Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “musicTech”
February 9, 2009
Cost-effectiveness of live electronics
Jamie Bullock has written an interesting blog post called Does live electronic music make good business sense?. While I follow his argument, and understand where it comes from, I think the topic could also be discussed from a different perspective.
His main point is that the benefit-cost ratio of working with live electronics is low. This argument holds if you are assuming that live electronics is being “added” to an otherwise conventional composition/performance process, and that the live electronics part would be an extra expense.
May 22, 2008
Homemade spherical speaker
Michael Zbyszynski has made a detailed tutorial on how to make homemade spherical speakers, using IKEA salad bowls and cheap speaker elements. The speakers look great, and apparently sound ok, so this would be interesting to do in a music tech course.
May 9, 2008
Music technology days 2008
Musikkteknologidagene, an annual seminar about music technology in Norway, will be organised in Bergen this year. I organised the first of these seminars in Oslo in 2005, then it moved to Trondheim as part of NoMuTe in 2006, then the Music Academy in Oslo in 2007, and now Bergen in 2008. The main idea of the seminars has not been to compete with the many international conferences in the field, but rather be an informal meeting point for various people working on/with music technology in Norway.
May 8, 2008
OLPC Sound Samples
I am doing some “house-cleaning” on my computer, and came across the link to the OLPC Sound Samples which were announced last month. This collection covers a lot of different sounds, ranging from the Berklee samples to sets created by people in the CSound community. Obviously, not all the 10GB is equally interesting, but the initiative is excellent, and along with the Freesound project, it makes a great resource for various projects.
April 24, 2008
Sensing Music-related Actions
The web page for our new research project called Sensing Music-related Actions is now up and running. This is a joint research project of the departments of Musicology and Informatics, and has received external funding through the VERDIKT program of the The Research Council of Norway. The project runs from July 2008 until July 2011.
The focus of the project will be on basic issues of sensing and analysing music-related actions, and creating various prototypes for testing the control possibilities of such actions in enactive devices.
April 23, 2008
Max 5
Cycling ‘74 has released Max 5! I have been beta-testing the software for some time now, and can highly recommend the update. There has been a lot of discussion about the new “rounded corners”, but Max 5 is so much more about improvements and workflow. What I like the most about Max 5 is the presentation mode, which allows for separating the “code” from the user interface. This greatly enhances creating more complex patches with a neat little interface on top, since you can easily select which objects to include in the presentation, and then rearrange them as you like.
April 10, 2008
Music Technology blog at the University of Oslo
To help spread information about various things related to music technology at the University of Oslo (and around), I have started the blog Musikkteknologi @ UiO (in Norwegian). It may be of interest also to people outside of UiO.
April 1, 2008
CIRMMT Spatialization Questionnaire
As spatialization is growing more popular, it is important to conduct more research into the field to know more about how people think about, and work with, spatialization in various settings. If you want to help in this, you should fill out the CIRMMT Spatialization Questionnaire.
March 27, 2008
Oldest sound recording
{#image536}The International Herald Tribune reports on the finding of a 10-second recording of the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” recorded on April 9, 1860. The recording was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, but has now been scanned and used for playback. This is now the oldest known sound recording, and can be heard here.
February 25, 2008
MultiControl v.04
**It has taken a while, but I finally found some time to update my MultiControl application. This was a small program I made back in 2004, and have updated a couple of times since then (that’s why the patching code looks so horrible, please don’t look at that…).
Originally, I made it for a series of workshops with kids, but I have also used it in a few concerts. Inspired by some blog comments and e-mails, I am happy to announce version 0.
February 20, 2008
Ali Momeni lecture
Here’s a video of a lecture by Ali Momeni (now at the Interdisciplinary Program for Collaborative Arts at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis), where he gives an overview of his work. Lots of interesting things!
February 12, 2008
Free Software
I am participating in the EyesWeb Week in Genoa this week. This morning Nicola Bernardini held a lecture about Free Software. I have heard him talk on this topic several times before, but as I have now some more experience on participating in a Free Software project (i.e. Jamoma), I got more out of his ideas.
Some main points from the talk:
Use Free Software! Freeware and shareware may have nothing to do with Free Software.
December 11, 2007
Mapping and conditioning
The concept of “mapping” is frequently used in the computer music community these days, and has also been used over the last couple of days during the Jamoma workshop. This reminded me about the distinction between mapping and conditioning, as frequently pointed out by Marcelo Wanderley:
Conditioning: filtering, scaling and normalizing signals in a 1-to-1 mapping Mapping: creating couplings between multidimensional data sets, e.g. MxN. For clarity’s sake it is probably useful to separate between the two.
November 12, 2007
NOTAM has to cut down on its activity
Due to a lack of increase in its budgets over several years, and increase in everything else, NOTAM - the Norwegian Network for Technology, Acoustics and Music - has to cut down on its activities. The most dramatic change will be that the lab and studio facilities will not be publicly available any longer, since the focus will have to be directed towards fewer and more advanced projects. More in this press release (in Norwegian).
November 5, 2007
Bodibeat
{#p501 .imagelink}Yamaha has announced a product called Bodibeat, a music player which will adjust the tempo of the music to follow your walking or running. It is based on an accelerometer and, I guess, an algorithm detecting peaks in the continuous movement signal. This gives the pace of the walker or runner which again can be used to control the playback speed of a music file. Apparently, the technology is based on research by BMAT, which is a spinoff from UPF.
October 10, 2007
Debut of the NMH Laptop Orchestra
As part of the Ultima festival and the opening of this year’s Musikkteknologidagene, Kjell Tore Innervik and I organised the debut of the NMH Laptop Orchestra. Inspired by PLORK, we lined up with laptops and performed two pieces by Alan Tormey and Ge Wang. This was an immediate success, and we hope to establish this as a permanent ensemble from now.
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September 28, 2007
Towards Active Music... (or not)
{#image489} I am doing some background research for a paper on “active music” and have been testing various audio software over the last few days. I was very excited about testing GarageBand ’08, since Apple has been shouting loudly about its new “magic” features. I have to say that I had some expectations that we would actually see some novel features here, especially since they promise a “hand-picked” band on a virtual stage.
September 22, 2007
Doepfer USB64
The new Doepfer USB64 Info looks very interesting with its 64 analog (or digital) inputs and €125 price tag. I am not so excited about the MIDI plug, and wonder whether they intend to communicate some higher resolution data through the USB plug.
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September 20, 2007
Giant Music Ball 2
We have been working on the Giant Music Ball all day. Besides soldering, aligning all the sensors was the biggest challenge. Here is a picture from early on in the process:
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I love cables…
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Crossing the Karl Johan street in the city centre of Oslo:
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Lots of people stopped by and wondered what we were doing.
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If you are around, please stop by booth 33 and check it out: Friday 9-16, Saturday 10-17.
September 19, 2007
Giant Music Ball
I have been preparing for Forskningstorget, an annual science fair in the city centre of Oslo, the last couple of days. Last year we made a Music Troll, and this year we are making a giant music ball for people to play with.
The ball is built from a huge boat buoy, 120 cm in diameter, made for tank boats and stormy weather. This makes it just perfect for a music installation which is supposed to survive some thousand children over the next couple of days…
September 14, 2007
Jack for Windows
I see that Jack is now truly multiplatform, including Windows.
jackdmp is a C++ version of the Jack low-latency audio server for multi-processor machines. It is a new implementation of the jack server core features that aims in removing some limitations of the current design. The activation system has been changed for a data flow model and lock-free programming techniques for graph access have been used to have a more dynamic and robust system.
September 10, 2007
eLearning getting to UiO
I have been complaining about the poor support for eLearning solutions at the University of Oslo for some years. I have tried Fronter, but find it too closed and rigid for what I want to do. I like that course information is open and easily available for everyone, but so far the standard course pages have been very much focused on basic information only.
I recently discovered that things have improved a lot under the surface, and that it is now possible to give students access to add information to folders under the course web sites.
June 12, 2007
ICMC panel
My panel proposal for ICMC 2007 in Copenhagen has been accepted. The title of the panel is The Need of Formats for Streaming and Storing Music-Related Movement and Gesture Data, and that more or less sums up what we are going to discuss.
The other participants in the panel will be Antonio Camurri (Genova), Nicolas Castagne (ACROE, Grenoble), Esteban Maestre (Pompeu Fabra), Joseph Malloch (McGill), Douglas McGilvray (Glasgow), Diemo Schwarz (IRCAM) and Matthew Wright (UC Berkeley / Stanford).
June 12, 2007
Keyframe
Henrik Marstrander will present his master thesis project tomorrow. This is an interesting visual table for controlling musical sound.
Details: onsdag 13.6 kl 1230. Rom på venstre side i gangen på vei til Salen.
June 11, 2007
LiveAPI
There is now a solution for using OSC with Ableton Live available from LiveAPI.org. This is one of the first things I am going to check out as soon as I’m done with my dissertation
May 16, 2007
Musikkteknologidagene 2007
Musikkteknologidagene 2007, a Norwegian contact meeting for people working in the field(s) of music technology, will be organised at the Norwegian Academy of Music 10 and 11 October. I initiated the first of these meetings back in 2005, and am happy that we manage to keep the concept alive. Both research on, and use of, music technology is growing rapidly in Norway as everywhere else. However, while many of us working in the field have large international networks in our special branches of the music technology world, we often seem to know little about what is happening in our own country.
May 13, 2007
MultiControl is updated
{.imagelink}I have received a constant stream of questions for an Intel-version of the little MultiControl software I made many years ago. MultiControl makes it easy to use any standard game controller (HID compatible) to control music software through OSC or MIDI. Still only for OS X, but a Windows version will follow at some point.
A UB-version of the application is now available here, and I will try and get around to making a Windows version one day.
May 10, 2007
Björk to tour with Reactable
{#image457}The MTG group at Pompeu Fabra reports that Björk will use the Reactable in her upcoming tour:
With her first tour concert at the Coachella Festival in California, the Icelandic singer Björk introduced the reactable for the first time to a mainstream audience. Our instrument will form a key element of the artist’s current world tour “Volta” which will appear at numerous music festivals during the next 18 months.
I have tried the Reactable at various conferences and it is great that this innovative collaborative instrument gets some attention outside the music tech community.
April 11, 2007
Cooperating Computer Music Languages
Brad Garton has posted an interesting blog entry about how he works with many different computer music languages from within Max/MSP, including RTcmix, Chuck, CSound, Super Collider and Lisp. He could also have used Java, Javascript, Python, etc.
I particularly like the idea of using Max as the basis for exposing students to many different types of programming languages and approaches, and will see if I can include some of this in my Max course in the fall.
April 5, 2007
Dexter, the Lemur follow-up
Dexter is the new product from JazzMutant, following the Lemur as a multitouch control interface. I find performing with the Lemur so much more intuitive and straight forward than using a laptop only, and it is great to be able to change layouts (even though the JazzEditor is a bit too complex for my taste). Jazzmutant seems to be one of the few (if not only) company that actually drives innovation in the music technology field at the moment, so it will be very interesting to see how Dexter behaves in real life.
March 30, 2007
When will we see some innovation in the music tech industry?
In a 1995 ICMC paper, Todd Winkler wrote:
If Leon Theremin were alive today, he would be amused by the corporate giants racing to discover the “killer app” that will bring interactive electronic images and sound to the masses. He had given musicians a seventy year lead to develop concepts and content exploring motion and sound. Indeed, many of the important discoveries presented at previous ICMC conferences regarding interactive systems, and issues surrounding real-time processing, sensing, and scheduling, seem to have gone largely unnoticed by the corporate world and popular media as they take their first baby steps toward creating intuitive sensors and systems that still await appropriate content.
March 29, 2007
Cycling '74 collaborating with Ableton
David Zicarelli has posted an interesting note about a new collaboration between Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. Ableton Live is one of the most popular and easy to use to use live electronics software tools, and Max/MSP is one of the most powerful and flexible, so this sounds very interesting.
March 19, 2007
Active Music
Tod Machover’s article Shaping Minds Musically is an interesting read, summarising much of the work on hyperinstruments that have happened at the MIT Media Lab during the last ten years. The main point he is trying to make, is that music should be active rather than passive. This comes from the observation that most people’s involvement with music is from a reception side rather than from production.
There is more music than ever in the air, but fewer of us actually play music, sing music, or create our own music.
March 15, 2007
Interactive Soundscapes
The Interactive Soundscapes project is about creating soundscapes intuitively. Samples can be loaded, simple effects can be added, and then the sounds can be mixed in the soundfield. Not as advanced as Tapestrea, but it seems to work very elegantly.
March 15, 2007
ISSSM 2007
Students in musicology, music cognition and technology should consider ISSSM 2007:
Following on the success of the first international summer school in systematic musicology (ISSSM 2006), the summer school will be held for the second time at IPEM, the research centre of the Department of Musicology of Ghent University (Belgium). This year courses will focus on current topics in the research field such as embodied music cognition, music information retrieval and music and interactive media.
February 28, 2007
AudioPint
The AudioPint project at MIT aims at creating a computer based system that is as portable and stable as hardware gear:
Consider a system that is small, lightweight, tough, able to be powered up, plugged in, and it used immediately - but with sounds that can be controlled by any computer-compatible input device, opening wide the space of expressive possibilities. Devices supported include midi controllers, joysticks, mice, touchpads, or any other custom controller that can connect to a computer!
February 28, 2007
Jon Olav Eikenes' Diploma Project
Jon Olav Eikenes has posted information about his diploma project on control of sound spatialisation at the department of interaction design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. As a co-adviser I think it is great to see an interdisciplinary project working so well. I hope we can get more of this type of collaborative projects in the future.
February 27, 2007
MIT: MAS.960 Principles of Electronic Music Controllers
Came across the web site of MIT course MAS.960 Principles of Electronic Music Controllers, which has some interesting references and links tovarious resources on NIME development. It is also worth checking out many of the student projects.