Whisper of eight turned on pistol grip megaphones.

Whisper by Miguel Monroy

The pistol grip megaphones are usually qualified by their "power". Loud and noisy, they are a sign of emergency. Here, Miguel Monroy renders them soft, almost whispering. They are located carefully, adjacent to one another so that the feedback of the same pistols homogenize the overall sound.
Listen to the piece ->here <-. Beautiful piece.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
.............................................................................................
Blog Jouons Blog Maison Blog Passion

Sound Candy

"Sound Candy is a toy which makes public playground yours with sounds and gestures. Wear Sound Candy on your body, record your favorite sounds to it, and jump! Hop! Run! Sound candy mutates the recorded sound according to your movement. Play creatively." By Shuichi Ishibashi, Daisuke Uriu and Professor Naohito Okude at the Okude Lab in Japan.

Sound Candy is a device for anyone to create a personal playground with sound and movements. The main idea for Sound Candy is to offer the possibility to entertain and be entertained by using ordinary stones and wood sticks that surrounds us. Because of its small size, Sound Candy can be attached to any part of the human and animal body, artifacts and objects. Sound Candy has two function: a recording one, and the possibility to integrate the recorded sounds and the signals from the sensors, such as vibration or acceleration caused by a variety of movements. The recorded sounds are converted in various ways by selecting either Angle Mode, Vibration Mode, Speed Mode and Rotation Mode.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
.............................................................................................
Blog Jouons Blog Maison Blog Lesson

Tenori On by Toshio Iwai

I saw it many times on the net, but never quite understood the genius of it until I saw this video. It is a "64" buttons interface, very simple, but the sound works so well for its type of interaction and the device fits instantaneously with your expectation. The rhythm you create invites for more exploration.

Toshio Iwai Launch of Tenori-On


Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
.............................................................................................

Structural innovation

Re-designing acoustic musical instrument according to the abilities and characteristics of rapid prototype materials

After laser printing on bread, one can print instruments! My friend Amit Zoran designed this really neat concept of an acoustic guitar sound box that has been given a unique sound and behavior through a CAD/CAM process. His research goal at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Ambient Intelligence research group, is to find and analyze a space for structural innovation, especially for acoustic instruments.

His works enables players to customize their own sound by assembling different sound cells, e.g physical parts of the instruments designed in CAD/CAM, instead of considering the instrument as one big sound box. Each string can have its own bridge and each bridge can be linked to different cells. By changing a cell' size, material or structure, one can create customizable sounds.

His innovative take mainly consists of printing, using a 3D printer, cells drawn into a vectorial software. These cells, made of 30cm radius, have a variety of materials strong enough to carry the pressure of the strings and handle resonance.
People can download recommended sound cells from the internet in order to change or manipulate their guitar sounds.
In the near future, Amit is planning on testing the physical behavior of different combinations and to find optimal structures.

Don't forget to check the video!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure

The subtle vibrations

Duncan Wilson created Otto with Manolis Kelaidis at the Royal College of Art.

OTTO (Greek for ‘ear’) is a device that makes hidden sounds audible. This is achieved via a thin polymer piezoelectric contact that senses weak vibrations and plays them as a sound through an integrated speaker. OTTO can be positioned on almost any surface through a combination of suction and magnets. By placing several units on different objects, one can select and create a new sonic experience and a form of ambient music appreciation, thereby utilising our space as a multidirectional audio platform.

Every object and surface in our environment has a whisper; subtle tremors and vibrations that are usually undetectable to the human ear, produced by the activity and movement of daily life. What if these sounds were audible? How would that change our aural awareness, perception of space and attitude towards objects? Would it be possible to ‘compose’ our own soundtrack using our walls and objects as a new form of instruments? Madsounds is a proposal for a different appreciation of our environment, space and objects by making it possible to identify, combine and manipulate these sounds.

More projects from the RCA.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure

Bootleg objects

Rebraun by Marcus Wolf + Marcus Bader

Designed in 1962 by Dieter Rams, the “Audio 1 Kompaktanlage” is a milestone of german post-war design. It embodies, even more than its predecessor, the famous “snow-white’s coffin”, the design ideals of the rationalist “Ulm School”. These sober paradigms of utility and matter-of-factness are playfully remodelled in the “ReBraun”: Two TFT-Displays take the place of the radio scales, the lettering on the anodised front plate ironically quotes the lingo of the radio era. A randomly positioned button, labelled “Zufall” (Randomness) stands for the freedom from mechanical constraints. The antenna does not receive any FM radio, but is used to connect the system to the internet via Wireless LAN. The case and acrylic hood were lowered by several centimetres for sporty reasons (think: hot rod!), and the window that formerly contained a signal strength readout now becomes a tabernacle for the old Braun nameplate.

A phono-radio without the phono, a cassette receiver sans cassette, and a non-turning turntable are the first three pieces in a series called “Bootleg Objects”. Obviously, something has been stolen here from these three right honorable design classics. Or rather, was something added?

Visualizing Audio Cues

Today at Interact 2007 I discovered the work of Tony Bergstrom who happens to be Karrie Karahalios's student. He presented today the Conversation Clock table.

On the Conversation Clock table, lapel microphones monitor conversation while the visualization of history is projected in the center. The Conversation Clock provides a visual history of interaction and communication. Each contribution displays bars colored to indicate the speakers’ identities. The lengths of these bars indicate the degree of participation, measured by volume. As a conversation progresses, a history is built with concentric rings reminiscent of the rings on a tree.

The Conversation Clock displays various conversational cues such as turn taking, interruption, conversational dominance, silence, agreement, aural back-channels, mimicry, time spans, rhythm and flow. If an individual has not been speaking, their lack of aural contribution is made clear in the rings. Of course, if individual is speaking at length and dominating the conversation, one can easily observe this as well. Aspects such as interruption, silences, and argument also make visual impressions on the table.

As a result, the Conversation Clock allows people to interpret their role in interaction. The visualization of audio allows people who speak the most to regulate their speech and speak less and the persons who speak the less to speak more.
"Live visualization of audio through social mirrors can provide influential cues for
individual participation in conversation. Participants alter themselves in order
to equalize the contribution of individuals."

Paper to download

Dice video

A Nikle Injuries by Fujiya & Miyagi

Undercover

I recently spent time with friends Jean-baptiste Labrune and Dana Gordon these past two days, and we had awesome research discussions about the future of HCI! Dana Gordon explained me her fascinating projects and I loved her Undercover blanket.
The Undercover contains 24 wireless speakers and provides a special physical sound experience. The Undercover allows you to enjoy the vibrations of the speakers on your body and provides a private mobile soundscape.

The blanket has an embedded array of small speakers that can receive a wireless audio signal via a Bluetooth connection. This audio signal can be beamed from any kind of audio device, such as mp3 player, television, computer, radio, etc. The volume controllers were designed in a way, which suits the blanket’s natural cuddling behaviour. The upper corners (A.K.A 'the blanket’s ears') control the volume - (pull the right one for higher volume and the left one for lower).

The Youtube of the Avant-Garde

Do you prefer to listen to sounds or to the relationship between two or more sounds? That is the question even though it may not be exclusive ...

A new addition on ubu, Four American Composers, Directed by Peter Greenaway.

For those who do not know Ubu, UbuWeb is the YouTube of the Avant-Garde.

UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats à la YouTube, which means that you can view everything right in your browser without platform-specific software or insanely huge downloads. We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Terayama Shuji, Paul McCarthy Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more -- of course all free of charge. Presented in conjunction with our partners at Greylodge.

List of the avant-garde films available.

Tested and approved: Csound is awesome

Adam Boulanger gave Aurelius Prochazka and I a three hours introductory tutorial on csound.

Csound is a programming language -originally witten in C, ref. its name- by Barry Vercoe at MIT Media Lab. Synthesized sounds that come out of csound are elegant and allow anyone with a computer to freely compose sounds. I prefer it to reason for its infinite personal potentials.

Composer Richard Boulanger edited the famous Csound book. BT on the other end revisited csound taught by Dr Boulanger for his Binary Universe album.

Saying that, all I can say is tested and approved and I can share some of the notes I took, as I think it can help anyone start with the Csound software and compose music.

Install the csound environment from sourceforge to install the CsoundLib framework.

If you have a mac, install Mac sound -for some reason Csound 5 did not work on my intel mac-

Open Mac Csound. Save the file that automatically opened.

Any name written in "blue" are called opcode, they are functions and clic " apple + ' " to have the help file of any of these opcode. The help file gives you the usual syntax and examples for each opcode.

A specific rate is defined with k, and a. The rest of the label can be anything descriptive, but the letter 'k' and 'a' will be understood by the system as the rate you want.

you can test out the following. Add to the orchestra window (orc)
sr = 44100
kr = 4410
ksmps = 10
nchnls = 1
instr 1
kamp = 10000
kcps = 220
ifn = 1
a1 oscil kamp, kcps, ifn
out a1
endin

add to the score window (sco)
; Table #1, a sine wave table with a small amount of data.
f 1 0 4096 10 1

; Play Instrument #1, the basic oscillator, for
; two seconds. This should sound relatively rough.
i 1 0 2

e

If you press the icon, your piece will play back.

in the score window (sro) you wrote: "f 1 0 4096 10 1 "
10 is the gene routine number. 4096, a power of two. it drastically changes the sound if 4096 becomes 8!
In file:///Library/Frameworks/CsoundLib.framework/Versions/5.1/Resources/Manual/ScoreGenRef.html
the gene routines are explained.

In the (sro) window you also wrote: "i 1 0 2"
i: means instrument
1: refered to the instrument 1 from the orchestra window
0: start
2: duration in seconds
3: frequency

(then you can add different instruments, that overlap in time or start at different times etc...)

Adam mentioned the indispensable opcodes to try out:
. foscil (A basic frequency modulated oscillator.)
. grain (Generates granular synthesis textures)
. grain2 (Easy-to-use granular synthesis texture generator.)
. soundin (Reads audio data from an external device or stream)
. physical modeling instrument: pluck (Produces a naturally decaying plucked string or drum sound.)

Finally a good key ressource is the first chapter of the Csound book by Dr. Richard Boulanger, Introduction to Sound Design in Csound. It can be downloaded for free from MIT Press. Also the Csound web site community

Good luck!