SoundCipher used for Cake Orchestra

Here's a bit of fun. A prototype cake orchestra is designed as a musical interface for people without much musical ability but with an interest in cakes. Essentially, each cake has an instrument pre-assigned to it (in this case: viola, tuba, clarinet, taiko drum and a “choir” noise) and moving the cakes up and down above the board plays sounds at different pitches. The article is here. The music is provided by Andrew Brown's SoundCipher library for Processing.

cake orchestra (test) from mook studios on Vimeo.

Sound, Music, Gesture: A Concert in Sydney

A concert of performances exploring relationships between sound, music and gesture
by: Ben Marks and Andrew Johnston; Jon Drummond; Bert Bongers and Jos Mulder; Sam Ferguson.

WHEN
6pm, Wednesday September 23 2009

WHERE
UTS Bon Marche Theatre
UTS Building 3
755 Harris St, Ultimo
Sydney, Australia
(near cnr. Harris St. and Broadway, enter from Harris St)
Map: http://www.uts.edu.au/about/mapsdirections/bway.html

Free entry

The image shows Bert Bongers and his crew demonstrating the gestural controllers for ACID's jam2jam generative music software.

Vote for the JamBot

The JamBot is a computational music improvisor that listen to an audio stream, deduces the rhthmic content and then generates a accompaniment. In this example, a conga percussion part. The Jam Bot is created by Toby Gifford, a PhD student at QUT. You can check out Toby's jam-bot, that uses his PhD research work, and vote for him in the People's Choice section of the Next Big Thing award. Toby (aka Dr. Offig) currently has an exhibition of the JamBot at the Next Big Thing display at the Melbourne Museum.

Oscillating Rhythms 1.05

An update to the generative music application Oscillating Rhythms has been released fro Mac OS X. This application makes a lot out of simple periodic functions by applying them to all sorts of musicala dn audio parameters to produce some regular and some crazy new rhythmic musical patterns. From the distribution

A generative tool designed to help you explore rhythmic space. Leveraging the power of periodic functions Oscillating Rhythms provides users with high level control over low level detail. Up to four tracks can be layered providing users with a rich pattern generation tool, from straight 8ths through to the most complex polyrhythms. Oscillating Rhythms is an AudioUnit host, so load up your favorite drum sampler and away you go. From the simple to the sublime Oscillating Rhythms is sure to spark your creativity – just don’t forget to record your performance!

Oscillating Rhythms is a generative tool designed to produce drum patterns by leveraging the power of simple oscillators. Oscillators are used to control all aspects of a performance including pitch selection, velocity, timbrel change and modulation. The reason that Oscillators are such useful tools for producing musical material is their inherently periodic nature. By combining oscillators controlling pitch, rhythm and timbre and providing very precise control over each oscillators period, phase and amplitude it is possible to build rhythmic patterns ranging from the subtle to the outrageous.

SoundCipher listed on the Processing site

SoundCipher, the music and sound library, was recently added to the libraries page of Processing. While still in beta this library adds significant music functionality to Processing using the JavaSound synthesizer and has some audio playback and MIDI message capabilities. It also features a music-time scheduler that allows Processing media art works to be coordinated around musical timing in beats, rather than around frame rates.

Electrovision live coding concert

For those near London, an Electrovision live coding concert will be held on 9 March 2009. Special guest SATBack provides a glimpse into the future of VJing. His multi-touch-screen VJ system VPlay is a new paradigm of VJ interaction. Designed for collaboration, it gets the VJ out from behind the laptop, and allows the audience to get involved. Clips, effects, mixers and more can be dragged and linked on-screen to create dynamic visual flows. Direct from the lab, this pioneering prototype showcases the dramatic possibilities of surface computing.

This month's Electrovision also features Pixelpusher, whose kaleidescopic moving montages are accompanied by Cheju's new album Broken Waves.

Electrovision, London's most inventive visuals event, returns to Brick Lane's Cafe 1001 on Monday 9th March from 7:30pm. *Free Entry*

SoundCipher released

A new Processing library for music and sound has been released. Called SoundCipher the new library provides access to the JavaSound synthesizer and audio file playback so that you can add music and sound effects to your Processing sketches. As an extension to Processing, SoundCipher allows you to program in Java to create your computational music or media art. From the web site:

SoundCipher provides an easy way to play music in Processing. With the SoundCipher library added to Processing you can write software programs that make music to go along with your graphics and you can add sounds to enhance your Processing animations or games.

Top Draw application

For those of you using Apple Macs, Google has released an application called Top Draw that allows you to do computational art using JavaScript. The application has built-in support for creating desktop and screen saver outputs from your work - these features have been very popular with Quartz Composer. It is simple but powerful - and free and open source! Top Draw comes with a simple text editor, drawing viewer, and a bunch of examples. Given that it supports basic vector graphics commands it's output is what you expect from applications such as Flash and Processing. Top Draw is a simple way to get started into the world of computational arts on a Mac. The application is one from Google's Mac Developer Playground project. Here's part of what the developers say about the app.

The Top Draw scripting language leverages Apple's Quartz and CoreImage rendering engines for graphical muscle. In addition to the drawing commands that are supported by the HTML canvas tag, there is support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing and much more. Because it uses JavaScript in a safe sandbox, you can run any script without fear of malicious action.

Download it here.

Generative music in Spore

There is a good description by Kent Jolly and Aaron McLeran of how computational (procedural) processes were used to generate music for Electronic Arts' Spore game in an audio recording of their presentation at GDC 2008, which is on Aaron's blog along with links to videos of various sections of the game that are mentioned in the presentation. In creating the music engine the team used a modified version of Miller Puckette's Pd software environment and a generative system that used constrained probability relying heavily on rhythm and pitch quantiziation, along with some rules-based counterpoint processes, to develop the multi-layered music in the game. Aesthetic direction, particularly on the important aspect of sound design, was provided by Brian Eno. These guys did a good job and it is great to see the use of computational arts in such a high profile and mainstream product.

JamBot in the news

Toby Gifford's JamBot research has received some press coverage recently. Toby is a member of QUT's Computational Arts Research Group. The JamBot research explores concepts of machine listening and improvisation. It is designed to be able to improvise along with live music performance using only a monophonic audio stream from the live ensemble as input. The research considers issues of feature extraction, rhythm tracking, generative accompaniment and interaction design. A number of academic papers have been written from the research including the Ambidrum and Stochastic Onset Detection papers.