Quick Post - Show Tonight

Quick post: Mara Helmuth, director of the (ccm)2, has a show at 20 Greene Street Soho tonight at 8:30 PM. Click here for more information. Her multimedia work Lifting the Mask will be performed.

Lo-Fi Adventure #1 - the Gourd speaker array

CCM2 recently celebrated the completion of a beautiful new speaker array for our Laptop Orchestra project. While I was thrilled by the department's breakthrough and the prospect of my own personal array, the winter break left me low on both the funds and patience for such a venture. As a result, I took an evening and gathered some materials together for my own makeshift speaker array:

-1 dried gourd
-1 1/8" headphone jack w/ a decent length cable
-5 small speakers (I grabbed some from my ever-growing pile of broken tape machines)
-soldering iron
-a pocket knife
-sandpaper
-some sort of glue

With these humble means, a couple of hours, and very little sense of craftsmanship, I ended up with this:



Admittedly, I was a bit underwhelmed with the sound at first -- certainly not something to play a nicely mastered CD on. However, using Max/MSP and playing around with various sound files, I found the crunchy, buzzy lo-fi texture that I was hoping to use it for.

I immediately put my new creation to work by taking a small processed sample of an old French folk song and playing it through the speaker over and over again, gradually reducing the sound to a dull drone. I used a collage of the process as the basis for a new piece, which can be found in part here (called "Il pleut, il pleut" after the folk song).

For the complete piece (and many, many more pieces), check out the Indie Music Cancer Drive, a great music-related service project organized by Josh Whelchel.

Also, stay tuned for more info about the REAL speaker array completed by engineering student David Friedlander and CCM2.

Sonic X Preview #1: Meet Ico

Yes, he has a cool name. Ico Bukvic is an Assistant Professor in Composition at Virginia Tech.

According to his website:

I like to think of myself as a composer, interactive new media artist, researcher, and performer. My creations draw upon synergies among aural and visual, acoustic and electronic, interactive works and installations, while my research focuses on scientific exploration of pragmatic and artistic potential of new multimedia technologies in a pursuit of the overall betterment of quality of life. If I had to name one thing that ties all of my ostensibly eclectic creations and research vectors together, it would have to be the ubiquitous interactivity. I am currently working at Virginia Tech as an assistant professor in music composition & technology, founder and director of the new Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio (DISIS), co-director and faculty in the new Collaborative for Creative Technologies in the Arts and Design (CCTAD) interdisciplinary program, as the first non-CS member of VT's Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI), and as a faculty (by courtesy) in departments of Computer Science and Art & Art History. Unless all this tongue-twisting verbiage has already put you to sleep, please feel free to investigate some of my creations and/or services below.

So, you can go to his website to see his creations or services. In the meantime, I found the L2Ork YouTube Channel, and found this gem.

GulpGulp! Preview

This Wednesday, January 20th, our Sonic Explorations concert will be premiering exciting new installations and tape pieces by our department, one of which is "GulpGulp!," an interactive installation developed by yours truly.

At it's core, GulpGulp! is a procedural audio generator which 'feeds' on two-dimensional image data. Based on brightness contrasts found in the image and other various programmable methods, GulpGulp! creates an audio signal comprised of various wave forms, not limited to pure sine waves, squares, triangles, saws, and noise. GulpGulp! further varies the process by assigning special waveforms to various colors and contours, making each and every input a completely different aural experience. Of course, all of this assignment is programmable to the end-user so that a single image has an infinite set of possibilities.

At the recital, I will be taking photographs of various patrons and using those images as the input data to create a truly unique experience. To further increase the experience for the guests, GulpGulp! creates a realtime visual experience which maps to the audio data and detected-contours to help the audience identify the source-material, creating a thought-provoking and entertaining listening and viewing experience.

Here I have a short video sampling three different images that were created using an older version of the algorithm. To save time, these images were only set to be twenty seconds in length, but a more dynamic and richer experience is found with longer durations and higher resolution images.

- Josh Whelchel

Sonic Explorations Concert 1/20/10

please join us for…

Sonic Explorations

with guests from Virginia Tech
Ivica Ico Bukvic, composer, CCM alumnus and Jay Crone, trombone
with works by CCM students, featuring interactive Wii music, video and much more

8:00 p.m. Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Cohen Family Studio Theater
CCM, University of Cincinnati
Free admission

Program

Painting the Pacific Angelique Poteat
FORGETFULNESS Ivica Ico Bukvic (interactive sound and video)
Mr. Ravenscroft's Haunting Nebojsa Macura
Ballet for Still Lights Jerod Sommerfeldt (video)

intermission and GulpGulp, an installation by
Josh Whelchel


ETIC 101 Michael Cortes
Language Joshua Goldman (video)
Shimmering Night Hojin Lee
derelicts of time Ivica Ico Bukvic
for trombone, computer, and 3D visuals (2008)

Details will follow