NIME 2005

So I'm sitting in this beautiful atrium in the University of British Columbia's Forest Sciences Center waiting for the bus to take me to the final concert event of this year's NIME conference.

NIME is new instruments for musical expression, and I've had 4 full days now here in Vancouver being exposed to lots of strange musical paraphernalia like robotic bagpipes, sensor violins, headbanging-aware guitars, and the like. (try to figure out the next element in that sequence... if you chose "teddy ruxpin cello" you'd be wrong, but a likely candidate for acceptance into the conference next year).

Quick run down of the coolest things I've seen here. Unfortunately, the links may be non-existent because lots of these musicians I've noticed have a strange relationship to the interweb...

McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player

Ok, it's just robotic bagpipes, but I'm a sucker for robots.

Don Buchla's Marimba Lumina

This thing has been out for a little while, but it's an amazingly expressive intstrument. A good description of the instrument is here.

Pocket Gamelan: A Pure Data interface for mobile phones

Attempt to port a version of pd (precursor to max) into a complied j2me application that can run on (still higher end and java based) mobile phones. The footprint they've developed is only 25k, which is pretty amazing. They've implemented almost all the pd objects, so the phone can do some cool things with midi (doing digital audio processing clearly is not possible with current phone processors). Future work is wireless communication between mobiles running a pd patch.

The Overtone Violin

I wish I had the video of this dude playing this violin, but it was pretty cool. The nice part of the instrument is the vast number of sensors on its sides and on the violin bow. During the performance, these sensors (motion, light, and more) allowed the performer to highlight all the crazy gestures that a violinist makes when they are playing -- the pace arm movements from long sweeps to staccato twitches. So what was great about it was highlighting all these subtle gestures embedded in the performance of a traditional instrument, and toying with the audience as to whether he was actually ever going to bow the strings or not. But then he started playing the strings, and that was kinda weak, because it tainted the coolness of the performance up to that point.

Golan Leving and Zzchery Libermans's Sounds from Shapes Project

Great Myron Kruger type stuff with shape analysis and music creation.

game music

so, microsoft is looking to axe game music in the new xbox 360, according to this article on create digital music.

this is too bad. I mean, certainly when listening to some of the insipid pop-punk that stinks up many sports like titles I wish I could just listen to my stereo. You know what I do? I listen to my stereo. Or turn the music off in options.

Lucas once said that some large percentage of any movie is sound, and backed it up by creating the industry leading skywalker sound. I think that if you go back to many older games (super mario, meteroid come to mind), as well as new ones like katamari damacy, etc., this is almost equally true.

I know ms is pushing personal media as part of the new xbox console, but this just seems like a really bad idea (surprise...)