So it exists. I found it here in Vancouver. I’m still not sure whether it is actual french fries or it is the colour that is put into them. A special thanks goes to Ronald MacDonald for the shiny sulphur yellow on a grey day.
Yesterday evening I had the great pleasure of hearing Maxime Rioux and his automata orchestra at Western Front Gallery in Vancouver City. The concert blew me away completely. I have never heard a more human expression coming from machines. The automata drummers is made by attaching a stick onto the membrane of a sub-woofer that rests on a spring. By sending low frequent vibrations though the woofer, the stick starts to pound on a drum. Each time the stick hits the drum, it is pushed backwards causing the spring to bounce. The most interesting instrument was a setup with a tabla on three springs and a woofer as described above. Because both woofer and drum was bouncing it became a wild dance of poly-rhythms.
After the concert I’m left with a clear impression that musical feeling has to do with periodical vibrations, springs, kinetics and chaotic motion. It is an obvious next step to apply this concept to computed generative music, but I doubt that the result will ever be as rich as Maxime’s concert. Real drums, real physics, 15 sound sources placed as a spatial orchestra and a talented human conductor.
Together with my “Creative Electronic” class at Emily Carr, we will exhibit various interactive sound objects at Western Front art gallery, Vancouver City. I’m positively surprised about my fellow students wild ideas and there energy for carrying them out. I look forward to see all the circuits bleeping and squeaking ever so happily.
I attended a two day AudioCubes workshop in Vancouver this week and the workshop ended with a performance where we was supposed demonstrate the creative possibilities of the tool. It’s a great toy, but as a musical instrument I think the tangible control lacks sensitivity. It’s hard to trigger a sound exactly when you want it, hence the music becomes a play with random events.
AudioCubes has great potential though, especially the build in sound circuit which allow each cube to contain a sound, or function as a sound manipulator of other cubes. This works great as you can move them around and combine them in various ways, like Lego-blocks with sound.
If I where to develop the tool I would forget about using it as a controller interface for sound applications. Instead I would try to make the cubes more independent from the computer. At the moment you have to connect a cube to a computer in order to load sound or change settings. What if you could record directly via a microphone and change settings using gestures like squeezing, rotating, moving and shaking. I look very much forward to watch AudioCubes being developed. Best wishes and street respect to Bert Schiettecatte, the audio cubist.
Photos from the workshop:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/percussa/
Today a mist came over Vancouver City and changed my view on things. All the good moments I experienced, almost a whole day off-screen, made me reconsider my extensive use of computing tools. My 12″ laptop screen keeps my eyes fixed for more than half of my waking hours. Practically half of my life I’m interacting with people and work though virtual tools. Do I find it wrong? Given the stone-age computing interfaces of 2007, yes. The set-up of mouse-pad, keyboard and screen is so limiting in terms of human interaction that it’s in effect de-humanising. We have to do better, fast. As a modern designer, working in the field between virtual and real I’m stuck with this tool, like so many others. Yes, Im getting tired of screens.
Tomorrow I will enjoy my metal workshop course at Emily Carr more than ever. I’ll buy a web-cam so I can at least get some human faces on the desktop. And, I’ll try to dig more into the Arduino micro-controller so I contribute more directly to the extinction of tiny screens.
The rare moments of silence, when I walk to school, cook food or wash the dishes are precious because they allow new thoughts to slip into my mind. I have rejected the idea of pod-casting because I thought it would be just another distracting phenomena, filling my mind with babel 90% of the time. Looking at the haystack of pod-casts felt like zapping though the 52 channels on television; I only found crap. Finding the needle that made me addicted to pod-casting took a while, and it came very unexpectedly. Tim Knapen [pacesetter2000.be], a friend a mine I met in Berlin, gave me the link to ‘SALT – Seminars About Long Term Thinking’. Directly uploaded from California, the land of ‘The Governator’, where stem-cells, sustainable technology, digital communities among other promising trends blooming at the moment.
http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml
Please leave a comment if you know about a pod-cast I should check out. I’ve also been exited about ‘IT-convasations’ [itconversations.com], but it became a bit to ‘dry’ after a while.
The majority of the skyscrapers in Vancouver City has huge glass windows that reflect light very efficiently. It’s amazing how the city changes color with it’s surroundings. I doesn’t always look as beautiful as this, but every morning on my way to school the city looks different.