Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Jazzmutant Lemur V2 on the blogosphere


The public beta of the v2 firmware update will launched by Jazzmutant at AES (October 3rd to 5th) with the full version released Q4 2008. The full update will be free.

Brand new features:

Breakpoint object: multi-segment envelope editor
Gesture object: trackpad emulation with advanced gesture recognition
Alias: memory and time saver
Tabbed Container
Mouse and keyboard control (!)
Improved and new-look Jazzeditor
New multi-line script pane

[Sonic State]
[Harmony Central]
[Mac Music]
[Gearjunkies]

Friday, September 26, 2008

Luciano Berio - New Perspectives

International conference organized by Accademia Musicale Chigiana in collaboration with University of Siena.
Scientific Committee: Talia Pecker Berio, Gianmario Borio, Fiamma Nicolodi.

The conference, organized by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana for the fifth anniversary of Luciano Berio's death, represents the arrival point of a research project financed by the University of Siena (Department of Archeology and History of the Arts) and coordinated by Talia Pecker Berio.

The main goal of the project has been to lay new premises for the definition of Berio's poetics, taking his music as a point of departure for a study that examines all the available sources.

The research program was articulated in six fundamental themes that cross Berio's entire oeuvre: his individual conception of music; the distinctive traits of his compositional process; his conception of form; the interaction between voice, language and gesture; the relation between electronic and instrumental sound; and his dialogue with different musical traditions. In the second phase of the project, the six members of the research team – Angela Carone, Angela Ida De Benedictis, Mila De Santis, Claudia di Luzio, Ulrich Mosch and Marco Uvietta – were joined by Maurizio Agamennone, Alessandro Arbo, Johan Dack, Pascal Decroupet, Christoph Neidhofer and Martin Scherzinger. Each theme has been elaborated by two scholars from different and complementary points of view.

The results of the research will be presented in four seminar sessions that will occupy the two central days of the conference. Each of these days will open with a keynote lecture, respectively by Giorgio Pestelli and Jean-Jacques Nattiez. The inaugural address of the conference will be delivered by Umberto Eco, the closing address by Edoardo Sanguineti.

[Program]
[General information]
[Concerts]

Monday, September 22, 2008

Music On microSD: pros and cons

What is slotMusic [slotmusic.org]

Official Press Release [sandisk.com]

What's in the Cards for SanDisk? Music [bits.blogs.nytimes.com]

SanDisk SlotMusic Cards Are Destined to Fail [gigaom.com]

Music On microSD: I Can’t Believe The Labels Fell For This [techcrunch.com]

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Ben Burtt talks about WALL-E

RT Australia had the opportunity to sit down and speak to sound designer extraordinaire, Ben Burtt.



[via ROTTEN TOMATOES]

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Inside the RAI Musical Phonology Studio

The Phonology Studio, a musical instrument of the twentieth century, an extension of human thought, has now found its ideal home in the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali of Castello Sforzesco, Milan.

RACK 1
  • Patchbay (made by RAI)

RACK 2
  • Brüel & Kjær 1011 beat oscillator
  • 6 Wavetek 110 oscillators
  • 2 Wavetek 115 oscillators
  • Heathkit AG 10 oscillator
  • General Radio 1398-A tone burst generator

RACK 3
  • Brüel & Kjær 1402 white-noise generator
  • SIAE 431A oscillator
  • Elit MOD 201/D millivoltmeter amplifier
  • Nine-input mixer (made by RAI)
  • Comparator (made by RAI)
  • 2 continuous-loop Appel 311 cassette players

RACK 4
  • Unit with 7 slots:
  • 2 ring modulators (made by RAI)
  • 1 amplitude selector (made by RAI)
  • 2 ring modulators for the frequency transposer (made by RAI)
  • 1 electronic selector switch (made by RAI)
  • 1 empty
  • Dynamic modulator (made by RAI)
  • Amplitude selector (made by RAI)
  • Frequency transposer (made by RAI)

RACK 5
  • Unit with 7 slots:
  • 1 amplifier Auso Siemens ELA 75-0 for 8-input mixer (made by RAI)
  • 5 empty
  • 1 power supply Auso Siemens ELA 23-03
  • Hewlett-Packard 3591 selective voltmeter + Hewlett-Packard 3594A oscillator with frequency meter
  • Patchbay (made by RAI)
  • Eight-input mixer (made by RAI)
  • Band-pass frequency filter Krohn-Hite 310-A
  • Band-pass frequency filter Krohn-Hite 310-AB

RACK 6
  • Octave filter bank (made by RAI)
  • Bass-pass filter bank (made by RAI)
  • Treble-pass filter bank (made by RAI)

RACK 7
  • For future improvements
RACK 8
  • 5 OSAE P20 T amplifiers
  • Patchbay
  • 2 OSAE P20 T amplifiers

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Sneak Preview: RAI Phonology Studio

In 1955, the Radio Italiana (Rai) established the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at RAI Center in Corso Sempione 27, Milan (Italy). Physicist Dr. Alfredo Lietti builded the famous “nine oscillators”, the white noise generator, the amplitude selector, the dynamic modulator, the ring modulators, the frequency shifter, the pulse modulator, the electronic fader, the “toc” generator, the cathodic comparer, the octave filters and the third octave filters.
Almost half a century later, the museum of Musical Instruments in the Castello Sforzesco now houses the equipment on which Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna conducted the first experiments in electronic music.
An innovative digital library service allows the public to obtain informations and to listen to short excerpts from the rich archive of compositions carried out in such machines.

Maddalena Novati found about 400 tapes for 200 hours of listening, which she has been cataloguing, restoring and converting with the help of Laboratorio MIRAGE (Università di Udine) and Laboratorio Audio Rai (Milan).

I suggest you the following reading: "Technology and Technics: Alfredo Lietti and Marino Zuccheri", written by Giovanni Belletti [pdf].
Some excerpts from original footage:

[RAI Studio of Musical Phonology: historical footage #1]
[RAI Studio of Musical Phonology: historical footage #2]
[2007/04/rai-electronic-music-studio]
[2007/05/rai-studio-of-musical-phonology-pt-2]
[2007/05/rai-studio-of-musical-phonology-pt-3]

MM

more soon!

InharmoniCity review by Vital Weekly

Vital Weekly is published by Frans de Waard and submitted for free to anybody with an e-mail address (form).

tracklist for Vital Weekly 644:

0000 Tune
0014 Tujiko Noriko & Lawrence English & John Chantler - Make Me Your Private Party
0340 General Fuzz - Starry
0730 Keijo - Ain't Got No Home
1025 Mika Martini & Oscar Chaves - Revolver Cenizas
1328 Anders Dahl - Doorbell, Tuning Fork, Crotale, Clarinet etc.
1630 Concrete cookie & The Maggot Farmer - Tropic Of Cancer
1927 C. Hilton - The Smoking Mirror 1
2233 Cynas
2610 U.S.O. Project - Girl Running
2916 Mubles - Beercan Suite
3214 Tune

listen to 644

Read the current issue here

[the complete archive of Vital Weekly including search possibilities:
http://www.vitalweekly.net]

AES San Francisco 2008: ILM Technical Tour

Saturday, October 4, 8:15 am — 11:15 am TT10, TT11, TT13, TT15 - Industrial Light & Magic/Letterman Media Complex, SF.

Don't miss the opportunity to tour George Lucas’s storied Industrial Light & Magic complex at its new home on the Letterman Digital Arts campus on the Presidio.


Technical Tours are made available on a first come, first served basis. Tickets can be purchased during normal registration hours at the convention center (maximum of 20 participants per tour).

Friday, September 12, 2008

Synesthesia Recordings

Dear readers and friends, we (Matteo and Federico) are happy to announce the birth of our brand new label 'Synesthesia Recordings'. This label is to be intended as a repository of live improvised electroacoustic works.

The main goal is to retrieve the late Renaissance praxis of “Ricercare” intended as exploration of a technical device playing it, subverting it in different ways. So this kind of “Musica Ricercata” should be affected by individual approaches to improvisation with sound materials of any kind, samples, electronic devices, pure sine generators, transducers. The local and momentary gesture generates a relational sequenced processes that defines the sonic path from start to the end. This recordings have to be intended as a “document” or Simulacra of a solo or collective performance but not as the performance itself (which is affected by causality relationships and other environmental and statistical phenomena).


After a huge amount of work, a new project called 'InharmoniCity' is ready and is available for download via Music Zeit, our official distributor for digital releases. Limited edition hard copies will be available in few days from now via CDeMUSIC.
The next step will be a dvd-video release of the same album, co-produced with Zerofeedback video-label by our friend visual artist Selfish. You can find the press releases here (cd) and here (dvd).

Teaser from the forthcoming dvd release 'InharmoniCity':


Girl Running - U.S.O. from selfish on Vimeo.

TRACKLIST:

1) Girl Running (08.48)
2) Invisible Words (12.20)
3) ...from the Past...out of the Future... (40.36)

InharmoniCity is packaged in a 2-panel wallet with artwork by LA-based artist David Trulli [www.davidtrulli.com]

Distributors:

www.cdemusic.org

Best played at high volume in the dark.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

The Murder of Crows: a sound installation

Sound and mixed-media installation with audio speakers, amplifiers, computer, electronics.

Since the 1990s, the experimental art of Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller has been a fascinating exploration of how sound affects and shapes our experience. World-premiering at the 2008 Biennale is their largest installation to date, The Murder of Crows – an astounding 100-speaker artwork that envelops the viewer/listener in the experience of the sculptural and physical qualities of sound. The large and cavernous space of Pier 2/3 is filled with speakers mounted on stands, chairs and walls, creating a minimalist ‘flock’. The installation is structured like a play or film, but with images created only by voice, music and sound effects. Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – from the series of etchings called ‘Caprichos’ (c. 1799), which was a denunciation of the evils of society in Spain in his day – the artists have placed a lone megaphone horn on a table in the middle of the space. Out of this horn comes Cardiff’s voice reciting dreams and thoughts as if, like Goya’s sleeper, she is absorbed in her own nightmares. Using multiple soundscapes, as well as compositions by Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, the artists create a ‘sound play’ that physically envelops the listener in a moving field of sound and music.

(This artwork has a 30-minute duration. Seating provided.)



[cityofsound.com]
[www.bos2008.com]
[vimeo.com]

Friday, September 05, 2008

TouchOSC

TouchOSC is an iPhone/iPod Touch application that lets you send and receive Open Sound Control messages over a Wi-Fi network using the UDP protocol.

Availabe on the AppStore now.


This allows to remote control and receive feedback from software and hardware that implements the OSC protocol such as Pure Data and Max/MSP.

The interface provides a number of different touch controls to send/receive messages:

  • Faders
  • Rotary controls
  • Push buttons
  • Toggle buttons
  • XY pads
  • Multi-faders
  • Multi-toggles
  • LEDs
[http://hexler.net/touchosc]