MIDI ON THE ROAD. Technique : Miscellaneous Being a MIDI-based musician doesn't mean that you can't get out and play live gigs; you just need to plan more carefully than the average pub band. Grizzled live MIDI veteran David Harman explains the pitfalls and outlines some of the preparation you need to take your show on the road. This is the first article in a two-part series. Read Part 2. If you were to wander around any medium-sized town centre on a Friday night, moving from this live music venue to that and observing the gear used by the bands, you might be forgiven for concluding that the MIDI revolution had never happened. The technology that we all know and love has allowed us greater production flexibility and a wider sonic palette than ever before, resulting in the creation of innovative music in hundreds of darkened bedrooms and project studios around the country.
Whether you're heading out there to get noticed, explore new musical avenues or just to have a laugh, the same basic principles apply: Daft Punk open up in exclusive interview with French magazine; ‘We make music for the fans’ As the release of “Random Access Memories” inches closer, the hype machine around Daft Punk‘s latest album continues to reach meteoric proportions. With the release of “Get Lucky,” thousands of shoddy bootlegs have landed in the trash, putting the robotic duo back where they belong – at the top of their game and back in the spotlight. Known for their enigmatic personas, Thomas and Guy usually shy away from the press circus but have made an exception for France’s Rock & Folk magazine wherein they discuss the origins of the album, their approach to the production and the fact that “no one tries anymore.” In this lengthy interview, Daft Punk open up about the state of electronic music, expressing their motivations for creating a new album and their concerns with the way the scene is trending acknowledging that they believe “there is less ambition today.”
Read past the break for the article translated in its entirety – or read the original French version here. Daft Punk: Right! Open Source Music. DJing Is Hard. Sometimes, even in the coolest of venues, it can all fall apart for the DJ. As I saw happen to one DJ recently… Pic: SoBoUK Ever felt utterly dejected with your DJing? Had a Friday 13th moment? Failed to learn an important skill despite trying and trying? It was at a VIP-type party held by a big DJ gear manufacturer. And if someone with decades of experience behind them can mess up like this, it just shows that none of us is immune. Why it has to be this way But the thing is, anything worth doing has to be hard, has to have the risk of you making a royal mess of it, built right in there. But the thing is, our mood and the crowd can seriously affect how we feel about being stood up there. Also, there’s basic performance nerves to conquer. And despite digital gear making some of the manual skills easy, the real skills of DJing – being sure of your music, programming it properly, successfully reading the crowd – haven’t changed one iota in decades.
You’re not alone… DJing is hard. Complete Works\by BWV Number-All. Skrillex: The $15 Million DJ. Music Thing: A Radio Sequencer, How to Get Into DIY Synth Modules, How to Have Fun. Lured by the siren song of modular synthesis and DIY electronics, but not sure how to navigate the piles of requisite knowledge – or uncertain what the trip down this rabbit hole might have in store? For years, Tom Whitwell’s Music Thing was a beloved daily read, as that site and this one were among the early blog-format destinations for music tech.
Tom moved on – something about a major day-gig at a paper called The Times, perhaps named after the font? – but that makes us all the more delighted to get a dispatch from him. In this guest column for CDM, he introduces one project, a brilliant FM radio sequencer, but also helps us catch up on reading on modular synthesis and electronics dating back to the origins of the technology. And he has a realistic look at what this will do to your life – all inspired by “pure enthusiasm,” as he puts it, “this is fun, you should try it.” Hey, isn’t that what the drug dealer said in those just-say-no instructional videos we watched in the 80s? Deadmau5 Shares His Modular Synthesizer Secrets Synthtopia. Moogfest - Mavericks of Sound Design Panel.
Secrets Of Kitchen Music How To Turn Ordinary Stuff Into MIDI Controllers Synthtopia. How To Build A Custom MIDI Controller Synthtopia. The Hand-Cranked, Antique MIDI Sequencer (High-Res Images, Details) Music, ephemeral and fleeting, to many of us wants tangible embodiment, some physical sense of the tug we feel from its unseen vibrations. We’ve regularly featured the image of the circle as a sequence; even as music software prefers left-to-right piano rolls and scores and tracks, it’s a logical shape.
Here, Finnish sound artist Martin Bircher looks to a last-century invention to build a mechanical expression of the sequencer. From an antique music box, comes MIDI, as in the video above. And if that’s too discordant for you, have a look at the original video below. Even in comparison to our analog electronics, there’s something beautiful about seeing the mechanical inner workings of a musical expression. Official description: “Digital Enhancement” is an interactive sound installation consisting of an electrified Symphonion Brevet No. 28, a synthesizer, an amplifier and four headphones.
And the original Symphonion in action: Another last-century classic – the Roland Super JV. 2012 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition Winners Challenge Your Preconceptions About Music. Winners have been announced in the 2012 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition – an annual event to find the world’s best new ideas in musicality, design, and engineering. Competition finals were held February 17, 2012 at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA. Twenty-four inventors, composers and designers from nine countries were selected to compete, from more than 50 entries.
Instruments were judged on musicality, design and engineering by a panel including Atau Tanaka, media artist and researcher, and Cyril Lance, chief engineer at electronic musical instrument manufacturer Moog Music. The competition challenges preconceptions both about what is a musical instrument and what is music. First place went to Marco Donnarumma, for Xth Sense, above. 2nd place went to Kyle Evans for Cracked Ray Tube.
Thrid place went to Bojan Gagic for LIGHTUNE.G. See the full slate of preliminary performances at the competition site. Project Blog Blog Archive Alex Nowitz > The Strophonion Instrument Development (2010-2011) The Strophonion is an electronic instrument which was developed and built by STEIM from 2010 until 2011. It belongs to the instrument group, that is usually subsumed under the term live-electronics using gestural controllers. The following blog gives an insight into the entire process of developing and building the Strophonion from the beginning. The Strophonion (left and right hand controller), 2011 © Frank Baldé Since fall 2007 I was invited by STEIM on a regular basis in order to develop my first electronic instrument, mainly with Daniel Schorno, a setup which is controlled by two Wii-remotes and which I call Stimmflieger.
Nowitz with Strophonion, 2011 © STEIM A) Initial and conceptual thoughts At first, I was collecting all kinds of ideas for developing, designing and creating an electronic instrument. 1) The instrument should be gestural and expressive. 4) Last but not least, the instrument should be wireless. Glove by Byungjun Kwon, 2010 © Byungjun Kwon Acknowledgements: Din is noise.
New Software Synth, Cosmosƒ, Designed For ‘Non-Standard Synthesis’ SonicLab has introduced Cosmosƒ – a new software synth with a real-time ‘dynamic stochastic synthesis engine’. Cosmosf is designed to explore what Sonic Lab calls ‘non-standard synthesis’: Cosmosƒ is a real-time dynamic stochastic synthesis engine, which does generate sonic textures with a complex event distribution process. Discrete sonic events of certain density are distributed in a time space with their onset time and duration parameter calculated with stochastic/deterministic functions. Each macro event defines the duration of a meso space, and the sub events are distributed inside it. The overall goal of these functions is to achieve control on each event space and perform the process of change on the appropriate operation level. Here’s an example of Cosmosf in action: Curating Sound: Exploring Performance and Embodiment, in Live Excerpts and Analysis from BodyControlled.
Continuing our insight into this view into electronic music performance and art through the lens of BodyControlled in Berlin, we’re joined by guest writer Kristin Trethewey. Kristin, a Canadian-born video artist and curator, takes another look at LEAP and BodyControlled, on the eve of its second installment. She gets straight at the question of what “BodyControlled” means, and what it can mean for sonic performance and creation. And I wanted to make sure to subtract myself from this write-up, seeing as I was playing – but see the excellent timelapse of the evening, above. -Ed. LEAP is one of these spectacular Berlin venues you’ve been hearing so much about. Robert Henke at BodyControlled, somewhere deep into a 12-hour performance.
BodyControlled is a series focused on the intersection of performance and electronics. CDM’s Peter Kirn (neverheardofhim) at BodyControlled in November. Excerpt – LEAP Gallery Berlin, 26.11 by peterkirn Electronic autopsy: Whitty and Cornford at work. Like a Wheel Within a Wheel: Beautiful Optical Turntables Generate Spinning Rhythms. Music is deeply tied up with motion; seeing that in a machine is somehow satisfying.
Soundmachines, from the enigmatically-titled Berlin studio TheProduct*, is an interactive physical installation made from optical turntables. By moving the “tone arm” – really in this case an optical sensor attached to an extended mount – you can change rhythms and sound sweeps. We’ve naturally seen many visualizations, tangible and digital, that make loops into wheels. But it’s worth noting the particular connection to a kinetic experiment by The Books’ Nick Zammuto from the film earlier this week. In fact, my one criticism of this piece is that the rhythms are so regular. Some syncopation in a machine like this would be not only pleasing, but immediately visible to the eye and therefore understandable.
Perhaps even decoupling the wheels from the motor could allow a user to experiment with sound. That’s not to take away from the impact of this piece, and in particular, the beauty of its installation. New Music Interface – The CCC-Pad (Sneak Preview) Håkan Lidbo tipped us off to the CCC-Pad, described as “a creative media interface where sounds and video can be played in a new and intuitive way”. The first version will be on the market in fall 2012, but the big touch screen prototype was tested at the Swedish Eurovision Song Contest, Jan 11, embedded above. The CCC-PAd is a prototype and part of an extensive research project by Dr Rikard Lindell in collaboration with Lidbo, programmers and designers. The concept of the CCC-Pad project is that everyone can interact with each other.
Most live electronic music is about musicians playing on separate units without the possibility to effect each others music. Same for visual artists. Collaborators in this projects are the designers Oskar Kjelleryd and Haithem Mizban from Quantum White and the programmers Fredrik Jansson and Dr Rikard Lindell from Mälardalen University. From Beautiful Ambient Modern Dance to Dubstep, Gestures to Music in Kinect (Download the Tool) It started as some compelling demos or proof of concept, but it’s plenty real now: the tools for translating movement, gesture, and dance from the body to interactive music march forward. Empowered by Microsoft’s Kinect and an artist-friendly toolchain, even a single, clever developer can do a lot. Sound designer, music producer, and Max/MSP developer Chris Vik of Melbourne has been one of those busy early pioneers, with an incredible tool called Kinectar.
So, the tech is cool and shiny and impressive: what about the actual music? And, even more importantly, what if all the hand waving and moving about could be meaningful? That’s the next step. For his part, Chris is teaming up with a dancer and choreographer to combine his compositional ideas with someone who knows how to move. The Dubstep-y demos (all below) are impressive, true, but the early tests of the work with the choreographer are simply beautiful, and demonstrate that wobble bass isn’t the limit of what this can do. Robotic Quintet Composes And Plays Its Own Music. Sound Machines 2.0 is Festo's latest effort to create robotic musicians. The German engineering firm Festo has developed a self-playing robotic string quintet that will listen to a piece of music and generate new musical compositions in various musical styles effortlessly.
Dubbed Sound Machines 2.0, the acoustic ensemble is made up of two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass, each consisting of a single string that is modulated by an electric actuator for pitch, a pneumatic cylinder that acts as a hammer to vibrate the string, and a 40 watt speaker. A new composition is generated in a two-stage process. First, a melody played on a keyboard or xylophone is broken down into the pitch, duration, and intensity of each note, and software with various algorithms and compositional rules derived from Conway’s “Game of Life” generates a new composition of a set length.
Here’s an example of what the robots can produce: It’s worth taking a look at the Sound Machines 1.0 too: [Media: Festo] Making Digital One-of-a-Kind: Inside Icarus’ Generative Album in 1000 Variations. Even the artwork changes. This is my personal copy – #148. Digital: disposable, identical, infinitely reproducible. Recordings: static, unchanging. Or … are they? Icarus’ Fake Fish Distribution (FFD), a self-described “album in 1000 variations,” generates a one-of-a-kind download for each purchaser. Generative, parametric software takes the composition, by London-based musicians-slash-software engineers Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, and tailors the output so that each file is distinct.
If you’re the 437th purchaser of the limited-run of 1000, in other words, you get a composition that is different from 436 before you and 438 after you. Happily, the music is evocative and adventurous, a meandering path through a soundworld of warm hums and clockwork-like buzzes and rattles, insistent rhythms and jazz-like flourishes of timbre and melody. You can listen to some samples, though it’s just a taste of the larger musical environment. Fake Fish Distribution – version 500 sampler by Icarus… Across the Universe: Mind-Blowing AV Performance Makes Music a Spacey Trip. Turning music and sound into three-dimensional worlds often yields something that fields like a trip through space.
But this feels like a real trip. Through pulsing, glowing starfields, “Versum”‘s audiovisual movements are brain-bendingly transformative. Artist Tarik Barri has created an integrated world of sound and image that makes the interface and the compositional realms seamless. It seems as though this really is a musical universe, through whose harmonies of the spheres you can fly like. Boldly going, indeed. Ingredients: Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, Java, SuperCollider, GLSL [the 3D shading language], and … some serious skill and time, I imagine. The work has been in development for some years (not surprisingly, given the results). Tarik’s work resurfaced after a presentation in the UK. I’m just back from the M4_u Max/MSP/Jitter conference in Leicester (was great, btw), where Tarik Barri presented his project ‘Versum’, both as an installation and as a performance.
More: FRACT, 3D Adventure Game Played with Synths and Sequencers: Myst Meets Music Making. A Primer on Creating Interactive Music for Games. Soundation — Make music online. A Guide to Producing an Epic Orchestral Track.
How to Listen to Music: A Vintage Guide to the 7 Essential Skills. Mike Garson On Ultimate Improvisation. Deadmau5, Honest About His Own Press-Play Sets, Misses Out On “Scene” Prodigies Leaping Beyond Electronic Dance Music.