Sound prototyping: A short composition of 4-7 sine wave oscillators harmonizing and disharmonizing:

Two videos of synth design approaches: 8-bit R2R DAC and Schmidt trigger oscillator.

The machine utilizes two hacked hard drives, a method originally inspired by this hard-drive laser oscilloscope.  The drives are fed by a 30W stereo amp kit, into which is fed a stereo sound signal generated in Puredata.

Lux Vocis works like so: a user speaks into a microphone and my puredata patch picks out the most commonly recurring spectral peaks of the voice.  These frequencies are then used as seeds for a Lissajous figure, which is then drawn on the surface by oscillating the two mirrors attached to the hard drive voice coils.

Here’s another informative video:

And some selected drawings:

Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous.  More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.

The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer.  The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron.  With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.

Each face on the device is both a touch-switch that sends input triggers to software as well as an electroluminescent panel that displays feedback from the software.  While the platform could be used in a huge variety of ways, my first inclination was to use the inputs as stimuli in a 12-node neural network, where each face is connected in a graph to the 5 faces adjacent to it.  Each of the edges between these faces is then weighted between 0 and 1, and the progression from one face to another follows the highest weighted edges.

Each node (face) in the network is then mapped to a MIDI note.  These mappings are described by a variety of musical modes.  Thus, a sequence on the Neurohedron will send patterns of MIDI notes to a synthesizer platform (Ableton Live, in this case).  This platform is wide open, of course, so anything could be triggered in principal.

Here’s a demonstration of the software model:

The interface is multi-modal, meaning that there are 5 states the interface can be in that determine what it does:

• Input: Pressing a face triggers an input stimulus to the neural network at that node
• Stop: Holding a face down stops any circuits that encounter that node
• Live-play: Sends MIDI notes pursuant to that face’s current mode-mapping
• (Musical) Mode: Changes the mode-mapping of the network
• Randomize: Randomizes all of the neural network’s weights

Here’s a little demo of Matt Boyle & I playing the Neurohedron in live-play mode.

Process & Production

The Neurohedron’s hardware consists of:

• Plexi & aluminum skeleton
• Laser-etched faces
  • Momentary switches
  • EL panels
• Logic Board
  • ATMEGA328PU Microcontroller
  • 2x shift-in registers
  • 2x shift-out registers
  • FTDI USB Interface
• AC Switching array
  • 12x Optoisolated triac & low-current triac pairs

This video demonstrates the shift-in and -out registers controlling switches and panels:

And this one detailing the AC switching:

And finally, a gallery of production photos:

CHRONOTRONIC WONDER TRANSDUCER is a miniature discollective of musick artists and poet-inventors.  Using a variety of means and methods, from hand-made electronics to custom-designed software, to conjure electromechanical invocations to dead gods and summon sound from the deep void of silence.  CWT’s lineup includes:

Ted Hayes presents Stan Breakhage, an ambient-industrial music & video performance that warps and manhandles Stan Brakhage’s venerable Dog Star Man into visual breakcore, aligned and controlled with custom-designed, live electronic instruments.  See a clip of Stan Breakhage’s premiere performance here.  Ted Hayes is a poet, inventor and composer whose work revolves around the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime, intersecting with desire and plummeting into stratospheres of bright noise and dark philosophy.  Combining both the arcane visions of structuralist film with a sincere sonic splendor, Stan Breakhage is not to be missed.  Read more about Ted’s work at http://log.liminastudio.com.

Joe Mariglio is a composer and artist whose practice spans many mediums.  He is often labeled an electronic musician, but does not really understand the term, since the vast majority of music has been electronic for some time.  Some of Joe’s work deals with problems surrounding the mediation of experiences.  Joe is also interested in networks, human and otherwise, structured improvisation, and narrative forms.  He enjoys baking bread, meditating, and building guitar pedals.  He documents his process at www.joemariglio.com.

And Um Yeah conjures a noisy electro–psychedelic swell and turns it into a song. Using handmade instruments, custom software, and creatively modified electronics, they will attempt to lure you in a world of fun and fear that you can only see by closing your eyes and pressing on your eyeballs. And Um Yeah isAmy Khoshbin and Michael Clemow, based in Brooklyn, NY.  Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/andumyeahmusic.

Steven Litt is a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of NYU. He is the creator of CrudBox, a robotic rhythm machine that controls electronic or electromechanical devices, amplifying their sounds in real time. His work mixes the raw, abrasive sounds of noise and electroacoustic music with the rhythms of electronic dance music. He is an artist, designer, and musician. He currently lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Lori Napoleon is an artist, mad-scientist and synthesist inspired by the physics of sound and light.  Her background in the hybrid art and science of holography fuels her continued explorations in process and material, and the creative potential intrinsic in challenging our assumptions about everyday objects, and repurposing obsolete technologies.  Spawned by her hybrid love of electronic music and the primordial urge to “build stuff,” Lori is currently focused on sound and instrument design, beating circuits into submission, and composition with analog electronics.

Proposal: This laser drawing machine uses an enclosed system of a low-powered green laser and voice-coil actuated mirrors to draw figures on a stationary or scrolling sheet of thermal fax paper, generating patterns of varying style and complexity. The patterns are generated algorithmically from the collapsed soundtracks of various experimental films.

Fixing the locating problems yielded these:

I then decided to move towards a continuous, single line composed of Bezier segments:

This could easily pave the way for a recursive sketching algorithm that composes each Bezier segment from n number of smaller Bezier segments down to a predefined number of levels.  The larger question, in this investigation, remains: what determines the high-level gestures?

Here we find the critical separation between the act and its imprint, between the cause and the effect.  Dance is a medium of causes that crucially leaves no mark except that of the phenomenological mark in the mind (brain) of the reader (observer).

When viewing a dance, under casual circumstances, we may not bother to attempt to fix in our imaginations the curvature that a body traces in the air, but rather leave it as a more holistic impression, an abstraction characterized by high-level features (degrees of activity, changes in energy-level, recognizable gestural signs, etc.).  The contours of a moving body supplement the contours of the body itself, extending it into another measurable dimension.  Visualizing these lines is not necessarily the goal, but rather building an awareness of them that shapes the perception of the entire dance.

Traditionally, and in general, dances do not leave marks in the sense that drawings do.  Dance does not visibly or permanently alter the intrinsic medium of its performance (spacetime).  A drawing does, however, transform a medium, additively or subtractively, with the aid of an extrinsic influence or medium (a pencil, a brush, an eraser, pigmented oil and water).  A dance’s extrinsic medium is the dancers that make it up, and its mark is like that of a poem read aloud—accomplished over time, with only the audience’s senses and memory available to contemplate the artwork.  A dance-poem leaves no residue upon its own medium.

Intentional usage of music is another story, but again, for most it is an automatic act, a habituation that arises over years of learned associations and tendencies.  Here and there our choice to listen and choice of music will have a more conscious intent; a jogger chooses something commensurate to the intensity of their run, or a DJ will seek a style and mood to reflect her audience.

In my own experience, one of the only conscious, self-aware objectives I have for music selection is that to which to sleep.  I have long been fascinated, occasionally obsessively, by ambient music–music with no rhythm*, that lulls and that evolves over long periods of time, challenging the individual’s perceptual capacity to detect change.

Much of this music has a soporific character or effect, which is often, in fact, intentional.  Consider Robert Rich’s sleep concerts: performances designed specifically and explicitly for an audience to sleep to.  Playing ambient music while falling asleep never emerged for me as a remedy or cure, but rather as an enhancement to the enigmatic twilight state that precedes sleep, a time in which the shadows cast by moonlight take on an even more lustrous character, where poetry abounds in the edges and interstices of consciousness.  I have vivid and affective childhood memories of planetaria in which music like this was played: soft, mysterious tones and drones that hinted of vast silver fields at night and, of course, their accompanying myriad and sundry constellations.

Ambient artists so far within my purview include Steve Roach, Stars of the Lid, Brian Eno, Lustmord, Lull, Coil, Bass Communion, Tim Hecker, Zoviet*France: and the aforementioned Robert Rich, and are but an inkling of the many more that are out there.

For merely one example of these kinds of textures, I offer “You Were Alive,” a piece I recorded last year:

* Examples of ambient music with rhythm are plentiful, the most well-known doubtless being Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works volumes, but I cannot generally sleep to them.  These works may perhaps be more accurately classified as “ambient techno.”