Off-ICMC live coding

Associated with the recent International Computer Music Conference 2008 in Belfast was a live coding concert on August 25 in the off-site concert program. The concert, promoted as Livecoding v's Indian Electronica, featured live coding artists from across the world. An audio recording by one of the participants, Matthew Yee-King, is available [200 MB] for your listening pleasure. The audio recording is from an open-mic in the space and while the audio quality is not high it is great to hear the atmosphere of the concert.

There are a number of tracks. The first starts as a rhythmic conversation with pitched and synthetic elements that build up over time. The growth and evolution of music in this way is a "natural" outcome of the live coding practice where material and processes are built on the fly. It's good to see the ongoing development of live coding activities across the globe.

Backyard Soiree 1

The first Backyard Soiree headphone concert for live electronic music was held in Brisbane, Australia recently on 12 August 2008. It turned out that it was a live coding festival of sorts with four live coding performances by Callum Hedemann, Andrew Brown, Thorin Kerr and Andrew Sorensen. Each performance was around twenty minutes long and video downloads of the full performances are available at the Impromptu site and excerpts are available on YouTube with links below. The headphone concerts provide everyone with good audio quality without disturbing the neighbours, and the event makes the most of Australia's back-deck outdoor living lifestyle : )

Andrew Sorensen, who organised the Soiree, comments about the documentation process.

For those that are interested, we captured the screencasts using a commodity home theatre dvd/hdd recorder. We sent composite from the laptops to the recorder and then sent composite out of the recorder and onto the projector. Audio came from the same headphone distribution box that the audience used (backyard soiree's are headphone gigs). Amazingly it all worked remarkably well and I can recommend this as a cheap approach for others wanting to record performances without extra processing load on the laptop. Composite obviously doesn't give a great picture but given the ease and price of this setup it's an option worth considering. The only slight problem was syncing the hand-held video footage to the screencasts in "post- production". I wanted to do a picture-in-picture style thing with bit's of hand-held camera footage mixed onto the screencast. In the end I decided not to worry to much about the hand-held video sync, primarily because I'm lazy, but also because it is really only there to provide some context for the screencast.

A performance except by Andrew Brown

(more)

Visual Poetry 2008

Boris Müller used Processing to design the artwork for the Poetry On The Road festival. He called the image VisualPoetry2008 because it is based upon a mapping of word frequencies in poems. Words are sorted in order of their frequency in the poem along a line, more frequent words are written in a larger font (like a tag cloud). Curved lines a drawn above each word, larger words producing thicker lines. Word lines from different poems are placed at different intervals up the page and spline curves connect words between text lines. Remove the underlying word maps and the curved line effect remains. Nice.

aa-cell @ ACID showcase

The live coding duo aa-cell (Andrew Sorensen and and Andrew Brown) performed a set of audio-visual live coding at an exhibition of digital Interaction Design research held at the Brisbane State Library (Australia) on 7th August 2008. aa-cell continue to use the Impromptu environment for their live coding and in this concert were able to integrate audio and video feeds into a single screen display for the first time; as opposed to their typical two-screen projections in past performances. Positioning the performance in ACID's research showcase context underscores the strong connection between computational arts activities and digital media research exemplified by aa-cell's live coding work.

Really Simple Seeds

Enzo Varriale and Gianluca Lisco, who work out of Rome as VJ crew Lanvideosource have released another interesting computational video called ReallySimpleSeed. As a the name implies, the work grabs text from an RSS feed, it then organise the text into a 3D tree inspired by an l-system structure and composit it with some video, all of which respsponds to the frequency changes in an audio track. The effect is quite neat if perhaps a bit inconsistent in its visual appeal over time. They have produced another good demo of the power of the vvvv environment to produce some great looking computational video.

Software Studies Initiative

The Software Studies Institute is a research centre started in 2007 at the UCSD whose focus is on understanding how culture is influenced by software. It examines how software-based institutions such as Microsoft and Google have become so influential and powerful, how software systems such as Amazon recommendations and Facebook are changing relationships and social structures and, of interest to runtime readers in particular, how artistic expressions and creative thought more generally are enabled through software. The web site for the initiative outlines its reason for being:

"Social scientists, philosophers, cultural critics, and media and new media theorists now seem to cover all aspects of the IT revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such as cyber culture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture. Yet the underlying engine that drives most of these subjects – software – has received little or no direct attention. Software is still invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural professionals interested in IT and its cultural and social effects. But if we continue to limit critical discussions to the notions of “cyber,” “digital,” “new media,” or “Internet,” we are in danger of always dealing only with effects rather than causes; the output that appears on a computer screen rather than the programs and social cultures that produce these outputs."

The Software Studies Initiative research centre is directed by Lev Manovich, a well known digital cultural theorist. It has a small core of researchers that include digital visual artist Amy Alexander and computer music researcher Shlomo Dubnov. There are a number of projects, a key one seems to be the visualisation of cultural patterns, which focuses not only on data visualisation by theory visualisation. They present this with a large display, the HIperWall, made up of fifty (count them!) Apple 30 inch displays. The connected computers they call their visual super computer. See image below.

aa-cell @ ACMC 2008

The live coding duo aa-cell (Andrew Brown and Andrew Sorensen) performed at the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney, Australia last week. This conference has been a regular performance opportunity for the duo over recent years. This time they presented one of their first music and graphics combination live coding exhibition. previous performances at ACMC by aa-cell have been audio-only affairs. So this performance was a step up in sophistication. Below are images of them in action and a screen moment from the performance - note the combination of projected code and graphics.

Landprint

The Kitchen Budapest project Landprint is doing computational art on a very large scale. By controlling seed sowing robots they propose to grow giant art works using a variety of different plants to create textual differences viewable from a distance. This is a great example of how computational approaches can be applied in the physical world using computing technologies (in this case robotic control) to have an imprint on the physical environment. The projects web site describes thier project.

The aim of the Landprint project is to reproduce subtle patterns and photos by combining various species of plants with programmed robotics.
Plants and flowers that spawn seem to make continuous patterns with their various colours and shades seen from a distance. With the use of programmed robotics for the planting and cutting of plants, we can manipulate the evolving patterns, to render photo-like, delicate images.

There are a number of interesting media art projects on their site and videos of many on YouTube. Check 'em out.

i3L iPhone MIDI controller

The i3L is an iphone to MIDI bridge for audio and video software available as a free download from artificialeyes.tv. The iPhone was always going to be an attractive controller given its array of senors including, accelerometer, multi-touch screen, and camera with connectivity via cellular, wifi and bluetooth. With many music developers familiar with OS X sofwtare tools we should see more iPhone music apps appearing soon too I'd expect. Here's how artifcialeyes describe the i3L.

i3L (pronounced "i thrill") is Freeware, and was developed using Max/MSP from Cycling74 and is a support application for aka.remote by Masayuki Akamatsu i3L receives pre-defined UDP messages from aka.remote.app running on the iPhone, scales the values to MIDI, and allows you to configure the sending MIDI channel and control change message number. While this software was developed to work seamlessly with our Real-time 3D VJ software Thrill, ( http://thrill.artificialeyes.tv ) you can use this program with any audio or video software which receives midi messages.

Monotone sixty four

Recently there was a post about the Tenori-on. Well a similar grid-based controller interface is available from Monome called the Monome sixty four - because it has sixty for buttons/lights arranged in a simple grid. These are assignable and controllable by your MIDI software applications. The controller is a convenient two-hand-holding size, with an elegant design including nice wood panelling on the box, and has an accelerometer built-in to sense tilting of the controller. The monome designers, Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain, call their products "adaptable, minimalist interfaces" and the sixty four is the third in an obviously-named series that includes the two fifty six and the twenty eight. The sixty four is priced at USD$450 plus international shipping costs of about USD$85.