musical omnibus #2: hackademics
music festivals and conferences:
music and hacks:
- Wired is great for the strange music events. The Plug headphone music festival has almost banished acoustic listening (to small spaces close to your ears) from their festival, everyone listens through headphones and talks in chat rooms instead.
- Andrew blogged the wooden octopus skull festival in Seattle. Meanwhile, check out one of his friend's new project, Virtual Metastacy.
- This week Kelly and I are going to the High Zero and will attend and assist at the gracious hospitality of the performer and composer Sam. Kelly points out via email that the festival, especially the street performance art, might be wierder than we expected. Exciting.
- Paul Lamere, MIR researcher at Sun and author of Duke Listens! has covered ISMIR 2005. Several other interesting conferences going on in Europe right now: DAFX 2005, and CMMR 2005, and ICMC 2005.
music and hacks:
- Does anybody have any favorite hack-related songs? (nods to dankamongmen, georgemcfly, psyched_out, modularformsboy, nerotica, or any self-identified hackers or musical encyclopedicists I may have omitted). A languishing thread from the recently minted atlhack.
- As I mentioned in said thread, the music and culture hacker Laurie Anderson comes to Tech in November. As reported in the Magnetic Fields fountain of reference stephinsources, she is probably the inspiration for You're So Technical.
- ChucK seems like a pretty inventive realtime synthesis language. Hopefully I can get more time to play with it. They have an extremely novel approach to synchronization---code executes in "suspended animation" and the programmer must explicitly move time forward (you can do this equally in your "shreds" so that they meet up), the synthesis all happens in wait loops where data is allowed to flow. The approach might be applicable to non-music languages. Read the paper to judge for yourself. Not as mature as Supercollider but may be a contender someday.
- My small orange DVD works great for movies, but seems to do weird things to certain (I'm guessing, louder) CDs, like the two Sufjan discs I mentioned. It seems that somewhere in the circuit things are getting saturated (it sounds crunchified) but there aren't volume controls on the box and I don't think it could be on the wire. Anybody have ideas to fix this?
- The computer music superstar Tristan Jehan has released his thesis, and is going to work on a startup, with Brian Whitman of eigenradio, if I'm correct. Good things.