you feel comfortable, and with which you can push the envelope of your own performance style.

Not only that, but even the most die-hard computer lover is likely to find something here – the mobile recorder, one or two of the effects boxes – that would nicely complement their rig.

And what I like about Chris’ examples is that, within the “experimental” aesthetic paradigm he’s set out, there are rich compositional and sonic ideas, modeled in the flow of signal betwixt his noise gadgetry.

Lots of great ideas for useful hardware came up in comments on the battery-powered story, so watch for a further compilation.

Making your own instruments may not be for everyone, but getting to witness the bleeding edge of musical DIY can give real insight into how electronic music performance can work, and what matters in sound. Last week, the famous sound research center in Amsterdam STEIM generously hosted an edition of Handmade Music, inviting inventors to make noises and performances with their self-made creations and to talk about their work.

Ben Terwel, one of the artists, shot the video above. It includes discussion in both Dutch and English, but if you don’t speak Dutch, you’ll still get the gist of a lot of the musical demonstrations. (It’s actually nice to hear the native language included, since I came in and spoke English, which you get plenty of here on CDM!)

A number of themes emerged from the work we saw:

Elegant circuits, multiple applications: Several pieces made use of Michel Waisvisz’s Cracklebox, the legendary hardware design born at STEIM. What’s remarkable about this design is the way in which it can be incorporated into other ideas. Waisvisz has written about how important the act of “touching” the sound can be:

Sometime in the early-sixties I started touching the inside of my fathers short-wave radio receivers. Before that with my brother René I had given ‘concerts’ at home by placing our fingers on circuit boards of transistor radios that were ‘wrongly’, but usefully, interconnected with wires. The little electrical shocks were nice and the changes in the sound were exiting and magic mind-openers. Through touch I was able to start playing with short wave sounds in a way that would later become ‘sound music’.

I had already heard some of the early recordings of electronic music, but these often sounded so dull, so constructed, so without musical soul. Touching the inside of audio electronics was way more exiting to me. I knew this could change ideas about electronics and music. Touched electronics sounded rougher and sort of rebellious against the clean and high-tech quality of the electronic music from the fifties and early sixties.

If you want to experiment with the Cracklebox, you can buy one from STEIM for EUR60 + shipping. It’s a very accessible design, so an excellent choice even as your first hardware.

Code and hardware, hand in hand: At Handmade Music in New York, we’ve tended to see projects that focus on either hardware or software. But the assembled creators in Amsterdam had some terrific examples of fusing the two designs. Many made use of Pd (Pure Data), the free and open source patching environment, which also enabled the use of Linux and low-cost, low-power, compact computing hardware. In fact, with access to such hardware, there’s no reason a traditional computer can’t be as svelte as an “embedded” solution. While wandering the labs at STEIM, I saw some other, similar examples.

One example (and the most literal case, aside from the Robot Cowboy): an audiovisual interface made from a paint palette and paintbrush. It was astounding to see how immediately people “got” this interface.

More:
http://visualpaco.blogspot.com/

Making performance work: Whether the Robot Cowboy wearable-music-making outfit (which easily stole the show), or custom turntable rigs and more conventional knobs and touch controllers, live performance was a key element. Obviously, these variables impact how audience members perceive a performance. But the artists also spoke about how significant these decisions were to their own happiness, the quality and satisfaction they could derive from their playing.

Standardization and communication: The question you see me answering in the video above is whether some amount of standardization can allow control via protocols like OSC to work more effectively – and, indeed, whether OSC could be as standardized as MIDI. In both Amsterdam and (later that week) Stockholm, I got into many more conversations about this, both regarding control messages (“hey, you just pressed my antennae on my wearable sound suit”) and sync (“gee, what if we want our two delay effects to not sound like crap together?”). I’m excited that we can now get into implementation on many of these issues. When you see a room full of strange, new creations, it’s not hard to recognize that strict, rigid standardization of messages can’t work. But what could work – both for the evolution of MIDI and for new protocols – is communication that allows you to interconnect all that stuff that’s not standard.

Anyway, to conclude, the whole evening was fantastic fun. I’m really grateful to everyone from Amsterdam (and well beyond) for attending, sharing so many terrific ideas, and showing off this fantastic work. I come home really inspired. We’ll have more documentation on some of these individual projects, as well as new discussion of where would-be DIY artists can get started, and how all of the underlying technology can be better documented, extended, and improved.

If you have photos, videos, or follow-up documentation, let me know! I’ll follow up once I, uh, get my body’s clock back on East Coast time!

This week – Sonic Acts: My only regret is that I can’t hang around Amsterdam for the festival Sonic Acts; fascinating-looking lineup, so if you go, let us know about it.

The Body, The Circuit, The Computer and The Voice: robot cowboy from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.

If you want to look for some of the roots of live electronic musical performance, STEIM is one place to start. Founded in 1969 by a group of Dutch composers (Misha Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Dick Raaymakers, Jan van Vlijmen, Reinbert de Leeuw, and Konrad Boehmer), and led by the late “founding father” Michel Waisvisz, it has remained an important hub for inventing music technologies. It was one of the first places that gave an indication that these kind of experiments could extend beyond academic labs into grassroots DIY movements and DJ/VJ club culture alike.

Amsterdam has been looking to do a Handmade Music series for a while, and this Wednesday we kick it off. There’s a huge lineup, so I’m packing two video cameras and one audio recorder into my luggage today before flying out.

You can check out the whole lineup on the STEIM blog, for a sense of what the Dutch DIY community is up to:
Feb 17 2010: Hotpot Lab #2 – Handmade Music Amsterdam

The event is Wednesday night; doors open at 20:00 and it’s free. See the STEIM concerts page.

I’ll also be doing an informal “State of the Union” address on the state of DIY tech, where things might go, and where people may get involved – and most importantly, what we can do to make these developments musically productive. One of the things that came out of comments last week is that we need better documentation. If people want to get involved in a broader community, outside even our traditional music community, DIY platforms for software and hardware must first be better documented, more usable, and more accessible.

Anyway, I’m thrilled to have a chance to bridge New Amsterdam (NYC) with Old Amsterdam, and start that conversation by listening and learning from a great group of people. Stay tuned.

We’ll have some guest posts through the week while I’m traveling, as well, and I’ll be back on home soil next week.