Amazing computer process performance – Sewing machine orchestra
I attended this experimental concert yesterday evening – a half hour performance where Martin Messier from Canada is using 8 sewing machines to produce massive noise, beats and almost modular synth madness with his Singer 😉 sewing machines in action. Martin told me afterwards that he’s using Ableton Live and Max for Live to control them. One wasn’t allowed to film it but found this clip on Vimeo of the show, enjoy
“Messier doesn’t sew : he resuscitates old singers put asleep years ago in order to release, in some magical ways, the luminous and sonorous presence of the past. he carries his public in a dreamlike universe where each machine, as singular subject, is magnified. after years of silence, sewing machine orchestra is giving speech to these surviving objects of the industrial era.
this creation was made possible with the support of the canada council for the arts.”
audio, light, performance : martin messier
electronic: samuel st-aubin
Experimental: Dyskograf – drawing a music sequence
DYSKOGRAF is a graphic disk reader. Each disc is created by visitors to the installation by way of felt tip pens provided for their use. The mechanism then reads the disk, translating the drawing into a musical sequence.
The dematerialisation of the props having led to an ignorance of the principles of recording and reading music, this installation leads to the rediscovery of a perceptible contact with recorded music and by this means, to the deduction of how it works.
The installation is above all a tool, which allows the creation of musical sequences in an intuitive way. The notion of a loop, closely linked to electronic music, is represented here by the cycle of the disk. The disk passes indefinitely in front of a camera fixed onto an arm. This substitution for the needle converts the drawing into sound by way of a specific application program (software). Through this system, the sequential ordering of music is learnt in a playful way, at the same time creating a unique object, souvenir of the musical composition.
The numeric world is a world of binary choice. The object of DYSKOGRAF is to give room again for accidents in numeric creation, accidents that often favour creativity.
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Venez essayer Dyskograf à Visionsonic et OFNI :
visionsonic.net (du 16 au 17 novembre à Mains d’Oeuvres / PARIS )
lieumultiple.org/6365/festival-ofni-10e-edition-ouverture-1411/ (du 14 au 15 au Lieu Multiple / POITIERS )
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Co-production : Cultures Electroni[k], Les Bouillants, Avoka
More info on the web :
dyskograf.com
avoka.fr
The Beer Cans Keyboard Movie
Do you have any idea of what you get if you combine 44 beer cans with an Arduino board and a Raspberry PI ?
We will tell you : fantastic user engagement!
We did this at Webstock, event which took place in Bucharest in September. Staropramen, one of the sponsors of the event asked us for an innovative way to offer a trip to Prague to one of the event’s guests.
So, we came up with a keyboard made out of 44 Staropramen beer cans. Each beer can was a key, and whenever someone touched it, the corresponding letter appeared on a large plasma screen (just like any regular computer keyboard).
And the surprise was fantastic! The user experience and engagement overcame any expectation. Every single person who attended Webstock tried the keyboard and participated to the contest.
Behind the scene, the system is built around an Arduino board and a few capacitive controllers (just like the ones which are inside smartphones’ touch screens), connected to a Raspberry PI board which controls the plasma screen display.
A movie and some photos took during the event can be found here –
robofun.ro/create/beer-keyboard (feel free to use them if you want).
Webstock is the biggest blogging and social media event in Romania. Find out more about Webstock here – webstock.ro .
Robofun Create is a Romanian company specialised in creating cool on-demand technology products. Find out more about Robofun Create here – robofun.ro/create .
KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2012 – Ryoji Ikeda
Ikeda creates sounds and visuals that are beyond our perception, making excellent use of computer and state-of-art technology. The one day only audiovisual concert takes place in the vast space of Kyoto Art Theater Shunjuza! Based in Paris, Ikeda is one of the world’s leading electronic composers and visual artists and his new work is always eagerly anticipated. His large solo exhibition “+/-[the infinite between 0 and 1]” at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and spectra[nagoya], which was done as a massive installation at Nagoya Castle with a high voltage search light that reached the stratosphere (Aichi Triennale 2011), have both left, sonically as well as visually, a great impact on audiences. datamatics [ver.2.0], in which Ikeda uses all sorts of data such as microscopic DNA and molecules all the way to the macroscopic cosmos in an attempt to grasp the world by exploring the limit of human perception, is the final piece of a series that began in 2006. Creating infinite sequences at high speed, he composes the almost violent performance with great precision. Ikeda’s ultra minimalistic world offers a sublime audio-visual experience. In 2013, his new work, superposition, will come to Kyoto for its Japanese premiere.
【KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2012 公式プログラム作品紹介】
池田亮司 『datamatics [ver.2.0]』
Ryoji Ikeda “datamatics [ver.2.0]”
10/20 [Sat]
京都芸術劇場 春秋座（京都造形芸術大学内）
Kyoto Art Theater Shunjuza
公演情報:
http://kyoto-ex.jp/program/ryoji_ikeda/
English page:
http://kyoto-ex.jp/eng/program/ryoji_ikeda/
Experimental: Forest and Trees – sound installation
“Forest and Trees” is an installation of moving images and sounds employing 12 digital photo frames.
The animation and its sound effects playing through the internal speakers of each frame gradually
come together to form music.
This work will be exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.
“Search for New Synesthesia”
mot-art-museum.jp/eng/schedule.html
This video is list version for vimeo.
Envelop Detected Waterphone
A simple exploration using a contact mic on one of Richard Water’s Waterphones, a Buchla 207r’s preamp and a CBS 130 Envelop Detector — all was sent to various CV ins of a 258v oscillator and a 266r Source of Uncertainty. Oh yeah, and the final output going through a Eventide Space reverb. more on waterphones here: waterphone.com/ and a better audio of a similar exploration here:
soundcloud.com/user7621213/envelop-detected-waterphone
Experimental: Fast Food in C major
The instruments: dried hamburger drum, soda pop violin, french fry pan flute, and salt shaker.
A & Bizu
Vancouver x Paris
Instruments: Jessica and Aurélien
Art Direction: Jessica
Filming and Editing: Aurélien
Built for MTV / Sony / Booooooom’s Made of Imagination
BONAPARTE – 40°42’48.46 N 73°58’18.38 by JUL & MAT
Based on the track: “BONAPARTE – 40°42’48.46 N 73°58’18.38 W”
Directed by JUL & MAT.
Robotic & video edit by PETER COCTEAU.
Filmed summer 2012 in PARIS, France.
Facebook : facebook.com/julandmat.directors
Twitter : twitter.com/juletmat
web : juletmat.fr
During one month, I’ve built and programmed the robotic installation shown here. I used ten LEGO motors (NXT and old ones), three NXT (which are the LEGO computers seen at beginning of video), and two Hitechnic SuperPro Boards. I use the Hitechnic boards to control the lights and make good NXT synchronization (by using Fast I2C communication). [Ed.: That refers to I2C, a means of connecting devices by way of serial connection, often used in embedded electronics.] Hitechnic is a manufacturer of LEGO-compatible electronics and robotics.
I first inspected all the music parts in the song by using Apple’s Logic Studio, and reproduced [the parts] in the NXT-G program. This robotic installation really plays the song from start to end.
Peter Cocteau’s NXT-606, an 8-bit, sample-based drum machine built on LEGO’s Mindstorms prototyping platforming, has already been making the geek blog rounds.
- Brilliant, minimal design: Peter cleverly consolidates controls on two knobs, as seen in the new video, without requiring laborious menu navigation or making multiple functions of those knobs confusing. Some major manufacturers could learn something from the efficiency of the design here.
- Friendly housing: Apple’s 80s-model computer designs were a model of making case designs friendly and approachable. We’ve rarely seen that “read” as well with musical instruments. Here, a combination of slick LEGO parts and clever layout get that feeling on an instrument.
- Focused utility: Part of the reason the housing and interface don’t get overwhelming is because the NXT-606 doesn’t try to do too much. It’s just a simple, sampled drum machine and not more, which makes it more drool-worthy, not less.
- Rapid prototyping and visually-developed software. I’d be a little happier with LEGO if the Mindstorms and NXT were more open, but it’s clear to see the advantages of this solution, as well. Check out the rapid, visual programming that went into the software development. There’s plenty that more open projects could learn. (This is doubly exciting after the revelation of the new AppInventor project for Android, though we may have to wait some time before we get to play with that.
Via CDM
Raspberry Pi running Pure Data w/ DR-OM patch
Video from Shawn Greenlee’s first session with the Raspberry Pi running Pure Data.
“I’m running Pd 0.44 (test version) with “-nogui -noadc -alsa” flags + a budget USB audio device, and a Novation ReMOTE ZeroSL as the midi device. Raspberry Pi OS is Raspbian “wheezy.” Note, I’m running from the command line, not from inside the X window system (performance with GUI seems more likely to glitch, at least with my first tests). I did not try headphone jack for audio given initial reports were not good (and presently I’m unable to test HDMI audio).
Pd 0.44 here: pure-data.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb-index.cgi
I used notes from Miller Puckette sent to the Pd-list (check September 8 & 9, 2012) and some info. from log.liminastudio.com/programming/running-puredata-on-the-raspberry-pi to get things going.”
DR-OM Pd patch from protoDROM version (Processing+ libPd) available at github.com/s3g/protodrom
blog.makezine.com/2012/09/24/protodrom-prototyping-with-pure-data-and-processing/
DR-OM code for Fluxama iOS app: github.com/fluxama/Drom
DR-OM ready-to-go for iOS: itunes.apple.com/us/app/dr-om/id555409573?mt=8
From the Lab: Airborne Beats
If you’re wondering how the app was built, Airborne Beats was programmed in C++ using g-speak and the creative coding library, Cinder. As for hardware, we pulled together one screen equipped with an IR sensor, a “commodity” computer (with g-speak installed), and speakers. For the most-part, it was designed and developed by a single person. Although Airborne Beats is currently a demo, the users of this application could be composers, DJs, or perhaps even children or educators. And the ability to recognize multiple hands opens up some unique collaborative possibilities (guest DJ, anyone?).
DATAMASKIN
