LoveTech presents LearnTech

Old friend and “controllerism” evangelist Matt Moldover is one of the founding members of a new group called LoveTech that has been throwing various interesting events in the last couple of months dealing with music and technology. Their previous gatherings have been mostly performances out in various warehouses in the nether regions of San Francisco, tomorrow night they are presneting LearnTech, more of a Salon based event where electronic music practioners can meet and unravel some of the mystery behind their craft. There have been a great many of these electronic music “salon” type of events springing up recently with my own Overlap.org Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon, the BArCMuT meetup group events, and this new event, but LearnTech is worth keeping an eye on as their events have an different vibe than the previous.

Of note at this event are Vlad Spears, who presented an excellent controller + Max combo at the Overlap Salon last month, and Preshish Moments, whose custom MIDI Controller + software combo has produced some of the most interesting beat oriented music I’ve seen that is really live controlled. If you didn’t have plans on Tuesday night, don’t miss this event.

LoveTech presents LearnTech

Live Electronic Music Workshop/Performance Salon

Tuesday June 23rd
7-11pm at Space Gallery
1141 Polk St (@ Hemlock St)
FREE

The musicians, producers, artists, and innovators of LoveTech show you how they make it happen in a community building, discussion oriented music tech salon

7pm:
Vlad Spears of Daevlmakr and Wolf Interval: http://www.daevlmakr.com, http://www.2secondfuse.com
Showing off the new Snyderphonics Manta controller and his Max/MSP tonal mapping app, Honeycomb

8pm:
Nonagon: http://nonagon.net/
Performing live with MIDI controllers
http://vimeo.com/1591204

9pm:
Moldover: http://www.moldover.com/
Guitarist vs Controllerist: Traditional Instrument Techniques on Instruments FROM THE FUTURE

10pm:
Preshish Moments: http://www.preshishmoments.com/
Building a custom MIDI controller out of wood, nails and Max patches

Special Guest:
Timeline85 Productions: http://www.colorsynth.com
Presenting ColorSynth Hallucination Technology – MIDI driven LED Lighting effects

Digital Jam Lounge by Rich DDT and Twiita:
Bring your laptop, synth, or any electronic instrument, plug in and play! A perfect environment to teach one another new music hardware and software.

Moderated by Rich DDT

Education and interaction have been integral parts of LoveTech since the beginning, with 1 hour workshops at the start of every event, interactive multimedia art installations, and a Digital Jam Lounge for trying out new audio (and visual) hardware and software and becoming a part of the performance. LearnTech expands on this idea by having engaging performers/presenters demonstrate their audio (or visual) craft and explore the technology behind it in an engaging and discussion friendly workshop, connecting the brilliant minds in our hyper creative community in a stimulating and fun environment.

Our 2-story location features mixed media art and a full service bar

This event is absolutely FREE
21+ only

Join the LoveTech Mailing List to hear about future events: http://LoveTechSF.com
Join the LoveTech Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=105912651809
RSVP to the Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=103735804253

K-Bow at Maker Faire on CDM

Yann Seznec caught the KMI booth at Maker Faire and shot some video of me explaining the K-Bow. Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music did a nice writeup with a video and discussing several other precursors to our project.

One point I’d like to clarify is the use of the bow in these situations. Peter opined regarding the video of Jon Rose at STEIM:

I know what you’re thinking – you could also just hook your violin into a pickup and some distortion pedals. I think it’s really the experience of playing it that changes, though I’m just guessing, since I’m not a string player.

This really misses the entire point of what the bow is, and what it makes possible. The first thing to note is that you do need a pickup with your instrument if you want to process its sound with K-Bow control. In the STEIM video Jon is controlling EQ that is sculpting his feedback created from the loop between the speakers and the pickup on his violin. He is controlling these EQ settings via the accelerometers on the bow. As he tilts the bow the accelerometers change their readings relative to earth gravity, and this value is set to the gain of the 3 band Equalizer, one band per accelerometer axis.

The K-Bow lets you control parameters your synthesis or effects processing live in conjunction with your playing, all seamlessly from the instrument. While our software gives you a number of effects, most things in a standard guitar processing setup, the real power of this interface is that you can modify them musically in performance. For example, if you wanted a pitch shift that was modified by where your bow was on the strings, it is easy to set that up. Such a situation would allow you to make your instrument sound like a Bass when the frog was near the strings, or like a…erm…really tiny violin when you were near the tip of the bow.

What our software, coupled with the bow and your instrument, allows you to do is set up a network of interactions that lets you traverse through a set of pre-curated sonic possibilities. By using conditional statements, a hierarchy of presets, and physical gesture a composition can be progressed through with a variety of linear and non-linear possibilities, controlled directly by the performer live during performance. This frees the music from more standard timelines in a variety of ways putting more compositional control back in the hands of the performing musician.

This is only for one player, when you combine multiple musicians, and allow their meta-information generated by their performance interfaces to cross modulate across the entire ensemble; then you create an entirely new kind of electronic ensemble performance where the musicians are linked in many more intimate ways than simply just listening and responding to each others musical vernacular.

Imagine the pressure that a violin player is pressing on her strings with controlling the filter frequency of the viola player. Or, the notes that the cello plays transpose the entire ensemble into that key. These are just to very simple examples, but they illustrate some of the things that are possible with this kind of integrated synthesis control from traditional instruments.

And we have even started talking about video control…

Recombinant Media Labs at UCSD Roundup

Last Friday was the first road test for Recombinant Media Labs’s nomadic style of panoramic cinema. Here are excerpts shown live on Friday from a variety of artists that have developed RML modules over the years.

Selections from RML at UCSD.

The new install consists of 10 screens in a 2×3 rectangle, each screen having 12 feet width, and standing 6 feet 9 inches tall; this makes the whole area total 24 x 36 feet, with 360 degree surround projection.

When Peter Otto, Music Technology Director at UCSD and Director of Sonic Arts R&D at Calit2 (and long time Recombinant Media Labs friend and collaborator) approached us about creating a revised incarnation of our Recombinant Media Labs surround cinema space in their new experimental theater, we immediately started contemplating about how to fabricate a refreshed model that would be more portable, more technologically advanced and inclusive of the added innovations that had sprung out of our experiences with our two SF Bay Area locations. While RML’s fundamental design was integrated into the architecture of the auditorium, the screen setup was reconfigured as a “Cinebox”;  a floating panoramic  rectangle that is viewable on both sides of the suspended movie surfaces that can be more easily transported. While our preliminary visual playback was similar, we are currently developing an entirely revamped video engine solution based on a computer cluster enabling real time random access to content, more scalability and eventually even greater optical spatialization and graphic manipulation capabilities.

The UCSD Experimental theater contains a MeyerSound Constellation system, which enables the acoustics of the room to be morphed instantly with a system that is almost invisible to the eye unless you know where to look. The playback system features dedicated microphones and 28 MM-4 miniature loudspeakers for ambiance calculation, and 12 UPJ-1P VariO loudspeakers + eight UMS-1P subwoofers. The sound of the Experimental Theater can literally be changed from extremely dead acoustic to a canyon at the touch of a button, and the results are very believable. The network also enables a variety of spatialization options on par with RML’s audio PA in many respects, and with further augmentation it seems this Meyer array will offer considerable diffusion variations to all of the 10 channel soundtrack material that has been created for the gallery video works.

The updated Recombinant mobile apparatus was constructed as a large group class project by Otto’s ICAM senior projects class at UCSD. It was a primarily a community project and RML received a great deal of dedicated assistance from undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff and local denizens. The assemblage week was vigorously intensive, with several sleepless nights, and as a unit  we encountered many myriad technical obstacles that ranged from positioning trusses, to finding workarounds for isolated intermittent equipments, to fine tuning pixel image quality by calibrating projectors and signal transmitters.  Here is a timelapse video of the whole marathon week of building, with a second for an hour.

Building RML at UCSD Timelapse movie.

On the final day everything was consolidated, and were very excited about the results. After the RML surround cinema program there was a number of engaging media presentations by ICAM students as part of the Recombinant Serendipity week of exhibitions, discourse, and displays.

Egbert Mittelstadt and Biosphere at RML/UCSD

RML’s alliance with UCSD demonstrates the beginning of  a more advanced and distributed network for experiential media habitats.  RML anticipates the testing of accelerating technologies and methodologies with UCSD and other research affiliates , especially as we scrutinize specifications for our upcoming annex installation with the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. Watch for more news from RML in the near future.

It took the hard work of many people to make this installation possible. I would like to extend heartfelt gratitude to everyone who helped on this project on behalf of the entire Recombinant Media Labs team.

Panorama Selections Presented by:
RECOMBINANT MEDIA LABS (RML)

Director: Naut Humon
Associate Director:Tana Sprague (ICAM 04)
Chief Technician: Barry Threw
Visual Coordination: Masako Tanaka

In Alliance With:
UNIVERSITY OF CALFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Peter Otto – Music Technology Director, Music Department at UCSD
Director of Sonic Arts R&D, Calit2
Resident Researcher at Center for Research in Computing
& the Arts (CRCA)/UCSD
RML @ UCSD Installation Director

and

Todd Margolis – Technical Director, CRCA
Rand Steiger – Composer, UCSD Music Chair
Sheldon Brown – New Media Artist, UCSD CRCA Director
Adrienne Jenik – New Media Artist, current UCSD Vis Arts Chair
Walter Cameron – UCSD Vis Arts, Screen and Rigging Design and Construction
Neal Bociek – UCSD Vis Arts, Screen and Rigging Design and Construction
Brett Stahlbaum – New Media Artist, ICAM Faculty Advisor
Candy Harris – Vis Arts, ICAM End of Year Event Planner
Jenn Stauffer – UCSD Music
Gabriel Johnston – UCSD Music
Seth Sandler – Screen Project Leader
Dave Corsello – Rigging Project Leader
Greg Dawe – Visualization Systems Engineer, CalIT2
Louis Hock – Installation Artist/Filmmaker, Recent UCSD Vis Arts Chair
Adrienne Jenik – New Media Artist, Current UCSD Vis Arts Chair
Tom DeFanti – Professor, Founder, EVL, Viz Scientist, CalIT2, Cinegrid Co-Founder
Tom Erbe – Studio Director, Lecturer, Music Software Author, UCSD Music
Laurin Herr – CineGrid
Larry Smarr – Professor, CalIT2 Director
Hector Bracho – AV Services Manager, CalIT2
Trevor Henthorn – Systems and Music Technology Manager, UCSD Music
Riccardo Canaviello – Business Development Consultant
Bonnie Wright – Spruce Street Forum Director, Music Curator
Gloria Poore – Urban Arts Pioneer, Screen Design and Seamstress
Emily Jankowskit – Contributor/artist (ICAM 09)
Francis Zaragosa – Production/ Performer (ICAM 09)
Mason Bretan – Production (ICAM 09)
Mike Carillo – Production (ICAM 09)
Natalie Arbino – Production/performer (ICAM 09)
Antonio Estrada – Production (ICAM 09)
Faith Tsai – production (ICAM 09)
Ben Hackbarth – UCSD, Multichannel Thinking
Rick Snow – UCSD, Multichannel Thinking
Cooper Baker, UCSD, Audio Engineering
Stephan Vankov – Laptop Musician/performer (ICAM 05)
Dustin Raphael – Performer (ICAM 09)
Barbara Jackson – UCSD Music Dept. Administration
Jurgen Schultz – Visualization Project Scientist, UCSD
Katharina Rosenberger – Composer, New Media Artist, UCSD

Special Thanks:

Holly Wang – ICAM Senior Project / Event Direction
Carol Hobson – UC DARNET, Past Administrative Director, CRCA
Miller Puckette – Professor, Associate Director, CRCA
Lev Manovich – New Media Theorist, Author, UCSD
Ramesh Ramesh Rao – Professor, Director CalIT2 UCSD

Affiliate Entities:

UCSD Music Department —- UCSD Visual Arts Department
Dean of Arts and Humanities
CRCA
CalIT2
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

RML AV segments by;

All gratitudes to:

BIOSPHERE & EGBERT MITTLESTADT

RYOICHI KUROKAWA

MASAKO TANAKA’S treatment of
the MULTIPLE OTOMO PROJECT
featuring music by OTOMO YOSHIHIDE
video assemblage and edits by MASAKO TANAKA
videographers : MICHELLE SILVA & TIM DIGULLA
with the help of Stefanie Ku  & Brian O’Reilly
& thanks to Asphodel Records

SCOTT PAGANO & JOCHEM PAAP’s  “UMFELD ”

SEMI – CONDUCTOR’s  “BRILLIANT NOISE ”

MASAKO TANAKA / MARKUS POPP – Oval

Thanks to:

Mitzi Johnson & Asphodel Records
Edwin van der Heide
Vance Galloway
Bryan Gibbs
Mixture 151
Alex Oropeza
Matia Simovich
Chris Musgrave

K-Bow at Maker Faire

Kids love K-Bow!

Two weekends ago Keith McMillen Instruments set up at Maker Faire in the electronic music section, with many of our friends from CCRMA, CNMAT, Sound Arts, and other individuals and organizations in the Computer Music Zone, set up by Noah Thorp of BArCMuT. People were delighted with our K-Bow, a Bluetooth sensor bow for string instruments with an integrated sound processing package, and our booth was packed all day.

In particular kids love playing with the new sonic possibilities that our K-Bow system makes possible. We are really looking forward to the educational possibilities of this bow, both for pedagogy and for interesting students in string instruments that normally wouldn’t be excited by the traditional repertoire.  The amazing thing about young people playing with the bow is that they get the concept almost immediately. The idea of a gestural sensor bow controlling sound via a computer seem almost natural to them, and their main obstacle is in technique on the instrument, not the conceptual barrier of how the sound is being made. Here’s to a new generation using traditional instruments for electronic music!

RML History

This last week I have been sporadically posting various snippets of information about the re-establishment of our latest Recombinant Media Labs installation at the Experimental Theater during a month of launching at the Conrad Prebys Music Center at UC San Diego. I’ve received a lot of questions from those who hadn’t seen our previous San Francisco facility about what RML is, and now that the initial implementation at our new location is largely complete, it seems like time to pull together some more data about where RML has been and where it all might be headed.

Biosphere and Egbert Mittelstadt at RML San Francisco

Recombinant Media Labs is an organization founded in 1991 to research, create, preserve and portray Spatial Immersive Synthesis: the science of projecting image, light and sound objects into 3 dimensional space. We support the production of projects that further the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic installation, surround cinema, and multichannel AV performance. Under the direction of Naut Humon, former head of A&R for Asphodel Records and longtime member of the Ars Electronica Digital Musics juries, the RML platforms provide international artists in residence the opportunity to take their creative impulse to the furthest frontiers of aural and cinematic language, and present them in the formats for exhibition, symposia, workshops and real time cinesonic chamber concerts.

The RML story began in the early nineties when its predecessor, Sound Traffic Control, was invited to Tokyo to world premiere its “dub dashboard treatment plant”. While preparing for this engagement in 1991, Humon described the performance as a “sonic airport where various musical cargos land, taxi, and take off from an imaginary runway inhabited by ‘audience’ passengers amidst the dynamic audio trajectories.” Japan’s Panasonic Corporation took this metaphor literally. They constructed a large air traffic control tower from corroded metal that housed multiple video radar screens and searchlights over a bed of fog, in an expansive room of 800 floor-to-ceiling loudspeakers. At these shows, Recombinant’s omni-directional media system began to emerge.

Upon returning to the States, Naut set out to construct a movable model of what had occurred in Japan. Throughout the rest of the decade, subsequent Recombinant spectacles were mounted at festivals, and customized for special locations around the world. During this time, its sponsoring partner Asphodel LTD., began releasing CDs for artists selected from these events. One of the most renowned Recombinant presentations occurred at the 20th anniversary year of the Ars Electronica Festival on September 9, 1999. Playing on the 9/9/99 calendar date, Recombinant designated a nine hour, nine minute and nine second production format, consisting of 61 timed modules created by 33 participants. After viewing preliminary events in the outdoors and adjacent auditoriums, spectators entered into a larger hall surrounded by stages on all sides occupied by Powerbook orchestras, turntable assemblies, sizable steel sculptures and an encompassing matrix of screens, lights, and loudspeakers. This technological configuration provided a springboard for a substantive, content-driven array of artists and film/video works as each module unfolded.

After appearances in Asia, America and Europe, Naut and associates drafted the blueprint for two fixed-location media laboratories that included a base for the Asphodel imprint, and a comprehensive studio complex. Within this structure, the RML consolidation was substantiated as a culturally coherent enterprise, hosting a vast range of visual artists, musicians, engineers, designers, curators, organizers, technologists, educators and theorists from around the world.

Lights on at the RML Theater San Francisco

The San Francisco incarnation of RML consisted of ten 16:9 screens in 360 degrees attached to the four enclosing walls of the room around the audience. The ten channel video surround video format in a rectangular configuration was used so that the works created for the system would be both scalable to other channel counts and transferrable to other festivals and events. The rectangular room is the most common architecture for typical auditoriums around the world, which made this setup  more sensible and common than a dome or other geometric configuration for works that must maintain longevity. By using discrete 16:9 screens we can reformat works for more or less channels as they are available, and for arrangements that might not afford a 360 degree setup. Playback is accommodated by 10 synchronized DVD decks, also chosen because of their compact robustness and over a decade ofubiquity in museums and installs around the world. This visual panorama was supported by a high impact sixteen channel surround sound array, capable of spatializing sound in three dimensions. Two rings of eight L-Acoustics PA speakers, one ring overhead and one slightly below ear level, encircled the theatre, allowing for the positioning of sound in conjunction with the visuals, creating a unified compositional canvas for diffused audio/visual works. These point sources were reinforced with eight 18″ subwoofers, one under each speaker column, two dual 18″ sub-bass channels at the end of the room, and sixteen transducers under the floor to create visceral vibrational effects. All of these combined created a truly immersive sound field that could accommodate vast dynamic amplitude shifts for layering of delicate or even overdriven frequency spectra.

Performance at RML San Francisco.

Over the initial years of RML’s first SF operation shows were presented from a wide variety of international artists, including Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Köner, Pan Sonic, Blixa Bargeld, Carsten Nicolai, Monolake, Maryanne Amacher, Christian Marclay, Ryoichi Kurokawa, AGF, Ikue Mori, Biosphere, Egbert Mittlestädt, Chris Watson, Vladislav Delay, Matmos, Kode 9, Pole, Richard Devine, Morton Subotnick, Deadbeat, Skoltz_Kolgen, Granular Synthesis, Thomas Brinkmann, Richie Hawtin, kangding ray, Richard Chartier, Joe Colley, Kevin Drumm, Markus Schmickler, Sonic Boom, Trevor Wishart, Mix Master Mike, Invisible Scratch Pickles, Executioners, A-Trak, Jochem Paap, Scott Pagano, Rechenzentrum, Fe-mail, Li Alin, Semi-Conductor, Scott Arford, Otomo Yoshihide, Masako Tanaka, Francis Dhomont, Francisco Lopez, Zbigniew Karkowski, John Duncan, Daniel Menche, Florian Hecker, Yasuano Tone, Louis Dufort, Alvin Curran, Lasse Marhaug, Murcof, Sutekh, William Basinski, Sue Costabile, Tikiman & Scion, Barry Schwartz, as well as starting production on upcoming cinematic offerings from Kronos Quartet, Survival Research Laboratories and Synchronator.

Recombinant Media Labs Opens at UCSD

The UCSD Recombinant Media Labs premiere came together nicely Saturday. A sampling of works were shown in our new cinema box format in the experimental theater at the new music building at UCSD. Also, a number of execellent graduating ICAM senior projects were screened.

We are overjoyed to have a new location to develop the environment; many technical improvements are planned that should enable a whole host of new compositional possibilities in surround cinema. Also, this installation will premiere a number of new works by RML artists both new and old. If you are near San Diego get in touch to see it.

Recombinant Media Labs at UCSD

We are currently down in San Diego installing a new realization of Recombinant Media Labs. While similar in form and content to the original space in San Francisco, this installation has several key differences that make the project have its own unique set of challenges.

The current setup is build with components that are meant to be much more portable than the previous installation. It is intended to be able to be set up in any room of adequate size and acoustic requirements. Unlike the previous setup, with the screens attached to the walls, the new installation has the screens suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room. This both allows for portability, and creates an amazing “cinema box” effect; the video is viewable from outside of the box.

The setup opens on Friday, if you are around the San Diego area, get in touch to view the new installation.

Jon Rose with the K-Bow

Over at KMI we were delighted to have Jon Rose come to our Berkeley studio and visit us, and be one of the first artists to get some time in on the K-Bow. Jon has had a long history with sensor bows, and so was the perfect candidate to try out our system, and offer some feedback. After some time getting accustomed, Jon left with a bow and the newest version of our software.

I caught back up with Jon shortly after I left music MusikMesse at STEIM, the electronic music research institution in Amsterdam. We worked together for two days developing sounds and tying them to K-Bow interactions. Here are some of the results we got, which do a great job of showing what sonic possibilities an accomplished improviser can explore using technology and extended technique.

The last night of my stay in Amsterdam we presented the K-Bow system to a packed room. Jon used the bow both in demonstration of the software, and in a live electronic trio with Richard Barrett and Cor Fuhler. From the STEIM blog:

Barry Threw and Jon Rose’s presentation of the K-Bow was concise and entertaining, making an amusing duo who also adequately explained through practical demonstrations the abilities of the controller.

The software and hardware of the bow were exemplary in their self-sufficiency. The software provided enough DSP processing objects to create interesting performances ‘out of the box’, as well as such effective additions as a simple four track looper, phase vocoding audio scrubber and surround sound panner, all freely assignable. It also provided the option to have all controller data routed to third party applications via MIDI and OSC. These were all simply and effectively displayed in user-friendly formats and graphics – a strength for any consumer product.

The hardware itself I can only comment on in a limited capacity, not being a string player. However, to me the bow seemed no heavier nor clumsier than a wooden one, the sensor box attached to the frog was not overly obtrusive and the carbon fibre construction seemed a good choice. Assignable controls include a grip sensor, accelerometer data, ultrasound and axis positioning.

June 3rd: Overlap Max/MSP Salon

Wednesday night June 03, 2009 from 7-9 pm @ Sound Arts – 520 Hampshire street, suite #206 SF, CA 94110

Tomorrow night is the monthly Max/MSP salon, hosted by Overlap.org and Sound Arts. This is our venue to share patches, ideas, and techniques related to Cycling ’74s new media toolkit. We are excited that Ableton Live is now a part of the Overlap Salon, and we are the new Ableton Live user group of San Francisco.

The salon will begin with a short introduction by all participants, and followed by a quick presentation. The remainder of the time will be spent collectively working and thinking about “the project of the day”. Everyone is welcome regardless of experience using Max/MSP/Jitter or Ableton Live.

This month is particularly exciting because we have a special presentation from Vlad Spears, of Daevlmakr, on a new patch he created called Honeycomb.

I set out to make a Max app that would map tónová mrízka onto the Manta. The tonal relationships seemed complicated on first glance, then I realized the entire chart could be created by a simple pattern of four intervals repeated twice on each row with note staggering at row start points. Once I had this puzzle solved, mapping the Czech akordu diagrams to the Manta turned out to be surprisingly easy. A dollop of royal jelly was applied to allow a wider working range of octaves without repeats, but from overlapped simplicity came very natural seeming complexity.

Honeycomb is the result.

Come by to share your own work, get inspired, maybe learn something, or just hang out with like minded practioners of the media art programming world.

Dorkbot 7 Year Anniversary Meeting and Party

The venerable group of people doing strange things with electricity, Dorkbot SF, is celebrating their 7th year this month. There is a 7th anniversary meeting this Wednesday, June 3rd at the Nevada Lightning Lab (409 16th Street in San Francisco) and features presentations by Jonathan Foote – Ghostmaxtrix, Marc Powell – Exploring the Food Genome and Greg Leyh – current research at the Lightning Lab + live Tesla Coil testing.

The big Dorkbot SF 7th Anniversary Party is coming up on June 20th.