Category Archives: Music

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.

Soft Machine – French T.V. – 1967

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Just noticed this clip of  Soft Machine on French T.V. from the legendary early period. Pop music was really experimental in that era! Looks like they’re improvising. Check out the mic technique mid-video – could that be something they picked up from Stockhausen? Robert Wyatt’s shirt looks really Pop Art. I actually have a few memories of 1967: I was five years old.

What a great find! Just wish whoever digitized the video had known how to handle the interlace.

Kugelschwung – Pendulum-based Live Music Sampler

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Kugelschwung is the result of a second year Human Computer Interaction project by six Computer Science students at the University of Bristol. These students should be roughly the same age as students in our seminar. The interface is simple but works very well and the concept is brilliant. The work has been accepted for presentation at NIME-12.

Motor Vehicle Sundown – George Brecht (dedicated to John Cage)

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This is one of the events kicking off the annual NIME-12 conference, which will be held starting next weekend at the University of Michigan. Really looking forward to this and all the other exciting things that will be happening at NIME-12. Nice also that this performance is part of the centennial brithday celebrations for our patron saint, John Cage.

From the University of Michigan Museum of Art web site:

As the lights go down on UMMA’s exhibition Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, please join us for a rare performance of Motor Vehicle Sundown, written by Fluxus artist George Brecht and dedicated to the American composer John Cage. This performance by students and faculty from the University of Michigan is presented in conjunction with the annual International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), and in celebration of John Cage’s 2012 centennial. Motor Vehicle Sundown is written for any number of motor vehicles arranged outdoors. In true Cagean fashion, 22 timed auditory and visual events and 22 pauses written on randomly shuffled instruction cards are performed on each vehicle.

The performance will take place in parking Lot C-2 on the south side of N. University at Thayer, next to Kraus Natural Science Building.

This program is co-sponsored by NIME, the UM School of Music, Theatre, and Dance, the UM College of Engineering and UMMA. Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life was organized by the Hood Museum of Art and was generously supported by Constance and Walter Burke, Dartmouth College Class of 1944, the Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund, and the Ray Winfield Smith 1918 Fund. UMMA’s installation is made possible in part by the University of Michigan Health System, the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, Arts at Michigan, and the CEW Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund.


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Elektron Musik Studion 1974 Stockholm

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This video offers a glimpse at an earlier era in electronic and computer music production – as well as what it was like to use a computer in the early 1970s. My first experience with computers dates from this around this time. It is interesting to reflect what has and hasn’t changed in the nearly 40 year interim.

Strobe Castle

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Continuing with the YouTube vignettes, but skipping ahead about 30 years, here’s an intriguing live video of Toronto band Crystal Castles doing Alice Practice which was a hit a few years ago. I shudder to think about the cocktail Alice Glass may need to imbibe before such exhibitions, but the video does at least demonstrate the kind of engaging performance that can be possible  with even a very lo-fi approach.

Oddly enough this video reminded me of my early youth: I sometimes played with a high powered strobe light my father used for adjusting the timing of the car engine. It seems no one was very worried about photosensitive epilepsy in those days, though we did have the idea that the strobe might be able to trigger a seizure. I certainly tried out all the possible frequencies more for visual effect than neurological experiment. We sometimes used the strobe to turn the basement into a makeshift disco. This was during elementary school and my interest in art and technology may date to those experiences.