Salvador Dali on ‘What’s My Line?” via
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Archive for May, 2007
I just came across this interesting project via Alex Ross’ quality blog. I love the idea of turning the sounds around us into some kind of reconstructed music in real-time, but I guess I find the result of this project kinda cheesy, like a backing texture from any run of the mill IDM release.
I’d like a device like this to incorporate some other settings where you can give the machine an idea of the mood you’re in or you’d like to create, the weather conditions and so on. If these were tied to musical and processing factors the device might offer some musical depth and interest, rather than just the one trick pony of turning sounds into music. I think the device would require some additional processing in the form of an Eno style delay chain, or some more advanced slice/verb processing. Whatever the case, the idea of taking the unconsidered sound of our cities and making something out of it is great. If we all became synesthetic for day, and could see all we heard in our cities, we’d all be reaching for our aural shades quicker than you can say synesthetic.
Just put some photos that I took during Fox and Pateras’ rehearsal and show last night up here. Both shows went really well and Anthony got a really great reception for his piece. When you look back at how much effort and organization it took to perform a ten minute work, it can generate a lot of mixed feelings. From my end of things it was at least a week or more of work to pull it all together, and tons time more for Anthony to write the work, copy the parts, etc, etc.
The show was also recorded and broadcast on ABC FM. I’ll be keen to have a listen back to it later and see how the reinforcement came across in the recording with the acoustic sound of the ensemble. I hope some of you were able to make it down, it was a great night and there should be more of it in Melbourne.
Just a quick note to let you all know that I’ll be mixing Anthony Pateras’ new work QQ with the Melbourne Symphony this weekend coming. (Both links have details on the concert).
The work is for 4 quartets (wind, strings, brass and percussion) with electronics (a MAX/MSP patch by Rob Fox to be precise). I’m sure this is going to be a great concert and it’s always cool to go and hear & see a symphony up close, as you can when the MSO play at the Malthouse. They like to pull out all the crazy instruments for the new music gigs as well….
Also Rob and Anthony will be playing their duo set on the same night in a separate little gig before the big show later. If you pay up for the big deal, you get the side order of art music free!
I was checking out some news feeds this arvo and came across a Web 2.0 deal at forbes.com for looking at a corporations exec structure. Anyhow, I thought I’d check out Apple and see how it was stacked. When I moused over Dr. Eric Schmidt’s entry, I got an interesting pop-up. I thought is was right up Fake Steve’s alley, so I sent it to him and he blogged it.
The internet is neat like that…
Some interesting stuff popped up on this boingboing post covering the 2007 Coachella festival. Björk is out and about playing material off her new LP Volta, and as usual, she right up to date on what the cool kids are into, and a lot of it is about multi-touch interfaces. Some of her band playing with the sexy and expensive Lemur (maybe to control Ableton Live?). And to top it off they’re using the totally sweet reactable as part of the show (the reactable is visible on the LH side). Our local pal Ross Bencina had a part in the reactable’s development, so I guess Ross can now slip Björk into the CV there someplace. Also, the low slung drum setup got my eye as well. I sure hope we get to see this show up here at the top of the world sometime soon. I guess the tour blog will have to do until then!
