Author Archives: mjl

Transit

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This is an admittedly impressionistic take on the Venus transit of 2012. No doubt there are already countless pristine images available all over the web, as well as live feed (while it lasts) and videos. I didn’t really make advance preparations – just piled all the filters I have onto my longest lens, stopped down, and waited for some additional light blockage by thin clouds. No tripod. So … conditions far from ‘ideal’, but for someone involved in the field of images, it would be more embarrassing not to have any picture of this at all.

Here’s a less impressionistic image made by projecting the sun onto a sheet of paper using binoculars. Again, impromptu & handheld:

Exercise for the reader: why is the above image bluish?

One final image of the transit taken at about 12:30 p.m. towards the end of the show. This was made holding the binoculars in one hand and my digital camera in the other. Hence the blur. Distortion of the shape of the suns disk in the following image (and the previous one) is a result of a non-flat projection screen, and non-orthogonal projection angle.

Next photo-op? 2117.

NIME-13 @ KAIST

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Last week at NIME-12, Professor Woon Seung Yeo (aka Woony) made the official announcement that Korea will host NIME-13. The conference will be held at the “MIT of Korea”, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in Daejeon, with an extra day in Seoul for cultural events and club concerts.

I gave a talk at KAIST in 1998 as part of an invited trip to Korea as keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Korean Cognitive Science Society. KAIST is about one hour from Seoul by express train.

Ruins of Detroit

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Another NIME conference has reached a successful conclusion and I’m heading back to Japan. Here I am in the ruins of Detroit with two key members of the NIME community. Below, me with Dr. Alexander Refsum Jensenius of the Norwegian Academy of Music and University of Oslo, and current Chair of the NIME Steering Committee. Above, Alexander with Professor Dan Overholt of the University of Aalborg, Denmark.

Good Start for NIME-12!

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Here is a photo from yesterday evening’s performance of George Brecht’s ‘Motor Vehicle Sundown’, just before the opening reception for NIME-12.

Our ‘NIME Primer Tutorial’ on Sunday morning went well and included the participation of distinguished Oxford University anthropologist Professor  Georgina Born, who is running a large scale project studying global musical culture. Professor Born is also known for having been active in the avant-guard rock scene of the 1970’s, as a member of bands such as Henry Cow.

Sonifying Tweets: The Listening Machine

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Via: http://www.thelisteningmachine.org/

The Listening Machine
by Daniel Jones and Peter Gregson

The Listening Machine is an automated system that generates a continuous piece of music based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the United Kingdom. Their conversations, thoughts and feelings are translated into musical patterns in real time, which you can tune in to at any point through any web-connected device.

It is running from May until October 2012 on The Space, the new on-demand digital arts channel from the BBC and Arts Council England. The piece will continue to develop and grow over time, adjusting its responses to social patterns and generating subtly new musical output.

The Listening Machine was created by Daniel Jones, Peter Gregson and Britten Sinfonia.

See also: The Listening Machine Converts 500 People’s Tweets into Music (Wired)

This Song Changed Popular Music

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According to David Bowie:

One day in Berlin … Eno came running in and said, ‘I have heard the sound of the future.’ … he puts on ‘I Feel Love’, by Donna Summer … He said, ‘This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’ Which was more or less right.

The Donna Summers tribute at Wired describes the importance of this track for electronica.