Sunday Synth Jam: Sound designer Diego Stocco is always doing something amazing and this short promo piece is no exception.

If you’ve been dreaming about a new synth or new app, see what Stocco does with a bunch of old junk:

A short abstract piece created during one of the sessions I did for an upcoming project.
I used an old dismantled piano, antique zithers collected in the past few months and metallic wind chimes. Played with piano hammers and a dulcimer bow.

See more of Stocco’s videos at his Vimeo site.

The ambient gurus at disquiet snagged a copy of Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony, a unique piece of audio art:

1-Bit Symphony isn’t a CD; it’s a small homebrew electronic device nestled inside a CD case. It is, in that way, a kind of parallel to the Buddha Machine (and the forthcoming Gristleism). The 1-Bit Symphony is to the compact disc what the Buddha and Gristleism boxes are to transistor radios. They’re lo-fi music-producing technology packed inside the familiar form of a pretty much outdated music-producing technology.

When the switch seen second from the left inside the box is flipped to its right, the machine starts emitting lo-fi sound (it’s necessary to attach headphones to the audio jack to hear the music). There are five “tracks” in all, “movements” they’re titled here. The first four are between five and 10 minutes in length. The fifth will play forever, or at least until that replaceable battery dies. In brief, the music is a series of cascading little beeps that suggest Philip Glass as a character in a Mario Bros. video game.

Earlier in the year, Moldover released his CD in a theremin CD case.

More at disquiet.

Sound Textile experimentations at Modefabriken – umlautbrikauski “freaking out on the Textile Harp”.

This is obviously early on in development – but the idea of fabric synth controllers is intriguing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Keston demos a sound art performance application that he’s developing in Max/MSP. The control is handled with TouchOSC on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Shards, by Gattobus,is a lie granular synthesis experiment.

Patch details below.

Gattobus explains the setup:

Stereo headphones recommended.

The audio is sampled live from Nord Modular G2 audio inputs and reduced to bits, stretched, and compressed by a patch of my creation.
The button that I press on the modular is for capturing audio fragments.
The captured sound sources are the Nord Modular itself, Elektron Monomachine and the Elektron Machinedrum.
Nothing is pre-recorded, everything is sequenced LIVE and processed in real-time time.

—

Per un ascolto migliore è consigliato usare delle cuffie.

L’audio viene campionato in tempo reale dagli ingressi audio del Nord Modular G2 e spezzettato, stretchato e compresso da una patch di mia creazione.
Il bottone che mi vedete premere sul Modular serve per catturare frammenti di audio.
Le sorgenti sonore catturate sono lo stesso Modular, l’Elektron Monomachine e l’Elektron Machinedrum.
Nulla è stato pre-registrato, ogni cosa è sequencerizzata dal vivo e processata in tempo reale.

This is a video showing a prototype of the Lumièrophone, a screen with embedded sensors that create sound in real time based on what is projected on it.

This demo shows it in action using the Walter Ruttman films Opus I and II.

Graphic Score Max/MSP/Jitter

via akihikotube:

Graphic Score Max/MSP/Jitterhttp://homepage.mac.com/sinx_music/

Sunday Synth Jam: This abstronica jam captures what Richard Devine does when he’s not busy watching a lake form around his house.

The patch combines Tiction – an animated nodal music sequencer for Mac, Windows & Linux; monome; and the touch-screen JazzMutant Lemur controller.

Sorry synth fans, but this Saturday Synth Porn entry is a little less synthy than usual and a little more porn-y.

The image above is from a performance of Technosexual, from Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand’s Mixed Relations.

Mixed Relations consists of a series of performances and workshops that explore the relations between bodies and technology within mixed realities.

If you can handle avant garde lesbian erotic multi-reality performance art, with motion sensors & a Nintendo Wii, see the details below.

Otherwise, here are the kitties and synthesizers.

The project involves two people performing in actual and virtual space. Live audio synthesis is achieved using Puredata to respond to body movements. These movements are detected through various technologies including marker based motion capture, flex sensors, pressure sensors, light sensors, accelerometers and the Nintendo Wii.

The performers’ movements are mirrored into Second Life, which is projected into the physical performance space. Live realtime video is also streamed into the virtual performance space, from cameras that are attached to the performers’ bodies. Scaled projections, scale models in virtual space and the projection of virtual instruments onto actual objects are used to create a mixing of the actual and virtual, blurring the lines between the two.

Technesexual consists of the performers engaging in playful erotic acts in physical and virtual space, while using handmade electronic stethoscopes to play the sound of their heartbeats in both spaces, blurring the lines between the two. The stethoscopes consisted of analog stethoscopes connected to piezo sensors wired to 1/8″ audio jacks.

The perfomance captured above was part of the Trasnocheo performance space curated by Susana Cook as part of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics 7th Encuentro at Mapa Teatro in Bogota, Colombia.

Little Life

This music video features garden water microorganisms filmed though a 25 Euro-cent web-cam converted into a microscope. The IR, laser, and LED light used to illuminate the film, were powered by solar energy.

The music consists of samples that were converted from stills of the original film material into sounds and then combined freely to fit the content.

Film by Oren Banai and music by Achim Kämper.

via Luftgeschaeft

This is a demo of Subsonic Labs’ Low Frequency Entity, a “real-time multi-touch interface to a visualized low frequency sound”:

The various touch configurations control different parameters of the synthesized bass, including filter modulation rate, bit crush, sample and hold, feedback, oscillator phase and fm synthesis.

Subsonic Labs is the creative work of Christian Bannister, a musician & developer based out of Portland, Oregon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bannister explains:

I am not analyzing the audio here at all. I am only using the settings on the bass synth to drive the visuals. I broke out certain “effective” parameters from the NI Massive bass patch and worked with those to define the visual characteristics of the entity.

I am looking at an lfo modulation of the filter here, a bitcrush effect, a sample and hold effect, feedback, an oscillator phase parameter, and an fm synthesis control. This gives me a huge palette to work with. I should say I am also sending midi note information to Processing and having that vibrate the form as well.

Once the visual starts making sense then I can begin interacting with it and finding musical ways to engage it or play it like an instrument.

Check out the Bannister’s site for more details.

GPS Beatmap: Planet as Control Surface.

This video is a demonstration of Face Removal Services‘ Beatmap – a GPS-based music instrument that transforms the face of the planet into an enormous DJ booth.

Yeah – it’s insane and awesome. I want to try this on my next road trip.

Details below!
Beatmap

Looping musical phrases are represented on a map as overlapping circular territories. As the vehicle approaches the center of a circle, the volume increases. In areas of the map where territories overlap the vehicle generates dynamic mixes of the overlapping musical phrases. By exploring a very large map of many overlapping territories the Beatmap creates complex, dynamic mash-ups.

The map can be explored on foot, by plane, boat, train, or automobile. In this footage the map is explored by car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, allowing the user to freely accelerate, swerve, and slam to a stop for optimum musical control of the instrument.

The Beatmap can be positioned anywhere on Earth and expanded or contracted to any size by manipulating a continuous stream of GPS data. The Beatmap can thus be used to create drive-through mash-ups on any surface of any size, from a tennis court to the Atlantic Ocean.

Exploring the Beatmap is like investigating a new city while navigating a DJ’s crate of records. Obscure landmarks begin to gain new significance by their association with unique musical juxtapositions. For instance, a treacherous pothole may invite multiple drive-bys simply because of its proximity to a particularly satisfying polyrhythm. The Beatmap is currently be readied for deployment in locations near and far.

Saturday Synth Porn: Sound of Life (SoL) is a very unusual audio-visual performance by noise performer 23N! that explores the idea of generating noise music from the movements of spermatozoa:

SoL consists in generating sounds and visual dynamically through the tracking of the movement of individual spermatozoa of the semen of the performer observed under a digital microscope. The obtaining of the semen is an intrinsic part of the performance.

Details on the work below.

According to 23N!:

Artist Statement

When spermatozoa are the ones generating sounds, who is the performer ? Are the spermatozoa the performer or are they already a distinct autonomous living entity ?

Sound of Life is trying to address these questions by limiting the interaction between the performer-creator, as the one who gave birth to the spermatozoa, and the spermatozoa to a minimum. Spermatozoa that enter the field of vision of the microscope are all potential performers and the sounds they generate depends mostly on their movements that are not controlled.

While the act of selecting the candidate spermatozoa can be seen as an action of the performer that limits the freedom of the spermatozoa, it is meant to be done in the case of a staged performance. In the case of an installation, random selection or selection of all moving spermatozoa can be easily implemented instead.

By making the act of obtaining the necessary fresh semen a part of the performance, the artistic creation is voluntary confused with the creation of life. The created life, the spermatozoa, becomes an artistic creator, blurring the border between life and art.

The software behind the performance is put together with the usual experimental electronic music culprits, including OSC, PureData, & Wiimote.

Interesting experimental concept or intellectual wankery? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

The Stealth Project uses NOVA (a 3D grid of LEDs) to display a 3 dimensional dynamic light-based visualisation. It also features 2 Monome 64 interfaces.

Planes, missiles and other hardware that deflect or otherwise avoid radar detection were key in the race for world supremacy. Detection avoidance, or stealth technology, was one of many ‘developments’ to emerge from the Cold War.

In the Stealth project, two grids of triggers target and launch missiles across an abstracted 3D space at each other, attempting to avoid radar detection and annihilate the opposition.

However, in contrast to the Mutually Assured Destruction madness of the arms race, the piece acts as a collaborative spatial musical instrument – each ‘missile’ emits sounds based on its relative position and the conditions it encounters along its trajectory.

The Stealth Project developed from research into the creative possibilities of volumetric, or 3D, visualisation techniques. Recent Squidsoup experiments using a Baby NOVA (the physical centrepiece of this project) suggested that this kind of three-dimensional light grid has considerable potential for abstract gaming applications.

The piece is a collaboration with ETH Zurich and horao GmbH, and features their NOVA 3D LED grid.

We’ve been pretty easy with you lately with our music video selections – but this video may have you running for the sanitary eye wash.

Cotton Museum’s Pus Pustules video promo is sort of NSFA (not safe for anywhere/anyone).

It appears to have been filmed in Disgust-o-rama. Appreciation of this video style is probably limited to fans of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. But it’s got a”throbbing cesspool” of electronic sound.

Here’s what those responsible for Pus Pustules have to say for themselves:

“PUS PUSTULES” is one of the most diseased COTTON MUSEUM recordings to date.

Clocking in at 21 minutes on side A, adorned with with a detailed etching of sickly beasts on side B and a five color silk screened album cover designed by Chris Pottinger. Theremin, Synth, and other odd electronic instruments create a bubbling cesspool of rotting sounds that leak from your stereo speakers like a cancerous sludge. Take a trip through a strange world where you can hear these sickly beasts devouring corpses while insects sting their bodies, leaving them covered with infected welts.

Cotton Museum is a solo electronic noise project from visual artist Chris Pottinger that has been performing for the past seven years.

Limited edition of 400 hand numbered copies, black vinyl with thick chipboard album cover.

Yum!

More info at TastySoil.com

“Just thought I would record a patch I made this afternoon on my modular system,” explains Devine. “Bits and pieces running through the H-3000 DS/E Eventide Harmonizer.”

Tonewheels is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. We previewed Tonewheels a few months ago.

Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures. This all-analog set is performed entirely live without the use of computers, using only overhead projectors as light source, performance interface and audience display.

In this way, Tonewheels aims to open up the “black box” of electronic music and video by exposing the working processes of the performance for the audience to see.

Derek Holzer: sounds, electronics
umatic.nl/tonewheels.html

This video documents Daito Manabe’s sound experiments with laser tracking of tangible images.

Note how the laser tracking and sound adapt to changes in the illustrations.

Daita Manabe previously documented his experiments with electrocuting his face to create a bizarre music video.

via daito:

Alvaro Cassinelli: concept, software and hardware development
Daito Manabe: sound concept and sound generatio
Kuribara Yusaku: latest software development including contour
tracking and interface
Stephane Perrin: participated in early development of the smart
laser scanner technology used for tracking.

This video captures a performance of Tokyo Lick, by Jeffrey Stolet, using custom software and infrared sensors. The system converts his waving of the hands into complex piano music.

Stolet describes his system as a “new paradigm for virtuoso music performance”.

Details below.

Simple Input, Complex Output: Performance and Data mapping in Tokyo Lick.

Challenges regarding the conceptual design and implementation of human / music instrument interfaces have a rich and nuanced history. Generally, if a musical instrument has thrived it has been due to the fact that the particular instrument could provide the desired musical outcome. Traditional instruments typically display a simple one-to-one relationship in terms of input and output (e.g., one piano key is depressed, one note is sounded). Current technologies release us from the shackles of such one-to-one input-output models and permit to the creation of new types of musical generation. At the University of Oregon we have been involved with projects where musical robots perform music, where eye movement data control sound and video, and where infrared sensing devices control sonic and video events.

In his program, Mr. Stolet will focus on the technology and the human-performance elements in Tokyo Lick, his composition for infrared sensors, custom interactive software, and MIDI piano. He performs Tokyo Lick by moving his hands through two invisible infrared spheres and directing the data derived from those motions to algorithms residing in customized interactive software created in the Max multimedia programming environment.

Tokyo Lick contains no sequences or pre-recorded material. Mr. Stolet will perform every note in real-time. Using a technology he refers to as “algorithm flipping,” he can rapidly change the specific algorithm or algorithms governing the response to the incoming MIDI control data. He actuates the algorithmic changes through pre-composed schedules, musical contexts, or through explicit intervention. Taken together, these techniques provide a conceptual framework for practical input/output mapping (action ? specified outcome) and for control and performance flexibility, while offering a truly new paradigm for virtuoso music performance.

via deviantsynth

Photophonics is an audiovisual installation by Bruno Mathez and Mike Blow. It was shown at the “Sonic Art” exhibition at The Blank Gallery in Brighton, part of the Brighton Fringe, in May 2009.

According to Blow & Mathez:

Photophonics is the first result of Bruno’s 3d video-projection mapping experiments. It is a ‘dispersed instrument’ with a number of electronic oscillators created by Mike, positioned on architectural elements of the dark performance space. Each one emits sound in direct response to light. A visual score is played, transforming the space into an hypnotic audiovisual experience.

You can find some of Mike blow’s work at evolutionaryart.co.uk.

via Califaudio