Nathalie Miebach is a Boston-based artist who translates weather data into complex sculptures and musical scores.

“Recently, I have begun translating weather data collected in cities into musical scores, which are then translated into sculptures as well as being a source for collaboration with musicians. These pieces are not only devices that map meteorological conditions of a specific time and place, but are also functional musical scores to be played by musicians. While musicians have freedom to interpret, they are asked not to change the essential relationship of the notes to ensure that what is still heard is indeed the meteorological relationship of weather data.” (Scroll down for the Call for Composers.) Continue reading

9.11.01_Scapes by Helen Thorington, 2002 (16:54)

Read Helen’s beautiful text (with links to more of my images).

Sound Credits: The sound score makes use of materials from Thorington’s 20-year collection of recorded materials, processed found sound, and sounds from the 9.11 event recorded by New Yorkers and archived on the web site SonicMemorial.org With thanks to SonicMemorial.org and those who have contributed to their collection.

If you’d like to contact Helen, her email is newradio at turbulence dot org.

Moori: Audience Participatory Performance :: May 14, 2011; 9:00 pm + May 20, 2011; 7:00 pm :: Barkroom, Parsons, 2 W. 13th St. Ground Floor (corner of 5th Ave), New York, NY.

Moori, by Haeyoung Kim, is an interactive audience participatory audio-visual performance. By incorporating multiple modes of messaging on a mobile phone, users tell their stories to guided questions by the performer. User data is processed to generate algorithmic audio and visuals while creating a larger narrative. This collaboration creates dialog among the performer and audience members and suggests new possibilities that can exist through the combination of algorithmic animation, audio and language. Continue reading

Taming Technology - Addomesticare la Tecnologia :: April 22-23, 2011 — Associazione Culturale Nub in Montale (PT) + April 29-30, 2011 — Le Murate, via delle carceri, Italy (at the historical prison complex of Le Murate and at the club Cargo).

Switch - Creative Social Network in collaboration with Associazione Culturale Nub and Tempo Reale present Taming Technology, a two day program including performances, DJ sets, installations, lectures and workshops exploring the territory between music, art and new media. The focus will be on practices such as physical computing, interface and interaction design, hardware hacking and biological computation, framed as fields of research capable of providing new connections between the virtual domain and the physical world. Continue reading

Hertzian Rain by Mark Shepard :: February 13, 2011; 3:00 - 5:00 pm :: Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York.

Live sound from multiple sound makers is streamed from a set of wireless transmitters placed at opposing sides of an urban space. These transmitters broadcast these audio streams locally on the same radio frequency to a group of participants wearing wireless headphones tuned to this frequency. Because the transmitters broadcast on the same local frequency, a zone of interference is created where multiple audio streams compete for signal dominance.

Participants carry umbrellas made of electromagnetic field (EMF) shielding fabric that enable them to actively shape the surrounding environment of radio waves. By orienting the umbrella in different ways, one is able to filter the interfering radio signals and select a single audio stream to listen to. Continue reading

Composing with Process: Perspectives on Generative and Systems Music 2.2: Marcus Schmickler and EVOL:

Generative music is a term used to describe music which has been composed using a set of rules or system. This series of six episodes explores — written and edited by Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore for Radio Web MACBA (RWM) — generative approaches (including algorithmic, systems-based, formalised and procedural) to composition and performance primarily in the context of experimental technologies and music practices of the latter part of the 20th Century and examines the use of determinacy and indeterminacy in music and how these relate to issues around control, automation and artistic intention. Each episode of the series is accompanied by an additional programme, entitled ‘Exclusives’, featuring exclusive or unpublished sound pieces by leading sound artists and composers working in the field.

This show presents two contrasting generative works by German composer Marcus Schmickler and Catalan collective EVOL.

Continue reading

Scale is a bio-art collaboration with neurobiologist/ engineer Malcolm MacIver, visual/ conceptual artist Marlena Novak, and composer/ sound designer Jay Alan Yim. It is being presented at STRP Festival, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

This audience-interactive installation involves electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a ‘choir’ whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The interface for Scale incorporates custom-designed software, a hacked Wiimote ‘conductor’s baton’ that participants can use to ‘cue’ individual fish so their unadulterated tones (as well as digitally processed versions) can be heard through the audio system, a touchscreen panel to allow for changes in volume, and arrays of LEDs under each tank to provide visual feedback to visitors. Continue reading

[Photo credit: M.I.T. Media Laboratory] When I die, what remains? What will I leave behind? What can I control? What can I perpetuate?

These are the eternal human questions facing Simon Powers, the protagonist of visionary composer Tod Machover’s new opera Death and the Powers, a full-evening work which premiered September 24, 2010 at l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo. In the opera, Powers, a rich, powerful businessman and inventor, wishes to perpetuate his existence beyond the decay of his physical being.

Reaching the end of his life, Powers uses his vast resources to devise a way to ‘download’ himself into his environment. This transformation turns every object in his surroundings — his books, furniture and walls — into a collective, living version of himself, called The System. Continue reading

Musopen is a non-profit library of copyright free music. This project will use your donations to purchase and release music to the public domain. Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn’t be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.

This isn’t just a crazy idea: we’ve done this before using donations from our website, but now we want to tackle something much more ambitious. Continue reading

Locustream Promenade — @ Festival MIMI, July 1-14, 2010, Marseille, Iles du Frioul, France — is a sound art installation composed of sonic beams (10 parabolic dishes equipped with sound speakers and small computers). The parabolas are suspended in the public space in such a way that a visitor only hears the sound from the beam when he or she is directly underneath it. Each beam plays a different stream from the Locustream project. The live streamed sounds are soundscapes coming from remote locations through the Internet. The space where the paraboles are hung is virtually connected to geo-distant spaces. By moving from one beam to another the audience walks through audio windows opening out onto a worldwide soundscape. Invited to take part in this experience the listener becomes conscious his or her immediate surroundings in a new way, perception of the local audio environment is modified. Continue reading