Love these kits from Bleep labs - the thingamagoop is a small one led performance instrument for electronic sounds, glitchy blips etc

They also have a thingamakit which is a 2 LED performance interface, but you need to build it yourself, so being handy with a soldering iron will help

YEHHH for Dr BLEEP

The Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC 2008) is happening at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music - The University of Sydney this week - Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Michael Atherton and I (SYNC) are performing a new work for electric guitar and live electronics on Friday night and on Saturday night I am playing a new work for flute and live electronics, titled Fue Sho which I wrote for the Aurora Festival earlier in the year.

A special guest of the conference is Robert Normandeau, one of my favorite electroacoustic composers.

I recommend you check out the Concert Program and come and check out all the great music. There are day time and night time concerts.

Ok, I have decided to have a section of my Blog for personal activities that I would like to share, such as Kayaking. So here is a link to some pics I took a few days ago on my birthday in fact, whilst on a paddle up the Woronora River . I have also logged the path on Google Earth using my new Garmin GPSMAP 76CSx portable marine GPS - which is absolutely wicked….

I am hoping to use the Kayaking category to link the pictures and the Google Earth paths so that others who might be interested can use the information to plan their own trips, and so I have a catalogue of my journeys - we’ll see if I am disciplined enough to do it regularly…

If your interested, I have a FeelFree Moken in a nice sky blue colour, and without all the fishing paraphernalia … It’s a nice boat… it leaked a bit when I first got it, but that was the clips holding the seat in, and was repaired under warrantee, which was good… now it as dry as they come.

This is the Google Earth Link to my paddle path, collected by my GPS while I was paddling back down the Woronora River on July 3. It will open in Google Earth and show you the path and some information about it, like the distance etc. The paddle is about 5 KM in each direction and is very easy.

The AudioCubes are an interesting alternative electronic music controller released onto the market a year or so ago. There is an interesting review of the AudioCubes on Create Digital Music, where to difference between triggering and continuous control is discussed.

Hands-on: AudioCubes as Alternative Controller

Thought you might be interested to hear a recent interview I did on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late with Julian Day. It features 2 new works for Kyma and live acoustic instrument written by me for the Aurora festival. One of them with my collaborator Michael Atherton, for our ensemble SynC.

http://www.abc.net.au/classic/newmusic/audio/nmuplate_10052008.ram

My flute work Fue Sho starts about 22:10 into the stream and is followed by the interview and then the work Sonic Alchemies with Michael Atherton.

Hope you enjoy

 Garth Paine interview on New Music Up Late: Download

This has to be about as cool as gaming music can get - the KORG DS-10 for the Nintendo DS

Features:
Dual dual synths: Two patchable virtual synths, with two oscillators each
Drum machine: Four-part drum machines loaded with samples of the virtual synth
Sequencer: 2 synth tracks, 4 drum machine tracks, 16 steps
Effects: Delay, chorus, flanger
Input methods: Touch-control screen with real-time sound control, a keyboard screen, and matrix screen

CHARLES COHEN AT THE BUCHLA MUSIC EASEL from ALEX on Vimeo.

/ / / / / Viewing with headphones or a stereo source is highly recommended / / / / /

This colorful video features sound artist Charles Cohen improvising on a 1970’s Buchla Music Easel. This extremely rare instrument is one of Don Buchla’s 200 series. Buchla (a pioneer of audio synthesis) only manufactured 14 of these units. The entire film was edited from an hour-long set of free improvisation, with audio was taken directly from Charles’ mixing board.

All of the photography and editing was produced by Alex Tyson, a sound and video artist from Pennsylvania. The film was shot in 16:9 720p High Definition format, using the Letus35 Extreme and a 35mm LensBaby 3GPL.

This film is free to distribute, share, blog, vlog, etc. When re-posting, please copy and paste this text to inform anyone about the film. Also.. please ‘bling out’ the embed size to 640×360.

At this time the film is only available online. While you can stream it in HD, it is best viewed on DVD.
Please contact the filmmaker for hard copies if interested.

Alex can be reached at alextyson (at) gmail dot com

Thanks to LensBabies for making this awesome lens!

I am performing and talking at the Creative Minds workshop and concert at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre this Friday, April 18. There is an electroacoustic workshop in the morning, 10-12, and a FREE concert 1-2PM. The concert contains works by myself, Michael Atherton, Roger Dean and Hazel Smith and others

For more details on the festival see Aurora Festival: Workshops and Forums

My new work is for concert flute and live electronic processing, based on Japanese Gagaku, utilising the scales and cordal structures commonly used buy the Sho in this kind of music. The processing creates sound clouds of differing pitches - take a listen to the piece here:

 

 Fue Show [9:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I have been working with dancer Hellen Sky for the last year on an interactive dance project called Darker Edge of Night which is using bio-sensing to explore the relationship between gesture, body and form in a dance work.

This approach is seeking to dig deeply into questions about interactivity - what is it really? - non-linear story telling, and ways of expressing nuances of performance within a work that has a number of agreed themes and content.

We are using the Infusion Systems wi-microDig wireless transmitter to send data from -

Two 2D accelerometers - one on the shoulder and one on the hand, and a
Bio-Flex sensor for measures EMG activity in the right fore arm and a
BioWave sensor to measure EEG (brainwaves), EOG (eye movements) and facial EMG (muscle movements).

These signals are all being collected and scaled in MAX and sent via OSC to a Capybara/Kyma system for realtime synthesis.

We presented concepts from the work intermingled with short performance excerpts at the Australian Performing Arts Market at the Adelaide Festival in February 2008 and you can see a video of some of that HERE

Love these instruments

and this wacky music video

A small video doco on Miewa Denki