Category: LookingOutwards-10

Fallon Creech-LookingOutwards-10

Video demonstrating interactions with iPad set-up

Prelude in ACGT, a project created by Pierry Jacquillard at Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne’s Media and Interaction Design Unit, explores the literal relationship between the biology and music using the creator’s own DNA. The tools extract Jacquillard’s DNA and convert it into music.

Throughout Jacquillard’s studies, he has always been profoundly captivated by the connections made between highly organic structures and artificial structures brought to life through man; his interest lies in the contrasting nature of the two opposing ends of the spectrum, which he believes to provide means of creating long-lasting interpretations of the product. He explains, “This Prelude is important for me, as the technological advances are taking any data (including music) and turn them into DNA in order to save them for almost eternity as they promise. But for me, the most important is more the interpretation of a code rather than the materialism of the code itself. I think that maybe we are just generating data that will last centuries but the key to retrieve them won’t. They could be a kind of post-digital hieroglyphs.”

This project relies on five interfaces that ignite the interaction between biology and music, change sound qualities, and visualize the individual components. The visualizations are demonstrated through different web applications on iPads. I appreciate the comprehensive process of his using only Javascript to interpret and convert the data into statement graphics.

Ian Kaneko LO – 10

The Seaboard Rise 49 by ROLI

In the prompt it mentioned discussing new computational instruments. I asked my friend who is a member of CMU’s exploded ensemble what their favorite piece of tech that they used in the ensemble. What I found out about was a cool instrument called the Seaboard Rise.

What I admire about it is that it took one of the most harmonically capable instruments (the piano) and addressed its main weaknesses. Those being the the lack of different timbres and the limited expressiveness.

The seaboard is very akin to a super synthesizer. You can download and install different sounds that you want the instrument to produce and can change them real time which addresses the timbre problem I previously mentioned. It also allows for slides and vibrato, two very expressive aspects of music that are unavailable to real pianos.

The product was created by the company ROLI, so it hard to pinpoint a specific creator of the project. I think that the pure quality of the instrument shows how much the creators really cared about this and saw the effects it could have on the future of music.

The Game of Thrones theme played on a Seaboard

Sydney Salamy: Looking Outwards-10

Apparatum is a piece made by PanGenerator, a musical group consisting of Krzysztof Goliński, Jakub Koźniewski, Piotr Barszczewski, and Krzysztof Cybulski, and was created in 2018. The group drew inspiration from the Pilish Radio Experimental Studio, which was one of the first studios to start producing electrostatic music. So while there is a digital interface, the apparatus is very old-fashioned looking and emits only analogue sound.

I really like the old aesthetic the group is trying to pull off with this installation. It’s the first thing that really stands out about it. I like this because it’s pleasing to look at and because there obviously isn’t a lot like it currently. I also really like how there was a mix of the old and the new. It wasn’t simply a remake of an old technology, the group decided to incorporate modern tech into an older styled model, resulting in a old looking apparatus with a digitally interactive interface. I like this since it takes the best parts of two different things to create an almost different invention.

Video Demonstrating Apparatum In Action

While the piece may be heavily influenced by an older aesthetic, it has modern electronic aspects to it as well. To create the electronic interface, the group used the software electron (node.js). The microcontroller elements are c running on Teensy 3.2. Teensy 3.2 is also used for the hardware. 

The piece (right) compared with its older influences (left)

Looking at their website, it is clear they have a certain aesthetic they are trying to pull off. The website is a sleek black and white, and many of their photos are in black and white as well.  The site almost looks like that for a newspaper. They seem to be going for an old fashioned but also futuristic look, if that’s possible, the color scheme giving off the old-timey vibe with the sleekness and use of geometric shapes in their photos giving the site a futuristic feel. This seems to be reflected well in Apparatum.

looking outward – 10 – ilona altman

  • I think it is interesting how musicality seems to be intrinsically tied to emotion. Just as we anthropomorphize visual stimuli, it seems there is a tendency to process notes in a way that reveals the interior subjectivity of that producing the noise. This makes me think about how perhaps music was our first language, and a study I saw that spoke about how the musicality of peoples voices when saying things (in anger, or speaking to babies) is similar across all languages, and that this may be one of the first ways we understand the world’s communication with us… I admire that this work was able to, in such a simple set up, touch on these concepts of musicality, emotion and projecting emption on to technology.
  • I would suppose that the algorithm used to generate this work was made by breaking down a note analysis of a singer who sag this song, and than repeating these notes by a computer, which holds them for the specified amount of time noted by the original recording.
  • The artist’s sensibility for humor definitely showed through this work with the song choice. It is also clear they have a bend toward minimalism, and it is this minimalism which strengthened the conceptual exploration of this work.
Video of the computer performance

http://www.everydaylistening.com/articles/2015/7/20/what-do-machines-sing-of.html

Gretchen Kupferschmid-Looking Outward-10

A new piece of sound art was installed at the San Fransisco Art Institute which mimics and/or satirizes the sinking & tilting Millennium Tower in SF. Created by Cristobal Martinez and Kade L. Twist (known together as Postcommodity), the piece uses computational algorithms to represent the movement of the tower. These sounds are supposed to create a soothing audio and beats which transforms this sinking and tilting into a therapeutic sound. The goal of the project was to encourage relaxation through the power of SF’s scenic beauty. I appreciate how the project aims to take a dire situation and flip it to call for relief from stress in a city. It is not often that art installed in museums is meant to aim to calm people or help soothe anxieties, so I appreciate this approach to art, especially through all you can do with something that can be so calming as sound. Though it doesn’t debut until the 15th, I am excited to see how the sounds themselves might sound and the effect it has on its viewers/listeners.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiSvfvXyMrlAhUxvlkKHfrtCJoQFjACegQIABAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsfai.edu%2Fexhibitions-public-events%2Fdetail%2Fpostcommodity-the-point-of-final-collapse&usg=AOvVaw05NthM2gw_u99Ngo4gDnE_

Sean Meng-Looking Outwards-10

Module of Commodore 64
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLfYT6yXgEc

For this week’s looking outwards, I researched The Commodore 64, which is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. The computer is evolutionary as it features a programming music function. The computer stores a certain track of sound and computerized it into its memory. By labeling and storing the music file, user can mix different tracks and mix them with different pace and the same time to compose music. The project is in 1984 and it opens up the possibility of the intersection between computer and music. And it also changes people’s perspective of music composition from a traditional method.

William Su – Looking Outwards – 10

Aiva is an Artificial Intelligence capable of composing emotional soundtracks for a variety of media like films, video games, and commercials.

According to the team that worked on AIVA, it was trained to compose music composition by reading through a large collection of music partitions from Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc. It created a mathematical model of what music is and uses it to make its own unique pieces.

As someone who has worked on and with AI, the making of an AI musical composer doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. In fact, stuff like this has been around for ages like with vocaloids or other computer generated music technologies. What really interests me is how AI is accepted by society. Recently, AIVA became the first virtual artist to have its creations registered with an author’s rights society (SACEM). According to the team, this will not replace musicians or “steal” any jobs. However, this comes into question, when will an AI become so good at what it is trained to do that it could replace humans? And how will we respond to it? In this particular case, it looks like AIVA is marketed more as a tool but it is clear that it can save time, work, and money, maybe better than a trained musician.

Sarah Kang – Looking Outwards – 10

A new algorithm produces the “portamento” effect, from news.mit.edu

Trevor Henderson is an MIT student in computer science who has invented a new algorithm that produces a “portamento” effect – the effect of gliding a note at one pitch into a note of a lower or higher pitch – between any two audio clips. His new algorithm is based on a geometry-based framework that facilitates the most productive paths to move data points between more than one origin and destination configurations. Henderson applies this optimal transport to interpolating audio signals, which blends the signals or sounds into each other.

This project really intrigued me because I had never really focused on the transformations of sounds and it was amazing how the two different sound categories morphed into each other. I feel like this would open up a lot of opportunities for computational music in the future.

Monica Chang – Looking Outwards – 11

Rosa Menkman

Her website: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/

About page on Menkman’s website
Intro page, Rosa Menkman

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch curator, visual artist and researcher who specializes in digital media and analogue – specifically noise artifacts: glitches, encoding and feedback artifacts. With her artwork, she emphasizes the idea that the process of imposing efficiency, order and functionality does not involve the creation of procedures and solutions, but utilizes ambiguous compromises and the forever unseen and forgotten.

‘Xilitla’ by Rosa Menkman

Menkman is considered to be one of the most iconic video glitch artists as she often utilizes software glitches to develop her stunning pieces. One of her algorithmic pieces, ‘Xilitla’, is a hallucinatory, futuristic 3D architectural environment formed by polygons and other unconventional objects. Using game-like functions, the viewer is allowed to navigate through this graphic landscape using the head-piece in the center. Menkman also considers this particular piece to be one that would best describe her body of other works.

Mari Kubota- Looking Outwards- 10

The Classyfier, created by Benedict Hubener, Stephanie Lee and Kelvyn Marte at the CIID, is a table that detects the beverages people consume around it and chooses music that fits the situation accordingly.

A built in microphone catches characteristic sounds and then compares these sounds to a catalogue of pre-trained examples. The Classyfier identifies it as belonging to one of three classes; hot beverages, wine or beer. Each class has its own playlist that one can navigate through by knocking on the table.

The idea behind this project was to build a smart object that uses machine learning and naturally occurring sounds as input to enhance the ambiance of different situations. The main tools used were Wekinator, Processing and the OFX collection.