Sunday Synth Jams: This video captures the savage percussive noise assault of Cartier Santos Sweet Lady, live at Make:Tokyo Meeting 04.

Fluorescent Lamp controlled with

• /I/F GAINER
• /Finger move
• /Hand move
• /Voice volume

If you happened to be at this show – leave a comment and let us know what you thought of it!

via omnibotoom

Kyle Evans created this electronically modified digeridoo.

Details below.

via yakthekyle:

I created this instrument to experiment in the combination of the organic sound qualities of a didgeridoo with the advanced signal processing capabilities of modern computer programming and sound synthesis.

This custom built didgeridoo features externally mounted modules that allow the performer to process and manipulate the sound of the instrument in real time. All control data is transmitted wirelessly via blue tooth and is controlling several audio processes created in a custom-built software environment.

Berna Vintage Electronic Studio – a Mac OS X software recreation of the classical electronic music studio – is now available for 10.69€ as a digital download. A demo version is available.

If you’ve used Berna, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Official Description:

Between the 1950s and the mid 1960s, long before Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos injected electronics into pop-music (with a few exceptions like the Barrons and Raymond Scott), electroacoustic music was pioneered by european radio laboratories and US universities.

Composing with tapes and electronics was a serious painstaking and expensive affair, prerogative of a restricted elite of contemporary music composers and adventurous sound engineers. At that time there wasn’t any electronic musical instruments market, as a matter of fact, most of the equipment was adapted from scientific tools belonging to radio engineering departments. Sometimes the equipment was built from scratch, cannibalizing anything that had wires, tubes and pots, more rarely, the studios used the few commercial instruments available in those days, such as the Melchord, the Trautonium and the Theremin.

Contrarily to what happens today, electronic music then was everything but fast and easy to create. A few minutes of electronic composition could take more than one year of work. Everything was handmade, from complex timbres with multiple sine oscillators bounces to tape editing with scissors and scotch-tape. Even sound envelopes were manually built by cutting tapes’ edges at different degrees of inclination. Ussachevsky’s ADSR was yet to be invented!

Berna is a software simulation of a late 1950s electroacoustic music studio. Oscillators, filters, modulators, tape recorders, mixers, are all packed in a easy-to-use interface with historical accuracy.

Explore serial, concrete and tape music or create strange new sonic worlds with instruments inspired by the greatest studios of the early days of electronic music.

Are you ready to meet the grandfather of the synthesizer?

Dreamscapes, for shofar, rainstick, mbira, Peruvia ocarina, didgeridoo and computer-generated sounds.

Composed & Performed by Herbert Deutsch. Deutsch is an American composer and professor emeritus of electronic music and composition at Hofstra University.

In the 1960’s Deutsch collaborated with Bob Moog in the invention of the Moog modular synthesizer.

via scootermccrae:

Composed in 1995 and dedicated to Albert Tepper.

Yeah, yeah – here’s that “talking piano” video that’s been bouncing around the Internet for a week.

I didn’t feature it here, because I thought Conlon Nancarrow was doing a lot more interesting things, and more musical things, with player piano sequencing back in the 1940s.

And, if you’re going to make a talking instrument, in my book – it’s either got to make music, or it’s got to say “Exterminate!”

But others are obviously seeing potential in this. Or that je ne sais quoi that makes an Internet meme.

Anyway, this video captures a”speaking piano” reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009.

Composer Peter Ablinger basically pixelated sound, at a resolution appropriate to the range of the piano, and used the pixelations as “notes” to sequence and reproduce a lo-fi version of the original sound.

UPDATE: Astera on hackaday wrote a rough translation:

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice. The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously arent normal Music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrum of the childs voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

This is another absolutely amazing video from sound designer/composer Diego Stocco:

Few weeks ago I visited a luthier looking for instruments parts, I had an idea in mind for an instrument I wanted to build. My curiosity was to hear the sound of violin, viola and cello strings amplified through the body of a double bass. I came up with a quadruple-neck experimental “something” that I thought to call Experibass.

To play it I used cello and double bass bows, a little device I built with fishing line and hose clamps, a paintbrush, a fork, spoons, a kick drum pedal and a drum stick. I hope you’ll like it!

Thanks to luthier John Wu for providing me the parts, even though I warned him that I was probably going to create a “monster” : )

You can see more details at Stocco’s Behance portfolio site. See Stocco’s Vimeo site for more examples of his musical sound design.

Sunday Synth Jam: An electroacoustic jam/happening by Lucky Dragons, live at Sculpture Space, Long Island, Queens.

Lucky Dragons is an experimental music group consisting of Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara. Lucky Dragons’ performances include live music, video projection, and sounds created in collaboration with the audience.

Based in Los Angeles, California, the band are noted for their unusual sound, described as having the ability to make “‘everyday sounds’ become alluringly other”.

via majimafia

Sunday Synth Jam: More of an electroacoustic avant garde jam – this video captures The Crank Ensemble performing String Theory:

For the Garden of Memory annual Solstice performance at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, June 21, 2009.

Excerpt features Bronwyn Ximm as “stimulator”, with Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Mark Brest van Kempen, Vicki Olds and Bodil Fox as “tuners”, with Mary Behm-Steinberg as “knitter”.

Sound is generated by placing piezo contact microphones on nylon string, and embedding them in knitting needles. Knitting concept by Bodil.

via LarnieFox:

The tracks include Walter (Wendy) Carlos’ Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963):

Liner Notes:

This recording of electronic music presents the works of four authors who come from four different countries with quite varied musical backgrounds. Two of them have considerable knowledge of electronics which stems from a formal engineering training in one case, and from a high degree of practical experience in the other. Diversity of styles is in evidence, as each composer’s style is his own concern. The common experience for these composers has been the use of technical resources at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the investigation of specialized methods for the evolution and transformation of recorded sound materials, conducted in my course at Columbia and further demonstrated in private sessions by technicians. This work is done in Studio 106, located in McMillin Theatre on the campus of Columbia University in the same room where the older Columbia University Tape Studio was housed. The present studio has been considerably expanded in recent years and has become a part of a complex of three studios and a small laboratory established under a Rockefeller Foundation Grant given to Columbia and Princeton Universities in 1959.

With the notable exception of the very unique possibilities offered by the RCA Sound Synthesizer located in Studio 318, the standard and specialized equipment of the Center is devoted to the production of sound materials by “Classical” methods, common to all electronic music studios. Thus, materials (of either purely electronic or non-electronic origin) recorded on tape, may be subjected to manipulation by tape speed variation, electronic filtering, several types of frequency modulation, artificial reverberation, etc. Tape cutting and splicing by hand still occupies a good deal of time in preparing the sound patterns and arranging them in longer sequences. Techniques are available to create certain types of rhythmic patterns and timbre variations by semi-automatic methods, but the materials thus produced are of limited usefulness. Much time in classroom discussion is devoted to the structural considerations which we believe to be quite challenging and of paramount importance in the electronic music medium, rich as it is in unusual timbres and opportunities for the realization of complex rhythms.

It is hard to imagine that there is much occasion any more for claiming that electronic music is “dehumanized” in its content. Electronic music simply undertakes to express, by different means, human situations, ideas, and emotions.
Vladimir Ussachevsky
Professor of Music
Columbia University

Marielle Jakobsons demos the Keith McMillen Instruments‘ K-Bow at Musikmesse April 4 2009 in Frankfurt, Germany.

The K-Bow captures subtle gestures and elements of a string player’s performance and uses them to control just about anything.

via mikezawitkowski

In this video demo, violinist Jon Rose controls feedback with the K-Bow, a Bluetooth-enabled sensor bow for string instruments.

Filmed at STEIM, Amsterdam, 04/2009.

Open Reel Ensemble, with String Quartet, perform Theme of Oplapscal.

The Open Reel Ensemble performs by “scratching” 4 reel-to-reel analog tape recorders.

via garudagroove:

SB Reel-to-Reel Tape Decks …… Ei Wada

Guest Player :
Violin …… Takumi Namba
Violin …… Junya Makino
Viola ……. Yoshiaki Kato
Cello ……. Rika Ishigai

Camera, Edit, and Direction …… Haruka Yoshida
Compose, Architect, and Produce …… Ei Wada (Crab Feet)

You can preview one of the tracks below, Richard Allan Robinson’s Ambience:

The source material for Ambience was produced on an “instrument” consisting of three electric bass guitar strings strung lengthwise across a long board, with a bridge and a small magnetic guitar pickup at each end. Two modes of sound production were used. One, in which transversely placed metal pipes were rolled up and down the length of the strings, of multiple glissandi. A second, predominant texture was produced by causing a number lengths to “oscillate” or rock across the strings (rather than to roll lengthwise).

This basic recorded material was then extensively transformed electronically by filtering, heterodyning, ring modulation, speed changes, etc., an 6′ finally an overall structure was composed of variously complex superimpositions and juxtapositions of the two basic textural types. A light controlled channel-speaker distributing device used in the original qaudrasonic version further emphasizes this textural contrast in that gliding textures have a predominantly circling movement around the listening area, while the more active, rhythmic textures move disjunctly.

The intention of the piece, originally conceived for performance with the Atlanta Contemporary Dance Group, is to create an impression of actually being swept up in a familiar yet mysterious sound-atmosphere or ambience – perhaps somewhat like the experience of driving alone in a car at night – a sense of increasing absorption and identity with the surrounding sounds – the motor, rushing air, tires on pavement, vibrations, etc. –

From the liner notes:

For the last three years, Dartmouth College has held an annual competition for electronic music. The winners and finalists’ works from the first competition were released by Vox two years ago and we at Dartmouth felt gratified by the warm critical response to the recording. We were also pleased that the competition gave the public an opportunity to hear some of the best works by new and younger composers.

The judges for the second competition were Lars-Gunnar Bodin from Sweden, Charles Dodge and Pril Smiley from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and Kenneth Gaburo from the University of California, San Diego. They chose the winning works anonymously after listening to nearly one hundred different entries. The winning composers were Peter Glushanok, an experienced film maker who has a small electronic music studio in his home, and Peter Klausmeer, a graduate student at the University of Michigan. The two finalists were Walter Kimmel,who is director of the electronic music studio at Moorhead State College,and Raymond Moore, who is a recording engineer for a large record company.

There were over two hundred entries in the 1970 competition which meant nearly a week of listening for judges Sal Martriano from the University of Illinois, Francois Bayle of France and James K. Randall of Princeton University. Again the prize was divided between one of Chile’s leading composers, Jose Vicente Asuar and Richard A. Robinson, the director of the Atlanta Electronic Music Center. The finalists were Jean-Claude Risset who works in Marseille, France, but who realized his work at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey,and Jonathan Weiss, a Composer in his early twenties who is in residence at the R.A. Moog Co. in Trumansberg, New York.

The listener to this album will hear enormous diversity in the approach used by the different composers. The following comments about the works were written by the composers themselves.

Jon H. Appleton, Director
Dartmouth Electronic Music Studio

Raw Metal, a collaboration between bulbcollective and Suzi Tibbetts, is an interactive musical performance constructed with metal, both in the actual and sonic senses.

Every sound utilised by Raw Metal has been sourced entirely from the recording of metal objects. Audiences are invited to both accompany as well as actively contribute to Raw Metal’s pre-composed material, by selecting and striking metal objects before a microphone.

Resultant sounds will be manipulated, struck and contorted into new aural shapes as the the inner sonicallities of metal sound, both percussive and resonant, are explored.

via psfk

What does painting sound like?

That’s the question explored by Jen Cotton’s Pour Sound, an experimental electronic music piece that translates painting into sound:

This is using openFrameworks for the computer vision and Super Collider to generate the sound.

The CV reads the color values of the canvas and generates sound based on the amount of red (R), green (G), or blue (B) that is present. The paint itself is thinned out into washes so that creates layers of colors that create layers of sound.

What would Rauschenberg painting sound like? Or Mondrian?

More examples of the piece are available at Cotton’s vimeo site.

This is a transcription of the Wiegenlied by German composer Richard Strauss, arranged for theremin, accompanied by MIDI theremin.

via copperleaves:

When I listened to Strauss’ original arrangement of this song, written for soprano and piano (later arranged for orchestra by the composer), it seemed to me he was trying to get a “celestial” sound from the keyboard. Since the Moog Ethervox MIDI theremin can produce amazing cascades of notes, I thought it might be able to capture the sort of heavenly, dreamy, harp-like feeling that Strauss was looking for.

I believe that the Moog Ethervox theremin (with full MIDI capabilities) is the finest theremin ever made. It is my understanding that only about 50 of them were manufactured in the 1990’s (the one in this video is serial # 007). The creation of the instrument was a collaboration between the late Robert Moog and German software designer, Rudi Linhard.

It is actually two instruments in one, a gestural MIDI controller and a traditional theremin. Although this work is a cradle song it is far more complex than it seems on the surface. It is divided into three parts, which I believe symbolize the three ages of a man: the child, the hero and the wise man.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough space here for me to go into the details of why I think this. Anyone familiar with the operas of Richard Strauss knows that his music is filled with the rich symbolism of a composer/philosopher.

On Wednesday, May 20, 2009, Paul Henry Smith will conduct the first-ever live concert of a Beethoven Symphony using a digital orchestra, performed by Vienna Symphonic Library’s Vienna Instruments at Holy Name Church in Boston.

This will be the first concert in a series that will present all nine Beethoven symphonies.

The Fauxharmonic Orchestra, founded by conductor and composer Paul Henry Smith, sets out to convince audiences that a live performance of a digital orchestra can be as expressive and moving as a traditional acoustic orchestra. In an earlier experiment in 2008, The New York Times called the Fauxharmonic Orchestra “genuinely impressive.”

The live digital orchestral music is realized by incorporating real-time performance control into a preliminary version that Smith prepares during hundreds of hours prior to the performance. For programming the Symphony, Smith relies on the Vienna Symphonic Library’s software instruments.

Accompanying viola and mezzo-soprano soloists, the Fauxharmonic Orchestra will make the most of its technology using wireless Nintendo Wii video-game controllers to change tempo, loudness, balance, timbre, and brightness – the elements a musician typically controls during a live performance. At Holy Name Church, the Fauxharmonic Orchestra’s sound will emerge from an array of Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 5 speakers.

Will The Fauxharmonic Orchestra Replace Real Orchestras?

Traditional instrumentalists have worried for years that computers and synths could one day put them out of business. Is that time here?

Maybe so, according to Smith.

“With current financial pressures, orchestras are cutting the performance of new music,” notes Paul Henry Smith. “By contrast, it costs far less for the Fauxharmonic Orchestra to prepare a new work for full orchestra and to perform it many times and in many places.”

Here’s an video that features Smith conducting the Fauxharmonic Orchestra:

Click here to view the embedded video.

While the Fauxharmonic Orchestra still can’t replicate the sound of a traditional orchestra, it’s undeniably musical.

Beyond being a replacement for traditional orchestras, though, the technology could expand the realms of traditional orchestration.

“This technology is best understood as expanding the rainbow of expression,” adds Smith, “rather than undermining the art of orchestral music.”

What do you think of the idea of a Fauxharmonic Orchestra? If you can make it to the concert, let us know how it goes!

Wired talks with Avant-garde cellist Zoe Keating who demonstrates her intricately layered loop-based compositions.

Keating has been described as a one woman string quartet. Keating uses live electronic sampling and looping to layer the sound of her cello, creating rhythmically dense musical structures.

To write for the theremin effectively one should know its strengths and weaknesses.

The theremin is a monophonic instrument; which is to say, it can only produce one pitch at a time. It has about a five-and-a-half octave range. Its low range can sound like a cello or string bass, mid range to upper range can be vocal-like and the top end is brilliant and piercing. But with effects or MIDI you can extend both the range and timbre of the instrument.

Theremins work on the principle of heterodyning—that is, mixing the output of two radio frequency oscillators to produce a beat. When this frequency is over 50 Hz or so, an audio signal is produced which is then amplified.

The theremin is played by changing the alternating magnetic fields that surround two antennae. The resultant waveform is variable. One hand controls pitch, the other volume.

The theremin is difficult to play well. There’s no keyboard or fret board for reference. Spatial perception is only part of it. One must have a good ear, since ear training certainly helps in hitting the intervals correctly. It’s important to be relaxed physically and concentrated mentally to hear the note before it is played. You’ll need to make the right adjustments instantaneously to hit the note cleanly in the center of the pitch. There are several different styles and finger work that can be used to do this. Some players concentrate on the right hand which produces pitch, but the left hand which controls the volume and attack is equally important. In a way, the right hand is the artisan and the left hand is the artist.

See the full article at the New Music Box site.

via MusicOfsound, Image: Usonian