Cafe Scientifique presents Making Noise, a night of perceptual exploration :: October 26, 2009; 7:30 p.m. :: The Horse Hospital, 30 Colonnade, WC1N 1JD, London, UK.

Join our scientists, artists and musicians as we ask the questions: When does noise gain meaning? And – Are we nearly cyborgs?

Short talks by Dr Mick Grierson’s demo of his computer brain interface – generating noise environments from brain waves! Patrick Degenaar, on visual prosthetics for augmented vision – and the prospects for bionic eyes. Lauren Stewart on what our brain does with music, and why some people (with amusia) just don’t get it. And Joydeep Bhattacharya on why sounds stir our emotions. Continue reading

rota by Carsten Nicolai :: July 3 – September 26, 2009 :: Ernst Schering Foundation, Unter den Linden 32-34, 10117 Berlin.

rota, which sees itself as an experiment, deals with the effects of the so-called neurofeedback on human perception. Taking his cues from the dreamachines or mind machines — developed by Brion Gysin since the 1950s in the context of the Beatnik movement to alter the viewers’ state of consciousness through the emission of alpha waves — Carsten Nicolai presents a test set-up, where visitors can experience for themselves how the brain responds to different visual (and acoustic) phenomena. Continue reading

SonarMàtica 2009: Mecànics :: June 18-20, 2009 :: Barcelona.

Mecànics (the exhibition): Over the past decade, the spread of new digital production tools has led to a democratisation of the artistic process, ranging from the music industry to multimedia art. Home-made recording studios, audiovisual editing programs and online record labels have made projects that used to require major investments easily accessible. Today, the spirit of punk is standard cultural currency.

Becoming the conductor of Roland Olbeter’s robot orchestra, or creating your own musical compositions – simply by moving counters on a board – with the famous interactive table Reactable (Rolling Stone magazine’s Instrument of the Year in 2007), Continue reading

How the Brain Responds to Music by Emily Singer :: June 01, 2009 :: MIT Technology Review :: Neurosurgeons measure neural activity during surgery as patients listen to music.

Lately, when neurosurgeon Ali Rezai implants a deep brain electrode into a Parkinson’s patient, he plays a special classical composition from the Cleveland Orchestra. The music isn’t designed to keep him focused during surgery, but rather to explore the effect it has on the brain. His patients, who are receiving an implant that helps alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, are awake during the surgery and can tell Rezai how the music makes them feel as he observes what it does to the brain. Continue reading

Transitio_MX 03: International Media Art and Video Festival :: Centro Nacional de las Artes, Centro Multimedia, Avenida Río Churubusco 79, Colonia Country Club, C. P. 04220, Coyoacán, México, D. F. :: Call for Proposals — Deadline: June 19, 2009.

“The third edition of the Electronic Art and Video Festival, Transitio_MX 03 attempts to acknowledge differences in a transparent and straightforward context. We aim to offer an event that is representative of current trends in new media art and video, and to show how artists use that technology in their creative pursuits.

While global space eliminates the geographical locations wherein these proposals take place by homogenizing them; technological appropriation is seen as a disagreement, and as such, artistic practices emerge as autonomous. Continue reading

Wearable Forest by Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi from the University of Tokyo is “bio-acoustic” clothing which is networked with a subtropical forest of the southern Ryukyu Islands of Japan. Equipped with embedded speakers, LEDs, an embedded CPU system and a wireless internet connection, the dress processes and remotely plays the soundscape of the jungle through the speakers and uses the LEDs to create patterns reflecting the activity level of jungle life. More than just a receiver sensors also let the user transmit pre-recorded acoustic data back to the forest installation, creating a bioacoustical loop. Continue reading

Sensorium Re-Connected — a generative composition for for 5 PCs and 2 voices by Andrew Garton :: January 11, 2009; 11:03 – 11.45 pm CET :: Kunstradio – Radiokunst :: Listen here.

From August 18 to September 6, 1997, Australia’s The Listening Room presented Sensorium Connect / Body Morph, a generative composition by Andrew Garton and comprised of sounds sampled from performances by Stelarc. Sensorium Connect was the first Listening Room project entirely produced for online and was streamed for its entire six week duration.

On January 11, KunstRadio broadcasts an entirely new version of this work. Sensorium Re-Connected commemorates the work of The Listening Room and the contribution this piece made to furthering radio and sound art online in Australia. Continue reading

[Image: Gil Alterovitz’s translation of genes (circles) into music … via A Musical Score for Disease] EvoMUSART 2009 – 7th European Workshop on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design :: April 15-17, 2009 :: Tubingen, Germany :: CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline: November 5, 2008.

EvoMUSART 2009 is the seventh workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2009 is to bring together researchers who are using biologically inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in this area.

Accepted papers will be presented orally at the workshop and included in the EvoWorkshops proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Continue reading

Jacob Kirkegaard – Labyrinthitis :: Touch # Tone 35 :: CD – 1 track – 38:10 :: Special wallet limited edition :: Commissioned by Medical Museion in Copenhagen, Summer 2007.

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his ears inwards: His new work LABYRINTHITIS is an interactive sound piece that consists entirely of sounds generated in the artist’s auditory organs – and will cause audible responses in those of the audience. LABYRINTHITIS relies on a principle employed both in medical science and musical practice: When two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, additional vibrations in the inner ear will produce a third frequency. This frequency is generated by the ear itself: a so-called “distortion product otoacoustic emission” (DPOAE), also referred to in musicology as “Tartini tone”. Continue reading

Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School is developing a computer program that translates protein and gene expression into music. In his acoustic translation, harmony represents good health, and discord indicates disease.

Searching for a more simplified way to represent the complex library of information inherent in gene expression, Alterovitz decided to represent those changes with music. He hopes that doctors will one day be able to use his music to detect health-related changes in gene expression early via a musical slip into discord, potentially improving a patient’s outcome. From Technology Review Continue reading