By the Numbers

Nearly five years after I pondered using the Conet Numbers Stations recordings for a bit of sound art, madebyrobot a.k.a. Jon Sykes has curated a rather nice compilation of concept tracks on the theme, released by PublicSpaces Lab. Cassiel is featured with Ciocirlia (track 5).

(Cover Art by Rita Monteiro @ PublicSpaces Lab.)

Vitruvian Fieldwork

Work continues in Field on the Vitruvian-inspired software Choreographic Language Agent for Wayne McGregor's Entity piece, the latest incarnation of which will be performed in November.

Since most of our projects involve sound art, we usually obsess over CPU performance and RAM, but Field/CLA is graphics-heavy with lots of OpenGL action, so the GPU rules. This 2006 MacBook Pro is way underpowered, so we're awaiting delivery of a 2009 model, slightly faster CPU-wise but (hopefully) a revelation in terms of graphics performance.

Ras goffa, British Dance Edition

ras goffa Bobby Sands is being performed as part of British Dance Edition 2010: details here.

Memorial Lasers

We have some shots on Flickr of the laser rig we designed and programmed for ras goffa Bobby Sands (the Bobby Sands memorial race) by Eddie Ladd.

Further performances this week at Chapter, Cardiff.

Ableton to Zawinski

In anticipation of the release of Max for Live, I felt a sudden desire to program Ableton Live to be able to read mail. With a bit of help from MXJ and Jython, Live can attach to a POP3 server and load email header information into the names of sound clips. Et voila, via Vimeo and our fledgeling Posterous blog for Max for Live tips and tricks:

http://maxforlive.loadbang.net/ableton-live-now-obeys-zawinskis-law-thanks-t.

Audiomulch on Paper

Our review of AudioMulch 2.0 for Sound On Sound magazine will appear in the November issue. It is downloadable for subscribers here.

PEAL

We (by which I mean myself and Lewis Sykes, under the collective moniker of Monomatic) have been awarded the major commission for an audio-visual piece in Leeds City Museum as part of Sound and Music's Expo festival.

We've called the piece PEAL. There's a project page here and an ongoing development blog here.

Live in Print

Just over two years after we last reviewed Ableton Live in print (for Recording magazine), we've had another shot, in Sound On Sound for the June 2009 issue. And things are about to get interesting.

Cyfnod in Preparation

We're just back from a month in Aberystwyth, working on sound design and sensing systems for Eddie Ladd's Cyfnod performance which tours Wales in October. Featured technologies include MaxMSP (with our Python extensions), Arduino, AudioMulch, BlinkM microcontroller LED clusters and laser assemblies. Oh, and a 300Kg, 2m x 4m custom-designed treadmill.

We have some photographs of the technology on Flickr here. Details about the actual performance project to follow.

EDIT: The piece is now entitled ras goffa Bobby Sands.

Monomatic 3D

We (as in myself and Lewis Sykes) are signed up to do a brief performance-ette as part of the forthcoming Future of Sound event at The Sage in Gateshead on Saturday. Chief amongst the toys will be a control system for 3D-AudioScape using a monome sixty four.

We've also knocked up a live, OSC-controlled monome visualisation in Processing; a customised Python plugin for the shado rendering library allows the visualisation to mirror the display state of the physical device. It's a little bit of a hack, but rather sweet.

This is all part of the ongoing monomatic project, with a blog here.