In the Pocket (Rhodes and Moog Light Paint) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

Fantastic, hip, soulful keys couple with brilliant stop-motion editing, as a Moog and Rhodes keyboard are splashed with light painting, in this new music video from Ethan Goldhammer. (See his blog for more.) It’s the perfect example of how a much-seen technique can retain its novelty when used creatively, especially as the sound itself seems to dance in light-up oscilloscope patterns.

Background:

Original music by Ethan Goldhammer and S. Burke.
Time Lapse footage shot in August 2008 on Block Island, RI.
Stop motion and light paint September 2008 in Cambridge, MA.

The lesson here: gear pr0n and special effects work perfectly when they visualize the way we feel about our musical objects and sounds.

Okay, so how did he do it? Ethan responds:

Ableton all the way. Recorded as loops with an [Akai] apc, then arranged later. The secret is also, making the animations, rendering them in [Final Cut Pro] but then WARPING them in ableton to the proper timing and bouncing them back to FCP.

Nicely done. Of course, this is why some audiovisualists have turned to Sony Vegas for Windows – formerly developed by Sonic Foundry, Vegas is actually half audio, half visual software. On the other hand, Live is a comfortable and flexible tool that does many things Vegas can’t.

Ethan also has a beautiful rendering of “Air on a G String,” the second cut from the legendary Switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, please don’t stop Ethan; I’d love to see more collaboration instead.

Air on a G String (Oscilliscoped) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

Brainpipe is a psychedellic journey down the neural pathways, a long, strange trip into the minds of an unusual band of independent game designers. And while some games demand muscular graphics cards or brilliant flat panels, this is one that requires playing with headphones. The immersive sense of the descent down this brain’s pathway is entirely dependent on its sound. While even big development houses often license sound engines, the band of hard-core designers at Digital Eel also rolled their own interactive audio code to make the sounds fully seamless.

Designers and developers Iikka Keränen (the primary coder) and Rich Carlson spoke to me about their work. (They make reference to artist Bill “Phosphorous” Sears, as well.) In the process, they have a lot to say about the design process, about ambient sound design and composition, that goes well beyond just the gaming world. This isn’t just about gaming: it’s truly about digital music.

Digital Eel has won three excellence in audio awards over the past six years from the Independent Games Festival, including, most recently, a nomination for the psychedellic hit “Brainpipe” at the Game Developer Conference this spring. Incredibly, though, says Digital Eel’s Brainpipe, in that time no one has interviewed them about the sound in their games. Independent of the interview, Rich concede to me the challenge of getting people to focus on sound:

People are focused on graphics –and gameplay– and, you know, sound always gets the short shrift, even at game companies.  Sound and music are always the smallest slice of the development budget pie.

But not so at Digital Eel.  Sound and music are integral and integrated with design from the first moment we have something happening on the screen.  We feel it must be, and not just sfx but music, especially music which so often sounds like something….like dressing, something painted on, like makeup or apartment paint to help cover up the picture holes on the walls.

Brainpipe Game Page (with Mac/Windows download links – demos available so if you hate this, you’ll find out!)

Brainpipe on Steam (Windows only)

At a glance:

Engine: Custom

Favorite inspiration: demoscene, The Dig, Star Control II, Stockhausen, Varese, Morton Subotnick, Ussachevsky

Special acheivements: hiding loop points, creating a seamless acoustic descent, tapping into your subconscious

Peter: Let’s talk about the game mechanic. Some of it feels familiar – this descent through a cylindrical pipe – but there’s something quirky and unique about your take on it. How did you settle on the interaction mechanic?

Iikka: This was quite literally the first thing I programmed for Brainpipe. We were trying to come up with a new "short" game after putting another larger project on the back burner because we didn’t have enough free time to work on it. Within a few hours I had the basic control scheme and the moving pipe running on the screen. This is similar to how some of our other short games (Plasmaworm, Dr. Blob’s Organism) got started; the first prototype is something you can play with. After that there were tweaks of course, but the feel stayed much the same.

Rich: Everybody likes the "wormhole effect" you see in space shows and movies, and we do, too, so we wanted to do something like that.  Iikka got the pipe happening and we began to play with it as a prototype. Originally, we just wanted the player to fly down the pipe having a kind of zen experience as the speed slowly increased, and that’s all.  Not much of game there, though.

We were talking about music right away and how the sound, the intensity of the patterns and colors on the pipe walls, and the speed of traveling through the pipe should all work together. [We wanted] a kind of triple whammy to suck the player in deeper and deeper — a strong, cumulative effect.

We did add obstacles and specials, things to scoop up, and plenty of things to avoid that look pretty but are lethal.  But the blend of music, color and pattern complexity, and speed remained as we’d originally intended — this began very early on in the game’s development.

Making sure each obstacle has a sustained sound so you can hear it coming in the distance in front of you and then hear it pass by and recede with Doppler shift certainly adds to the audio illusion.
I think the kicker is the way the intensity ramps in the game.  It’s sort of like a rising sawtooth waveform-shaped thing.  During each level, the intensity, the speed increases, Then, between each level, the intensity drops to give you a breather before the next level begins.  Each time the intensity drops, it is still at a higher intensity level than during the previous level break, and all of this ramps upward.

It kind of coaxes you along.  You might not realize that you’re actually moving faster and faster each level for a few levels.  It’s a good training system.  Eventually you’ll get it as the game approaches its highest intensity levels and speeds.  Anyway, I still think it’s really cool.

The sensation of synesthesia is something a handful of game designers have tried to achieve. What are some of the games that have inspired you? Are there games you feel have reached that fusion of sound and visuals?

Iikka:  My personal influence is the "demoscene" that I was a part of when I was younger; it’s a subculture of programmers and artists using computers to create non-interactive but real time audio-visual experiences.

Rich:  For me, LucasArts’ adventure game, The Dig, with its seamless looping of various Wagner themes and so on. The music would morph as scenes changed.  It was an amazing piece of work. 

The music from Star Control II innovated with music and visuals, and it directly inspired the music for Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.  The idea that each alien race should have their own theme music came from there (though this kind of thing is less unusual now than it was when SC2 was originally released), as did the idea to attach separate and distinctly different music to each thing, category of thing, item, window, pop up announcement –every action in the game and every flick of the interface … like a toddler’s "busy box" of sound.

Back to Brainpipe, other areas of music outside of games inspired us as well.  Aleatoric, musique concrete, avant garde — stuff Bill just naturally creates and stuff I’ve always loved since I was a kid. [I checked] out the LP’s at the library by Stockhausen, Varese, Morton Subotnick, Ussachevsky, all these wonderful pre-synthsizer electronic sound and found sound composers. And the records were awesome because they were always in pristine condition — relatively few others ever checked them out.

[It’s] mindblowing stuff to listen to while you’re listening to Steppenwolf on your Japanese transistor radio and playing John Phillips Sousa in your Junior High band.  Liberating.  Of course this stuff scares some people and some people react to it negatively –all strongly– but if you listen to it, put together by someone who pays attention to details while intuitively knowing what they’re doing, you can hear the music in the sighing of pond reeds, or on the heavy end, the music within industrial clamor and the beauty in the beast.

That seemed perfect for Brainpipe which really demanded a whole different musical approach and completely different kinds of music produced in ways that are not normal — not typical at all.

I love that you talk about sound being integral with the design process. Even for a musician, though, thinking in more than one medium can be a challenge. How do you approach this in terms of design; how do you make it part of the process in practice?

Rich:  When we make a game, music and sound are in right away.  From the first couple of hours, the basic prototype is on the screen, so they began to shape the sonic style of the game immediately.

Because sound and music are growing up at the same time as the art and programming is, all these elements influence each other pretty equally, so you don’t get music and sound that sound "separate" or tacked-on.  You get sound you can’t turn off, and you don’t want to, because it’s actually part of the game.

Sounds can also influence and inspire and change things.  You might be after a certain sound effect, but then you stumble across something else that’s much cooler, so the animation of a visual effect is changed to match the sound.

What was the compositional process like on this game? The sound design / sound score clearly fuse – with these recurrent "whooshing" sounds as an added layer. How were these assembled?

Rich:  Basically what you’re hearing is a series of loops.  Most of them are 16-second loops.

I knew right away that "music" with beats wasn’t the way to go.  The music had to create a soundscape, something that supports a mindscape, really — pun intended — rather than making you want to tap your foot.  It had to smoothly transition just as the "art" on the pipe wall and the speed of traveling through the pipe smoothly transition in the game.

I also knew that the music had to have a kind of primal power and evoke a sense of mystery about what is supposed to be going on and what is being revealed.  Bill was very much into this too.

At the same time, we wanted it to reflect the random thoughts floating through and bouncing around inside your brain.  One of the best ways to accomplish this was to leave conventional music behind, which is what Bill and I ended up doing.

It was important that the loops be seamless.  If you’re working with beats and grooves, that’s a very easy thing to do — it starts on one and ends on four.  You simply loop that, attaching the end to the beginning and it sounds fine because, for the most part, that’s how a bass/drums/guitar combo plays.

On top of that I knew we needed loops that didn’t sound like loops.  Loops gamers wouldn’t notice were loops, with no obvious "breaks" where the end of a loop would be obviously attached to the beginning, or the beginning of another.  The loops had to have no beginning or end!

The sources for the loops were varied. There are very successful loops in the game that are extremely simple, comprised of only two or three tracks or elements.  [But] some of them are monsters mapping out to 32 tracks or more.  Again, the idea was to create loops that don’t sound like loops with a range that would reach an orchestral level of density.

Finally, the soundtrack loops had to blend seamlessly with each other while increasing in intensity. One way to do this, of course, is to cross fade them, but that wasn’t going to be enough. The intensity and the components of each loop needed to be gauged so a dramatic and appropriate intensity ramp was reached.  I think we came very close to nailing it, but I want to keep experimenting with this.  We can go farther now, having only scratched the surface.

Can you talk about some of the found sounds that are collaged into the result? (I’m hearing the TARDIS materializing…)

Rich:  I don’t want to spoil the magic trick but, like most who do music and audio, I collect sounds from all kinds of sources.  I’ve been doing it for a long time, so if you listen carefully you’ll hear things from old TV shows, records, radio shows, interviews, sound effects records, and God knows what else folded in there. 

The soundtrack is meant to represent the background music of your own brain so references to "real life" should resonate –especially, we hoped, on an unconscious level.

I don’t want to list all the sources — some of them are in the credits –  because what is going on is also a sound trivia game.  It’s the Mystery Science Theater of game music, but the gamer is provoked to make guesses and speculate.

You noted that part of why you embarked on building your own sound engine was that OpenAL [a standard, open, cross-platform API for spatial audio] wound up being inadequate. What were some of the obstacles you encountered? Have you found other independent game creators dealing with the same issues?

Iikka:  We had to switch away from OpenAL because it made repeating clicking sounds on common integrated audio hardware. The lack of features is not terribly important, as you can always just use OpenAL as the output channel for your own sound mixing system. My sound code would be perfectly happy living on top of OpenAL if it was universally supported.

Sound is a rather underappreciated and underdeveloped area in games. To many game developers, especially smaller ones, it’s enough that it "makes a sound when something happens". The focus of development is very much on the visuals.

It seems like game audio lacks a functioning standard. OpenAL is promising but lacks some of the maturity of, say, the OpenGL API which game visuals can use. What’s your take on the landscape? Is there hope that a new standard or engine could address these issues, and result perhaps in better sound and music design in games?

Iikka:  I think it’s possible that OpenAL will mature to a point that it will work reliably on all common hardware some day, and at least form a standard foundation for people to base their sound engines on so they won’t need to learn a new API for each operating system they support.

As for workflow and design, I don’t view these as dependent on what is under the hood; they are the result of the mindset among the team members. Certainly one could imagine development tools that allow an audio artist to work more directly with the game, but a good first step is just making sure that everybody involved in the project is involved in designing the work flow.

Can you describe your custom sound engine? What functionality did you find you wanted to build into it? What would you want to put in the next iteration?

Iikka: I call it "eelmix". It’s a modular sound system in which sound sources, filters and mixers are arranged in a tree structure, like a scene graph of sorts. It’s analogous to musical instruments wired together, eventually converging to a master output to speakers.

The main goal was the modularity, the system makes it easy to make a "box" that takes a sound output (from any source), mangles it in some interesting way, and then feeds it to where it was originally going, without modifying either the source or the destination. We haven’t really used the full capabilities of this yet but the modular system is also useful for things like separating UI ("2d") sounds from the game ("3d") sounds that makes balancing them easier. And it eliminates the need to conform to some preset number of "channels".

There are other lesser goals, like eliminating clipping by using 32-bit precision internally and simulating a non-linear response curve when rendering the final output. This is a very simple and useful bit of code that really improves sound quality when there’s tons of sounds being played.
Going into the future, what’s left is mostly just filling in some blanks like including basic prefab filters, making sure that every kind of sound source can use every kind of sound sample, that sort of stuff.

Indie games it seems, like larger games, have struggled a bit on sound and music – perhaps because of the lack of better tools. But what are some smaller, experimental, or independent titles you feel have done good things with their soundtracks?

Rich:  A couple of indie games have had sound and music that was really special, I thought.  I loved the music from Saints & Sinners Bowling a few years ago.  Just great stuff that nestled right in there so you didn’t want to turn off, and that’s the true test.

Musaic Box which I encountered at this year’s IGF [Independent Games Festival] uses conventional music ingeniously.  You solve musical puzzles by ear, assembling melodies to reach certain goals. I think music is actually more integral to this game than it is in Brainpipe because it’s directly a part of gameplay.  You couldn’t play Musaic Box without it.

Flow stood out to me for doing something really quite gentle and tasteful and, well, flowy — even the soundtrack lived up to the game’s name.  That’s important I think, and that gets back to some of the things I’ve already said here.

Sounds to Hear

To head deeper into the strange sonic world the Digital Eels inhabit, Rich sent along some additional sonic resources:

Weird Worlds stuff
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/the_single.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/mfbtpv2_320Kbps.mp3

Misc. stuff from different games old & new:
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/voidprobe.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/blok.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/drblob.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/forest.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/plasmaworm.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/haircut.mp3

An interview (Omaha Sternberg interviewing Bill, "Phosphorous") with a couple snippets of Brainpipe music in it:
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/omahaphos_intermix1_160.mp3

Enjoy. The game is really unusual, so I look forward to hearing what CDM readers think of the experience. And if you have other games (or other interactive experiences) about which you’d like to learn more or get an interview, let us know.

Auditorium is a fascinating free Flash game that turns interactive music arrangement into a series of puzzles. The center of the game is what the creators call “flow” – a visual stream of particles that can be directed to audio “containers” to create sound. The user places circles with icons signifying direction in the stream to redirect the particles where desired. As the stream hits the containers, it produces musical patterns. The results aren’t entirely open-ended – that is, there is a fairly fun puzzle game here, in that you can only “clear” a level by directing the flow of particles through all the objects. But the creators do claim that:

Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play. There are no right or wrong answers; there are many ways to solve every puzzle. To get started, fill up the first audio level.

playauditorium.com

The game so far is just a “demo”; the goal is to flesh out the game and deliver a more fully-functioning version. There’s a precedent for that: games like N+ (formerly N), Crayon Physics, World of Goo (formerly Tower of Goo), fl0w, and Da Blob – even the prototype for breakout hit Portal – began their life as free games or research prototypes before becoming officially-published titles, just to name a few. In fact, a significant chunk of what’s happening in game design these days is beginning its life in research and indie projects. That’s likely because hardcore and casual gamers alike are hungry for new concepts, and A-list developers are saddled with epic projects and bone-crunchingly huge ambitions and budgets. I’m not certain Auditorium will be the next big hit, but this kind of model could generate the interactive music games that future-minded music lovers have been anticipating.

My only criticism here, as with many similar games, is that the actual music content is fairly static. It’s a good prototype, but it’d be great if these particles had more influence on music. That creates a new problem for game designers: the music itself is really part of the game mechanics. Part of the fault here is Flash, whose sonic capabilities are fairly limited without a significant investment of effort. I’d love to see a game environment in which it’s easier to prototype musical ideas, with live-generated musical materials and synthesis.

The prototype here is promising, though. Found other interactive music games out there you like? Do let us know!

(Thanks, Brent!)

What does music look like? With new sounds and new technologies, the question is more apt than ever. Tom of Music thing points, via his Twitter feed, to this interesting post regarding Ligeti’s Artikulation:

Visualizing Artikulation [Bad Assembly]

Music notation takes on a different meaning in the age of computers. After all, the essential divide in notation – between sound representation and realization – is blurred in the digital domain, in which we move between visual and sonic information seamlessly and a sound can be reproduced exactly. But, perhaps in that fluid context and without the musical conventions that grew up with notation, the importance of notation becomes that much clearer.

In this case, the classic experimental electronic composition Artikulation by composer György Ligeti has already had a visual score associated with it. Rainer Wehinger created the visuals above after the fact as an “aural score,” intending visuals to present a visible “reading” of the sounds of the piece. That makes the score itself closer to the digital visualizations we see as motion graphics works all over the Web (and on our sister site Create Digital Motion). The point isn’t to create a set of instructions by which you can perform a piece, but a visual counterpart that allows you to (presumably) hear it differently.

To be honest, I’m not always certain what to make of these results. Does this score really help you hear the piece? I’m curious to hear different reactions. But I wonder if the real holy grail comes back to software and interface. Seeing a pre-composed score is already interesting. But make that score interactive, and, in short, you have music creation software. Perhaps we’ll get beyond simple sequencers and step sequencers and start to see a growing number of interactive software designs that play around with that concept. (See Tom’s other thoughts on that today as he looks to Audio Damage’s new Automaton plug-in.)

Side Note: Twittering

If you want to follow us music bloggers on Twitter, I’m (uncreatively) peterkirn; Tom Whitwell is tombola. FriendFeed for me is the same. I haven’t made a CDM Twitter account; if for some reason that interested you, let me know, but otherwise I’m inclined to think RSS is just fine.

And if you have Twitters/FriendFeeds you think I should follow, please do holler.

If you’re interested in audiovisual performance as well as audio, here’s an app to keep an eye on. Resolume “Avenue” 3, announced today, is a ground-up rebuild of a popular VJ app. Now, things like GPU-native video may not mean much to the musical readers of this site. But how about features like this?

• Beat-synced audio triggering alongside video – using the soundtrack inside video clips, or using separate audio files
• VST audio effects, synchronized to visual effects and controls
• MIDI and OpenSoundControl (OSC) support
• Cross-fading of audio and video
• Beat-synced loops

We’ve been playing with an early betas at the live visualist-oriented Create Digital Motion and will have detailed hands-on reports soon. In the meantime, here’s a detailed look at what’s in Resolume Avenue 3:

Resolume “Avenue” 3 Announced: The Audiovisual App to Beat? [Create Digital Motion]

You can see the results above with Missy Elliot, but naturally this could also be used with very different source material as a glitchy audiovisual experimental ambient set, or as a way of triggering videos and audio backing tracks alongside a band.

It’s not without limitations. You can’t yet use VST instruments, so you couldn’t drop a synth or sampler into your visual set and play that – at least not in the first release, due in September.

But it’s clear an audiovisual convergence is happening. You can add this to the recent debut of GrandVJ, a live visual app with a virtual MIDI keyboard in the display and “Synth Mode” for triggering, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the addition of VST effects support in the visual patching environment vvvv. And we’ve likewise seen interesting ways of combining Ableton Live and other music apps with live visuals, as in Momo’s tutorial for A/V cutups with Lucifer.

vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release.

• VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects
• Multichannel waveplayer
• eCue Lighting Control Support

In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is that you can now add powerful visual interaction with a VST plug-in. That could be a huge boon to audiovisual shows. Max and Pd (among others) have had this ability for some time, so it’s not revolutionary as an idea – but it is nice to get this feature in this powerful, eye-candylicious app. (Thanks to Bjorn from vvvv for the heads-up.)

I may have to try out Kore, since Kore runs easily as a VST and hosts other instruments / effects in a way that can work live. FL Studio could be interesting, too, for the same reason – and, like vvvv, has a solid following as a Windows exclusive.

Details:

http://vvvv.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=3&postId=256
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=Change+log
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=VST
http://www.ecue.de/products/interfaces/butler.html

vvvv Tag @ createdigitalmotion.com

vvvv also recently added the ability to develop your own objects (“nodes” in vvvv speak). Development looks unusually easy, with baked-in C# support, so there’s good stuff happening in vvvv-land in general.

Labels and artists are only now catching on to the idea of letting fans remix their music, and are even slower to give those fans access to individual stems. But where musicians have embraced this idea, they’ve gotten surprisingly big outpourings of support — thank a culture that’s gotten savvy with digital music tools and consumes more music than ever.

While that change continues to spread slowly, though, audiovisual remixing could already have a jump start.

Radiohead: Big news for fans of data visualization, the coding tool Processing, and Creative Commons: Radiohead have "shot" their latest video using only 3D scanning devices in place of cameras, and they’ve made source code and the data (in friendly CSV files) free. The whole thing is released under a non-commercial / ShareAlike CC license, which is well-suited to remixes in general.  So, to anyone who was disappointed that Radiohead didn’t use a Creative Commons license for their remix contest, now you’ve gotten something you didn’t even ask for — three-dimensional, animated data of Tom Yorke’s face. And because this is essentially raw data, it’s unusually open to interpretation.

Visual stems? By total coincidence, Create Digital Motion’s Jaymis wonders aloud if the entire A/V scene couldn’t be given a jump start by two obvious (but strangely elusive) decisions: 1. release video "stems" for music videos to give people free access to them, and 2. go get a real visualist. Some artists have done #1, of course, but there wasn’t a specific name given to the result, and they’ve more often than not released full videos — so here you go.

Both stories are covered today on Create Digital Motion:

Radiohead Makes House of Cards Video with 3D Plotting, Processing; Gives You the Data

To The Next Level of AV Remix Culture: It’s Time to Release Music Video “Stems”

But I think it’s well worth asking readers here on CDMusic, too. Music sampling and even remixing may be old news — even if copyright protection remains the norm. But could opening up visual remixes and free visual interpretation re-energize how people think about music?

Of course, this isn’t just for the sake of doing it. Jaymis launched his discussion partly because he wanted something more expressive at a performance, and Radiohead’s CC decision allows them to take an experience that would be pretty limited (a few minutes of cool video) and make it far less so (live data and code remixed by especially-savvy fans). Likewise, the CC license is essential in the latter case; there’s far less incentive to fans to code their own visual software if they can’t share ownership of the result, or — just as importantly — share the resulting code with each other. (The tool the band’s video used, too, wouldn’t even exist without the open source community that created it.)

So, what’s next — particularly if you’re not as famous as Radiohead?

Hopefully we’ll have Jeremy and Ethan together for one of our future events here in New York soon.

We hear a lot about remix culture, but what does it actually mean – and does it mean anything? The founders of RemixAmerica.com hope to promote video mash-up as political discourse, by feeding Web denizens clips historical and new and remix, videocasting, and discussion tools. They’re lucky enough to have Sanford and Son and People for the American Way pioneer Norman Lear at their helm, too. We’ve got the story over on Create Digital Motion:

A New Online Community Focuses on Political Video Mashing; Here’s America Gone Psychedelic

I do want to point specifically to the video from Emergency Broadcast Network co-founder Brian Kane, particularly because of the musical score, by out-there electronic maestro David Last of Brooklyn. It’s a remade look at America’s 200th birthday, via animator Vincent Collins, and it illustrates just how important the sound of the remix can be.

Well, that and pulsing pink psychedelic Americana is just the thing for the after-4th of July week and election season here in the US. A good watch, all around.

I believe digital culture is about more than just remixes, and that buzzwords sometimes get ahead of the actual work. But part of what brings back the power of sampling is a return to its roots in political discussion – whatever your point of view may be, making some noise. Got other examples? Got a trippier animated film than the one above? Call them out in comments.

Don’t forget, if you’ve lost track of our visualist sister site, you can subscribe to Create Digital Motion’s feed.

Last month, I was lucky enough to head to a gathering of music and visual artists at the studio of artist Duncan Laurie in Jamestown, Rhode Island, accompanied by performances in Providence and Boston. Among the cast: Richard Devine, Josh Kay (Phoenicia/Schematic), Steve Nalepa, Todd Thille (Synesthete), Vidvox’s David Lublin, Josh Randall (Robotkid/Harmonix), Aerostatic, Brian Kane (former Emergency Broadcast Network), and Ooah (Glitch Mob).

And then there were the rocks and coconuts. Duncan Laurie and electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been sonifying natural signal sources, hooking up vintage radionics equipment and connecting rocks and bananas and such to signals. Richard and Josh brought along part of their formidable collection of modular equipment, and a great crackling, screaming analog racket resulted.

Fans of vintage gear, big knobs, and audiovisual mayhem will surely be jealous. (Photos above courtesy Todd Thille, Arrow.)

mind-meld.org

Flickr set 

Here’s co-organizer Todd Thille (aka Synesthete) describing the full event.

Mind Meld 2008 – Event Wrap by Todd Thille

Todd writes: The weekend of Friday the 13th marked the 3rd annual Mind Meld gathering at Duncan Laurie’s Jamestown, Rhode Island studio. An incredible assortment of audio and video artists were assembled, ostensibly to relax, but with so much talent in one place, a show or two is inevitable.

Duncan’s three-storey studio sits atop Bull Point, surrounded by water on three sides. The studio was built entirely out of salvaged materials. Floors made of glass block allow light to penetrate up from the lower workshop, through the main room and into the laboratory on the top floor. It is on the top floor that Duncan and his electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been experimenting with sonifying signals from Nature. There is an impressive array of old Radionic equipment as well as a number of devices that Gordon has developed. The visual centerpiece of the lab is the "Music Machine", an 8′ tall cuboctahedron that was part of a GENESIS Bio-Entrainment Module, a bio-feedback device developed in the 1980’s. The machine is now host to Gordon’s Purr Generator. The purr generator is a device which generates a signal at approximately 25 Hz. This coincides with the frequency of vibrations given off by a “happy cat” and has long been thought to be therapeutic. External audio sources can be played through the machine.

Much of the activity at the studio in the last few years has been given over to exploring signals in Nature. Based on precedents set by Cleve Backster and T. Townsend Brown, plants and rocks are fitted with electrodes or have copper leads affixed to them. Small voltages present are picked up with a variety of test equipment, including Wheatstone bridges, rate of change convertors, EKGs, and the IBVA brainwave monitor. The resulting data streams are converted to MIDI and used to drive Ableton Live.

For the artists that have assembled each year, the draw of a fantastic location, strange nature research and wealth of information about Radionics that Duncan posses are too much to resist. This years gathering included mainstays; Steve Nalepa, a West Coast electronic musician, gaining attention with his forthcoming Flatlands CD/DVD and Bass Science, a dubstep project with MattB; Todd Thille ( aka Synesthete ), an Istanbul based VJ and multimedia artist currently engaged in designing new software and hardware for the explorations underway at Duncan’s studio; David Lublin, of Vidvox, makers of the popular VJ software VDMX; Josh Randall ( aka Robotkid ), a Creative Director at Harmonix by day, working titles like Rock Band and Phase; Aerostatic, the Brooklyn based couple Michelle Darling and Terry Golob, who’s style ranges from ambient to breakcore with some Seseame Street (both have worked at Sesame Workshop) in for good measure.

Newer faces included Brian Kane, a former member of EBN and the self described "Karl Rove of the art world, who was busy pushing his latest meme, Meat Water; Ooah, one of the members of rising stars, the Glitch Mob; Richard Devine, still recovering from a near death experience after a small wound on his foot, infected with staph, nearly destroyed his heart, came to reek sonic mayhem with a massive stack of modular synths; Josh Kay ( aka Jeswa ), who joined Richard in exploring the sonic possibilities of the studio, and a formidable force in his right as a member of Soul Oddity and Phoenecia and founder of Schematic Records; CDM’s own Peter Kirn rounded out the list of performing artists.

Through the work of Elizabeth Keithline and Nick Bauta of The Steel Yard and Firehouse 13, the audio visual extravaganza, "we’ll do it live" found a home at the Pell-Chafee center in downtown Providence. Two massive 40′ wide screens were hung from the three-story vaulted ceiling. Duncan and Aerostatic opened with an exploration of signals coming from a piece of granite (seen in their Rockstar short) and a banana. Peter Kirn deftly handled Kore for his 30 minute set with reactive visuals by Synestete. Brian Kane performed selections from his triple-head av masterpiece, HDADD. Robotkid and rndm threw down a bumpin’ av mashup. Nalepa and David Lublin got the party moving with Flatlands remixes, dubstep tracks and ethereal hand-held footage with Quartz Composer overlays. Ooah brought out the glitch hop with his Panty Raid and tracks from other Mob members. Richard Devine and Josh Kay double-teamed Traktor, bring the soundsystem down with meters in the red and finishing out the night with TapStereo.

The event picked up and relocated to Duncan’s studio where Richard and Josh Kay set up a wall of modular synths to plug into the different sound sources. Peter got busy writing an FFT patch in Processing and tried it out with signals coming from an onion and a lime. He also experimented with Gordon’s Bat Box. The rest of the crew amused themselves with Rock Band and chatting in small groups around the bar-b-gue that sprang up on the driveway.

The group started to disperse on Sunday and everyone but Richard and Josh Kay had left by the time that Steve, photographer Arrow One, Peter and I headed up to Boston on Monday night. We met up with Robotkid and Brian Kane for a show in Cambridge at Beat Research. There was a good crowd despite it being a rainy school night. Peter had much better control over his Kore set. Robotkid and I mixed visuals until Brian fired up his DVJ and played some of his AV pieces. Nalepa came in a pinstripe suit and tore up the room with Bass Science dubstep.

Peter and I started Tuesday morning at the new offices of Harmonix. We decided not to get sucked into any meetings and beat a retreat to the MIT Museum. There were good exhibits on deep sea craft, high-speed photography and sculptor Arthur Ganson.

The afternoon brought a visit to the studio of visionary painter Paul Laffoley. He had requested a chicken stuffed in a watermelon, potential racial slur aside, we obliged and hand delivered him a "chelon." Paul was in the midst of prepping for a 60s and 70s retrospective that is to be on display in New York in February. He was also hard at work on a Tarot deck. We parted with Peter afterwards and the 3rd annual Mind Meld came to a close.

Thanks to Todd Thille for writing up this report for CDM. Captions by Peter Kirn.