The Monome, a fresh new music interface, is in production. A programmable grid of of 64 buttons, it’s a smallbrew device. That is, the piece of hardware is neither a mass-produced corporate item nor a homebrew bit of weekend-invention happenstance. It’s a proper commercial release, albeit on a small scale. Half a grand will get [...]
This is a first. I’ve been doing the almost-daily Disquiet.com Downstream entries since October 14, 2003, and today is the first time I’ve linked to something I did myself. This past Sunday I moderated a panel discussion at the inaugural Maker Faire, put on by Make magazine (makezine.com). The subject: “Making Instruments, Making Music.” The [...]
Among the keywords in the audio catalog at the Internet Archive, aka archive.org, is the name of a recent video game created for the Nintendo DS handheld: Electroplankton. As many have noted, the game is less a game than it is a toy, in that it has no intended end; it’s a musical tool with [...]
What does it take to invent your own instrument? How has pervasive computing technology altered the way musicians compose? When you design your own instrument, does that change how you write music?
These are just some of the questions we’ll be discussing when I moderate a panel (one that should bleed into an ensemble performance) this [...]
The lineup for the next Circuit Bending Festival in New York, at bentfestival.org, has been posted. And even if you can’t make it there between April 19 and 23, the list still provides a handy primer to who’s doing what right now in the wacky world of misusing existing technology on the cheap. The performers’ [...]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: Two via downloadsquad.com: (1) A mouse-based loop scratcher called Scratch (link) and (2) a Speak & Spell emulator (link), but can you circuit-bend a virtual machine? … Two via createdigitalmusic.com: (3) The website for Max/MSP software, cycling74.com, has re-launched. Recent additions include video of enhanced turntablist Daito Manabe (link) [...]
There’s a cognitive disorder known as “musical hallucinations.” It afflicts not the young but the aged, those whose decades of aural experience can come back unbidden, turning the brain into an out-of-control iPod on shuffle. For someone raised in a household where video games and other electronic devices, rather than a standard stereo system, filled [...]
Pierre Bastien’s recent record out on Rephlex, titled Pop, like its predecessor, Mecanoid, creates shopworn arrangements from instruments largely of Bastien’s own creation. These aren’t instruments as in virtual plugins for software or homebrew synthesizers, but dilapidated contraptions that have steampunk charm, acoustic instruments strummed by electric motors, birdlike whirlygig-pets chirping on command, a kind [...]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Apparently this (link) is a half-hour video of the duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) playing chess with their Buddha Machines at the De Appel museum of contemporary art in Amsterdam, November 2005 (via chaile.org). The sound quality isn’t great, but eventually people shush and the music [...]
While its name sounds like the premise for a Philip K. Dick novel, the Buddha Machine is not fictional, even if recent back orders, due to its popularity, might have suggested as much. A small, plastic, battery-operated device resembling a cheap AM radio, the Buddha Machine contains nine brief ambient snippets that loop endlessly. It [...]