Wall•E Loves Noise Toys (part 1) from Gian Pablo Villamil on Vimeo.

This Thursday night, if you’re in NYC, you’ll want to be in Brooklyn – and around the world, stay tuned as always to CDM.

Handmade Music projects will again explode into the nerdster party in Brooklyn, with more ways to get involved worldwide. The science fair-meets-music lounge event hits Thursday night, and this time, you can walk home with your very own noisemakers – no musical or electronic experience required.

Tristan Perich, composer, sound artist, inventor, and 1-bit music maker will be onhand from Loud Objects to share the Noise Toy kit. He’ll walk you through making one, talk about how it works, and we’ll make a little racket.

And once we get a few of those kits made, you’ll be welcome to join in an impromptu Noise Toy Ensemble!

If you fancy higher-fi, digital music and virtual reality, we’ve got you covered, too, with a whole bunch of software projects.

• Noise Toy workshop with Loud Objects / Tristan Perich: Learn how this cheap kit can make glitchy sounds like Bzzzzrrrreeeeepehkhkhkhhhhhhhk! Workshop + kits – make one for free, $10 suggested donation to take it home!
• Force fields: Pulsantes is pulsating musical sequencer software with interconnected rings and force fields generating rhythms, created by Spanish artist Jaime Munarriz. (Jaime can’t be there, so I’m bringing his work!)
• Nintendo instruments and organic musical chemistry: glitchDS is a free cellular autamaton-based musical sequencer, ported from Nintendo DS to PC/Mac – this and other sound toys by Bret Truchan.
• Artificial musical realities: jReality is a Java library for creating real-time interactive audiovisual apps in 3D, with fully three-dimensional sound and visuals, motion tracking, stereo projection, and more. Peter Brinkmann shows off the work of the jReality project, including his own sound components.
• Wireless Sound Objects by Eric Beug are the equivalent of a wire-free modular synthesizer, for improvisation, performance, and education.
• Free business-card kits for exploring basic sound circuitry from PAiA didn’t ship in time for last month’s event, but they’re here now — get your free kit while they last, then draw your own sound controllers with pencils!

Presented by createdigitalmusic.com with our friends at music trend-setters XLR8R.com, DIY bible makezine.com, and self-made marketplace Etsy.com

Hosted by artists’ facility and happening location 3rd Ward

7:30pm, Thursday, March 19 – FREE!
3rd Ward is located at 195 Morgan Ave., at the corner of Stagg St., in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
(near the Grand St L train)
Directions
RSVP: handmade@3rdward.com

More on the projects – and many of these are available online, so I’m still working on ways of holding virtual Handmade Music parties, too.

Second Life is one of those things I might try out one of these days, except that I’m quite busy with my first, second, third, and fourth lives at the moment. I’m surprised that while Tom at Music thing catches on to music gear sales in the virtual community, he misses out on all the synths. Search “synth” on the SLBoutique, and you’ll find lots of classic gear rendered in 3D form. Seen recently:

Conbrio Synth
Yamaha DX1
Roland JX10
TimewARP 2600 (a unique virtual version of a virtual version of a real synth – yikes!)

All of these come from SL user Hardmoon Systems. (Hardmoon, are you out there on CDM by any chance?)

Tom also points in an update to the virtual studio featured last year on the Second Life blog SLOG. Now the bad news: a lot of this gear is entirely virtual. It’s just 3D eye candy, a la the Sims, with the disturbing requirement of having to actually pay real money for it. (Money for a non-functional 3D virtual mock-up of a virtual synth? What?) At best, you’ll get an animation of someone playing the synth.

Naturally, this gets my gears turning. While SLOG can only dream of General MIDI integration (oh … boy … wouldn’t that … be fun), I’m thinking about a virtual 3D world that can transmit and receive OSC data and simple audio streams. Second Life can at least do the audio end, but 3D worlds that allow you to control real music sources while in the virtual space could add more dimension. Search CDM for Quake and Unreal and you’ll see some other examples. Second Life, as much as the kids today may love it, may not be the best environment for that.

Second Life is becoming a major international community for music, and Ableton’s David Cross wondered in an email to me the other day if perhaps this would extend from communities of listeners to user groups and communities of music makers. The synths might all be eye candy, but there are free spaces with concerts and chances to experience music — a lot more interesting, as far as net music, than staring at a QuickTime stream. That’s made me wonder, for those of you who do have time for a Second Life, has anyone found interesting communities or resources in SL? Or is it really just hype, and there’s a better alternative virtual community? Let us know.

Elsewhere:
Music gear for sale in Second Life [Music thing]
Wired Magazine jumps on the SL bandwagon