Networked Music Review

NMR Commission: “PuréeData” by Ted Hayes

jo — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:12:45 +0000

PuréeData by Ted Hayes [Optimized for Google Chrome]:

PuréeData is a web-browser interface for a single shared sound environment that allows live, collaborative patching for anyone, anywhere. Visitors interact with a shared PureData audio synthesis patch and listen to the results as an MP3 stream, with no software to install or set up. The project is open-source, and all are encouraged to modify, improve and set up their own PuréeData servers.

PuréeData is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

Ted Hayes is a poet-inventor: conceiving objects and experiences that explore the sublime and the enigmatic through recombination and deconstruction. He is a proponent of what he has dubbed “Research Art,” or art-as-science experiment, and actively investigates the themes, technologies and ramifications of autonomy, emergence, semiotics, pattern recognition, and neural networks. Ted’s works range from a group of language-inventing robots to a mythological city-founding ritual for soprano and string quartet, is a graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His operating principle is, in a word, poetry: to pique with enigma and confound with beauty.

NMR Commission: “You’re Not My Father” by Paul Slocum

jo — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:36:06 +0000

You’re Not My Father, by Paul Slocum, [Requires Quicktime plugin] is composed of a sequence of recreations of a 10 second scene from the television show Full House, overlaid with sound loops from the scene’s original music. The crews who re-shot the scene were recruited through Internet message boards and Craigslist; each was paid $150. Instructions for shooting the scene and delivering the footage were issued to the crews. To-date, the project includes participants from Austin, Cincinnati, Chicago, Dallas, Denton, London, and San Francisco.

Although the commission money has been exhausted, Slocum is still accepting submissions. If you are interested in participating, read the PDF document on the website. Your footage will be added to the video sequence online and exhibited in future gallery exhibitions.

About the Process: In an email he wrote to Helen Thorington (January 11), Slocum describes the difficulties he had finding participants for the project:

Originally I was posting on Internet message boards for Full House, fan film making, and other related topics offering $80 for each completed video, hoping I could get about 18 videos. But nobody was taking the offer so I increased it to $150 and accepted that I had to reduce the number of videos. I ended up having the best results with Craigslist. You can’t post an ad to multiple cities, so I rotated the ad between different locations.

I gradually built a list of people willing to participate, which was complicated to maintain since people frequently expressed interest and later stopped responding to my emails. Most participants did not meet the deadlines I set. I received the first video in early November, and the last three in early January, less than a week before the launch date.

He then goes on to describe the formal challenges he faced:

Originally, I’d wanted the voicing of the dialogue to be so close to the original that it would maintain the hypnotic rhythm of the mockup loop I had created. I specified this in the documentation, but nobody could do it well enough, and the sound from the reshoots didn’t maintain the rhythm of the original concept. I was concerned that the piece wouldn’t work until I had the idea of overlaying the original audio onto the reshoot audio. This maintained the rhythm and emphasized the room reverb (and space) from the reshoots.

I found that the key to making the piece work out was subtle changes. Very slight timing changes made a big difference, equalization of audio, selection between two slightly different takes… Also some of the reshoots did not work aesthetically, but after a lot of experimenting I found that changes in color saturation of the clips could fix problems without changing much about the original authorship of the reshoot. I could bring out colors in dull clips, and control overly complex clips. I also discovered that the transition from under-saturated clips to over-saturated clips can be interesting.

You’re Not My Father is included in Slocum’s solo show “More House” which opens tonight at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, 5020 Tracy Street, Dallas, Texas.

You’re Not My Father is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Slocum is a musician and new media artist living in Dallas. Computers and computer culture are often the medium and subject of his work. Some of his projects are “The Dot Matrix Synth”, an 80’s dot matrix printer with re-programmed firmware to transform it into a musical instrument, “The Century Callback Project”, a phone number that calls you back 8 times in a century, and “The Time-Lapse Homepage”, a video made with HTML. He is also half of the “Tree Wave” project that creates music and video with obsolete assembly-language-programmed computer and video game gear. Paul is the director and co-founder of “And/Or Gallery” in Dallas, a gallery that specializes in new media artwork. Some of Paul’s performances and exhibitions include Transitio MX in Mexico City, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Deitch Projects, and Eyebeam in New York, Le Confort Moderne in France, README 2005 in Denmark, and The Liverpool Biennial.

NMR Commission: “More of the Same” by LoVid

jo — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:50:28 +0000

More of the Same by LoVid [Start slowly with 1; close each popup window before launching the next] - More of the Same extends LoVid’s investigation of electrical irregularities and human interactions. After it loads copies of a single sound sample, fissures in the digital veneer are explored as the spoken communication is played back repeatedly. Though each instantiation of the speech is identical, physical constraints affect the timing. This allows the nature of the medium to peek through the cracks in the voices.

More of the Same is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) overwhelms the senses with new media in their performances, videos, objects, and installations. LoVid has toured the US and Europe extensively performing, exhibiting, and lecturing at PS1, The Neuberger Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art , The Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, Exit Art, Evolution Festival (UK), The Kitchen, RISD, Massachusetts College of Art, FACT, Kansas City Art Institute, Chicago Art Institute, University of Wisconsin, Futuresonic Festival (UK), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Ocularis, and Institute of Contemporary Art London, among many others. LoVid has been artist in residence at Eyebeam, Harvestworks, iEAR, Alfred University, and Stevens Institute of Technology; and has received grants and awards from Turbulence.org, Experimental TV Center, NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Greenwall Foundation. LoVid is also a free103Point9 transmission artist.

NMR Commission: “Spectral Quartet” by Woody Sullender

jo — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:46:13 +0000

Spectral Quartet — by Woody Sullender — is a web adaptation of the project Whispering Spectres, which will be installed at Turbulence @Pace Digital Gallery 2, April 5-29, 2011.

The audio content consists of filtered radio signals, culled from various web streams from the Internet. These signals are being passed through many “band pass filters”, a type of equalizer that allows a small range of frequencies through while attenuating frequencies outside of this range. In effect, most of the audio signal is “erased” except for a narrow stratum of frequency material. This work highlights small, hidden musical moments that are occurring on radio, but are usually rendered inaudible by other elements in the sound.

Although the Internet can bridge disparate communities, our experience on the web is of a customized landscape, with content tailored to our ideological views, our shopping behaviors, our socio-economic demographics, etc.. Spectral Quartet literally re-unites these voices into a singularized, aestheticized, quiet moment.

Spectral Quartet is a 2010 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for its Turbulence web site. It was supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

BIOGRAPHY

Woody Sullender is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY, working primarily in music and audio media. Over the past few years, he has emerged as a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. More recent work focuses on “erasing” existing audio by removing most of the frequencies from a recording via band-pass filters. This has manifested in a range of media from a lathe-cut record of a diminished “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to an FM broadcast of erased radio stations. Among other activities, he teaches new media in the New York area and hosts a weekly radio show on WFMU.

NMR Commission: “Quartet With Pyramid Scheme”

jo — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:32:59 +0000

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme by Jordan Topiel Paul, Eric Laska, Richard Kamerman, Reed Evan Rosenberg:

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a streaming online sound installation whose audio content is collected through a sixteen-week pyramid scheme structure. Every two weeks, a new set of participants (recruited by prior participants) submits sound samples that the quartet will selectively work into the stream. The samples are played continuously in unpredictable variations through a Max/MSP patch. By the end of the process, 512 participants will have been asked to contribute.

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

JORDAN TOPIEL PAUL is a musician, artist and elementary educator based out of Queens, NY. Originally an improvising percussionist, he continues to explore improvisation in his current work with sound installation and electronic media. His recent pieces have involved collaborative planning and production, field recordings, site-specificity, FM and Internet transmission, Max/MSP programming and indeterminate processes.

ERIC LASKA is a New York-based musician. Examples from recent work focus on the proliferation of sounds from localized material processes, the arrangement of improvised music for extended periods of time, and composing for electro-acoustic music based on “back-end” principles such as power consumption. In addition he is part of the Internet surf club “Double Happiness.”

RICHARD KAMERMAN’S artistic interest is aimed foremost on the task of magnification. Small sounds, small gestures — made large. Inconsequential events — made important. The vast difference made to a narrative by a small change in focus. Room acoustics, microphone/pickup placement, and amplification are often very important to his live construction of sound, where he places great weight on the embracing of unintended consequences - e.g. errors in translation/format conversion, bursts of feedback, power supply failures.

REED EVAN ROSENBERG is an American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sound. He programs various digital instruments for each specific project on which he embarks, encompassing the areas of improvised electronic music, extreme computer music, and installation art. Recent projects include an in depth study of chaotic synthesis using Boris Chirikov’s “Standard Map,” systems that hack and trouble auto-tune and phase vocoding, and a musical system using the boids algorithm which simulates the flocking patterns of birds and was most famously implemented in the CG of Jurassic Park.

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NMR Commission: “WWW-Enabled Noise Toy” by Loud Objects

jo — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 14:53:34 +0000

WWW-Enabled Noise Toy by Loud Objects (with funds from the Jerome Foundation) [Needs Firefox browser]:

Loud Objects, NYC-based circuit sorcerers, present a wacky way to learn hardware audio programming. The WWW-Enabled Noise Toy invites anyone with a web browser to write their own audio code, program it remotely onto a Noise Toy, and play it live via webcam. In the spirit of “try it yourself” software demos, the website provides a simple environment for experimenting with low-level microchip-generated audio. Load code from the Loud Objects’ own library of performance algorithms, hone your own noise techniques, and add your work to the online archive to share it with other microchip coders and create an open source noise community.

BIOGRAPHY

Graduates of Columbia University, Kunal Gupta, Tristan Perich and Katie Shima have been performing as Loud Objects since 2005. Their performances, focused on sound from programmed microchips, have ranged from live circuit constructions on overhead projectors and slide projectors, to soldering atop a 24-light bulb fluorescent podium, and later with modified fluorescent light guitars.

Loud Objects have performed in the USA and internationally at numerous festivals on four continents, including Sonar (Spain), Transitio_MX (Mexico), Piksel (Norway), Evolution (UK), Bent Festival and Blip Festival (NYC), Electric Eclectics (Canada), Screen Music 2 (Italy), Art and Music with the Overhead Projector (Germany), Festival of Endless Gratitude (Denmark), NIME (Brooklyn). Their varied performances range from solo acts to shifting duets with vocalists, drummers, susophonists, tuba quintets, laptop musicians, singers, painting machines, manatees, and recently as movie soundtracks.

As teachers, they have hosted workshops where attendees learn to build and program sound- generating circuits. They have explored teaching as performance, explaining their motions as they solder their circuit live, fielding questions above the noise. They have spoken and given workshops at Maker Faire (California), Handmade Music Night (Brooklyn), Le Cagibi (Canada), Museum of Science (Arkansas), Columbia University (NYC).

As artists, Loud Objects blanket walls with small speakers and microchips. Instead of pushing buttons, the audience is encouraged to rewire the actual circuit with soldering irons, hanging as part of the installation. These installations have been in shows including Art and the Overhead (Sweden), Piksel (Norway) and Art and Music with the Overhead Projector (Denmark).

NMR Commission: “Trace Aureity” by Adam Nash

helen — Sat, 01 May 2010 13:00:55 +0000

Trace Aureity by Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona) [Needs Second Life account and client (free)] - Trace Aureity is an interactive, immersive, audiovisual sculpture located in the 3-D synthetic world Second Life. There are eighty-eight manipulated field recordings — from city streets, birdsong, to talkback radio — and ninety-six nested rotating objects densely arranged in a three dimensional grid. Avatars, either solo or in groups, generate sounds by moving through the installation. Some of the innermost nested objects, colored red, also spawn glowing spheres which fly out and bounce around inside the work, triggering sounds as they pass through other objects. Because the playable space is so dense, players are rewarded by slowing down their movements as much as possible, since even miniscule movements create differences in sonic output. The contingencies of time-based interaction by people-as-avatars creates a dynamic audiovisual composition, always unique to that moment and those interactors. This may be seen to represent an evolution of the aleatoric composition techniques of John Cage and Brian Eno, as well as an enactment of the objets sonore of Pierre Schaeffer.

Adam Nash will lead a tour of his work on Thursday, May 22, 2008 between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. US EDT. If you would like to take part in the tour, please contact adam at yamanakanash dot net.

Trace Aureity is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University. Read an interview here.

NMR Commission: “Voices from the Paradise Network” by John Hudak

jo — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:16:04 +0000

Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak, with Flash programming by erational.org [Needs Flash Player and speakers on] - John writes: My mother-in-law passed away recently, reminding me of a technique that a parapsychologist named Dr. Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974) used to record what he purported to be voices of deceased spirits. With the amount of information moving around on the internet these days, and the passing of my mother-in-law, who I thought would want to get in touch (if possible), I thought I’d give Raudive’s technique a try within the digital realm.

Voices from the Paradise Network is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with the funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

John Hudak has been interested in sound and music from the age of four, when he began to play a variety of instruments. At the University of Delaware and the Naropa Institute for the Arts, he studied English, video, photography, creative writing and dance. John then began to create taped soundtracks for his solo performance-art/dance pieces, that later developed into audio, audio-video, and mixed-media pieces. Language has also been a predominant focus, and John has studied and published haiku poetry, the literary equivalent of the reductive, minimal, and nature-based sound forms that interest him.

John’s current work focuses on the rhythms and melodies that exist in our daily aural environments. These sounds usually remain hidden, as we tend to overlook their musical qualities; or, their musical qualities are obscured through mixture with other sounds. This work takes the form of audio CDs, web-based projects, mixed-media installations and performances. In simplified terms, what John is doing could be considered reframing and transforming sound in our environment so it can be noted, admired, and valued.

NMR Commission: “ItSpace” by Peter Traub

jo — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:15:22 +0000

ItSpace, by Peter Traub, creates a network of pages within the social networking site MySpace. Instead of people, the pages feature everyday household objects from the artist’s house. Each page has a photo of the object, a description, and most importantly, a 1-minute piece composed of samples of the object being struck, resonated, and so forth. All the pages, or objects, are ‘friends’ with each other, so that visitors who discover one object may jump to the others to see their profiles and hear their sounds. Visitors to the site are invited to create new ItSpace pages with pieces made from their own household objects and link those in as ‘friends’ of the original set. Listen to an Interview >>

ItSpace is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Traub is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia. He received his Master’s in Electro-Acoustic Music Composition from Dartmouth College in 1999. After that, Peter moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he worked as a software engineer for five years. While gambling his daytime employment on internet startups, he spent nights composing at Stanford’s CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). His music and internet-based sound art works have been played and exhibited internationally. His interests at UVa include music that utilizes computer networks, virtual and real spaces, multi-channel composition, and the exploration of alternative and open-source software systems for composition.

NMR Commission: “My Space Sound” by Sawako Kato

jo — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:10:39 +0000

My Space Sound by Sawako Kato [Requires Mac OSX, Flash Player, and a fast Internet connection] - My Space Sound is an audio popup book about the village called MySpace. The story starts like this: “Once upon a time … there was a village called MySpace. It is the era when so-called ‘Web 2.0′ is still a novelty…” Users can participate in the story by entering their MySpace URL, as well as by just browsing the story. In a world composed of both facts and fictions extracted from the database, the audience gets a chance to rethink the chaotic social network space.

“My Space Sound is the result of my fieldwork about MySpace, with some help from my friends. It is just a tiny point or node in a huge social network, and it is a starting point rather than an accomplishment. This is just my story, and I am curious to know your story. My Space Sound is the artistic observations and everyday sketches of the imperfect processor named sawako about the state of networks and individuals.”

My Space Sound is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

As a musician, Sawako Kato has recently made a name for herself with her own unique combination of field recordings and DSP combined with a noticeably feminine touch. As a new media artist, she created “2.4GHz Scape,” which explores the urban WiFi signal scape; “ishi ~ listening stone,” a sound art piece that uses a crystal radio and stones, and an ephemeral timeline drawing with Max/MSP/Jitter.

Sawako has solo releases from 12k, and/OAR and Anticipate, She has collaborated with a wide range of musicians such as Taylor Deupree, Andrew Deutsch, Kenneth Kirschner, Taku Sugimoto, Toshimaru Nakamura, asuna, Ryan Francesconi and Jacob Kirkegaard; and has performed in Tonic, Diapason, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Monkey Town (NYC); MUTEK Festival (Canada), Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA), Batofar (Paris), Kunstraum Walcheturm (Zurich), offsite, Apple Store Sinsaibashi (Japan); m12 (Berlin), Glade Festival, Resonance FM, ICA (UK); and other venues in the US, Europe and Japan.