Boing Boing has come into possession of some wicked footage of an anonymous Atari Computer Camp excursion that has everything you could ever want from grainy stock video: namely, yellowed and over-saturated money shots of retro-tech, and a bevy of over-eager and still-innocent pre-teens banging out BASIC to make crossword crosses out of the words Van Halen (no joke!) and gawping at the awesome limitless power and future of computers.

Here’s the catch: neither of the videos — the first clocking in at about seven minutes, and the second coming in at seven and a half — have any sound at all.

And so: given Offworld/Boing Boing’s sizable audience of chiptune/junk-tech musicians, we thought we’d throw the score open to you. If you’re interested in submitting some of your music for the videos, which will be broadcast on BBtv at a later date, send an email to brandon@offworld.com with the subject line “Atari Computer Camp” and we’ll dig through and select our favorites from there. Bonus points awarded for (but certainly not limited to) composing on actual 8-bit Atari tech.

We’ll admit it – this video of the V-Accordion Festival sort of freaked us out with its frightening majesty.

The technology behind Roland’s V-Accordion line, though, is pretty interesting – combining everything you know and love about accordions (Italian restaurants) with a slice of MIDI-controlled synth action. It does orchestral sounds, physical behavior modeling and has MIDI out for controlling Live, your bent Casio or whatever freaky gear you get your synth on with.

Anyway – Roland has announced an accordion contest, with the grand prize being a trip to Rome to jam with the V-Accordion babes at the V-Accordion festival.

Note: they actually make no mention of V-Accordion babes in the contest rules, but if you play the accordion, you can dream.

Livid has announced that they will be giving away a limited edition of their Ohm DJ/VJ controller:

In celebration of the great response we have had this past year for the Ohm controller with hundreds of users now in over 35 countries, we are giving away an Special Edition Ohm package. This one-of-a-kind Ohm is made of Jelutong wood with a light blue stain and will be the only one of its kind in circulation. This Ohm is being made custom for this drawing as an appreciation to the community. The drawing will take place on March 16th.

The entire package is worth $930 USD and includes an Ohm, a copy of Union and Cell VJ softwares, a Livid T-Shirt, and shipping. All purchases made from the Livid Instruments website (refills, T-shirts, hardware, software etc…) will be automatically entered in the giveaway, additionally you can enter the giveaway by entering your information on the form here. The winner will be randomly picked on the 16th of March and we will also announce the winner on the lividinstruments website.

You can enter here.

Note: By entering, it looks like you’re signing up for the Livid email newsletter.

Puremagnetik has created a custom sound set for you to download, warp, morph, mangle and destroy!

1) Login and Download the Selector Library Here.

2) The Selector Library comes packed with percussives. Use Ableton’s Sampler, Simpler or Impulse and any Audio or MIDI effect(s) from the Ableton Library to create 1-10 Drum Racks.

3) Make 4 Live Clips for each rack that you create.

4) Send your Live Pack to selector@puremagnetik.com by February 16th.

Got questions? Selector discussion is available here.

Prizes:

• 1st Place —> $100 store credit at Halcyon Online, $100 Coupon from Percussa, Free 2 year subscription to Puremagnetik, Merchandise from the Ableton Web Shop.
• 2nd & 3rd Place —> $50 store credit at Halcyon Online, $50 Coupon from Percussa, $100 QuickBuy Coupon from Puremagnetik, Merchandise from the Ableton Web Shop.
• Twelve runner-ups will have their content included in the final Selector Micropak and will be awarded a $12 QuickBuy Coupon from Puremagnetik. All names will be credited on all Live Racks and Clips.

The list of all winners will be posted on PM’s home page on February 20th.

This sounds a bit like a single entendre – but if you’ve got Alesis equipment and you show your rig on YouTube, you could win a big package and upgrade your gear. 

Here are the details:

Do you love your Alesis gear? Tell the world about it and you could win a DM5 Pro Kit with SURGE Cymbals! Just fill out the form below and upload a video of a performance (solo or group) or demonstration of you using your Alesis gear to YouTube between now and January 11, 2008 to enter the contest. Videos must cover current (not legacy) Alesis products to win, preferably from the new products page. 

The lucky winner will receive an Alesis DM5 Pro Kit with SURGE Cymbals for their entry!

You can enter as many times as you like, but please submit only one video per piece of Alesis gear you own so enter early and often! We will notify the winner via email live from the Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, CA on January 15, 2009. 

Details here.

Virtual instrument company SMule is looking for the most “smulian” Ocarina videos in their This Contest Blows contest..

February Album Writing Month (FAWM) might be what you need.

Each February, FAWM.ORG forges a collaborative community where musicians of all walks and skill levels write an album’s worth of material in the shortest month of the year (roughly one tune every other day).

This year’s FAWM is the sixth annual event.

A trio of up and coming electronic dance musicians from Montreal have been crowned the top synthesizer composers in Canada.

FM Radio Gods, Montreal dance scene heavyweights, were judged the winners of the Roland Synthesizer Contest at the competition Finals held in Montreal last week. There sound blends minimal house, glitchy electro, trance and techno. Their video for Elektro Kills is embedded above. 

The group’s composition, See You Later Oscillator, was played for a crowd at the Society for Arts and Technology. The slow dance track repeatedly built and released tension in glitch- and percussion-laden patches that had the crowd bopping and swaying. 

The Roland Synthesizer Contest invited composers to submit original music tracks created on keyboard, software or other synthesizers to Roland Canada between July 1 and October 15, 2008. The top six tracks were chosen, published on a MySpace site and put to a public vote to choose the top three entries. The three chosen entrants, FM Radio Gods, Alessio Mazzone, and Francis Hooper hailed from Montreal, QC, Maple, ON and Burnaby, BC respectively.

The finalists’ tracks were played at the Roland Synthesizer Contest Finals on November 13, 2008 at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) building in Montreal in front of a live audience and judging panel composed of:

• Amin Bhatia, winner of the Roland International Synthesizer Competition in 1981 and 1982;
• Jason Amm AKA Solvent, a Toronto-based electronic musician;
• Jeremy Greenspan, one half of the Hamilton-based hit duo Junior Boys; and
• Paul McCabe, vice-president of Roland Canada.

FM Radio Gods took the glory of first-place and walked away with the grand prize: a Roland V-Synth GT synthesizer valued at $3,895.00. Second-place went to Francis Hooper, who took home a Roland SH-201 and Roland SONIC Cell, and third-place went to Alessio Mazzone, who won an EDIROL PCR-500 and Cakewalk Pro Suite.

Video site Vimeo has teamed up with the band Justice on a new video contest – HOW WERE YOU GREAT IN 2008?

Drawing from this past year, they want to see what you did that was GREAT. Whether you were filming, recording, playing, listening, drawing, snapping photos, writing, traveling, touring, blogging, promoting something you love, voting, blah blah blah.

There are over $6000.00 in prizes, which include a trip to hang out with 2008’s Grammy nominated electronic duo, Justice & Ed Banger mate and art director, So Me on New Year’s Eve in Chicago, at Revolution Number 9, as well as limited edition custom merch.

To enter, videos must be between 30 seconds and 3 minutes and must be tagged with ‘jst4all’ and a tag for the blog/site that referred you to the contest.

That means that you add these two tags to your videos: jst4all and synthtopia, and when you win, you send me a postcard from your trip.

Submissions will be accepted till the end of November and the finalists will be determined by the video that receives the most likes.

The requirements are pretty wide open – so submit a cool video, tag it jst4all and synthtopia, and see if you can win some cool schwag!

Image: ghindo

There’s a related remix context you may want to check out, too.

Description:

Pulse contains all the musical maps and charts you need to plan and execute your own fantastic voyage through entire worlds of electronica, hip-hop, and film music.

With classic analog sound streams tapped from hot Buchla, Doepfer and Cwejman electronics, and beat structures forged in a deep neural network of today’s finest soft synths, Pulse is completely packed with royalty-free sounds, each one organized and fortified with spot-on metadata that ensures seamless playback in ACID software and every other program that supports .wav files. Blend the essential elements in Pure Analog Lifeforms and build formidable music species adaptable to any inner landscape.

397 (545 MB) original, royalty-free WAV files.

We’re really excited to tell you that Jazzanova are doing a remix contest for their new single ‘I Can See’ on SoundCloud. We just had a listen through the parts and it really sounds like a fun remix project to work on. Ben Westbeech does a great job on the vocals and it seems one could do fun stuff with the piano backing track. The original tune is really good as well! 

To start working, just head over to the Jazzanova remix site, register with your email, download the parts and drop your mix in the DropBox. The Jazzanovas will then listen through and comment directly on your track!

A bunch of nice prizes (including Ableton Live licenses and SoundCloud PRO accounts…) are waiting for the lucky winners- and on top the chance of a digital release on Berlin-based label Sonar Kollektiv. The remixes will be presented on the Jazzanova website and Soundcloud. And the winner of the competition will be picked by the Jazzanovas themselves.

This is a cool contest and it shows off how great SoundCloud can work for sharing groups of files. You can check out the remix parts below:

See the Jazzanova site for remix contest details.

Ohm Force has announced a fun contest – How The Minimonsta Saved The World.

How it works: you make a cool track with Minimonsta before November 30th (you can use the free demo version), you send it to Ohm Force, you win cool stuff. Details here.

How The Minimonsta Saved The World comic below:

“No one knows more about the right mixer for their style of music than the DJ”, stated Scott Garside, Behringer Corporate Communications Manager. “Any company eager to listen to their users is going to learn not only what is right about their mixers, but also where they have missed the mark. Our greatest hope is that DJs who use any brand of mixer will see this as an opportunity to get a design really right. In any case, the DJ wins.”

A completed survey is also an entry to win one of five Behringer DDM4000 digital DJ mixers. Winners will be announced on January 1st, 2009.

Uploaded to the Roland Synthesizer Contest MySpace site, the top six tracks will be open to public vote for two weeks from Tuesday, October 21 to Friday, October 31.

The poll ratings, combined with the judges’ previous scores, will determine the top three finalists who will compete at the Roland Synthesizer Contest Finals event in Montreal on November 13, 2008.

The top six semi-finalists were chosen by an esteemed group of judges that included:

• Lawrence Gowan: celebrated Canadian musician and lead singer and keyboardist for the rock band STYX.
• Anthony Cooperwood: Montreal keyboardist with acts such as Cirque du Soleil and Freddie James.
• Tony Padalino: Toronto keyboardist with CTV’s Canadian Idol.

The Roland Synthesizer Contest was last run as an international competition by Roland Corporation in Japan over 20 years ago and was staged this year as a national, Canadian, contest for the first time. The rules were very simple: entrants were invited to submit an original synthesizer composition created on a keyboard or computer synthesizer of any make until October 15. The submissions were then critiqued by a panel of judges and streamlined to six entries to be voted on by the public.

Propellerhead software has announced the 2008 Bassline Battle.

Reason 4 are invited to put together the funkiest, illest, baddest bassline and drum beat combinations for a chance to win grand prizes, provided by Propellerhead Software, Focusrite, KRK and Novation.

Entering the battle is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Use the Reason Electric Bass ReFill, or the Electric Bass demo ReFill available for download here, to create a killer bassline. For competition purposes, your funky masterpiece must conform to the following guidelines:

• It must consist of Bass, Drums and Percussion only
• It must be based on the Reason Electric Bass ReFill (full or demo version)
• It can not use third party ReFills or self-contain samples
• It must be 8 bars long

2. When you are done, upload your bassline as a Reason .rns song file. You can upload up to three separate basslines. You have until November 24 to upload.

3. When submission time is over, it’s time for the Reason user community to rate the basslines. The top 10 basslines will proceed to a final round. In the final round, the top 10 submissions will be rated by our superstar artist panel consisting of Mocean Worker, Arabian Prince, Chaka Blackmon, DJ Babu and Mix Master Mike. The winners will be announced on December 19th.

Prizes

The Grand Prize from Focusrite, KRK and Novation consists of the brand new Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 Audio Interface, a pair of KRK Rokit Powered 5 G2 Monitors + a KRK 10s Subwoofer, and a Novation ReMOTE SL COMPACT 25 MIDI controller.

The second prize winner can choose between the Studio Combo that contains all four of Propellerhead Software’s hypersampled ReFills, or ReCycle 2.1 – the toolbox for sampled grooves that lets you create your own REX files from sampled material.

The runner-ups will receive a limited edition, custom finalist “Quite Funky” t-shirt

Open Labs invites you to participate in the first annual Beats ‘N Treats Music Festival.

Open Labs will be hosting a two-day music event titled Beats ‘N Treats Music Festival on October 24-25, 2008, in Austin, TX.

The two day event will feature live bands and a beat competition called the “Gold Rush Beat Competition,” in which the winner will receive an Open Labs NeKo LUX encased in a 24-karat gold chassis. The instrument is worth over $24,000, and is Open Labs’ most expensive instrument to date.

The competition will be held on the outside stage of the Mohawk for both days, with running times of 5 pm to 2 am on Friday, and 2 pm to 2 am on Saturday. Local Austin MCs will be the masters of ceremonies. The inside stage will feature live bands and DJs throughout the event.

The entire event will be filmed with multiple hi-definition cameras, and broadcast live from www.openlabs.com. Open Labs is currently marketing and advertising worldwide for the Beats ‘N Treats Music Festival, and over 2,000 attendees are expected, not including on-line viewers.

The gold NeKo is personally owned by Open Labs co-founder and chairman, Victor Wong, and only 24 of the gold NeKo’s will ever be made by Open Labs. Wong claims that he is giving away his personal gold NeKo as a token of appreciation to the musician community for Open Labs’ success, and as a celebration for Open Labs’ five year anniversary.

“We know that there is a huge urban music scene here in Austin, and we’d like to give it some more recognition, as well as help foster its growth,” said Wong. “Everyone at Open Labs is very pleased with the amount of success our company has received in the last five years, this is our way of giving back to the community, who have been the fuel to Open Labs’ fire.”

The Beats ‘N Treats Music Festival will have two stages during both days: an outside stage to host the beat competition, and an inside stage that will feature live music. The band list for the inside stage tentatively includes Recorder, DJ Veedub, Rattletree Marimba, CTRL, Fiction, The Beautiful Supermachines, CockVanDyke, Academicos Da Opera, Aciable, the Ginsu Wives, The Mercers, Androids of Ex-Lovers, Salero, Shriner Threat, El Paso Heist, Hot Pentacostals, Blackolicus, Salesman and more. The rooftop of the Mohawk will feature product demonstrations of Open Labs gear, Q&A’s with certified Open Labs employees, artist demonstrations, and the gold NeKo itself will be on display.

There is a $10 registration fee for beat makers wanting to compete during the Gold Rush Beat Competition, please visit the Open Labs website for details on registration payment. All proceeds from the registration fee will be donated to charity. The registration period will start on September 15, 2008 at noon, and will end on October 15, 2008 at midnight. The registrant number is limited to 200, and is on a first come, first serve basis. Open Labs will cut off the registration period if it reaches 200 before October 15, 2008 and will announce the preemptive cut-off date at www.openlabs.com.

“We’ve also had a lot of public interest in the gold NeKo since we’ve had it on our website and Youtube videos,” said Wong. “I know there are some stellar beat makers out there who deserve this machine, but can’t afford it. Now is their chance to own a 24-karat gold NeKo, our best and most expensive machine, using nothing but their talent.”

Make your own short clip (from 2 to 20 seconds) or photograph about your favourite Chemical Brothers track. Then upload your work here on to the Google Map (after the jump) and tag it to it’s exact global location.

A selection of the best work will be featured in a new concept music video for the Chemical Brothers, To celebrate the launch of the new Chemical Brothers’ album ‘Brotherhood’ videos will feature on a Google Earth channel available on September 1, as well as on the Chemical Brothers Youtube channel.

Deadline for submissions via Chemical Brothers’ website:

Monday 25th August 2008 – 13.00 GMT – BUT THE SOONER THE BETTER!

Prizes:

• Winner:

$5,000 cash

Your remix featured on MariahCarey.com, IslandRecords.com, and Mariah’s MySpace page

Mariah’s “top friend” on MySpace for a month.

• Runner-up: Digidesign MBox 2.
• Top 10 Finalists: A copy of E=MC² personally signed by Mariah.
• Runner-up: Digidesign MBox 2.
• Top 10 Finalists: A copy of E=MC² personally signed by Mariah.

I’m not a Mariah Carey fan, but I love an interesting remix and $5,000 ain’t chump change.

If you do a remix, please cut out the squeely high pitched vocals, for my dog’s sake.

Moby’s Ooh Yeah video competition has been very successful, and a smart project, too. He’s giving away $10,000, but generated dozens of videos for Ooh Yeah in the process.

This one, from Kasia Koniar, has two socks falling in stop-motion love.

Anders Bäckman’s entry for Moby’s “Ooh Yeah” video competition:

Filmmakers are invited to submit their films for the track Ooh Yeah and the winner, chosen by moby, will win the $10,000 prize money and have their video used as the official music video for Ooh Yeah from Moby’s latest album, Last Night.