Some of the most widely publicized news from this past week’s Game Developers Conference (gdconf.com), held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center from February 18 - 22, centered on a sixth-sense device, from Emotiv (emotiv.com), that uses brain waves to trigger game play. Still, the original five senses were in full effect, sound key [...]
Yesterday’s Disquiet Downstream entry was a 25-year-old discussion about computer-powered interactive art systems (disquiet.com). Today’s is a pair of MP3s recorded thanks to an ingenious piece of software that turns the Nintendo Wii video game console into a musical instrument. After a quarter century, art and science have become entertainment.
The Wii Loop machine needs to [...]
In the world of 8bit music there are retro tunes and there are reanimated tunes.
Retro tunes are newly recorded pop melodies that sound like they’d been programmed toward the end of the Carter administration to provide background music to simple video games.
Reanimated tunes are punk-damaged efforts in noisy hindsight. Numerous musicians today infuse the rudimentary [...]
The great netlabel Monotonik (mono211.com) closed out 2007 not with another in its ongoing free new electronic releases — but with a tasty archival entry. Back in 2000, on his own Systorm Technologies label, Aaron Rutledge released an EP titled Musical Endeavor under the name Pliant. According to the recent Monotonik entry, the EP was [...]
News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) It isn’t yet listed in imdb.com, but according to Movies That Rock (Condé Nast magazine supplement this winter), Gustavo Santaolalla (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) is scoring I Come with the Rain by Scent of Green Papaya director Anh Hung Tran. [...]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Generative music-maker Kenneth Kirschner is the subject of a new interview up at tokafi.com: “[Q:] Your music is electronically processed to a large extent. Why then, are you still interested in the piano as a basis? [A:] I think piano is often for me the clearest and most direct [...]
There’s a temptation to link to the score to the recent video game hit Bioshock and to not mention that it is, in fact, the music for a violent, shoot’em’up at all and to instead just pay attention to the sounds themselves — how wind-like noise fills in the background of the strings on the [...]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) One promising aspect of the new service iJigg, where musicians are invited to post their tracks and await rating by their eager public, is that among its 21 initial genres is “beats/instrumentals,” right up there with folk and hip-hop (ijigg.com). … (2) That sound-art disguised as a cheap [...]
This past week saw the release of 8-Bit Operators (Astralwerks), on which over a dozen Krafkwerk classics are performed on Gameboys, old Atari setups and other lo-fi, lo-rez and, in general, unintended digital audio production tools. A heap of the assembled’s work is available for download at 8bitoperators.com, one highlight being a track from 2004 [...]