Month: February 2016

Upcoming events

Posted in misc - 28 February 2016 - 0 Comments

Things coming up..

  • Gravitational Waves in Sheffield, a new series of events planned with UoSheffield Sound Studios. The first one will be on this Friday 4th March, curated by Vanessa Massera and myself. It’ll be in celebration of the upcoming International Womens’ day.
  • On the 10th March I’ll start my ODI sound art residency.. Looking forward to getting into that!
  • Then going to FoAM Kernow in Penryn for the Tanglebots workshop on Sunday 20th March, a family workshop making robots to make tangles.
  • While in Cornwall I’ll be performing with Dave as Slub on Friday 25th March, streaming live to the SuperCollider 20 year birthday party in New York City.
  • Then back to Sheffield for EulerRoom on 9th April, another new series of events I’m doing, with focus on live stream. The first one will be multichannel, featuring the excellent Joanne Armitage and Calum Gunn, plus myself as resident live coder.  It’ll be multichannel as well, with four stacks of dangernoise PA, bang.
  • Further ahead I’ll be giving a talk at the excellently named AHEM conference on unravelling live coding on the 15th April, and a couple of weeks later joining an Algorave tour around Leeds, Newcastle and London..

Open access journals

Posted in misc - 23 February 2016 - 0 Comments

I asked around the social media, “What are the good open access journals in digital arts, computer music etc?” Motivated by deciding that once I get some commitments out of the way, I’m not going to write for closed access publication any more, especially not with public funds. The results so far, in no particular order:

Interview in The Wire magazine

Posted in rant - 12 February 2016 - 0 Comments

FullSizeRender

I had an enjoyable, far-reaching chat with Emily Bick and the results are in the March issue of The Wire magazine. Emily has managed to fit in quite a lot about Algorave, Slub, Canute, Tidal, Weaving Codes and Susanne Palzer. The last time live coding was featured was March 2008, in a review of the first (and so far, last) TOPLAP CD including a track from Slub:

A prehistory of Live Coding TOPLAP CD
Four years ago, in a smoky bar in Hamburg, Toplap was formed — an organisation dedicated to promoting live algorithm programming. So far, so niche. Defying expectation however, it has since exploded into a fully functioning electronic music scene, with hundreds of practitioners improvising with live coding languages such as SuperCollider and ChucK. That is, writing, rewriting and modifying music software on the fly during performance (often with the rapidly changing code projected on a screen).

The cream of this scene’s live recorded output has now been collated on Toplap’s inaugural release. Despite superficially geeky origins — many performers are coders first, musicians second — the music here is stacked with depth, guts and soul. Opener “Water Surface” by Ron Kuivila is a featherlight study, shimmering with static broken by bursts of bee-like feedback. In contrast, The Hub’s “Hub x 6” is an
analogue-style fun fest of farty trumpet bursts and spaceship noise. RedFrik’s ticklish “Aug 19” is Luke Vibert-style acid, but with enough rhythmic aberrations to take it beyond twee. “20060401folded” by scene forerunners Slub is a compelling, edgy slice of rollercoaster Techno. In truth, it’s hard to believe much of the music here is essentially freewheeling software reined in by finger tapping humans. Live coding has so far flourished, but under a bushel. Perhaps it’s time the rest of us got a look in.  Susanna Glaser

I think it’s a nice bushel, I hope we can stay there a bit longer.

Live stream excerpt

Posted in misc - 10 February 2016 - 0 Comments

Writing some code about arpeggio and reverb

 

Superdirt

Posted in misc - 8 February 2016 - 0 Comments

https://www.flickr.com/photos/77410704@N05/6949587694/

I’ve always been impressed and a bit jealous of SuperCollider’s community, especially since taking the above photo after sneaking into the supercollider symposium in 2012. Such a strange mix of musicians, engineers, philosophers, artists and otherwise confused. It’s great then that the upcoming 0.7-dev release of Tidal has tight integration with supercollider, via SuperDirt, ultimately meaning an easier installation for everyone, more effects, and a healthy mix of sample-based and synthesis-based noises. Big thanks to Julian Rohrhuber for making superdirt, this is going to be fun..

Anticipation video

Posted in music - 3 February 2016 - 0 Comments

Here’s a video from sonic pattern last year, working with Alex Keegan on a two-date project playing with beat perception in dance music that I wrote about here. This collaboration was brought together by Nick Hughes, they are both part of the ace agrobeat band Blood Sport. This was a really nice experiment, hoping to work with them more this year.