Berlin and Club Transmediale

I was lucky enough to represent RjDj on a panel over at Club Transmediale last week. The panel discussion was about apps and their potential impact and importance for musicians and the music industry.

It was a great discussion ranging from the use of mobile devices for ‘toy’ like apps like the Mobilee label app done with Touchmix , through sample instrument apps like Star6 to more format oriented platforms like RjDj.

It was really interesting to talk with Bryan McDade about the app and various pieces of technology he supervised for Richie Hawtin during the Contakt tour. This seemed like a pretty crazy combination of technologies resulting in a very ‘connected’ audience and performer. I remarked that the work they are doing with live music is kinda similar to the stuff we are trying to do with the recorded music experience.

Aside from Club Transmediale, I checked out the WMF club briefly, heard a bit of DJ Sniff, but then went up the Fernsehturm and somehow managed to fluke a table in the restaurant. Here I met a really friendly Romanian businessman who was a hospitality and restauranteur. It was pretty interesting to talk to him about change in that industry. Berlin also has a crazy night time rainbow thing going on at the moment !

Whilst I was there, I also went back to a location I recorded about 6 years ago now. Its the Ostbahnhof trainstation. I made a recording there and did a piece of music based on derived chordal structures, melodies and rhythms from the field recording. At the time there weren’t any photos taken of the station, or perhaps they got lost.. so I took some more.

Here is the piece of music :

Panel discussion at Transmediale, 2010 Berlin

I’m going to be at Transmediale in Berlin next Thursday as part of a panel discussion about music apps. I hope to discuss the unprecidented range of artistic and economic possibilities that the format of reactive music affords.

In short presentations, current music gadgets and music applications for mobile electronic devices developed by artists and designers will be introduced. Afterwards, the editor of De-Bug magazine, Thaddeus Hermann, and the participants will discuss the artistic and economic potential of these new formats and applications. Are they used as an independent artistic medium, or are they merely expansions and accessories of known formats? Do they open up new artistic perspectives and new earning opportunities? How does the collaboration between artists and technology developers work? What has been the experience so far, and how do the panelists foresee the near future of this field?

Talk at Music 4.5 2010

Recently I had a great inspiring conversation with @rassami about RjDj, reactive music and the incredible new horizons that music as software opens up. She kindly invited me to represent RjDj at Music 4.5 and talk about some of those concepts. I’ll also be discussing some of the work we have done with major label artist apps such as Little Boots. The event is on the 4th March 2010. I’m talking after the opening interview with Jemima Kiss from the Guardian, Feargal Sharkey and Brian Message. Nikhil Shah of Mixcloud will also be part of the same section.

Here is a little explanation about the event from the website :

Music 4.5 will bring together music tech start-ups, serial entrepreneurs, investors, artists, band managers and key industry players to share knowledge, discuss strategies for business success, debate market trends and evolution, as well as network.

The name Music 4.5 is derived from a Web 2.0 philosophy which says that, after the huge losses incurred on Web 1.0, the ambition for web enterprises is to make money and achieve a 4.5 times return on investment (ROI). In the music and technology business landscape this means a 4.5 times ROI for all parties: artists, entrepreneurs and investors.

The Music 4.5 event brings together the tech geeks and the music geeks, both innovators and creators, with the aim of inspiring a new creative discussion focusing on innovation, revenue and business model opportunities, disruptive technology and social content. Most innovation in the music industry comes from tech companies attempting to disrupt the market and find a sustainable way of making money in the ‘era of free music’. The objective of the Music 4.5 day is to create, curate and deliver fresh thinking focusing on the opportunity within the extended new music paradigm.

I’m really looking forward to this one, hearing the opinions and strategies across the industry for how to move forward into the real digital age of music.

Learning from Kids – Interaction

This xmas I bought my niece a Crayola ‘Colour me a Song’. It’s kind of reactive music for kids :

This was the result :

The really interesting thing about her interaction with it was how much more she interacted with the visually interactive elements ( the lit buttons ). She really understood that things were being turned on and off very quickly. Connecting the more abstract concept of speeding up music with faster pen movement was somehow different. Perhaps as it required association with her movement and the tempo, whilst also being distracted by another wonderful and very visual thing – the crayon.

It made me think that when designing forms of reactive music I should avoid competing with things like crayons.

Ascend – a scene for RjDj

Ascend is a scene playable on RjDj, which I created for @kocicenka for her xmas present.

It’s a piece of music which is triggered by the sounds of your surroundings. It picks hard attack sounds and spins them off into infinity, creating an augmented layer of audio over your reality. It also uses these events as triggers, choosing notes from a scale as these sounds are sampled, making an ever changing ambient soundscape.

You will be able to get the scene via the in-app store within the RjDj application soon.

Creativity and Sleep

I have an interesting relationship with sleep. I can’t get to sleep that well and I can’t get out of sleep that well. It’s kinda annoying. Especially as I really percieve the difference between the work I do when rested and when I am not. Its increasingly clear to me that I make far better decisions and I’m far more creative when I have slept properly. This might seem obvious, but some people believe in the concept of creative insomnia.

I also dream music when I’m asleep and often wake with music in my head. This happens the most when I dream a lot just before waking.  One of things that annoys me the most is when this pattern is disturbed and somehow the creative work I was doing whilst sleeping ( I know that sounds ridiculous ) is lost, because I forget it when I wake.

To explore this I’m trying out a bio-alarm clock iPhone app called Sleep Cycle.

Sleep cycle monitors your movement using the iPhone accelerometer during the night and then wakes you at an optimum moment within a time window to maximise your rest efficiency. So far its been working really well. I’m hoping that its going to enable far more transfer of music and ideas from that last, highly creative, phase of sleep – into my concious world. I also thought – what would it be like to make music *from* this data..

On the other end of the scale, as definitive waking is unfortunately a necessity, @kocicenka got me a great xmas present :

Clocky is a crazy R2D2 like robotic alarm clock which runs around your room going nuts if you dont turn it off. It works ! It’s actually a project of MIT alumni Gauri Nanda.

Panel at Berklee College of Music & in SL

Tomorrow January 11th at 3:25-4:55 pm EST / 12:25  SLT  I will be taking part in a panel discussion about music and virtual worlds, held at Berklee college of music and in Second Life. The panel also features John Lester of Linden Lab ( creators of Second Life ) who does a lot of development work in the field of Education and Healthcare, Grace Buford who has established a successful online presence as the virtual performer Cylindrian Rutabaga, and Andrew Woolf and Perry Geyer ( of Boston based group Fierce Tibetan Gods ). It is moderated by Lori Landay of Berklee.

I expect I’ll be talking about the various pieces of interactive music work I have done in the virtual worlds space for organisations like Princeton University, Mexico Tourist Board, Costa Rica Tourist Board as well as other interactive installations like Parsec, Dare and Gestural Music.

I also hope to talk about the possibilities of music delivered as software ( on various platforms ). I’d also like to discuss how virtual worlds could be utilised by the music industry to deliver interactive content and how we could see a focus on the ’social 3d music app’ as a virtual good soon.

Join us for the discussion in SL here !

New York New York

I just got back from a memorable trip to NYC. Memorable for a number of reasons really. On the way over there myself and @13bitstring did some Pd crazy patching at 35,000 ft over an ad hoc wireless network. Hmm.. surely that must be illegal..

I had a number of great meetings in NY along with a presentation at EYEBEAM where were demoed some cool new stuff, including the ( codename ) RJC1000 software from RjDj. EYEBEAM was pretty cool place and we met some great people there.

Unfortunately I then picked up food poisoning and was totally blown out by it and stuck in the hotel for days. So I missed most of the RjDj NYC Sprint. I was really sad about this as I wanted to meet all the great RjDj composers who turned up. Ah well, next time

Little Boots RjDj app

This Monday saw the release of  the Little Boots Reactive Remixer app I’ve been working on at RjDj. It feels really good that its out !

Here is a short video about it :     ( inc.  some nice footage of @13bitstring when we were testing in the studio ! )

‘Playing out’ reactiveness

Flo, Ian and myself doing some reactive madness - pic by @kocicenka

We had a great time on Friday eve at the Kids on DSP reactive album iPhone application launch party at RjDj. The kids did a live set that included audio sampling from 5 mics located around the space, as well as a skype in option where party guests ( or anyone – as we advertised it on twitter ) could dial into the mix and have their voices reactively control the music. It was a wild effect ! Someone mentioned there was a recording of it somewhere, so hopefully that may surface soon somewhere on the interwebs – I will link to it if it does.

The app is now live in the apple app store. Wagner James Au has done a nice review of it on the appleblog.com and @revdancat did a good interview here. Prior to release it was also covered by The Guardian newspaper in the UK and by MTV

RjDj London Sprint

This was also RjDj London sprint weekend. We had some great discussions and sessions with enthusiastic scene creators and people interested in RjDj both for musical uses and other uses such as augmented reality applications. I’m really looking forward to their stuff.