Just a note if you’re in town this weekend: The fine folks of RjDj Labs are in town Dec. 11th and 12th at EyeBeam for their first Reactive Music Experience in New York.
RjDj uses the sensors, headphones & mic for the iPhone to create “reactive music” with the sounds of the world around you. The app captures audio from the environment with what they call “scenes” (made with Pure Data). Each scene is different, making various patterns or effects in response to where you are and what you’re doing. It’s sort of a psychedelic musical snapshot of what you hear in that moment, and you can record it and upload it for sharing.
Over year ago, RjDj recorded this video to show how they do what they do:
RjDj’s here in NYC to debut a new product, the RJC1000, which they say is their “take on the the legendary Akai MPC range. Think the MPC for reactive music and you know a lot.” They’ll also hold a holiday hack shop to teach everyone how to make reactive music. Make sure to bring all your toys if you want to register and attend: laptop, headphones, mic, iPhone/iPod.
All the info can be found on the RjDj pages. Have fun!
For music fans and listeners who don’t have the DJ chops, but still want to join in today’s remix culture, there’s a new suite of interactive listening tools from .MXP4.
I’ve been playing around on this company’s website, and as they say, with the .MXP4 format you don’t just listen to music, you can play with it as well: separate & mix the voices & instruments in a song the way you like it; construct a remix on the fly from different versions of a song; sing along in karaoke mode; and even buy digital albums that allow you to re-order the tracks and create a seamless party mix. It’s basically iTunes on steroids.
I cruised through some of the .MXP4 player features with examples on their website – 1) pulling instruments and voices out of a Bravery song 2) remixing a Calvin Harris tune 3) playing DJ with an eighties compilation. Check it out:
(Sorry ’bout that frame rate. What you get with free screencast software. )
.MXP4 lets the musician provide a richer multimedia presentation of a single or track. Other kinds of data can be laid into an .MXP4 file besides the sub-tracks or different versions, such as images and text. And there will be mobile and social media applications, so fans can share their mixes with friends.
For the listener, you can check out the .MXP4 player or widgets and browse through their current offerings. And for the band or artist, there is an .MXP4 editor in private beta testing. (There’s a prototype tutorial for that HERE.)
I’m not sure how widely received this technology will become, but I will say that I spent a lot more time listening to & tinkering with songs than I ever would with just my iPod. Which I guess is what .MXP4 and the artists involved would like you to do, especially if it means you’ll open your wallet and buy the music. 🙂
If you’re like me and came up through the trenches of analog sound recording, you may appreciate this:
In my audio classes, students like to do wild things with sound by clicking on plug-ins and software add-ons, unaware that many of the sonic effects that delight them so (pitch, delay, echo, flange) were originally created by physically manipulating magnetic tape recorded and edited on reel to reel machines. This is a generation who’s probably never held a cassette tape or back-cued a vinyl 12-inch, so they have no memory of rocking the reels or anchoring 6 foot tape loops with mic stands and grease pencils. Since those days of jump-cutting with a bloody razor-blade are long gone, I was tickled to find video of this interactive sound installation by Signal to Noise that incorporates strands of pre-recorded magnetic tape:
To quote the video’s accompanying information: “As the glove comes in contact with the tape, sound is generated and can be manipulated via touch and movement… the pre-recorded sound on the tape is a random collage of compiled material including a range of musical styles & found recordings. This piece is informed by works such as Nam June Paik’s Random Access Music and Stockhausen’s tape experimentations as well as the notion of using analogue tape as an instrument.”
I was not able to find out much about the artists who created the piece, other than finding their project blog, Signal to Noise, so you can see more on the development of the installation there.
But since the artists make mention of tape experimentation and musique concrete, let’s go back in time to 1979 with the BBC and see what creating aural montage with tape splicing was like (bonus points for the Doctor Who theme, of course):
As much as I love my software and computers, there are times when I do miss physically man-handling sound, chopping up and twisting the tape, dragging it past the play-heads, threading it backwards through the pinch rollers, all without benefit of a visual waveform as a guide. Best thing was wearing discarded pieces of blue editing tape as a fashion accessory. What a crap-shoot it was most of the time, but many happy accidents occurred as well. When I was done with a sound edit or mix, I knew those plastic reels contained real blood, sweat and tears, not just eye-strain and a vague headache. Really, the only thing I don’t miss is nicking my fingers with the razorblades, but I still have the old scars to remind me.
Now THIS really makes me want to bust out the dark eyeliner and dive deep into the stacks…
Synth Britannia from the BBC: “A documentary following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage.”
According to the BBC’s fantastic info page (which includes video interviews, blogs and a wonderful track listing), the program aired last month, but through the miracle of the interwebs, we all can relive the salad days of synth pop. Here are the first 2 sections, and the rest can be found in the related videos column on YouTube:
This totally reaffirms my nerdy childhood love for all those Kraftwerk and Gary Numan records. Taking the punk aesthetic & applying it to machines, the artists from this era were pioneers in pop music and musical technique. Everything I hear in this film sounds as fresh and exciting now, as it did on the wonky cassette player I had as a kid. I doubt the “electro-indie” stuff playing in Urban Outfitters and on Gossip Girl will last as long. It’s a history lesson for trendoids who think they’ve re-invented the wheel.
Thanks to the good people of MAKE Magazine online for tipping everyone off to all this synthy joy. 🙂
At last month’s MMiX Festival, on the Oct. 9th night of concerts, a flock of laptops descended upon the main space at Theaterlab and “sang” some of the most enchanting machine music I’ve ever heard.
That’s probably an odd image but it does stick in my mind as a way to describe what it’s like to see Dan Trueman and his Mini-Laptop Orchestra perform. I hadn’t really heard a bunch of computers chirp, warble and drone in harmony before.
This group of 8 MacBook musicians was assembled by Dan Trueman, founding member of The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). They’re a subset of PLOrk who performed pieces specifically composed for the unique sound of the laptop orchestra. After all, they can’t really duplicate a real orchestra doing the William Tell Overture. They were joined by Eric Beach and Josh Quillen of So Percussion, and the sweet sounds of Dan’s Norwegian fiddle which resulted in a striking combination of futuristic computer sounds and vibrant acoustic instrumentation.
Below you can listen to the Mini-Laptop Orchestra’s whole set from the MMiX Festival, which featured the following compositions:
Blinkyby Rebecca Fiebrink
Bells and Whistles by Michael Early
Beesch by Jascha Narveson and Boom Dinger by Sean Friar and Cameron Britt
Goodnight by Josh Quillen
Quick note on how the laptop orchestra makes music: the orchestra’s members manipulate audio using the computer’s own sensors that detect pressure, velocity and spatial position. Tilting the computer, striking the touch-pad or keys can bend or shape the tones or notes being produced. The musicians use multi-sided speakers which transmit audio in all directions to simulate the way a traditional instrument might emit sound. You can find out more about PLOrk and hear a lot more of their music on their web-page at http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/.
Instead of spending thousands of bucks and clearing a ton of floor space to house your personal arsenal of guitars…what if all you needed was ONE guitar and a drawer-ful of sound-cards to get as many different axe sounds you wanted?
Well, I’ve been looking at this project from the MIT Media Lab created by Amit Zoran with instrument-maker Marco Coppiardi. It’s called the Chameleon Guitar, and essentially it’s a guitar body with neck, strings and frets. However, the heart of the guitar body is a swappable soundboard. You can change it to different sound boards made of various kinds of wood, or other kinds of materials. Electronic pickups attached to the soundboard gather unique information about the insert’s response to the vibration of the strings, which is then fed into computer algorithms that can use that data to simulate the sound of different shapes and sizes of resonating chamber.
As the creators say, they can make a guitar sound the size of a mountain…or a mouse. Gibson Dreadnought? Baby Taylor? Sure. This could provide incredible flexibility for a guitarist in performance situations, as switching instruments would take 10 seconds and be as easy as popping in a new soundboard.
The video above might be Zoran’s first proof of concept video posted on YouTube, but if you check the MIT news page, there’s much more detailed information and updated video available at this link: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/chameleon-guitar-0203.html
Seriously, wouldn’t you have a lot more room in your apartment if you had a Chameleon?
When I heard that Kathy Supove was going to be performing with Toy Killers atthe Stone on Halloween, I thought, “Toy Killers? Hmm…might be before my time.” I think I was still playing with toys when these guys were in full swing during the late ’70s and early ’80s. So I set off to see if I could find out more about them.
Lo and behold – YouTube has everything you know? – there’s a video trailer for a CD of unreleased Toy Killer material that came out last year. The band was/is made up of madmen percussionists Mark E. Miller and Charles K. Noyes, who apparently liked to literally tear it up and burn it down during their downtown performances. Mayhem ensued!
The pyromaniac pair made some industrial punk, no-wave noise with a host of downtown musicians like Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, Nicky Skopelitis, Bill Laswell, Arto Lindsay and the Golden Palominos. Actually, you can listen to a bunch recent demos from Miller and Noyes on their MySpace page. They sound just as clangy, buzzy and aggressive, but I didn’t hear firecrackers or blowtorches going off. Fire codes are a bit different these days, but it will be perfect Halloween fun to see Kathy (ahem, Kathleen) Supove go head to head with this infamous duo.
One of the most prominent new musical tools I saw in use during the MMiX performances and workshops last month was the Akai APC 40, a controller with buttons, knobs and sliders that was created specifically to work with Ableton LIVE.
The APC hasn’t been out that long, but already Ableton users have developed some far-out finger skills on the device, which almost remind me of keyboardists or guitarists with that kind of high speed dexterity on their own instruments. Some examples:
You could say the APC 40 is similar to the very popular monome, which made it’s first appearance on the electronic music scene as early as 2005. But the monome does not include knobs or faders, using just the minimal grid of backlit buttons on a square box, which is an open-ended interface that can be configured as toggles, groups, or sliders for pretty much any audio application. At this point, the active community of monome users and developers has started using the device for more sophisticated open source video, text and game applications.
Not to be left out in the cold, Novation releases their own Ableton controller this month. It’s called the Launchpad, designed to work with Ableton:
The Novation design seems to split the difference between the APC and the monome, but it probably won’t be as open as the monome. I haven’t found anything solid yet on whether it will work with anything other than Ableton, but I expect someone will figure how to hack it. But the basis for all these controllers are those backlit chicklets, like it’s the most natural musical act to press something and make sound, whether it’s keys, frets, pedals or silicone buttons.
A tip of the hat to a friend of MMiX who’s got some special performances coming up…
Elan Vytal (a.k.a. DJ Scientific) will drop a set tonight, Thursday, Oct 29 at The Stone in NYC, busting out the turntables and laptop to perform as the group LB (Pound) with electric violinist, Matt Szemela (a.k.a. String Theory). Elan and Matt have been cooking up an eclectic mix of urban beat juggling and melodic string popping that blends all kinds of underground and concert hall sounds in one high energy performance. It’s a rockin’ house party turned high art and you won’t want to miss it.
Also, on NOVEMBER 8 at 3pm, Elan Vytal performs at the Flea Theater’s Music With a View series curated by the great Kathleen Supove. The event is called “Instruments of Your Dreams”, a showcase of various artists working with unusual musical instruments. It features performances by Phyllis Chen (toy piano), Judy Dunaway (balloon), Doug Van Nort (laptop ensemble), Elan Vytal (turntables) and guest moderator, Ralph Farris (composer/arranger/violist of experimental indie string quartet, Ethel).
You may know that Elan Vytal is a long-time collaborator of acclaimed violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and a member of DBR & The Mission. Both artists recently performed together for a First Fridays event at WNYC’s Greene Space. Here’s a taste of that night’s jam which highlights Elan’s skills on the turntables:
The MMiXdown 