Punk lovin Robots

For three hot and sweaty nights in July, punk music and robots collide at the ICA in a series of exciting and evolving gigs called Neurotic. Neurotic highlights the neurology associated with the essential human experience of pleasure, learning, taste and ageing within the context of the instinct to dance.

Artist Fiddian Warman has created 3 robots schooled in the ways of old school punk using neural networks, which respond to musics level of 'punkiness' with pogoing and freaky dancing.

More homemade MultiTouch

The future of music hardware is....handmade!

How to Make a Cheap Multitouch Pad - MTmini

Yes, it's made from a cardboard box and some paper... it's a multitouch interface for about 50c... killer.

You can go to his site for more details, more vids and links to all the open source software you need to run it - http://ssandler.wordpress.com/MTmini/

X0XB0X Synthesizer

"During june of 2008 i built a x0xb0x,these are the closest you can get to a TB303 without it actualy being a tb303,each component inside the case is the same as the original tb303 - This was my first play after building...I was pleased with the result. " thanks to Dazbo10

Oldest Computer Music Recording

A news report from 1957 documenting the Ferranti Mark 1 computer playing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and 'In The Mood'. Techno it ain't...

SpinalCat

Another turntable+digital solution...this time the SpinalCat project from Nikita Pashenkov as part of his thesis from MIT...paper records! You can read the 'How To' and a history of optical turntable devices in his thesis ).pdf link).

Will Wright and Brian Eno talk about Generative Systems

Will Wright is the games designer behind Sim City and The Sims. Brian Eno is Mr.Ambient known for having released albums on floppy disks that ran Koan, an early generative music making package. Will Wrights new game is called Spores, a game whoose architecture is based on self generating systems and Brian Eno, neatly enough, is generating the soundtrack. It's a good talk about generative systems and randomness in music and games.

It's nearly two hours long but you can click on the Open Tools icon on the video screen to skip to specific chapters. link FORA.tv

Live Sound & Video Mangling - Eboman, DVJ1000, Mabuse

Hello... sorry for the lack of posts. Life's been busy and looks set to continue that way for the next while. I am going to have to go slow on AudioLemon. I'll still post but not as often. Keep me in the RSS feeder and I'll be back soon enough :)

The video is from Ebomann who uses his own custom software SmadS-Sens and controlling system to do the type of video/sound editing you see in the clip. "All functions can be controlled with conventional sequencing software or by a range of intuitive interfaces. The most advanced interface consists of a wireless body-motion sensor suit with up to 48 sensors connected to the performer's body. The suit translates body movements to data, which is sent to computers wirelessly to control SmadS-SenS." I just like that you can scratch the video/sound and timestretching looks cool... easily pleased :)

I'm not too familar with VJing. Usually I think there is somebody better for that kind of thing. Lately though the tools for audio and video seem to be meshing together. There's a fair lot of software and hardware that'll let you edit and process video like it's sound. To me that seems like a whole lot of fun. You can get hardware like the Pioneer DVJ-1000 DVD scratch deck. It ain't cheap but it works.

DJ Second Nature DVJ-1000 Demo
(the video gets good 6.00 min in - Roger & Zapp :))

While I was googling about I found a really great piece of software called Mabuse . It's pretty simple to use, focuses on the direct manipulation of video by sound and it's all controllable by MIDI CC#s. It basically just mangles video and audio loops in fun ways. Any mangling you apply to an audio loop you can apply to the video as well... slowdown, stutter, completely mangulate. There's only 3 fairly crappy loops that come with it but you can get a whole heap of free video loops if you search around in CreateDigitalMotion. The 8 bit loops are sweet.

In the video below you can see what Mick Gierson got out of Mabause. I didn't get anything even remotely like that but still...

Mick Grierson - Mabuse audio visual synthesis

Noise and monocromatic images. Is there anything more sci-fi ;)