How many people’s resumes include both a gig with the Phillip Glass Ensemble and posing nude for Marie Claire? An evening with new music virtuoso Kathleen Supové is not what most people expect from a solo piano recital. Her show this week finds her flanked by laptops, plus three projectors running childhood slides, live digital video, and the manic pianist from the Lawrence Welk Show, as she crawls in wearing a pink leopard-skin bodysuit narrating on a wireless.

If anyone can turn the grand piano into a digital instrument, it’s Supové. She was so enthralled by the capabilities of Yamaha’s MIDI-enabled player piano, the DC7, that she’s commissioning a body of work for the instrument. Collaborations with electronic composers, often involving microphones in the piano, blend the acoustic sound into an unpredictable, thunderous wonderland of colliding sounds. “Multimedia experience,” though, isn’t just about technology — rather than the usual parade of pieces, her concerts tend to absorb performance art rants into the mic and other “theatricals.” Her obsessive-compulsive commisioning of composers has brought pieces for her by everyone from Xenakis to Zorn to Bubblyfish (best known as a Game Boy player) and, well, me.

I’ve got one more evening with Kathleen at The Flea; I’ll certainly miss it. She certainly suggest a broad range of possibilities of what playing can be about — I hope emerging, younger players take note.

Sorry for the light news day, but I’ll be back next week with lots more coverage, shifting from game systems to how to use game hardware in your own music, more on interactive musical clothing, and other goodies! In the meantime, here’s my next project: -PK

How does a musician go from classical pianist to Game Boy musician? Ask composer / sound designer / sound engineer Haeyoung Kim, who makes 8-bit music under the name bubblyfish. Check out Haeyoung’s site for lots of articles on her and Game Boy music-making in general, as reported by everyone from MTV to MSNBC.

Here in New York, Haeyoung and I, among other composers, will be reimagining pianistic possibilities at a concert by downtown pianist Kathleen Supove, Tuesday through Thursday at 7pm at The Flea in TriBeCa. Piano duet with Game Boy? Check. Electronics generated live from the piano? Check. Video projections on the surface of the piano and live VJing? Check. Even Schroeder would be proud.

For those of you in NY, drop me a line if you’re going to stop by; for everyone else, I’ll be back with some tips learned from the tech in this show.

If you haven’t seen it yet, The History of Sampling by Jesse Kriss lets you interactively navigate the links between sampled songs and samplers. Jesse’s site pulls data from the-breaks, a huge collection of sampling rap music.

The real story, though, is how this site, and many other nifty new sites making rounds on the blogosphere, were built: they use Processing, a completely open-source development environment (Mac/Windows/Linux). Processing should interest CDM readers for several reasons: it’s at home on the Web (there’s even a Google interface!), it’s comfortable with multimedia and graphics, it works with Java, and (perhaps most importantly) it’s designed to be easy-to-learn for those new to programming.

Processing is moving along fast: beta 90 was released today, following the first public beta release April 20. New learning materials are being added regularly for those ready to try it. It’s even been used in a Papa Roach video (check the exhibition page). And don’t forget Chris O’Shea’s Sonicforms, the open-source repository for alternative/tabletop musical interfaces, which uses Processing for part of its software interface, along with Pure Data — another free tool for interactivity.

None of these tools may be for total newbies, but they’re free and can be a great way of entering the world of programming. Readers working on this, let me know, and we’ll keep track of your projects and progress (and exchange tips). If nothing else, some readers will certainly enjoy seeing what you’re doing!

Two- or three-octave keyboards from M-Audio? Whatever. Try the “original” mini-keyboard: the toy piano. Doron Altaratz hacked a toy piano for use as a video controller: play keys, and this visual organ responds with smoothly-shifting visuals. (VJs will know Doron as the alter-ego of VJ Sputnik.)
For more on IMC Expo plus pictures, see the CDM show report.

If you’ve dreamed of navigating through virtual reality worlds with just your hands, a la the movie Minority Report

, you’ll like the prototype of CINE (Collaborative Immersive Network Environment) by Miro Kirov, Houston Riley, and James Tunick with advisors Jean-Marc Gauthier and Frank Migliorelli (yes, it’s those crazy NYU ITP folks again!) Full-body gestures let you navigate in 3D.

I tried out CINE at the Studio IMC Expo. It’s certainly fun to play with, though keep in mind in prototype phase it has a ways to go before it lives up to some of its lofty design goals. There are possibilities for music and sound, too, though: the up-front interface is apparently Max/MSP. So if you’re looking to mix the Holodeck with musical performance, there may be promise.

See CDM’s IMC Expo report for more shots of this and other showcased creations.

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to attend the 2005 IMC Expo at NYC’s Chelsea Art Museum, a showcase of new interactive sound/visual installation works. The show featured everything from “volumetric” LCD light cubes to sci-fi-style interactive displays to installation toys. For an overview of the new works:

[wpg2]archived/imc/[/wpg2]

Catalog of Works: Studio IMC has its own gallery with work descriptions for additional background.

Many of the works were best described in early-prototype phase, but it was nonetheless lots of fun playing with motion tracking, cameras, and of course the toy piano video organ! Don’t miss last week’s report on Cybersonica for more interactive creations from the other side of the pond.

“This new media stuff is great, but it’s like it’s never developed very far. It’s like it’s technology for its own sake. How do you make music?”

How many times have you heard that? One of the major causes of the “technology for its own sake syndrome” is simple: smart people are spending so much time reinventing the wheel, duplicating other people’s work, that no one gets to the stage of refinement — only early development.

Sonicforms: future DIY interfaces go open source

That’s why it’s especially good news to see things like the new Sonicforms project from our friend Chris O’Shea. Chris is doing what others have done — solving the technical problems of creating interactive “table” interfaces, on which tangible objects can be used for sound production and composition. But he’s doing something many others don’t: he’s sharing everything he’s learning, and (just as importantly) encouraging others to do the same. Sonicforms will involve:

a central repository for learning about building interfaces and sharing experiences

tools and strategies for building interfaces, including open source code for free development environments like Pd and Modeling

an actual physical installation to which others can submit content

Why it matters

Keep in mind, modern electronic music would never have come to fruition without simple, DIY projects and shared plans. Bob Moog would never have gotten into synthesis design without building Theremins in his basement. (and, incidentally, making money on the built product) In fact, usually private sector and public sector projects feed off one another in technology.

Chris’ project is, in his words “not finished by a long way”, but we’ll be watching! And, of course, I’ll do whatever I can to help serve as an additional resource here at CDM. Good luck, man! (We’d all better get experimenting, coding, and patching, too!)

[Updated:] Check out the new QuartzComposer blog; I’ll be reading! -PK

I looked earlier this week at Quartz Composer, an interactive eye candy development tool that not only creates slick RSS newsfeed screensavers, but even allows audio and MIDI input and outputs MIDI control, perfect for live performance and VJing.

Developer Pierre-Olivier Latour has posted an extensive description of Quartz Composer at VJCentral. Quartz Composer is in fact a descendent of the now-defunct PixelShox, a free tool with a cult online following that is now unsupported. But there’s no need to shed tears for PixelShox: Quartz Composer is a completely different product, a major leap forward taking advantage of OS X Tiger’s new Core Image features.

Bottom line: Quartz Composer is free in Tiger and just another reason to upgrade. All you need to do to get it is install the developer tools from the OS X installation DVD — you were going to install it anyway, right? Go check out VJ Central for the full links, and stay tuned for more QC info here in the coming weeks.

Joshua Ellis (zenarchery.com) writes us with an insanely cool discovery on the Mac OS X 10.4 developer DVD. I’m still waiting on my Tiger shipment, but this will definitely be on my install. Josh writes:

So I’m playing with the new Quartz Composer in OS X 10.4, which allows you to do weird sort of graphic installation-y stuff, plus design your own screensavers. It’s basically a drag-and-drop OpenGL composer, sort of like Max/MSP for making eye candy. You can load images or QuickTime movies and do real-time graphics processing on them.

In the list of controller tools? MIDI Clock, MIDI Controllers (aka pitch and mod wheel) and MIDI Notes. I haven’t gotten all my drivers updated yet, but it appears that this eye candy can be controlled via MIDI (in addition to the keyboard, an LFO, RSS feeds, the command line…pretty much anything). And you can write your eye candy out as an actual application. Which other people can download.

You have to install the XCode Tools to get this on Tiger, but they’re included free on the DVD. The app is called “Quartz Composer”. I think Macs may have just gotten a couple of hundred times more interesting.

Josh also tells us you can interactively map audio inputs to assign volume peak and spectrum to other controllers(!) While this is no substitute for Max/MSP and Jitter, for some visual fun and Swiss Army Knife-interactivity, looks like a must-install. Stay tuned.