Sonic Boom and Careen Ajar

Spectrum feat. Sonic Boom
Careen Ajar (Naut Humon, Scott Arford, and Li Alin)

Saturday, March 1st 2008
Doors at 8:30pm
Location and more info: 650.255.8947
$10 donation

SPECTRUM featuring SONIC BOOM

“Sonic Boom” is the alias of Pete Kember, best known as the singer/guitarist in the legendary hypno-drone unit Spacemen 3. In 1990 he issued his lone solo LP, Spectrum; after the 1991 swan song Recurring, Sonic recycled the Spectrum title as the name of his new band, which debuted with

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Love, beautiful indie interactive world

Love is an MMO with beautiful and original graphics. What is more impressive is that the game’s creator, Eskil Steenberg, is building this world entirely on his own. To help overcome the time consuming task of creating an entire world of game art by himself, many of the graphics in the game are procedurally generated.

Conceptually, it is a game based on exploration of an alternate world with friends,

Bay ACM Lecture: Pluribus

Tonight at the ACM Bay Area meeting in Palo Alto,  Dr. Niranjan Damera-Venkata and Dr. Nelson L. Chang of HP will present their framework that combines the power of multiple inexpensive projectors to quickly and automatically create a scalable “super-projector.”

Wednesday, 27 February 2008, 7:00 PM
Hewlett Packard, Building 20-A 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto

http://hpl.hp.com/research/pluribus/

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium: Naut Humon & V. Vale

On Monday, cultural magnets Naut Humon and V. Vale will speak on many aspects of electronic and underground media history at the UC Berkeley Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, in a lecture titled “Attention Depiction Disorders”. Naut will be speaking a lot about this history of Recombinant Media Labs, up to our current point.

In addition installation and video artist Perry Hoberman will be projecting live video at the event.

2/25/08

7:30 - 9:30

Berkeley Art

Online Music Analysis API

The Echo Nest is an online API for audio file analysis. You can upload as many audio files as you like, and the server gives back an XML file detailing musical attributes such as dynamics, beat information, pitch information, musical structure information, file encoding, and timbre. There is free example source code available on the site to assist in parsing the XML information for use in games, visualizations, or installations.

Moondust

This video is of Moondust, a video game exploring interactive and generative music concepts on the Commadore 64. It was written by Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and musician. It is interesting look at these older games from a time when the medium wasn’t as invested in industry and see the experimentation that was present in them.

One of the reasons that music in these early interactive works is so interesting is because of the severe limitations that the composers and programmers were working under to realize their visions. For the last decade the focus of game audio improvement has been on resolution of assets, and in making it easier to play back game cues that were composed in traditional manners. These older games used algorithmic compositional methods and intelligent melody and harmony generation to create scores that, although dated by their sound sources, were very often dynamic.

Interactive Media as Relevant Cultural Discourse

Steve Gaynor has started quite the dialog on his blog, waging a bet to any taker. He states:

I’ll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I’ll bet you that fifty years from now they’ll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today.

Already a number of very good counter-opinions have been cited, and the bet taken, by people including Borut Pfeifer, Marek Bronstring, Michael Samyn, N’Gai Croal (drawing from a very respectable knowledge base), and John Walker. All of these posts offer insightful reasons that games may well evolve into a more widely respected and poignant medium. However, I think there are a few points missing or under emphasized.I would also like to take this bet.

IASIG Mixer Party

It is, of course, Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. If you are in town, be sure to hit the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group’s Mixer party.

Chieftain Pub
198 5th St.
6PM-10
Wed, Feb 20th.

Project Bar-BQ 2007 Report Released

For those that aren’t familiar with the BarBQ Interactive Music conference, it is quite an event. Held in darkest Texas, away from the distractions that so often inhibit our epiphany and catharsis, BarBQ is a gathering of some of the brightest minds working in interactive audio and computer music fields. The goal of the conference is Influencing Music Hardware and Software Over the Next Five Years, and before everyone gets there that is about as

Where are they now? IRCAM’s Buchla 100.

(Update: I’ve been rightly informed that this is actually a Buchla 300 system.)

Last week I was down in San Deigo working on some ongoing projects with Keith McMillen (of the BEAM Foundation) and Miller Puckette (of Max and pd fame), and ran into this gem, the Buchla 100 from Ircam, in a spare bedroom. Miller said he pulled this noble old warhorse from the dumpster at Ircam. Even in its current place of