The Singing Sock Puppets are MIDI controller sock puppets created by Matthew Irvine Brown, who completed a MA in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London in 2006. The sock puppets are equipped with flex sensors, and thus opening and closing the mouth of the sock makes the puppet sing up and down a scale. It can be any musical scale, from pentatonic and blues to chromatic and so on.

Matthew Brown point to the fact that the Singing Sock Puppets could be used to help illustrate relatively complex musical theory, such as the differences between blues, chromatic, and pentatonic scales through play. This type of musical terminology doesn’t normally enter the curriculum of music lessons in schools until the children reaches 15 or 16 years of age. The Singing Sock Puppets enables these different musical scales to be taught to younger children in a fun and instructive way.

Check out the videos 1 and 2 of the first two prototypes. [blogged by Lene Mailund Digital Experience]

NMP – A New Networked Music Performance System [PDF] by Xiaoyuan Gu, Matthias Dick, Ulf Noyer, Lars Wolf (Technical University Braunschweig, Institute of Operating Systems and Computer Networks (IBR); Mühlenpfordtstraße 23, Braunschweig 38106, Germany, E-mail:{xiaogu, dick, unoyer, wolf}@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de URL: http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de

Abstract—Although IT has penetrated into nearly every aspect of the work and life of human beings, music professionals still stick to the traditional way of carrying out rehearsals and concerts. Music performance in this way requires physical presence of the participants and has a number of inherent limitations. We introduce in this paper a prototype of a novel Networked Music Performance system that enables the music professionals and enthusiasts to play with each other through cyberspace. An application like this is bandwidth demanding, highly delay-sensitive and requires the synchronization of the audio streams. Hence, the support from underlying end-systems and networks is critical. However the current source coding mechanisms and the best-effort nature of the Internet poses many challenges to achieve the desired quality of service. We have implemented the prototype in a Local Area Network environment on Linux PCs. The system contains four major interactive components and enables two different application scenarios of real-time rehearsal and rehearsal on-demand. Continue reading

No Note Left Behind Project Launch Party– 3/22/07 at Recombinant Media Labs 763 Brannan St. San Francisco, CA: The No Note Left Behind Project will be launched with a presentation and demo on March 22nd in San Francisco, CA by the BEAM Foundation. The goal of the project is to create a standard for an enduring performance score for New Music that may involve computers, networks, alternate instruments and audio/ video processing.

The new scoring system is named MAPPS for Musically Accumulating Persistent Performance Score. MAPPS consists of an authoring environment and methodology for rendering all synthesis, processing, interaction and representation in a high level portable language. All hardware except the performer’s instrument will be virtualized. Flat screens will serve as music stands. Working versions of these concepts have been implemented in the MACIAS system now being used in performance by TrioMetrik. Continue reading

Jason Freeman received his B.A. in music from Yale University and his M.A. and D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University. He is currently an assistant professor of music at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The recipient of numerous awards, including two Turbulence commissions, one for N.A.G. in 2003, the other for Graph Theory in 2006, and a 2005 Rhizome commission for iTunes Signature Maker, Freeman’s works have been performed all over the world.

What his works have in common is that they break down conventional barriers between composers, performers, and listeners, using new technology and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators. Continue reading

The Tri-phonic Turntable (1997), by Janek Schaefer, is inspired by the work of composer and choreographer Philip Jeck. In particular Vinyl Requiem, an installation/performance which utilised 180 Dansette record players from the ’50s and ’60s. Jeck mounted them on a vertical scaffold and set them all to play simultaneously.

The Tri-phonic Turntable, however, aims to do the opposite. Instead of using many record players to play different records Schaefer combined several record players in one portable device. The objective being to enable the artist to create accidents and discover new sounds locked inside old vinyl finds. Continue reading