I went to see the McGill improv ensemble perform Art of Cobra by John Zorn. Usually, I find it more interesting to play free improvisation than listening to it, but this time it was quite entertaining. Cobra is a rule game, explained by Zorn as “I’m going to hold up some cards and they’re going to play something.” he prompter holds up a que card, points at the performers and then they playing something....
Today I went to a guest lecture by Marije Baalman on WaveFieldSynthesis (a spatial sound reproduction principle based on the Huygens principle) over at Concordia. I heard a demonstration of WFS at IRCAM a couple of years back, and it was good to (finally) get a good theoretical introduction to the field. They are usually testing it with 24 speakers, but they are now going to make a permanent 900 speaker setup at the Technical University in Berlin for creating a surround WFS setup....
Yves Guiard should have held a lecture at McGill last week, but unfortunately could not make it. Reading on his web page and looking up some of the references, I found some interesting comments about bimanual control. He writes: During the nineteen eighties, I spent a lot of time trying to understand the logic of division of labour between the left and the right hands in human movements. I came to believe there is something deeply misleading to the concept of hand dominance, central to established thinking in the field of human laterality....
LibriVox is a voluntary project set up to record all books in the public domain and make them available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Besides the joy of having audio books, this is also very interesting from a speech/voice research perspective. Another source for open-source text files is the French Incipit blog. Interestingly enough, I found a French version of Nicholas Cook’s introduction to music!
Ball State University Interactive Wireless Sculpture is an outdoor interactive digital installation interpreting the wireless data infrastructure at Ball State University. Beginning the evening of April 18 and running through April 19, this digital media sculpture, consisting of 4 projection screens, computers, speakers and lights, will broadcast interactive media that reacts to the amount of traffic on the campus’ 15 wireless zones. The sculpture will contain its own wireless access points, sensing local interactions of viewers using wireless devices....
{.imagelink}The monome 40h is a reconfigurable grid of sixty-four backlit buttons, connecting with USB and communicating both MIDI and OSC (Create Digital Music Review).
Douglas Hofstadter is discussing music and artificial intelligence: Back when I was young – when I wrote “Gödel, Escher, Bach” – I asked myself the question “Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?”, and then proceeded to speculate as follows: “There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs… To think – and I have heard this suggested – that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model ‘music box’ to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit....
There seems to be a lot of initiatives for making “higher-level” abstractions for working in Max/MSP these days. Now, I just came across a project at UCLA intended mainly for theater productions: Theater Max is the result of several years of work, lots of trial and error, and far too many hours of programming for us to count. What we now call Theater Max got its start in 2001 with a production of Eugene Ionesco’s Macbett....
{.imagelink}SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude. It offers some great features, and I particularly like the possibility to easily select single partials and edit them directly. Most controls also work in realtime....
Bob L. Sturm at UC Santa Barbara: {.imagelink}VLDCMCaR (pronounced vldcmcar) is a MATLAB application for exploring concatenative audio synthesis using six independent matching criteria. The entire application is encompassed in a graphical user interface (GUI). Using this program a sound or composition can be concatenatively synthesized using audio segments from a corpus database of any size. Mahler can be synthesized using hours of Lawrence Welk; howling monkeys can approximate President Bush’s speech; and a Schoenberg string quartet can be remixed using Anthony Braxton playing alto saxaphone....