From May 1 through May 14th, Pete Edwards and Phillip Stearns have been working on developing an open platform for endless musical and electronic invention, exploration, and discovery from the bottom up or the top down. This system is based on minimizing the differences in the input and output “languages” used in various musical electronic formats.  This means finding a way to allow free communication between logic, analog and eventually digital electronics. We are working to achieve this by finding a middle ground between these mediums where signal format and amplitude can be shared freely with minimal need for translators and adaptors. Our proof of concept models have shown that unhindered communication between binary logic and variable analog systems renders wildly adventurous possibilities and a unique musical character.

The form factor ethos is one where our passion for invention and performance are given equal attention. The key to achieving this goal is designing a hardware system with maximal scalability of size, quality and hardware format. Thus allowing the experimenter to quickly and cheaply connect circuit boards with simple jumper wires. Meanwhile the traveling musician may prefer to adapt their system to be held in a rugged housing with large format control hardware. This is effectively achieved by adopting a standard layout for a set of core modules which can be built up to the appropriate scale using a series of shields and pluggable add ons.

After a series of discussion on what such a system might look like and how to establish a standard that could be as flexible as possible, allowing for the nesting of micro and macro elements, we began prototyping modules and stackable hardware interfaces.

Project documentation is still underway, with schematics for the prototypes still in development, however, we have, after only two weeks, produced a functional system that fulfills many of our goals including portability, quick system (re)configuration, open patchable interconnection architecture, and stable breadboard compatible form factor with the potential for stackable shields and interfaces.

Future plans discussed for the project include the development of VCO, VCA, and VCF modules that operate on 5 volts, releasing schematics and system specifications to the public, production of low profile breadboard compatible modules in kit and pre-fabricated form with options for either through hole or smd components.

A video demonstrating the 4000 series CMOS logic based modules can be viewed here.

The Module Prototypes:

Prototype of The Shifter module.

The Shifter - A dual 4-bit serial in parallel out (SIPO) shift register (CD4015) is connected as a single 8-bit SIPO shift register. Two 1 of 8 digitally addressable analog switches control two feedback taps which allow for each of the shift registers 8 outputs to be fedback to the register input. Input to the register is the output of four cascaded dual input XOR gates (CD4070) for a total of 5 possible inputs. The first two inputs are provided by the 1 of 8 switches, the third and fourth inputs are labeled as “mod” inputs for patching of any logic level signal, and the fifth input is connected to a “seed” button located on the lower left corner of the module. A logic level signal on the clock input will shift, or advance, the register once every positive going edge transition. Setting the feedback taps to the same state will fill the register with logic 0 each positive edge transition of the clock input. The register may need to be jump started by pressing the “seed” occasionally in the event that all outputs go low (lock up condition). The edge connector and header row provides connections for ground, power (3-18V), address and inhibit control inputs for each of the 1 of 8 switches, “mod” inputs, 8 parallel outputs of the register, and output from three of the XOR gates (1 = both feedback taps XORed, 2 = the second tap and “mod” inputs XORed, 3 = “mod” inputs XORed).

Prototype of the Divide by 2 by 2 by 2… module.

Divide by 2 by 2 by 2…- A single 12-bit binary counter (CD4040) takes a logic level signal and provides 12 sub-octaves, each available as patch points on the header on the left side of the module. Additionally, three 1 of 8 digitally addressable analog switches (CD4051) provide independent selection of the first 8 sub-octaves generated by the binary counter. The header row along the bottom provides connections for ground, power (3-18V DC), counter clock input, counter reset, address lines and inhibit control inputs for each of the three 1 of 8 switches, and the final four output stages of the binary counter.

Prototype of the Divide by 3-10 module.

Divide by 3-10 - This module divides a logic level signal frequency by integers 3 through 10. A 1 of 8 digitally addressable analog switch allows for the selection of the factor of division. A divide by 2 through 10 counter (CD4018) operates on feedback to establish the division factor and is used in conjunction with a quad 2-input AND gate (CD4081). The header row and connector provide connections for ground, power (3-18V DC), counter clock input, address lines and inhibit control inputs for the 1 of 8 switch, and the sub harmonic output.

Prototype of the Rhythm Brain module.

Rhythm Brain – Three binary rate multipliers (CD4089) share a common clock input and output pulses that are multiples 0-15 of 1/16th the logic level signal on the clock input. All chips share a common “set to 15″ input, which globally resets the pattern. Each chip has independent 4-bit addressable rate multiplication and inhibit controls. The edge connector and header row provide connections for ground, power (3-18V), 3 independent 4-bit address selection of rate multiplication and inhibit controls, and individual output for each chip. An additional set of outputs provide the compliment of the individual outputs on the header on the right side of the module.

Prototype of the 3-bit Digitizer module.

3bit Digitizer – An incoming analog voltage is digitized and quantized in real-time at 3-bit resolution. Two quad opamps (TL074) are used as comparators connected to a resistor network which sets 8 thresholds at equal intervals from 0v to the Voltage supply level. An 8-bit priority encoder (CD4532) is used to convert the comparator outputs to 3-bits. The edge connector and header row provide connections for ground, power (3-18V), 3-bit output in order LSB to MSB, enable output, gate select output, and the 8 outputs of the comparators.

- developing a method to measure the proximity from one bicycle to another. We are investigating a combination of Xbee modules – tiny radio frequency modules – and ultrasonic sound – high frequency sound generators which one normally uses to drive mice, insects and other animals insane.

- we are working on our scooter radioplay expedition ‘dus niet brommen’, which we will present at the Urban Explorers Festival in collaboration with art initiative Noordkaap. During this scooter expedition the audience is riding along with 10 brave, young scooter guides. Sitting at the back of these scooters they listen to a radioplay which is being broadcasted live from the central radio scooter (recognizable by its huge antenna). In this radioplay the sounds and movements of the scooters influence the various sounds of the radioplay. Using piezo’s, FM transmitters and computers with wifi connections on the scooters the scooter sounds are transferred to the central radio scooter. Sitting at the back of this central scooter I mix and adapt the sounds to the various locations and send them into the ether.

First week

We did some experiments with Xbee modules which were quite succesful. We walked around outside and inside with Xbee modules connected to our laptops. Inside the Xbee modules do not work that well because the radio waves bounce back from the walls. But outside they work quite nicely within a range of about 50 metres. Actually these are the first sensors we use that work better outside then inside…

For the scooter expedition we found a very nice Stentor FM transmitter. We made an antenna and now we can broadcast our scooter radio programme in a range of a kilometre. Furthermore we worked on the power supplies for the electronic devices on the scooters.

Second week

We are running into quite some problems with the power supplies. The situation is a bit stressful since we have only 1,5 week to make it work. The PandaBoards we are using for the project are now – fortunately – way more stable and performance wise efficient thanks to the brand new linux distribution which Didier put on them. Sjoerd has been working on sound design for the radio play.

Down here you can listen to a sound preview – all sounds except the male voice are being triggered and influenced by scooters.

You can check out a tv item about ‘dus niet brommen’ down here:

After a few months of planning our crew of 14 manages to gather for 4 days in Amsterdam to talk, play and enjoy the wonderful hospitality of STEIM.

 Jeroen Uyttendaele and Dewi de Vree, Ground. Photo: Justin Bennet

iii is a platform that has been taking form during the past year out of the desire to share processes revolving around the development and presentation of self-made, performative media.

 Dieter Vandoren, Drift

We meet to search for the outlines and to discuss the common specificities of our practices, as well as to try out new ideas for collaborative works and to plan future activities.

Wen Chin Fu, OHHO

We rapidly take over the studios and guesthouse (thanks Nico!) – experiencing STEIM  and its facilities as a quasi self-sufficient organism, embedded but also autonomous from the city around it.

Erfan Abdi, Notesaaz .  Photo: Justin Bennet

With the exception of a few short expeditions to gather supplies, we remain within the building, shuffling up and down the steep stairwell from the dark rooms on the ground floor to the luminous apartments above, where we find magazines portraying human female breasts placed besides journals dedicated to highly abstract topics.

The residency culminates on sunday by opening up to the public with No Patent Pending #2. Kristina Andersen, Justin Bennet and Joel Ryan join us during the afternoon to take part in an open discussion. We talk about strategies for maintaining, as non-experts, autonomous research trajectories that invade (and then quickly escape) academic and artistic confines.

In  the evening we present a program of performances including existing works and several new pieces developed on site.

A big thanks to STEIM for hosting us and to Stroom Den Haag for supporting our initiative.

]]> http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2013/04/06/iii-self-made-media-collective/feed/ 0 http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2013/02/07/performance-stellar-sound-rooftop-by-iris-van-der-ende/ http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2013/02/07/performance-stellar-sound-rooftop-by-iris-van-der-ende/#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:00:05 +0000 Iris van der Ende http://www.steim.org/projectblog/?p=4980 Read more…

Inspired by the sonic analysis of distant stars by astrophysicists, the performance combines an interactive outdoor laser system with compositional elements of classical harp and recordings made of the sonic signatures of heavenly bodies. Featuring narratives by Hungarian astrophysicist Zoltán Kolláth. The evening took place on the roof of the Q-Park garage at the Cultura Nova festival in Heerlen. August 2012.

 

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Before arriving at STEIM, I worked with the turntables in an installation-based setting.

In order to prepare them for use as an instrument to play with, I adapted the TT`s and replaced the motor`s cables to more easily attach them to a microcontroller, as well as putting longer line-out cables onto them to make them more flexible in a performative context.

The next step was to find a way to control and play the turntables. With these helpful instructions: http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Tutorials/HighCurrentLoads as well as with the expertise of Marije (coding) and Peter (hardware) from the STEIM-Lab, I was able to put my ideas onto a breadboard. I was then able to control the speed of all record players from 0 up to the fastest possibility of the TT´s motor via knobs, trigger all on/off`s with a switch and had the possibility of adjusting the on/off time settings by another knob.

To control the speed of the turntables, I used an arduino microcontroller and a simple transistor circuit as seen at the link above. After soldering the things onto the breadboard, I put everything into a tiny black box. My first self-made controller was finished.

As construction of the controller took so much time (more than a week including research, soldering,etc….), time to practice the instrument for the upcoming concert at the Oorsprong, which was courteously organised by STEIM`s Jonathan Reus, was a little short. Despite the short time left, I started to work with the sounds which I therefore cut onto vinyl. A recording of a studio2 session can be found here.

The Time at STEIM was very productive for me. It was possible to be totally focused on my work and to go much further. Thanks once again for this inspiring place and the helpful and friendly people there! Hope to get back soon.

Arrived at STEIM with two bags of gear and a laptop. Felt great to be back
there again although I have visited them quite regularly since I finished
my internship back in February last year. First thing on my to-do list was
to set up gear and do some soundchecking!

I’m pleased to be working with a subwoofer the next few weeks. It’s one of
those things my own studio is sorely lacking. Once I got my ‘no-input’ mixer
set up it was time to give it all a test run:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-001

After recording some of these sessions I saw that my Soundlings colleague
Georgios Papadakis was in the building. We had a chat about some upcoming
projects after which I got back to the mixer. I recorded another session
in which I tried to focus on the chaotic bass frequencies. The result is
quite harsh and deep:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-002

Time to dive into some SuperCollider code soon to see what I can do with
the sounds I’m getting so far!

Day 2

Instead of coding I decided to first bring along some more hardware gear to
see how it affects the feedback loops. Plugging in an Alesis Bitrman seems
to turn the setup into a funky beat machine. I made a couple of recordings

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-003

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-004

Later on I had a fruitfull talk about pressure sensors with Marije baalman
which resulted in me taking along a bunch of sensors to try out. Prepared
a bunch of code which I will use as a starting point tomorrow. This was
the last recording I made today:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/nirec005

Day 3

Slow start today… due to a lack of electricity. I guess having power is
quite essential in live-electronics. As soon as the power was back on I
decided to do a bit of jamming:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-006

Been trying out some post effects on the output sound… with varying
results. Resonant lowpass filters work quite nicely although I made some
mistake in the panning which I’ll have to fix. I’ll try out a multi-
tap delayline with feedback tomorrow. Since the source sounds are all
about feedback I tend to focus that eastatic of the processing of the
output.

I recorded some sessions with a more fragile approach to the sound…
Almost like exploring the tipping point.

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-007

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-008

Day 4

Did a lot of coding and scrapping and coding again today. Using chaotic
functions to control parameters is quite a laborious process. Its hard
to predict the outcome. So trial and error it is! It was good to be
switching between coding and playing all day although it took me a lot
of time to get to the kind of sounds I’m looking for. Actually I’m
not there yet, and it’ll probably take me a long period of finetuning
before I’m really satisfied. here are some of the results:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-009

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-010

Day 5

Got this recording as I just switched on my gear and tweaked 2 or 3 knobs:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-011

Exploring the boundaries of chaotic tipping points today. I’m realizing that
playing with a no input mixer is not so much like playing ‘solo’ but a lot
more like playing a duet.

Day 6

Today Yaniv Schonfeld came of in the afternoon for some no input jamming! Learned
a lot again… also with playing around with a pressure sensor on the software
side:

noise!

Realized that the processing I do in SuperCollider should be fed back to the no-
input mixer… The results are a lot more intricate that way. I like the way that
every sound element is interconnected to the overall sound. In the evening I hosted
the Think Tank Meeting #12. Marije Baalman and Georgios Papadakis gave presentations
and a workshop on the topic mapping. In the end I got the chance of asking some
advise on mapping in chaotic circumstances. Very helpfull!

Day 7

My thoughts are slowly shifting from exploring the sounds of no input to designing a
controller for the software part. I have some ideas that I’d like to explore in these
weeks of my residency. One of them is to create a controller that requires physical
strength in order to become really expressive.

Recorded a few more jams:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-012

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-013

Day 8

First day of controller building!

Day 9

Now for some sounds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqsGPAreyJE

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/sensor-test-recording-01
 

Day 10

The controller is pretty cool! and quite expressive! Today I’m constantly
trying out different kinds of mapping for the controller. I’ve taken out
the ringmodulators from the setup just so that I can better hear what the
effects in SuperCollider are doing to the overal sound.

Here’s a recording of the controller connected to the no input mixer sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/tapage/no-input-recording-014

Workshop laser interferometer setup.

Blowtorch, framed glass, goggles, onstopper, salvia officinalis…

A short residency (from 30th November to 7th December 2012) culminating in one performance, and an intense two day workshop; all of these events and situations at STEIM exploring and refining the notion of (audible) detection, of sonic archaeology – sound as a revealing of the material world. Throughout this work, first phase, excitation, an action within the world, is paired with subsequent detection or revealing, decoding the history of substance and attempting an animistic relation to the world.

First days, shopping for glass and safety gear, becoming acquainted with the local suppliers of ontstopper, hunting for zwaelzuur to be used primarily in performance and during the workshop, in the light; simple sonification of (electro-)chemical reactions using a discount laser and failing solar panel.

Six hour train window gazing suggested a strong link to glass to be explored during the residency (forgetting that some similar experiments were conducted on the floor of a certain record shop in Berlin many years ago): stacked or hanging glass radio transmitters communicating vibration, arrayed lines of delicate glass scattering the beam – divided by hung mirror galvanometers, dribbles of acid, melted glass channels, tongues of copper and aluminium plugged in to the transformer. Ready for scraping, and heat shattering.

With framed glass and some chemistry in the bag (graphite spray withstanding), the first glass transmitter (an auto-destructive instrument) was quickly prototyped, proved surprisingly effective after careful (literal) trimming of the legged capacitance. Brushed and scalpel scraped at the optimum angle to the receiver (above).

Glass electrolyte dribble.

Closely followed over the next days by glass electrolytic cells (alternating metal tape strips), and a glass white noise generator (dipping into the cookbook).

Plant leaf pierced.

As an adjunct the potential detection possibilities of living plants were returned to during the residency, attempting to create and document one of the most simple electronic setups to monitor micro-voltage potentials within plant leaves/cells and thus to able to compare these with monitored changes within the human psyche.

Future work in glass/detection suggested: conductivity of silver nitrate/gelatine solutions, glass membranes (pH), electroplating (after coating), melted glass channels in the earth, rochelle salt in the earth, copper taped skin ground glove pulse,

Aside from seismometer repair, preparations for Friday’s performance (recording perhaps soon on soundcloud) focused on integrating some kind of pulse excitation (555) with the salvaged HD coil electrolysis and dumped earth, and some not so positive tests with glass/foil charge accumulators.

Tuning the interferometer.

With 15 eager attendees the two day Detection workshop defies  easy and concise description. Some impressions: metaphase divination, flickering retroactivities, rain-drenched transmission-excavation (on a bridge), excited interferometer tuning in the darkened room, doors slammed, air movements transformed into humming, drone feedback, hand wound pencil coils wrapping and hiding one end of the circuit.

And for reference:

The workshop document pdf

For this new Live Cinema project call Unicellular Time, we had the opportunity to do a production residency at Studio 2 in STEIM, from august 6th to august 18th 2012.

For this project we are working with bacterial observation of unicellular organisms that started after thinking about “What´s real time when physical dimension of the body changes?”. Sandra is using a digital microscope to observe and videotape different live unicellular organisms like miracidiums and nematodes. This organisms are taken from liquid humus, that is used to fertilize earth. We are going to combine videotaped footage and live observations with the microscope to do the live video performance.

Through several observations in our previous work we start dealing with the notion of an unknown world, that without a reference, the perception of time is very, very relative. And one of the results is that a person can experience void.

Having all this in mind, I (Enrique) start to ask myself how can I express this?. I focus on using resonances of several metal surfaces like foils, pipes, etc. The method was to take out the attack to modulate only the sound in expansion; I start to create the music that will express this void using LiSa software, a live sampler that I have been using in the past years under the guidance of Jos Zwaanenburg in STEIM.

Now we are in the process of constructing the audiovisual unicellular time experience. The show will be performed in the Live Performers Meeting 2013 in Mexico City and Rome. So, wait for more info about it…

Some material of the process:

We want to thank the advice of Dra. María Teresa Quintero, Parasitologist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, that helped us a lot with the science side of the project.

Links:

https://flxer.net/ChaNa/performances/protozoario-time/

NOTE:
This project is the continuity of our first Live Cinema show called “DEREGRESO”, an audiovisual representation detonated by a medical procedure to use fluoroscopy for visualize internal fluids by low doses of radiation. The Project it has been built by the original file using “OsiriX” a medical visualizer for artistic purposes, resulting in an introspective trip in dialogue with original music composed in LiSa by Enrique Mendoza.

In “DEREGRESO” we experience a unique procedure. I was working in a piece called Kráneo (composed and performed in STEIM), at the same time Sandra was experiencing the medical treatment. When I made a trip from Amsterdam to Mexico City I met Sandra that was also making a come back to life. We got together with our current artistic moments that result in our first Audiovisual Live Performance.
DEREGRESO link:

Finally we want to thank STEIM Studios for the invaluable space, time and guidance provided to the project.

www.enriquemendoza.net

http://www.flxer.net/ChaNa

Musicaerial September 2 Lepelenburg Park, Utrecht

Musicaerial & Frouke Wiarda, framgents ‘tempus fugit ‘ Bart de Vrees    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cHBbNJOpbI

Christina Viola Oorebeek  

‘tempus fugit’ for solo percussion & electronic                                                          [:soundwheel: toy piano tines:kite string:hourglass:]

Percussion solo: Bart de Vrees

From August 20-30th, I had the opportunity to work at STEIM on a
new work for the project ‘Musicaerial’. Frouke Wiarda conceived and organized the project, which had its first performance as the pre-opening of the Gaudeamus Music Week 2012 on September 2 in Lepelenburg Park in Utrecht.

In the studio Bart and I experimented with the sections of the piece using the soundwheel I developed, toy piano tines and other small percussion instruments. The interaction with the kite was done by Bart plucking and playing on the amplified kite string. For that, we had sessions at Blijburg, the “new beach” in Amsterdam with Frouke as kite master, trying out live sampling with a portable amp/speaker unit.                                                                                                  The sound differed from session to session, as well as at the performance, as the kite strings need to be changed according to the velocity of the wind. At the performance, a relatively
thin one was used, which happily produced a crisp and well-defined pitch, mixed with wind. The live sampling and interaction with the kite could only be imagined and reconstructed in the studio through field recordings of the sessions.

Bart de Vrees, percussionist and composer, is great to work with. His performance at the Gaudeamus Week was stellar, his chops on the kite string were awesome and his input and feedback in the work process, inspiring. Reason to continue the collaboration!

Doing a piece in a fluid compositional form, with room for improvisation, in a park, meant trying to develop a strategy full of contingencies. There were many unpredictable elements:

_the weather, obviously                                                                                                                       _no rehearsal with the sound system                                                                                               _the varying sonorities of the kite string, and more.

I was using Max/Msp for the first time, an addition to Lisa and Junxion, which I have used intermittently in the last years in work with electronics. Throughout this new residency, Daniel Schorno, composer-performer and adivsor at STEIM,  provided excellent advice with the setup, as well as offering valuable feedback and new ideas in the artistic concept and realisation of “tempus fugit”. His broad experience and background in ‘classical’ and improvised music in the digital-and-or-acoustic worlds, plus his artist’s eye for imagery, which he so generously shares with colleagues, is a true treasure. I can only hope that he remains vitally connected with STEIM in future!

Also, I want to thank Max-mentor and valued colleague, Danny de Graan, composer-performer, for his help and for his valuable Max for Live meetings at STEIM.
And, of course, thanx to STEIM for the residency!

fragments of the work with Bart:                                                                                                         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cHBbNJOpbI

I sat on a bench at the Amstel near STEIM and noticed the pink wires coming out of the palm of my hand, running to a small device attached to its back, and felt that I’d probably have to try to not behave in an overly suspicious way.

Me and the device are harmless, I tried to communicate non-verbally to the numerous pedestrians and the curious police car.

We’re both just part of a hybrid instrument, consisting of some software, two of these wireless MiniBee controllers, and two theremins.

Those buttons at the other end of the pink wires – they snuggled so comfortably in the palm of my hand that I forgot about them when I went out of the dark STEIM studio.

* * *

The Instrument Lab #3 started with introductions to the rich history of STEIM by Jonathan Reus and Takuro Mizuta Lippit (including intriguing footage from the archives) and a tour through the building. This effectively set the tone for the week to come, and fired up the inspiration.

When we first presented our initial research ideas to the Steim staff and our fellow residents, I had the plan to develop a (possibly wireless) device which lets me apply and control effects on the sounds of my theremin, without having to remove my hands from the theremin antennas.

Packing the equipment for my trip to STEIM, I had felt sorry for my WiiMote, thinking “you’ll have to be disassembled, poor little thing”.

In the workshop of Frank Balde however, we discussed the disadvantages of bluetooth in a performance setup (though generally, the hacking of poor little devices was encouraged). This, and Marije Baalmans workshop on the Sense/Stage system, saved the WiiMote, but also rendered it superfluous for the time being.

The miniBee controllers of the Sense/Stage system are easily configurable and remarkably reliable – a seductive combination that made me employ two of these for my setup; one for each hand. Basically, they’re mini-Arduinos with Xbee radio communication and onboard accelerometers. This way, I could use the built-in bending- and turning possibilities of my hands to communicate something to the software, while the theremin was still able to concentrate on the distance of my hands from the pitch- and volume antennas.

Attaching the miniBees and their batteries at the back of my hands by means of some white rubber band (widely used to play jumping games on schoolyards) was far from elegant, but I had promised my hands to not force them into gloves while playing the theremin. The same rubber band however, in combination with some strategically applied gaffer tape, also allowed me to fix the three-button-contraption in the palm of my hand, so my fingers could click them without confusing the theremin.

The choice of the pink wire for connecting the buttons to the miniBees made the whole look like a medical device somebody had lost in a park, but unfortunately the extensive wire-and-button-boutique of STEIM was closed for the easter weekend, so I had to go with whatever was to be found in the box that me and Sam Andreae had quickly assembled while the lab was still open.

* * *

To give all the accelerometer- and button-data a meaningful purpose was like juggling with a couple of agitated pythons, but eventually I managed to map everything I needed through a patient max patch into my Max4Live device, whose main job it was to record the live input from my instruments (pataphone, sax, theremin-brothers) into a buffer and replay that in a controlled chaotic way, while applying some filters.

Not too much to ask, one could say.

* * *

After the easter weekend, the STEIM staff returned to check the progress of our projects. The evening of the same day also brought the Concept stage, where we were to present the outcome in a concert, so there was not much time to make big adjustments.

Still I found the comments by Kristina Andersen and Daniel Schorno very useful.

Daniel reminded me that I had to watch out for RSI-problems if I used buttons in the way I did, and suggested to use specific gestures to do the switching of parameters or even different modes of operation. And indeed, during the performance, I realized that my fingers, which were supposed to swiftly dance over the buttons to control recording and effects, were actually clinging to them like rugby players with a personality disorder.

Maybe that was because I didn’t have a chance yet to teach that part of my brain which extends into my fingers to do its new job (which dramatically differs from pressing saxophone keys), but I’ll definitely keep Daniels comments in mind.

And Kristina’s enthusiasm gave me the confidence that I actually could use this system for a performance, even though the software was still figuring out what it was meant to do and my skills for playing this new instrument were not even ordered yet by my consciousness.

playing the pataphone

* * *

Recapitulating this intensive week of STEIM Instrument Lab #3 of course also brings back memories of my fellow residents and their projects.

Sam Andraea, whose distortion-enhanced saxophone made me jealous for its charming wildness; Hasan Hujairi with his electronically expanded oud, who also played a nice duo with Luigi Pizzaleo and his amazing metal sculpture interface thing; Iris van der Ende with her beautiful harp sounds that even make the stars twinkle; Tim Thompson with his kinect-powered Space Palette instrument that transformed the audience into happily smiling performers.

And of course the STEIM staff, inhabiting this wonderful place and making the center of Amsterdam move counter-clockwise by boldly rowing against the stream of cultural decay.

I’d like to thank them all.

* * *

Ten years ago, I visited STEIM for the first time – for a research week with Italian director Andrea Paciotto. This residency dramatically changed the course of my life, as I learned about all the things for the first time that I now use on a daily basis, like Max/MSP, sensors, live video- and sound processing, Ableton Live and self-made pasta sauce.

Now, as if a loop with some transformation has been applied to my life, I will return to STEIM – and, to my pleasure, for a longer period.

During the Instrument Lab #3, I learned about the Instruments & Interfaces Master course that STEIM and the Institute of Sonology offer together.

The setup for the concert with Knalpot

After the Instrument Lab, I continued working on my setup, to prep it for using it during the theremin-festival at the Grand Theatre (another endangered species) where I partially played solo, partially improvised together with Knalpot – and the feeling crept over me that I didn’t want to let go, that I had to research further how to really use this interactive system, how to make it part of my setup for solo- and ensemble improvisations.

So I applied for the Instruments & Interfaces master course, and was accepted.

This week, I’ll start into this new phase of STEIM-influenced life.

Exciting times these are!

www.janklug.com

Roughly seven months have past; from hitting rock bottom at STEIM’s soundbunker with the presumed dead, legendarily obscure Black Box analogue modular system to washing up on the shores of the first floor with drawers full of knobs, pots and spare parts, making me drool like a kid in a toystore…
I faced broken modules, faulty power supplies, burning leads and loads of waves, from etherial and watery to solidly piercing or low frequent rumbling waves, in many a shape. Today choice and chance collide, giving me the opportunity and time to shed some light on the progress. And write.
I could start with a basic description of the system and the individual modules but I will not, simply because it is pretty elaborate to describe and hopefully I can manage to keep you interested if I don’t give it all away in this first post.

So for now, to start with, I just want to make the following three announcements;

1 – The Black Box modules have been fully recapped, enhancing the looks beyond any manmade definition of sexyness;
2 – New six-pin Painton leads were made to make optimum use of the three-way ‘main’ power supply;
3 – a custom eigth-way power supply module was finished today to make up for the lack of the 3rd, still non-functional, original cabinet, making it possible to use a total of 24 modules.

More news and info coming soon!

All the best,

Sybren Danz

During january / february 2012 we took part in the artist exchange project “musickitchen” (http://www.musickitchen.eu) during which Anne La Berge, Sven Hahne, Robert van Heumen and Matthias Muche were meeting at STEIM for preparing an electroacoustical composition for a quite large ensemble, consisting of:

Timeart Ensemble
Michel Doneda: sopranosax (FR); Sven Hahne: laptop/video (DE); Matthias Muche: trombone (DE); Daniel Riegler: trombone (AT); Leo Riegler: laptop/turntables (AT); Joris Rühl: clarinet (FR), Benjamin Maumus: spatialization (FR)
&
Anne La Berge: flute/laptop (NL), Robert van Heumen: laptop & controllers (NL), Felicity Provan: trumpet (NL), Oscar Jan Hoogland: elektrisch clavinet/electronics (NL), Angel Faraldo: laptop (NL)

We developed a score taking into special account the possibilities of live-sampling and interaction between the instrumentalist and the laptop players. The piece was performed on february the 2nd at TROUW/de verdieping.

http://soundcloud.com/vanhuman/section-1-slow-air-subtle

http://soundcloud.com/vanhuman/section-4-motives-gestural

http://soundcloud.com/vanhuman/section-8-clusters-around-f

http://youtu.be/apnoN7NHB-U

The second approach has used vibrotactile feedback as a method for firstly receiving cues and other instructions from the laptop, and secondly, as a means of communicating with another performer, within an improvisational setting. The first method is described in detail here, and is demonstrated below in a performance of Kontroll, for prepared piano, self-playing snare and live electronics. As well as sending signals, vibrotactile feedback is used to provide a more embodied experience for the performer, creating the feedback loop that is often broken/missing in systems of digital music (see papers above for more details).

The second method was a joint project with Christos Michalakos, and is described in detail here, with a video of our NIME 2011 performance below.

I met with Marije Baalman at STEIM, with a view to developing the vibrotactile system in a wireless format, both to assist my own performances, as well as to work with larger ensembles. We quickly implemented a prototype using Marije’s Sense/Stage technology, which was relatively easy to set up (with Marije’s help on the Python bits), and seemed immediately very stable. Marije also improved the circuit that I’d been using for the vibration motors, and mocked up a final model that would be small enough to be worn around the arm (or leg) without restricting movement, and would also be light enough not to hinder performance. I’m looking forward to working with this over the next few months, as the wireless system will enable me to explore relationships between more performers/instruments.

XBee / vibro-motor / battery / Sense-Stage prototype

I would like to thank Kristina Andersen for invaluable artistic discussion and musings. Lots of food for thought concerning where my work fits in contextually, and some of the implications that pushing it in certain directions might have musically. With good reason, many people associate STEIM with sensors and technology, but it’s reassuring that the other part, which is just as important, if not more-so, is still so strongly supported. Gratitude also to Joel, Taku & Jon for further conversation, and to Andy for the fantastic meal!!

I will update once I start working with the finished design.

all photos by Laura Arlotti

Soundstorming – Amsterdam, 12-13 May 2011

Soundstorming is an exploration walk that guides participants through various acoustic territories and sound locations. The walk functions as a mobile playground for collaborative experiments with sound and listening.

Echoing the process of brainstorming, Soundstorming provides a freewheeling environment in which participants are encouraged to explore different listening modes and develop site specific interventions.

Particular attention is put on the body as a whole sensory being and political subject. Situated listening activities serve as a starting point for developing individual sensitive capacity as well as a strategy for investigating specific social-cultural contexts and notions of public and private.

At the end of the walk, participants critically presented their documentation and the experiential data gathered during the exploration with the group.

Key-terms, concepts and actions

Phenomenon and context > Sound is not exclusively a linear signal from source to listener. Instead of focusing on sound “in itself”, think about how the whole context of listening modifies your sensations, feelings, and place perception. Consider how site variables and conditions contribute to the holistic experience of a certain event and inform your listening experience.

Production of space > On one hand space is physical, its affordances and constraints modify your relation to it. On the other hand: each of us has the capacity to modify space just by “being there”, by triggering new events, and by making new relations possible.

Politics of listening > The position we occupy in space is a declaration of intent – a socio-cultural-political statement. Relate this to what are considered “acceptable behaviours” in public space and to the set of power relations that reside in every space. Just by adopting a certain listening posture you are questioning social conventions and cultural habits.

Borders > Borders consolidate and – at the same time – deny the contradictions and the ambiguities that they represent. On one hand, they are physical structures, they delimit specific portions of space. On the other hand they are cultural constructions that serve as an identity mirror for emphasizing – and isolating – differences. It’s only by reconstructing our relation with the space around us and by inhabiting its borders that it becomes possible to reduce and confine the violence and the power that borders represent.

References

F. Careri, Walkscapes. El andar como pràctica estética [Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice], Gustavo Gilí, Barcelona, 2002
G. Clement, Manifeste du Tiers-Paysage [Manifesto of the Third Landscape], Sujet/Objet, Paris, 2004
J. Crawford, Gordon Matta-Clark: In Context, in L. Fusi, M.Pierini, Gordon Matta-Clark: nulla si crea e nulla si distrugge, Silvana, Milano, 2008
W. Herzog, Vom Gehen in Eis [Of Walking In Ice], Hanser, München, 1974
D. Kleinberg-Levin, Listening as Social Practice and as a Practice of the Self, paper given at Tuned City, Tallinn, 2011
D. Michael-Levin, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics, Routledge, 1989
P. Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, iUNIVERSE, New York, 2005
N. Thompson, The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, MASS MoCA & MIT Press, 2006

Solo Improvisation 1 by Sam Andreae

What I was particularly keen to develop during my STEIM visit were the control aspects of this set-up. I’d already experimented with adding touch points onto the saxophone to control devices like the CrackleBox (pic below) or the Ciate-Lombarde instruments. But I wanted to take this further, increasing the integration between the physical aspects of playing the Saxophone (mechanics, movement, pressure, vibration) and selected variable aspects of the electronic sounds generated. I used a series of pedals to control many of the sounds while my hands are busy playing the Saxophone, but I wished to somehow transfer these controls onto the saxophone itself by utilizing actions that are already present when I play my instrument.

Solo Improvisation 2 by Sam Andreae

Of the many interesting lectures we attended during the course, the work on sensors and Arduino devices were the most useful for my project. Using the Arduino I could draw from any number of analogue sources and then use that information, by converting the analogue information received into resistance within an electrical circuit, to control different electronic variables. For example, using a contact mic as the analogue source, I can map the sound information received to a certain variable with my electronics (lets say amount of feedback being sent to channel 1 on the mixer) therefore allowing me to now control this electronic variable with my acoustic sound on the saxophone (play louder = more feedback). The same can be done with any number of sensors and variables within my set-up, currently I’m using pressure pads and contact mics and I’m working on using accelerometers and photo-resistors in the future.

Solo Improvisation 3 by Sam Andreae

My work has leapt forward thanks to my STEIM visit, I found it such an inspiring place to be, all the staff are incredibly dedicated to the work they do and this creates such a great atmosphere at the center. I’d particularly like to mention Jonathan who help ease us into the STEIM mentalitly, and Marije who fielded all of my idiotic Arduino questions with much patience. It was equally rewarding to be around the other participants, it turned out that we all had our focus in quite different areas, and therefore had much to learn from each other. It wasn’t all work though! Me and fellow labber Iris snuck into the synth basement one night to have a crazy jam (results below) and we all enjoyed exploring the many and internationally themed restaurants in the area (obviously we didn’t venture more than a couple of blocks from the STEIM building at ay one point).

STEIM Synth Jam (excerpts) by Sam Andreae

Lastly there was a performance at the end of the week where we all presented our work, it was great to see everyone on stage performing after all the intense discussing that had been prominent throughout the rest of the week. I don’t have any photos of my post STEIM set-up as yet, I will post again when I do. I wish all the best to everyone who attended the instrument lab and everyone who works so hard to keep STEIM such an innovative and inspiring place. I hope to visit again sometime in the future.

Solo Improvisation 5 by Sam Andreae

Sam Andreae

Patricia Bosshard: augmented violin, conception

Dragos Tara: live electronics, conception

Gestures sequence definition: this sequence, mostly made out of slow and tensed motions, will be repeated, as a ritual.

Small variations depending on the evolving sound environment. Some gestures produce violin sound, some don’t. The interactions with computer don’t have to always be obvious.

The electronic sounds are made of emulation of modular synths (MAX/MSP).
In a rich multilayer sound context, the gestures isolates some sounds, acting on their volume, frequency range and spatial behavior.

Future, perspectives:
More focus on violin sound an gestures, independently from them impact on electronics.
Sound tests with more than 4 loudspeakers for sound spatialization.
Explore the performance as a whole, especially under the woman-computer dialog point of vue.

Platepipe. The instrument

Elettrozappa. Detail on copper and steel plates

Rear view. Detail of piezo mikes.

Elettrozappa player

Luigi Pizzaleo

Residency at STEIM (23.04 – 6.05 2012) 

Patricia Bosshard: augmented violin, conception

Dragos Tara: live electronics, conception

Live electronics performance for violin and embedded motion sensors Bow

inspired by Joseph Beuys

Two main gestures categories: sound effective or not

Data mapping throughMAX/MSP:

Bow length, distance to bridge, bow speed, hand pressure on the bow

to

low frequency oscillators, amplitude and frequency modulation with sinus waves or random generators

Gestures sequencing: towards a choregraphy that will be repeated several times during performance, but with different consequences on sound.

I am Iris van der Ende, harpist and theatre maker. During the Instrument Lab residency I have worked on a system that extended my harp to an interface. I wanted to play the strings and interact with stellar sounds.
I arrived at the Instrument Lab with my pedal harp and an interactive system that was almost working. Fetapapa who worked at Steim developed this for me: a software programme connected to some of the strings by small microphones. The Stellar Sound System. But it was hard to gain specific midinotes by playing the strings because the harp is an instrument with a lot of harmonical overtones.

When I showed my case at the Instrument Lab I immediatly got advice from the staff. How I could better attach the microphones to the strings. Where exactly on the string the vibration was most intense, in order to gain the best signal. And the wise advice to put some foam material between the microphone and the wooden body of the harp to isolate the signal from one string to another and to mute the vibrations of the harp.

After some days of testing materials between the strings (yogamatrass, handkerchiefs, rubber) I found the best material: soft sponges. And my Stellar Sound System started to run! I could play harp and rely on the computer giving midinotes. Harpists can download the tool Stellar Sound System here: http://www.fetapapa.com/FetaPapa/Stellar_Sound.html

Next to this technical victory it was very inspiring to work between the other residents who all developed new instruments. The way they intergrate technology in their performance was an eye opener to me. The theremin extended with arduinos performed by Jan Klug. The sculpture  of Luigi Pizzaleo interacting with the sound the oud from Hasan Hujairi. The saxophone with electronical distortion from Sam Andreae. The movement tracking Space Palette from Tim Thompson..
And I was very inspired by the lectures in the Instrument Lab about new instruments. The performances developed at Steim blew my mind. The performance with 2 Wii controllers by Alex Nowitz. The internal amplified laptop screen played with a violin bow by Hans Koch. His crashing computer concert. The Hands from Michel Waisvisz. A world of technologic music performance opens to me.

Rightnow, since my harp is really interactive, the new question arrives to me. How can I relate me playing harp to the sounds being triggered… I am very excited to explore this new world. I will integrate the system in my performance Stellar Sound Rooftop for end of June. And I am very excited that I am welcome to continue my artistic research in the house of Steim next six weeks!

During this week we mostly played the instrument to understand what kind of movement it demands , through the rehearsals we understood once again that such an instrument is meant to be tuned in advance , like building a pupet , and through its behavior (piano/pupet) our work as musicians and performers is to activate the beast , make it sing its own song, through actions of the body rather than exclusively a musical goal .

since the instrument is big and has a lot of strings, four hands are required at all times.

Narrative structures where used in order to give the performance a smooth flow.

for example:

one metaphor we worked with is the moment pinocchio turns from wood into flesh , by developing the idea of a puppet turning from wood into flesh action emerged as well as an abstract goal of giving life to an inanimate object.

another metaphor that was used is “autopsy” , the first movements on the piano is played with bows , the bridges for the strings that can be bowed where placed in such a way that the action we do with the bows portrays the movement of cutting wood with a saw.

on this opportunity i want to say thank you to all Steims staff for the wonderful hospitality and warmth and support along the way . (you’ll be seeing more of me:)

Excerpt from Cadavre - on youtube
 

luigi

Steim’s Instrument Lab residency programme is mainly about developing our own approach to the notion of electronic instruments (software and/or hardware). On a personal level, I see this residency as a chance to better understand the possibilities that I have not considered before. Most importantly, however, I think that this residency is a chance for me to reflect on my process and own ‘career’ as an artist.

My activity in music started in earnest with the oud, although I had studied classical guitar for many years. In my four years in Tokyo as a visiting scholar and graduate student at Hitotsubashi University, I had the opportunity to constantly think and rethink about my relationship with music and where I would like it to go. It was in Tokyo that I began to experiment with the idea of experimental music and electronics, as opposed to simply playing ‘oriental’ music on the oud (which, as a medium, I felt did not best reflect my own self). I had a similar experience to reflect in London, when I was part of the Red Bull Music Academy 2010: At the RBMA, not only did I work on developing new music, attend lectures by the likes of Steve Reich and Cosey Fanni Tutti (from Throbbing Gristle fame), and meet some great artists from around the world; I felt that I connected with the city of London in a meaningful way. Of course my experiences while working on my PhD at the University of Exeter and while working at Al Riwaq Art Space in Bahrain have also been important in my development and approach.

The main issue I wish to highlight in this blog is that over the time of this residency, I have connected with the city of Amsterdam in my own way as well. I feel that being able to absorb the locale’s social/cultural/historical nuances  enrich an artist’s personal experiences that on some level inform future practices and developments. Being away for someone like me is also a chance to reflect on where I come from and where I hope to go in the future. This idea was triggered while I made a brief visit to Foam Gallery, where I saw a work entitled “Let’s Sit Down Before We Go” by Bertien van Manen. The work “refers to an old Russian custom (Присядем на дорожку): before you leave on a journey, take a moment to think about where you come from, where you are going and why.”

At the Instrument Lab, where we are encouraged to sit down before we ‘go’, I have been thinking about my approach to instruments and my approach to music in general. I am very excited about some of the projects I am in the process of developing (which will have to happen after my current residency ends in a few days). I must also admit that my discussions with the other residents here with me have been of extreme importance, and I learned a lot from each of their approaches.

As an artist and as a person, my experiences and the processes I go through are of great importance to my creative output. By connecting with a city such an Amsterdam (which holds an important cultural position globally) and by interacting with all the individuals I’ve met through Steim, I feel that I have taken one step closer to understanding my own practice and my own motivations better.

And now, I will go back to rehashing my Post-Esoteric (Oriental) Art Music Manifesto based on these findings.

(by Hasan Hujairi)

http://soundcloud.com/luigi_pizzaleo

This is a good result for me, since it is the achievement of one of my best expectation for this lab: sharing musical experiences and backgrounds, and making them interact.

As to the technical evoution of my work, I could make sensors work through Arduino, with both junXion and a little sketch I wrote by myself. However, I did it on a breadboard but I wasn’t able to solder them to wires, even why they are too little for my not perfect sight (and even less perfect skills with solder). Moreover, only position sensors gave me a consistent and useful result, while others  (mostly pression ones) should undergo an accurate work of calibration and it would take too a long time. So I decided to use, for this time, a joystick, not very beautiful to see but very affordable, as I could observe during Frank’s workshop. Tomorrow…

Off topic: I was at the Van Gogh Museum today. I think everyone should see it at least once in his/her lifetime.

Luigi Pizzaleo

I originally thought I wouldn’t be able to bring my Space Palette instrument because of its size, but I was able to cut it into four pieces and bring it along.   It was originally designed as a “casual instrument” for people to enjoy at festivals (like Burning Man), but over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different arrangements of the controls and features of the sound generation to make it more suitable for performances.  It’s always useful to have deadlines (such as the Tuesday night performance here) to force myself to make progress.  I doubt I will ever find the perfect arrangement of controls, but I’ve been able to experiment with several different approaches while I’ve been here.

When describing my work in one of the presentations, I mentioned that one of my ideas was to use the outline of the hands (or body or any other physical object that you stick in front of the Kinect) as a waveform, directly.  It’s a relatively simple idea that seems to have a lot of potential for creating and evolving sound in a direct and intimate way, and I was happy to hear Kristina Andersen echo my enthusiasm for the idea.  I haven’t been able to implement it completely, yet, but I made some progress toward that goal – TUIO 2.0 has a spec for an OSC message that conveys the outline of an object, and I implemented that in the MultiMultiTouchTouch software that forms the basis of the Space Palette.  It isn’t clear to me what approach I should use for converting the outline to audio in realtime, but SuperCollider is a very strong possibility, and this finally gives me a good excuse to learn that language.

One of the Lab participants (Iris van der Ende) has a harp which can trigger sounds created from stars.  She brought some short star-related video clips (for example, time-lapses of the night-time sky), which I was able to convert and play from within Resolume.  Soon we’re going to try triggering these video clips using the MIDI output of her harp.

…Tim…

Some impressions from lectures and workshops.

Technical workshops (on STEIM software and physical compyting) were wonderful: I’m actually able to do things and use tools today I wasn’t a week ago.

The lecture of yesterday, April 5th, by Tijs Ham, gave new impulse to my old idea of studying accents. Accent is an aspect of linguistics that has never been investigated for lack of either theorical or practical tools and concepts. Just now some papers and websites on USA accents begin to appear. I think the approach Tijs Ham described yesterday could give impulse to a new field of research in the field of linguistic, in close collaboration with linguistics. My interest for this research is partly due to my phylological background, partly to the incredible richness of accents and prosodies of italian speech. All this has very little to do with music, but it shows how knowledge throws seeds  with unpredictable outcomes.

A thought on a video we have seen this morning, a viola player playing Bach without the bow. How gestures become lightness, dance, poetry of movement, when they are free from the burden of their function…

Luigi Pizzaleo

Each costume will feature embedded audio modules that can be played individually but can also be patched to other costumes to shape the sounds and rhythm.

Over the next five months I will be working on Maelstrom 2600 with the assistance of STEIM who will be consulting and supporting the project.  Henry Collins is also working on the project to guide the audio direction.

We made our first residency visit to Steim recently to kickstart the project.  There are so many aspects to the project that all need to fit together so it was really useful to chat with the different staff there about materials, logistics, technologies, performance and possibilities.

Vinyl cut circuits

During this visit I investigated cutting vinyl circuits and used the machines at fablab to try cutting a circuit.  I’m hoping that these circuits will be durable within costumes so I’ll be testing this one to see what it can withstand.

The vinyl cut I made was fairly basic.  I was wrestling with eagle software for a while until I decided to draw a basic lunetta inspired circuit to keep things simple and to keep my options open for testing.

“A Lunetta is a basic concept, the pins of the Ics are brought right out to a panel that you can connect together using wires.  Some people use alligator clips to connect them, some people use bannana jacks, but it’s all the same.” - Intro to Lunetta CMOS synths

 STEIM Bunker

We also spent a fair bit of time playing with the wonderful synthesizers that dwell in the STEIM Bunker.  Including a VCS, System 100, korg ms-20 and some odd Steim creations.  We made some recordings and Henry also combined them into tracks using local sounds and recordings in the STEIM studio, these should be posted to the STEIM blog in the near future.

Now it’s back to France to get busy with Maelstrom 2600.  I’ll be posting updates as the project progresses at my blog here as well as some milestones on this Steim blog.

Maelstrom 2600 is made possible through support from the Australia Council

When I checked into my room at the Steim Guesthouse, the first thing I noticed was an A4 print of Karlheinz Stockhausen being a little friendly with Minnie Mouse. This funny image set the tone for what I think is a very insightful experience so far.

Introductions to the history of Steim and to some of the ‘legendary’ work that has come out of Steim (such as the Kraakdoos – or Cracklebox -  and other instruments made by Michel Waisvisz, or software such as LiSa or JunXion) are of great interest to me as an artist. Visiting the Soundbunker during our breaks – a cave-of-wonders with many treasures such as hacked Crackleboxes and EMS’s Putney VCS3 – has becoming a personal source of joy. We even were shown how to use videogame controllers to manipulate MIDI outputs in surprising approaches.

We had several talks about the idea behind electronic instruments (as opposed to simply electronic ‘interfaces’): Their ergonomics/implicit design, complexity/learning curve, and perfecting performance practices. By looking at the different types of instruments that have been developed at Steim (both hardware and software), I began developing a series of questions of how I wish to modify my own electric oud and my approach to performing with it. By understanding some of the possible approaches and available tools, I am beginning to sketch out ideas of what kind of sound I am trying to reach. I will certainly be sharing my findings over the upcoming week as this residency progresses.

For now, I look forward to another day with more questions. I am very excited about what is yet to come of this.

[by Hasan Hujairi]

I came here in Amsterdam with different ideas  that involved both instrumental (namely amplified metal plates played with a bow) and compositional tools design, as well as various metal stuff to build the instrument. The first day brought many inputs, and many new, unforeseen ideas (such as using Processing sketches as interfaces) have sprung out. Anyway, my main project remains a controller, based on Arduino and a set of sensors, to drive elaboration of sounds (metal plates, or my own voice).

The most important take over today is the richness of musical ideas of participants. I strongly hope to collaborate with at least two of my colleagues (an Oud and a Saxophone).

The only difficulty has been following so many people speaking a fluent english. My english, as often happens to Latin speakers, is a little slow, mostly written, and often I express high-resolution thoughts in a low-resolution verbal form.

Great staff.

Good job everyone!

luigi pizzaleo

We created an experimental Android app (with iOS port coming), way too experimental to post here. It can load any structure consisting of non-overlapping polygons. These act as multitouch buttons which you can press or drag over to produce trajectories. The surface generates OSC messages in response to touch control and these can be used to control any musical system. The surfaces are zoomable to any level of detail, and can be played with multiple fingers, or also automated agents that navigate the space according to simple procedures (we have so far explored loopers, flocks and simple exploratory agents). With the framework for the system in place we experimented with a number of ways to procedurally generate interesting surface structures and map them to procedurally generated musical structures.

The work reached a very rugged prototype which was sufficient for an experimental try out at our live performance for Sonic Acts, on February 25th at Paradiso. Unfortunately the performance plan was derailed: our only Android tablet (plus one of our laptops), went missing from the venue only a couple of hours before the show.

The project is being continually developed an we aim to co-release an app with STEIM later in the year.

The major changes are

The first change has a practical reason, as the sensor package was too heavy to put on the bow without losing the balance totally.
The second one, the LED, is more an aesthetic decision, it makes the augmented bow look like a piece of technology, which is helpful for an audience to experience the performance.

After a week of rescaling and cleaning my junXion configuration, I have used the new system in a concert during the Frameworks Festival in Munich. The new sensors are fun to touch. I especially like the beautiful simplicity of the pressure sensor. Marije used two copper contacts and a piece of conductive foil for this part, very efficient and also impressively inexpensive.

Pressure Sensor, LED, XBee (c) Marije Baalman

Fello Detail (c) Marije Baalman

www.andiotto.com

Concert starts at 20:00 tonight. Should be a good time.

Andrew Scotti's electro tube instrument

Jason Sloan and I arrived at STEIM six days ago with five students from Maryland Institute College of Art, where we both teach sound art and electronic music. This is the first residency program created for students in the new sound concentration at MICA that Jason founded in the past year. Since coming here we have also learned that this is the first residency of a group of undergraduates at STEIM.

I came here for an Orientation Workshop back in October of 2010. During my stay here at that time I quickly began strategizing on how I could bring over some students from MICA to develop performance projects here. I am grateful that this idea has finally become reality, while also providing me with another opportunity to develop a bit of my own work while I’m here (currently creating a personalized mapping of a commercial DJ controller- NI Traktor Kontrol S4, for use with a networked performance project in Max For Live).

In our planning for this residency, Jason and I chose a group of students who had not only done excellent work in our classes, but who we also thought would work well together as a group. Their skill sets are diverse, as are their approaches to sound. Tyler Tamburo, Shawn Cook, and Andrew Scotti are all Sound concentrators in the Interaction Design and Art department, each active in musical performance projects extending beyond their coursework. Sasha de Koninck is a Fibers major, working with sound in the context of smart textiles. Faith Bocian is a Photography major who is also interested in live electronics in the context of drumming. We have been very pleased with how the students have assisted each other on their projects, and with how they have responded to the creative stimuli here at STEIM.

Shawn Cook and Sasha de Konick hard at work

Our primary criteria for the electro-instrumental projects that our students would develop at STEIM was that they had to be usable in a group improvisation. While each student submitted a proposal weeks before we left Baltimore, most of the students have modified their project concepts quite a bit since their first workshops here. We have two performances lined up. The first one is tomorrow in Studio 3 at STEIM. A second one will take place in an outdoor space at The Vigil all-night music festival (now in its third year) at MICA on April 28th. In between these performances the students will have an opportunity to tweak or redesign any aspects of their instruments in light of their first live performing experience with them.

Tyler Tamburo's "Baltimore Gothic" instrument

Today we set up the performance space for tomorrow’s concert with composer/vocalist Ken Ueno and clarinetist Greg Oakes, with whom we’ll be sharing the concert and collaborating in an opening improvisation. The students seem to have made some major breakthroughs with their projects in the past couple of days. Later tonight we’ll have a jam session in the studio, as has become our late night ritual throughout this week. Tomorrow morning we will have our last workshop of the week, a strategic improvisation session led by Taku, gearing up for the performance tomorrow night. I think we’re ready!

from Performance I.V.Y. & me

I work with imagery, sound and light, as well as live cameras, video tracking & 3D live drawing in fields of Visual Music, Abstract Cinema and New Media; collaborative & solo performance & installations.

This was my 4th residency at STEIM since 2008, the first one was with Alex Nowitz experimenting with the use of Wii controllers for video/audio duet and since then refining my video-tracking and software mapping to various MIDI and bluetooth controllers, including a custom built wireless video-spotlight called the ‘Videmote’.
In August 2011, I began a new leg of my creative journey by choosing to design a custom wireless instrument for live performance to replace my off-the-shelf controllers. I wanted freestyle control requiring layered physical gestural skills, a greater degree of complexity in software mapping, housed within a first prototype that I could grow with and adapt to include future technologies.

‘Instrumentality’ was  the issue I first needed to address during the residency:

Frank Mauceri instrument 'Fluffy'

'manifestation' instrument

• what is an instrument?
• why do I want one?
• what makes a good instrument?
• what will it look like?
• how will I hold it?
• how will I ‘play’ it?

WEEK ONE INSTRUMENT LAB#1  16-23 August 2011
http://www.jamiegriffiths.com/steim-instrument-building-workshop/
In order to understand the problems associated with conceiving, designing and building an instrument, we studied;

•  The philosophy of instrument building
•  Hardware-software interaction principles
•  Practical considerations for live, virtuosic electronic performance
•  Softwares: JunXion & LiSa for instrument mapping & audio sampling

We were mentored by key STEIM staff and artistic personnel:

• Kristina Anderson: STEIM history, events & instrument archives.
  

  Arduino into JunXion

• Daniel Schorno:  STEIM Instrument showcase including Crackleboxes and analog synths in the underground ‘bunker’ http://vimeo.com/28155973
  
• Takuro Mizuta Lippit: Thinking about new instruments
• Frank Baldé: JunXion and LiSa software mapping, real-time computer music.
• Kristina Anderson: Imagining your instrument. Draw a sound and build the instrument that might conceptually be able to make that sound.
• Frank Baldé:  JunXion intoArduino
• Marije Baalman: Sense/Stage XBee wireless device.
• Joel Ryan:  Vizualizing complexity and the Inside-out trombone.
• LoVid: Workshop & performance. Building a skin-sensor circuit using a 1/4 inch jack and circuit board (affectionately called a ‘Taco-Jack’) with Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus

All of this led to tangible results... I began to set up a requirements list of my priorities for the new instrument. I knew I wanted acrylic for the prototype form factor and researched local suppliers but during the Instrument Lab week I had a lucky break. I stumbled across a 1970’s folded acrylic vase in an outdoor Sunday market that jumped into my hands. It was perfect... and cost 2 Euros.

pink-instrument with taco jack

‘Fluffy Pink Box’: Presentation & Improvised Performance by Jamie Griffiths, Frank Mauceri (Maine, Ohio) and Sinan Kestelli (Istanbul, Turkey).

I added the new Taco Jack (just built that afternoon) to a pink balloon I found on the street, tucking the circuit board inside the acrylic vase, and taping the potentiometer to the top. BY wetting he surface of the balloon with saliva I could alter the conductivity between two fingers on the balloon and hence change the sound coming out from the Taco Jack. On the last night we did a workshop performance, using the skin sensors built during the session with LoVid, and some custom mapping of sound and video files, put together earlier that day.  http://www.jamiegriffiths.com/fluffy-pink-box-at-steim-instrument-lab-aug-2011/

Frank Mauceri’s Blog http://www.steim.org/projectblog/?p=3432

Sinan Kestelli’s Blog http://www.steim.org/projectblog/?p=3591

Group Instrument Jam: Aug 23, Last Day of the Workshop http://soundcloud.com/fmauceri/sets/jam-session-at-steim-amsterdam/  Sinan Kestelli (TR) – Sampling and digital processing, Peter Edwards (US) – Electronics, Frank Mauceri (US) – Saxophone and digital processing, Benjamin Bacon (US) – percussion, Jamie Griffiths (CA, UK) – Video and digital processing.

Much of Joel Ryan’s talk had struck deep chords with me.  “CLARITY OF LOGIC DOES NOT PRODUCE GOOD MUSIC”.  Joel pointed out that musical timing is intuitive & is known to be measured in micro-seconds (faster than a neuron can trigger).  Body timing is therefore DIFFUSE involving millions of micro-bodily choices & rapid intuitive responses whereas computer timing is PRECISE/LINEAR. Very different. The design of an instrument works best when this diffuse mode of performance is enfolded into the design, such as with a violin, for instance.  So how can I introduce diffusion to a visual performance? Through complexities in software such as parallel processing streams with marginal randomisation around those numbers? Gestural embodiment in the physical instrument’s form factor? At the quantum level, there are no absolutes. The ‘numbers’ in living systems are constantly randomising around the illusion of fixed numbers.  

Static = Death
How to enfold gestural complexity into the ‘machine’, keeping this in mind?

WEEK TWO ASSIMILATION: a week of solo reflection, experimentation, programming and design.

I have been using JunXion since 2008, but LiSa was new to me.  I had used live audio sampling with Ableton Live in two of my major works, so I was keen to find out if LiSa. was a compelling alternative.  I experimented with OSC mapping from LiSa through to Isadora (my main software for visuals).  I was intrigued by the live vocal aspect of LiSa and its greater complexity for rapid sampling playbacks.

LiSa won’t run on Lion (since Apple have now made Rosetta obsolete) but there is a workaround by running a partition of Snow Leopard on a Lion machine.  Frank Baldé has also released companion software called LisaX which can run a LiSa patch on Lion, once it has been authored and saved on a Snow Leopard machine.

There were some pre-existing performance requirements that the new prototype instrument needed to accommodate.  In addition to control of live and pre-recorded media it had to control DMX theatre lighting including my custom video spotlight that was currently mapped to a Wii Nunchuk joystick.  I also contemplated whether to add a wireless camera to the instrument plus some other ‘optional’ add-ons such as infra-red leds to allow it to be seen & tracked in the dark by an IR camera.
That was all I had time for before teaching the Isadora workshop intensive in week 3.

WEEK THREE Four day Isadora Workshop Intensive 

Interactive graphical programming with Isadora software for 13 artists.
Jennifer Kanary, Sjoerd Leijten, Han Halewijn, Julia Mihaly, Sander Trspel (Amsterdam), Per Sacklen (Sweden), Pinar Temiz (Germany), Eva Auster, Nick Blackburn (England), Laura Mahon (Ireland), Chris Duplech (France), Sneja Dobrosavljevic (Belgium), Valeria Marraco (Argentina/Amsterdam)

It was a fantastic group with many outstanding ideas and projects already in development, including a bicycle-beamer, remote cars, multi-channel installations, psychosis labyrinth, gestural music, projection-mapping with the kinect camera, interactive lighting and more…

WEEK FOUR Artist Residency 5-11 SEPT  2011

naked I.T. (Interactive Tool)

I am lucky to be working with the very talented Marije Baalman http://www.nescivi.nl/ (Sense/Stage hardware & software), with additional support from Frank Baldé (JunXion software) to build the prototype for my new instrument.  Important goals that I had identified were to create a live performance instrument upon which I could develop a playing style that would sustain between performances. Acquiring the gestural skills over time would hopefully lead to a sense of virtuosity with the instrument that could be detected by an audience. The controls would still need to be adaptable for one-off projects, with the ability to quickly alter the mapping, as desired.

I set up my performance system in a downstairs STEIM studio in order to test which aspects of performance I most urgently wanted to map to the new instrument.  The plan was to work with Marije’s Sense/Stage PCB hardware along with Python,SuperCollider and Isadora softwares.
http://sensestage.hexagram.ca/getting-started-with-sense-stage

The Sense/Stage XBee hardware was then embedded inside the empty acrylic instrument. From there it broadcast the data to my laptop using radio (not bluetooth) thanks to the Sense/Stage firmware written and installed by Marije in Python/SuperCollider and from there I unpacked it via OSC into an Isadora patch.  Once the data was received I could use it to control any aspect of my performance, such as video, sound or lights.

I tried adding a long handle adapted from a hollow aluminum crutch, but I abandoned that concept after a couple of days. It was unnecessary and unwieldy. I had thought it might be helpful for steadiness if I decided to add a camera to it, but it felt best when held freely in the hands. I experimented with different types of sensors and controls by connecting them to an Arduino Uno via Junxion software into Isadora software.  Once I found the sensors that I liked, I added them to the instrument, and we connected them to the XBee.  The sensors included:

getting dressed...

• 8 buttons for the left hand
• 1 potentiometer/dial on the top left
• IR proximity sensor for the right hand
• photo-led sensor for the left hand
• flexion sensor for the right index finger
• touch paper on both sides for left and right thumbs

I tried out some piezo mics but rejected them, preferring the touch paper.  I also rejected a position sensor that ought to have allowed me a glide/slide/touch control, but failed to generate usable data. I may retry this with a different brand later on. Perhaps it was just a dud.
I would have liked to add a joystick, but ran out of time. We did experiment with a small track pad, but the data was absolute, not relative data of the x,y position when touched and the plastic was too flimsy, so we opted to put that aside also.

I had enjoyed using touch paper in the instrument workshop so I decided to try adding it in a position that would work well with my thumbs.  Here is a video link to a demo of the touch paper connected to an Arduino Uno, mapped to JunXion and Isadora software, for control of video and audio. http://vimeo.com/28446091  When you press down on the paper it changes the resistance between the two copper strips. The Arduino converts the electrical information into digital data in JunXion software, that I then route into Isadora software, using MIDI (or OSC) protocol. I could set up the Arduino to communicate directly with Isadora, but since I had learned how to use JunXion to do that already in the Instrument workshop, I left it that way in order to save time.  Isadora is controlling the video clips and for the audio I took advantage of the Quicktime Synthesiser inside JunXion that can selected as an output.

ready for the ball...

Holes were drilled into the acrylic, as needed, for attachment of the tactile controls (sliders, dials, touch screen etc).  Velcro was used for the Sense/Stage XBee itself, although this will be locked down more rigidly once the perfect position for it has been determined.  However it does need to be able to be removed easily as well.  The rechargeable battery was also attached by velcro to the inside of the instrument. The XBee contains a built-in accelerometer, to which Marije  added a gyrometer and a board connected to the main device that allowed wires to be connected from the other sensors located around the outside of the instrument in suitable locations for my fingers/hands.

The remainder of the week was spent refining the layout of the controls and adjusting the firmware of the Sense/Stage as needed.  I built a custom user actor in Isadora for the instrument’s incoming data, in order to unpack the numbers in a convenient way within the patch.

Immediate next steps beyond the time available during the instrument residency:

• Scale the controller values to a useful data range for physical gestures
• Map the data to suitable aspects of my live performance
• Build a control panel in Isadora that reflects the internal mapping of the data, but that is easy to see while standing a couple of feet away from the laptop.
• Practice with gestural performance  ie ‘learning’ the subtleties and complexities of the accelerometer and gyroscope data flows triggered by different kinds of physical gestures

Wish list for Additions to the Instrument: in order of perceived urgency

• Track pad absolute x,y or… Docking station for an iPod as a bluetooth device and touchpad
• 8 button set for the right hand
• Joystick relative x,y to control my DMX video-spotlight, called the Videmote
• Infra Red LEDS to wash the instrument internally with IR light to allow it to be tracked by a kinect camera or other IR camera
• Wireless Mic  vocal or breath triggers
• Wireless Camera  IR pinhole camera or SD camera with wireless EyeFI card

Thoughts on the Form Factor of the Instrument:  
The shape, size and weight of the instrument are all good. I may still revise the shape at a later development stage, but mainly for aesthetic rather than functional reasons.  I do get some comments about  my ‘vase’… so a unique form factor would prevent the visual recognition that is perhaps either a bit of a distraction to the audience, or perhaps part of the fun!
Sanding or chemically etching the exterior of the acrylic surface may render it more refractive/opaque for effective use of internal color LEDs or infra red LED lights.

PEOPLE & PLACE

• MARIJE BAALMAN http://www.nescivi.nl/
• JAMIE GRIFFITHS http://www.jamiegriffiths.com

TUTORIALS

• SENSE/STAGE HOMEPAGE http://sensestage.hexagram.ca/getting-started-with-sense-stage
• SENSOR VOLTAGES http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=sensors
• DIY SENSOR TUTORIAL http://iainmccurdy.org/sensorsworkshop/index.html
• MICRO-CONTROLLERS  http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/controllers/all-about-microcontrollers/
• ARDUINO http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
• ARDUINO INTERFACING WITH HARDWARE http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/InterfacingWithHardware

SUPPLIERS

• SENSOR SUPPLIER http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/index.php?cPath=36
• FLORIS General Parts/Sensors http://www.pieterfloris.nl/shop/category.php?id_category=10
• FLORIS XBee Parts http://www.pieterfloris.nl/shop/category.php?id_category=29

DOWNLOAD BLOG ENTRY AS A PDF  jGriffiths_STEIMInstrumentLabBlog FINAL.

“play Peter Ablinger” is a project involving clarinetist Gareth Davis, the Julie Mittens and Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. A quasi music theatre piece exploring the aesthetics of noise/rauschen.

Our latest installment of the Graphite instrument  ore now called ‘ground’. Developed on and of in 2011 at steim.  Ground is an audiovisual instrument in which graphite drawings are used a control interface for several electronic instruments. Graphite is a conductor for electricity. By using graphite as a variable resistor (instead of a standard knob) the pitch, amplitude and sound color of sound generators can be controlled. The instrument offers a field of possibilities in which auditive and visual elements are interconnected. Several handmade synthesizers are deployed in a given performance and directed and controlled by the drawings.

Ground evolved during our stay at steim from a interesting concept with very basic sonic possibilities to a ‘mature’ electronic instrument.

“2011 Meditations On Eurydice”

…which is an ongoing Live Cinema performance based on, in, and around the myth of Orpheus.
(The project officially began with “Orpheus 2010″ — also thanks to STEIM’s support)
check out the STEIM project blog for “Orpheus 2010″ at::: http://www.steim.org/projectblog/?p=1836
and the official propaganda for “Orpheus 2010″ at ::: http://www.seanwinters.com/livecinema

PREPARATION

For “2011 Meditations On Eurydice,” there were lots of things that needed to happen BEFORE I came to STEIM.

Three long days of recording…

Day 1 = String Quartet
[SOUNDCLOUD WIDGET SHOULD BE BELOW]
VarVIII(1stHalf)_2011MeditationsOnEurydice

Day 2 = Sean Winters TRIO + Jos Zwannenburg
[SOUNDCLOUD WIDGET SHOULD BE BELOW]
VariationVIIC_2011MeditationsOnEurydice

Day 3 = Percussion/Gamelan
[SOUNDCLOUD WIDGET SHOULD BE BELOW]
Percussion_2011MeditationsOnEurydice

Filming and creation of visual materials…

This is a still taken from one of the filming sessions in Amsterdam:

This is EMMANUEL’S first treatment:

This is EMMANUEL’S second treatment:

Needless to say EMMANUEL FLORES ELIAS is an amazing artist and it’s always a pleasure working with and/or around him.

IN THE STUDIO(s)

I started off in Studio1 for five days or so…

First of all, I gave myself a little bit of time to just play around and experiment with Pure Data & Gem.
I’ve intended to utilize Gem extensively for quite a while.

(below = Jos Heutmekers in Studio1, captured through the camera on an imac, put onto a sphere with Gem)

I could get pretty out there–by talking on and on about open source, Scriabin, and the spiritual revolution–but let’s just suffice it to say that Pure Data & Gem are both essential in my vision of what a Live Cinema performance should be.
The only catch is that, on top of the fact that they’re extremely time consuming, they can both be quite buggy.
I’d like to just take this opportunity to “shout out” to Miller Puckette…
You are a visionary who has truly changed what it is to be an artist in the 21st century; thank you.

After my PD/GEM experiments I got down to business and built what would eventually become the “Eurydice Masher.”

(above = the MaxMSP patch which “hosts” an 8 channel audio installation)
This installation happens in the foyer as the audience is walking into the venue.
All of the audio is taken from sources that are directly related to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
“Black Orpheus” by Jobim / “Orphee” by Stravinsky / etc, etc, etc.

There are lot’s of other photos, videos, and notes from the preparatory sessions that happened in Studio1 and the set-up/experimentation that happened in Studio3, but alas, there are only 24 hours in each day.
Suffice it to say, that at the beginning of October, the crew and I (Jos Heutmekers, Sander Bolk, Jilt Van Moorst, and the Pin 4tet) set up in Studio3 for the performance of 2011 Meditations on Eurydice.

[YOUTUBE VIDEO SHOULD BE EMBEDDED BELOW]
2011MeditationsOnEurydice@STEIM

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The second part (of the two part residency) consisted of moving towards finishing the project entitled…

“Ode Aan Het IJ”

…which is a collaborative effort with the one and only Andre Douw.

Exploring the concept of context, there are five installments that collectively form the “Ode Aan Het Ij” suite:::
1) The Bam Zaal installment which was world premiered in 2010 at the Gaudeamus music festival in Amsterdam, NL with the (micro-tonal) fokker orgel, a snare drum, and a quadrophonic “tape.”

2) The octophonic installment is an electroacoustic work to be experienced exclusively on eight hi-fi speakers.
[Available upon request; contact sean(at)seanwinters.com]
3, 4, 5) The stereo installments are to be experienced in three separate configurations; good speakers, laptop speakers, and headphones.
[SOUNDCLOUD WIDGET SHOULD BE BELOW]
“Ode Aan Het IJ” (STEREO) Good Speakers
[SOUNDCLOUD WIDGET SHOULD BE BELOW]
“Ode Aan Het IJ” (STEREO) Laptop Speakers
[SOUNDCLOUD WIDGET SHOULD BE BELOW]
“Ode Aan Het IJ” (STEREO) Headphones

Once again: There are LOTS and LOTS of other photos, videos, and notes related to this project, but alas, there are only 24 hours in each day.
For now I must conclude this post.

It has now officially become my custom to end every Steim project blog posting with the following line:::
>THANK YOU TO EVERYBODY WHO IS/WAS (or) WILL EVER BE AT STEIM.

For an oscillator, I am envisioning something very similar but the grooves will be notched onto discs that spin.  It was great to discuss some of the new interfacing technologies with the STEIM staff as it is crucial that the wiring and software be robust for touring and plane rides etc.   I will post more on these topics as the designs develop!

For now, I am sidetracked with building some voice modulating masks for an dark doom industrial acapella piece \m/ I am putting together for an art show in March.

"Gridiron", Tristan Shone, Rendering (Aluminum, Steel, Linear Bearings)

The Experimental Performance Sequencer Arduino Shield is a looping event sequencer. It gives the user extensive control over several parameters of multi-channel, synced and looped sequences but obscures those controls in such a way that discourages one’s desire for precise control and predictability.
I developed this piece with Marije Baalman at Steim in August 2011.

My goal is to give improvisational electronic musicians a means of creating complex sequences without pulling their focus from the performance. I like the idea of sequence programming and manipulation as part of the performance and essentially as an instrument and have tried to explore that through this piece.

Video can be viewed here.

In order to interface the sequencer with my analog synth gear I used to following circuits:

My residency at STEIM has provided me with access to a wonderful source for my next piece: the city of Amsterdam. Over the past 3 weeks, I have collected over 20 hours of field-recordings from different locations in the city. These recordings have been edited and categorized, and my pre-compositional work has begun. A combination of recording equipment was necessary in order to successfully capture sources within the urban environment. When discretion / stealth was necessary, I used my Sound Devices 702 with a worn pair of DPA 4052 miniature omnidirectional microphones. When discretion was not necessary, I instead utilised a Sennheiser MKH30/60 M&S pair within a Rycote windshield: in contrast to the DPA mics, these microphones are highly directional (if somewhat conspicuous!). All recordings were made at 96khz / 24-bit.

The Fall, by Camus, was my inspiration for writing a piece using the sounds of Amsterdam. However, my work is not intended to follow the narrative or structure of The Fall. Instead, the text has helped me to develop a number of ideas concerning specific images and sonic vocabulary. For example, Jean-Baptiste describes Amsterdammers as:

“…funeral swans drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals. Their heads in their copper-coloured clouds, they dream; they ride in circles; they pray, sleep-walking in the fog’s gilded incense; they have ceased to be here.”

This passage led me to focus upon collecting the sounds of bicycles (admittedly, not a difficult task in Amsterdam!).

As well as capturing incidental street activity, I focused my attention upon a few specific locations, for example, the beach / disused land to the West of Centraal Station, Vondelpark on a Sunday morning, St. Nicolaaskerk on Christmas Eve, Museumplein on New Year’s Eve etc. I have begun to compose a number of studies that each explore specific musical vocabulary (impacts, rhythms, tonality, acceleration / deceleration etc), specific locations (St. Nicolasskerk, Vondelpark) or specific materials (bells, bikes, birds, boats, crowds, laughter, rain etc). From these studies I will eventually extrapolate my final piece.

Thanks to all at STEIM and Happy New Year!

New Year in Amsterdam by Sam Salem

I firstly learning about the history of Steim which fascinated me and I am in awe of work they have done. Seeing what was possible opened up my ideas of what I wanted to do in a live performance context. From this I started to work on different ways of working with live sampling in MaxMSP.

Wjh~

wjh~ patch

I have always felt that during an improvisation there would be a great moment or sound and I would have missed it or I want to use it again. So I wanted be able to go back and play with that sound that just happened. This lead me to develop a constantly recoding buffer that I could record off backwards from the moment I press a button so that I would never miss what just happened. This is when I worked on wjh~ a MaxMSP object which does this.

We also Learnt about JunXion the software developed by Steim that can help to get the control Data from Human interface devices on to the computer so that it can by used as an instrument. Learning about this helped me to order ways of controlling human interface data on MaxMSP. JunXion uses states of patches for each input to control a desired output. I used a similar method of states that I could change between in max.

From many of the conversation and workshop made me aware of the importance of how you map your controls to your sounds. This is because this mapping is what gives the instrument its feel and can dictate what kind of sequences are possible and thus the compositional possibilities of an instrument. As a composer this excites me as instrument can give new and possibly interesting limitation to music and composition and something that I hope to look at in the future.

The Rattle Hammer and MoEFE

This was made first made in response to the workshop with Kristina Anderson in which we were given a lot of materials to make a instrument that would make a sound we had drawn. The Rattle Hammer worked well and I felt summed up my intentions in the MoEFE project.

The Rattle hammer

I developed the rattle hammer further by putting two contact Mics on the outside of the box. I then filled the box with different object to change the sounds that the rattle produced. Keys in the box I felt worked well.

During my time at Steim I worked on MoEFE’s with the first step to get the computer to understand when energy was about to be exerted and when it had been. This I work on by using a wireless game controller that used accelerometers, and mapping the movements of this controller.

Using this gesture mapping, the buttons on the wireless game controller in conjunction with the Rattle Hammer I created a method of sampling the rattle sound and distorting the rattle sound. I also used these sampled sounds to create what I call “sound piles” which is actually just granular synthesis with large chunks instead of grains. I then used the tilt sensors to be able to control the volume, pitch of the sound piles.

Once I had the basic of the instrument functioning I wanted to make the controls more malleable so I could change what I was controlling. This was hard as I only had 6 buttons, I however took an idea from beat ‘em’ up games and create combinations of buttons to change what the controls would be doing. For instance I wanted to choose what I was sampling out of four different options so I used different combinations to be able chose between them.

I had lots of fun making and coding the instrument but I did not have very long to develop it as I had agreed to perform with it on the Tuesday after the course. This meant that I had to quickly learn the instrument and all the combinations I had written. This was fine but I didn’t get to the point where I couldn’t use the on screen info to tell me where I was in the controls.

I had developed a short performance that showed what I could do with the instrument. However before the show the patch started to break and became problematic. I later found out this was because of a third party external for MaxMSP but it meant that I could not perform. Working towardsthis performance had meant that I had created a lot in a short amount of time.

I feel that I have made a good start on the MoEFE instrument and I like how it sounds and playing with it is fun. I feel however it is still very basic and I am a beginner at playing so it does not run smoothly. I am going to work on practising and developing it further.

There is also an element that I did not get to explore because of the short time period. It was to use the MoEFE instrument to hit and make sound with other object. I would like to experiment with using a hammer with the similar gestural controls that can hit object that make interesting sounds. I would like to experiment with this being a destructive act as I am interesting in the satisfaction of a destructive gesture and the ideas of Auto-destruction and Auto-creation as ways of creating art.

The Strophonion (left and right hand controller), 2011
© Frank Baldé

Since fall 2007 I was invited by STEIM on a regular basis in order to develop my first electronic instrument, mainly with Daniel Schorno, a setup which is controlled by two Wii-remotes and which I call Stimmflieger. (The literate translation would be voice kite). During the second half of 2009 the staff at STEIM and I were discussing various approaches towards building a new instrument. At the end of 2009 Dick Rijken, director of STEIM, and Frank Baldé, head of the software department, officially invited me to focus on doing so with full financial and tech support by STEIM. I don’t want to miss saying how happy, enthusiastic and thankful I was and still am about this extraordinary offer and opportunity. In fall 2011 the Strophonion was finished and premiered on November 5, 2011 during the Sound Triangle festival at the LIG Art Hall in Seoul/Korea.

Nowitz with Strophonion, 2011
© STEIM

A) Initial and conceptual thoughts
At first, I was collecting all kinds of ideas for developing, designing and creating an electronic instrument. Here are some keywords which shall outline the most important categories:

1) The instrument should be gestural and expressive. Movements of arms and hands should have a considerable impact on the actual way of playing the instrument as well as the overall appearance of musician and instrument during a performance.

2) Other achievements should be: virtuosity in playing the instrument, using the musician’s fine-motoric, tactile and sensual skills, involving all five fingers to control and play the instrument.

3) On top of this, the concept of playing the instrument in a conventional way, playing accurate pitches from a keypad (of any sort) on a chromatic and/or quarter-tone basis, should be an integral part of the instrument as well.

4) Last but not least, the instrument should be wireless. In other words, no wires  should be applied to connect the controllers to the computer.

B) Experimenting, learning, exploring
Frank Baldé provided newly created software configurations (junXion, LiSa) for me. Experimenting with those I experienced various new ways of processing the voice via LiSa. On the hardware level I explored different continuous controller components, such as bending sensors, pressure sensors, joy-sticks, 3-axis accelerometers, different switches and buttons. Byungjun Kwon provided all these and he built a glove which was a great experience to play with.

Glove by Byungjun Kwon, 2010
© Byungjun Kwon

Another important instrument which I could experiment with was the MIDI Conductor which was built some years ago at STEIM, designed by Michel Waisvisz, and which uses ultrasound to measure distance. This specific way of controlling continuous data seemed to be very precise, accurate and easy to define, which is important to get the best possible control of musical parameters such as volume or pitch bending. The most important aspect to me, though, was the fact that the ultrasound measurement method works in a straight line as opposed to the 3-axis accelerometer whose characteristic is rotation around each axis. Eventually it turned out that both combined and each for one hand, the ultrasound for the left and the 3-axis accelerometer for the right hand, should be the two main components regarding the integration of continuous controllers. At some later point, Byungjun suggested to also install a little joy-stick for the left hand. In addition, a pressure sensor was also installed as being the fifth continuous controller built into the instrument. (The 3-axis accelerometer counts as two, since, at the time of writing this blog, I’m using the x- and y-axis of the 3-axis accelerometer, but not the z-axis.)

Backside of the right hand controller of the Strophonion, 2011
© Alex Nowitz

Backside of the left hand controller of the Strophonion, 2011
© Alex Nowitz

C) Developing the ideas
A main issue during the very early stage of development was: how do I get across my ideas, how should the instrument look like and, more important, how should it be played. For this reasons I made sketches and even moulded some mock-ups out of clay:

Nowitz’ “Hand in the spoon” sketch, 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Nowitz’ “Shell” sketch (1), 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Nowitz’ “Shell” sketch (2), 2010
© Alex Nowitz



Nowitz’ “Shell” sketch (3), 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Nowitz’ “Skull Shell” sketch, 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Nowitz’ sketch and mockups of the Shells made out of clay, 2010
© Alex Nowitz

D) Creating and shaping the prototype: the Shells
Florian Goettke, visual artist, used to be a professional violin maker. He shaped the final version as well as the prototype, constantly adjusting and improving it. His work began by creating mock-ups for me to experiment with.

Florian Goettke at his workshop creating the first mock-ups, 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Florian Goettke’s 1st mockup (side perspective), 2010
© Florian Goettke

Florian Goettke’s 1st mockup (the keypad), 2010
© Florian Goettke

During this period of trying out different mockups created by Florian, it gradually became clear to me how we should approach the shape of the instrument and its parts. The controller devices for the hands, at least the one for the right hand, should look like a shell. That’s also about the time when the prototype received a name: the Shells.

The Shells – Prototype development of right hand controller (1-6)
© Alex Nowitz

While Florian worked on the wooden shape of the Shells Byungjun ordered the electronic parts and did a lot of soldering and firmware programming. Once Byungjun and/or Florian attached the electronic parts onto the wooden shape, Frank started testing the devices. If the result was as expected he started to define the data coming into junXion and prepared these so that I was able to play-test the Shells from an artistic and musical standpoint. A lot of adjustments needed to be made all along the way of developing and building the instrument. Therefore, the Shells became a typical example for a work-in-progress that was handed back and forth between Frank, Byungjun, Florian and me. It goes without saying that all of us, working in completely different fields, had to collaborate very closely.

Shells (front/on top), 2010,
© Alex Nowitz

At some point during this procedure, we seemed to have reached an impasse. Every time Byungjun or Frank were testing the prototype in their offices it seemed to work just great; every time I was testing it I got unintentional responses from the instrument until the three of us met in my rehearsal space where we detected interferences between the XBee based wireless data network being used in the Shells and the wireless microphone system from Shure which I was using to amplify and live-record my voice. After we found the issue, Byungjun increased the power for the XBee network and the problem was solved. I’m mentioning this specific issue just to give one little, but crucial example out of many others that needed to be solved along the way. And it demonstrates perfectly how closely the four of us had to collaborate during the entire development process in order to solve problems and to take it a step forward.

XBee Pro on XBee board (XBee Explorer USB), 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Ultrasound Module (built into the left hand controller), 2010
© Alex Nowitz

Shells (right hand controller) at an early stage, Ultrasound (transmitter and receiver) and XBee Pro, MIDI Conductor (in the back of the picture), 2010
© Alex Nowitz

In fact, we were constantly re-adjusting and enhancing the prototype on all levels – ergonomics, shape, hardware and software – and, at the same time, learning to play the instrument. Finally, on April 12, 2011 I premiered the prototype during a solo concert at the Radialsystem in Berlin hosted by Gerhardt Müller-Goldboom who is the director of the so-called ensemble ‘work-in-progress’. Incidentally, Frank came to Berlin, too, in order to make sure that the instrument was working the way as supposed to. In fact – it happened to work out great! Various other public presentations, mainly as being part of my solo show Homo Ludens followed: Bratislava (multiplace festival), Rotterdam (Hocus Pocus commissioned by dePlayer/Operadagen Rotterdam), NIME in Oslo, Nyksund, Trondheim and Kristiansand (all Norway), Lisbon (Music Viva), Amsterdam (Steim’s Pattern and Pleasure). During this period of extensive practice and showings I developed a good sense for playing the instrument so that I could tell what details need to be changed in order to improve the playability and to gain accurate, precise musical control. Due to Frank’s experiences in this entire field of instrument development, he always made great suggestions for improvements as Florian did so, too. In other words, we continued re-programming and re-shaping the instrument.

Shells (alongside/underneath, final stage), 2011
© Alex Nowitz

Shells (front/on top, final stage), 2011
© Alex Nowitz

Shells (right hand controller, final stage), 2011
© Alex Nowitz

E) The final version: the Strophonion
After Byungjun has left Amsterdam during summer 2011 to get settled back home in Seoul, STEIM hired Mr. Stock to make an exact copy of the prototype. Once he had finished the electronic parts, Florian took them and built them into the final shape which was also based on the prototype. Florian’s final work did bring out a fantastic instrument with a great look and ‘handy’ shapes.

Nowitz’ Strophonion (complete) on a stand, 2011
© Alex Nowitz

Admittedly, the initial idea was to emulate the shape of a shell. And indeed, one may recall a shell looking at the prototype. But when the final version of the instrument was finished in fall 2011, I felt I must give it another name, since neither the right hand nor the left hand controller makes you think of a shell anymore. Therefore I took the chance to rename the instrument emphasizing the way it’s being played, namely with two hands in combination with the voice. There are three syllables which, put together, give the instrument its name: the Strophonion.
1.) strophé (Greek), which means rotating, turning, spinning or twisting, is the beginning of the term. Musical parameters, such as pitch, volume, frequency filtering, sample lengths and sample position and many others, are controlled by the rotation of the right hand (using the 3-axis accelerometer).
2.) phon (Greek) means voice and/or sound. This syllable forms the middle part.
3.) The ending of the term, ion (Greek), is an atom or molecule, that gives electrical charge, and means: ‘going’. But, as being part of the neologism Strophonion, it shall also allude to the way of playing the left hand device (distance measurement via ultrasound), which may recall the way of playing an accord-ion.

List of all components of the Strophonion:

Right hand controller device:
- 12 buttons (3 rows, 4 buttons each)
- modifier switch
- pressure sensor
- 3-axis accelerometer

Left hand controller device:
- 6 buttons
- modifier switch
- joy-stick
- ultrasound (receiver)

Waistbelt:
- ultrasound (transmitter)

Software components:
- JunXion v4.6 (2011)
- LiSa XC(ore) v1.37 (2011)

Computer components:
- Mac Mini (2,26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)
- Mac OS X v10.6.2

Patterns+Pleasure Festival: Alex Nowitz from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Voice and Strophonion by Alex Nowitz from Netsildna Kool on Vimeo.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank all of those who were responsible for developing and building the instrument:
Frank Baldé – software, programming
Florian Goettke – ergonomics, shape, design
Byungjun Kwon – electronics (prototype development: Shells)
Mr. Stock – electronics (final instrument: Strophonion)
Heather MacCrimmon – waistbelt

Also, many thanks to all the people who were and are involved in other ways:
Dick Rijken – director
Takuro Mizuta Lippit – artistic director
Wouter Overgauuw – financial director
Jonathan Reus – project manager (Strophonion)
Robert van Heumen – project manager (Shells)
Joel Ryan – artistic advisor
Daniel Schorno – artistic advisor
Marije Baalman – maintenance
Nico Bes – bestman, troubleshooter of all kinds
Esther Roschar – bestwoman, travel manager
Vivian Wenli Lin – video documentation

December 23, 2011
Alex Nowitz
www.nowitz.de

I came at STEIM with the idea to develop a series of little instruments or modified tools such as knives, cutters, razors, in order to amplify the sounds they produce on my skin (a sort of super- microphone which is sharp itself would be the ideal) and depending on how much I press I should trigger some FX such as distorsion or reverb; and depending on the velocity of the action the sound should change pitch.
Well, it was a bit too ambitious for my poor programming/softwares skills.
So I decided during my residency at STEIM to investigate on different sharp-edged objects …let’s call it a first step.

I myself am a bass clarinetist looking into working with live electronics and Jess intends to develop herself more in the direction of composing for ‘classically trained musicians’. By intertwining our paths we get to learn from each other and move forward together.

During our residency we started working out several older pieces for bass clarinet and electronics from the 70s. Originally for analog electronics Jess and I built some first versions of Max/MSP patches to move those pieces to the digital domain.
By the end of the residency we had a working version of Intra by Ton Bruynèl. Written in 1971, it was great to experience playing this piece which is probably the first piece for bass clarinet and live electronics in history!

Composer David Dramm came by during our residency and we had a great time working with him on building a drum set out of bass clarinet sounds. I spent hours blowing, clicking and rattling my instrument and listening to what I would usually ignore while Jess placed mics in all kinds of unconventional positions.

The remainder of the time we spent on taking lots of bass clarinet samples for the piece Jess and I will be writing, talked a lot about basics of bass clarinet and basics of electronics. Since the residency I and Jess have been working a lot more on all that we got started at STEIM. In December we will continue our work together in Edinburgh, focusing this time on the piece for bass clarinet and live electronics that we are making together.

Look for MVG and Sonic Spaces to follow this project, previews are planned for April, concerts and workshops in New Zealand in May. #SSNNd

supported by het Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst

Joel Ryan’s talk was energizing and insightful, putting me back into a sense of creative vertigo which is more inspiring than daunting, but only just!
Throughout the week, the workshop participants shared knowledge with one-another, each having a different skill set that I found particularly helpful, and yet my own knowledge of both piezos and acoustics came in handy for them too, so it really was about sharing knowledge all-round.

The repeated themes of music making music vs playing music, making music AS playing music, and the distinction between instruments and interfaces kept running as a through line through many discussions.

Daniel’s suggestions about performing electronics with others and with visuals rang with practical wisdom that I’m sure I will be revisiting for quite some time as I keep carving away at my multimedia system “instrument”.

Overall, it’s been a very good experience, I’ve learned quite a lot and been able to focus on my own work in a very supportive context.

Go STEIM!

while others used a balloon or recycled food container.

It was also great to see so many different applications of the Circuit Tacos. Some people ran Tacos into computers while others plugged them into analog synths; some people added peripheral wires and others linked them up with metal bowls.

In the evening, Jonathan cooked up a delectable meal with burrito bar and margaritas. We even found some ice! People ate and drank and then participants got to perform short sets using their new instruments. We performed with our newest video synthesizer and were delighted to have a full set by Casperelectronics. Everyone had a blast and there was even some dancing!

For three years, I have been working intermittently on a violin solo with electronics. The premises of the project have changed a number of times, and the performing violinist has changed one time.  On December 18th, the piece will be performed in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven at 14:00.  This is my first piece for traditional score and ‘tape’, which feels kind of retro, but it is a form as useful as others and is fascinating to work on. There are three movements perhaps suggestive of streams, virtual or found in landscapes:  1. Vortices 2. Serpentines 3. Riffles. Each part makes use of a limited number of techniques for the violin. The score came first and then I recorded it with Jellantsje de Vries, violin, in the studio at Steim and started to ponder the endless possibilities of how to transform the material. After weeks of cutting and pasting bits and pieces and experimenting with all kinds of editing, I made some mockups. This then caused me to revise the violin score drastically, which was a good thing. The coming together of the sound worlds commenced. That process is ongoing and its beginning to take on a usable form. I am using sound editors and basing the elecx in Logic. Jellantsje will have a foot switch, programmed through Junxion in Logic, to be able to move with some freedom from section to section, hopefully seamlessly. Daniel Schorno has been of great help with the sounds development and technical aspects of the work and I thank Steim once more for the opportunity to work in such an inspiring envoirnment! Also, Danny de Graan has been very helpful with his standalone Max patch for granular synthesis.

So, during my artistic practice, I explore various concepts such as embodied cognition, instrument chain in digital musical instruments, performativity in electronic music, etc. With these ideas and practice, I came to STEIM to be at a one-week long collaborative artistic environment, discuss with people who also think on such concepts and develop my own practice.

The workshop was really great as I expected and here is my summary of what can one do in an Instrument Lab, which could also give an idea to the potential participants. One could;

think: lectures during the workshop were great as I was exposed with different perspectives about electronic instruments such as design, purpose of use, interaction, history.

talk: the participants at the workshop had different backgrounds and as we were at the same work space and also most of us at the same living space (STEIM guesthouse),  we had so much time talking about various concepts about electronic instruments and everyone seemed to be inspired by other participitants’  way of thinking.

design & build: besides thinking and talking, we also produced some concrete and physical outputs during the workshop. We had a great session with Kristina, building an instrument with materials such as paper, rope, tape, staples, etc. thinking about its functioning, performativity. Also, we had a workshop with lovid team, designing and building an instrument with its case which could be performed with the voltage in our body. Right now at home, these instruments serve as an instrument to think about new music instruments.

perform: during the workshop, we performed with our “circuit taco” s we made after the workshop with lovid, which is actually the best way to experience and evaluate an instrument. Here is a video from that performance.

Also, at the last day of the workshop, we, workshop participants had an improvisation session together, which was great to see the interaction of the tools we use to make music. Here is an audio excerpt from that session.

practice: I had the chance to work with my equipment at one of the STEIM studios and practice there as much as I want during the workshop. This was a critical component for a practice-based workshop. Below is an image of my workspace at STEIM.

cracklebox: I loved the cracklebox with its simple design and lots of possibilities it offers despite this simplicity.

junxion: When I saw how this great software of STEIM works and in what possible ways it functions, I directly integrated to my setup during the workshop. I would strongly recommend it for anyone processing their control data. It provides such a great flexibility to change the behaviour of the controllers.

lisa: Although I design my own sound generation processes, I think STEIM’ s lisa software is some kind of a treasure to work with samples.

Briefly, STEIM Instrument Lab was a great experience for me both with the people I’ ve met and the time I’ ve spent. STEIM staff and all the lecturers were very helpful during the workshop and gave any assistance both for technical and conceptual issues. I would definitely recommend this workshop to anyone looking for new performative sound/music tools. I hope to visit STEIM again soon and experience this inspiring environment to realize some ideas.

I was introduced to STEIM’s technology and aesthetic approaches through an orientation workshop. This was a great way to settle into the rhythm at STEIM before undertaking my own research and development. During the orientation lectures and demonstrations I was given the chance to engage with various STEIM approaches, whilst reflecting on my own project. This was followed each evening by many lovely dinners in the guest house, where ideas flowed and jamming was a natural digestif. At the workshop it was as important to meet and swap stories as it was take part in the daily lectures. I was lucky enough to meet a collaborative partner with whom I am still working (albeit cross channel).

In the residency that followed I was able to practically explore what I had learnt at the orientation workshop and incorporate these to my existing skills. This included imforming my use of gaming technology with Max MSP, elemental approaches to composition and looking at simple tactile acoustic devices for sound exploration. I developed software for use in my workshops at Generator Music (http://www.generatormusic.co.uk) and have documented them all under the umbrella of VOLT (http://www.generatormusic.co.uk/VOLT.html). This also includes a more detailed project report. I have incorporated my tools into the workshops with much success, and am in the third, refinement phase of the process. My project website will continue to evolve with additions to my music workshop palette, which will include software and compositional ideas.

My residency at STEIM gave me the space to consolidate work with group composition. This opportunity was highly beneficial to my portfolio, and has laid the foundation for a project that I hope will continue to grow.

In the time there I assisted Jonathan Reus (STEIM) with iPhone programming, providing some source code for multitouch and simple gestures.

I began developing an installation piece/iPad app for Swiss composer Katharina Rosenberger (currently Assistant Professor at UCSD).

I made progress and bug fixes on my Cyclic-N iPad app for my ICMC 2011 presentation/paper.

I also took the time to work on some popular music, with the track I did at STEIM chosen by Jay Scarlett as a candidate for Beat Dimensions 3 or his forthcoming compilation on Black Acre (UK).

(!)

I was introduced to STEIM a year ago when I brought an installation to a festival in Amsterdam.  I am honored to have been invited back for a two-week artist residency leading up to the Patterns + Pleasure Festival.  Both the residency and the festival were wonderful experiences, and I am thrilled to have connected with such an inspiring group!

I spent most of my time preparing the design documents, video, and software templates that will accompany the open-sourcing of my Mojo controller.  I have been developing The Mojo for about five years with help from the global controllerism community including STEIM, other media labs, commercial instrument makers, and DIY builders like myself.  In releasing and publicizing the complete design of this instrument, I hope to contribute some of my knowledge and experience to that community, and further the craft of music-tech performance.  During my stay at STEIM I also had the opportunity to teach an online controllerism workshop for the Talking Thing media lab, give a Light Theremin soldering workshop at the Today’s Art Festival, and DJ for Discovery Festival.

Participating in Patterns + Pleasure was truly a joy for me.  Never before have I had the opportunity to meet such and amazing array of artists, teachers, technicians, and electronic music enthusiasts- all in one place!  Performing in this environment was the peak experience of my European fall tour.  I look forward to future collaborations with these wonderful people.

Thank you STEIM!!!
- Moldover (!)

Some questions or plain sentences that keeps me busy after joining the workshop:
The desire to express.
What makes an instrument?
How do people listen to prerecorded records? The scratch is bringing back the moment.
How to reach that much variaty and complexity as in an acoustical instrument?
How can you reach or built systems, whith wich you can reach in a moment a strong intensity?
An instrument as a musical and reflective practise.
How can we design something where you never have been before, inventing a new way..?

It was an inspiring time at Steim. I enjoyed much from my fellow workshop participants. They came from all different places and with all different musical backgrounds. We had lots of conversations while sharing a nice refreshing beer and lovely meal at the end of the day. Steim is a inspiring place for sharing thoughts and being challenged to reach new territories in my artistic practice. I loved it! Thanks! Frouke Wiarda

Cadavre 2.0 is the continuation of the original cadavre that was performed in israel in 2009 – where a harp of a piano was found thrown away in the street ,

Cadavre

The object was used as a tool to build a theatrical concept around , thus it gained the name cadavre wich is a word play in hebrew on harp and an animal cadaver

Since Juli I have been working on a new version of cadavre – which is now salvaged from a 50 year old upright piano ,it is amplified with guitar pickups and played on with bows drumsticks and hopefully electro-magnets very soon.

the idea of this work came up to me the moment i found the instrument , i have always been fascinated by how stuff sound , especially broken ones , at a certain point i got tired of preparing guitars so the oportunity opened up for an extremely prepared piano that loses the form of a piano in order to become a totally new instrument.

We had a wide array of participants, not only from different countries but also from different backgrounds. The mixture was very inspiring, stimulating and collaborations emerged in no time quite naturally. Jamie did not only covered the Isadora software but also helped the participants explore combining other software and hardware tools to realize their concepts when needed.

JunXion, Osculator, Max/MSP, PD, Supercollider, Kinect, Wii, Arduino and some other custom electronics were at participants’ disposal and were throughly covered.

We think it’s best to hear this 4-day experience from the artists/designers themselves:

Julia Mihály -  voice | performance | electronic composition | specialized in contemporary music. performances with voice and live-electronics. greatly inspired by 8-bit-trashcore, synthi A, electricity, zebras and zombie-jazz. for more informations click on  http://about.me/juliamihaly

“I like to use Isadora as an interactive visual supplement for my performances as a singer and also in connection to performances of my own electronic pieces as an additional element of composing. I came to the workshop as a complete beginner in Isadora. After some experiences with GEM in connection to Pd, Isadora now appears to me as a more practical alternative for real time video processing. So first of all it was useful to discover some of the possibilities of the software, creating basic patches that can be extended and integrated in further projects. Some important topics were how to control video output via gamepads, wii and so on, and how to use video as a real time interacting partner on stage reacting on live input especially of my voice. Jamie did a very good job as a teacher, explaining everything in a very pleasant, very well understandable and good structured way ! – Thanx : ) We had a nice atmosphere in the group, lots of interesting people with different artistic backgrounds and good collaboration among the participants. All in all it was a really recommendable workshop!”

Eva Auster – Video & Projection Designer

Eva Auster is a freelance video and projection designer with experience working with UK theatre companies and directors, creating visual content for live performances and online/ promotional videos. For further information visit: http://flavors.me/auster

“Creatively, this is one of the best experiences I have had as an artist.  This workshop has given me a very clear and immersive experience into interactive technology and broken down any barriers of fear that I might have had before beginning the workshop.  The immersive nature of the workshop has also provided me with a spring board in which to take my work into a new direction, whilst also demystifying the technology involved when creating this type of work. I came on this workshop because of my passion for performance and visual theatre, and my keen interest in taking the leap into interactive design.  I feel that I have definitely gained invaluable experience, and more importantly the confidence I needed to take my work further and progress as an interactive artist. Jamie is an incredible artist and very patient teacher which made the whole experience even more enjoyable.”

Sneja_D - visual artist & new media designer. more info: www.sneja.lu

“I have always been fascinated by interactive installations but as I am neither programmer nor have I experienced electronics much, I did not know where to start. Isadora seemed to be a solution when I saw Mark’s video tutorials on YouTube.  This was sufficient to build simple live VJ patches but for more complex self running video installations I needed more. To the 4 days Isadora  workshop in Amsterdam, I came with a precise goal: find out how to use motion tracking in Isadora, trigger scenes through movements of gallery visitors, get information about which camera and connections to use …but I learned much much more … Jamie’s 4 day workshop was definitively one of the best workshops I have ever attended and this for various reasons. It was rich and intense. It was concrete as we started from project examples and the goals of the course attendees which  was really a good strategy. At the end,  every workshop attendee was able to realize at least one part of his/her initial idea. The number of workshop attendees was perfect : 13. Not too big so that everybody could express his own interests and goals…. as well as ask questions and get answers. Not to small so that there was a good mix of  facets to discover and get in touch with people from completely different horizons. I met a lot of very nice and interesting individuals. Jamie is a fantastic teacher: skilled and experienced, ready to share her knowledge, open to listen, ready to help, flexible with the course hours, social, funny and very sensible. I feel so lucky to have been part of this workshop.. ”

Sjoerd Leijten- composer / musician / sound artist. Open forms, improvisation, indeterminacy and real-time processing often pop up in his work. Next to his activities as a vocalist and guitarist he also designs interactive and generative applications within programming environments such as Supercollider and Pure Data. more info: www.sjoerdleijten.nl

“For me as a musician because of the Isadora workshop all of the sudden the live use of video actually became accessible. I was already using Supercollider & Pure Data and was exploring the video possibilities within Pure Data and Processing, but the learning curves were a bit to steep. The Isadora workshop by Jamie let me start experimenting with video in conjunction with audio straight away. Very inspiring.”

Jennifer Kanary – conceptual artist/ artistic researcher. More info: www.labyrinthpsychotica.org

“As a conceptual installation artist, who is normally used to working ‘lowtech’, I was interested in exploring how I could integrate more technology into my work. Over the past years I have followed several workshops related to hacking electronic devices and basic arduino builds, but I was missing an overview of how everything could come together in physical and visual actions. The Isadora workshop gave me that overview.  During the workshop I very much enjoyed learning how Isadora allows for several video and sound manipulations that can be triggered using data that comes from an arduino and or a Wii motion device. I learned how to track video, work with particle and 3D projectors and use a variety of software that allows for the inter communication between device, data and action. The Isadora workshop also helped me to understand programming logic in a much easier way, without needing to be a programmer, as it uses logical visual actors that are supportive to how an artist thinks. Although I still highly depend on people to build the hard and software for me, I feel that by doing this workshop, not only am I slowly empowering myself for the future, my deeper understanding also allows for better communication with developers, allowing me to build a great network and develop more advanced concepts. As an artistic researcher, I particularly enjoyed Jamie’s ability to provide theoretical support as well.”

I arrived at the lab expecting it to be a week of lecturers and assignments (as I’d come from university this was the type of environment I was expecting). I didn’t realise that I would be able to use the STEIM resources to work on my own project while I was there. So it came as a shock when I learned that my learning at STEIM would be heavily self directed, of course there were classes and workshops but I got the most benefit exploration of the resources available in the lab. The classes and workshops were also very interesting and it was very educational to learning from people who were actively developing instruments and new ways of engaging with music. Learning how an inventor of an electronic instrument had conceived and developed the project was an incredibly insightful experience.

Learning about the custom software that people had create to interact with electronic music in a more tangible way was really inspiring. How the finest details of motion could be mapped, with the greatest precision, to sound. And how the unpredictability of how an instrument could react to the performer could be more exciting than the most carefully planned interface.

One of the most amazing parts of the Instrument Lab was the people that I met at the course. There was a great mix of backgrounds and nationalities. They were a great group to be around for the week and I got a great deal from interacting with the other people taking the course.

I spent a lot of my time at STEIM experimenting with tools to reconfigure the way I work as a (primarily) visual artist. I was introduced to JunXion, LiSA, and then MetaSynth – and finally PD – Arduino, Wii, infrared LED …
The real revision in thinking came on the last day, all at once, and I wish I had another week – at least – to spin out what happened.
My work has strong relationships with drawing and chance-accident; and I work very directly. So the directness and drawing part of my interests were met when I was just playing with a contact mic … and then tried out Pure Data, which feels right as a basic software, even if challenging.

EHD 2009 - 2011 previous work

Later that day, by chance my video camera picked up this strobe effect stimulated by Pete Edwards’ synthesizer during a jam session, reflections of studio lights on the lamp bulb in the upper right corner …

It’s for purely visual content – Frank Mauceri’s recording attached in his blog post is much better for sound – it is the same session.  Below is a video still.  This is pretty direct – it would have been great to project that live. I haven’t produced anything in color for years ! And I didn’t do it alone, I really enjoyed and benefitted from the atmosphere of collaboration at STEIM – many thanks to my new friends.

Before arriving at the STEIM Instrument Lab, I had been developing flocking algorithms to control granular sound synthesis. I came to STEIM hoping to explore options for introducing interactivity to this system.  I regularly perform as a saxophonist and use digital media in performance; this was a clear starting point for developing an interactive instrument to use with my generative algorithms.

The Instrument Lab workshops surveyed a variety of interactive systems with hands-on sessions introducing circuit building, the Arduino microprocessor board, and STEIM’s powerful JunXion and LiSa software.  STEIM staff and visitors shared a range of knowledge and experience. As broad as this exposure was, it helped in formulating specific solutions for mapping acoustic input into my flocking simulations.  For example, issues of sensor mapping and scaling are elegantly addressed by JunXion. I also became interested in incorporating wireless accelerometers (also STEIM tech) into my saxophone rig.  Lots of new work ahead – thanks STEIM!

Also many thanks to my fellow participants.  The generosity and encouragement of artists experimenting together is the real interactive technology. These connections, collaborations and friendships will last far longer than the solder joints on our lab circuit boards. We celebrated our week at STEIM together with an interactive jam session. Selected audio can be heard at the Soundcloud link below:

Jam Session Audio

Analog alchemy – Peter Edwards
Sampling slight of hand – Sinan Kestelli
Video Macramé – Jamie Griffiths
Percussive punctuation – Ben Bacon
Witnesses and documentation – Elizabeth Doering, Michael McLoughlin, and David Collier.

Fluffy Pink Box audio exerpt

Fluffy Pink Box is:  Frank Mauceri, Jamie Griffiths, and Sinan Kestelli

This trio of multimedia performers immediately recognized their shared sensibility when they met, searching for the same electronic device in the back of an erotic supplies store. This performance does not use that device, but rather circuit tacos (designed by LoVid) that sense changes in skin conductivity. Sensors control audio and video in the live performance.

Last winter my duo (the EAR Duo) commissioned a set of robotic musical instruments from EMMI (Expressive Machines Musical Instruments) that we could perform with and take on tour. In addition to all of the musical possibilities we were interested in, we also wanted the flexibility and portability to travel with the robots, therefore keeping them within airline regulations was a key component. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, we were able to fund the creation of these bots and begin performances across the North East United States and Europe.

Our residency at STEIM occurred just before the European portion of the tour. Our residency gave us the time to work out all of the bugs before going into performance mode as well as providing a space to rehearse with the robots. I should also mention that the EAR Duo at that time was located in Amsterdam while EMMI was based in the U.S., so we didn’t know the robots very well prior to our residency. As with any musical collaboration, we (the EAR Duo) needed time to get to know the robots and become comfortable playing and improvising together. STEIM provided the perfect meeting place for this.

Our robot friends together are called MARIE and they consist of AMI (Automated Monochord Instrument) and CARI (Cylindrical Aerophone Robotic Instrument). AMI is a string robot while CARI is a wind robot that sounds similar to a clarinet. Our premiere tour consisted of composed music by members of EMMI (Steve Kemper, Troy Rogers and Scott Barton), improvisations, and a classic EAR Duo tune “Dorian Reeds” by Terry Riley. All of the music utilizes AMI and CARI as well as acoustic saxophone and bassoon. We had essentially created a new ensemble and none of us new exactly what to expect. Thanks to our residency at STEIM, we were able to rehearse with the robots and really get to know their way of playing. It successfully prepared us for the concerts and gave us a better understanding of our newly created ensemble.

The day after our STEIM residency we traveled to Ghent, Belgium to put these new robots to the test. Here is a link to some footage from the concert:  EAR Duo + MARIE at the Logos Foundation

NoiseFold performs 2.0 with guest musician David Bithell at the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theatre in Denton Texas - This 3-screen work utilizes a 3-laptop network

NoiseFold was formed in late 2005 when Cory Metcalf and I began collaborative development of an integrated audio-visual performance instrument & synthesis system. Central to our approach is a method of simultaneous sonification and visualization of data that results from real-time mixing and processing of geometric equations. In brief, we manipulate virtual 3D objects that emit sound as a form of tightly integrated audio-visual performance. While this work is very much a continuation of earlier interests in fusing cinema, performance, sound and music, it was also hastened by our close association with Steina Vasulka < http://www.vasulka.org >. Steina is a seminal first generation video artist and former Artistic Director of STEIM, who was in residence during the mid 1990s. We were early adopters of the IMAGE/ine platform developed at STEIM under Steina’s guidance. She and I subsequently co-taught the first University level studio course to use this software.

Cory and I began our multi-part residency at STEIM in July 2010 and returned again in July 2011 (the two visits are encapsulated in this blog). Our initial work was focused on implementing a distributed system built in Max/MSP/Jitter that expanded our performance environment from 2 to 3 networked screens. The result was NoiseFold 2.0, which garnered an honorable mention in the Vida 13.0 Art and Artificial Life International Awards. Various movements from the project were presented by STEIM at OT301 in Amsterdam and the full work has been performed in museums, concert halls, theaters and arts laboratories in the USA and Europe. The conceptual and technical scope of the project is outlined in this video document . < www.fundacion.telefonica.com/en/arteytecnologia/certamen_vida/vida13/noisefold.htm >

Throughout our first residency, Cory and I were laying the groundwork for a series of related project components that we then undertook in my research laboratory at the University of North Texas. Central to these discussions was the sense that we needed to expand our range of sensor instrumentation, pursue the addition of acoustic improvisers in our performances and ultimately redesign our “nFolder” software from the ground-up to facilitate a system that is able to reconfigure itself “on the fly”. We were further encouraged in this direction by the critical insights of STEIM Director, Dick Rijken and Artistic Director, Takuro Mizuta Lippit (aka DJ Sniff). In the intervening year between the first and second residency we rethought our use of infrared sensors, and with the help of Ben Johansen at the University of North Texas, came up with a simple clamp-on gooseneck design that is easy to reconfigure. The 3-point IR system pictured here is the basis of a very stripped-down approach to X-Y-Z motion capture. NoiseFold also began the integration of acoustic musicians into our existing audio-visual vocabulary. Our work with Andrew May (composer, programmer, violinist) < http://cemi.music.unt.edu/may >  and David Bithell (composer, trumpeter & performance artist) < www.davidbithell.com >  resulted in an effective performance where acoustic instruments augment and/or control aspects of both sound and image.

Our return to Amsterdam for the second phase of work was focused on further experimentation with instrumentalists and laying the groundwork for the new modular software. We worked closely with cellist, Frances Marie Uitti < www.uitti.org/Biography.html > and recorder player, Anna Stegmann < www.anna-stegmann.com >. For the most part we were involved with integrating the musicians into existing works and experimenting with parameter mapping of acoustic control data. Cory designed a real-time data capture module and augmented our ability to route sensor controls to expand the gestural and video capabilities of our existing nFolder software programmed in Max 4.6. In the process, we composed a new movement for Anna Stegmann and re-orchestrated a number of existing movements for Frances Marie. We gave a second concert at OT301 with these two wonderful musicians. The event was made possible by the intrepid support of composer, producer and curator, Ivo Bol < www.ivobol.nl >.

David Stout 2011 < www.noisefold.com >

Infrared sensors fitted to gooseneck clamps can be mounted in various configurations to facilitate simple gesture capture

The front control page of the original nFolder software - with aprox. 12 control pages encompassing various video, audio and data processing parameters

Performance Review  <www.gonzocircus.com/15063/noisefold-feat-frances-marie-uitti-en-anna-stegmann-–-ot301-amsterdam-–-21-juli-2011>

http://www.genecarl.nl/www.genecarl.nl/Of_Interest_Concerts.html

Video of Electric Storks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kamuKWzlDL4electric Storks

Late at night after the first day of the orientation workshop, I wrote into my notes in Google Documents, “would it make any sense to perform slowly changing music with gestural controllers?  And would there be any way to perform slowly changing music using gestural controllers with lots of movement?  Kind of a strange economy of scale: so much effort to produce so little change in the sound.  How would I go about creating a gestural controllers for drone music?”

Oddly enough, another controller idea came blasting out of the past.  I had the opportunity to experiment with the EMS VCS3 synthesizer that STEIM houses in its collection of older analog gear.  I had never approached one of these legendary (and now rare) instruments before.  The VCS3, unlike perhaps any other electronic instrument of its time, includes a joystick as part of its interface.  By mapping parameters of the synthesizer (such as filter frequency and resonance) to the X and Y axis of the joystick, I could achieve a level of subtlety of motion that I had never experienced with an analog synthesizer before.  This experience helped point out some possible directions for a new control interface for performance.

In addition to electronic music performance, STEIM encourages work in the field of sound installations.  This focus also inspired new ways of thinking about my work.  Late at night after another day, I wrote in my notes about an aspect of my music which I have been aware of for a long time, but have never put to use in an intentional manner, instead preferring to leave it to chance: how the timbre, texture and overtone content of the music changes depending on where in the room you listen.  “An installation or performance in which the location of people (performers? audience?) in the room determines changes in the sound material.  The motions of people, picked up by sensors, would make changes to either pitches or types of modulation.  Then, as people move to hear the sound in another location, that causes the sound to change even more.”

Whether or not I will pursue these ideas in a second residency at STEIM, I found my time there to be extraordinarily valuable.  The orientation workshop merged a conceptual approach (philosophies of music) with a practical approach (electronic instrument design) without being tied to any stylistic agenda.  Spending a week immersed in electronic music was inspiring on its own terms, while the captivating city of Amsterdam offered a thriving music scene, and pleasant walks along the canals.  I learned much from my fellow workshop participants, who were all dedicated musicians from a variety of backgrounds.  Every day, following the workshop classes, we shared conversations, ideas, technology, music and wonderful meals.  STEIM provided an ideal place to evaluate, challenge, and renew my artistic practice.

The rhythm measurement is based on dynamic and melodic variations (in this context Fourier analysis is very important too). This means that not only the dynamic ‘beat’ but also the speed of melodic changes are measured. However putting this measurement to use in an interactive/intuitive way was quite challenging. Experiments with a variable beat were no success at all (though quite funny: a bit like playing with a very drunken drummer).

In the present configuration the rhythm measurement can be applied to the number of notes played in a bar, either following the tempo of the input (Auto Sync = default now) or opposing it (Auto Async). The rhythm always changes to equal parts of the bar at the chosen tempo (bpm). The resulting note length is displayed. This addition to the system allows a musician to change the ‘speed’ by playing ‘examples’ of a desired rhythm and makes the resulting music much more lively.

You can check out the application at http://www.jazzperiments.com. Click on JAM> to start the applet or launch as Webstart Application.

Procedure

My live sets usually involve a great deal of movement and manipulation of four pieces of equipment: a Pioneer CDJ-400, an Alesis AirF/X, a Digitech Vocalist/Vocal effects processor, and a small Eurorack mixer. Ultimately, I use my composed material – mixed and edited in ProTools – as vehicles for improvisation, feeding them through the aforementioned pieces of hardware.  The music is often energetic and erratic, and when combined with the effects of the CDJ and the Air F/X in addition to improvised vocal accompaniment, the resulting live experience is very dramatic and kinetic.  An accurate description might perhaps be of heavily edited electronic music combined with the spirit of 60′s and 70′s free jazz.

After presenting what usually constitutes a live BlipVert experience for Frank Balde and Takuro Mizuta Lippitt, it was suggested that setting up a LisaX/Junxion combination that could be manipulated with a controller would be an ideal endeavor.  It was observed that I was more or less ‘triggering’ certain effects and sounds, and the furtherance of this concept seemed to fall directly in line with STEIM’s mission.  Frank Balde set me up with LisaX and Junxion programs that were controlled via Wii controller.  I found this not only to be highly original, but incredibly accessible.  Frank also introduced me to other controllers that could be used in conjunction with STEIM’s programs, such as an iPhone and iPad.  I hope to be able to learn about the intricacies involved in programming LisaX and Junixon in the future.

Practice

Thanks to STEIM’s incredibly generous offer to use one of their studios for the duration of my stay, not to mention the unrestricted hours in which I was able to use the studio, I experimented with utilizing my new STEIM setup with my own live performance components.  I also created a 6 speaker surround-sound environment to widen the sonic impact of my stereo recordings.

I found that using the Wii controller in conjunction with my ‘triggering’ of the CDJ, Air F/X and vocal effects processor worked very well.  Essentially, I had another element of “triggering” hardware that I could incorporate into my live experience.  Dovetailing off of my experience working with Troika Ranch and the NYU New Music Ensemble, this idea of triggering seemed to offer unlimited possibilities in the areas of stage setup, movement, and refining performative elements.  For example, my ancillary movement onstage – often the result of emotion and adrenaline – now had an anchor of sorts.  I could re-focus that movement to another trigger, thus creating a purpose for this ancillary movement.

I also found that I had to develop a new level of concentration when working with the Wii controller.  With each movement of the controller and operation of its components, a different effect and/or sound manipulation was enacted.  I’ve found that working in this manner becomes a veritable mine-field of accidents if the performer does not have a strong connection with and knowledge of their equipment.  Therefore, the Wii controller provided a challenge of not only remembering the parameters assigned to each movement of the controller (such as pitch shifting, sample speed, filtering, etc.), but focus and discipline when executing sounds (i.e. knowing how to stop and start the sample source when I wanted my other components to be represented).

Performance

I was very pleased with my performance at STEIM (with Juan Matos Capote) on June 5th.  After a great deal of practice in the studio utilizing these two environments, I felt confident enough to present them both in a live performance.  The samples used in LisaX were of my own tracks from my 2008 BlipVert album “stop:skronk;explode.”  The sample triggering with the Wii worked very well with the chaotic nature of the music, and highly sped up samples and pitch-shifting were fun to experiment with during sections between songs.  It almost seemed to be an carefully executed and controlled overload of information, which is exactly the place I hope to get to in all of my performances.

A few complications I noticed were balancing sounds (i.e. live mixing) and precise location of the cursor within the sample.  I would possibly spend more time working with sound mixing at another residency.  Perhaps there would be a way to work in sound mixing to the Wii controller operation.  I see this as ideal for someone in my situation, as two independent environments – sampling and mixing – would need some kind of regulation.

I also feel that I would need to practice more in positioning the sample cursor in LisaX.  Most often, it seemed that I happened on certain sounds or sample sections at random.  There were sections that I would have liked to identify and refer back to specifically at certain points throughout the live set.  Perhaps this could be accomplished by using shorter samples, or completely different samples independent of BlipVert material.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, my recent experience at STEIM has presented me with new ideas and possibilities for performance.  I feel as though I’ve mastered my current setup, and I am looking to expand (compositionally and in performance) in whatever way is unique and inspiring to me.  Some of these ways have been composing new styles of music as BlipVert with live bands, free improvisation sessions, and experimentation with using different ethnic instruments and cross-cultural composition.  I believe STEIM is one of the best institutions in the world for providing ideas and inspiration for artists who wish to expand and develop their performance ideas.  I hope to continue to work with STEIM in the future.  I believe (if the opportunity presents itself) I could work with STEIM to develop a completely unique live performance environment for my BlipVert project.  This of course would raise questions as to the kind of venues acceptable for said environment, technical requirements, and length of time to develop components.  I look forward to the future having seen STEIM’s ideas and opportunities for electronic music performers.

I would like to thank Nico Bes, Frank Balde, Takuro Mizuta Lippitt, and all of the wonderful STEIM staff for their help and support during my recent residency.

-W/Blip

The workshop ‟Mapping Everything Else” held at this year’s NIME conference in Oslo, Norway, focusses on the questions: what do we want from musical instruments in a performance, what behaviour should they have, how can they be intelligent systems, and what does this mean in terms of mapping? These questions are investigated through a hands-on approach. Computers and other technology are purposefully banned from the working spaces: talking and experiencing mapping without technological entanglement is freeing up creative capacities, and was perceived as a very liberating experience by the participants.

The workshop is roughly divided into three parts, which focus on the mapping of gestures to sounds and vice versa, the construction of a system from such simple mappings, and a representation of a system in a topological map.

We started the workshop with a ‟round robin” exercise: gestures are mapped to sound from one participant to another, using nothing but body language and the voice. Standing in a circle, one person makes a gesture, which the person next to him interprets in terms of sound. Then, the sound is passed on to the next participant, who will produce a gesture which they think would be a good way of controlling this particular sound. This gesture is interpreted as sound by the person next in line, and so on.

Then the workshop members were divided into three groups and asked to develop small musical systems based on keywords we gave to them: these instruments were to be performed after some time for brainstorming and practice. The keywords (‟orange”, ‟broken”, ‟elastic”) were selected intentionally so as to have little musical connotations, and leave open more space for interpretation. After the first round, the keywords were rotated, producing new interesting results for instrument mappings.

The next step was for each group to develop their own concept for an instrument, and think of how it was going to be performed. The three concepts that came out of the groups’ discussions were modularity, feedback, and social comfort. These concepts were investigated from the perspective of topology, i.e. a spatial representation of the sound world, the permutations and states of the envisioned instrument. Participants were challenged to capture this topology by means of paper, chalk, crayons, tin foil and tape. Quite surprising two- and threedimensional structures were the outcome of this workshop part.

The workshop finished with the groups’ presentations of the topologies and the performance of their instruments. We were happy to have such an enthusiastic, creative and insightful group of participants, and thoroughly enjoyed the discussions, experiments and interactions we were privileged to initiate.

Berit, Jon and Georgios
Click here for the video

photo:Lotte Stekelenburg

My work consist of layers, in the use of the mixed media, drawing, building installations, live constructions, performing, and playing with scale and creating a bond between reality and the imaginary world. These layers, developing from the performance are tools I use to express a story line which investigates, and actively pushes the audience to become a part of the work, raising the question of the ‘Here and Now’. In many of my installations and performances I start an interaction. I use paper or daily object to interact with the audience on a large screen,which is being projected. I will use this as a settling point for the viewer, this is a visual recognition there for the audience has settled into a passive state. I will arrange simple elements such as a bucket, a string, and a umbrella in the space of the performance.
Next week at Steim we are researching how to implement visual and sound manipulation. I will be working with Georgios Papadakis he has worked on ‘Max’ to adjust it to my idea of making a choir.
for example I make a Cut out with my face(mirror), you see me in a cut out and I make a sound. This is being recorded(filmed). After I project the samples all together on the screen. Here you get a multiple feeling of the cut out making sounds. a Choir has emerged.
Let’s see how it will go .

After a set of European shows in Amsterdam and Vienna, the MLB project transferred it’s energies over the Atlantic a couple of months ago. This last May, a set of really one of a kind shows in the Northeast U.S. took place, featuring Atsuhiro Ito (OPTRON), Loud Objects, Phil Stearns, Jamie Allen and Yao Chung-Han, in varying combinations.  We were hosted by the fantastic folks at Issue Project Room (IPR) and The Silent Barn in NYC and did a further show in Washington DC at the Sonic Circuits series of events @ Pyramid Atlantic.

Each U.S. show had quite a different vibe – and each was special for its own reasons.  As we delivered our own particular brand of high amperage musicianship, something new seemed to reveal itself each night.  The space of IPR, white-walled and acoustically resilient, made for an intense, intimate set of performances.  Pictured below are Phillip Stearns‘ double fluorescent, no input mixer piece, and Atsuhiro Ito‘s pulsating, melodic set.

Next up was a kind of homecoming to the Silent Barn out in Bushwick… A pre-show visit to the local German beer hall (schnitzel!), and the warm welcome of MLB friends Mr. Kunal Gupta and G Lucas Crane, reminded us all why this place is definitely worth the drive to Ridgewood.  If you’ve not been to the Barn, you really need to stop by: Kunal just bought a deep fryer.  I had a poke around the stage/kitchen with a hacked megaphone I’m now making noises with.

To cap off the U.S. dates – an incredibly memorable show at Sonic Circuits after a long drive down to DC.  Jeff Surak, Director & Curator of Sonic Circuits helped us out by putting together a concert at Pyramid Atlantic’s art gallery, which features an old walk-in bank vault just off of the stage.  Yao Chung-Han started off the night with a particularly inspired and subtle LLSP set.  Loud Objects set up camp in the vault, and well… took all their clothes off.  It was beautiful.

We have a few more bits of audio to mix from the performances above, and then will soon be releasing a vinyl compilation of all this madness.  Video footage will be out later as a short, edited documentary sometime in 2012, and we’re on the hunt for festival sponsorship to bring the whole group together again.  Thanks as ever and always to STEIM for their support and encouragement – please stay informed and keep in touch here.

[MLB continues as both a research project and performance tour. Check the MLB site or download MLB's current Press Release for details.]

Sleeping Bears | interactive installation | KAAP exhibition | Fort Reigenthoek Utrecht

Last weekend! 9  & 10 July 2011 – open from 10h to 18h

www.kaapweb.nl

An interactive sound installation by Lyndsey Housden and Yoko Seyama, created with children aged 7 to 12 years in mind, was developed at STEIM during Lyndsey’s artist in residence from March to May 2011. Sleeping Bears is installed inside one of the mounds at Fort Ruigethoek, Utrecht; a former waterline defense fort. Over 100 years of natural growth has transformed this bygone military base into a nature reserve and an adventure island for children. Lyndsey Housden and Yoko Seyama were commisioned by STORM Utrecht to make a work for the Fort in the context of a young peoples art festival. In response they imagined the mounds as giant sleeping bears, whose mesh of elastic nerves generated a sympathetic composition of electric sounds when children of all ages played inside. The chimneys that are visible on top of the mounds piped out the sounds created inside; this resulted in a continually evolving sound composition, caught in the wind and inviting people to climb the mound.

During my  STEIM residency I worked together with Georgios Papadakis from STEIM to develop the software and sensor interface. The work uses accelerometer sensors combined with contact microphones and resonating columns to generate electronic sounds. We used the STEIM  JunXion software to read and scale the accelerometer data.

a more detailed project blog follows in the next weeks.

The KAAP exhibition is Curated by Tiong Ang

Commissioned by Storm Utrecht. Supported and funded by STROOM Den Haag and STEIM Amsterdam.

Technical support from Georgios Papadakis (STEIM) and Rene Wassenburg schrikdraad-ontwerp

I am not exactly what might be called an electronic musician. I am a saxophonist, composer and arranger, with several experience in Jazz, classic and contemporary music and improvisation.

I always used electronic as a technological support for composition but I never used it as an instrument or to produce sounds in live performances.

Getting in touch with STEIM I was attracted by their approach of “humanization” of the use of electronic.

I could appreciate the chance to play not only behind a computer or a keyboard but even using your body or your own instrument.

And this is exactly what I found by attending the workshop.

So I could deepen the technical possibilities that I  could have using the two software Lisa and JunXion that are very flexible software and that can be used with every kind of “controllers” from a nintendo wi to your own body or your voice.

I found also very stimulating the lectures we have followed in the two last days of the workshop. The collective activity about “mapping everything else” is perfectly inside what I think is the “STEIM philosophy”: producing and performing some composition without using nothing of electronics, just using your ideas, your body, your voice and your mind.

And I have appreciated a lot the last day-activity with a very deep reflection about composition vs. improvisation and the execution of a contemporary score, with different ensembles and different approaches.

But, perhaps, the most important experience during the workshop has been the opportunity to meet artists from all over the world, to share with them ideas and extremely different experiences, to jam together in the STEIM studios. Jamming together has been really exciting and maybe has laid the foundations for future projects with some of the other attendants.

I hope I can still participate in the future activity of STEIM and I hope I will use some of the knowledge and concepts of STEIM in my future projects.

Modality is a loose collaboration between both developers and (advanced) users of SuperCollider. They gathered in order to develop a toolkit simplify the creation of your very personal instruments with SuperCollider, using controllers of any kind. It was initiated by Jeff Carey and Bjornar Habbestad.

Our residency at STEIM was the second meeting we had; a follow-up to the first workshop we had in Bergen at BEK in October 2010.

The participants in the STEIM-Modality residency were (in no particular order):
Jeff Carey, Marije Baalman, Miguel Negrão, Alberto de Campo, Till Bovermann, Hannes Hölzl, and Robert van Heumen.

Modality is about making this easy - game controllers and SC (photo Till Bovermann)

Timeline

The residency started with a presentation of the Modality project to the local SuperCollider user group meeting , where Jeff Carey talked for about one-and-a-half hour about his current instrument setup to explain the kind of problems that we try to address. Despite Jeff’s jetlag (just having arrived the same day from an overnight flight from the US) this was an engaging presentation, intertwined by detailed discussions.

In the following three days, we held internal presentations; each about their own work, mainly focused but not limited to SuperCollider-related pieces and their supporting frameworks. These presentations then continued into discussions and brainstorming, so we had no problems to go over time with regard to our optimistic planned time schedule. Some of the presentations were joined by visitors as well.

Thursday

The first day, Jeff and Marije introduced the project to the people who were not present at the previous meeting, and to give a summary of what we achieved during the first developer meeting. This was followed by Till who showed some of his work on TUIO, SETO, Materials, controller semantics and juggling sounds.

In the evening we joined the Open Studio Night, by giving several presentations on the project – short improvisational performances followed by explanations about the project.

Modality improvisation during the STEIM Open Studio (photo Till Bovermann)

Friday

The next day, Robert kicked off the day by showing us around in his performance setup, and giving us insights into the STEIM software packages LiSa and Junxion. We found a lot of inspiring concepts for mapping and data processing for our Modality toolkit in there.

Miguel continued by doing a presentation on some of his work on 2D parameter spaces, synths as models, parallel execution of server-side sc code, and other bits of supercollider code, which featured quite detailed and fine-grained insights into software design patterns, especially the model-view-controller concept.

This was followed by a presentation by Marije, featuring the SenseWorld DataNetwork, especially her newly designed (and commercially available) MiniBees.

Alberto playing with a game controller (photo Till Bovermann)

Saturday

On Saturday, Alberto presented his course on improvisation that he had his students in Berlin engage in, giving some insights in how to teach students on how to improvise and create instruments on the fly.

In the afternoon Miguel gave the rest a short crash course on the git version control system; SuperCollider’s main source development switched over to git from subversion a while ago, but not all of us were comfortable in using it yet. Miguel’s presentation, and then our use of git for the Modality code we developed during the residency, really helped us all to feel at ease with the system.

Sunday

On Sunday we made an excursion to Marije’s home at IJburg for relaxed Sunday afternoon brunching, coding and eventually dinner. Here we made the first start on the new MKtl and MDispatch classes.

Monday

On Monday we continued coding at STEIM, and did a concert in the evening within DNK’s concert series at the Smart Project Space.

Tuesday

Following this, Tuesday was a bit of a slow day; with some of us departing to go back home, or onto the next destination.
However, we managed to refine some implementations, but not much to say about this. The usual programming day.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

From Wednesday to Friday, Miguel, Till and Marije continued to come together, coding and documenting the implementations at STEIM, while Alberto pushed his contributions from Berlin (in a rough 4h cycle).

On Thursday we presented our workshop results to an attentive audience at the STEIM Hotpot #16.

Presentation slides for Modality Hotpot #16

Achievements

We developed a new set of extensions (a Quark, in SuperCollider terms), which enables users to interface with both MIDI and HID devices through the very same MKtl class.

The user can query which controllers are currently connected to the system and pick one of them from a list. The capabilities of each device are stored in a configuration file (which only needs to be made once and can then be used by any user; assuming the person who made it shares it by putting it in the MKtl quark). The user can then access the data coming from the controller through a human readable name, rather than a hardware specific code (e.g. a MIDI control number, or an HID device element cookie), and add actions which will be executed each time data comes in from the actual hardware controller. We’ve tried to make the implementation as generic as possible, so that it can easily be extended to also support OSC, the serial port, or other interfaces.

Additionally, we worked on the MDispatch class, which allows to create calculation units; algorithms that render output from a given input. Examples of this are e.g. the conversion of button presses (two events: on – off) to one trigger event (on), the calculation of slider speed, or the average value of a number of controllers. We’ve created various templates for commonly used functionality, which hopefully makes it easier to abstract the data processing from your work, allowing you to think in blocks of data processing in order to chain them together.

As the MKtl and MDispatch classes share the same interface, you can easily exchange one class for the other, e.g. use processed data from an MDispatch, rather than the raw data coming from the MKtl directly.

As we are polishing up some of the implementation and documentation in the aftermath of the residency, we soon hope to release an early (pre-alpha) version for the general public.

Thanks

STEIM’s hospitality to give us the space and time to sit together in the same room for about 10 days has really helped us to share experiences, do intensive brainstorming and develop code, which will be beneficial for quite a few SuperCollider users out there.

The orientation workshop was a fantastic experience with direct bearing on my creative output. The days at Steim could be assessed on three levels: engineering, esthetic, interpersonal. I came here with a set of ongoing projects and technical issues, which hobbled the path to their completion. I left with inspiration and solutions.

The training sessions introduced the in-house software and hardware tools against their historical context. I had a chance to approach the experts who developed them, and receive valuable guidance with regard to my personal queries. The engineering aspect is perhaps more prominent in electronic music, compared to other genres. Working with new instruments, one must constantly face up to the technical challenges, which threaten and impede the artistic vision. Some of the veterans at Steim have made overcoming these issues their lives’ work. I don’t have the privilege to work with such people at home. It was wonderful to learn from them.

Next, the lecturers explored the overriding esthetic and philosophical questions that stem from instrument design and performance of experimental music forms. What are the critical issues in building an instrument? How do its characteristics stack up against the personal background, skillset and objectives of the performer? How is this type of music composed and scored?

While these points and their ramification have been raised before, exploring them in a coherent format under the guidance of experienced practitioners brought them forth with a new focus. These ideas resonate very differently for a budding artist who is groping for the way forward. The sessions were a chance to step aside and field-test my modus operandi.

This brings me to the human aspect, i.e. the third criterion for evaluating this course. Although we comprised a group of people with strikingly different influences and practices, all those attended this workshop agreed there was something special about the environment at Steim. In the end I wasn’t quite sure whether what fueled our creative energies was the forced exile of living in Amsterdam, the well-equipped studios, or the buzz in the hallways. Either way, it was a stimulating mixture and we followed up the daily lectures with nightly jam sessions. I hope some will morph into long-term collaborations.

Overall, I was very impressed with everyone I met at Steim and hope to go back for an extended residence at some point.

Icarus (Ollie Bown and Sam Britton) have been making electronic music together since 1997. Although starting out producing studio albums, the band has become increasingly involved in live improvised laptop performance and their recent recorded output has been predominantly based on live work.

In an attempt to return to studio production but also to draw upon the live and generative aspect of their work, Icarus set themselves the goal of making an album that was different every time you bought it. Some other factors conspired to make this an appealing idea:

–> Discretion; was the reason nobody ever managed to make a successful generative album because they were trying to make infinite variation when in fact finite, managed variation would do a better job?

–> Fragmentation; the changing face of the music industry means people now buy bits (if they buy anything at all), the bits have no uniqueness and are infinitely costlessly reproducible. By selling a unique variation could it also be possible to sell the unique rights to something (the recording rights). Does this make for something special?

–> Multiplicity; when an album finds its way onto bit-torrent sites, how engaging would it be if there were still unique variations of that album that remained off the radar?

–> Innovation; the tools now exist to allow scriptable control of studio production software, so why not try it?

The goal of making 1,000 variations was settled upon: more than any sane person would care to listen to, but not so many that the rendering time, the size of the resulting data, and vastness of the output would be unmanageable. The aim of the project was to create tracks, each of which existed in one of 1,000 variations, where each variation was a known, managed entity.

The project came to STEIM’s Studio 2 for 3 weeks of intensive R&D following an application by Ollie and Sam late last year. This was Icarus’ first project at STEIM and although Icarus’ approach to performance and music production is in many ways an un-STEIM way of doing things, there was no lack of stimulating interaction and exchange with STEIM personnel and fellow residents.

Icarus’ project exploited the creative possibilities of Max For Live (M4L), the new interface between Ableton’s Live digital production and performance software, and MaxMSP, Cycling ’74′s do-it-yourself algorithmic music software. The band benefitted from STEIM’s close contact with the M4L team and their hosted M4L user-group meetings. The bulk of the software was developed at STEIM using M4L and some example music was made, although the real composition is the band’s job back at home in London throughout March.

The rig: no hardware controllers, but lots of computers rendering different versions of albums.

Editing breakpoint functions, which are used to manipulate audio data and then interpolated to achieve variations. The master dial (indicated by birdie) which controls which of the 1,000 variations is being played at any point in time. This is integrated into Live as a master controller.

A Schroeder quadratic residue diffuser, which is part of the acoustic treatment in STEIM’s studio 2, also provided some inspiration for us for number sequences that would have interesting generative and variable properties.

A number of variations from a test run. Same same but different.

Icarus gratefully acknowledges the support of the PRS For Music Foundation.

Attending the orientation workshop was a fabulous opportunity to learn about Steim as an organisation and the role they have played in the development of performance technologies in the Netherlands and internationally.  The project examples they presented often had a focus on creating electronic instruments which seamlessly fit to the musician’s required movements; and that similar to traditional instruments, can be played  in an advanced way.  Instruments and interfaces that enable the performer to learn the instrument and develop unique techniques and styles of playing.   Seeing their focus and thought into what make an instrument successful  has sparked ideas regarding the complexity of interfaces. And although my interests lie in more interfaces and instruments that are not seamless but rather awkward and clumsy, seeing examples of a different point of view was a motivating learning experience.

Kristina Andersen’s presentation and workshop was particularly inspiring.  I found her approach to creativity and developing ideas interesting and relevant to my practice.  She had a fresh approach to creating, that attempted to invent new ways of imagining through play and spontaneous ‘on the fly’ questioning.

Instructions in Steim’s sampling software Lisa were also great,  Lisa is a loop based software for audio performance that is everything I have previously wished for in audio sampling software, I intend to use it as a performance tool in the future.

When i was first planning my trip to Amsterdam,  I was wondering whether to stay with friends or in the guesthouse at Steim.  A friend who had previously attended pointed out that one of the best things about his time there was meeting and chatting with the other workshop participants and that it was a great place to stay.   He was right, it was great to meet and chat with the other participants who were all working on interesting projects of their own.

Luckily STEIM provided us with a couple of days in one of their studios, to work on our material and our performance. Also, another element had to be researched: one of our members (Laurens, responsible for live coding), was not in the Netherlands. Because of this, part of the goal of the residency was to see if we could work with an internet connection and screen sharing. Laurens usually does the live coding locally, but since he is in Latvia we needed to try this alternative.

First of all, we needed to get screen sharing running, so Laurens could then program the code on my laptop, which was in the studio in STEIM. To enable this screen sharing ove internet, it was necessary to connect to the net through the switch at STEIM. On the switch the ports 5900-5910 were forwarded to my static ip address, enabling Laurens to control my laptop. Another thing necessary was audio and video feedback to Laurens, so he could anticipate on the performance. We used iChat for this, with a room mic connected to the MOTU, which was the audio feedback in iChat. This way Laurens was able to hear what was happening, although it was hard to get this optimal because of the jumpy internet connection. We wanted to use the video-conference option in iChat as well, but since the connection was not optimal we only used audio.

Also, we wanted to explore new ways of interacting and connecting the drawing, synth, circuits and live code. The live code is beamed on a big screen, which is also used to draw on with ink. This way the code is the audiovisual connection with the ink, moving from a functional to aesthetic purpose.
After the first rehearsals, it seemed the ‘composition’ of the MAX objects and the drawing of Julie were not meeting eachother… it suffered from the fact that there was no visual feedback for Laurens. We had to be a bit more strict about the relative positioning of objects, so Julies drawing and the object would be related to eachother more. Also, the encapsulating of objects was an idea to expand and contract the live code, allowing for a more dynamic screen.

Regarding the sound, STEIM let us use their VCS3 synthesizer. In our previous endeavours we worked with a MS-20. The VCs3 made the overall sound more interesting. Since there is only a box on stage without any keyboard, the aesthetics in both sound and appearance of the radios internals and the synthesizer is also increased.
The visual representation of the instruments (circuits, VCS3, laptop/code) also reflects the amount of control and sound possibilities the different devices have.
Interesting other feature of this setup is that the radiocircuits are the most rudimentary form on stage. By using it also as a feed into the VCS3 the functionality of the radio is expanded, since the sound is now upgraded with al kinds of possibilities in the synthesizer. This connection in turn is even exceeded by the laptop, which uses the inputs of both ‘instruments’, and is able to add even more to it. The way everyone works with the possibilities they have is very interesting i think, since i believe the limitations of systems and instruments can push the amount of exporession you try to achieve. On the other hand an increased amount of possibilities asks for a well-thought out approach.

The small residency was also a preparation on the performance in the Skybox for the Notations festival. That’s why we needed to test the internet connection end the screen sharing possiblities. We have tested as much of the setup we have at the performance, by changing the setup in such a way that we are most mobile. We removed the mixers from the setup, and tried to use the MOTU UltraLite as a standalone mixer in combination with three speakers. This setup will also be used in the Skybox, and working like this makes our setup more mobile and adaptable to other situations as well. Trying to reduce the amount of equipment needed is a step forward, and we are almost at a point where we have everything ourselves (laptops, beamer, instruments, ink, sound devices) This way we could easily do our performance in any gallery or other place without its own PA system. Only bottleneck at the moment is still the internet connection. Preferably we have a USB internet modem with a high bandwidth.

During the residency we were also able to make some shirt clips of our project, which you can check out in the videos below.

It is very much at an intermediate stage. Gone are the Nintendo Wii controllers and in are the Arduinos. This shows 2 different stategies for the buchla lightning Rods – the left is simply strapped onto a box containing the ardio board, the right has been deconstructed and positioned inside the ardiuno box, sharing its power source. The point of the latter is to give better thumb access to the switches – restriction to this acess have been the biggest problematic issues with the designs so far.

and here is the Wireless reciever box which also functions as a recharger for the arduino batteries

The next stage will be to combine what we learn from these two prototypes into a  “final” (is it ever final?) handset design dedicated to the purpose. Whether this contains the Buchla technology at all or whether it will be completely replaced is the next big decision we will face.

After moving to the UK I always had, in the back of my head, a thought that I would go and see it in person. After starting my MA (in Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Manchester) I decided to apply for an orientation workshop.

Now backing it up a bit. Zoom and enhance. Zoom and enhance.

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I’m a performer, improviser, and composer, likely in that order. I’m also an instrument building and modifier.

What I most often do is improvise using my drums+electronics setup. It looks like this:

I built and/or modified nearly everything on that drum set (down to the drums themselves), including all the electronics laying around it.

My approach to electronics, in general, is very DIY/lo-fi. I haven’t used a laptop in live performance in over three years, and I only did it for a couple of months then anyways. Most of what I do is hardware based. Even now that I’m getting into sensors, code, and microcontrollers, it is leaning towards self-standing, embedded solutions (ie Aruduino, iOS, etc…).

So what does it sound like?

Here is an short track from an improvisation-based CD I did with brilliant composer/performer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay:

13 Glitch House Beat (200bpm)

It also looks like this:

GEMDays 2010 Performance

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Ok, back to STEIM.

Being that I build instruments and such already, I have a few ideas for things that might be worth applying for a residency for. The two main ideas are as follows:

1 – An accelerometer and gyroscope based wireless sensor for attaching to the wrists of a live painter.

2 – A computer hard-disk ‘percussion’ instrument that is part automaton.

Now for some details. The first one is intended for a cross-disciplinary improvisation-based group I have, called Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern.

It looks like this:

And sounds/looks like this:

TSC @ The Noise Upstairs

The manner in which we, more recently, perform is that there are contact mics placed on the back of the canvas, and the two musicians (Anton Hunter and myself) sample/process the sounds of the brushes/palette knives on the canvas. Where the sensors come in is that they would be controlling a system (max/MSP) that samples/processes the sounds she makes. In effect making the sounds from the video linked above a self-standing instrument. This will allow Anton and myself to go back to using more ‘traditional’ (and I use that term VERY loosely) instruments.

My original plan was to use gutted/adapted wiimotes for this project. More specifically wiimotes with wii motion plus built in as the gryos would give much more accurate tilt/rotation readings. I still plan on doing that for the development of the software, but after speaking to nearly everyone here at STEIM, it’s clear that bluetooth is not the best solution for wireless performance. Lots of connectivity type issues that I’d rather avoid. I think the final hardware version will be something based on an accel/gyro/arduino board with the wireless part being XBee based.

Now this project seems right up STEIM’s alley in terms of sensor/wireless/art/interaction etc.. but it also falls in an area just outside of what I can manage on my own. And particularly in terms of software (more on this below) I think it would be better to just develop/build it on my own and maybe apply for a residency to refine it later on.

Now the second idea, the hard-disk clicking one. This is what I think I will apply for a residency for as it involves things that are outside of my understanding quite a bit, and fit in with what STEIM does, but in a different way. The current/rough idea is that it would contain four ‘open face’ computer hard drives (very old/loud ones) that would be mounted on a wooden/resonant enclosure. Below that would be several foam drum-pads. When tapping one of the pads, the corresponding hard drive would start a clacking pattern that would die away. Each hard drive would have a different pattern it went through and/or all would cycle through different patterns. I’m also thinking of using the platters themselves as encoders and having contact mics on them to amplify/process the sound later on.

The kicker is that I want it to be self-standing. As in, no computer. Due to the multi-instrumental approach I have at my drumset (see picture below) adding a laptop to the system would be prohibitively complicated, AND it would be nice for it to be a self contained system.

So those are two ideas that spending time at STEIM has really gotten me thinking about. Well what about the time itself?

The workshop/talks have been great. Getting demonstrations of JunXion/LiSa were very handy, as well as learning about the history of STEIM. For me the fun started on day three (or was it four?). Taku‘s talk on inventing instruments, as well as Kristina Anderson’s interaction design talk were my favorites. That conceptual approach to the instruments/interfaces is something that resonates with me. More of my recent builds have been interface adaptations, like the Electric-Whisks.

How I interface with my instruments is a big concern in a mixed instrument like mine. The interface choices I make have to account for being an instrumentalist at the same time. I’m not a ‘controllerist’ in any way.

In addition to drums, I play piano/guitar and similar instruments (piano is actually my first instrument starting at 4years old and studying it through university). This instrumental extension is something that poses unique interface problems. I’ve never been a big fan of sensors for sensors sake in that music doesn’t become more exciting if you throw a sensor glove on it. I believe the music is what’s exciting. I guess this is a tangent/rant that could live elsewhere.

What about the STEIM hardware/software?

Hardware wise the Arduino, and similar boards, really changed the game. Most of what I saw here, instrument wise, was based on Arduinos and old PowerPC Mac Mini’s (interestingly enough). They do seem to be making some interesting developments in terms of XBee/wireless type solutions. I’m curious to see if that manifests itself commercially.

Software wise it’s a bit weird. LiSa, the longstanding staple of STEIM software feels really limited to me. Granted, it does what it does well, and I LOVE live sampling. For me the limitation comes in in terms of MIDI resolution. I HATE the sound of 127 steps in gestures. That step-step-step sound when doing rapid and/or long changes kills it for me. The fact that there is no easy way to incorporate DSP into the equation is another bummer. I’m half tempted to learn LiSa and develop a setup with it, but knowing that there is a roof, as it were, isn’t appealing. I’ve done some max/MSP stuff in the past, and although I can’t make a LiSa in Max, it might be worth the work/effort building it in there as theres no ‘roof’. There is also a more practical limitation in that LiSa runs in rosetta, which is supposed to be gone from the next OS X (10.7) update. Yikes!

So in summation. STEIM is an amazing place. Vibrant with energy, history, and brilliant people. It’s hard not to get inspired here. And inspired I am. There are practical manifestations of this (the instrument ideas above) but more importantly there is a deeper, conceptual inspiration in terms of electronic music and interfaces.

For more info on my music/work please visit my webpage:

http://www.rodrigoconstanzo.com

My week-long residency gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time working on my solo electronics interfaces in SuperCollider. In addition to tweaking past work and creating some new work I have been doing lots of research into granular synthesis, instrumental data mapping, and spectral analysis/re-synthesis. Some really smart people have helped steer me in the right direction. If anyone is interested I suggest checking out the following people/projects. Loris, Jonathan Reus, Marcelo Caetano and this paper, Michael Klingbeil and especially his software SPEAR.

Using these tools/concepts I plan on extending my SuperCollider-based electronic setup within the next year. This is a long-term project for me and I appreciate STEIM giving me the opportunity to flesh out some ideas. I will update this post further as my project continues.

Live. Liquid Architecture Festival. Melbourne, Australia

The purpose of this residency was to work intensively on the further development of a musical interface – the eMic – a sensor based microphone stand ‘instrument’ that allows the performer to manipulate vocal sounds in real time via the sending of control signals to sound processing patches in software. In particular, we were keen to explore the STEIM developed software JunXion to investigate different approaches to the mapping of gestural data to musical parameters in a duo context. Our ultimate goal is to improve the responsiveness of the instrument in real performance contexts and to investigate the ways in vocal performance data can be used in a duo context.

Wireless eMic Mark II prototype base showing buttons and pressure sensor. A mini CV to OSC bluetooth transmitter is housed under the base, which sends signals to the performers' laptops.

Wireless eMic Mark II. Underneath the base of the stand where the electronics and bluetooth transmitter are housed.

Wireless eMic Mark II: Prototype showing top section with joystick controller, pressure sensors and buttons

Wireless eMic Mark II: Prototype showing top section buttons and joystick base

Donna has been performing with the eMic since 2003 and designed the instrument as a way of connecting her skills as a vocal performer with her electronic music practice. The other motivation for the design was to develop a flexible and engaging vocal interface as an alternative to what she saw as quite limiting laptop based performance with a vocal mic input. Donna and Julian have been working as a duo since 20o5. Since that time, they have a produced a range of collaborative compositions. When used in the context of the duo the data outputs from the eMic are also sent to the second performer who is able to use this data to shape musical elements in performance. The challenge therefore is to develop meaningful musical mappings where the second performer has access to the gestural data sets from the first.

During our week long residency, we worked to the following plan

• Design, development and testing of sensors
• Familiarisation with STEIM JunXion software environment
• Exploration of data mapping strategies using JunXion
• Exploration of performer-to-performer mapping strategies

The main aim was to stabilise the instrument and develop some software patches in JunXion, PD and Ableton Live (Donna’s computer), and in Max/MSP and Ableton Live (Julian’s computer) that would serve as the basis for a new collaborative composition. Good progress was made against these aims during the week in residence. This new work will extend the use of sensors to Julian’s electric guitar (via an Arduino board and sensors) so that full performance gesture capture and exchange can occur.

Donna in STEIM studio

Julian working on sensor data at STEIM

Arduino board

As part of the artist residency, we presented at a STEIM hotpot lab #12 on Hyperinstruments (Dec 9, 2010). This was a good opportunity to introduce the instrument and the duo work to the audience, answer questions about our ongoing research, and invite critical discussion.

STEIM Hotpot Lab #12: Electrumpet by Hans Leeuw (NL) eMic by Donna Hewitt & Julian Knowles (AU) Hypersaxophone by Michael Straus (US)

During the week, the snow storms started that would bring Europe to a standstill in coming weeks. Snow is fascinating for us Australians – our climate is far too warm for snow (save for a very small alpine region in the south east). Armed with a new phone, Julian started some ‘quick and dirty’ mobile phone shot videos to capture the mood of each day, adding an improvised soundtrack. One video was completed each day, based on a couple of minutes continuous video captured at a single location. Here is a taste.

Amsterdam 14.12.10

2011 will be a year of consolidating on the work from STEIM and the completion of new duo material. A range of performances are planned in Australia, the USA and Scandinavia.

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Australia Council for the Arts and Queensland University of Technology whose funding made the residency possible, and STEIM for the artist residency and the generous support of the staff.

Donna Hewitt Myspace

Julian Knowles Myspace

Further Listening/Reading

Musical examples

Julian Knowles and Donna Hewitt (2006) ‘Nodule’ Live at ICMC New Orleans
Julian Knowles and Donna Hewitt (2007) ‘Amphibian’ from Liquid Architecture CD.
Donna Hewitt (2010) ‘Idol’
Julian Knowles and Donna Hewitt (2007). Video compilation of some early Knowles/Hewitt duo performances.

Articles

Hewitt, Donna G. & Stevenson, Ian (2003) Emic – Extended Mic-stand Interface Controller. In: New Interfaces for Musical Expression NIME-03, May 22-24, 2003, McGill University- Montreal, QC, Canada.

Hewitt, Donna G. (2003) EMIC – Compositional experiments and real-time mapping issues in performance. In: Australasian Computer Music Association Conference 2003 – Converging Technologies, 5th – 7th July 2003, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia.

Knowles, Julian D. & Hewitt, Donna G, (2006) Amphibian (Musical Work)

Knowles, Julian D. & Hewitt, Donna G. (2006) Nodule. (Musical Work)

In 2007 Bostjan Simon followed a week long LiSa workshop in Steim premises. It was organized in collaboration with the Conservatory of Amsterdam and hosted by Jos Zwaanenburg. Later that year we started Vanilla Riot (next to Bostjan there is Stephan Meidell and Onno Govaert). During the following years we did a few international tours and released an album.

One thing we always have been working on is merging our instruments with electronics. You can take a listen to an earlier attempt recorded in June 2009:
Pøtchz

In april 2010 we added an extra element to our show: visuals, by Roel van Doorn. By using three beamers (being influenced by Roel and by sound input from the musicians) together with a transparent curtain in front of the musicians there is the possibility to have an interactive play with different layers in the space (front, musicians and background)

During the week at Steim we developed a lot of new musical material. We all have a background as improvising musicians and treat the material very flexible. Next to our regular instrumentation (baritone guitar, drums, clarinet/alto saxophone and electronics) we added a few cheap synthesizers, integrated live feedback and its processing, experimented with clipping; distorted processed live and sampled sound (LiSa). Also we managed to have Bostjan processing the drums while Onno has very accurate control over the output.

Stephan’s guitar and pedals:

For more detailed information about the visuals please read Roel’s description:

Research Vanilla Riot visuals

IR camera and light
In order to use live visual input from the overall dark stage, i experimented with an infrared camera
and an external infrared light. Using the input from the camera in Jitter, i created several
possibilities to control the visuals, using cv.jit objects to create outlines of the people on the stage
which are influenced by the overall volume of the guitar. The drum input switches the input from
complete red with high contrast to white outlines, using gate triggering.
Only problem with the IR light is that it beams a spotlight instead of an overall ambient light, this is
something which need further attention.
Also, the possibility to ‘stretch’ the input extremely can be used to create vertical and horizontal
stripes instead of the ‘normal’ input of the camera.
GL objects
Another part of the research is to have a more minimal approach with shapes created by several
different jit.gl objects. Before the residency i used a lot of premade movies, but they seemed to limit
me. Using the GPU to create GL shapes greatly improves the fps, and gives a very versatile
backbone to the visual patch. I use a joystick to control the overal view of the rendered
environment, to zoom in and rotate the view of the gl objects. During the residency i programmed
the complete patch using gl rendering, also the live input is being rendered to a jit.gl.videoplane
object to have more control of zooming and gl effects.
Another new way of using the gl is to use the @matrixoutput option of jit.gl.gridshapes, connecting
them to jit.gl.mesh objects. The matrices that are sent out the gridshapes objects can be processed
and altered, which gives a very dynamic way of working with the material, creating even more
chaotic but controlled visual output.
Network input volumes
All instruments are plugged in the soundcard of Bostjan, who is on stage playing clarinet and
saxophone. We created the following parameters to be used as triggers for interactive visual output:
- saxophone level (dpa microphone input)
- guitar level (lineout input from the guitar)
- snaredrum level (contact mic input)
- basedrum level (contact mic input)
- electronic sound level left/right (direct output from laptop Bostjan)
These levels are scaled to 0-1000 and sent by a network connection to the laptop of Roel, who is
responsible for the visuals. All programmed patches have different ways to use these sound inputs
as controls for visual output, using them as continuous parameters or as gate triggers.
Strobe light
Another little thing we add in the setup is a little strobe light, which can be controlled by Onno
(drums) using a footswitch. This way the stage lights are getting more dynamic. There are already
two beamers that beam behind the curtain, on both Stephan (guitar) on the left and Bostjan (sax) on
the right. Since the two beamers are not able to beam anything in the middle (due to small distances
on the stage) where the drums are, we want to give Onno the possibility to play with the strobe so
the stage itself is divided in:
-beamer left on Stephan
-strobe controlled by Onno
-beamer right on Bostjan

Click HERE for some samples we recorded at Steim

There are a number of themes that have emerged in and around the building of electronic instruments and performance technologies over the past 50 years (STEIM represents a large cross-section of these through its research and residency programmes). Every once in a while these diverse approaches seem to converge around a common set of musical, technical and conceptual concerns. These brief condensations of contemporary artistic tactics isn’t necessarily either enduring or deliberate, but can point to exciting ideas floating in the ether – and perhaps a new or important awareness or two about what it is we do as musical and technologically concerned artists and performers, and why. And for me – just like learning a new word or idea – once such an awareness is suggested to you, it seems to show up everywhere you look. Discussions between performers, the electronic arts festival beat, and video, image and audio online of course make awareness and intersection of these new artistic energies pretty damn quick.

MLB was initiated quite a while ago, as it happens (2006! It takes a while to match up the agendas of groups in North America, Asia and Europe) The project convened at STEIM in November 2010. During the intervening years, I kept notice of a certain strand of electronic musical/visual performance style popping up here and there. The people simultaneously exemplifying and defining this style work in relative isolation from one another, and come from a host of backgrounds, motivations and contexts. But, to me at least, in a number of these works there is a common thread: A desire to treat the audio-visual signal as an energy for directly investigating the materialities of sound and image.

By “materialities” here, I mean both the opening up (a dissecting, a direct experience) of the ways we produce audio/visual signals, as well as an interest in the ways that these signals, perhaps most particularly in performance, can act as a kind of probe - or instrument – for assessing, testing and defining the limits of a technology, space or audience group or member. Although I don’t think it was intended as a performance of the kind represented in MLB, I’m always reminded in discussing these ideas of Bill Viola’s Street Music piece where he “fired a rifle into the air several times on the corner of Cedar and Nassau streets in the Wall Street district of New York,” on Sunday, September 26, 1976 at 8 a.m., and recorded the acoustic result on a number of microphones placed around the area. What can we come to know about a given material situation via the aesthetics and simplicity of a provocative impulse?

A first insight might be the possibility of an electronic-sound-performance that is seeking a kind of minimalist obviousness. Let us try first to build an interface-less interface, or (as I have described both my own circuitMusic performances and Loud Objects‘ work) “the electronic-arts equivalent of banging two stones together.” So much of our interface culture comes out of a desire to trick our senses, reduce our understanding of reality or diminish our roles as sensing and experiencing beings. Most digital electronic interfaces are either convoluted or cheap substitutes for what is actually going on. Abstractions of abstractions of abstractions – developed through functionalised (at best) or militarised (not even at worst…) models of what technologies should be. Could we resist this supposed progress with a kind of simple signal aesthetics? While the idea of an un-mediated experience through an electronic media arts is oxymoronic, we move ever-towards the ideal of an honest interface, and conflate with musical and performative goals the ambitions of deep understanding and transparency of process. The action of even the most accomplished musician reduces to the simple action of the switch – moving most appropriately from one state (now) to another (next) – nothing more.

The environments we inhabit as performers and audience, such as they are, and as they have evolved over the past few thousand years, are remarkably unaware of themselves. So, we might also develop strategies that go beyond cliche attempts to “break down the fourth wall,” towards a comparable opening-up of the real material of the performance space. One way of doing this is through high-amplitude signal effects – that is: bright lights, and loud noise. Which sounds perfectly awesome to me. One of the best things an audience member said to me following our MLB show in Vienna had to do with their physical inability to focus on the performance stage: “I had no choice but to look at the room around me, at the other people in the space…” Again, here we use the audio-visual to inquire into the condition of things. Our prompting towards a social archaeoacoustics of electronic performance might somewhat balance out the apparent need to coat all of our lived surfaces with a mirage-layer of ever-higher definition digital digitalis?

So here we have the technologies of transparency and the impulse function, and the echoes and shadows of a resonant physical space. So what of the neuro-, psycho- and socio-logical effects of these investments and investigations via signal aesthetics? What does a concentration of non-metaphoric, non-narrative and non-representational signals do to us? The apparent severity and immediacy of these kinds of experiences is, for some, an opportunity to reflect on the function of perception – sort of like watching yourself produce your own induced, inner state. Like an optical illusion “showing” us that what we perceive is not in fact what we see, a wash of noise and bright flashes can allow for a kind of pure-perception, an experience of media without meaning, light without information, noise without referent.

[MLB continues into 2011 as both a research project and performance tour. Along with other activities, Issue Project Room NYC will host an upcoming performance featuring Atsuhiro Ito (OPTRON), Loud Objects, Phil Stearns, Jamie Allen, Yao Chung-Han, Kazuhiro Jo in May, 2011. Check the MLB site or download the current MLB Press Release for details.]

• An idea to build a prototype of a mouth controller for voice performance
• Important to quickly and fluidly insert and remove from oral cavity
• The controller would somehow track movement of upper oral cavity articulators during vowel, approximate, fricative and stop conditions

Approaches.

• Articulation inside mouth through pressure sensors
• External visualization (ie. X-ray microbeam) using oral cavity pellets or other such methods
• Muscle activation
• Others?

Daniel Schorno  (composer/artistic advisor @ STEIM) and I had numerous discussions and a mini-exploratory/research

session to try to build a simple prototype of a teethguard & softpot pressure sensor.

The sensor we used can be found here: http://www.spectrasymbol.com/

Softpot and mouthguard                                                                                                                 mouthguard

Mouthguard                                                                                                 mouthguard

Quick paper mould of upper palate                                                   softpot and arduino

But, not very successful – when the strip was bent to fit within the curve of the mouthpiece it seems that the nodes were

compressed and threw off the scaling so much that it would not record stabile responses to touch.

Below I found some relevant video links regarding articulation, including the silent EMG speech recognition prototype

developed by an outfit called InterACT.

Video links:

Relevant Voice Science Links:

Silent Speech, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP7d4nN4qsM

• Article from BBC’s “Click” about the use of electromyography to capture silently articulated speech. This is then converted to text, which can subsequently be fed into a speech synthesiser. The possible applications include restoring speech to individuals who are unable to produce any voice – such as laryngectomy patients.

Silent Speech Translation by interact, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMPNjMVlr8A

• This prototype demonstrates the electromyographic (EMG) silent speech recognition research in InterACT. The EMG research focuses on making use of the EMG signal generated by the articulatory muscles to recognize silent speech. The demo person will speak in silent Mandarin speech and the system translates it to English or Spanish.

InterACT Technology reported by CNN, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZCecsdlM7Q

• InterACT center of Carnegie Mellon University reported by CNN

Virtual articulator ENGLISH, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQDIxI5dQgA

• Demonstration of the Virtual articulator. The feature of the Ceramill Mind software simulates the mandibular excursions and automatically constructs a full anatomical framework proposal, according to the dynamic occlusion, therefore reducingt the necessity to grind the surfaces after milling.

Simplified dental impressions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z82Gd55D7vs

• Drs. Marc Gottlieb and Pat Roetzer demonstrate how to use clear disposable dental impression trays with the Dam it post dam membrane and 5th. Hand lip and Cheek retractor to take perfect impressions. This technique is used for orthodontic impressions, study models, night guards and bleaching trays.

Ken Stevens x-ray film, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcNMCB-Gsn8

• X-ray film of speech organs in action. Recorded in 1962. “Why did Ken set the soggy net on top of his deck? I have put blood on her two clean yellow shoes.”

TRUBY, H.M. X-ray Film, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xG5tdV2gdo

• An x-ray film of the speech organs during articulation of consonant clusters. Recorded in 1958. Further information: TRUBY, H.M. (1959), “Acoustic-cineradiographic analysis considerations with special reference to certain consonantal complexes”, Acta Radiol. Suppl. 182, 1-227.

Biomechanical Speech Synthesis, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIMqxRRvVOw

The proposed mouth controller is designed for use by performers – here are two excerpts of performances I gave while in Holland (Studio Loos in The Hague & Karnatic Lab @ Badcuyp in Amsterdam)

Edgerton Performance:

Feb 4. Studio Loos (Den Haag). Johan van Kreij & Mike Edgerton:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfqS_6qrK30

Feb 8 in Amsterdam. Romain Mercier & Mike Edgerton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ywTZ1T87zA

Other documentation regarding articulation:

tongue position of cardinal vowels                                                x-rays of cardinal vowels

human vocal tract                                                                              human vocal tract from front

simplified dental impression                                                     points on the upper palate

approximate pellet locations from the x-ray microbeam project             means and standard deviations for pellet placement

International Phonetic Alphabet

Upper and Lower palates from Edgerton model of Articulation

A few references:

Ackermann, H., Hertrich, I., Daum, I., Scharf, G., & Spieker, S. (1997). Kinematic analysis of articulatory movements in central motor disorders. Movement Disorders, 6, 1019–1027.

Robert E. Beaudoin and Richard S. McGowan. PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS ANALYSIS OF X-RAY MICROBEAM DATA FOR ARTICULATORY RECOVERY

Clayton, C.J. (1992) An intra-oral access device.  Journal of Medical Engineering Technology.  Sep-Oct, 16 (5) 204-209.

Edgerton, M. E. (1999). Palatal Sound: A Comprehensive Model of Vocal Tract Articulation. Organized Sound, 4:2 (1999) 93-110.

Peter Flipsen Jr LONGITUDINAL DATA ON ARTICULATION RATE AND PRODUCTION UNIT LENGTH IN CHILDREN WITH SPEECH DELAY. Phonology Project Technical Report No. 9

Forrest, K., & Weismer, G. (1995). Dynamic aspects of lower lip movement in Parkinsonian and neurologically normal geriatric speakers’ production of stress. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 260–272.

Forrest, K.,Weismer, G., & Turner, G. S. (1989). Kinematic, acoustic, and perceptual analyses of connected speech produced by Parkinsonian and normal geriatric adults. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 85, 2608–2622.

Gracco, V. L., & Löfqvist, A. (1994). Speech motor organization and control: Evidence from lip, jaw, and laryngeal interactions. Journal of Neuroscience, 14, 6585–6597.

Hausdorff, J. M., Lertratanakul, A., Cudkowicz, M. E., Peterson, A. L., Kaliton, D., & Goldberger, A. L. (2000). Dynamic markers of altered gait rhythm in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Journal of Applied Physiology, 88, 2045–2053.

Hertrich, I., & Ackermann, H. (1999). Temporal and spectral aspects of coarticulation in ataxic dysarthria: An acoustic analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 367–381.

Hirose, H., Kiritani, S., & Sawashima, M. (1982a). Velocity of articulatory movements in normal and dysarthric subjects. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 34, 210–215.

Kent, R. D., Netsell, R., & Bauer, L. L. (1975). Cineradiographic assessment of articulatory mobility in the dysarthrias. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 40, 467–480.

Kent, R. D., Weismer, G., Kent, J. F., & Rosenbek, J. C. (1989). Toward phonetic intelligibility testing in dysarthria. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 54, 482–499.

Saltzman, E. L., & Munhall, K. G. (1989). A dynamical approach to gestural patterning in speech production. Ecological Psychology, 1, 333–382.

Liss, J.M. et al. Quantifying Speech Rhythm Abnormalities in the Dysarthrias. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 52 • 1334–1352 • October 2009

McAuliffe, MJ. Emily Lin, Michael P. Robb, Bruce E. Murdoch (2008). Influence of a Standard Electropalatography Artificial Palate Upon Articulation A Preliminary Study. Folia Phoniatr Logop, 60:45-53.

Tatham, M. (1995) Dynamic articulatory phonology and the supervision of speech production. In K. Elenius (ed.) Proceedings of ICPhS 95, 58-61. Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology

Weismer, G. (1991). Assessment of articulatory timing. In J. A. Cooper ( Ed.), Assessment of speech and voice production: Research and clinical applications (NIDCD Monograph Vol. I, pp. 84–95). Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health.

Weismer, G. (1997). Motor speech disorders. In W. J. Hardcastle & J. Laver ( Eds.), The handbook of phonetic sciences ( pp. 191–219). Cambridge, England: Blackwell.

Weismer, G., Yunusova, Y., & Westbury, J. R. (2003). Interarticulator coordination in dysarthria: An X-ray microbeam study. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46, 1247–1261.

Westbury, J. R. (1994). X-ray microbeam speech production database user’s handbook. Madison, WI: Waisman Center.

Westbury, J. R., & Dembowski, J. (1993). Articulatory kinematics of normal diadochokinetic performance. Annual Bulletin of Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, 27, 13–36.

Westbury, J. R., Lindstrom, M. J., & McClean, M. D. (2002). Tongues and lips without jaws: A comparison of methods for decoupling speech movements. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 651–662.

Wrench, A. (2007). Advances in EPG palate design.  Advances in Speech-Language Pathology (Special Edition on EPG), 9(1), 3-12.

Yana Yunusova, Gary Weismer, John R. Westbury, and Mary J. Lindstrom. Articulatory Movements During Vowels in Speakers With Dysarthria and Healthy Controls. J Speech Lang Hear Res 2008;51;596-611

Upon my arrival at STEIM, I was introduced to some of the most awesome people I’ll ever know – staff of STEIM, the diverse styles and nature of the invited artists and my fellow workshop attendees. Each individual has their unique ideals and methodologies in electronic music, which inspires me a lot. It also enables me to experience the vastness of what electronic music comprises of. The talks given by the members of STEIM gave me a better understanding of STEIM’s vision and mission, as well as its artistic ideals and values. This gave me a much clearer idea of other potentials that can be explored at STEIM. The visiting artists brought us their experience with STEIM’s software, working practices and the different approaches to instrument building, composing, etc. I enjoyed all of the talks and definitely learnt a lot from the artists. Particularly the one with Kristina Andersen on Interaction Design, we were asked to draw an image out what our music is like, and later to make an object either to represent it or to make the kind of sound that may exist in our music. I find this exercise really useful and drives one to omit and not consider too much about the tools we already have and existed to just try and produce the final product. I find myself often when composing or designing a new patch for performance, we look about and get distracted by all the ‘already-made’ tools (which are great). This process further helps me to identify what is required and necessary.

listen to me.

As kyle had posted (if you missed it, or you can always listen again.), this is an improvisation by kyle on arduino controllers and myself on a logitech joystick both using LiSa and JunXion. This initial experimentation gave me a look and feel of how easy working on LiSa and Junxion can be, as well as how controls can be mapped to a more intricate extent.

Here is my fiddling with EMS’s VCS3 (thanks nico!) : here.

Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone at STEIM during the period of Orientation Workshop #108 for making it such an enjoyable stay. Also, for the opportunity to coming to Europe and experience electronic music from one of the places where it began. This truly is an amazing experience. Cheers!

best,
jon he
more info of my works: here
videos: here
sound: here

Karolina Bater/Recorder, Karin Preslmayr/Viola da Gamba, Goska Isphording/Harpsichord

During the residency at STEIM april 7th-10th 2010 the trio worked on two compositions which involved electronics.  The electronic parts for both pieces were created using SuperCollider and were triggered live during the performance synchronizing the trio with the electronic musical materials.

In the case of Yannis Kyriakides’ “Discophaisto” the materials were made in SuperCollider using samples from a vintage drum machine, the Roland TR-808.  The software was used to generate patterns for each cue, these were then recorded and played back in Abelton live. In Henry Vega’s “Slow slower” the electronic musical material was based on samples from the trio itself.  The materials were generated as streams that varied in texture from glitch like versions of the instruments to pure sinusoidal tones creating a pallet of density over which the tension of the piece unfolded.

In both cases the electronic performer follows the acoustic performers giving them the freedom to mold the tempo as they would naturally with a purely acoustic composition.

There is also a sample of the STEIM rehearsal at:

http://soundcloud.com/henryvega/slow-slower-roentgen-connection-trio-rehearsal

Thank you to STEIM also for providing the technical equipment for our concert in the Bethanienklooster on september 19th.

The people I have encountered during my stay at STEIM, including STEIM employees, visiting artists and fellow residents, all brought forth individual and influential ideas, methods and past experiences to the forefront of my learning and development during my stay. The unique views and diverse experience of everyone involved creates for a refreshingly eclectic environment where any and all subjects and opinions are presented. With this source of knowledge and inspiration, I found an excellent launch pad from which my technical explorations could begin.

I came to STEIM with with a background in experimental electronic music, art and technology and new media studies acquired through my graduate and undergraduate studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My primary artistic practice is in the fields electronic music performance, experimental electronic instrument creation and realtime video performance, while my technological approaches vary from micro controllers and computer interfacing, to analog circuitry construction and hardware hacking.

Through the small amount of time I spent at STEIM, I acquired a large amount of both technical and theoretical knowledge that I am excited to further utilize in my future work. I found the software created at STEIM (Lisa X and JunXion) to be very powerful tools for my current interests. I have recently been experimenting in using skin conductivity for computer interfacing and found JunXion to be essential in my prototype development.

Jon He (fellow resident) and I created an impromptu recording of an improvised performance during our experimentation with JunXion and Lisa X. Jon using a gaming joystick, and myself using my touch interface prototype.

http://soundcloud.com/yaktronix/improv-jon-he-kyle-evans-steim-jan2010

Beyond my more prominent explorations, I also found time for other enjoyable experimentations, such as learning and creating with STEIM’s EMS VCS3 synthesizer.

http://vimeo.com/19627882

My residency at STEIM was as equally productive technically as it was conceptually. My practice has been undoubtably influenced and broadened allowing for it to be newly motivated by previously unexplored potentials. I found my overall learning experience at STEIM to be a combination of reinforced technical and conceptual theories I have already discovered within my own practice, along with a hardy dose of rich and exciting new ideas that will be of tremendous value to the continuation of my practice.

orientation workshop # 107

with Jacob Wick, Cormac Crawley, Ludwig Giersch and Duncan Chapman.

The STEIM interested me a lot because of the various resources developed and being developed related to relationships between music interfaces and human performers.

Coming at the STEIM was, and still is, a very good context for me to develop my project « I am the echo of a shadow of a shadow ».

This project, that I am working on since 2009 is an installation of controllers and their scores.
The computer screen is removed, remains to interpret the music sound, the partitions and a stopwatch.

This project, reconnect the composer, performer, and developer (electronics / digital instrument maker) collaboration. It leave the laptop screens and investigate again the space of performing musical interfaces controlling the computer. The scores become the only way in which the musical interpretation can take place because the computer screen is not present and cannot guide or influence the musicians interpreting the composition.

This year, I am working on some new digital interfaces. They are being developed with the help of developers.

Video Loop#01 played by Diemo Schwarz

After my application to the STEIM I was invited by Robert van Heumen to an orientation workshop.

I was just coming back from a residency in Montreal at Perte de signal where I have developed the first prototype of a new controller using magnets.

It was a great opportunity to show this new tool to the crew, they gave me some good ideas in way to develop the second prototype that is currently being build in Paris by Maurin Donneaud and Vincent Roudaut (XY interaction).

During the 10 days I also had some great exchanges with the other participants, played music with Jacob and Ludwig and had some good chat with all of them.

Link impro with them

Thanks a lot to Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Daniël Schorno, Frank Baldé, Jonathan Reus, Michael Straus and Thomas Mymel for sharing their knowledge and research with us. Thanks also to Esther Roschar and Nico Bes for their kindness in welcoming us.

The format of discussions/classes was a breath of fresh air. Staff and artists alike often geared their talks towards the requests of the workshop attendees and this frequently opened the floor up for much engaging and informal debate over various artistic beliefs, methods and ideas… for example one such topic that cropped up was the regressive use of the laptop as a visual cue during live performance.

For the most part I am a soundscape composer and installation artist and so initially I thought that being engrossed in this level of live interactive instrumentalism would be slightly daunting to absorb. But in retrospect I found the whole learning experience very inspirational and have definitely come away with some new ideas and a few techniques to go with.

 A special thanks to Jonathan, Robert, Frank , Taku, Daniel, Michael and Thomas… and of course to my fellow attendees!

Gregory and Jeff after an excellent first day…

The Desert Fathers: Jeff and Gregory, serious, sans beer

My work involved several things this past visit in August 2010:

1) A studio recording with Gregory Taylor. Our duo, The Desert Fathers, has some live recordings floating around, but have never recorded in the studio. The recording went quite smoothly, Gregory and I put in almost a week of eight hour plus days playing, recording, reviewing mixes. The material came out quite well, I think, and mixing and editing are almost finished….the CD will be titled “Charismata” and should be out soon. We also performed a concert at STEIM:

The Desert Fathers
STEIM Residency Concert: The Desert Fathers: Jeff Kaiser (US) – trumpet + computer & Gregory Taylor (US) – computer: Aug 5, 2010: STEIM, Amsterdam NL

2) I also video recorded interviews with musicians Joel Ryan, Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Gregory Taylor and Lesley Flanigan for my dissertation. These went smoothly, and the musicians had very intriguing ideas, of which I am currently transcribing and compiling…

3) Bonus: While not an “official” part of my stay, I used the studio in the evenings to record acoustic music with US ex-pat saxophonist John Dikeman…a lot of fun.

There were also many artistic/social pluses to this visit: concurrent with my stay were artists Lesley Flanigan, Jesse Seay, PIRX and scholar/author/musician David Schwarz…we had a great time wandering the city, exchanging ideas and taking in the local beer…

With David,  Jesse and Lesley at Gollem

Looking forward to next time!

Jeff Kaiser
http://www.jeffkaiser.com

I begin with a site and time specific examination of the STEIM foundation (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a concert that took place there on August 5, 2010. I received a grant to be in residence at the institute for the month in order to plan this book in the presence of artists making new musical applications and trying them out in concerts opened to the public. I will offer an account of the works of the three artists who performed at STEIM on August 5th. This account will open the musical, interactive, theoretical, cultural, and psychoanalytic issues that pervade the rest of this book, the works under discussion and the discursive approach that I will undertake in an attempt to theorize interactive, electronic art through the teachings of Jacques Lacan.

Lacan: a Brief Introduction

I will take several passes at some of Lacan’s ideas throughout this chapter and book. For now I would like to introduce his ideas with some large-grain explanations. First, Lacan offers a narrative of developing subjectivity through which we all pass from birth to language acquisition (the disorganization of the self after birth (typified by the Real), the Imaginary Order (typified by the mirror stage) and the Symbolic Order (language)). Second, direct access to the experiences of this narrative are, of course, retrospective fantasies that we tell ourselves and each other in social space as mediated propositions. Lacan understands both this narrative and its mediated, retrospective enactments according to three registers of experience: the Real, Imaginary Order, and the Symbolic Order, as illustrated by the well-known triangle below.

The Symbolic Order is the world of code, of language, of the Law, of social conventions in which and of which our lives are saturated; the Imaginary Order is the world of mutually exclusive binary oppositions that govern our developing subjectivity from six months to a year and a half (the mirror stage) and which (once we have entered the Symbolic Order) still reside as residues of binary identification: fullness / lack; presence / absence; identification / alienation. The Real is everything that remains; it is in a very different logical class from either the Imaginary Order or the Symbolic Order. Imaginary and Symbolic signifiers saturate our lives; what lies beneath is the Real. The Real shows itself in moments of crisis, psychic and personal or collective and cultural. I will say much more about these concepts in the pages that follow.

The Performance

Lesley Flanigan opens the concert. She creates and manipulates feedback, combining it with her own voice throughout. See a YouTube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLwbox8n6x4 for the first fifty seconds of the performance. At 0:38-0:40 you can hear the sound of a microphone producing feedback as it is moves—the basic material of her performance.
Feedback is a kind of noise; and yet to call the sounds in Lesley Flanigan’s performance noises would be to address a subtle palette of sounds with a very blunt instrument indeed. For one thing white noise indicates saturation of the audible spectrum with frequencies at a uniform dynamic level; there are various colors of noise (such as pink noise). Suffice it so say that there are many recognizable frequencies throughout Lesley Flanigan’s performance, so the sounds are really not that noisy at all. Imagine a continuum with white noise on the left and the pure sine wave of a single frequency on the right; Lesley Flanigan’s performance involves quite a wide range of acoustic phenomena in the middle, from feedback around which one can hear a frequency (anecdotally one could sing a note for each feedback source) and more or less pure frequencies, drones, sung pitches.
There have been many approaches to noise over the past; perhaps the most infamous and historically significant is Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises that not only announces the arrival of noise on the futurist scene with great celebration, but also suggests ways of notating and harnessing its signifying power. Consider the various ways in which we refer to noise. We say noise to refer to a sound that interrupts (either neutrally or with a sense of positive or more usually negative surprise as in “did you hear that noise?”). A noise in this sense is an acoustic signifier that intervenes in the context of another (perhaps unconscious, perhaps conscious, as in the ambient sounds of a house at night, broken by a noise that wakes you and causes you to ask “did you hear that noise?”) A noise in a conventional musical performance is something disturbing, interrupting, a threat to middle class composure and decorum; in electronic devices, noise has been for decades a byproduct of circuitry to be minimized, and some engineers have spent their lives minimizing such noise.
Noises (plural) simply suggests more than one noise, but noise (in general) is the category that Lesley Flanigan specifically and many interactive, electronic artists in general explore, expand, and cultivate in the form of controlled feedback loops.
Lesley Flanigan creates her music from feedback—a very specific middle ground between white noise and pure frequencies; at times feedback sounds noisy (one cannot sing Do if asked) and at other times the feedback does have a pitch center. At 0:31 in the clip referenced above, for example, you can hear a feedback A-flat (a bit flat) shift an octave higher as if the machine sang in a falsetto, or yodel.
In the early twenty-first century in first-world social space, to enjoy feedback specifically or noise generally is to enjoy the subversive, to enjoy that which cuts against the grain of middle-class complacency (just as Charles Ives had wished for dissonant art music a century earlier). On a more personal and immediate level, I like noise and find it strangely soothing. In order for this to happen, it has to resonate with some psychic formation and for me this psychic formation is the Lacanian Real. The teachings of Jacques Lacan in general and his three categories Real / Imaginary / Symbolic (as introduced above) will occupy a central place in this book, and I want to say more about these ideas slowly and gradually as they grow out of immediate textual needs. Early on in the book (as here) definitions will be descriptive, simple, and illustrative. Later on, the definitions will be more nuanced and more completely documented. The Real is the thingness of life that lies just beneath the surfaces of how we understand and name our experience.
The Real is that thingness which can seem to appear when some recognizable object is pulled apart, cracks, or reveals what lies beneath. The glimpse of the Real in Lesley Flanigan’s performance is auditory and occurs when normal functioning of electronic equipment produces the feedback that she harnesses. As she masters that feedback, the resultant noise becomes tamed, named, Symbolic. Since the Real is a quite scary thing, one should ask “why enjoy the Real except in an autodestruct mode?” An answer must be that it is enjoyable to feel the fabric of subjectivity pull apart so that one can master it and remain contained. To some extent this is the pleasure I felt hearing Lesley Flanigan’s performance—the pleasure of immersion into an envelope of noise.
The body has much to do with all of this, but what is the body after all? I don’t think there is such a thing as a body in any ontological certainty. There is the body in which I live. Fine, but what is that? What are the thresholds between such a body and the means by which I understand it and the world around it? For me (taking Lacan as my lead here) there is the body with a small “b”; it is the body in which each of us lives (or better, the articulations that are enunciated as thresholds are crossed between our flesh and Imaginary and Symbolic dimensions of our social lives); the Body with a large “B” is that corporeality in social space that makes it possible for our bodily (with a small “b”) threshold crossings to occur and be understood, acknowledged, denied, disavowed, welcomed in social space in the first place. Further, I suggest that bodies (in both its Imaginary small “b” and larger, Symbolic large “B” dimensions) are articulated as thresholds are crossed and enunciated between and among flesh (the Real that underlies the Imaginary and Symbolic dimensions of body / Body) and the Imaginary and Symbolic registers that give it meaning in social space.
Such an approach to body / Body has a basis in the Lacanian topology of Real and its thresholds to the Imaginary and Symbolic Orders, particularly in Lacan’s assertion that the prematurity of human birth makes mirror (mis)recognition and its correction in the course of the mirror stage a fundamental generative force in individual development and culture.

When Flanigan sings there are two main textures she evokes: 1) vocalizations above a low drone, and 2) fragments of a song above an accompaniment that sounds like a child swinging back and forth on a swing. This gesture is an oscillation between two thirds that can be either heard Do (E-flat) / Me (G-flat) to Ra (F-flat) to Fa (A-flat) OR Ti (E-flat / D-sharp) / Re (G-flat / F-sharp) to Do (F-flat / E natural) to Mi (A-flat / G-sharp). As this oscillation and Lesley Flanigan’s voice fade, feedback brings the performance to a close. In the YouTube video of the end performance at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR4G-BLkvrA, the fade takes place from 0:46 to 1:30.
A very curious thing happens when Flanigan sings, having worked so hard to create a complex web of spontaneously created and (mis)shaped feedback loops; her voice has a curious inside-out quality for me. If you imagine our continuum with white noise on the left and a pure sine wave on the right, it is as if she has pushed through feedback and noise to reach pure lyrical singing “on the other side”—as if a kind of foldover or phase change occurs. For me, Lesley Flanigan’s work moves back and forth along the Symbolic – Real trajectory of the triangle introduced at the outset of this chapter (going with the direction of the arrow as she (mis)shapes feedback; and flipping against the grain of the arrow when she sings); she takes a coded signifier (noise of a moving microphone) and opens up a space in which to hear the Real beneath; and then a strange foldover occurs in which the Real changes phase into symbolic forms.

PIRX

PIRX comprises Maciej Sledziecki on guitar and Marion Wörle computer. There is also what looks like conventional sound effects pedals on the floor, which Maciej Sledziecki presses from time to time. The performance involves (mis)shaping sounds of the electric guitar in addition to loops that were pre-recorded. My first association was of Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms #10 for guitar and tape (1992). I will discuss first the Davidovsky, then PIRX.
The charm of Davidovsky’s Synchronisms lies in the subtle incorporation of taped sounds into the live performance of a highly notated score for a conventional instrument or group of instruments. The work belongs to the classical avant-garde of the post WWII era, although the piece does not sound as highly controlled (and therefore highly chaotic) to me as the pieces of the Darmstadt School of the 1950s such as works by Olivier Messaien and Pierre Boulez. The piece is in two large-scale gestures: 1) the guitar plays alone, and 2) it is joined by electronic sounds. In the first part of the piece (00:00 to 04:13 in the video) Davidovsky evokes the widest possible array of guitar sounds and gestures, from runs, slaps, passagework, strumming, chords, melodic fragments, left hand percussive trills, knocking the instrument with knuckles and fingers, vibrato, pitch bends and harmonics.
The pitch structure of the guitar part (both gestures) is highly modernist and freely atonal. The pitch material is based on four and five note collections that have various half and whole steps within perfect fourths and fifths (very characteristic of the tuning of the guitar strings) and the highly modern sound of the tritone (right between a perfect fourth and perfect fifth) that famously splits the octave in half. See the YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IztTJTVpeOk for a performance of the Davdovsky by Daniel Lippel.
On the YouTube video of the Davidovsky, the taped sounds enter at 4:13
I would like to discuss the transition in the work between the first and second gesture in some detail, since it bears on the relationship between conventional and electronic instruments in the piece at hand and also on the take that PIRX will give a similar binary—between the conventionality of the electric guitar on the one hand, and processed sounds from a computational program on the other. See Example 1 below for a passage of the score that captures the transition from guitar playing alone (see “G” on the left of the first system) to guitar playing with tape (see “T” on the left of the second system). 4:13 occurs during the fermata at the end of the first system.

Example 1: Mario Davidovsky, Synchronisms #10 for Guitar and Electronic Sounds, mm. 98-105

The first note in the tape part is an E-flat that enters in measure 102. Since the guitar part sounds an octave lower than written, the tape part sneaks into the piece sounding a sixteenth note later than the guitar, pppp. The next note in the tape is G-natural that is also the same pitch as the guitar played this time at the same instant—the downbeat of measure 103. The next note in the tape is a D-natural that is also the same pitch as the guitar sounding at the same instant—after an eighth beat in measure 104 (Davidovsky had pointed out earlier on the score that grace notes sound on the beat, so the guitar’s D-natural will sound exactly with the tape’s D-natural). The next note in the tape is an F-natural that follows the guitar’s F-natural in the same measure. The tape’s G-sharp in measure 105 now anticipates the guitar’s G-sharp and clashes with the guitar’s A-sharp. The tape has now come clearly out from hiding. But in addition, the sustain of the pitches mentioned thus far in the tape should tug at our ears since guitar pitches decay after being struck (much like the piano) and the sustain (though pppp) should suggest to us that the tape has entered. After the taped sounds enter the work at 04:13, the rest of the piece involves subtle interplay between the two instruments. At times tape sounds are obviously tape sounds; at times guitar sounds are obviously guitar sounds, but often one isn’t sure, and therein lies the charm of this work.
In the PIRX performance, one can see and hear and feel that the world has changed quite a bit from Davidovsky, even though only 18 years separate the two. In Davidovsky the tape part is a) pre-recorded and b) not present at all as an immanent partner for the performer. In the video clip of the Davidovsky, the guitar played almost imperceptibly nods to have someone begin the tape (this gesture is much more obvious on other performances), and though nicely concealed, this alienation between immanent guitar player and tape are essential to the Davidovsky; the guitar player plays with the tape and absolutely not the other way around.

Also in the Davidovsky the taped sounds sound rather like guitar sounds and the ones that don’t are clearly extensions of guitar sounds. In PIRX, the computer transforms electric guitar sounds much more radically. In PIRX, the binary—immanent instrument (electric guitar) and mediating technology (computer)—is made more immediate: both the computer and guitar have players.
For me the second part of the Davidovsky is charming in its subtle manipulation of sounds that seamlessly cross the threshold back and forth between non-electronic and electronic sources of sound. In the PIRX performance, two large and prolonged gestures first resist the gravitational pull of the traditional electric guitar, leading to a sustained crescendo of noise, and then release the music back to sounds of the electric guitar.
The pulling open of conventionality is of course nothing more nor less than pulling at a signifier in the Symbolic and hearing the Real beneath—another take on that category that I think will come up again and again in interactive, electronic art. The Davidovsky, as beautiful and evocative as the piece is, domesticates what it hears beneath the conventional sounds of the guitar (the signifier in question here); PIRX, on the other hand, opens up the pulp brutality of the Real inside the signifier.
You can hear the very beginning of the performance in the following YouTube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvZbdPP1eKI. The performance begins with the Real—an evocation of the pure pulpy fleshiness of the sounds of playing the electric guitar with the pitches subtracted out. Toward the end of the clip, the performers release the music into the sounds that we associate with the electric guitar. For me, the low B-flats that you can hear at 1:08 begin this process of release. At the very end of the clip above, Marion Wörle triggers a loop in which a low G in a guitar oscillates back and forth to a B-flat a minor third above. This interval will remind most listeners (at least unconsciously) of the blues.
The final extended gesture of the performance (refer to the clip below) involves the performers building upon a drone—a low E-flat. Maciej Sledziecki plays an E-flat an octave higher and oscillates back and forth between E-flat and the note a half-step higher—F-flat. Gradually this oscillation blurs and an immense new note resounds full of complex noise, overdubbing, and other voices. Into this new note, Marion Wörle adds notes on a small keyboard (which I could not see in performance but is perfectly clear in the clip) She begins adding high notes to the guitar’s E-flat / F-flat at 1:28. These pitches are very high A naturals and F-sharps. There is a looping hissing sound (like the softened sound of a rattlesnake) that comes into the music every few seconds, giving the performance an enormous sense of three-dimensional space—as if circling in a bent loop around its periphery. Throughout this entire passage, acoustic shards of the Real expand the signifier of E-flat / F-flat as a note.
For a YouTube clip that occurs near the end of the performance, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBv6rtPeLI0; listen to the lower fifth B-flat that Maciej Sledziecki plays below the E-flat beginning at 1:12, suggesting a dominant / tonic simultaneity.
For me, PIRX explores the trajectory Real – Symbolic on the triangle introduced at the outset of this chapter (going against the grain of the arrow, as it were). PIRX pulls remnants of the Real into the Symbolic, as the fleshiness of articulation void of sound releases throughout into conventional sounds produced by the electric guitar.

The Desert Fathers

Jeff Kaiser and Gregory Taylor comprise this duo; Jeff Kaiser on the trumpet and Gregory Taylor and the computer. I heard their performance as a complex take on call and response—a kind of mirror of sounds in which some sounds seemed to move back and forth between them and others sounded without a response (neither direct nor delayed). For me this is an acoustic mirror fantasy. Lacan famously marks the (visual) mirror stage as a crucial stage of development in which the self (mis)recognizes itself in the face of the (m)other; since Lacan, researchers in the 60s and 70s published a wide range of articles on an earlier, sound-specific stage of development that they dub the acoustic mirror stage.
The acoustic mirror stage involves the first intentional sounds that we use to communicate—the cry. The cry for attention is the first such sound in developing subjectivity; it is crucially (for music) pre-linguistic and it occurs at a stage in developing subjectivity in which we can not yet flip over from our backs. The acoustic mirror stage divides the world into two 180 degree halves—a “bright” half that corresponds to what we see (and for which the ear a) has an opening, b) has very little hair, and c) has spirals that amplify the common auditory range of speech) and a “dark” half that corresponds to what we cannot see (and for which the ear a) has no opening, b) has much more hair, and c) has no spirals to amplify the common auditory range). This is the origin of why sounds seem threatening when heard from behind. In the acoustic mirror stage, we both begin to acknowledge a separation between our bodies (enclosed in what Didier Anzieu calls our skin ego) and the other, on the one hand, and, on the other, a communication between the self and the other through an exchange of sounds that cross the skin ego and then become inscribed in language.
What Jeff Kaiser and Gregory Taylor reveal in this performance is the range of acoustic (mis)recognitions that can and do occur across this threshold. Let’s say we identify with Jeff Kaiser as the self; that is we imagine that the focus of articulation lies with him and Gregory Taylor embodies the other. What I mean by this is that between the self and the other there is communication as Anzieu has shown; you can imagine an arrow with two points between SELF | OTHER representing the sounds in / of this acoustic mirror as information is exchanged or as each hears him / herself reflected in the acoustic mirror of the other. This arrow moves from SELF to the right to the OTHER and back again. But psychoanalytic theory also implies that there are sounds in this phase of development that are incorporated neither into the self nor into the other; these are fragments of the Real. To show them we need another arrow moving to and from the SELF from the left and to and from OTHER to the right.
At 0:30 of a YouTube clip of the performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6s5sVCELxY, the camera zooms out and we can see that Jeff Kaiser is producing a series of glassy, brittle, extremely dry sounds that at first hearing we might not have identified as sounds from a trumpet being processed live. This moment suggests the importance of the visual dimension in the acoustic mirror. It is not enough just to listen, to hear oneself reflected in the voice of the other. It helps to look, to see with a glance that one has been heard, and that certain sounds are in fact aimed at you. I refer not to a glance between Jeff Kaiser and Gregory Taylor but to the gaze of the camera; at a certain moment the camera sees Gregory Taylor and we see that certain glassy, brittle, extremely dry sounds seem to be products of an exchange of information between the two performers.
Theories of the acoustic mirror focus exclusively on relations between one developing subject and his / her body as it differentiates itself from / forms connections with, its world (the gradually disintegrating Real as it becomes mapped in Imaginary and Symbolic signifiers). From 1:26 on Jeff Kaiser’s fingers still articulate notes, but the glassy, brittle, extremely dry sounds have gone. Are they no longer being reflected in the acoustic mirror of exchange? Are they lost as they encounter the Real as sounds we can’t recognize as reflections, echoes?
For me, the Desert Fathers exploit the acoustic mirror on the trajectory Real – Imaginary on the triangle introduced at the outset of this chapter. They take a communicative binary (self / other); some sounds move back and forth between them as others fall back into and are absorbed by the Real.

Conclusions

For us to see the acoustic mirror between two people introduces the social dimension, or, to put it psychoanalytically, the dimension of the other (into which the audience is placed at moments like this). The relationship between work of art and audience not only introduces the social dimension, but we need to theorize how that social dimension functions. Generally speaking we need to recognize (either consciously or unconsciously) something in the work that is always-already within us. And also that recognition must resonate in a shared moment, gesture, ritual in social space. A gesture performed in social space that knits together individuals and others is nothing neither more nor less than interpellation.
The quintessential gesture of interpellation is the hail, theorized by Louis Althusser; with a single gesture (necessarily repeated over and over because our thirst for it is insatiable), we inscribe ourselves into social space. I will discuss the form, content, and ideological implications of interpellation in the context of interactive, electronic art in subsequent chapters. But for now, let me say that there are three stages that a discussion of interpellation can take place: 1) a conventional Marxist approach involving exploitation of labor in which coercive elements are hidden, 2) psychoanalytic applications in which the coercive elements come out from hiding, and 3) questions of the potential of interpellation resistance in current interactive, electronic art. One of the ongoing issues that I explore throughout my writing concerns the subject in current social space. Put simply: if the subject is undergoing a shift in orientation away from Cartesian dualisms, what effect is that having on ideological interpellation? I will address that question throughout this book.

This chapter has examined large-grain psychoanalytic implications in three works performed at STEIM on August 5, 2010. My being there at the time, the pieces chosen by the creative staff of the institute, the culture of STEIM and its followers in Amsterdam, conversations I had with many of them, and my own experience of being in the performance spaces, were all brought to bear on these remarks. While most of the documentation for the rest of my writing must necessarily be on-line video, the documentation and the resultant discussion of this introduction could be real-time performance. It is important to STEIM that electronic music be performed live and that live performance involves an immediate instrumentality. STEIM performances always evoke a visceral presence, an incorporation of technology into bodies that make music, and improvisation both as integral compositional technique and space in which audience members can see, feel, and hear the unfoldings of musical materials. But for me, being there in the time and space of these three performances both meant that the immediacy created an impact and (perhaps oddly) that I missed a great deal in the process of this immediacy creating an impact.
The immediacy of the performance in time and space (“I was there”) is a signifier like all other signifiers—much is lost as much is registered as meaningful. And I mean signifier not just as in these marks on a page / screen; I mean signifier as in flesh and blood being in a place and time and registering its experiences. How does one know what has been lost in the immediacy of the time and place specificity of the present? For one thing, making the video clips upon which this introduction is based caused me to see and hear things that I had missed in the immediacy of the moment. This simply means that while immediate experience causes us to veer around some things as they get lost, the video documentation upon which much of the rest of my writing will be based will similarly veer around some things that get lost as other things come into view and earshot.
In the following chapters, interactive, electronic works will be examine in loose, often overlapping categories. At times the discussion will begin with a work and move into psychoanalytic and / or cultural-historical discourses; at times the direction will be flipped; at other times the discussion will begin with a psychoanalytic and / or cultural-historical element left open like a thread in the midst of a previous discussion.

http://soundcloud.com/reflexible

reFLEXible = Joachim Devillé, trumpet/flugelhorn ; Thomas Olbrechts, alto sax ; Stefan Prins, live-electronics

Ehr…. except uploading photos?! Too bad had some nice flicks of this but that doesn’t seem to be an option for now.

ciao, Arnoud.

Breathscape Recordings 16/4/2010 – 22/4/2010

What does my body say to your body? What does your skin hear? What do my movements say to your muscles? What does my breath say to your lungs?

While at Steim we focused on recording the breath of a movement artist (Emily Sweeney) and a vocalist (Audrey Chen) as part of an ongoing project titled “Breathscape.” We have recorded breath under different conditions and in various locations and wanted to continue this research at Steim. While in the recording studio, Chen and Sweeney responded to the sounds of one another breathing, as well as recordings of their own breathing played back to them: http://soundcloud.com/bilwa/steim-audrey-emily-breathscape1

Breathscape is an inhabited installation that integrates body-sounds and videos with live performance to investigate the impact of new media technologies on somatic experience. Breath, muscle movement, and touch—basic, universal elements of physicality—become common points of reference around which audience and performer consider the ways our bodies hold images, ideas, and memories in both live and virtual contexts. Breathscape seeks to draw observers’ attention to their own kinesthetic navigation of technological environments, providing a space for meditating on the body’s changing communicative powers in the emerging virtual realm.

Video from installation at SUMU/Arte in Turku, Finland: http://vimeo.com/15978849

STEIM – breathscape

For more info about our work: perpetualmvmtsnd.org

Over the last 15 or so years many of the musicians and artists that i work with and meet have said to me that I should get over to STEIM to find out what happens there. Much of my work involves working with various interactive technologies to create work with groups for festivals, the Internet or live performance (some examples here http://www.duncanchapman.org/tag/performance/) . I had deliberately left it vague as to what exactly I was going to work on whilst in Amsterdam as like many freelance artists i’m continuously working on multiple projects , it would have been easy to use the time to “problem solve” one of the things in the immediate future. Rather than this i was looking for a more generic experience that digs a bit deeper into questions of “why work like this ?” or “what does this mean ?” rather than focus too much on the “how do i get this to work”.

My visit certainly fulfilled all my expectations in terms of having a stimulating and sometimes provocative environment, more questions asked than answered (which is exactly what I was after) and many things to use in future projects……….

here are a few things that came up during the visit …………

(notebook extracts November / December 2010)

The computer as a solitary tool ? (so how does this work in a room with 30 participants ?)

How to make this a collective experience ?

What gestural inputs can give a meaningful experience to participants who have little or no conventional musical skills or experience ?

Lisa : Why did I stop using live sampling ? (tired of the pitch shift)

is this a way of revisiting this without falling into the same cliches that made me abandon this about 6 years ago ? (the short answer being yes )

Buffer as a model of a shelf…….. moving about timeline (maybe try this with a group of 20 people with some means of navigating using a physical controller to move back and forth ?)

What are the most interesting models of participation ?

Is transparency in the execution of work always the desired outcome ?

Embracing the Chaos (it will ALWAYS fail )

Model of musicking that incorporated chaotic elements but retains an identity as a piece ? (if I play Mozart badly its still Mozart but some things are less robust !)

The Nature of collaborative interaction between players , computer vs(or with ?) instrument / voice

Scale of the sound (if i have a computer based instrument my sound can easily be out of proportion in terms of density and complexity to a solo instrument / singer ) also the scale of the gesture in relation to the sound (metal drummers move more than players of Feldman) .

Meta tools (it looks like i’m doing my email when i’m playing a gig !) why does everyone like to shut the computer ?

What does this mean in terms of where we are “supposed” to look during a performance ?

Sticking with a setup and working for years on it (Daniels hemispherical model )

Is it always a “dialogue” with a machine ?

Is narrative the only way of creating flow ?

How to encourage the people I work with to enjoy getting intentionally lost (and get them to trust that I can get them to be found again ?)

Making music by playing music (how to get organisations to trust that this will produce the work rather than using the expected models of creating music by designing music ?)

Restrictions as ways to defining content and focus ……………..

Is the goal always virtuosity and how is this different from playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto ? (sitting in the mainstream of musical practice )

Using non visual feedback (pull my ears when you want me to stop playing )

How to create articulated moments in performances (defining strategies for this).

How to avoid work always becoming “theme and variations” (or exploring this world more rigorously and in greater depth )

Does the interface suggest behaviour and is this any different from any other instrument ?

and

What are our future possible collaborations ?

some projects that will draw on the things from the orientation workshop…..

I’m currently working on projects including work for the 2011 Huddersfield festival (using the sounds of Rhubarb growing to make a piece with 30 students from a local school) , the Wigmore Hall (making an online series of pieces that mine their archive and use parts of recordings from the last 100 years) and another piece in the “Dark Januaries” series with singer Isabel Jones (this years piece will revisit the live sampling we used to do with a stack of Akai samplers but now i’m planing to combine the things I learnt with Lisa with a monome controller rather than a keyboard).

duncan chapman

(duncanchapman.org)

]]> http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/12/24/duncan-chapman-orientation-107/feed/ 1 http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/12/19/walter-fabeck-with-nina-silvert-%e2%80%9cgaia%e2%80%9d-gestural-activity-into-audio/ http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/12/19/walter-fabeck-with-nina-silvert-%e2%80%9cgaia%e2%80%9d-gestural-activity-into-audio/#comments Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:43:52 +0000 Walter Fabeck http://steim.org/projectblog/?p=2519 Read more…

What was a surprise to me, and shouldn’t have been, was the constant discussion floating around STEIM about the role of electronics as instruments. As somebody who plays an instrument for which there is no controversy – a trumpet is unquestioned as a musical instrument, as far as I can tell – these discussions are fascinating. What makes an instrument? How is virtuosity defined? How can electronics become embodied? Who cares? In most cases it seems that the idea is to justify using a “machine” – a laptop, collection of circuits, whatever – as an “instrument.” But justify to whom and against what?

It has been enormously helpful to me, for instance, to think in reverse: to consider the trumpet a machine, an elaborate piece of metal designed for a specific purpose. There is a lot of nonsense in the trumpet world about the instrument having a personality of a sort, generally a nsty one that is hell-bent on ruining your performance, day, life. While this attitude does allow for a facile deflection of culpability for a poor performance, it does not help – or at least it is no help to me – in facilitating development as an instrumentalist. It is much more helpful for me to regard the trumpet as what it, literally, is: a machine for filtering air, spit, song via a series of tubes and pistons into a specific sound. The instrument – the machine – has neither soul nor intent. These lie within the performer; the instrument is merely a filter.

The trumpet consists of four slides, three pistons, and a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece can be detached from the leadpipe, which renders the mouthpiece the terminus or the leadpipe the entry point for sound; the pistons can be depressed vertically within a certain range, spun 360 degrees, or lifted out of their casings, altering the amount of air that allowed to pass through the instrument; and all slides can be moved within a limited range or detached, altering either the total length of the instrument or the amount of terminus points for sound. Most sounds on the trumpet area  function of spit, produced by an embouchure and aperture that can be manipulated within a limited range, depending on how worried one is about damaging one’s lips; and the vast majority of sounds that the trumpet produces are controlled by airflow, which is in turn controlled by the diaphragm and oral cavity. Within the oral cavity, there is the tongue, a fabulous muscle capable of a wide range of motion, which directs or limits the amount of air flowing through the aperture; and the cheeks and jaw, which expand and contract the total volume and velocity of air passing over and around the tongue. The amount of spit that has collected within the instrument in the process of playing it, which is more or less out of the user’s control, can also be manipulated/performed by blocking the flow of air through the instrument (for instance, by turning the one of the pistons so that air no longer flows freely through it), and can have drastic effects on the sound produced. The trumpet is a machine for producing sound, and as such is nearly limitless.

Therefore, the argument that electronic instruments somehow are illegitimate because they present “limitless possibilities” is ridiculous because traditional instruments, viewed through a certain perspective, also have nearly limitless possibilities. There is a question of tradition, as always, but like most questions of tradition, it is baseless and exposes the reactionary nature of the whole argument. Electronic instruments have existed since the mid-20th century, and were put into use almost immediately; the modern trumpet did not develop a repertoire until the early 20th century. The difference is minute. There is a wealth of historical material for electronics that can be – and is – referenced and manipulated in contemporary performance, just as there is a wealth of historical material for trumpet that can be referenced and manipulated.

So then, what is an instrument? The top two definitions that the internet returns for “instrument” are helpful: “a device that requires skill for proper use” and “the means by which some act is accomplished.” For me, I think, it is an interface between intent and sound. In any case, the role of the instrument – what it is, what it does, what it means – is a fascinating line of thought and a useful discussion in general. It is vital that organizations like STEIM are engaged in this dialog(ue), and it was very exciting to be momentarily dropped in the middle of it.

More information about the Worm Songs at: http://www.henryvega.net/music/wormsongs.php

The following video was created around the same time as the residency with Emmanuel Flores creating the visuals:
http://www.vimeo.com/15708129

I came to Steim with the prototype sensor Daniel Schorno built for me in 2008. Here, this hacked Wii acts as a sensor, with a USB attached to it, and interacts with my Max/MSP patch during live performance.

Daniel started by integrating the Wii Controller with my Max patch via junXion. It is programmed to control the parameters of pitch, volume, and speed via the movements of my right arm and is activated via a button that sits on top of the violin bow. This button was removed and extended from the Wii and remounted on the bow, just a short bit above my right forefinger. In this way, it will be easy and smooth enough to turn the sensor on or off during live performance – so I can easily and spontaneously select to use the sensor —or not.

Daniel also built a patch so that I can use the other end of the Wii – the Nunchuck – to activate different pre-loaded sounds in my patch. While Daniel worked separately on this aspect programming, I worked on adding sound files to my Max patch. Toward the end of the week we had two of the buttons on the Nunchuck set up to scroll through and access my loaded samples.

Now this sensor is ready to go, and I am really excited about integrating this into my work.

Working with Daniel is great – besides being a fabulous programmer and instrument builder, he is also performing artist. So he understands the practical issues for a musician working with technology and the need for facilitating a smooth live performance.

I always appreciate the welcoming atmosphere at Steim. From talking music-business with Takuro Lippit, a conversation about velcro with Byungjun Kwon, and the support of Nico Bes and Esther Roschar. I was also glad to have the chance to meet Steim’s new Project Manager, Jonathan Reus.

Thanks to Steim for the time and resources for working on this project. It was a great week!

Thea Farhadian
www.theafarhadian.com

I was able to prototype a wireless interface that manipulates live sound and image simultaneously for performance.  I also investigated the potential for game engine software to operate as an instrument / interface and a virtual collaborator.  Even with this extended period of research I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of possibilities for game-generated/assisted improvisation and I’m very excited to explore and expand on the basic system I developed.

I’ll briefly describe my project, give some details on the results of my research, and offer my preliminary conclusions for artists interested in exploring this creative process.  Below are images from pwn3d, a media performance I gave at the Dallas Museum of Art’s C3 Theater last Spring.

The old joystick controller.

Screen capture from one game environment in the performance.

pwn3d unpacks the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre, currently the most popular form of media entertainment.  In the performance I attempt to control a set of artist-created FPS games whose refusal to function “properly” derails the performance into a technical catastrophe in which I’m the hapless victim.  The train wreck’s engineered audio / video glitches weave the drama and conflict of the creative process with that of American Western cinema’s gunslinger.

One goal of the residency was to replace my previous joystick control with a wireless gun interface.  In past performances, controlling game environments with a joystick tethered my body to a table.  At STEIM I replaced the joystick with a pair of Wii-based pistols to control the FPS.  This allows me to use my body and the space and perform “gunslinging theatrics” that reinforce other references in the performance to classic American Western cinema.

New wii pistols.

Unity 3D.

A second goal was to explore and develop the simulation game environment as a musical instrument.  I quickly learned that Unity 3D has severe limitations for sound processing.  Like all engines, Unity’s audio is entirely sample-based, offers dismally few options for sound manipulation, and spatializes in-game sounds in stereo but does not support 5.1 surround.  I’m now considering re-building the project in Valve’s Source Engine, which spatializes in 5.1.

STEIM helped me work around some of these limitations by separating the audio processing to its own separate system with LiSa and JunXion.  Frank Baldé’s miraculous customizable “magic wand” (as I call it) for JunXion & LiSa has revolutionized the sonic dimension of my performance.  Bluetooth connection limits require separate controllers and separate computers for audio and video, but the expanded possibilities provided by STEIM’s robust live audio processing software are well worth it.  Once I’ve ported to the Source engine I plan to experiment with audio and video processing on a single machine, but separating them on two dedicated devices works well as a functional short-term solution.

Conclusion
Media installation & performance artists [Kurt Hentschläger, Julian Oliver, Brody Condon, JODI] have shown that game engine software holds great promise as a system which can take on a “life of its own” as virtual collaborator and as an interface.  However, such dynamic interactions have been almost exclusively visual because the visual bias of the current generation of game engine software, which is designed for complex visual simulations and rather limited audio.  For non-programmer media artists, a separate audio processing setup is necessary.  Even so, game engines’ visual and haptic physics simulations remain useful and under-explored as instrument/interfaces to generate dynamic input for dedicated audio processing software/hardware.

Hartelijk Bedankt:
Dick Rijken
Jilt Van Moorst
Frank Baldé
Mark L. Franz
Daniël Schorno
Kristina Andersen
jonCates
Takuro Lippit
Nico Bes
Gijs Molenar

Shane Mecklenburger
http://www.shmeck.com

Thanks to the very generous crew at STEIM we were able to explore performative aspects of our music, as a tour in Norway was about to take place. During the past months we have finished recording new materials for Lumisokea, working together in such a way we never did before; recording unusual acoustic instruments (pipe organs, harmonium, prepared piano, aux. percussion, etc) on top of electronics layers made with customized patches and accurate sound design.  Cutting things up and reorganizing the material following principles which come from contemporary classical music , song-writing and visual arts composing.

The result was very satisfying and Koenraad mixed it himself. In the meanwhile we found a label (eatconcrete.net) and the record will be released coming spring both on vinyl and cd-r.

The work at STEIM was focused on figuring out how to reproduce on the fly in a live performance – making use of improvisation – these new sounds we had the time to compose accurately. We recorded loads of samples from prepared piano, harmonium, percussion and organized them in a sampler. That gave us the freedom of using these sounds we really like without needing a piano in the venue and without having the usual endeavor of amplifying  the acoustic instruments in order to have them on top of the already loud electronics layers. Now life is much easier and this avoids a lot of stress before a performance.

Besides, we both took our time to organize and select the electronics we wanted to use, their color, their function and so on,  narrowing down our band sound. The main thing was to ‘prepare’ our electronic devices (I use a monomachine and Koenraad runs MAX/MSP, Ableton Live and Super Collider) for when you are performing and need immediacy on stage.

We both have an improvised music background and eventually we figured that improvising using similar sounds to the recordings was the best option for our future live shows. And I can say that it’s indeed working and it’s a lot of fun too!

So, big thanks to STEIM for welcoming and hopefully we’ll visit them for another full-immersion residency!

Listen to a sample : Priano preview

See our web pages on Bandcamp and on Soundcloud

Lumisokea

The following text is presented near the installation:

Nature is full of sounds with harmonics which also occur in music of African tribes, Balinese gamelan or … fugues of Bach. Birds and many other animals ‘sing’ for about the same reasons as human beings. And still we generally don’t regard sounds from nature as music.

In this installation sounds from nature cause transpositions of the ‘standardized’ sound of a tuning fork (A 440 Hz) to a tuning that matches the input. Notes which are ‘recognized’ in this way, are played back in corresponding chords and in a spectrum of 3 different voices (red,
yellow and blue). Of course, the input is variable and unpredictable: the sound of the wind in willow trees, of birds, of traffic at a distance, of visitors … but apparently there is music in almost every sound … maybe music is more natural than we think.

The microphones used in this project are very sensitive and pick up sounds from a wide range, however the software only processes soft sounds with some kind of ‘tonal’ quality, filtering out ‘white’ noise, crackling sounds, shouting etc. More information about this project and options to experiment with the software can be found on http://www.jazzperiments.com.

I spent a week in October at STEIM working on new techniques for making computer music. Echo Nest Remix is a set of tools for using detailed, automatic audio analysis to remix and compose music. I wrote software in Python and to chop up an existing song into segments and to cluster those segments by timbre. I used Max/MSP to loop the sounds in each cluster and treat these clusters as the voices in a composition, fading them in and out, modifying their speed and repetition, and finding interesting combinations of timbres.

Working with a handful of recordings by harpist Kyle Oppenheimer, I ended up with distinct groups of sounds: sharp, accented notes; soft, sustained notes; treble-heavy chords; the sound of Kyle’s hands running up and down the harp strings. I layered and looped these sounds until new music grew out of them:

The music and software I created during my residency are part of a larger goal of making audio analysis technology useful as a creative tool. The staff at STEIM had many ideas for this project that I hope to explore in the future. Many thanks to Taku, Jon, Nico, and the rest of the STEIM crew for the hospitality and inspiration.

Ben Lacker ]]> http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/11/24/ben-lacker-echo-nest-remix/feed/ 0 http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/11/23/the-young-shaman-perspective/ http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/11/23/the-young-shaman-perspective/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:43:25 +0000 Rubin van Kooyk http://steim.org/projectblog/?p=2312 Read more…

Advantages:
1. The Wii controller works without wires. This gives the performer freedom in movements for hands and arms. He/she is also able to move around in the performance space and doesn’t necessarily have to stay next to the computer.

2. All electronic components needed, like sensors, board, buttons, batteries, etc. are all placed within the controller. The packaging is very well done!

3. However, it’s a small device which is handy, easy to grab and light in weight!

4. The Wii has buttons that don’t make much noise at all! This is crucial especially if the Wiis are used to control electronics in the context of chamber and/or acoustic music.

5. Two AA-batteries or equivalent rechargeable ones are needed for the use of one Wii and last for many hours, for a considerable amount of time.

6. The Wii show almost no latency assuming a powerful computer is provided!

7. The Wii is affordable and easy to get.

8. The Wii is stable and doesn’t seem to break easily. I use two of them for three years now and they never broke so far.

Disadvantages and Limitations:
1. Main issue is the connectivity of the Wii. Bluetooth technology seems to work fine once the Wii/s is/are connected. Unfortunately, the connecting procedure itself can take some time and is depending on factors, which are unclear. If other blue tooth devices are turned on in the same room as well may cause some troubles in connecting. Even WLAN seems to be a source of interference. The problems probably remain as long as Apple doesn’t want to work on the enhancement of the bluetooth protocol in the operating system.

2. If the accelerometer sensors are used to control parameters in music, like definite pitches, it is difficult for the musician to play with in an accurate manner. The sensor shows a considerable latency time if directions are changed quickly to a different or, even more, to the opposite direction. The sensor keeps on measuring the movement first started and then, after a certain amount of time, the measurement data change to the new, wanted direction. To a certain degree, this can be balanced with the connectivity software junXion. But there are definite limitations simply due to the technology of accelerometer sensors.

3. Unless you don’t hack the Wii there are four ways of playing it according to the way it is designed for playing games:
a) It’s more than obvious that the thumb is the main finger designated to play the controller.
b) Index finger is used for B-Button on the backside.
c) Certainly there are other ways to use the Wii, but are less conventional. The Wii can be held by thumb, ring and little finger whereas index and middle finger are then able to play the upper arrow-buttons (more likely the ones to the right and left), A-button as well as plus and minus-button. HOME-button is a bit awkward to play with, but possible as well.
d) The Wii can even be used as some sort of a keyboard if you hold it with just the thumb on its backside and use the front panel to play on: arrow-buttons by index finger, button 1 and 2 by little finger and, accordingly, the other buttons by the fingers in between. Admittedly, it’s not very convenient, but it’s possible.
Applying method a) and b) in combination is the most common way of playing the Wii. Taking into consideration that there are 11 buttons in total of which only one is played by the index finger and the rest of 10 by the thumb, one may say it’s a “thumb instrument”, not so different compared to a kalimba f.i. In consequence, the thumb finger suffers a lot of stress if the musician uses the controller on a daily basis and within the context of professional music making. One may have to develop awareness for joint problems and strategies to avoid those! The common way of using the thumb is grabbing and holding things, whereas fine motor skills remain reserved to the other four fingers, especially if rapid and repetitive movements are applied which are much easier and smoother executed by the other four fingers than by the thumb.

Conclusion:
However, for all the reasons mentioned above in paragraphe A) I think the Wii-controller is still a very powerful instrument tool to be used in order to create and generate, shape and mould electronic sound and music. But not only that, also the visual aspect of such a performance benefits as a variety of gestures and a unique vocabulary of gestural expressions may evolve just simply along the way.

Personal Prospect:
With the help and support of STEIM, in particular Bjungjun Kwon (electronics), Frank Baldé (software/patch), Daniel Schorno (patch) and visual artist Florian Göttke (hardware/ergonomics), we are now building a new electronic instrument from scratch. Commercial components like game controllers are no longer used or in other words misused anymore. The first prototype of the instrument will be finished in January 2011.
However, I will keep on playing with the Wiis. Together with the computer, the software part of junXion, LiSa and the specific implementations, they form an instrument that needs to be practised and performed in its own way which is unique enough to be not discontinued.

Alex Nowitz
November 17, 2010

www.nowitz.de

Although Steim is on the on the other side of the hedonistic approach, or maybe just because of that, I had those weird thoughts the following days.

Funny enough, I left my suitcase across from Steim’s guesthouse – and that was possible because Kristy, a modern witch girl, or the Modern Witch girl, she was giving a talk about the witch house microgenre, dubbed by a Colorado based artist – Pictureplane.

My week at Steim was, at the beginning, very relaxed, until I started to meet all the “knowledge workers” there, usually one by one, day by day.

The initial reason why I eventually (and after (too) many years) finally applied is called “Sound Hunt” (more about it soon – watch this space), which is the next step in my three year long work with kids. It’s going to be a cross between workshop, game, improvisation and composition (sorry for this one, but i guess when there are certain “instructions” it has to be a composition?).

Since it’s going to be the first time I use controllers as a part of the whole interface, I couldn’t have come to a better place, where so many ideas, doubts, and problems were examined and deepened and/or solved in one-on-one discussion forms.

The timing, and my (in the beginning) vague proposal had its limits, so the final hardware/software test will eventually happen in the coming month(s).

On top of that, I had a great time working in one of the studios, editing and recording files, which will sooner or later reach the servers.

I am looking forward to the next chapter in my approach to sound – and I’m not happy to say that it will have to include some software (LiSa + junXion), but if it doesn’t crash too often and the actual results prove to be worth of using this specific setup – I will have to remain silent.

Kids will be loud anyway, we know that.

I’m working on a sound installation piece using 6 iRobot “Create” robots– more recognizable to the mass market as “Roombas” but without the vacuum cleaner installed. I brought two of the robots from Chicago with me, and helped Steim acquire one as well, so we had 3 to work with. Even before I had arrived, Byungjun Kwon and I were discussing, via email, what hardware solution would be best for the piece. He suggested the Arduino board, and as soon as I arrived, Jun began tutoring me in Arduino programming. The trick was to get the Arduino to speak the same Roomba code as the robots, and he found a solution online with NewSoftSerial. Once he did that, it was just a question of deciding what the robots ought to be doing. I knew I wanted them to “sing” independently of each other, and I knew I wanted them to respond to their environment, but I was still experimenting to find the right “voice” for them— how can you make beeping robot vacuum cleaners sound like more than just a household appliance? So Jun devised a program that allows me to plug in a list of different short compositions. Whenever the robots bump into something, the sensors trigger each robot to cycle through the list. Now I could experiment with different notes by easily plugging in different compositions.

Experimenting was made especially fun by the presence of “test audiences” — one of the staff brought her young daughter in, and I learned a great deal watching how she interacted with the piece. I also started exploring ideas on how to create sound acoustically with the robots. My plan eventually is to develop an interactive non-electronic environment for the robots to move through. I’m working with a fabricator right now to create an acrylic top for each robot, with which I’ll experiment with adding acoustic enhancements. Once that’s up and running, expect fun images!

I have been writing a modular improvisation interface in SuperCollider for the past two years.  I wrote this software so that I could have a flexible and expandable interface that could change in every new performance situation I found myself in.  I live in New York City, where multichannel situations are rare (and you are lucky to even get a matched stereo pair of speakers).  So, my software has, up to this point, been in stereo.  However, I have a couple of situations coming up where I will be able to use a multichannel setup – performances in Huddersfield, UK and a couple of big shows in NYC.  So, it seemed like time to overhaul the software for multichannel.  This process involved rewriting code in each of my 40 or so modules and overhauling some of the structural code of the software.  The result is not visually very interesting.  In fact, it amounts to that little button added to each module as you see above.  However, the sonic result is something we can all imagine.  4 or 8 speakers means more space for sounds to exist, and so far I have been super excited to hear the results.  My multichannel software was premiered in a performance at STEIM on 20 August, sharing the stage with Anne LaBerge, Yedo Gibson, Daniel Schorno, and Oscar Jan Hoogland.  This coming week I get to use it in performance with Peter Evans and Jim Altieri at The Tank in New York, and in February Anne LaBerge and I will perform at the University of Huddersfield’s GEMDays festival in an 8 channel wall of diffusion.

Thanks to STEIM for the time and resources for working on this project.  I had a great time!

Sam Pluta

Back home now in Baltimore, I am eager to begin mapping out some new templates for improvisation that will inform my next large composition project with turntables. I would like to be less dependent on predetermined sequences of audio clips, focusing instead on mastering a signal processing and live-sampling/looping network into which I can pour any audio that I select in performance.

While aiming to minimize the time I spend stroking the laptop track pad while performing, I am very interested in using the built-in camera on my laptop as an instrument. Having purchased junXion, I have had a lot of fun using the video object tracking controls to manipulate samplers and synths in Reason or Ableton Live. I have a head lamp that is very useful for this purpose and could provide an interesting theatrical element when playing on a darkened stage (surrounded by the multi-colored array of LED lights from my APC40, Kaoss Pad, and padKontrol). Alternatively, I am thinking about having the laptop screen face toward the audience or other performers, inviting them to come closer and affect the sound through their movements in front of the iSight camera.

In the immediate future I am also planning to incorporate some audio sensors through junXion, using piezo discs attached to various objects to trigger samples in Live. I will have to explore how to build in a variety of sample responses from each piezo disc, either randomized or dependent on frequency content or amplitude. I would like to use a piezo disc audio trigger on the “tone arm” of a Fisher Price music box record player that I have had since my childhood, using my finger on the underside to activate the various resonating prongs. The idea of using this toy turntable alongside my usual DJ turntables feels like a natural extension of my interest in exploring personal audio history, and is slightly amusing.

Along with the great discussions and improvisations that I had with fellow orientation workshop participants Matt Wakefield, Abdullah Benabdallah, and Hanna Schraffenberger, I am very thankful to Taku Mizuta Lippit for taking the time to meet with me and letting me test out his Max-enhanced turntable setup. I especially valued his thoughtful responses to my ideas for a network piece connecting two ensembles playing simultaneously on different continents, with a turntablist/sampler in each ensemble capturing and manipulating sounds from the opposite group. Beyond some of the abstract concepts about global surveillance that I mentioned as subject matter, Taku encouraged me to probe more deeply about what the role of the net would be in this project. I haven’t yet discovered exactly how I will integrate the streaming audio and video in a structural and meaningful way for all participants, but I look forward to this investigation and hope that I can continue it in dialogue with STEIM.

The first meeting with someone from, and at Steim, is pretty much summed up in this drawing, made by Kristina Andersen (one of the creative project advisors). There were some more pictures, videos and links on display – but you get all that anywhere, anytime.

I have a feeling that the next series of my workshop for kids will be ready in the coming months (hopefully weeks) – and I look forward to the recording session on monday.

I have a double trajectory. On one side I have a BA in Anthropology, with a personal focus on creativity applied to a development project. On the other side I have been working as a composer for theatre, documentaries, exhibitions and cultural products for the past 9 years. I definitely joined this two fields here in the Netherlands and am currently attending a Master degree in Music and starting a MPhil in Art/music applied to heritage contexts.

My interest in the STEIM workshop was mainly to discover another world. In my composion processes I focus on acoustic instruments, even if sometimes altered with electronic effects. STEIM seemed the perfect place to get in contact with the electronic world for its human-computer interaction ethics and DIY approach.

Although I still find myself far away from the aesthetics of electronic music and performance, two amazing events clearly got my attention:  Junxion is an amazing piece of software which I intend to work with on a personal project, applying its possibilities to an enhanced guitar. Jon Rose’s talk was reaaaally interesting and his experiences will clearly help me develop some subjects on my current MPhil trajectory.

Definitely this was a new frontier that opened for me, and if it depends on me, STEIM will be on my future path with some new collaborations…

Hugo Morango

Coming to STEIM for the second residency – we worked here on our first CD “deleted scenes” in 2008 – is great. What can we say. “Sorry, don´t expect any mails within the next two weeks. We are lost in studio 1.”

The plan is to work on some compositions that we prepared for electronics and guitar – rough material that we got from our weekly rehearsals and improvisations in Cologne. This material should get the core of the new CD – this time however we want to structure the materials much more than before, and use the experience from the improvisations to build some forms.

After setting up at the studio and listening back to the rehearsals we are not very happy. Most of the stuff was exciting when playing it, but does not seem very promising for further exploration. Anyway we stick to the plan, and end up in some blind alleys, absurd discussions and Dutch nightcafes.

During these days we also meet Jeff Kaiser and Gregory Tailor who are working in the other studio and seem to be done with their CD-recordings within 3 days. … We play a split-gig with them and Lesley Flanigan at STEIM, using some of the material we brought from Cologne – good to play. Here we also meet David Schwarz who is our neighbour at the STEIM guesthouse, writing a book on digital arts.

However – an excursion to Müller Music with it´s fabulous collection of percussion instruments, effect pedals and other stuff should change the whole situation in the studio. We leave some money there and get back to STEIM with a profound collection of little drums, toy-flutes, indonesian kalimbas and other obscure idiophones. After one week of fighting we finally found our rhythm of sleep, work and walk across Amsterdam. We start recording and rerecording all our little friends. Since we cannot play them properly we do it how we do it and overdub one track over the other as long as the capacity of our old laptop allows it. There is a critical mass, where the whole thing starts to groove… “Studio 1 … you`re the only one … for me”

So the second week we change the whole conception of the album, finish the recording sessions after spending nearly 100 hours at studio 1, hang out with Sam Pluta who arrived at the guesthouse, and are having a Terry-Gilliam-expierence with Taku at a Dutch open-air theatre festival.

The two weeks are over at speed of light – here we are anxious to get back to Cologne to do all the mixing (feels like approximately 400tracks) and answer all the emails.

All the best to STEIM – hope to see you soon and THANK YOU A LOT,

Marion and Maciej

aka PIRX

www.satelita.de
www.myspace.com/pirxband

Hello, I am Hanna Schraffenberger – an artist, scientist and inventor interested in all kinds of media technology – especially enthusiastic when those are related to music. More than 10 years ago I was told that ‘real electronic composers’ use apple computers for making music. As I could not afford one of those computers I did built an electric circuit and included a real apple in it as a variable resistor and spent days making music with that apple-instrument. Now I am 27 and I have graduated in ‘Audiovisual Media’, my interest in science grew and in the meantime I got my own laptop to make music with. However the pleasure of trying out new things in the fields of music, media art, science and technology is still inspiring me to do all kinds of projects which often include but do not focus on a computer. For example: the Wall of Sound (a multitouch multiplayer musical instrument), the Glass Beat Game (an interactive board-game which makes sound depending on how you place marbles on the board),  Beatnik (an genetic algorithm which generates drum beats and modifies them due to the judgment of the listener), OpenMic (a computer game played by making sounds in front of the microphone) and the Formamat, a vending machine that gives chocolate for deleting personal data. Most of those projects are realized in my current studies – the MSc Programme ‘Media Technology’. Next to those projects I am playing in various ensembles for free improvised electroacoustic music, usually switching between the computer and the saxophone. I also have my own blog about free improvised music (www.improvised.de) and a website about my works in media art, science and technology (www.creativecode.org).

Coming to STEIM I was mainly interested how I could get rid of “looking at the computer screen while playing live music with the computer”. As I have been playing around with alternative input devices (Wii, Arduino boards with light sensors,…) for some time I was interested  how to develop meaningful mappings between input and output and how to find an personal musical language using the computer. Also, I was wondering if I would encounter a nice existing technology which will allow me to easily combine saxophone playing with computer playing without the need to switch between the both.

Now that I am finally participating in the orientation workshop at STEIM, the workshop has not only answered but exceeded all my expectations! It addressed all of my original interests but also constantly rises new questions and provokes ideas for future experiments. As I have been student assistant for courses such as Human-Computer Interaction and Sound Space Interaction I now can see possibilities of using the technology developed by STEIM in educational environments. It was highly interesting to see how other artists have developed input interfaces and especially how they have mapped input values to parameters of the LiSa software… I was especially impressed how they came up with setups which do not require looking at the screen. The diversity of musicians and talks has been very inspiring and I am looking forward to the following talks.

I am sure the demonstrated junXion software will allow me to work musically instead of technically much faster in future projects.  Inspired by the presentations, I plan to use an Arduino Fio board in order to build a wireless controller which allows me to play with the Saxophone and computer at the same time.

Additional to the great lectures and demonstrations it was especially fruitful to meet and improvise with the other course participants  (Erik Spanger, Matt Wakefield and Abdullah Benabdallah). Exchanging experiences, opinions and of course jamming together added a nice “active” component to the theoretical parts of the workshop. Especially the common improvisation on Friday afternoon is one of my STEIM-time highlights. See for yourself!

Part3

Today we had a demonstration of various instruments by Daniel Shorno applying LiSa and junXion. He showed us his live performance setup. I especially liked the use of the shotgun microphone together with the wii controller. I’ve used a similar principle in my former work where I was using sounds of washing machines during my life performance. The audio signal came as input through a microphone and were changing depending on the its position. See picture. The good thing with wii controller setup as shown by Daniel is that it can be performed by only one player. I also had the opportunity to talk with Daniel about my current project especially about the interaction between music and dancers. Some very good ideas came up during our conversation: changing color of projected visual background depending on position of dancers on stage, give dancers possibility to interact with music while doing the typical flamenco steps.

In the afternoon we had a very interesting presentation by Taku Mizuta Lippit “Thinking about new instruments”. We talked  about some very important aspects li:

-virtuosity: I personally faced the problem when I was playing live with my laptop and interacting with the dancers that the audience didn’t really understand that I was playing live. People thought I was djing. Taku showed us some very good examples where electronic instruments can be performed with a lot of virtuosity.

-Play with computer screen closed: in fact when making music with computer the visual component (screen) sometimes distract you from listening. Therefore it’s very important to minimize the maintenance gestures of the system. This leads to more general principle we also discussed on Friday morning with Robert Van Heumen when we were taking about live sampling:

part4:

-”reduce to the max”: limiting the options does not mean less sound. In fact a lot of examples showed here at Steim demonstrates how minimal sounds can do a lot of sounds. As Goethe said: “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister”.

Furthermore, Robert Van Heumen gave us a very nice presentation of his former projects which I’ve found very inspiring. He also gave us an insight in the concepts he was doing in his work like the cobra rules of improvisation or the family tree concept.

In the evening our workshop team had a free improv session at Studio3. It was streamed live on Ustream. I used LiSa and junXion on one of Steims Computer. As controller I was using a Joystick. I was able to produce some minimal sounds that glued very well into the entire mix. I think it was a very good decision not to use any of my common tools and just try out LiSa and junXion in a live situation. I was happy with the result even if I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare my settings. This experience confirmed the idea of making a lot of sounds out of few minimal sounds.

Many thanks to Erik Spanger for initiating the improv and to Matt Wakefield and Hanna Schraffenberger for the great session!!!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/dj-dubble8

With emphasis on my university work; I have been looking for tools to approach composition as a consistent process, and attempting to find a method of blue printing compositions. It turned out rob had done a project like this called ‘Stranger’ that has given me a few ideas to hep with brainstorming out some sketches. John Zorn’s Cobra (1984) a text for musical improvisation, came up in discussions today as well which shares a similar link to Rob’s ‘Stranger’ project and another piece written by him ‘Shackle’ that used supercollider. Zorn’s ‘Cobra’ uses a series of descriptions to guide you towards a particular sound using all sorts of focus points such as feeling, texture, use of body parts, physical instructions to others… The great thing about it is that you can choose to decline some of these descriptions, much like the set up you can achieve in supercollider which Rob used for his ‘Shackle’ piece. Although these process’s are geared toward mixing up the regular format for free improvisation, its approach can easily be applied to fixed composition. Whether a series of instructions that could be used for writing compositions would be of any use at all is uncertan? I definitely think it adds another layer of communication between the composer and the device they use to compose. Which could be a good thing,helping themes and evolving concepts to flourish in translation.

All of us from the Orientation Workshop (Abdullah, Erik, Hannah and I) got together for a Free improvisation session in Studio 3 yesterday evening, we set up a live stream (http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10496263) using the on-board mac isight camera and mic to capture the event. Hannah was playing Saxaphone and triggering presets on a launchpad, possibly the two were linked and she was sampling sections of her playing, but I am unsure of this.. Abdullah was using Lisa and a Joystick to control some minimal samples, I used two softsynths within the sampler and pre-recorded drum hits from my kit at home in a sequence, cutting and automating them by ear using ableton live, as well as a few basic loops on lisa to add further texture. As for Erik, he was playing his usual set up with a deck and mixer borrowed from Toku and ableton lieve with a mixing processer interface.
It was a long improvisation, many ups and downs, but all in all a great session! There were some really cool parts that happened with in the piece, I really enjoyed playing with hannah’s sax parts especially, she is a naturally equal player who predicts changes with ease. Also it was good to test a live set up with Lisa as it definitely allowed me to see what i need to learn about it. I’m beginning to feel a bit more comfortable with working with it, it was enjoyable to use a basic set-up with it in the free improvisation yesturday. Although, for now at this stage of experimentation I am leaning towards spending more time with Junxion. I’ve learnt enough to map selected movement recieved by the on-board isight camera to some parameters on ableton, I was very impressed by the logical way the program is layed out and really enjoyed the end results.. Some great examples of automating envelop filters happened, sounds I am usually unable to achieve on the fly with a regular controller.

Thursday was also a great day, we had a chance to talk with Taku around his chosen topic ‘Thinking about new instruments’ it opened up an interesting set of discussions surrounding the issue of ‘virtuosity’ – To what level is it important? How can we get a good balance of it? Also, how do we embody the thing we are playing? How do we achieve a sense of autonomy? and.. How do we make our instrument nessessary?

Hopefully more workshop improvisations to come – I definitely want to minimize my workflow for next time and focus on just one or two things; either simple automation via Junxion to sounds within Ableton Live, or a repetitive and concise selection of audio to sample then edit within Ableton as a standalone devise.

Abdullah performed via LiSa and JunXion with a joystick. Matt performed with both of these programs in addition to Ableton Live, using Ableton synths and his sample bank. Hanna played tenor saxophone and Launchpad (I’m not sure which software she was controlling). I moved between a variety of Live sets and mixed these with improvisation on one turntable. In retrospect I would have liked to begin with more of a blank canvas rather than my familiar structure of pre-assembled set material, which is inherently less responsive to new input from outside. Next session I would really like to integrate more fully the performance approaches I have been thinking about while here at STEIM- creating through the actions and reactions of the moment. In any case, I felt that there were some great moments as a group improvisation and I look forward to the next jam.

I went to an amazing show on Thursday night at the Bimhuis- CORKESTRA, a group of Dutch free improvisers who have been on the scene for a long time: Ab Baars, Anne La Berge, Cor Fuhler, Michael Vatcher, Nora Mulder, Tobias Delius, Tony Buck, and Wilbert de Joode. This performance was a fantastic blend of audible structure and free improv, with strong sound images throughout. The more pre-composed openings, meeting points, and endings were easily extended into free interactions among the musicians. I also appreciated the subtle wit with the bending of genre expectations, introducing unexpected stylistic change-ups at many points.

Thursday and Friday we also excellent presentations by Daniel Schorno (Applied LiSa & JunXion with eponymous instruments), Taku Mizuta Lippit (Thinking about new instruments), and Robert van Heuman (Electro-instrumentalism, live sampling and split-second decisions). All of these talks were excellent in providing a window into the creative decisions and performance strategies that they have chosen as individual artists.

Later on we had a chance to see Rob Van Heuman play at a local church with Gareth Davis, followed by Erik Spangler, a fellow Orientation Workshop Participant, playing at 0T301 with an ensemble. I was impressed by the subtlety in which Rob complemented the musician he was working with and how they filled the church with a rich ambience. Erik’s ensemble performance was a great watch, there was a really wide dynamic range with the choice of instruments and their playing, quality improvising with a thick rich texture! Both performances were a great experience and performed passionately, they definitely got the creative juices flowing! My workshop housemates and I, with the inclusion of a female bassoonist that Erik played with at 0T301 (and maybe others tbc..) will be having an improvised live session on friday evening in the studios here at Steim, so thats definitely something to look forward too!

Anne LaBerge – Flutes and Electronics
Ivo Bol – Electronics
Oscar Jan Hoogland – Clavichord
Dana Jessen – Bassoon

Electro-acoustic improv band at OT301

The way that these players were listening and communicating, with a special kind of synchronicity, definitely places this in one of my top 5 group improv experiences of all time. Big props to Dana for putting this ensemble together!

I played single turntable (thrift shop vinyl + Ms. Pinky control of digital audio clips), padKontrol to Max4Live, and melodica. From the need to travel light on this trip, I concentrated down to using the Korg padKontrol in place of my usual APC40 for control of Live- I feel pretty happy with its capability for treating samples with a variety of touches, though I do miss the faders and such. Many thanks to Ivo and OT301 for supplying me with a turntable and mixer. For once, I feel like I brought just what I needed and was able to use everything I had set up in a way that was responsive to the flow of the ensemble. The 9 records I brought on this trip:

1. TROCKNEIS (Dan Breen, Audrey Chen, Andy Hayleck, Paul Neidhardt, Catherine Pancake) – 5025 AD
2. DJ Krush – Stepping Stones
3. John Coltrane – Alternate Takes
4. Authentic Belly Dance Music
5. Morton Subotnick – Silver Apples of the Moon
6. James Ostryniec, soloist – Music For Oboe
7. Stereo Test Record
8. Prefuse 73 – Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian

9. Ms. Pinky vinyl

Earlier in the day we had two very great presentations at STEIM- the first by Frank Baldé, on the sensor-mapping software junXion. I’m very excited by the possibilities with this, particularly in regard to ways that my performances could draw the audience into affecting the sound stream through movement, control of light, or some other system of participation feedback. Many, many possibilities here, and it will take awhile to digest where exactly I want to take this. The second presentation was by Kristina Andersen, on interaction design. She brought forward a number of great ideas relating to intuitive connection between the physical objects or sensors in space, and how these can shape a listener or participant’s experience of the sound and its causes of transformation. It was very refreshing to hear a strong emphasis on letting the perceived need for technical know-how take a backseat to reflecting on performance experience and sketching of what types physical motion and of control over sound would be most useful, before trying to learn every technical possibility.

-Interaction between dancers and music by using controllers or sensors

-Interaction between washing machines and music by using sensors

-Interaction between visual material (recorded life by camera or triggered by VJ) and music

It could even be more complex like creating interaction between the tree parts at the same time.

In the afternoon we had interaction design with Kristina Andersen. One relevant aspect to my work we talked about was the importance of integrating the dancers at the very early beginning of the creative process. It’s very important that they feel comfortable with the devices/instruments.

Tonight we are having some “expiremental electro-accoustic goodness”: Robert van Heumen will play with Garth Davis at Tabula Rasa. Also our co-workshoper DJ Dubble8 will perform at OT301.

I’ve been connecting with fellow guesthouse residents Abdullah Benabdallah and Matt Wakefield, discovering a lot of common musical interests. Matt and I had a couple of improv sessions today (dueling laptops, padKontrol, melodica), and all three of us are looking forward to setting up for a more extensive free improv in one of the STEIM studios this weekend.

The creation of these sound clusters was done by collating various associative sound elements (foley, muffled text, musical tracks, soundscapes, etc…). Then I sequenced them in the space with a narrative intention as well as used them in an improvisational multichannel mash up. The latter method relies more on a collative understanding of the elements used, their exact sequence not as relevant, rather their nature, drama and interaction in space give the total impression of the sound cluster.

Far from finished, but in the right direction…

A bit about myself:

• I have realised a lot of my sound work is collage based stuff, using any sound source as a legitimate element in composition, indiscriminately mixing and modulating other people’s music with my own, film excerpts recordings, live instruments, whatever genre – one big abstract mash up.

This has entertained me for some time now mainly through regular radio shows I was presenting and playing live at on London’s Resonance 104.4fm since 2005. The nature of these mash ups has evolved to this project of trying to contextualise these mash ups in a narrative framework but yet keeping the abstraction of the soundsources. i sometimes play under the name of Spax.

>> to listen to the radio shows on their different incarnations (the most recent one is Soundsoup) here: 
www.newtoy.org/soundsoup

• I have also been developing a project called Wet Sounds which installs in Swimming Pools to a floating and diving audience who are literaly immersed in the sound which is only audible underwater. I also play through a double sound system (one above and one below) this creates three distinct soundsystems (one above the water, one below the water and one both as the listener floats on the surface). I play a sound collage similar to what I described but more suitable for underwater listening. The project is also open to an annual selection of sound art works which are played as well in the concert and represented in the online sound art gallery. Wet sounds has been touring since 2008 at swimming pools in the UK and in Europe at various festivals (AV Festival, ISEA, Helsinki Festival, Ultima, Nu Musik and many more)
 www.wetsounds.co.uk

• Another project I do is Scrap Club, a public Destructivist activity, which involves collecting stuff that people throw away and getting people to smash them to bits using sledgehammers. Lots more here www.scrapclub.co.uk

• My other music project is a solo noise ordeal I subject people to occasionally… I call it Avalanche Noiz, fascinated by the convolving rumble and bulbous noise and its spatial elements. This and other trax can be heard on www.newtoy.org/jukebox

Other stuff that I do is on the Newtoy website

0_O

www.newtoy.org
www.wetsounds.co.uk
www.scrapclub.co.uk

In recent times I have become fascinated with the development of compositional methods using electronic/sonic resources and theorising as tools, mainly as a way to improve my communication with other musicians on a practical level. I have been using the ableton sequencer over the last year or so and its approach has opened many doors for me. Also I have just completed a short introductory course in MaxMSP at Goldsmiths (University of London), which has given me a taste of how many possibilities a musician has to communicate with the computer in more interesting ways than just using it as a sequencer.. I still regard bouncing off others as the most important of all writing process’s which is a philosophy I will never let go of.
When I first started using a sequencer I saw it as the perfect opportunity to jam when no-one is around, and has consumed most of my time for the last 3 years. It has now got to a point where I want to start joining the freedom and organic subtleties you can get when using an acoustic instrument, also the most prominent occurrence of spontaneity when improvising with other musicians, and combining this with my understanding of electronic music. There has been a clear division in my experience of both of these things to date, I came to Steim in an attempt to begin rendering this issue.
In my brief introduction to Steim today I am beginning to realise there is a strong emphasis on communication here, to almost personify computer based software and hardware making it less rigid to work with, hense allowing more freedom to put emphasis on my own desired sounds. This is exactly what I need to infuse into my live set up, and what I have come here to get inspiration for.

Uni work – Something that I have been working towards in a university project (C.E.P) is to input data into the computer which would reference some of the progressions that occur a lot in my compositions and trigger predictions in relation to what I am playing, making live improvisation a bit easier. Although I wanted improvisation to be present in performance, I really wanted the emphisis to be on live composition. I wanted to use a certain amount of algorithmic aspects to achieve this, but limit them so things didn’t get too crazy! However my direction has changed quite a lot now, a lot of questions have risen to the surface that are beginning to make me think there is something wrong with the way I have been approaching a more comfortable live set-up . In the lectures we had today, the more i listened the more I began to realise that it’s perfectly reasonable for me to want to take some pressure off in live performance. However the focus should definitely be making the computer more playable for me as a musician, rather than just pressing playing and trying to look busy! After spending days/weeks working on a track it seems a waste not to take more time in focusing on performance.

Ideas are flowing uncontrollably at the moment! I’m loving my time here so far, and look forward to solidifying my ideas as this orientation workshop continues.

Matt

What brought me to Steim?

During my study of Computer Science at the University of Zurich I got familiar with some principles of New Artificial Intelligence. One of them was the awarness that intelligence needs a body. I also believe in the importance of body “knowledge” and share with Steim the idea that Touch should play a major role in the performance art.

Concretely I am looking for new instruments/technics in order to incorporate the embodiment concept into my practice. My current project is called “electroflamenco” and is part of a dance performance show with flamenco dancers, washing machines and light projection. I am sure that these elements build a field for exciting electro/accoustical experiments.

First Day
Today we had the general introduction of Steim by Jonathan Reuss. He showed us several instruments developed at Steim. I noticed that not only the instrument is important but also the performance. People should understand and follow what is going on. I will consider this aspect in future.
In the afternoon we had the presentation of LiSa Software by Robert VonHeuman. LiSa has really a lot of functions and possibilities. I will download the software and go deeper into it to see how I could use it for my work.

DJ Dubble8, mixing for Mobtown Modern music series in Baltimore

The last time I was in Amsterdam I was 15 years old, traveling to the premiere of an opera by my first composition teacher, Param Vir. That was in 1992, the year I decided to become a composer. At that point, my teacher had no interest in electronic music and neither did I. Even after taking music technology classes as an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory and an electronic music seminar with Mario Davidovsky at Harvard, it was not until I was exposed to sampling and turntablism in underground hip-hop that I became interested in creating any electronic music beyond what my studies required. Now, seven years after I first started sampling from my recorded composition archives and immersing myself in live remixing, it is the turntables that bring me back to Amsterdam, to STEIM.

I moved to Baltimore three years ago to develop a collaborative project that I had begun with saxophonist Brian Sacawa, a duo called Hybrid Groove Project. This project branched out of a piece that I wrote for alto saxophone and electronics, entitled pastlife laptops and attic instruments- combining fully notated music, improvisation on both saxophone and turntables, beats created in Reason software, and turntablist manipulation of pre-recorded samples of Sacawa’s saxophone lines (via a time-code vinyl control system called Final Scratch). Our repertoire expanded through other music that I wrote, as well as remixes of existing pieces for saxophone and electronics by composers such as Jacob ter Velduis and (re-arranged) Philip Glass. Our most recent performance was in January 2010, when we premiered our concert-length, multi-instrumental remix of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Tierkreis (12 melodies of the Zodiac), a project that we titled Zodiacrobatic.

By the time of my work on Zodiacrobatic, I had begun to use Ableton Live as my primary software tool for both electronic composition and performance. This decision was informed by a desire to incorporate more live looping and signal processing into my performances, as well as to have greater flexibility to recombine samples and to be more performative with my various rhythmic layers. Since transitioning over to Live, about a year and a half ago, I have composed several pieces for myself to perform on diverse instruments (melodica, keyboard, violin, Spanish guitar, theremin) with live looping through a foot controller board- Pre-Dawn Artscape/Ghost Town (2009) and Grandpa Dale Songs (2010). The latter piece is built around samples from old cassette recordings of my grandfather playing piano and singing his own compositions (Tin Pan Alley-style songs) along with a recording I made of him reading from his autobiography before he died in 2003. Personal audio history is of particular importance to me in the music I have been composing recently.

My use of Ableton Live in performance has been primarily directed through the medium of the Akai APC40 controller and, since getting Max For Live, the Ms. Pinky M4L patch for turntable control of any referenced audio clips in my set. Recent performances have ranged from DJ sets of my original trip-hop tracks to free improvisation with a pool of field-recorded audio from the local soundscape. My involvement with free improvisation has expanded greatly in the past year, primarily through my involvement with the improvised music series Out Of Your Head, based at the Windup Space in Baltimore. Each week is a different combination of musicians (usually 3 – 5 people) from the collective. I perform on Out Of Your Head every month or two, and have come to greatly enjoy the unpredictability of the ensemble dynamic. I look forward to adapting some new modalities of improvisation and possibilities for live sampling to bring back from my experience here at STEIM.

Within this sonic ‘still frame’ its possible to add various sound elements simultaneously which enhance the emotional, associative or dramaturgical character of the ‘still frame’ expanding it in more than one dimension which in cinema we are bound to. We can only see one thing at a time on screen and you cant have a true collage of elements perceived at once to create a holistic sense.

On the other hand, literal elements such as visual description of a character, or a set on all its props, or a wide panorama can be summarized in an instant soundbyte to give the idea of what is represented. These are elements which could have a poor or banal sonic element. This is another reason why I dont see working from a literal adaptation the way to go, it could serve as an inspiration and guideline but further away from the literal source than a visual adaptation.

If theatre is the equivalent to a standard radio drama in its use of foley and dialogue, then cinema is the equivalent to narrative based acousmatic music in  sound theatres. 

So what I am left with is an enormous amount of sound design in a multichannel setup, it is like being a stop-frame animator… 

more soon…

I want to stay away from narration or dialogue based sound narratives like radio plays because the mind operates on a different level to analyze speech and translate it into meaning while sound is more immediate and emotive, especially when analysing progression of surrounding events it gets perceived on a more subconscious level than speech. I also want to stay away from sounds which are too descriptive and concréte like gunshots and footsteps kind of thing (although it could be unavoidable to a certain degree).

I initially thought of transcribing or rather, transcoring an adaptation of a book, but text, being literal, as well as cinema, adapted from literal stories, has loads of elements which cannot be transcored such as: 

• A facial expression, character description
• A character looking somewhere
• A change in a room’s props.
• Immobile objects [furniture, buildings, walls, food, mountains, rocks, etc…]
• Some kinetic objects, if they are unusual and the sound they make is unrecognizable
• Some movement, for example someone swinging an axe, we might hear the swing but would not recognise the axe unless we hear the impact and recognise its sound. A sound might indicate the movement is happening but not give us the impression of a movement actually taking place and its consequence.
• Light changes / shadows
• Panoramic view

This pretty much does away with most adaptable narratives, and so what I am dealing with is sound content which borrows a similar sense of narrative that dance might have with electro-acoustic sensibility.

…. more soon

STEIM’s engineer Jun built a new motion control interface for my cello bow, which is a wireless Arduino solution, much preferred over the original prototype, a re-egineered Wiimote. Bluetooth is a pain.

The new interface consists of a small circuit board, an accelerometer and a small rechargeable LI battery that fits perfectly onto the frog of my bow. The ergonomics are great. Thanks so much, Jun!

Some rescaling of the sensor data was necessary in my junXion patch, but the tables and the autoscale features of the software helped a lot here, no problem at all.

DJ Sutsche from Hamburg joined me in Studio1 for 3 days, and we prepared our Sutsche & Fello live-set for the de:sonanz festival in Skopje (Oct 7 2010). Inspired by the STEIM vibes in the studio he even scratched his records -though he’s so techno – and came up with nice beats out of his pitched-down maxis. That was some amazing Dub sound and fun to improvise with.

For the next three months I’ll carry my cello and the Fello system through India and will play gigs/ do workshops together with the Indian DJ Prashant Pallemoni. This new Fello setup looks much more stable than the previous Wii setup, as it never loses the data connection as it happens with the bluetooth every now and then (especially with big audiences who leave their bluetooth phones switched on…). This one will be a reliable fellow for the trip.

Photos 1-4 by Theo Howard, Photo 5 by airport security in Dubai

Watch it on vimeo

Many thanks to the team at STEIM

STEIM residency, 15th – 20th August 2010 :-
Kathy Hinde and Sabine Vogel

We had the possibility to use the big studio space at Steim for 5 days to work intensively together on our collaboration as the duo ORNIS, on a new piece called

/ and the walls threw back echoes /

Sabine Vogel – Flutes, Live Electronics & composition
Kathy Hinde – Objects & live video

On the last day of our stay we performed the new piece at the LOCAL STOP CONCERT at STEIM. On the same evening played Anne LaBerge, Sam Pluta, Yedo Gibson, Daniel Schorno, Oscar Jan Hoogslan.

ORNIS on vimeo

It was a very good way for us to prepare ourselves to the concert we had on August 22nd at the ISEA RUHR 2010 in Essen, Germany.

We had previously collaborated, by both being invited to Norberg festival, Sweden by EMS in 2008. This was more like a ‘meeting on stage’ where we combined our audio and visual material spontaneously, with only a short amount of discussion beforehand, which did work very well and lead to a few more performances. From this first brief collaboration, it was apparent that the aesthetics of our work had much in common, And the content we had been working with shared many similarities,
eg, ice, water, glass, quietness, transparency, subtle changes, live sampling.

During the Steim residency we decided to focus on a number of elements in the creation of this new piece:

1 – The relationship between audio and visual. How do we work with this?
Are some connections fixed (eg certain sounds with certain images),
Does one trigger the other? are images and sound always placed together / separately.
Does one follow the other? ie – visuals respond to sound / sound respond to visuals.

2 – How could the performance become an installation? Can we expand the format of stage / performance and screen. How do the audience encounter the work?
What structures / stage design can we incorporate into the piece?

3 – How do we improvise together using sound and image?
The practicalities of this have so far created a way of working where images respond to sounds. How can we make a system where this works both ways?
How do we collaborate together?

We focussed on how we could expand the performance into an installation.
We had been discussing using glass and transparent facades to reflect and project onto and through. Kathy had been working with glass layers, and text exploring the phenomenon that glass is molecular structure is like a fluid, but it behaves like a solid. The existence of opposite properties within one substance has resonance with the other material (sound and image) Kathy and Sabine work with – working with the barely audible sounds from inside the flute, amplifying them to an audible level, audio and visual recording so of ice / water / steam and glass.
It became a little bit complicated to use real sheets of glass and we found with Nico’s and Kaes’ help some sheets of procpects, that we could use. At this point, we chosed to work with what we had, whilst also planning ahead to create a larger, more ambitious installation in the future.

We hung up the reflective sheets – and we realised that we could position a sheet of glass near Sabine so the projected visuals would reflect – and therefore she had a good view of them.
We had been discussing how Sabine could respond to the visuals, one simple problem in the past being that she couldnt’ see them – as they are projected behind her! We thought about setting up a preview monitor, but the reflections in the glass was a great solution, and fitting with how we wanted to make an installation of multiple reflective layers.

Sound influencing Visuals – Visuals influencing Sound…

We decided to be quite low-tech on this front, and simply try out different ways of responding to each others material. For one section, where we set up a system for the sound (short samples) triggered specific related visuals – mainly the ice sounds triggering a timeplase of ice melting. However – this was the only place we set up any direct triggering or visualisation / sonification. We were both very keen to keep things quite simple and avoid too much information being given out at one time.

We experimented with audio with no images and visuals in silence. This worked at the start, and we decided to have some sections like this. It didn’t seem appropriate to introduce the separation of audio and visual later in the piece, as it felt like this broke down the relationship between the two media. We built up a structure and practice from that – filming the results to watch back to refine the structure. We had certain audio or visual cues that we recognised as being a certain ‘section’. Some of the piece was improvised, and other sections we had decided quite specifically to use certain sounds and images.

The sound techniques Sabine uses combines field recordings with live flute and electronics, using Steim’s software LiSa and JunXion. Lots of parameters can be controlled live by foot pedals, that STEIM invented for her and a wii controller plus a deconstructed nunchuk.
Kathy was using VDMX with 2 projectors through a matrox triple head2go, two live cameras and some physical set-ups using glass, perspex, water and lights/ projections.
The main ‘output’ was sent to a projector beaming images onto a large screen behind the performance space. The second output went to a miniature projector, position to project images either onto a set up using stacked glass ‘slides’ or onto 2 hanging layers of perspex. The stacked glass slides were 15cm square, and each one had different text written onto it in a number of ways – sandblasted, written in tippex or ink-jet printed onto acetate. A mirrored layer was at the bottom and created reflections of the projections back onto the glass layers from below. The text related to how glass was similar to a fluid, and other text S and K worked on through the week. The slides were changed live and re-projected onto – and captured with a live camera feed into the visuals projected onto the main screen (similar technique was applied to the hanging sheets – projected onto and captured with live camera). One of the ideas for working in this way stemmed from the idea of traces, palimpsests and content being resampled and gradually shifted and evolved.

Thank you to Daniel, Nico, Taku, Kaes and all the STEIM people. We are looking forward to come back in April 2011 and continue our work!

This is a link to a video of me rehearsing with the Dumbell in Studio 3

I arrived at STEIM with the partially completed second version of my instrument called the “Electronic Dumbell”. My areas of interest are: Hardware Hacking, Circuit Bending and DIY electronics; Found Objects, Dada, Readymades, Fluxus, Ergonomics and Sculptural Instruments. My intentions for this residency at STEIM were to finish this instrument and to begin the process of learning and composing.

The Dumbell consists of two amplified oscillators that have six short circuits built in to them. These short circuits are triggered by six on/off tilt switches and two variable resistors in the form of grip sensors that are positioned on the central stem. It is designed to be completely self-supporting, cheap, visually arresting, and to have directional control of the sound in the performance space. Its sound is intended to be glitch and noise based.

In the studio I made adjustments to the physical balance of the Dumbell by placing counterweights at key locations around the instrument. I became aware of the strength of the materials that I was using, and what kind of movements and stresses I should be aware of during performance. In this I mostly refer to the central stem of the Dumbell which is made from a piano key and designed to take years of stress from specific directional planes when it is mounted and played within a piano. It was not designed to take the forces that will be exerted on it from all angles during a performance as a component of the Dumbell. We tested the key and it seems able to take strong forces from many directions in the short term, I will keep a keen eye on the piano key to see how it copes in the long term.

I also repositioned the tilt switches and solved various technical problems with the readymade amplifier that, like the piano key, was not designed for the task. I make a point of abusing electronics in this way as I find the outcomes unpredictable and fascinating. As it turns out, the amplifier has uncommon grounds that we postulate are there to prevent earth loops and phasing when used in applications such as automotive audio systems. This was a useful discovery as isolating the earth like this probably helps prevent phasing between the three circuits in my design when they are running from the same power source.

I spent a large portion of my time rehearsing with the Dumbell, getting to know its idiosyncrasies, and deciding what movements and postures should be associated with the six short circuits and their combinations. I’d used trial and error procedures to position the tip switches accordingly and replace certain short circuits that didn’t ‘sound’ as required. The gesture and posture that an instrument like this forces upon the musician is also important, because it is beginning to develop the persona of a marching band or carnival instrument, and this persona will affect any composition written with for this instrument. This carnival or marching band persona was unintentional but still a highly desirable path to follow.

I also managed to grab some rehearsal time in Studio 3. This was invaluable because the fundamental design of the instrument uses the Doppler effect and acoustic reflections as performance tools; so, doing this allowed me to compare the harsher acoustics of Studio 3 to the muted reflections in Studio 0. These differences impressed me to keep the basic pre-amplifier equalisation so that I could adjust the tone of the Dumbell to suit different environments. Even though the pre-amplifier only contained the basic “bass and treble” filter bands, it provided enough sound manipulation to compensate effectively to the two different acoustics of the studios. Rehearsing in Studio 3 also allowed me to experiment with the instrument as a performance tool as well as a sound generator.

Thanks to Taku, Jun, John and Daniel, I am already looking at what new possibilities the format of the Dumbell may hold.

I have been using FTM + gabor for about a year now after attending a similar workshop at BEK. Since then I have been using it exclusively for my live performance set up, consisting of a range of file and real-time granulators, cross filtering and data handling. I’d been looking forward to this workshop to increase my knowledge and skills as a self taught programmer.

The Package is aimed at real-time audio manipulation and really allows the user complete control and flexibility of digital audio.

Deimo started out by introducing the different data classes, keeping things moving for what is a pretty dry subject matter for impatient musicians. FTM is a set of complex data structures for max msp, ideally suited for real time audio manipulation. Functions can be called and applied to data held in matrices. I find it far more simple and powerful than max’s data handling and have already started to use it exclusively to handle data.

Following the basics we moved on pretty quickly to making some noise with a whistle stop tour of the Gabor externals which handle audio. Gabor works with its own independent timing structure giving sub sample accuracy and a noticeable improvement in sound quality from msp for granular and spectral synthesis. Deimo showed us plenty of examples including many real-time analysis re-synthesis patches.

Next up was a look at the MnM externals and abstractions – a set of tools for mapping, machine learning and gesture recognition. It’s an excellent set of tolls for anyone handling and mapping controller data.

Deimo then showed us his amazing concatenative synthesis patch CataRT that allows the real time analysis and playback of grains selected through range of spectral descriptors.

After this second week I feel already inspired to develop my performance patch further with more expressive synthesis, accurate live analysis and more intelligent mapping.

http://ftm.ircam.fr/index.php/Main_Page

Seeing Frank Baldé use the wii remote control as a music instrument, knowing exactly what he is doing when creating an enormous variety of sounds and effects in a simple synthesizer file was an amazing experience. The question that came to my mind is what it is that makes me want to play an instrument since I did not find it very attractive for myself to practice playing a wii remote controller until I finally achieve a virtuosity comparable to Frank’s. It appears that the resonance of my instrument as a sensual feedback is essential for my affection to playing an instrument. It is the particular resonance the clarinet gives in certain parts of my body when playing it, as well as feeling the warm air flowing out through the tone holes. I experience resonance as something to “fix the soul to my body” or as a connection between instrument, body and soul – a “human interface” in its best sense. So I decided not to “move on” to electronic instruments but rather keep playing my various clarinets. Widening the expression of my instrument by unobtrousively adding electronic device is attractive for me, and I used pedals as controllers so far, or the composers I worked with controlled the electronics themselves, giving me the convenience to concentrate on my instument.

Using a joystick or wii remote control while playing an acoustic instruments is troublesome. I would have to stop playing every time I want to use the controller. Pedals as the “traditional” controllers seem to be a good solution. I can easily program the effects processor or software and control the effects by foot switches and expression pedals. I just might be a bit unflexible, especially when using the vocal effects processor which needs to be programmed. But what if I want to be free in using and controlling effects? I can either search for a kind of “wii remote control” that is not in my hands, or I can turn the clarinet itself into a controller. Using a wii balance board could be fun, and I will definitely try it out, though it might be really hard to control and give quite randomized results. Turning the clarinet into a controller would mean to add sensors to it. The bell is probably the best place for fixing movement sensors because it is the part of the instrument that moves most when playing. John Toenjes, another course attendant who works with dancers and brought some of his sensor stuff, agreed to help me try it out. Unfortunately, we did not succeed in connecting the sensors to JunXion, so this project is something to be realized in the near future. Thanks to John and Josh for trying.

Being quite unexperienced in the use of softwares, the LiSa and JunXion lectures were difficult for me to follow. I will need some time to digest and keep on learning on my own, now as I got important impulses on what and how to work with samples etc.

Important for me were the artist talks with Wouter Jaspers and Laura Carmichael. Wouter as a performing electronic musician spoke about his attitude of working as a musician and his way to make a living of his performances – an aspect in a professional artist’s life that simply cannot be ignored. I also benefitted a lot from Laura’s talk, who in her practise-based approach as a performer and device user (not progarmmer) gave me a wonderful insight into her way of using remote controlled electronics in her theatre-like performances with her duopartner Naomi Sato. She also spoke about joy and harm of technical setups and stage decorations and the effort and easiness of setup since they use TouchOSC as a device for controlling the electronics themselves which makes them self-sufficient in their performances. Beyond technical stuff, Laura told that she spends a lot of time with her colleague in talking about their relationship to each other, a point that many long-term ensembles probably should pay way more attention on.

In the whole, the week at STEIM was an inspiring time with lots of input. As it also can be seen from the blog entries of other attendants, many questions beyond the technical stuff have been discussed, and I got plenty of thoughts and questions about all levels of art and being and artist.

]]> http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/09/28/1976/feed/ 0 http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/09/28/sunshine-and-smoke/ http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/09/28/sunshine-and-smoke/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:33:56 +0000 Alex Cuffe http://steim.org/projectblog/?p=1957 Read more…

I arrived in Amsterdam last Monday a STEIM virgin. Little did I expect the wealth of information and inspiration that would be offered over the coming week. As the workshops and presentations progressed, I sank my teeth deeper into questions that had been hazily forming over the past years; and although I can’t say I have any answers yet, the questions have certainly become clearer. I will try to give an overview of the thoughts and processes that have occurred to me during my time at STEIM.

At first the lectures covered a range of topics directly related to STEIM: the software developed here – LiSa and JunXion – but this quickly developed into broader aspects of performance practice and instrument development. STEIM is clearly a place where one can have an idea planted and watered in the most elegant way.

First I sat back to absorb the information being presented. Sample based performance, whether live or pre-recorded, has been central to my performance for some time now, so LiSa acted as a wake up call to the ideas central to this. Those of being able to record and play back instantaneously, and/or the ability to call on a wide range of samples with relative ease. This is nothing new, but I had the distinct feeling from talks with other artists that the wheel had been reinvented many times with regards to software.

I made some casual research into some topics I had been interested, but had abandoned: those of multitouch interfaces and pressure-reactive surfaces. I was pleased to discover that in the meantime someone had done exactly what I had originally intended to do with my research, and that man was David Wessel with his SLABs. Wessel had developed a multitouch, pressure reactive surface that was able to trigger and manipulate samples instantaneously. My curiosity was piqued.

Amidst a sampling of mayonnaise-centric Dutch cuisine (that didn’t necessarily agree with everyone), we were introduced to instrument building and artist talks. A vast proportion of performance instruments that have been developed seem to be based on existing controllers – for example, game controllers, basic midi devices, dj mixers – and these have to be modified for the purpose. We seem to be battling against the restrictions of the devices, and some win. Basic controllers seem to be better suited, and in fact Takuro Mizuta Lippit’s controller consisted mainly of a switch for triggering alternate recording and playback.

My thoughts moved to the limitations of these controls, and in comparison to acoustic instruments, the dimensions of control we have are few. By this, I mean that with (for example) a violin the left hand controls (continuously) pitch over four strings, tone, timbre, effects, activation of pitch (as opposed to damping the strings); and the right controls volume – pressure and speed, timbre – in multiple ways, tone, pitch (independent, but more restricted in comparison to the left hand), effects; and together these affect the ‘mapping’ of each other. This is all without relatively arduous movement and all simultaneously. Compare this with a fader. There is one degree of movement which takes up the use of almost one hand. So the violin has one hand mapped to 5+ dimensions of control (more if you include the other hand) and the fader has it mapped to one. Wessel’s SLAB has continuous control of 3 dimensions (xyz – z being pressure) and up to 10 independent activations. If this was split into two areas for right and left hands, there could be 6 interrelated dimensions of control and 5 independent activations. Of course this is just theory.

I borrowed STEIM’s Manta device the following day and linked it up to my most recent performance setup, and this worked very successfully, but did not have continuous xy control.

Two more artist talks led to various more philosophical and practical questions. From Wouter Jaspers:

• How can one survive as a practising experimental artist? (The answer was quite simple: tour and network).

And from Robert van Heumen there were more esoteric questions:

• What is the ethical justification for the violence done to a performer through live sampling? – this led directly from a discussion about the prevalence of the ‘echo’ effect of sampling and manipulating a player, and the effects that has on a performance.
• Why is pre-recording samples regarded as cheating? – this has something to do with a conflagration of a desire to live sample and an animosity towards simply re-playing samples.

My thoughts on these questions led to a desire for some sort of hybrid electro-acoustic instrument that did not use synthesis, and that had the power to digitally alter its own sound qualities in a continuous and multi-dimensional way. Call this wishful thinking, but all the technologies exist for making this a reality.

The last talk (by Laura Carmichael) centred on theatrics and autonomous setup for performance of existing contemporary works. This brought to mind STEIM’s expertise in coaching performance practice, and my lack of training and ability in this area. The academic performance practice in relation to current performance theatrics was also discussed, and we talked about the gaping abyss between ‘vanilla’ concert performance – that of traditional stage-based, coat-tail-wearing symphonic players – and contemporary music staging, verging on the theatrical, saturated with multimedia.

This Orientation represented an exploration of the possibilities available here at STEIM, the diversity of the issues explored and the depth of expertise available. It has stimulated my curiosity, piqued my interest and is motivating me to engage fully in realising a theoretical instrument in reality. Call it the making of a meta-instrument.

This project sought to generate a new experimental piece for Yamaha Disklavier + pianist (me!).  Hugo Morales Murguia was commissioned by the Conlon Foundation at my suggestion, as his composing always seeks to take a new approach to an instrument and we had worked together several times before, creating other exploratory pieces for ‘extended’ piano. We worked at STEIM (where the Conlon’s Disklavier had been housed for summer – my first personal experience of a real piano being at STEIM so that was exciting!) over two collaborative residencies, to discover what the instrument could do.

The attractions of this instrument are basically that it can function independently of the performer, as a kind of player piano, but can also be played from a computer or anything that gives out MIDI.  It can also respond to live input from the pianist, taking the MIDI as something to be processed or conversed with.  Essentially Hugo created a kind of duet then – with the piano sometimes playing itself and me doing things on top of that to control another layer (eg the piano playing it’s own notes, held down, which then fed pitches into homemade speakers which I held against the strings – creating an eerie double-layered song between machine, human and the resonant acoustic qualities of a grand piano).

For me, the neatest and most poetic section was the third (there are four discrete sections of the piece in total).  Here I let the keyboard lid fall softly, revealing pressure sensors on the keys that I then used to control the intensity of very fast repeated notes the piano played itself, under the lid.  This clever use of human-as-expression and machine-as-powerful/inexhaustible showed a really intelligent use of the capabilities of the instrument.

Our work together involved both exploring the instruments capabilities but focused gradually on notation: How does one most effectively notate simple but new performance systems?  Taking this time to carefully create a score was a valuable reminder of the need to work together – composer and performer – and allowed us to use pre-existing and new notational language in a useful mix.

The performance was at Gaudeamus Muziek Week 2010 and was attended by a full house at STEIM, with presentations by Christina Oorebeek, Frank Balde and Luc Hautkamp.

Hugo:

I suppose that one of the first seductions of using such an instrument is to make it play all those things that for pianists are unachievable or ‘un-pianistic’ to realize. Thus, my first sketches where mainly focused in the performance of acrobatic and humanly impossible gestures and pitch-densities.  After a lot of speculation of the real possibilities of the disklavier and some structural planning, I finally had the chance to work physically with the instrument, a form of work that I largely enjoy. I soon confirmed the instrument was capable of reproducing all those things a pianist cannot achieve (although its possibilities of speed, responsiveness and density are to be considered). However, very soon, the native features of the instrument easily blurred all those previous interests away.  I discovered a ‘new’ instrument with its own sounds, (very different from a piano), its own limitations and a variety of control possibilities (greatly expanded by Sarah) to be explored.

In short, I opted to compose a work based on the mechanical features of the instrument, a study about the musical use of its artifacts and extensions of its control possibilities.

After viewing the past projects of STEIM-folks such as Michel Waisvisz, I was reminded of the action/tactile/gestural roots of STEIM, understanding audio as an invisible presence that can be shaped with macro-movements. Projects such as the cracklesynth are fascinating to me because of its indeterminate nature – it deals with inaccuracy and musical vocabulary in a very interesting way. The performer cannot know exactly what sounds they might produce, forcing an element of improvisation into every performance. The talks at STEIM this week have re-initiated a project I had in mind some months ago – also influenced by my own background in improvised music, my interest in automated compositional systems, sample-culture, and the work of Markus Popp (aka Oval, Microstoria etc).

The idea is constructing a kind of sequencer using a modified turntable and prepared vinyl records. By illuminating a record from below with a bright LED attached to the arm of the turntable, and attaching an LDR directly underneath, one can compositionally program a record by piercing holes in the vinyl.  As the prepared record rotates, the LDRs respond to the flashes of light that pass through the holes, and control a series of oscillators connected to an audio output. Think of a player piano’s paper rolls – but circular, and loop-based. It would be possible to control multiple oscillators off the one record by setting up a series of LEDs and LDRs, and making holes in the vinyl at set radii. By the nature of the compositional process the musician is forced to think about musical ideas as short, repetitive fragments, and without any exact idea of how it might sound.

I have posted a concept diagram/short blog post about the work here.

Instruments, Society

• What is an Instrument?
• Is it important for artists to be involved with the instrumental technology?
• Do art institutions promote an idea or aesthetic, and to what degree?
• What is the role of the social body in the idea, funding, creation, practice and reproduction of individuals’ artistic expressions and aesthetic endeavors?
• Can performance be an expression of social responsibility, identifying the importance of others in the creative process?
• Is instrumentation a connective tissue between the Creator and its Creations?
• What is the connective tissue between the Creator and its immediate Society?

The Idea and The Real

• Is it rewarding? (project, music, process, etc.)
• What is the relevance?
• How do you find voice? voicings?
• How do you get inside the now, the sound, the object?
• What do you do when there is no Idea on stage? (have options)
• How can emotional expression be preserved in a quantized environment?
• Does sound have to be eventually analog to reach us?

Erich Steiger
http://www.antilog.org

The Falcon allows you to move it’s grip around in three dimensions, but what makes it particularly interesting is that it can also exert fairly powerful forces back on your hand. This makes the mapping layer in the software rather more involved than it is in non-haptic devices as the data generated by the controller can influence both sound and physical forces.

I have chosen to deal with this problem by creating phyisical metaphors for the control – where the controller affects a simulated physical system. I have therefore been primarily concerned with two mapping layers: from the controller to the physical model and from the model to the forces on the controller. The ones I have developed so far are:

– A wheel that can be turned. The momentum of the wheel can be felt as resistance if you push in the opposite direction or as an assisting force if you push in the same direction. With certain settings, once some momentum has been generated you can leave the controller to turn itself due to the forces on it. See the video examples below.

– A 3D grid that locks your hand into discreet cells. The force with which this happens can be varied to make it easier or harder to move between cells. The 3 dimensions of the grid can be also be individually altered (n x m x p). See the video examples below.

– A string model. 4 virtual strings are set up and positioned along the z axis. When they are struck, the falcon exerts a force away from the string bouncing your hand back.

I now hope to develop some instruments based on these models, which will mean grappling with a third mapping layer: from the model to the sound engine. It would also be interesting to try alternative mapping setups, such as analysing the audio produced and using that to determine the forces on the controller.

Video examples:

– 3D grid demo:

– 3D grid demo 2 (with simple audio mapping):

– Winding wheel example:

________________

On another note, I have also begun developing a patch that allows you to ‘feel’ a waveform by running your hand along it, and having your hand displaced vertically by the amplitude of the audio file at that point (this idea was suggested by Michael Young). This can also be expanded by allowing you to scan for different frequencies. For example, if set to 100 Hz it displaces your hand according to the amplitude of the sound file within a certain bandwidth around that frequency. As there are two dimensions to play with – y and z if the waveform is spread over the x-axis – two different frequencies can be scanned at once.

________________

I was also happy to present some of my past work on the Feedback Joypad instrument and give a short performance with it. More info at tommudd.co.uk/projects/joypad.htm

or for more info on me generally:

tommudd.co.uk

SO… What exactly is a “Live Cinema” performance?

Thanks to STEIM (and an exquisite crew of supporting artists) I was able to produce Orpheus2010 during an intense five day residency at the end of June 2010.

Orpheus2010 from husc on Vimeo.

In July I spent two weeks at STEIM developing some early concepts for a new sound-theatre work called BOTCH.  The work will premiere in New York City in 2013 so there’s a lot of time to experiment with different ideas.  Basically I’m interested in finding interesting relationships between people and machines that highlight our contemporary co-dependence while finding what is is distinct about the human half of the equation.  It seemed to me that working with STEIM technology would be a good way to experiment with this since the institution is so involved with interface.

New York singer / performer Christina Campanella joined me for the second week and we explored a number of ways to use LiSA with JunXion.  We used Wii remotes as the main interface and experimented with the built in video tracking in JunXion.  Generally speaking we were not trying to do anything fancy.  In fact, we were trying to find the simplest ways to demonstrate a theatrical relationship between voice and machine.  For example, we spent a few days building a basic sampler that would record Christina’s voice and allow her, using the remote, to scan forward and backwards through the recording, and then punch in a new recording at various points.  I was interested in what happens when the sound recorded is verbal information, and the manipulations that follow are aimed at the semantics of altering sequence etc…  I was thinking mostly of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in this regard.  Creating a solipsistic world where a single performer on stage is accompanied by her recordings.  The recorded voice was output to a small speaker, which made it almost come alive.  Like a weird little pet droid…

In BOTCH each vignette or section operates as a self contained module, and the directions for what the performers do is notated as an algorithm, rather than a conventional score or script.  And so the performance directions for this work are written in a kind of pseudo computer code with if/then statements, loops, and random numbers generated by coin tosses.  By having the humans on stage operating according to the logic of a computer brings out a nice tension between what is human and what is machinic.

Another experiment we tried involved Christina and myself on opposite ends of the room, listening to a small speaker.  The speaker would play back the voice of the other performer on a time delay, and each of us had to try to mimic what we heard in real-time.  This quickly devolved as it’s an impossible task, though an abstract musicality emerged.  After the actual verbal information is lost, the melodic and rhythmic aspects of the voice become the focus.  Though this is quite a simple idea, it would be really difficult to pull off using Ableton Live or sequencing software.  Also, being able to easily integrate the Wii remotes made it possible for the performers to control everything rather than a sound operator, which in a piece like this is essential.

I’d used Max/MSP in the past to create theatre performance systems, but since my main interest is capturing live recordings and immediately manipulating them, LiSA offered all the possibilities I needed, and after an initial learning curve I was able to quickly prototype ideas. We also worked with more advanced ideas, such as using the 3-D axis control afforded by the remotes, resampling techniques, and video tracking to effect a range of parameters, and I’m not sure where that will lead.

On the last day of the residency we had an open studio presentation, where we showed about 20 minutes to an audience.  These were really just the initial sketches for four different sections – each one investigating a different relation between voice and the electronics.  Afterwards we had a good question / answer session.  One thing that really stands out is how engaged the audience was in responding to the work.  I find QA sessions in the U.S. to be mostly perfunctory, but here both the STEIM staff and the other audience members really dug in and gave us constructive feedback and a good discussion came out of it.

Overall this was an excellent experience at STEIM, and I feel that the work we did here will be important for the future of our piece.  I’m grateful to everyone at STEIM who offered technical help, artistic advice, and a conducive atmosphere for making this work.  Thanks also to the Netherland-America Foundation for funding our travel to Amsterdam.

My name is Freeka Tet and I am currently active in different projects aka Sgure, Gazormass, Chlorgeschlecht, and MAxibacon.
First I want to say thanks to all the Steim gang, especially Jun, Frank, and Taku.
Second I want to apology for my english ( yes i am french )

Ok so basically I was resident at STEIM begining of April 2010 for 2 things, hacking the Sixaxis, and build a glove with different sensors on it to replace the Wiimote I am currently using during my performance.

Sixaxis Hack ///////////

I am using Max/MSP on OS X and I finally found a way to get the Sixaxis/PS3 gamepad working thru bluetooth on my machine, I found a high interest on it, as this gamepad have accelerometers and built-in battery and the more important every buttons are pressure sensitive giving me a value between 0 and 255 and all this for less than 50 euro …
What I wanted to do is to change the ergonomy of this device to something I could use more easily for my own show but has we had a lack of time and that everybody was really busy, we worked on my second project instead.
(the sixaxis hack will happen for sure I am working on it on my side..)

Glove ///////

So here is what we worked on with Jun.
A glove with
- 1 accelerometer
- 2 pressures sensors
- 9 reed switchs ( you activate them with a magnet and don’t need to push any buttons )
- everything is a plug to an arduino/funnel board and communicate thru 2 wireless xbee modules.
Then I use Junxion to send all these data to Max/MSP via OSC.

We had only 4 days to do it, but we finally did it! and its working like a charm… but for some reasons, I don’t use it yet in my performances. Kind of weird but this residency made me learn so much about my artistic direction and now I know that I feel better by hacking some popular already existing devices than building a controller from the scratch. This glove is surprising me by his sensivity and precision but its actually too much! And I feel way more comfortable with my Wiimote (we actually had the time to change the wiimote as well, so I have now 2 extras buttons that are just perfect !)

During the residency, I had the time to work a bit on my toothbrush project, I did work on an arduino board, and use the capacitive sensing idea to trig different sampler and effects, thanks a lot Jun for helping me on this !!

This is just a quick resume of what happened, I probably will write more details about it later.

http://www.halftheory.com/sgure

http://www.myspace.com/sgure

http://www.myspace.com/gazormass

http://www.myspace.com/chlorgeschlecht

http://www.myspace.com/maxibacon

My research revolves quite tightly around my two major interests, guitars and DIY electronic musical instruments. Naturally, as both a guitarist and an electronic musician, I do not want to separate or isolate either element; I wish to marry the two together physically and audibly for both performance and composition.

My MA thesis reflects this desire:

The Integration of Guitar Performance and Live Electronics: the Circuit Bent Guitar

Throughout the degree, I have been researching electronic modifications to the traditional electric guitar in order to establish the scope of existing work. My research has lead me to experiment with the audible and gestural capabilities of guitar electronics and guitar FX pedals. This has involved the modification and adaptation of guitar parts and circuitry using ‘circuit bending’ techniques to construct small feedback generating instruments. See below:

My final project, the Circuit Bent Guitar, which is still currently under construction, is essentially an extension of these initial experimentations. However, the circuit bent FX pedals are housed inside the body of the guitar with various pots, switches and body contacts located on the guitar scratch plate to control them.

My time at STEIM was an amazing experience and truly inspiring. I learnt a lot about STEIM´s technology and its endless possibilities, which generated numerous ideas for future projects. Through the lectures I learnt even more about areas that I had previously researched, including The Crackle Guitar project by Bertram Dhellemmes and Daniel Schorno and also the hybrid electronic musical instruments of Bert Bongers.

If I had to sum up my STEIM experience in one sentence, I would reference something that Takuro Mizuta Lippit, the artistic director at STEIM, quoted in his presentation, “making music by playing music”. I think this is often forgotten when making electronic music and it has stuck with me, making me rethink my own approach to composition.

Many thanks to everyone at STEIM for such a great experience, hope to reconnect in the future at some point.

As usual I am very grateful to everyone at STEIM for this continuing residency. It makes things possible in days which would take months and other things which would never happen at all without STEIM’s support and influence.

On this visit we replaced one of the Wiimotes was using with a replacement handset and an arduino board: it has more and better sensors, a more reliable , tiny rechargeable batteries, it is more ergonomic. It took a couple of days to convert/recreate the programming. We ran out of time on this before thinking creatively about what new possibilities having two of these instead. But yet again I have the feeling it is again opening up the scope of what is possible. Next time we will replace the second handset reprogram JunXion.

Unanswered questions arising:

Could the XY (and potentially Z) sensors from the Lightning be replaced? Hack the existing transmitter/receivers or replace them. I would like a more compact system.

Visual feedback? It would be nice to have the current LiSa buffer represented in text form on an LCD. I also wonder if some of the controllers could be represented. As the system gets more complex I sometimes need to check the status of 4 different continuous controllers – I’m not sure how this could be done – perhaps a camera and screen could be combined in some way?

Related point: Ideally it would be nice to have LiSa/junXion running in an independent box, like an i-phone which could also function as infra-red camera and display- and get rid of the laptop completely – I guess the technology is not there for that yet but it is an interesting long term goal.

Vibration feedback to give an indication of when the edges of spatial regions are close.

Onwards and upwards!

Here is our newly designed sound Box, much inspired by the legendary Crackle Synthesizer, introducing: The Sonas Inflecto.

For more info on our project go to www.saltonsink.com.

The author and WiGi at the Next Festival Bratislava 2009. Photo © Judith Goodman.

Getting WiGi with It:

Performing and Programming with an Infrared Gestural Instrument: A Case Study

by Richard Scott

Abstract

I offer an account of working with the Buchla Lightning MIDI controller and of the expansion of the instrument into the “WiGi” system, using Nintendo Wii-motes, JunXion and LiSa software, and made with the support and collaboration of STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music). I will emphasise my background as an instrumentalist and consider some of its practical consequences for the project. I outline the various stages of development which have led to an expanded, fully functional performing instrument, and highlight some of the questions and decisions which occurred over a period of five years. I consider some æsthetic and other questions which arise from the process, some limitations of the system and my plans for its future development. Finally, I outline the various functions of the current instrument, the issues of mapping, scaling, buffers and illustrate my use of it.

You can read the whole story here.

It is an artistic study in the kinetic relationships between sound, image, motion and space. It takes its inspiration from the early cinematic practices of Étienne-Jules Marey, whose work in studying and photographing movement revolutionized the way we visualize time and motion, and puts them in the contemporary perspective.

The main question of this project is the ontology of the cinematic praxis: what is contained on the audiovisual material that allows the cinematic experience to be constructed? How is the narrative material developing? Is modern human differs in attention? How to present the material to the modern audience?

The soundscape of sober electronics promotes the image and brings the sound and time dimension to the visual aspect. The nostalgic and familiar sounds of piano bridge the modern and old sounds from the early cinematic world into the modern world.

Our goal is to explore the audiovisual phenomena form the perspective of emergence much like the image emerges onto the eye’s retina. The spectator is provided with an audio-visual objects that are observed by the virtual camera’s eye. This observation gives a dynamic perspective in time and space and allows the creation of narrative of sound, image, motion and space as an individual experience.

The inspirations of the project are the early cinematic practices of Étienne-Jules Marey and the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. The deep technical limitations they faced and the creative solutions they came up with are a start point for the creative techniques that are used in this project.

We wanted to work in a supportive and stimulating environment, and STEIM was a perfect place for that. The best aspect was the support from Nico and his attentiveness to our needs.

The project was presented at STEIM, as well as during ‘SPOR’ festival in Aarhus (Denmark).

The subsequent performances are going to happen during Gaudeamus festival this year on September 10th and during Musica Electronica Nova Festival in Poland in May 2011.

While the tracking was more sensitive in the dark gallery space in Antwerp, because the light source was more focused (as opposed to the 4 theatre lights in Amiens ). The visual impact of the space was less impressive and therefore in some way there was less dialogue between the space and the sound.

In both cases one thing I’ve realised from the installation is to keep things very simple. In the art world as opposed to the music world, an audience is not used to sound abstraction, and need as much help as possible in terms of representational material. One also does not have a captive audience, and what that means for the interactivity is that  one has to look for the most transparent cause and effects of the movement while maintaining some kind of narrativite engagement to keep the audience in the space.

this was a real eye-opener for me about translating ideas from the concert hall to the gallery..

The public enters one person at a time into a dark neutral space in which they experience the sensation of literally walking through debris of frozen sound. One stumbles on a landscape of frozen voices, barely recognizable shards of 1970′s pop music, static bird song, broken pulses of disco music reduced to an almost Geiger like clicking, resonances of invisible spaces. These imaginary spaces are mapped onto a topography of intersecting voices and sounds, which slowly transform over time.

Technically this is achieved by using a video camera which tracks the movements of the audience so that the XY position is mapped directly onto the frozen moment of the sound heard back in the space or in the headphones. The sound is granulated and the position of the person in the space determines which moment of time is heard.

Time becomes space.

This installation was developed out of the Suspended Spaces project on visiting the ghost town of Varosha in Northern Cyprus. I have a particular personal connection with Varosha, as it is the location of my earliest memory. We were on holiday there at the time of the invasion in July 1974. I was 4 years old. I remember hearing sirens and running into the basement of a hotel, where we spent the day with my brother, whose birthday it was that day, drawing pictures on the floor with the chalk that was being dislocated form the limestone walls by the bombing going on outside.

Returning there again in 2008 and seeing from the outside the shells of these hotels, wondering if I could recognize the hotel we were staying in, wondering if we would have left any clothes or toys in the rush of evacuation that would still be lying there somewhere under dunes of sand. Knowing that my first memory comes from the day that time froze there, gave me a strong sense of looking at the transitory facade of one’s own memory, as if it was a granulated landscape one could walk through. The potential human narratives of a moment in time, frozen and left to nature to transform into her own supreme concept.

The following illustrations try to present visually the experience of the installation, the sense of walking through the fragments of voices, mostly of early 70′s pop music. As a way of mirroring the topography of voices that inhabit the space, text is photo-shopped onto photographs of the installation in a version that was presented at Time Canvas at the M HKA (Antwerp) on the 7th March 2010. Here the installation was presented in the headphone version. The preceding photograph is from the presentation at the Maison de la Culture (Amiens), where the space was delineated by theatre lights, and the sound was directly heard in that space.

Acknowledgements:

Software for the project was developed at STEIM (Amsterdam). Thank you to Frank Baldé and Byungjun Kwon for technical assistance. Ayelet Harpaz for provding her voice. Brent Klinkum, Daniel LÊ, Françoise Parfait and the others from the Suspended Space team for making this project happen, and the technical team in Maison de La Culture d’Amiens for their help in putting up the piece. Pauline Jurado for permission to use her photograph of the installation in Amiens.  Champ d’Action for programming it at Time Canvas at the M HKA (Antwerp).

Homebuild triggers -> chip from old IBM PS/2 keyboard -> Gameboy link cable -> Gameboy running LSDJ playing backgroud beat + solo-synth controlled by skaters…

video

Robert van Heumen directed our workshop and his presentations were really interesting and clear. We also had presentations by some of the Steim staff that included –Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Nico Bes, Frank Baldé, and Daniel Schorno. Here we had the opportunity to hear about their individual work – from software development to live interactive performance.

I had been looking a sensor to integrate with my violin/electronics work. Daniel Schorno offered to help me with this and we talked about the options for my building a sensor, including the type of sensor and its placement. We decided to build something simple from a Wii controller. Daniel broke apart the Wii, encased the circuit board, and attached a USB to it. I decided to have it placed on my wrist as opposed to the frog of my bow, as it seems it will invite a more fluid way of interaction. Currently, I am working on integrating the sensor into my Max/MSP patch.

While I knew we would be learning about liSa, JunXion and other Steim products, overall, the Orientation Workshop exceeded my expectations with the presentation we received and the assistance I had with the sensor. My week at Steim was also filled with interesting conversation with artists from a number of places in the world. It was a great place to exchange ideas, giving me inspiration and ideas for the next steps forward. Thanks to everyone at Steim for a great week and your support.

Thea Farhadian / www.theafarhadian.com

The first performance with our new limb-mounted Wiimotes instrument which we’re calling ‘Gaia’ took place in the Blue Room of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam last Friday 7th May. Heartfelt thanks are due to Jos Zwannenburg for going the extra mile and making this possible. Videos of the 3 pieces have now been uploaded to YouTube:

Threshold 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTJzSWHL1rc

Threshold 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJl3lxdj9WM

Threshold 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NtGf1zjlk

The event had an extra degree of complexity, over and beyond that of our own making,  because our performance was interpolated with live episodes from Kingston University in London, mainly featuring chamber choir, the whole thing being up-linked and broadcast on the Web as a multi-media opera “The Hero’s Journey”. I am not certain how well our sound and picture was streamed as there seemed to be some issues with the server right up to the last minute. But that was out of my hands and my focus was solely on getting a good sound and everything working for Nina Silvert in the Blue Room. The 3 short pieces went very well and I felt Nina found new subtleties and fluidity within the set-ups which are technically quite complex. She has a lot to remember but I felt that the technology was not in the foreground here, as she continues to develop an increasingly intuitive relationship with the instrument.

Technically, I was very pleased that there were no issues with the Bluetooth rig at all and all 4 Wiimotes behaved themselves..! This was something of a relief after our own earlier issues with Bluetooth (and the sharp intake of breath from more experienced Wii-moters, which I’d noticed whenever I’d brought up the subject of reliability in performance) . In fact during the sound-check I walked right round the Blue Room, including the high balcony, checking the effective range of the Wii’s pairing and was pleasantly surprised that the connection remained. I suppose I’m tempting fate for next time by saying this..

This was a completely new area of performance practice for both of us (I’d never worked with accelerometers, JunXion or wireless systems before this) and I feel we’ve achieved a fair amount in quite a short time, learned a lot and are now packed with ideas about where we can make improvements and create new work!

A few words about the concept in these 3 pieces. The sound material had to include the vocal aria from Villa Lobos’ popular “Bachianas Brasieleras No.5″. This is because the whole multi-media work including the London elements was based on the emergence of this tune. It did lead us to make certain decisions which we probably wouldn’t have made if our performance was “free-standing” so to speak; but on the other hand it helped us make some basic decisions early on – specifically, that the pieces would use almost entirely vocal sounds – mostly Nina’s own in Thresholds 1 and 2 changing to that of Kingston student Hannah Rose Tristram in Threshold  3. So quite early on we had the idea that the pieces would ‘reconstruct’ the popular aria from fragments of vocal tone, like someone struggling to find a voice again after some catastrophic breakdown . The process ends with us hearing the complete melody, but still a bit dislocated, achieved by Nina ‘stepping through’ the phrases with her left arm. Many thanks to Frank Balde at STEIM for explaining how to make JunXion do that!

The 4 wiimotes – one per arm and leg – are conditioned by JunXion to apply a host of transformations to sound files which reside in an Ableton Live set. As well as the parameters and mix of  transformations on these files (granular delays, freeze reverbs) there is also the opportunity for Nina to interact directly with a longer pre-recorded sequence running through each track, sometimes wrestling  it into mangled distortion before letting it emerge (Threshold 2) or more directly gating the signal, as with the  (literally!)  punch-in/out technique for the drones in Threhold 3.

By the way, the “Thesholds” are so named because they represent  the 3 increasingly difficult challenges which Gaia has to meet and cross, within the 12 stages of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. The other 9 stages were created and transmitted live from Kingston University (songs and choral pieces) and seen and heard by the Amsterdam audience on a screen, between our pieces.

In the next blog entry I’ll summarise how the necessary methods and techniques of JunXion dveloped during my mentoring sessions in 2 short residencies at STEIM; going to Bluetooth hell and back; how Nina Silvert and I found our collaborative path, and how this instrument will develop from here.

Walter

DUO X (Laura Carmichael, clarinet and Naomi Sato, saxophone/sho) worked on a new phase of our staged concert program “Urban Doldrums” which incorporates live electronics and video.

During our STEIM residency our aim was to stage our concert program, integrating new wireless controllers (TouchOSC on the iPhone) into our performance practice, and to rehearse and fully test six pieces of electro-acoustic music being coordinated by a new “master patch” in MAX/msp, and to test test test all the necessary equipment in the four-channel environment. We worked in Studio 3, where we had plenty of space to simulate a staged environment, including using the projector for rehearsing with video as well as audio.

Our goal was to get the technology working to the point where it is almost invisible or un-noticed by the audience, so we can again bring the focus to the instrumental performer, the sound and visual aspects of performance. By integrating the controllers into our program of electro-acoustic music, we eliminated technical set-up changes between the pieces we perform, have more control within some of the pieces in which we improvise, and are thus not tied us to standing at the computer or interrupting the flow of the performance to accommodate technical demands.

Efficency of set-up:
We needed to streamline our set-up from one which required the assistance of two technicians during a performance and about eight hours of sound checking, to a set-up we could use completely independently and set up and sound check within two hours, for the purposes of touring. Prior to this phase of our work, we simply could not perform in a lot of venues because the technical demands of the program were too much, and there were not the personnel/support/time available at many venues.

Our expectations were to use a new “Master Patch” in MAX/msp that would control all six separate compositions and their accompanying video, start and stop them, allow for adjustment of levels, and trigger soundscapes that are in between the pieces. Each individual piece has its own patch, and previously we had to open and close each one, and each one had to be mixed or adjusted manually. We needed two technicians helping us to run the sound and build a set-up. We also did not have all the equipment we needed– different pieces required separate audio interfaces and computers. All of this needed to be standardized, simplified and made to fit our equipment and work 100% reliably.

MAX/msp programmer Luc van Weelden made the patch for us. Here you can see a two minute video describing the interface between the iPhone TouchOSC application, MAX, and a couple of examples of how we used it in performance:

Our expectations were fully met.
We started the residency with a beta version of the set-up, and during the residency we fully tested and tweaked it.

Now with the MAX/msp Master Patch and the TouchOSC on the the iPhone as a wireless controller, the set up is standardized, and from our perspective as performers (end users), it is fast and reliable. Everything is run off of one laptop (except for the piece which is designed to use two computers in a LAN). We can build the whole set up ourselves and perform without any additional personnel/engineer if necessary.

We achieved our goal to get used to running the whole program in this new environment— we were able to identify and solve places where the musical and theatrical flow was interrupted because of technical difficulties. In other words, we no longer need to have the choices of timing be dictated by technical issues; the technical aspects support the musical and theatrical ‘story’ rather than dictating it.

Additionally, we also achieved something we had not anticipated, namely we developed, tested and standardized our own protocol for building the set-up on tour:
We “practiced” tearing down and setting up our equipment from scratch several times, getting faster at it, and noting small details that became essential in producing reliable and repeatable results. In the process we developed a solid check-list and protocols for sound checks, which we have applied since. For example, becoming certain of exactly what order in which to open and set-up certain patches, build networks and change computer settings and equipment, so that it works reliably and is efficient.

In February 2010 this program was performed at the ‘Experimental Sound, Art & Performance Festival 2010′ in Tokyo Wonder Site, and at Theater Kikker in Utrecht.

Our performance won a prize at the Festival in Tokyo, for innovation and quality of performance. We have been invited to return for a feature concert in the next season.

We will continue performing this program for audiences in Europe, Japan and North America in the next season, both on contemporary music festivals and adventurous music series.

The simulation of the entire performance set up, with video and in a four-channel audio environment was crucial for our work. We found a few technical problems with our audio set-up and the programming, getting everything to work in the exact set-up we would use in concerts. The fact that we had access to very good audio equipment meant that we could accurately hear and see our results, and adjust accordingly.
We also discovered several small details of practical solutions regarding our interface with the computers and controller that were crucial (see list below). All of this was solved during the residency period.

YOU CAN SEE HERE A TRAILER OF THE FINISHED PERFORMANCE on VIMEO: http://www.vimeo.com/10964989

This piece will be installed at city park and will be completely energy independent – using the solar power.
(Project is also part of the SolArs2010 comptetion). It is project based on something that I call “basic interactive” concept – limited and very simple input and output configuration.
I am very intersted how long it will survive…

more later…

Blog post no.1!!! Back in Amsterdam, tonight we’re giving the first performance using our recently developed ‘Gaia’ instrument, at the Music Conservatory. We’ve made three short pieces which form interludes in Kingston University London’s choral mixed-media piece taking place simultaneously here and at Kingston (and live online).

Development of the ‘Gaia’ project started in January, which has so far involved two short but fruitful trips to STEIM and many hours in my London workspace. In the February visit I had very useful mentoring and advice on both conceptual and practical issues from Robert, Daniel and Takuro. During the second visit in April I worked with Frank to really get up to speed with JunXion, finding out how to effectively condition and interpret Nina’s martial arts based movements via 4 Wii-motes (one per limb!) using Ableton Live as the audio engine. During a STEIM lunch I had further orientation from Kristina regarding the methodology of motion-sensing and the very pertinent advice “not to let her (Nina) become just an operator” which we’ve taken on board!

It’s been quite a steep learning curve and there have many technical and procedural issues to address, not least the reliability of Bluetooth.. I’m going to post some more detail soon about the development stages, retrospectively, as well as keeping the blog up to date about where things go from here. We’re looking at tonight as a great chance to get a first public airing on a project which feels full of potential. We’re over here with Ben Horwood from Kingston University whose doing the live feed tonight. Just going over to the Conservatorium now having checked out the wiis and weblink over breakfast in the STEIM guesthouse!!

More soon…
Walter

light sensitive synth

and

pencil synth

Also I am currently working on my trigger setup for an interactive audio installation to be implemented on skate ramps. The triggers are connected to a Nintendo Gameboy running LSDJ. Video to come…

Reid Dudley-Smith – Solo for Cracklebox

As I played more and more, I came to really appreciate the limitations of the box, so while I originally wanted to modify my own Cracklebox to do various extra things, I eventually decided to keep it as it is. Recently, I decided to write a simple Max/MSP patch that used some of the methods I learned at Steim to expand my solo playing.

The patch has four short buffers that allow me to record samples of the circular note patterns I play through the Cracklebox, using a footpedal to trigger the record on/off and loop on/off separately. From my experience of using LiSa on my orientation, I made the buffers in such a way that I could ‘overdub’ into them. I quickly found that the footpedal didn’t allow me enough scope to move through or alter the buffers very effectively. Once again, my experience at Steim came in very handy, and lead me to build this prototype:

As you can see, its a cunning and sophisticated combination of Cracklebox and Wii Remote joined with some rather natty Police tape. Using a handy Max external, I now have the accelerometer functions of the Wii Remote mapped to control the speed/pitch of sample playback, and a granular playhead position/width movement. I even took advice from the Wii Remote implementation in JunXion and added some range adjustment and data smoothing to get as much control out of the accelerometer as possible. The patch also has some pitch tracking to control the speed of volume swells of the samples. I’m now working on making as much of the patch as possible switchable from the Wii Remote, in order to use the footpedal as little as possible.

Once I have the patch at a point where it works as smoothly as I would like it to, I’m planning on making the Wii Remote sit more comfortably on the back of the Cracklebox, and to make the buttons easier to use with my two thumbs. Perhaps the most important thing I learned on the orientation course was how much harder it is to develop hardware than software, so I’m expecting this process to take a while yet.

I know that the people at Steim will be able to help me out with this development, and I know that they have been looking into arduino-based wireless accelerometer controllers that may actually be more suitable for a final version of this project. That said, it is important not to underestimate how handy it is that the Wii Remote is so cheap and ubiquitous, and that so many people have already developed wonderful software like JunXion to make their use as music controllers much less of a headache!

As this project is still in development, I will update the Project blog with new photos and videos in the coming weeks, and I will release the patch to download once it is completed. Watch this space!

-Reid Dudley-Smith.

reiddudleysmith.co.uk

Also, huge thanks to everyone at Steim for their help and inspiration, especially Jun, Daniel, Taku, plus the other artists in residence including Andreas Otto, Sean Winters and Tim Vets. I hope to return soon!

From an interview by Annet Dekker:

“The fairy tale of Sensitive to Pleasure tells about an artist that has created her piece for her own physical pleasure. I act as myself, the artist, dealing with the ambiguity of being in love with my own piece, a creature inside an ambisonics cube capable of revealing the sound of her body when in contact with other human beings. I created it to be pleased with but, as the creature has human-like thinking behaviors, my ideal lover has left me behind. I’m standing still outside the ambisonics cube. I become the doorkeeper of the interaction between the visitor and her. I am condemned to see a visitor entering alone and having pleasure with her without looking at it and what I get back is a very physical pain, which might be also pleasant for me; this is part of the piece. This is a reflection of an event that everybody can recognizes. And beside this human life aspect I like to transport this feeling into the artworld. Of course I’m not speaking of a lover but about my artwork. This is basically the underlying idea behind this piece.”

Below are some photos, more info on the dedicated blog: stp.nimk.nl.

The physical traces of human design and craft evident in these circuits can be thought of, to my mind, as an extension of the compositional process, and there must be a useful way of engaging with this type of (sound) design on an aesthetic level as well as a functional level. It looks like there are far easier ways of building these kinds of circuits, and in many cases you would simply use a computer instead. However, we have here material evidence of the creative music process as seen from the engineer’s perspective.

Have a look at these examples and see if they provoke any kind of aesthetic reaction:

STEIM LED display

STEIM LED display rear

And another piece of the puzzle – probably the controller for the LED display:

STEIM LED driver component side

STEIM LED driver solder side

You can see the care taken in the complementary layout of both the component sides and the solder sides of these boards, including useful patches of copper left for etching production details and info including a logo, a serial number, and the function of the board. Without much further examination, one can safely assume that the pins marked with red dots are positive voltage pins, and the ones with black dots are ground. This is one level of information communication from designer to designer, but are there others?

Is the orange colour of the connecting wires on the LED module accidental, useful or an aesthetic choice? What about the solid red resistors on the driver board? If aesthetic, what/where/who is the intended audience? Designers, engineers, performers, users, material researchers…? Is there an audience beyond the personal aesthetic of the circuit designer or was this layout just the most practical way of doing it? How does this type of sound design situate itself socially within the field of electronic music, and who do we need to acknowledge here?

Questions, questions…

i thought that persisting in updating a XIX century instrument like the traverse flute (bohem system), by processing it, instead of working with a more actual tool, could be a bit retrograde. As an example of inconvenience, for the DSP you have to accept for instance the presence of the acoustic (dry) sound of the flute which (obviously) will always be there and for me sometimes feels like showing your nudity in front of people that you don’t really want to.

But every instrument/work we saw these days (and i am quite sure every instrument), either came out as a way of dealing with a particular problem, or it was developed “thanks” to the same reason.
So yes, is not that astonishing conclusion to say that problems are what make us grow, but for now i will stay with my retro instrument and all its nuisances, and hopefully develop it (for instance with a good mapping in JunXion and a more effective sensor system) in response to my necessities.

Here a couple of examples (in mp3) recorded in Studio 2 (at Steim), yesterday and this afternoon, working on three different materials with the same form (except for the coda on the 1st piece)

flute+computer+sound card+close micing (DPA, audix)+pure data+JunXion boX+volume pedal

My expectations prior to my STEIM visit were pretty scattered. Mainly, I just wanted someone to tell me what STEIM is (or was). Other expectations were joysticks, wii remotes and motion sensors. I definitely had my fair share of the latter… But I still don’t know what STEIM is (or was) and, to tell the truth, I’m glad that I don’t; I don’t think anybody really does (or should).

What I achieved while staying at STEIM is another story. My main goal was basically to work as much, and sleep as little, as possible. Acoustic/Electric/Analog/Digital… Hoe laat is it? Alle is altiyd lekker. Graphixxx Scores were composed late at night and then colored upon with oil pastels the following morning. A remix I’ve been constantly pondering of Wagner’s infamous Tristan und Isolde was thoroughly de-constructed as I attacked it relentlessly in Studio2 with a joystick, wii remote, and camera data (thanks to Frank Balde’s glorious program Junxion). [Keep your eyes out for the full-length audio-visual Remix coming soon; it will be sold exclusively at designated fritteurs throughout Europe] Throw in a few late night improvised smooth-jazz sessions with fellow STEIM-travelers and you’ve got a bona-fide schmorgesborg.

The point is that STEIM is an extremely excellent place to get a lot done<–

Also, public thanks to Tim Vets for his well timed help with “algorithmic node logic.”
To Reed for his glorious and insightful comments about Raaijmaakers’ process based art practices. And to everybody that is STEIM… Robert, Frank, Daniel, Jan-Bas Bollen, Wouter Snoei, Kristina, Taku, Nico… Anybody that has, does, or will work there in the future.

Sean Winters
April 2, 2010

(And respect to Sean Williams for, well, being named Sean Williams)

Since I’m a bit of a scavenger anyway, I was happy as a pig in s*** digging aound amongst old bits of circuit boards, stepped switches, transformers etc. Some interesting finds included two Aries 300 modular synth modules – the AR-314 VCF (12dB/oct low-pass) and the AR-327 Multimode Filter. A capacitor on the AR-314 had made a mess but otherwise the units look in excellent condition.

Other bits included a bare PCB labelled STEIM 1997 with the designer’s name and each sector’s function nicely silk-screened onto the surface. Maybe not much use now, but imagine how valuable such an object would be to a musicologist, organologist or cultural historian 25 years from now!

Following on from my last post about learing from the past it is no surprise that STEIM, like many other organisations, does not have the resources to sort out all the bits of hardware and to archive all of the unique and amazing work that has been produced here by hardware designers. For me, the musical performance or compositional act extends right back to include the hardware designer as a fundamentally important agent in the process, so having a look inside these boxes is almost like reading the marginalia on a score or treatise.

Yet STEIM is fully active and needs to be able to make things now without worrying too much about saving broken circuit boards from prototypes that perhaps never worked. So often, the only technical documentation is probably the actual hardware that the performer takes away with them to perform with, and the other versions of hardware get recycled, or sit around gathering dust for years until the space is needed by some other piece of equipment.

What can be done with all this stuff? A museum is out of the question since the really successful products would almost all be out in the world, and the philosophy seems to be to make things to be used, not to be put in glass cases. This suggests a maintenance program to fix what is broken and to maintain what is useful, yet who will use this older technology – to whom is it useful or of value? Why use precious resources to preserve things that may not be used or usable?

The parallel with Early Music Studies is clear. When people (like me) start to show an interest in repertoire of early electronic music, one of the most important areas is that concerning the hardware – the tools used to produce the sounds – both timbrally and performatively. Unlike Early Music, we are in a priviledged position of having access to some of these early electronic instruments, but for how long?

I would be interested to hear from anybody with any ideas about what sort of things should be preserved (where to draw the line) and how to archive it, display it, or make it available for research, or even if any of this would be a worthwhile use of resources.

At the moment I am working with the Novint Falcon 3D haptic games controller and the libnifalcon drivers to try to develop an instrument that will allow intimate and expressive control of digital parameters, where virtual spaces and textures can be created to offer physical feedback to the performer. From what I’ve seen so far in my short time here, I’m keen to experiment with JunXion’s extensive mapping capabilities for organizing input data from the Falcon and jumping between different virtual spaces.

I’m also keen to develop ways of performing with (prepared) piano and electronics that utilize these ideas to allow greater control of digital parameters without interrupting the actual ‘playing’ of the instrument. Up until now this has been purely by analysis techniques, so-called ‘machine listening’, but this must either involve a structured preconceived composition, or a highly sophisticated intelligent system. The projects and ideas that I have seen at STEIM so far have certainly highlighted many possibilities for solving this problem and I’m looking forward to developing some of the ideas that have been discussed over the past few days.

On a lighter note, I spent an evening with the lovely VCS3. Here’s a gratuitous excerpt:  mango putney

www.laurensarahhayes.com

In the recent version this system consists of one Nunchuck sensor (a part of the WiiMote) attached to the frog of my bow, one MIDI controller and one computer. The sensor’s movement data is translated to MIDI through junXion and allows for manipulation of an audio delay setup in Ableton Live (using six copies of the fantastic OhmBoyz Delay) and LiSa.

The general approach is to record the cello sound into the buffer and play it back immediately, while the x and y movements of the bow control delay feedback and time.

In my studio compositions I have always looked out for sounds like drum rolls, made of any other sound material. Playing sounds like drawing dots and lines, for the creation of beat structures. With “Fello” these kinds sounds can be played directly. It’s fun and inspiration!

Additionally to the accelerometer sensor on the bow I use a BCR2000 MIDI controller plus two foot switches to choose the midi channel(s) on which the bow data shall be sent. The function of the bow interface can change through a quick touch of a button or pedal.

Last year I have played “Fello” in the dance performance “()else” by Victoria Hauke from Hamburg, which has taken me even to a dance festival in India in November. There I met with DJ Prashanth from Hyderabad, who plays traditional Indian percussion sounds through a turntable/ laptop setup. For late 2010 we are planning a tour through India and Sri Lanka with support of the Goethe Institute.

As preparation for this tour, I spent some time re-working my junXion configuration. It’s clean and stable now, simpler than before but with a few more options: Robert helped me taking a closer look at LiSa and using it additionally to Ableton, which works well and sounds really good. Thanks Robert!

Byung-Jun Kwon made a backup sensor for me, very beautiful! Jun is great support. His advice is to switch to another sensor-system in the near future, as the WiiMote’s accelerometer can be unreliable when too much bluetooth is around. We’ll hopefully do this in summer.

For the last three days of my residency, Axel Kochmeier (DJ akaak) joined me in the studio.
We will play a duo show called “Sutsche & Fello” in Berlin’s awesome Berghain Club on April 14th. He plays and mixes Techno Maxis pitched down to 33rpm. Here’s a video snippet of our rehearsal:

And here’s a two minute track which I composed only with “Fello” and a metal pipe:

19century-accidents by springintgut

(For previous ideas and versions of “Fello” – made in PD together with Florian Grote – look here).

Despite a lack of functioning spring reverb, and several controls being way off their expected operating range I managed to settle in nicely with it over two two and a half hour improvisation sessions, firstly with Martin Parker, Owen Green and Lauren Hayes, and subsequently with the above plus Yolande Uriz and Thorbjørn Nyander Poulsen.

Having only spent 2 hours with a VCS3 before I was still in my comfort zone and the familiar feel of direct contact with electronics via knobs, pins, switches and a joystick is such an easy way of channeling existing musical experience that it was no trouble to be as expressive as I wanted with this new instrument.

What is great is that you can constantly reconfigure the patch and sensitivities of the controls very quickly so you can respond to the other performers in no time. Tristram Cary spent an awful lot of time and effort designing the VCS3 interface and its ease of use  os testimony to this great design. Components can be upgraded  to give more/less resistance, more/less turns etc. and it is this level of detail in selecting and implementing the appropriate components that I am focusing on with my own designs.

Check Martin Parker’s blog for links to the recordings of our first two sessions.

Some of the discussion so far has related performance with design. Here’s a short video of me performing the design/manufacture process of the TRK:

TRK soldering from Sean Williams on Vimeo.

So I’m here at STEIM to get a clearer idea of better ways to approach my design for performance by talking to people, learning about what already works, discussing ideas and playing music with new people.

sbkw.net

Present were:
Owen Green – DPA and laptop
Lauren Hayes – mic and laptop
Martin Parker -DPA and laptop
Thorbjørn Nyander Poulsen – gameboys and laptop
Yolande Uriz – flute and laptop
Sean Williams – joystick and laptop / VCS3

Ode to Sextant
Have we started yet?
Master System
Short, Sweet
Beetles and Chips
TVmovie
Frittata
Grimula

a documentation video of Fishing for Sound can be seen here

Fishing for Sound at Paradiso

First

Second

Third

Fourth

Not sure that I’m overflowing with critical insights about these yet, save for the fact that a) I over-play (I must have been excited) b) We laptoppers trod on eachother’s sonic toes somewhat (mea culpa, in this second clip I muddied the waters by abandoning the mic and starting to use samples) and c) conqseuently there’s a lack of consistent character to much of what I contributed.

Whilst here I’m going to do some much deferred work on honing some techniques with this. I’ve been looking recently at an implementation for Max/MSP of empirical mode decomposition by Doug Van Nort and Kyle McDonald as a way of extracting audibly relevant features at different time scales. This would have an immediate place in a number of forthcoming projects, including decomposing room ambiences, driving sample manipulations partly from the activities of an MC, and setting up schemes for allowing instrumental coplayers to steer (or at least influence in a scrutable way) live electronics from their playing. Immediately though, I’m going to look at what I can do with this and vocal gestures, as a continuation of a recently discovered penchant for doing sub-Phil Minton style squawking and yelping.

Those present:

Owen Green
Lauren Hayes
Martin Parker
Sean Williams

Below are rough edits from some of the improvisations we performed together after some fine Riesling and a pork and spinach dinner cooked by Owen.  We’re just exploring what it sounds like to play together, there are no solos and there is little genuine space but we were semi-deliberately concentrating on the sonority of the four voices together.

Smerge
A blurry but rhythmic improvisation performed in studio 2 at STEIM on the 30th March. Sean Williams – VCS3, Owen Green – Laptop and DPA, Lauren Hayes – Laptop and samples, Martin Parker – Laptop and GruntCount

http://www.infrared.ace.ed.ac.uk/_getResource.cfm?id=18572

VeeSeeEss

A VCS3 driven improvisation performed in studio 2 at STEIM on the 30th March. Sean Williams – VCS3, Owen Green – Laptop and DPA, Lauren Hayes – Laptop and samples, Martin Parker – Laptop and GruntCount.

http://www.infrared.ace.ed.ac.uk/_getResource.cfm?id=18573

Chit Chat

Scruffy improvisation performed in studio 2 at STEIM on the 30th March. Sean Williams – VCS3, Owen Green – Laptop and DPA, Lauren Hayes – Laptop and samples, Martin Parker – Laptop and GruntCount

http://www.infrared.ace.ed.ac.uk/_getResource.cfm?id=18574

Late Lurpak

Like some butter on the turn, this is a little cheesy improvisation performed in studio 2 at STEIM on the 30th March. Sean Williams – VCS3, Owen Green – Laptop and DPA, Lauren Hayes – Laptop and samples, Martin Parker – Laptop and GruntCount.

http://www.infrared.ace.ed.ac.uk/_getResource.cfm?id=18575

Jurassic Parker

A dinosaur of an improvisation performed in studio 2 at STEIM on the 30th March. Sean Williams – VCS3, Owen Green – Laptop and DPA, Lauren Hayes – Laptop and samples, Martin Parker – Laptop and GruntCount.

http://infrared.ace.ed.ac.uk/easetest/_getResource.cfm?id=18576

Long and Boring
you guessed it by the title

http://www.infrared.ace.ed.ac.uk/_getResource.cfm?id=18577

In early April of last year, I was in Amsterdam for a few days at the end of a long tour with KRK (Matthew Ostrowski and me). I was soon to begin another long tour, this one with No Sugar, an electroacoustic duo with the wonderful and amazing Liz Allbee, and had recently nearly finished assembling our disc “Bitter Pill”, 13 tracks taken from recordings made the year before in Oakland, California. What was needed was final mixing, sequencing and mastering. I contacted Robert and he informed me that the STEIM studios were full, but that he’d set me up with monitors and a mixer in the conference room, and that was good enough for me. I was already beyond familiar with the recordings, having done an enormous amount of editing and reworking of the material, trying to make a coherent whole out of some rather disparate elements. So a simple set-up in a simple room worked out quite fine. I spent two long days in that sunny room, and came away with something that, though I couldn’t listen to it objectively at all for quite some time afterward, holds up nicely now – listening recently, I could finally actually hear it, and I think it’s good. At least, an accurate portrait of our music. Thanks again to my gracious hosts Robert and Nico, hope to see you again soon!

Both of us – Christian and Gaudenz – made a new LiSa-setup, a combination of old, often used things and new functions. This work took a long time for programming. The research of an intuitive and more functional combination between Max (as a midi-router/-generator) and LiSa was connected with the constructing of a new LiSa-setup – for our way of work, some functions in LiSa are not well working and/or not in an intuitive way of musical thoughts. So we tried to use Max to replace and extend some LiSa-functions. Some remarks about specific possibilities:

Computerkeyboard as MIDI-keyboard: The tightness of the notes is not really good, mapping it by max works better. Mapping-change is possible in Max. With the modifier-keys (shift, option and control) ther are a lot more messages possible (for example for rarely used messages like preset-change).

MIDI-processors: For using ‘amplifying current zone’, its good to have the message for selecting a region in the buffer and then changing a controller step forward-step backward. With Max, its more stable to deal with this.

And other enhancement, that works far better by controlling it via Max, is multichannel-/surround-panning. MIDI-processors and tables in a layered setup is a possible solution, a control in Max is by far more intuitive and faster done.

‘Panic’: Key-command (Esc) in LiSa – there it is like a interruption / cut of all sounds. If this function is used a lot, it seems to be sense-full to have also a ‘all note off’ message, with the effect of releases and not just cuts.

MIDI snapshot control: More ‘layers’ at the same time of a x/y-coordinate-window is very useful in the context of quadrophonic music. Christian programmed a setup in Max for just computer-based quadrophonic music. The problem with LiSa was the immense message-lists coming in by MIDI. There leads to a very remarkable slowness in the system – for the moment not solvable…

Christian worked and experimented a lot with contact (piezo) – microphones; two of them like a ‘pendular’-system with a stereo-effect. That gives results in different, chaotic working delay-times between the sound of them. Gaudenz worked on the sound-connection between his modular-synthesizer (Doepfer A-100) and LiSa.

Rehearsals with our new LiSa-setups were very interesting to find new ways of playing, trying out the new functions (and security of the programming…) and going further in refining our musical language. Also to lead us to new possibilities that the new setup has opened.

A very special and funny moment was the visit of Max Matthews at Steim: His main interest in our studio was Gaudenz’ new Mackie-mixer…

Another very inspiring thing during our stay in Amsterdam was the contact with Michael Vorfeld and Uli Böttcher (who were also at Steim for the same time). The nice contact to these other (re-)searching musicians was very interesting and inspiring.

Our concert (may 30) was a very good possibility to have the ‘reality’ of a concert-situation with our new setups. A very interested audience has given a lot of discussions about music, form and aesthetics.

Over all, these were very good, intense and inspiring days.

To do this, I had imagined going into the orientation that there would be some hardware sensors involved, perhaps adapting Wii controller sensors in some glove type of sensor system. The guqin lays flat on a table, with the left hand moving fluidly in right to left and left to right motion (there is a great amount of glissando and portamento in the fingering techniques).

One of the nice aspects working at STEIM is the relaxed and open vibe of the overall environment. It is more of a collective than hierarchical structure, at least in my interactions with the STEIM people. This was also true of the other Orientation participants. David Fodel and I worked to work up a crude proto-type by taping a Wii remote to my left hand and experimented with controlling parameters of a slightly delayed, slightly processed guqin sound. The hands on work immediately gave a tremendous amount of practical feedback as to what aspects of hand gesture would be effective in controlling what sound processing. In this context, we worked with STEIM’s JunXion software and Ableton Live. Investigating LiSa’s live sampling and buffer control/playback also produced a number of possibilities. This laid a foundation of understanding on possible design of the control sensor systems(s) for guqin, as well as possible software solutions that STEIM could offer for my guqin project.

In addition, my observation of Daniel Shorno’s hardware setup and his performance demonstration perhaps revealed to me the most interesting and promising solution. Among other controllers in his rig, light sensors in which he was able to control sound by floating his hand above beams of light seems to be the perfect solution (at least in theory) to working with control sensors and guqin. I am imagining an array of various light, infrared and ultra sound sensors, as a sort of wireless, cable-less control device that will allow me to float my right hand above the guqin as a way to manipulate live processed sound during an improvised performance. This hand motion above the guqin extends very naturally from guqin left hand technique and arm/hand motion and thus it seems to be a perfect and seamless blend of instrument technique and technology control.  This is my next trajectory of hardware investigation.

One of the most helpful parts of the STEIM Orientation for me were the presentations by other artists involved with STEIM. Watching how they set up control devices to achieve specific goals and with a variety of software provided good exposure to solutions others had arrived at in their interactions with computers and software (also with live performance). Also, the larger STEIM community was a great resource in connecting with other people who might be worth talking to regarding creative projects or hardware/software solutions. I found many times in conversations the phrase “You should really talk to . . . “ came up. This resulted in a few meeting with other artists in Amsterdam. One very good one was with Joel Ryan.  Also playing guqin while Robert Van Heuman manipulated my sound in a live improvised context provided a great number of sound manipulation and processing ideas using LiSa, as well as ideas for improvised collaborations in the future. All in all, it was a very fruitful experience, providing many avenues for further investigations, perhaps resulting in a STEIM Residency application to help realize these investigations.

Two short clips (thanks David!) of some of the collaborations are posted online:

Jeff Roberts and Robert Van Heumen: http://www.vimeo.com/9045501
Jeff Roberts and David Fodel: http://www.vimeo.com/9045683

I am particularly interested in the use of bio-data in real time media.  Until know I have experimented with two kinds of body interfaces: an EMG (electromyogram) interface  and with an EEG (electroencephalogram) interface to obtain bio-data in order to create new forms of performance on the stage or new forms of relations between machine, body and space.

As a result of these two experiments, I created two performances using real time media (Max/MSP/Jitter): Seed/Tree and INsideOUT.

Following this research of interaction in between bio data and real time media (sound and video),  I would like to explore the body- temperature and the GSR (galvanic skin response) sensors to create a new form of relation between machine and body.

As a result of this research, I would like to create an installation where the visitor’s skin and body temperature, will be measured. The values received will be transmitted to a computer and will be used to create the sound and the images that will be projected, making the visitor create his/her own environment.

I’m currently looking for information and researching about …  and I hope that soon I will have a clearly idea about the instrument I would like to built.

After orientation week, my primary goal was to continue developing my computer and turntable based system. It was also important for me to be able to discuss some issues and ideas with Dj Sniff as he uses a similar set up. My goal for this system is to develop an environment which allows me to manipulate and process samples via the turntable for performance and compositional purposes. In order to embrace this notion of computer based turntablism, I use time-coded vinyl, more specifically MsPinky, which is a time-coded vinyl system which can be used with Max/Msp. This software allowed me to gain control of audio files on the computer via the turntable but also gave me other useful information such as direction and speed of the vinyl. With this information I could control audio samples, but I could also control more minute parameters such as feedback amount in reverb or the cutoff frequency of a filter. However there was one element which was still eluding me: the process of changing samples. Prior to experimenting with this system, I had to change the samples manually on the computer which can be irritating for both the performer and audience. What I decided to explore was having a sample bank within the Max/Msp patch, from which I would be able to access a specific sample using only the turntable.

I devised a relatively simple system which operates using conditionals, in conjunction with the velocity and direction values of the vinyl. At its simplest, the sample bank consists of one buffer with three optional samples which can be read into the buffer. Moving the vinyl in a forward motion at a certain speed will increment or load the next sample into the buffer. When the maximum number of samples have been used, the system re-initialises the buffer with the first sample and the process starts again. What was important here was that I could still manipulate the records/sample without it incrementing through the samples constantly, so careful attention was needed when deciding on the threshold values to be used in the conditionals.

In terms of using the turntable as a controller to computer music instruments, this is a small but important obstacle to overcome. It is an element of the system which embraces the notion of practicing and being able to reproduce, to some extent, the same performance again and again, leaning away from improvised performances. To be able to increment to the next sample or start and stop a recording buffer using vinyl, requires the turntablist to know the threshold values, used in the system, intimately. What is evident from my research to date and from working with this patch are the gestures I use when controlling certain elements of the system. Although these gestures might change with user, I find these gestures to be an interesting characteristic of computer based turntablism.

The audio samples below include a short test run using different cymbal sounds for samples and then a longer performance which uses some field recordings and also incorporates some other elements of the patch, most notably a Csound instrument.

The premise of this project was to build a hardware unit which provides polyphonic audio (separate audio signal for each string) as well as MIDI data (pitch and velocity) for each note executed which could be utilised for mapping purposes. Such a hardware unit would allow the user to maximize CPU power for signal processing. Following on from a previous “break-out box” project, I purchased the Axon AX-50 board from Terratec (Germany) to allow for MIDI data for each note. The tracking is excellent in combination with Graphtech’s “Hexpander” MIDI interface.

Initially, I wanted to hack the board so it supported polyphonic audio and MIDI concurrently, however, the Axon board is inherently noisy and a series of the DIN pins carry a rather unfortunate mains noise rendering the board unusable for audio. So, I devised a separate power supply (9v battery) acting as a piezo amplifier, powering the Axon unit separately with an adapter. I devised a DIN splitter cable so that the Axon board is able to receive the audio derived from the guitar, whilst maintaining separate power sources, ergo eliminating the ground noise issue. My thanks to Jun Kwon for his assistance with installing a series of isolator transformer to improve the quality of Audio/MIDI data translation.

In separating the ground of the piezo amplifier from the Axon AX-50 board, one is presented with a different noise problem, whereby noise generated by MIDI data is present in the audio signals. A separate MIDI interface was tested, which reduced the noise but it did not eliminate the noise altogether. To eliminate the ground noise completely, a USB isolator may be required. This project is on-going.

Mapping Strategies

The premise of this project was to reflect pitch structure in my chosen DSP during real-time performance. I built the following patch in PD (Pure Data), in an attempt to reflect pitch structure in pre-programmed signal processing during real-time performance, which can be dictated by the chosen pitches executed by the performer while maintaining an element of improvisation. The electric guitar is inherently a multi-parameter mapped instrument. For the most part, it maintains a many to one relationship, concerning many attributes of a physical instrumental technique utilised by the performer to produce a desired sonority. It is important to maintain an approach which is conceptually clear, one that maintains musical meaning versus technical mapping.

The patch collects pitches played by the performer, then generates random index via a counter. The random index is then re-called from the [coll]. In this example MIDI note 60 (C3) is mapped to an automation clip in Ableton Live. The automation clip triggers a series of signal processes specified by the user. This example is using the built in mic on my laptop.

PD to Live – Phase 2 from Ricky Graham on Vimeo.

“Killing your Darling”

After some discussion, there is further potential to develop the patch into a more modular, versatile, and interactive performance system, which may allow the patch to operate with a greater degree of independence, encouraging the performer to engage with the system via a new performance approach, versus a learned or repetitive performance practice. I intend to develop the patch to further accommodate statistical analysis of pitch class development and additional string information, such as velocity, and note onset and offset. Thus, temporal phrasing will become an interactive part of the mapping and performance process. Other approaches include the utilisation of pick position data to trigger appropriate timbral processing, resizing the [coll] size in real-time to vary the rate at which a signal process is triggered, and the real-time drawing of automation values.

My thanks to Daniel Schorno for his feedback on this project.

Performance in Antwerp

This was a great opportunity to improvise with themes I have been developing for the forthcoming album by signalsundertests. I scored some motives to work with during the performance, but I am still developing an appropriate method of scoring pitch, timbral, and spatial attributes of each theme. I would like to work with a stave per string in future, and it is my hope that the score will also be applicable to acoustic instrumentation. All in all, an excellent experience.

signalsundertests performing at the Live Looping festival at Arenberg, Antwerp.

Thank you to those who provided photography on the night, including Ingrid, “Sjugge”, and Benjamin. My thanks to Sjaak and Ingrid for their hospitality, and to the amazing musicians which were a part of this wonderful event. And of course, thank you to all the staff at STEIM for their support. It was a very productive and enjoyable residency.

The week in november 2009, I stayed at STEIM, I worked on two different setups.

One is my LiSa-based Live-setup with an aditional old drummachine, the Rythm-Ace, the antecessor of the TR 77, Rolands first drummachine ever. which means, no editing, only presets with a lot of Mambo in it. I use it for goofing around with some kind of semi-serious impropop and later used it live in a duo with Eugene Chadbourne.

For the other setup, I use is a Micro Modular to produce a feedback, that I control with fotoresistors placed in a pizzabox -sized board on a table, with a dimmable lamp over it, there are 12 sensors to control 12 parameters. With my hands I produce shadows on the pizzabox to ‚play’ the feedback. I can just use the dimmer to modulate, I use coins to cover single sensors and as well two small plastic stroboscopes with adjustable speed to produce patterns. Itried to use a drumloop (with a tap-pad) with the stroboscope and quite like it. The sound is rather raw and prickly and the Micro- Modular-patch reacts pretty unpredictable. I put this setup together in search for an electronic instrument, that I can use in a solo performance. There is the good question, if you can improvise solo at all and I find it inspiring to work with material, that is good for unexpected moves.

The fotoresistors are quite interesting. Find something for € 1.98, that is so sensitive! I tried them out on the screne of a TV-set and the result was that they sent a signal, that was pulsating at 5o Hz, which is the frequency of my old telly. On the Mico Modular it played a nice piece of music, unfortunately only one piece, as the result is always the same, whatever happens on the screen.

I tried the sensors on the MM as well with diffrent cheap chinese lightchains for x-mas trees, that have diffrent pulse-programs. Sounds a bit like Terry Riley on a no-input-mixer.

I add a pic of the Micro Modular patch. The (hardware-) Out 1 is connected with the AudioIn Right. The interface between the MM and the fotoresistors is based on a Doepfer ‚Pocket Electronic’ (http://www.doepfer.de/home_e.htm), a small Midi Interface. The sensors are easy to connect (same way like on the Junxion-Box), you find it in the Pocket-Electronic-Manual on the Doepfer page.

The way I built this controllerbox was like the French use to construct cars, start at the bottom and build one thing on top of the other. It has 12 potentiometers and 4 switches, 12 sensor -inputs, that you can switch, meaning, you can either use the sensor or the poti.

The lamp I use is a 300 watt stage light mounted on a microfone-stand with a distance of about 125 cm above the table. I use a suitable dimmer; (http://www.atld.de/Lichttechnik/Lichtsteuerungen/Einzeldimmer/Uni-Lite-1Ch-DimSlide-1000W-and-Analog-0-10V-Output::272.html).

I have used this setup in a soloperformance by now and will go on working it out more, use the  stroboscopes and syncronize their actions with  drumloops, which is not so easy to handle live. So when I come back for another week at STEIM, I know what to start with.

Sound examples:

Pizza Funghi

Pizza Oorlog

ss impropop 01

ss impropop 02

Uli Boettcher

ulboe@arcor.de

As a textile designer working with simple sound electronics, but no background in music and only very little experience in live performance, learning LiSa and JunXion is challenging. But I was very happy finding out that the software could be a real big step for my work and bring live sound sampling into textile sampling.

I am currently doing a residency at London Printworks Trust which supports my research about textiles and electronic sound.

I am interested in the translation of colour and printed patterns into sounds, using either colour sensors or cameras. To provide a steady light for accurate colour recognition I built a little stage for colour swatches. David developed the set up in JunXion. Obviously it is quite tricky to achieve repeatable results but it was very promising and I just need a better camera and more even light  and a few other adjustments. Not regarding though that the textiles are still soft materials and not very steady by themselves…

Here a few images from the swatches on stage.

and how they appear on the screen…

A very big thank you to Kristina who gave me great advice how to incorporate live performance in my work. We came up with a few ideas for installations, ‘human installations’ as I call them, and process-based performances. I am still digesting these ideas, but more to come soon.

I very much enjoyed the talks from Robert, Daniel, Takuro and Jun. Jun, thanks indeed for your hardware support!

I look forward to catch up soon again!

Concert on 10.12.10 in Vienna, Stiftung Essl Klosterneuburg
In planning: concert tour in New Zealand 2011
Collaborating period: between 17-19.1.10 at STEIM, Amsterdam

John Croft:

My first visit to STEIM, after several years of working in live electronics. Barbara and I have been working on this new piece, …mit schwarzem Glanz for viola and live electronics, for some time now, in the rare moments we could get together, so it was a pleasure to work intensively over a number of days at STEIM. The piece relies on the detection of many parameters of the viola sound — pitch and loudness of course, but also noise content, brightness, melodic angularity, suddenness of attack, and so on — and mapping all of these to complex patterns of immediate response in MaxMSP, including a lot of real-time spectral processing. Because there’s no score following or pre-composed sounds, it’s essentially impossible to work “in the abstract” on the patch — it is the kind of thing that really needs testing in a kind of “controlled environment”, with plenty of time to try all the possibilities. Which is precisely what STEIM provides, and so we achieved a great deal, from the dark, pulsating opening, where the slow surges on the open strings of the viola control spectral compression and dilation of the sound, to the explosive passage near the end, where the undulating line of the viola controls a constantly changing filterbank. Because I work in a university, with its ever-increasing administrative distractions, it was a rare and welcome experience to work for a sustained period of time in such wonderful facilities. So now, aside from a few minor things, my piece is essentially finished. I’m very grateful to STEIM and to Nico for this opportunity, and I hope to return some time. Thanks to everyone!

Barbara Lüneburg:

The Research Project:
I am conducting a practice-based PhD-study at Brunel University/London (supervisors: Dr Bob Gilmore (since 2007), Dr John Croft and Prof Christopher Fox (both since 2010)), the topic of which is “The creative role of a performer in contemporary music as an interface between instrument, composer and audience”. My research touches topics like creativity research (for example the system model of creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly), group collaboration between composer and performer and performer and the field, the modelling power of the field, charisma, stage presence, concert aura and programming.
The collaboration with John Croft is part of my praxis-based research. The work we are doing at STEIM consists of investigations around the use of the viola and the development of fitting live-electronics.

At the same time I will investigate the creative relation between composer and performer. By combining to different domains of knowledge (that of the performing artist and the writing composer) and two different fields of experts and consumers, in which we are working and connected, promises different creative results than if each person is working on his or her own. To proof that theory I have to undertake much different collaboration in various forms and test it against different models of creativity research.

STEIM has repeatedly supplied me with studio space, technical equipment and last but not least a guestroom to enable composers coming from abroad or other cities to work with me for the duration of several days.

Work done at STEIM:

First of all John and I used our time at STEIM to check the viola part for feasibility and flexibility of playing. Secondly we were working at the electronics themselves and my response in playing to them. Already before I had sent John a recoding of the first sketches of the piece, which he had used to develop Max-MSP patches that were specifically designed for this piece. Now the patches had to be tested in terms of functioning and aesthetical results on the technical and acoustic conditions  of a life-situation. We took time to sort out the necessary sensitivity of the patch, to find practical solutions for pitch detecting and to discuss what the electronics do with the live-part of the viola and how I accordingly might react to it. This is work that is most efficient and inspiring if done together on the spot. The life-situation cannot be adequately replaced by working with a pre-recorded tape part of the instrumental material. Also, the immediate collaboration between composer and performer enriches the creative process by bringing together the experience and knowledge from two different domains.

STEIM is consistent in offering composers and performers the possibility to make such collaborations happen, not to speak of the technical and human support they give. Therefore I want to thank again, also in the name of all composers I have worked with at STEIM.

David Fodel in Studio 3 at STEIM

I came to the STEIM orientation with the expectation of gaining deeper understanding of the commercial software they have developed, and to present to the staff several artistic projects I currently have in development.

I have used JunXion in the past, but only for basic operations in mapping HID hardware. During my stay I was able to create several new patches for use in an upcoming performance titled “Still Life in Real Time”, which will premiere at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in April of 2010. For this project, I am tracking position and 3-axis orientation of several objects, which constitute a “Still Life” composition, both visually, and sonically.

David Fodel - Still Life with Guitar

The aim of the project itself is to interrogate the possibilities of real-time, structured improvisational, audio-visual composition, while incorporating the symbolic potential of the interface. The traditional Still Life, and in particular Dutch Golden Age Still Life paintings, provided me with an art historical locus and context for referencing this potentially symbolic quality of objects.

The technical aspects of the project are driven by this concept of “interface as content” and the ways in which the tangible interface and the embodied activities of the performer come to convey meaning. That being said, the technical problems then become those of creating tangible relationships between the objects, which are projected through sound and image, by selective mappings.

Screen cap of JunXion patch used for Still Life project

JunXion provides a way to create these mappings in a manner that allows for rapid prototyping. So that’s what I did during my time at STEIM. I learned some of the deeper capabilities of the tool, which allowed me to explore some functionality that is key to the success of the project. I will outline these briefly below:

1. Creating switches without “buttons”. I need to be able to tell the system to enable or disable certain functions or actions without clicking buttons, because that feels like it is an “un-natural” movement in the set-up. I was able to track large differences in accelerometer data, and turn that into a kind of switch, by storing, checking and updating a variable that denotes when the switch is on or off.
2. The individual object orientations, as tracked by the 3-axis accel data transmitted from each object wirelessly. Using JunXion, I map each axis to one or more MIDI CC’s, and scale the data using the Tables in JunXion. This data is then forwarded on to audio and video parameters that respond to the movement of the objects.
3. Relative positions of each object while they are situated on the plinth or pedestal. I was able to do some quick testing using JunXion’s built-in Object tracking, but it seems like I may have to use something else for the production version. I set-up a quick sketch that was able to detect blobs using Processing, but found that the actual “tracking” of the blobs is more complex. I need to be able to manage the blobs more precisely so the systems can determine how the blobs are related to each other spatially on a 2D surface. I am using a simple set-up of a frosted glass, with a camera underneath to let the system know when the objects are sitting on top of the glass, and where they are in relation to one another — the composition.

So this is mostly what I worked on but I also did some playful “what-if” scenarios with the other Orientation attendees, namely Berit Greinke, and Jeffrey Roberts. Berit was working on translating color to sound for her textile installation / performances, and Jeffrey was working with augmenting his live performance with a traditional Chinese string instrument called a Gu-Chin.

David Fodel working with Berit Greinke on color-to-sound conversions

Jeffrey Roberts playing Gu-Chin and WiiMote, David Fodel augmenting sound.

The discussions I had with Kristina and Robert were very helpful in giving me some perspective on my current work. This includes the Still Life compositions as well as my work with the Solar Wind Harp, a software (hardware under development) instrument that can “play” the solar wind in real-time via the NASA ACE satellite. I hope to be able to construct a large installation/performance version of the Solar Wind Harp with the assistance of STEIM staff in the future.

Testing Blob Detection patch in Studio 3

Most important to me was the interaction with the other orientation attendees. Hearing about the work they are doing, and the contexts within which they are working, provided a breath of fresh air, and a breadth of fresh ale to wash down some hard to swallow pills which seemed to be blurring my vision.

I have included links to brief videos of one of the experiments with Jeffrey Roberts playing Gu Chin, with one of my WiiMotes attached to his arm. The WiiMote is sending controller data via junXion to a patch in Ableton that is manipulating his live sound through various frequency domain dynamics effects processors. The other link is to a video of Jeffrey and Robert van Heumen playing together in the STEIM Studio 3.

Jeffrey Roberts and David Fodel

Jeffrey Roberts and Robert vanHeumen

In the summer of 2010 I hope to get my masters degree in Interactive Media and Environments at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands. My final work will a series of hand build instruments (guitar, harp, violin and drums) with buttons and sensory attached. The sensor data will be send to a computer or another piece of hardware for live sampling purposes. So my special attention went out to the LiSa X and junXion programs as well as the support STEIM might give me developing these instruments.

At the Frank Mohr Institute I was working with Max/MSP a lot, the advantage of this program over the STEIM software might be the expansiveness, something useful when trying out lots of things. But on the other hand I’d rather work with LiSa X and junXion, it seems more reliable and a lot faster, besides that it a more ‘single-use’ program which makes it easier to comprehend. I think it will be a valuable addition to my set-up and I will surely consider using it when I had a Mac computer. The fact that it doesn’t work on windows or linux (yet) might be a reason to switch OS in the future.

The examples of instruments (partly) build and developed at STEIM really gave me a good feeling about asking for help in the near future, I think they can really help me out in all aspects of my work, like thinking of conditions for sampling functions, building sturdy instruments and developing the hardware part.

I had a good and inspiring time at STEIM and hope to stop by every now and then for concerts and I hope to do a collaborative thing in the future.

Kasper van Hoek

I’m Giorgio, trumpet player and electronics-user from Italy.

For a long period of time I’ve been using a number of midi/usb controllers ,but I never found the one that suited me completely.

My idea was about a controller ON the trumpet, something within the instrument that could control the parameters of the computer.

Then the only place where to ask “how to” was Steim.

I had the chance to meet really interesting and cool people that put down in a really simple way what seemed to be out of the world to me.

They introduced the Arduino platform and everything started to make sense.

Right now I just started to work on that kind of plattforms and I hope to be able to go back soon to Steim to start working on this project.

In the last couple of months I’ve been using extensively Lisa and Junxion for my music and they works really fine.

Steim seems like a plays where you may share ideas and learn something for sure.

Best regards to everyone.

Giorgio

This project uses a pre-recorded material: Florence Foster Jenkins singing.
Her recordings are processed by electronics and controlled first by the sound of live instruments (enveloppe follower, centroid-tracking, spectrum analysis) and then also by the gestures of the instrumentalists. That second part (motion tracking) was the center of my residency.

Except a compass, a light sensor and video-tracking that I finally excluded, I  used different sensors: pression, distance, accelerometer. The mapping was: sensor->arduino->Junxion->MAX/MSP. Quite easy to set up actually and no troubleshooting.

Aestechnical

This composition is about communication in a mediatic world, which most obvious symbol would be Skype, I guess.

The artifacts between two people communicating interest because they create their own space. Artifacts, like this blog on a computer, are part of our social lives.

For a musician, an instrument is an artifact, the way you communicate being widely determined by it. That is even more obviously when you use electronics. There is also something about artifacts in composition. Your choices are mixtures of aesthetics and technology, creating a space of its own. Choosing a microphone or a sensor is a technical as well as an aesthetical matter. This impure way of thinking music is highly stimulating to me.

But only if you keep it impure. Using new technologies doesn’t create new music. You can’t reduce music (or sound art) to some options about technology. Today the big challenge is not really technical. It is more about building your own language and communicating .

That’s something I try to kee in mind all along this long process.

***

At the moment I am still testing some sensors, particularily in making them wireless (the musicians have to move in this composition).

As an accelerometer, the Wii remote seems to be a practical choice.

First public test on the 5th of february. I will get back to you

]]> http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/01/24/artefact-at-the-steim/feed/ 0 http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/01/23/interactive-music-areas/ http://www.steim.org/projectblog/2010/01/23/interactive-music-areas/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:45:34 +0000 Teun de Lange http://steim.org/projectblog/?p=1216 Read more…

Welcome to STEIM where ideas 'bloom'.

I had come this second time with a project in mind, to work on a set of audience feedback remotes for interactive audiovisual music. I had a prototype, naked and caseless, living in a Farnell bag and a set of half finished Max patches and Arduino code to fill out. I had seriously intended to hole myself up in the attic bunker that STEIM kindly offers wandering artists. However announcing this plan to Daniel, my mentor at STEIM, drew a response that diverted me on to a series of interesting and useful tangents. Perhaps the first lesson to draw about residencies is that the plan one arrives with is often a residency’s first victim.

This is what an artistic residency at STEIM may do to your carefully laid plans. Render them beautifully broken.

Daniel gave me some key advice that would colour my ten days in Amsterdam last November; ‘leave programming for the ivory towers and engage in the culture of the city and the richness of feedback’ – or somesuch. So it was in my second residency I focused less on announcing myself and my work to the people around STEIM but instead tried to keep myself open to the intervention, opinions and knowledge of others. This took the form of a series of annotated conversations with Daniel, Kristina and Taku, the trawling through as many galleries as I could stumble upon, all night google sessions and much reflection done in bars and restaurants. In short I attempted to become a cultural sponge. Instead of throwing my ideas at people and seeing which stuck as I am often apt to do, I turned that model on its head and encouraged others to talk while I furiously took down notes.

What did I learn? What stuck? Early on Daniel mentioned two ideas that he had which I was quick to appropriate i.e. steal – in the academic community we call it ‘referencing’.

• An artwork has three properties; A name, ‘reference’ and theory.
• A piece of music has three properties; A name, ‘reference’ and score.

This appeals to me as a model for describing the products that artists, musicians and art musicians arrive at. A good piece of art or music, or in fact anything worth mentioning, should have a name; how else would one talk about it otherwise? The ‘reference’ is easiest to think of in music where I like to think of it as the ‘hook’, the recognisable point of entry for an audience. Meanwhile the score or theory is the aesthetic framework, the pattern of decisions that the artist has made to arrive at the final piece. Perhaps the third property is the most interesting to the artistic community when evaluating a work. But even the casual observer of an art work can quickly ‘smell a rat’ when a piece appears to have no underlying logic to it.

This image has no underlying logic.

In a long sofa discourse held in STEIM’s lobby with Kristina I invited her to tear in to my ideas for an interactive music controller for audience feedback. Better that I got used to it then with the friendly STEIMies than go in to my viva later this year unprepared for rigorous (read rough) artistic feedback. Kristina soon knocked some sense into me, forcing me to confront several flaws in my ideas.

At this point it’s worth explaining a little more about the work I brought with me to STEIM. The as yet unnamed music controller features a single rotary encoder,  an 8 x 8 tri-colour LED matrix and a ZigBee wireless link as well as the obligatory Arduino. My plan was and still is to use ten of them to allow real time ‘worm polling‘ of my music with an audience, and then use that feedback data to interact/intervene/improve my tunes algorithmically (or should that be algo-rhythy-magically).

Naked tech.

Knob to twist and a display for visual feedback. Simples!

Kristina gave me the idea that the items could be shared, not tied to a particular audience member, which I’d overlooked as a concept. Perhaps a side effect of sitting through too many ‘buttoned up’ ‘sit down’ electro-acoustic concerts. This forced me to reappraise my notions of how I would box up my controllers. Kristina gave me many suggestions, all of which were useful and relevant. Here are some of my favourites

• ‘Become the Nielsen family‘. – As a ‘reference’ for my art.
• ‘Run experiments – the gig is your laboratory’ – On the subject of developing my idea.
• ‘Use bubblewrap’ – An awesome suggestion for extra rapid prototyping of case designs.
• Use ‘iterative interaction’ making small changes to the design after each ‘regular deployment’. – On the subject of design strategy.
• ‘The chemist asks what happens when …?’ – On the subject of how to take the next step in development.
• Remember there are ‘no imaginary people’ – On the subject of avoiding living in my head/over intellectualising.
• ‘Go to gigs and test it out. Don’t talk or think about the final thing.’ – On the blunt reality of what I have to do.
• ‘Convince people you’re allowed to do whack shit and don’t be lame’ – Here Kristina was telling me the secret technique of testing new technology on ‘punters’ but perhaps this should be applied to all art/music/science/life in general?

I convinced these people I was a freelance fashion photographer. I'm really not. I had aspirations of selling the photo to VICE's Dos and Don'ts. They weren't interested, but I still love the stop sign above the gormless goon's head. What was she thinking?

After talking to Kristina I left it a couple of days before returning to STEIM. Perhaps I should mention that my last residency was not just an opportunity to work on my artistic practice in STEIM’s appealing attic atelier space, jokingly known as ‘the monastery’. I had far greater responsibilities than simply looking after the development of my ideas, software and hardware. Really I was there to look after Daniel’s cat Cheetah! Daniel had kindly put me up at his Jordaan apartment with instructions for the care and comfort of his domesticated moggy while he was away, ironically at his own artistic residency.

Daniel and Cheetah.

In England we have a saying about people and pets, “he’s a nice guy – but I wouldn’t trust him with my cat“. As such I felt the heavy weight of the commitment and spent much of my time in the Jordaan caring for Cheetah. Cats have an awful habit of sulking when their owners leave them and then sulking even harder when they return, to punish them. Out of respect for Daniel and a curiously English bent for pets I was determined to keep this skitty-kitty happy. I allowed her to rule my day in a way that made my partner at home quite jealous. Working on a laptop, listening to the BBC World Service, feeding and most importantly playing with a cat, I worked on the ideas for my thesis and final pieces. The laser pointer sessions conducted to improvised and new music and the rapidly prototyped cat interaction device I built deeply coloured my thinking on the subject of metaphor; a key part of my thesis. I shall not divulge nor digress into my ideas on cats and dogs as metaphors for people yet. Rather I shall ask one question, what can cats and dogs teach us about the dance floor?

Portrait of the young artist with a little cat.

Returning to STEIM for a final interview with Taku I was keen to ask his advice on an idea that had occurred to me when searching for the ‘theory’ behind my work. It is often the case that artists simply ‘do’ and then search for the theory after the fact, the same occurs in the sciences – or so I am told. My own ‘theory’ was that in my first two serious pieces I had been obsessed with  embedding my own modern ideas for interactive audio visual music in the bodies of existing old technologies, namely the radio and the TV. I had been interested early on with Duchamp’s ready mades but also deeply concerned with artistic intervention/re-appropriation and subversion of existing technologies. I decided to coin the term ‘post-neo-retro-futurism’ as googling it yielded no hits – which surely meant I had at least some space to develop in to artistically. Essentially it was a made up phrase designed to encapsulate my ideas about taking our past ideas of what future technology would bring and then colliding them with my own current ideas of ‘future’ art/tech.

Talking with Taku about my ideas of the future and in particular looking at our past ideas of what future technologies would bring allowed me to put some meaty ‘art theory’ on the bones of what could otherwise smell like another poorly thought out idea. Taku reminded me that historically thinking the concept of the ‘future’ is a relatively recent one, emerging from enlightenment thinking in the 1600s and opposing the older, more static, Greek notions of ‘concepts’ and ‘knowledge’. Apt topics for discussion in a great enlightenment city like Amsterdam where Descartes himself had once lived. Descartes it should be noted is my favourite philosopher, a hang over perhaps from my days as an undergraduate studying theoretical physics, he invented the subject… .

I don't know what post neo retro futurism looks like yet, but it will definitely require a lot of cables. Which is lucky because I seem to collect them.

Quite apart from picking Taku’s brain for juicy thesis references I was keen to ask him for his opinions on the subject of artistic appropriation as we share a common love of DJ-ing and stolen/sampled/sample based music. Taku pointed out to me that in his opinion there were no real ‘ethics’ of sampling.

“The ‘ethic’ comes in during the act of making or the listening of the audience. If your medium’s recorded media you just do what feels right. Nobody can own me when I play. I control the music.” – Taku/DJ Sniff

Perhaps that’s an interesting place to finish the review of my residency with the idea of Taku controlling his music, reading the crowd manually with his eyes and ears. Meanwhile I’m still trying to reinvent the wheel and build a system where the audience battle the DJ with their own set of knobs to twist and push the music forward. Till next time STEIM… .

After ten days I went home. But I'll be back. If they'll have me.

3 yrs later, the electronic duo Controllar came to be, borne out of desire to create electronic pop music with human expression. After a long development process, the first performance of Controllar occurred in Theater Kikker in Utrecht in 2008 resulting in a 3 month tour through the United States. After performing for a year on this original setup, we came to know the borders of what is possible- and our desire to push these borders further grew enormously. That’s where STEIM came in the picture. We were looking for a place to provide the space- but more importantly the technical and artistic support we needed to develop our instrument, our sound, our band further.

As I write this we are sitting in a friends apartment in Pittsburgh PA before our show in Garfield Artworks amidst our 2nd “American Tour”. Thanks to the incredible support from STEIM during our 2 weeks in November/December, we’re reaching a performance level we didn’t dare to consider 3 months ago.

Thomas Myrmel

We tacitly agreed to both play acoustic, and through the two days of playing and recording were incredibly lucky in the quality of the sound that we captured. Nicolas had four mics on his drumset: snare, bass, and two general mics placed at either side of the kit about a foot away. I stood near the middle of the room and just used STEIM’s trusty AKG414 for the sax. Listening back to the tracks we recorded, we’re again fortunate that there won’t be too much mixing necessary. I can’t remember the names of the mics Nicolas used, but the sound captured of his many cymbals and various small percussion objects is, I think, really fantastic.

field/neuringer @ steim studio 1, 30/11/2009

Musically, the meeting was a great success. Again, mostly tacitly, we agreed to play completely freely, dispensing with any discussion of structure, style, idiom or whatever. And yet the recordings reveal that we were totally in tune, finding common ground in exuberant, energy-driven free-jazz expressions that might suggest we’d been playing together for years.

After the second day we packed up and went down to The Hague to perform an informal concert at Gum, a small, cozy gallery space. It was great to do, and to do following the recordings. Although we were both tired from our respective previous endeavors on the road, Nicolas kicked everything into high gear and put me to work to keep up.

Many thanks to STEIM for facilitating this first meeting!