Workshop: Neuro Reality Check (Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) Performance: GenComp Collective Berlin & Book Launch: Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience :: December 2, 2011, 10:00 pm :: N.K., Elsenstr. 52/2, Hinterhaus Etage 2, 12059 Berlin :: Open to the public (register for the workshop here).

GenComp Collective Berlin: Chaotic, cybernetic, and hybrid systems — Neurological and cybernetic research techniques have been adopted by many experimental music protagonists, such as Louis and Bebe Barron, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor and others. Continue reading

Evomusart 2012: Deadline Extension And Gpem’s Special Issue Announcement :: Call for Papers ::

Several authors have contacted Evomusart to get an extension of the submission deadline. It was therefore agreed, to extend the deadline for all events. Authors who have already submitted their work may update their submission until the deadline. The new submission deadline is December 7.

Evomusart 2012 :: 1st International Conference and 10th European Event on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design :: 11-13 April 2012, Malaga, Spain :: Part of evo* 2012; evomusart: http://www.evostar.org/2012/call-for-contributions/evomusart/ Continue reading

Call for proposals for performances, talks, installations, demos and workshops :: Network Music Festival, *Birmingham, UK :: January 27, 2012 to January 29, 2012 :: DEADLINE: 30th November 2011

The *Network Music Festival* will take place in January 2012 in Birmingham (UK) in the heart of Birmingham’s creative community. Presenting a diverse programme of laptop performances, live coding, communicating home-made musical gadgets, sound installations, workshops and everything else in between, the Network Musical Festival boasts an international line-up including some of Birmingham’s best home-grown hi-tech musical performers. We are looking for proposals for performances, talks, installations, demos and workshops. Continue reading

Call For Papers :: ICAD 2012 :: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia :: the deadline for submission of papers and posters will be on or around February 3, 2012; other deadlines will follow ::

Preliminary Announcement and Call for Participation - ICAD 2012 :: The 18th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2012) will be held June 18-22, 2012, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the heart of midtown Atlanta, Georgia. The event will mark the 20th anniversary of the 1st International Conference on Auditory Display. Since 1992, ICAD has been the premier international venue for the dissemination and discussion of work related to the science, art, and practice of sound as a communicative display. Continue reading

Sensing Shared Places: Designing a mobile audio streaming environment by Rui Chaves and Pedro Rebelo :: This paper addresses mobile audio streaming in the context of sharing a sense of place. This action is mediated by the network, the body and remote listening. These elements are essential in the concept and design of a platform for audio transmission ( liveshout ), that aims at intersecting mobility within the realms of radio, network and transmission art.

The paper is available for download here . Continue reading

Interference Journal is a journal that looks at the role of sound in cultural practices. The first issue is now live and can be viewed at here.

The title of the inaugural issue of Interference – An Ear Alone is Not a Being: Embodied Mediation in Audio Culture – acknowledges acoustic practices that involve not just the ear but a corporeal body that senses, resonates, transduces and responds to sound, and furthermore, seeks to emphasize the legacy of this embodied listening subject in the practices, media, and conceptual frameworks that make up audio cultures. ‘Embodied mediation’ presumes a reciprocal process: the texts in this issue explore not only how listening experiences and acoustic practices are shaped by corporeality, but also attend to the many ways in which those processes work upon that body, through psychophysical affect and the representation and encoding of listening subjects in acoustic performances, technologies and cultural artefacts. — From “Editorial” by Rachel O’Dwyer

The First Computer Musician by R. Luke Dubois :: an article in the New York Times: 06/08/2011 ::

If the difference between 1911 and 2011 is electricity and computation, then Max Mathews is one of the five most important musicians of the 20th Century. – Miller Puckette

photo by Roger Linn

In 1957 a 30-year-old engineer named Max Mathews got an I.B.M. 704 mainframe computer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N. J., to generate 17 seconds of music, then recorded the result for posterity. While not the first person to make sound with a computer, Max was the first one to do so with a replicable combination of hardware and software that allowed the user to specify what tones he wanted to hear. This piece of music, called “The Silver Scale” and composed by a colleague at Bell Labs named Newman Guttman, was never intended to be a masterpiece. It was a proof-of-concept, and it laid the groundwork for a revolutionary advancement in music, the reverberations of which are felt everywhere today….

Read more: here.

From The New Materiality by Nathaniel Stern, Furtherfield.org; a review of the exhibition The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft:

“Soundw(e)ave, (Christy Matson’s) piece on show, is a self-referential textile, where the actual sounds of computerized Jacquard looms were used to create woven compositions. Her noisy sound waves were turned into three patterned pieces of fabric, made by hand-operated, computer-assisted and fully automated (Jacquard) looms, respectively – each weave growing progressively denser with the more advanced technologies used in their production. The piece, says Matson, was a huge turning point in her practice; it pointed her towards a kind of digital craftsmanship, where she was better able to place value on the ideas, materials and skillfulness needed to be an artisan across contemporary digital, craft and art domains. Continue reading

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Vague Terrain 19: Schematic as Score; curated and edited by Derek Holzer: Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, and a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable — through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics. John Cage once quipped that Tcherepnin’s synthesizer system was “the best musical composition that Serge had ever made”, and it is precisely Cage’s reformulation of the concert score from a list of deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic possibilities that allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music composer that followed. Continue reading