Unidentified Sound Object @ the 2020 NAMM Show

Save 30% on our sound effects libraries to celebrate NAMM 2020 using the exclusive promo code "namm2020" - let's meet up at the Anaheim Convention Center (January 16-19)!

START SHOPPING: unidentifiedsoundobject.com/shop

"Empty Rooms", audio-visual self-organized performance space

(Mixed Media Installation)

Premiered on 29th - 30th October 2010 @ [BOX] Videoart Project Space in Milan, during the Live!iXem Festival 2010 (thanks to VisualContainer)


A Movie made of algorithmically generated "inactive spaces” is projected on a screen.

An overlapped stream of pre-recorded “sound activities” is then diffused from a record player and from 4 different iPods running in shuffle mode, creating recombinant “invisible actions” to fit into the Movie.

A self organizing link between sound and visuals is established via cybernetic procedures defined as interconnected spin networks, produced by a video camera “observing” the movie and by one microphone “listening” to the space placed inside the performance Locus.

The Kyma sound design environment (accelerated by the Pacarana sound computation engine) is then engaged in order to compute the data and perform real-time evaluations between the different types of numerical information (audio-video), producing a “sonorous response” to the asynchronous stream of audio-visual contents.

The synthesized information is then diffused in the performance space again through 4 loudspeakers.

Various types of feedback will take place during this highly dynamic process implying a self regulating behavior that will establish new connections between the pacing of the movie locations and the “sonorous” content produced by the processing of the iPod sound streams.

The Observer will then experience the following layers of information:

- a Real-Time recombinant Movie made of “inactive” locations.

- an Overlapped Stream of “possible actions” diffused by the iPods that fits into the Movie.

- a Sonorous link between the above domains of activities via 4 full range loudspeakers.

The Observer can take into account one or more layers of information (even all of them) in order to create himself a cinematic experience via a correlation process.

More info here:
[Empty_Rooms_eng_booklet.pdf]
[Empty_Rooms_Technical_Rider.pdf]

artists contact: unidentified.sound.object (at) gmail (dot) com
booking: booking (at) usoproject (dot) com
promotion: press (at) usoproject (dot) com

Brian Eno on UbuWeb Film

Brian Eno: 14 Video Paintings (1981 & 1984)

[availabe on dvd]

These video installations were produced by Brian Eno to be shown at various galleries around the world. Subsequently released on vhs and laserdisc, the two works are to the video format what his audio pieces were to music; ambient musings on the nature of the medium. They are non linear and have no obvious plotline or direction: 'video paintings' as the title suggests, drifting in and out of focus. The first piece on the disc is accompanied by Eno's seminal Thursday Afternoon, a beautiful single hour-long piano track, and the second piece entitled Mistaken Memories of Mediaevil Manhattan is set to tracks from 'Music for Airports' and 'On Land'. 'Thursday Afternoon' is probably the most accessible, with Eno using film footage taken of his close friend Christine Alicino and cutting it together intimately. It ends up playing a little like a nostalgic diary, a musing on the life or a person now departed. The second piece is less figurative, and features painterly shots of the New York skyline, clouds moving overhead and the colours drifting like a melting palette.

[watch video - via UbuWeb]
[direct download - mp4]

[thanks to babelrecords.blogspot.com]

Pacarana in action

Edmund Eagan demonstrating the Continuum at the Haken Audio booth at Winter NAMM 2009.

The new Pacarana connected to a TC Electronic via konnekt24D, which handles Audio and MIDI I/O. Here is the current list of supported converters.

[see miroc.co.jp - via 8th Nerve Kyma News]

Live!iXem 2008

Festival of experimental electronic music and arts

18>22 November 2008 - Palermo, Italy

V Edition

18 nov. 21.30 – Goethe Institut – Via Paolo Gili 4
Antony Pateras (pianoforte preparato), Sean Baxter (percussioni) e David Brown (chitarra elettrica preparata).

19 nov. 21.30 – Malausséne – Piazzetta Resuttano 4
AMP2 + SECRET GUESTS Live performances

20 nov. 19.30 > 24.00 – Left – Via degli Schioppettieri 8
AV screenings by Torregrossa

21 nov. 21.30 – ASK 191 – Viale Strasburgo 191
SonoRoom Live sets: Marco Pianges, Dario Sanfilippo, Samuele Calabrò, Gandolfo Pagano.
DanceFlor DJ sets: Ajno [minimal <+/-> techno | dubstep] and More!

22 nov. 21.30 – ASK 191 – Viale Strasburgo 191
SonoRoom Live sets: Nino Secchia e Dario Sanfilippo, Talachtis, Mathias Manceck+Raffaella Piccolo, Il cielo di Baghdad.
DanceFloor DJ sets: D.M.D. Death Modern Dance, Claudio Bonanno e Gianluca Scuderi, Ajno.

[ixem.it]

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]

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!

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).

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]

Mimmo Paladino | Brian Eno: a work for the Ara Pacis

11 March - 11 May 2008

The Ara Pacis Museum, the first piece of contemporary architecture to appear in the historic centre of Rome since the 1940s, is hosting this contemporary arts event between Brian Eno and Mimmo Paladino.

Brian Eno – "a non-musician kind of musician” as he likes to describe himself, is the man behind “Generative Music”, the precursor to New Age music, as well as a video-artist, sculptor, artist, and music philosopher who is also a more than capable player of a variety of musical instruments.
The two men have put their heads and combined talents together and come up with a unique work designed to fits the spaces inside the Ara Pacis Museum.
For his part, Brian Eno wanted to create a musical background that has no words, no melody, no rhythm and never plays over in exactly the same way twice. The music and sounds he produces are a long way from being a mere soundtrack that runs behind Paladino’s sculptures and artwork but are rather something that is completely separate from them and yet somehow also strongly connected to them. Unlike classical music, where the sounds are organised in a precise pattern, Eno works with musical values that waft through the air independently of each other.

The starting point for both Eno and Paladino is the concept of deconstructing their work and repeating modules that typify their creative inspiration. By stretching and flattening single sounds or themes and putting all the pieces together the two artists manage to obtain a harmonious whole.

[Eno. The music of the mind]

[Paladino/Eno at Ara Pacis]

[a conversation with Paladino]

Noise: a Hole in the Silence

Silence. Noise. And, in the middle, between the two poles, every possible variation and gradation. Noise: a Hole in the Silence brings together works by twenty-one artists. Each work helps to outline a particular fragment within the complex panorama of sounds, noises, hums and silences that make up the exhibition, which takes its inspiration from Een lek in het zwijgen: noise, an event conceived and organized by Gwy Mandelinck (poetry) and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (visual arts) at Watou (Belgium) during the summer of 2007 and judged the best exhibition of the year in Belgium.

Visitors are free to wander around the exhibition, and to accept the invitation to -listen to me- that is repeated on their encounter with each work. The material of sound, at times strongly present, at others mysterious, is articulated and modulated through different languages: the sound fragments, multiplies, vanishes for a moment to reappear in a laugh or in the sculptural and material presence of a piano, or simply in the gust of wind that makes a rod attached to the branch of a tree vibrate.

The protagonists of this exhibition: Joseph Beuys (Germany), Marcel Broodthaers (Belgium), John Cage (USA), Mircea Cantor (Romania), Giuseppe Chiari (Italy), Jimmie Durham (USA), Jan Fabre (Belgium), Lara Favaretto (Italy), William Kentridge (South Africa), La Monte Young (USA), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Italy), Kris Martin (Belgium), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Melik Ohanian (France), Yoko Ono (Japan), Adrian Paci (Albania), Diego Perrone (Italy), Miguel Angel Rios (Argentina), Luigi Russolo (Italia), Mungo Thomson (USA), Bill Viola (USA), Jordan Wolfson (USA).

The works are accompanied by poetry intersecting with art and offering the visitor a listening experience that continually creates new impressions and new meanings.
In the exhibition there are the poems of: Hugo Claus, Charles Ducal, Gerrit Komrij, Rutger Kopland, Anton Korteweg, Erik Lindner, Lucebert, Gwy Mandelinck, Eugenio Montale, Erwin Mortier, Fernando Pessoa, Juan Manuel Roca, Camillo Sbarbaro, Geert van Istendael, Peter Verhelst.

Spazio Oberdan, Viale Vittorio Veneto 2, Milan opening times: every day 10 am - 7:30 pm, Tuesday and Thursday until 10 pm, closed on Monday ticket: full -6.20, reduced -4.10; school parties -2.70 entrance free of charge on the first Tuesday of every month.