STEIM's Project Blog

Sun Run Sun has been an in depth exploration into various navigation techniques and our relationship to sound in the environment. When navigating we try to locate ourselves by referring to an external source - traditionally a map, recently a GPS device - but ironically a serious sense of dislocation is becoming a common experience. Sun Run Sun was an attempt to look into ways of re-locating and re-negotiating our sense of where we are specifically through the use of sound. By using sound I hoped to encourage an experience of space that is more immediate and less referential than image. It also took me to navigation by animals that use sound, such as underwater mammals and bats. Although the project involved a considerable amount of technical development the primary aim was to create transformative experiences through sound.

Sun Run Sun was a direct continuation of the previous residency project called Taking Soundings (2007). The Artist in Residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute / Montevideo in Amsterdam provided the opportunity to collaborate with STEIM on producing a sound installation, performances and develop special instruments called the Satellite Sounders. During the winter of 2007/8 I gathered the technical team of Sukandar Kartadinata, Jorgen Brinkman and Damian Stewart to help me build the Satellite Sounders, hand held instruments that take data from the navigation satellites orbiting overhead and turn it directly in electronic sounds whilst the player/navigator walks. All the detailed information on process, sounds, presentations and technologies is documented on the project blog http://sunrunsun.nimk.nl

At STEIM I specifically worked on building the six Satellite Sounders with Sukandar and Jorgen in the lab. They are built using the tiny Gumstix boards running Linux with patches in Pure Data which include a NMEA data parser for the GPS (written by Damian) and a sound generating patch. I tried various different sound to data mappings and tried out the prototypes - visit the sounds section of the project blog.

Sun Run Sun premiered in April 2008 at NIMK/Montevideo in Amsterdam, and has been shown in different formats at STEIM, TAG Den Haag, Mediamatic Amsterdam, V2_ Rotterdam, Temporary Museum Amsterdam, Art|Sci Centre UCLA, Integretron Joshua Tree California, NIME2008 & Contemporary Art Museum Genova, ISEA2008 Singapore, and up-coming at Picnic 2008 Amsterdam, Re:visie 2008 Netherlands Film Festival Utrecht. It has been reviewed in Neural and Eyeball Korea and an interview published in TagMag5.

The Orientation Workshop was incredibly eye-opening and inspiring. I came to STEIM to learn more about ways to combine the technical understanding of an electronics designer, the sensitivity and imagination of a musician, and the awareness of gesture-sound relationships of a contemporary percussionist. The workshop was packed with talks, lessons and performances from the STEIM artists/engineers. I was enlightened with STEIM’s philosophies on the role of new technology in music and art, and I became much more aware of current and past work in the electro-instrumental movement.

I was given a studio with a good audio and computer set-up, and started playing with STEIM’s tools, JunXion and LiSa. Rather then simply doing exercises to see all the capabilities of these tools, I figured the best and most fun way to learn would be to conceptualize a simple ‘musical instrument’ and then try to realize it with these given tools.

From the inspiration of STEIM and the city of Amsterdam, I thought to extend the metaphor of a traditional 12″ vinyl record as a source of music. It has the cultural significance as a storage medium for music which can be played back on a turntable, but I wanted to make the record itself an instrument from which one can perform or “play” music. First I considered various ways that a musician can interact with the record. The musician can shake, tilt left/right, tilt forward/backward, bend, spin, strike/press on the table, etc… all of which can be done with varying speeds, degrees of displacement, and in combination. I then thought about how these gestures can be intuitively be related (directly or abstractly) to a response in the sound, affecting different characteristics of the music. For the sounds, I used very short samples of a song I found on the STEIM lab computer, and manipulated many parameters of their playback characteristics with a high degree of nuance. Using various sensors (X-Y Tilt, Pressure, Wii 3-D Accelerometer), the JunXion HW Interface, JunXion and LiSa I was able to develop a rapid prototype to experiment with the feel of playing the record and listening to the sounds. I spent a lot of time practicing this instrument and followed my physical movements and ears to make adjustments to the gesture-sound relationships. At the end of the workshop, I performed short improvisations for Daniel Schorno and Taku Mizuka Lippit. They also played with the record themselves and gave me interesting technical and artistic feedback.

I also did a small experiment with a pressure sensor to create a short-term memory button that remembers its interaction with the user. In contrast to a traditional button where the sound begins as soon as the user presses the button, this “Post-Touch” button waits after the initial press and triggers the sound immediately AFTER the user releases the button. Before triggering the sound, the button remembers how long it was depressed, how hard/soft it was pressed, as well as any variation in the pressure. Upon release, the sound begins and then creates a sound envelope defined by press-release time window and pressure information. The user defines the envelope before the actual sound, and then activates the sound by releasing the button.

Everyone I met at STEIM was passionate about electro-instrumental music and they were all very excited to answer questions and share their knowledge. From my time at STEIM, I developed many new ideas and I look forward to contributing more to the electro-instrumental community.

Thank you STEIM.

Levy Lorenzo (US)

Greetings from Miami!

I spent two artistically inspiring weeks at STEIM. The first week I did the orientation workshop with two other artists: pianist and composer Eleonor Sandresky, and percussionist and electrical engineer Levy Lorenzo. I am a theatre sound designer and a singer/songwriter, so we were quite a mix. I found that this was great for exchanging ideas. The three of us were new to STEIM and to the concept of developing our own electronic music performance tools. I am glad that a place like STEIM opens its doors to artists entering the field, and I think this is important because it widens the span of the field.

The orientation workshop started with Robert Van Heumen’s introduction to STEIM. Robert’s presentation covered the entire scope of work that STEIM does, and this made me realize what a special place it is for electronic artists. His presentation also seemed to be geared at “how artists can use STEIM”, and it was exiting to discover the array projects that can be accomplished there. Robert also showed us the software LISA and how he incorporates it in his performances.

Takuro Mizuta Lippit gave us a great presentation about instrument design. He went over artistic considerations and different levels of technical knowledge. One of the things that I found most interesting were the examples of instruments created by STEIM or with the help of STEIM. There was quite a gamut of instruments and interfaces ranging form Michel Waisvisz’ CrackleBox to hacked Wii instruments, to Laetitia Sonami’s glove and Jorgen Brinkman’s web.

We had a session with Frank Blade, who gave us excellent demonstrations of the software Junxion using a joystick and a Wii remote. He also gave us a session where he demoed some of the traveling exhibit pieces, which I found very interesting and ingenious.

Daniel Schorno met with us individually and as a group. He gave me very useful pointers for working with LISA, and showed us his performance set up using LISA and several external controllers.

Jorgen Brinkman gave us a tour of his wonderful analogue equipment collection in the STEIM basement and showed us his special web with blue LED lights.

I was privileged to attend a concert that STEIM was holding that week with a season ending party. The concert had mix of international artist and musical styles. It was great to see how they applied the tools that we had learned about, and see the artistic side of electronic music with new controllers. Laetitia Sonami performed with her glove and later gave us an impromptu presentation of the design process for it. She also demonstrated her performance setup using Max/MSP.

Michel Waisvisz passed away the night of the concert. Despite this great loss, which also coincided with STEIM’s funding being in jeopardy, everyone at STEIM kept their liveliness up and remained exceedingly available for us. Everybody at STEIM is incredibly nice and courteous. They are extremely happy to show you their work or to explain anything. The people that work there are all talented in different areas, which makes STEIM a great resource for wide range of subjects. For me the best part of visiting STEIM was getting to know the people there. STEIM is a little gem in the Netherlands, which I hope will continue to grow and expand.

My awareness of STEIM came from my interest in using sensors in theatre to trigger aspects of the sound design. I brought my own sensors to STEIM and my sensor interfaces (icubex and teabox), but I had not idea what I would do with those tools outside of a theatre context. After being intrigued with LISA, I put the sensors aside and spent the second week trying out this software.

For a while I had been interested in exploring live sampling in performance, but I thought it was way too complicated for me. After being introduced to LISA I saw that I was wrong. LISA makes it very easy to catch sounds and quickly play them back live, however the challenge is to do something musically interesting with it. I found that “composing” music using a live sampler required a big shift in my composition process. When I compose everything is predetermined, there are no elements of surprise. Playing around with LISA I found that surprise is one of the fun things about performing with live samplers.

I did a simple exercise singing into LISA some predetermined notes, a chord, G – Bb – C, and then transposing it in LISA and layering those transpositions to create different harmonies. The idea was to sing a melody with words over that and to sample syllables and consonants to add a rhythmic element. I found that I never got to a point where I could always get the same results in LISA and since I am not an improviser, it was hard to write a predetermined melody. Again, this was a lesson for me about working with live samplers. Things can’t be so predetermined and making them like that isn’t any fun. At the end I left STEIM with this new notion in mind, which I will indeed continue to explore.

lisaexercise.swf

Many thanks to STEIM and I hope to be able to visit again with more projects!

Carolina
www.carolinaperez.org

-photos by Pablo Sanz Almoguera

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During our time at STEIM in June, 2008, we managed to archive and process
tens of hours of radio recordings made on-location by Raed during the July ‘06
war in Lebanon. We distilled these recordings down to 70 minutes and
performed heavy editing and layering at the studio to form 14 separate
audio tracks of collaged radio featuring music, advertisements, radio
jingles, speeches, call-in radio shows and more.
The end result offers a window into the chaotic and schizophrenic
landscape of wartime Lebanon through the sound of radio broadcasts.
This project will find a CD release on the Sublime Frequencies label.
www.sublimefrequencies.com

Additionally, we improvised and recorded as a trio using these and
other Middle Eastern radio recordings as a backbone alongside
turntables, open-circuit electronics, live radio, processed trumpet
and contrabass. Several hours of recordings will be edited and mixed
in the future for release.

Studio time was also spent recording for a ‘Sammy Clark’ release,
an ongoing duo of Raed and Liz which incorporates turntables,
electronics and extended trumpet.

Finally, audio materials (radio and other archival materials) from the
civil war period in Lebanon were reviewed by Raed and Mark for a
future collaborative project.

Thank you STEIM

Having just returned from Europe a few days ago, I am still buzzing with ideas and information from my week at STEIM. Reading this, you might find that strange since it is such a dark time for them, with their funding in jeopardy and the great loss of director Michel Waiswisz. In spite of all this, everyone at STEIM did their best to give us a good experience, and for me it was exceptional.

From the first session, I was blown away by how much they do there and the range of the musical community they serve around the world. Each day we met with new people with a different take on electronic music, hardware, software, etc. They are all masters in performance, inventing/composing, and are really good at explaining what they do and how they do it. In other words, these people do what is extremely rare in the arts, and that is to give direct, practical information in addition to artistic guidance. They all had one overarching thread in common, and that is the focus on making good music for the audience, however that works for you. This really resonates for me as a professional pianist and composer. Immediately I felt that I was in the right place. This also said to me that these people have a depth of knowledge about their subject and deep understanding of the field that makes them the go-to place for instrument enhancement and building. In addition, since they are all actively engaged in pushing the boundaries of the musical arts and electronics, they are discovering things all the time.

My work involves choreographed movement that I make for my piano compositions that I perform and I have long envisioned an electronic sensor system that I can retro-fit in any piano. Not having a background in engineering but at the conservatory, I had always felt that building anything was out of my reach. But now, thanks to the folks at STEIM, I’m beginning to imagine what the parameters of this sensor system should be and a little about how it might work and even how I might build it myself. So time to get to work and make something! Can’t wait to go back there to work out the kinks and fix mistakes in design that I’m sure I’m going to be making, never mind learning a big bunch of new stuff. After being there I want to wear the sensors too!

Check out videos and music at my site on myspace/eleanorsandresky.com and look for me new piece with sensor systems on Ned McGowan, Monica Germino, and Seth Josel in 2010.

Between June 9 - 12 I was a guest in STEIM’s studio 2 to work on the filmscore for the new film of Dutch filmmaker Jan Suschitzky. I have collaborated with Jan on two former occasions, and for his new film we decided to try to first make the soundtrack and Jan will make the film based on the rhythm and atmosphere of the sound. Since his work is very poetic and rhythmical I think this could be a very interesting experiment. I have received a grant from the Fonds voor Scheppende Toonkunst to realise the composition.

Most of my music is made out of sampled material, recorded material and found experts from records. I wanted to look for new ways of collecting material and my idea was to collect sounds recording with musicians which I will later manipulate and rework to use in my composition. Also I wanted to find ways to work and communicate my ideas with performing musicians since I don’t work with written scores or traditional notation.I have worked in the studio with percussionist Diego Espinosa, bassplayer George Cremaschi and saxophonist Ties Mellema. I asked Diego to play the vibraphone since I love the instrument, and it is great to sample it. Also I love the bass (being a bass player myself) and the combination would just be great for the atmosphere of the film. I worked with Ties on many occasions before and he is just an excellent player. I have recorded sessions where we improvised, I gave them specific tasks to execute and I let them use the Wii remote. I developed a JunXion / LiSa setup so they could sample and playback their sounds themselves, using the motion detectors of the Wii remote to go back and forward in the sample buffer and control filter parameters. In the case of Diego and George it worked really well, while they were playing vibes or bass they created percussive effects by holding the Wii remote in their hand.

I work a lot with STEIM’s audio instrument LiSa since I really like the direct and intuitive way you can use it and its live sampling capabilities. My controllers for improvising and controlling sounds live are USB game controllers. Since STEIM has implemented the Wii remote in JunXion I have become a enthusiast user of the sexy white controller. I looked into different new ways of using and adjusting my LiSa and JunXion setup using the Wii remote and I spend some time creating patterns and sounds with the fantastic Putney VC3 synthesiser. The time I spend and concentration I could achieve really helped finding ideas for my composition. I realised again what a unique and valuable place STEIM is, I cannot conceive the music scene without it.

I recently completed a two week residency at STEIM along with Bonnie Jones and Alessandro Bossetti. Bonnie and I shared Studio 1 while Alessandro used Studio 2. We worked together and individually.

When I arrived at STEIM I had been using a system that involved a snare drum, using a small speaker driver and a contact mic to pass physical feedback through the drum head. [more…]

My residency was to help me develop the Buchla Lightning II Midi Conducting Rods, a legendary early infra-red sensor instrument http://www.buchla.com/lightning/index.html , along with LiSa, into a viable perfoming tool, in particular for live improvisation. This period of residency was very valuable for me as a chance to disappear into the dark hole of studio 2 and concentrate in the software aspects: something I have great resistance to in my normal life. And also to exchange ideas with the STEIM team and to get on hand support for LiSa when I needed it. Most of my time was spent experimenting with programming the Buchla and LiSa to find ways that makes some kind of intuitive sense to me and give me a variety of controls derived from gestures necessary to make an instrument capable of complex and varied improvisations.

I need an instrument that can be very precisely controlled that I can use to interact with other musicians, for example Grutronic http://www.myspace.com/grutronicmusic: shown here playing with Mr. Evan Parker

But I also want an instrument that surprises me, that remains interesting and doesn’t lead me to the same sounds every time I use it

What I developed so far is not quite the minimal wholly wireless system I was invisaging after the orientation period a year ago. I imagined having no table in front of me and just standing there with the buchla wands, but this would involve a heck of a lot of hardware modification and would maybe leave me wired up like a xmas tree. At the moment I am free of any wiring at all – I just have two sticks to wave about in the air and it feels very free and liberating - so it seems a shame to spoil that. At least at this point I really don’t want to get into building or hacking hardware, I think there would be too many issues with power supplits transmitters etc and besides, I have enough problems keeping these old buchla’s working as it is without drilling big holes in them. What I have now for performing now is practical and it works pretty well. It combines the Buchla, faderfox controller also using an Akai MPC and a couple of Korg Kaoss pads – sometimes augmented with a kalimba, nord modular, my cute custom analog suitcase synth:

and a cracklebox for example. Also Moog, Eventide and Vesta Kaza processors if I can carry them. Its all pretty visceral and body based and I can have the computer screen closed when performing which is important – as watching people who are 100% visually involved with their screens onstage is definitely not my idea of fun. At the moment I’m using mostly analogue modular sounds sampled to hard disc – ultimately I’d like to combine this with live sampling too.

Performing with the Buchla at the STEIM organised concert on May 30th was a little bit premature but it also put a pressure on me to develop something very quickly which in the end was quite mad and funny and i think worked out pretty well. I have performed with the Buchla many times but never along with LiSa, or with any other computer progam for that matter. My Faderfox controller was kind enough to die on me the next morning, rather than 2 minutes before the gig – which, from my experience, is normally when things decide to break…

The residency has also left me with an overview of a how I would go about constructing a live sampling patch and how I could use that to interact with other musicians. Also discussions with Frank and Taku generated some new ideas about working with a sequencer in conjunction with the Lightning, the Faderfox and LiSa: early experiments were surprisingly hard to control. I also think it could be worth my exploring Junxion and the Nintendo wii controller. Junxion could me a much more elegant solution to the mess of midi mapping I have to do. The wii can probably not replace all of the Buchla’s functions but it could certainly augment them and maybe replace one of the wands. One weakness of the Buchla is that it has very few button encoders. Despite my appeals to Mr Buchla to add a bunch of switches to the forthcoming and long, long overdue Lightning III, he told me he won’t add much significant to the existing Lightning II functionality.

In the end of course its more than a bunch of hardware and software, its an instrument and I’ll need to test out the programming and practise with it in different contexts over the coming months – all this programming stuff is fine, but its all ideas really - what might seem useful locked away in a studio and what is really useful onstage with other musicians are often not the same. So I still have to get to grips with performing on this thing, and developing the mixture of control and abandon that I would like to achieve, which really isn’t that easy. I think I will never try to play Charlie Parker tunes on it.

I don’t actually know of anyone who has ever really mastered the Buchla Lightning. There is hardly any documentation or recordings. In fact the only person  I have ever heard playing it is me - which is refreshing and also unnerving. When I first found came across it I felt like it was magic and somehow made especially for me. That feeling hasn’t left me yet. Its taken me years to get to point where I feel I know what it is for and am comfortable performing with it, but I am beginning to put the pieces together. I’m sure there is a lot of work still ahead but I am happy to got this far. I hope I can go back to STEIM to carry on this work in the near future.

Apart from the odd phone conversation with Mr Buchla I have felt strangely alone and in outer space when working with it and concieving of what it could do and what I want to do. But for some reason I have taken on this challenge – to the point that it now feels like it is becoming my main performing instrument. It has been very helpful to go to STEIM and feel that what I am doing with the buchla is relatively normal - I can honestly say its the only place I know where i feel that way.

Here’s a quite funny little clip from a Berlin Salon Bruit gig with Caretakers made a few days after the residency:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV5aBaYmiD8

Thanks go to the UK Arts Council of Great Britain for financial support for this project.

I participated in a workshop 4-10 September 2007 and then returned for 2 weeks of serious composing 7-20 January 2008.

The project I was working on, “head transplant experiment,” commissioned by Ina/GRM, is my first (second?) live piece for solo computer (most of my work is for fixed media). So I spent an enormous amount of time exploring and experimenting and finding my way. I developed a myriad of fantastic modules using light sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetic field sensors, mercury switches, piezzo, contact microphones etc. to control various processing, synthesis and sampling patches.

But in the end (just before coming to STEIM) I set most of that aside for future development and honed things down to a very simple setup (i.e., reliable, controllable, musical…).

I use Midi faders, knobs and buttons (Behringer BCF2000, Lexicon MRC) and the computer keyboard:

to control 1 Max/MSP patch that performs various types of (extreme) distortion on 2 soundfiles:

All the parameters can be controlled gesturally in a variable range and with appropriate precision, thanks to the high resolution of the BCF2000 and to a method I set up for flexible controller mapping and scaling:

The patch responds very nicely to my control inputs, and yet at the same time has a kind of “mind of its own.” This is not the result of algorithmic parameter control but of the impossibility to foresee the outcome of certain combinations of parameters given two constantly changing sound inputs. So when I play the instrument I am truly in an “interactive” situation where the other sometimes seems to be a kind of animal with its own inscrutable intentions to which I must respond, and the result is that I discover new material each time I play.

The patch has an elaborate system for saving and recalling parameter values (including a method that can be used to save presets ”on the fly“ during a performance), and the values are sent to the BCF2000 (which has motorized faders), so after recalling a preset parameters can be changed with no discontinuities. I used this potential extensively in the studio as I was exploring, improvising, composing, revising, etc. But for the performance of this piece I chose to recall 1 preset at the beginning and perform all parameter changes “by hand.” For this reason I wrote a detailed score describing all the manipulations I need to perform during the piece.

In the truly ideal studio and living environment that I found at STEIM, I was able to finish developing the instrument, explore its potential, and write a first version of the piece. After leaving STEIM, I finished the revising the piece at GRM. It was premiered on 9 February 2008 at the Maison de Radio France, in Paris, and performed again in March in a more informal club-like atmosphere in Buffalo, New York.

Because it is extreme, noise-based, total-sound-experience music (you bask in the sheer energy of its very complex, dense and active sounds – one listener said it was “like sunbathing”), rather than a piece based on an articulated, hierarchical structure, I believe it is best suited for an environment where the audience is free to move around, rather than a traditional concert setting, where the listener is “trapped.”

I am looking forward to performing the piece again, and I am planning to write a few companion works for the same instrument in order to make a very noisy “set.” I’m also planning to develop the other instruments I began, for use in both solo and ensemble situations.

Between 30 May and 3 June the POW Ensemble has been working with three composers on new pieces for the project “Strange Attractors”. We gathered with Alwynne Pritchard, Gabriël Prokofiev and David Fenech at STEIM, Amsterdam for a working project with my ensemble.

The working method was quite challenging. We wanted the composers to compose their pieces in collaboration with us, which is really the only way to write for the combination of electric guitar and 2 computers. So the composers were working on the guitar parts with Wiek Hijmans, while at the same time Guy Harries and me (Luc Houtkamp) were writing software based on their plans.

I think the pieces will be very great!
They will be premiered in April 2009 at the Gaudeamus Performers Week in Amsterdam.

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