World Listening Project presents Soundwalks in East Garfield Park with Dan Godston and Fereshte Toosi :: August 1, 2009; 10:00 am – 1:00 pm :: Chicago Center for Green Technology, 445 N. Sacramento Blvd., Chicago, IL.

During a soundwalk, people explore their soundscape, using a score as a guide. We meet at CCGT at 10 a.m. for a brief tour of the premises, then the soundwalk starts. This soundwalk, which is being co-organized by WLP and CCGT, happens inside and outside the building — through the Resource Center, on the CCGT roof, past the rain cisterns, through the “Elementhouse” designed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the Solar Decathlon, to the eastern part of the property where they keep the solar berm and green roof test plots, and along a path in the field to the south of the CCGT building. Continue reading

OJO Presents Interactive Lecture Series — An Engagement Party Event :: August 6, 2009; 7:00 – 10:00 pm :: MOCA, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA.

Interactive Lecture Series will consist of a series of lectures, each of which will act as a musical score, with the speaker, audience, space, and environment functioning as compositional elements. As talks are presented on various topics, members of OJO will take up position beside the lectern as the house band, using audio trickery to affect the audience’s reception of live speech. Focusing on specific words and phrases in order to induce listeners to react in all sorts of ways, their interventions should lead to chaotic and memorable lectures. Continue reading

Cronicaelectronica recently released Digital Sound Drawings by Moren Riis, 6 pieces that use direct processing of drawings into sound. The release, which is free to download, is also complimented with a limited edition set of prints from Marius Watz, where traced segments of conical shapes cause vibrantly coloured interference patterns.

Network diagrams, occlusions and eclipses of celestial bodies, and dynamic charts reminiscent of Paul Klee’s Pedological sketches all abound in Cornelius Cardew’s experimental musical scores. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Hard Data by R. Luke DuBois [Needs Flash plugin and speakers; wait for data to load] Hard Data is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. Continue reading

Turbulence Spotlight: Piano Etudes by Jason Freeman, with Akito Van Troyer and Jenny Lin [Needs Adobe Flash Player plugin; Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 2+, or any recent web browser] — Inspired by the tradition of open-form musical scores, Piano Etudes is a set of four short works, each of which is notated as a collection of short musical fragments with links to connect them. In performance, the pianist must use those links to jump from fragment to fragment, creating her own unique version of the composition.

The pianist, though, should not have all the fun. So an accompanying web site enables anyone to create their own version of each etude, download it as an audio file or a printable score, and share it with others. In concert, pianists may make up their own version of each etude, or they may select a version created by a web visitor. Continue reading

Jorinde Voigt – Matrix [Notations] with Patric Catani & Chris Imler (Composition) and Lemniscate / ∞ [Acoustic Cluster] ::until December 20, 2008 :: Galerie Christian Lethert, Antwerpener Strasse 4, 50672 Kőln, Germany.

Matrix & Lemniscate is a unique collaboration between the artist Jorinde Voigt, and composers Patric Catani and Chris Imler. The lemniscate is, fundamentally a mechanism for the infinite (∞). A lemniscus or ‘ribbon’ that chases itself in a figure of eight describes the repeated and unending journey of the unbounded. Early Indian thinkers were quick to assert the abstract powers of infinities by recognising that when adding or removing parts to infinity, infinity would always remain. Jorinde Voigt draws structures energised by real and imagined possibilities to investigate finite boundaries of systems. Continue reading

Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days :: October 24-25, 2008 :: Wilton’s Music Hall, London, E1 8JB.

Sonic Arts Network and BBC Radio 3 present a two day festival based around Stockhausen’s “Aus den Sieben Tagen” (From the Seven Days) — an instructional score, made up of 14 pieces. Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days brings together some of the world’s leading contemporary avant-garde musicians for a unique and ground-breaking interpretation of one of Stockhausen’s most controversial works. Featuring over 20 performers, installations and a four day durational piece (see below), the festival is set in one of London’s most atmospheric spaces, Wilton’s Music Hall, the oldest grand music hall in the world. Continue reading

dorkbot-nyc – David Steinberg, Christina McPhee, and Sam Pluta :: September 3, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Location One, SoHo. The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

David Steinberg: mobile music machines – Lots of interesting musical software have been developed more or less recently for portable videogames consoles (Gameboy, PSP, etc.), PDAs or other similar platforms. I’ll present many of these applications (for Nintendo Gameboy, Palm OS, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, Gamepark consoles, etc.), explain what’s needed to use them, who created them, what are the advantages and disadvantages of developing musical software for each platform and of course show some examples of what can be done with these new instruments. Continue reading

[Image: Graphic Music Sequencer – Caleb Coppock (top) & Untitled #06 – André Gonçalves] Algomantra recently posted on a project by Caleb Coppock, which allows the composition of music by directly drawing onto paper discs. Since the kind of graphite marks made by ordinary pencils conduct electricity it provides a system for drafting a visual score in sectored patterns on paper discs. The Graphic Music Sequencer uses wire brushes that contact a paper disc as it spins on a standard record player. When the wire sensors move across the conductive graphite a tone is generated, the pitch of the tone is further regulated by the thickness of the pencil line. It’s interesting that in nearly all musical scores, including those of experimental layout, there needs to be some system of decoding and mediation to translate mark into sound. Continue reading

Psychodrama: 13 Variations by Melissa Grey – Featuring: Harold Jones / The Antara Ensemble and The Orchestra of Agincourt conducted by Edwin Gonzales :: April 25, 2008; 8:30 pm :: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY.

A performance including live chamber ensemble, electroacoustic soundscape and projected video, Psychodrama is a multiple re-scoring of the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho. Continue reading