MusicTech

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....

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.

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....

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....

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....

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....

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.

Talking about large-scale motion tracking:

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.

{#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.