Early last week a student showed me Thru-You.com, a collection of YouTube video mashups by Israeli, neo-funk artist Kutiman. I was thoroughly impressed with his work, but soon afterward the site went down due to bandwidth limits. Since then it’s been up and down several times. Hopefully they’ll have their bandwidth problems sorted out soon, so If you can’t view these videos straight away, bookmark the site and check back because they’re worth the wait. Update: The videos have been moved to YouTube, so there should be no more bandwidth issues.
Ali Momeni has recently posted an article about his and Robin Meier’s installation Strategies for Post-Apocalyptic Computation that was shown at the 2009 Spark Festival. Based on the article it looks as though they have renamed the piece Truce. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Our installation explores reciprocal musical interactions between the mosquito and the computer. The computer produces a stimulus signal to which the living mosquitoes synchronize. Subsequently, the computer sings a third voice that responds to the musical inflections of the mosquitoes’ buzz. These three voices come in and out of harmony depending on the mosquitoes propensity to maintain its sync with the stimulus signal.
I made three or four visits to this fascinating installation during the festival. Here’s a segment from a recording of the piece that I made during one of my visits. To see some well produced video of the installation please visit the original article.
Michel Rouzic has just released version 1.4 of Photosounder that includes a new “lossless” mode so the output is identical to the input. Previously there was some loss of resolution importing the audio. From Michel:
Basically the lossless mode in question is a sort of 2D time-frequency filtering mode, kind of like some other programs like Audition 3 do by letting you airbrush on a spectrogram, that’s the idea basically. The difference here is that besides the brushes that Photosounder has, you can export the image to Photoshop and do some very precise filtering, for example making a sound feature disappear by hand, enhancing parts of a sound, subtracting to sound as I once did by making the difference between a song’s spectrogram and its instrumental version’s spectrogram to isolate the vocals, experiment with contrast, curves, levels, sharpening, various effects (I’m pretty sure you could for example try the glowing edges again and get a different sounding result).
To illustrate the lossless mode, here’s a segment of dialogue from a 1972 social commentary film in the public domain presented with the lossless mode on and again with it off. The lossless mode sounds exactly like the original waveform, while without the lossless mode the audio lacks resolution.
After Joel Ryan and Keir Neuringer’s appearance at the Ted Mann Concert Hall on February 21, 2009 for the Spark Festival, I had an opportunity talk with Keir during the night life event at the Bedlam Theatre. I told him all about Audio Cookbook and he agreed to posting a segment of his performance here.
The performance consisted of two improvisational pieces with Keir on saxophone and Joel Ryan processing the sound in real-time. The sheer breadth of textures and mood produced by the duet made it difficult to decide what to include in this entry.
The first piece was 23:55 minutes long, while the second was 10:15. Here’s a fifty-seven second segment from the first piece that illustrates some of Keir’s unorthodox techniques on the saxophone as well as Joel Ryan’s approach to real-time audio manipulation.
The opening piece at Spark, Concert 5 on Thursday, February 19, 2009 was Metamorphoses by Clifton Callendar for three cellos, or solo cello and digital delay. As it happens, it was expertly performed in the latter configuration by Evan Jones. The level and timing of the delay made the piece often sound as though there was more than one instrument present, and auto-panning on the delay trails sent the ghost instruments back and forth across the stage. The cellist was wearing headphones, perhaps listening to a click track. Here’s a short segment from the performance.
Early last week a student showed me Thru-You.com, a collection of YouTube video mashups by Israeli, neo-funk artist Kutiman. I was thoroughly impressed with his work, but soon afterward the site went down due to bandwidth limits. Since then it’s been up and down several times. Hopefully they’ll have their bandwidth problems sorted out soon, so If you can’t view these videos straight away, bookmark the site and check back because they’re worth the wait. Update: The videos have been moved to YouTube, so there should be no more bandwidth issues.
Michel Rouzic has just released version 1.4 of 
After 
The opening piece at Spark, Concert 5 on Thursday, February 19, 2009 was Metamorphoses by