strange music

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

In this three day workshop from 24-27 October 2009 in Bulgaria, participants built a simple light-to-sound converter and DC motor controller, and then began to experiment with drawing sounds onto transparent “tonewheels”. The workshop ended in a group performance and an invitation to the audience to try out the instruments for themselves.

Could you score a piece of music with 140 characters or less?

Supercollider 140 is a free album of Twitter music – audio pieces composed of Twitter-sized snippets of SuperCollider code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire’s online readership here.

Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.

The compositions are self-referentially named, with titles like:

{LocalOut.ar(a=CombN.ar(BPF.ar(LocalIn.ar(2)
*7.5+Saw.ar([32,33],0.2),2**LFNoise0.kr(4/3,4)*
300,0.1).distort,2,2,40));a}.play//#supercollider

Tweet that and put it in your SuperCollider!

You can preview the album below, or download it at the Internet Archive:

Detailed artist biographies for the composers are available at The Wire.

via SuperCollider

If you think this video of Japanese girl group synth band Cosmos is horrible, I feel your pain.

On the other hand, if you think it’s awesome in a sort of David Lynch way, I also feel your pain.

Give it a look and let me know what you think!

via blackisblack

via isopod: Brent talks about the mystery of self-programming synths – the fact that old batteries sometimes lead to synth patches that are actually pretty cool.

A lot of people take an Eno-esque view – that the quirky results can lead to something more interesting than you might program yourself, or at least provide an interesting starting point.

Many TB-303 owners find that they get interesting random sequences, too, when their batteries get old.

Have you ever had this happen with one of your synths? And do you think synths should come with a “Randomize Patch” button?

Giorgio Moroder has a special place in the history of electronic music, because of his genre-inspiring classic track I Feel Love, with Donna Summer and Pete Bellotte.

When Brian Eno first heard I Feel Love, he told David Bowie “This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years,” which it did. The track has been covered by dozens of artists and imitated, either directly or indirectly, by thousands.

Moroder’s version of the original Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, on the other hand, has been lost to obscurity.

Until now: Read more…