Lights On is an audio visual performance created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria, which has a facade that contains 1085 LED controllable windows. The windows’ colors are changed in realtime with music that’s broadcasted on speakers surrounding the building.
Visuals coded in openFrameworks by Zachary Lieberman, Joel Gethin Lewis and Damian Stewart (yesyesno). music by Daito Manabe, with support from Taeji Sawai and Kyoko Koyama. We made this in three days :)
This is an edited performance, link via makezine.com.
Haile is a robotic percussionist that can listen to live players, analyze their music in real-time, and use the product of this analysis to play back in an improvisational manner.
I found a connection between graffiti and pirate radio.
Both of these art expressions hack into public facilities. In the case of graffiti, the hacker uses the wall. In case of pirate radio, the hacker uses public radio waves illegally. It can be said that pirate radio is sound graffiti and I would like to propose to combine these two methods of graffiti; The artist can spray a QR code (two-dimensional bar-code) in the street with a stencil. Then when people who find the graffiti take a snapshot of the code with a mobile phone they can find the radio station through the internet.
Musician/ roboticists Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman constructed a web-connected “robotic mechanical orchestra” that plays a marimba by firing rubber balls out of a cannon, strikes traditional percussion instruments, and also rubs mechanical fingers along wine glasses. The machine, Absolut Quartet, uses artificial intelligence to creatively riff on melodies composed remotely by users on the web.
“At the core, the machine is just motors, metal, and software,” say the MI T alums. “However, the design of these elements gives the whole machine a ‘personality’ and this is what allows a creative dialog to exist between the machine and the online user.”
Inspired by the view of Earth via astronauts in space, Bella Gaia presents a gorgeous sound, light and picture experience via HD cameras and fisheyes lenses. The creator, Kent Williams, is in Tokyo this week and Bella Gaia is being displayed at the Hoku Topia Planetarium.
Daito Manabe’s newest art piece uses a machine which turns music into electrical pulses. By slapping electrodes on his face these pulses cause the muscles to twitch and jerk in a painful looking dance of contorted expressions. I’m not sure what the goal is here, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t find it fascinating to watch.
The video above shows the robot offering an impressive rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee. Its “lungs” consist of a bellow that moves air in and out, and its “tongue” can block air in two places to transition between notes. Its “vocal cords” are a vibrato device that can change vibrations according to the air flow, and it even has elastic “lips” that can control its airstream, changing in width, thickness, and angle as it plays.
But the robot is more than just a musical gimmick: it’s being used at Waseda to study robot-human interaction. Klaus Petersen, a PhD student at the university, has developed software to allow the robot’s two CCD cameras to track and map a human musician’s hands as they play, to help the robot better play along. Based on the human player’s gestures, the robot modifies its playing, such as its speed, to match.
At BioRob 2008, Solis also presented work showing that the robot can successfully teach human beginners. “The robot is able to evaluate the performance of flutist beginners, as well as provide feedback to the student, in order to improve the performance,” he told me.
Gearwire sits down for a talk with Mr. Qubais Reed Ghazala, widely regarded as the father of circuit-bending. Ghazala speaks at length as to the origins and popularity of bending’s most iconic project – the modified Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, aka the Incantor.
This is an experiment, where I count one byte up – from 00000000 to 11111111. Decimal spoken, this is from 0 to 255. I have assigned a sound to each bit and when it switches from 0 to 1, the sound is played.
Randy George is my new musical hero, with his 21C take on a one-man cover band. His cover of Something About Us by Daft Punk was:
performed on Nintendo DS Ubisoft Jam Sessions, Midi controlled software electric bass, drums, synth, vocoded vocals, and solo theremin, recorded in a single pass, with a single camera.
Binaural is a sound-based installation by Shajay Bhooshan and Daniel Widrig at the 5 Days Off Festival in Amsterdam. The installation is a manifestation of a song by Frans de Waard. The aural information has been translated into a physical piece of worked that can be seen and touched. The frequency spectrum from the audio is “smoothed out” by storing the information as colour. This data is then further digitized to generate geometry before being created as a 3D object. The goal of the project was to show what can be done with digitized, sensorial information.
