Lusine on the Detroit People Mover, Movement 2009 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

I’ve been a big admirer of Lusine’s adept sound palette, which smartly blends minimal, techno, and ambient techniques. That, in turn, represents to me some of the best stuff the US-based label Ghostly International is turning out. Liz McLean Knight sends us this video of a conversation she had with Lusine at Detroit’s Movement Festival in May, wandering onto the city’s People Mover. (You can join in a chorus of the Simpsons “Monorail” tune if you like.)

One aside from Lusine not in the above video: he talked about sticking with stock plug-ins for stability. What he didn’t say, but what you might infer, is that this may help him keep his sound focused rather than getting distracted by other capabilities. On the other hand, speaking of rules that are meant to be broken, he’s friends with Richard Devine, who has a VST folder that could put any of us to shame and bring any VST host to its knees.

You can bet CDM will check in with Lusine when the new album comes out – and we’re eager to hear just what this vocal/”pop” direction may actually sound like.

http://lusineweb.com/

No relation to the Lusine who was Miss Armenia 2003, though I can’t imagine this Lusine would mind the comparison.

Gestural Music Sequencer from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Something as simple as remapping a single knob can give you new musical ideas. So expand that to entire gestures and live video input, and you can help push your performance in new directions and out of old habits. That’s why it’s always great to see projects like the Gestural Music Sequencer.

Built entirely in free tools – tools fairly friendly even to non-coders – the GMS lets composer and musician John Keston explore new ideas through gestures captured in a video stream. It’s easier to see than to talk about, so check out the just-completed documentary short by Josh Klos, with the aid of Julie Kistler and Brian Smith. (And yes, documentation makes a huge difference; we’d love to see more of this stuff!)

The ingredients:

• Processing, the free, multiplatform coding environment [site | cdmu tag | cdmo tag]
• controlP5, a lovely, light, quick-and-dirty library for UI controls
• Ableton Live – though you could substitute other software via MIDI, Live makes a nice, familiar interactive music engine

Live-triggered video inside your music host is about to get a lot more popular. Daniel “Herb” Herbert writes to let us know that his Mabuse Software, an “experimental audiovisual software company,” has developed a new AV plug-in for mashing up video. It’s a VST plug-in based on the now-defunct Pluggo, with a Max for Live port coming later this year as that is released. Of course, that does reveal some of the trouble with Cycling ’74’s decision to dump Pluggo. You’ll be limited to running this kind of cool software in Live, and from what they’ve said so far, you’ll also have to pay for Max for Live to do it – no free run-time is planned. But I can tell you that all of Jitter’s video and 3D output capabilities work from inside Max, including in full-screen mode, so there’s no question you’ll get some power out of the combination. I just hope people find some creative stuff to do and not just more of the same YouTube mash-ups.

Herb describes the software and promises more AV tools to come:

The beta version won’t save, but is otherwise fully functional.
A full screen add-on will be available soon, as well as a number of other plugins to expand the Mabuse AV range.
Features include:
Run video within a VST plugin
Automatic Tempo matching
MIDI controllable video fx
Easy to use browser
Record to Quicktime Movie

A PC version will be available if there’s enough interest through the forum and you could be in with a chance of winning a copy by joining the mailing list before the full version is released.

Short 1 min demo video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9TGDrkJh6A

5 min tutorial video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ_xDptp-ws

Via YouTube Doubler, a twisted online YouTube mash-up tool created by digital artist and Emergency Broadcast Network veteran Brian Kane, comes a strange new … orchestral composition. (EBN, for those not in the know, should translate as "video mash-ups before you knew what video mash-ups were.") Charlie Rose interviews Charlie Rose. "Google…" Just watch. (The video is embedded after the break, as it’s essential that both clips start up at the same time. Video will therefore naturally autoplay.)

We’ve got two layers of mashing-up going on: the first layer of this mashed … cake is a new composition by Tan Dun.

ThruYou / Kutiman already showed us what happens when an elaborate video mix pieces together imaginative songs from tiny clips of YouTube uploads – a potentially gimmicky concept, but brilliant when done right. Noted composer Tan Dun has gone that route, as well, with his Internet Symphony.

Using thousands of submissions to http://youtube.com/symphony, the resulting composition is entitled “Internet Symphony, Eroica.” See top.

But all this gets much better when the mash-up is squared in YouTube Doubler. In addition to the Tan Dun composition, a short film has Charlie Rose interviewing Charlie Rose about the Internet. Rose appears as the spoken word narrator on top of Tan Dun’s score, and what results is an odd, reflective commentary on our times, adding a certain nervous uncertainty to Tan Dun’s Internet optimism.

Enjoy.

Matt Ganucheau and I got to sit down with Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing Video during the Game Developer Conference to discuss some of the potential for interactive music in games. Matt is a composer, sound designer, and educator, talking about how he’s encouraging his own students to think about adaptive music in new ways, combining Max/MSP and a Space Invaders clone built in the Unity Game Engine. (See our story from earlier this week.)

I talk a little about my sense that new tools could expand the range of possibilities in game music. Right now, the two major game engines are the AudioKinetic Wwise and Firelight fmod engines, each of which do have potential of their own – and continue adding features for more interactive sound scores. Each got some significant, flashy new features announced at GDC. But I was especially impressed by the use of Pure Data (Pd) in a custom implementation inside the game Spore. That allowed the compositional team to produce a truly generative musical score (led by legendary composer Brian Eno, with EA’s Kent Jolly and composer Aaron McLeran). I hope we see more of that in the future. Starting of students doing it themselves (with Max in this case) is not a bad way to start.

Boing Boing has more video of us they’ll be posting soon – including the embarrassing but diverting footage of us dancing around in Katamari costumes.

I’m new to this speaking live thing, but hope you enjoy. My favorite part was getting questions going. Livecasting is something we’ll try here soon.

A big thanks to Xeni and the talented Boing Boing TV crew for inviting us on and running a great show! And thanks to those of you who came on the chat rooms to talk to us – actually a lot of terrific questions and comments we weren’t able to address.

Music in Video Games, a conversation with Peter Kirn and Matt Ganucheau [Boing Boing, with lots of download options for YouTube, MP4, iTunes, etc.]