Lilli Wessling Hart

SAN FRANCISCO, CA • February 1, 2007 - Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music and video software company, today released Cyclops v. 1.3 which adds Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs running OS 10.4 or later. Cyclops, developed by Eric Singer of Code Artistry LLC, is a Max/MSP object for video color, grayscale and motion detection. It is a perfect solution for artists and performers who want to add video control to their work without investing in expensive standalone hardware or software.


Cyclops' control output allows for seamless integration of motion control and object tracking into Max/MSP, our interactive programming environment. Max/MSP and the Jitter video/3D graphics objects are already available for Intel-based Macs.


Free updates are available for download at https://cycling74.com/downloads.

New York-based artist and programmer Eric Singer is the author of the Cyclops object for Max/MSP, the founder of LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots), and created the MidiTron MIDI to real-world interface.

More information about Eric Singer and his work are available at http://www.ericsinger.com, http://www.eroktronix.com, and http://www.lemurbots.org.

Cycling '74 creates software for the specialized needs of artists, educators, and researchers working with audio, visual media, and physical computing. Our visual programming tools Max/MSP and Jitter serve as the creative engine behind thousands of innovative projects.

More information about Cycling ’74 and its entire product line available at https://cycling74.com.

Graphics available at https://cycling74.com/pressimages.

Cycling '74, a San Francisco-based music and video software company, today released Cyclops v. 1.3 which adds Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs running OS 10.4 or later. Cyclops, developed by Eric Singer of Code Artistry LLC, is a Max/MSP object for video color, grayscale and motion detection. It is a perfect solution for artists and performers who want to add video control to their work without investing in expensive standalone hardware or software. 

cycling-74-releases-cyclops-for-mac-intel

Cycling '74 Releases Cyclops for Mac Intel

Cycling '74

This year, we decided to set up shop at the 3rd annual Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. Last year, Cycling '74 shared a little corner of a booth with the nice people at MakingThings, and that was enough to get us hooked on this crazy annual celebration of all things DIY and electrified.

We found MakingThings inside the Shed, and we got a little 10'x10' booth in Expo Hall, not far from the hourly Tesla coil demos. We set up a couple of computers running a MIDI-controlled synthesizer patch, an Arduino I/O demo, and a small collection of Jitter patches.

We're used to being the odd-ball company in the corner of fairs and trade shows, so it was a thrill to see so much MaxMSP and Jitter expertise being demonstrated at the Maker Faire. A lot of our friends and long-time users stopped by the booth to say hello and take a peek at Max 5. The Cycling '74 booth was a real hub of activity. We also got to meet a lot of great new people in the Expo Hall and hear about their awesome projects.

Here are some project highlights from the show that use Max:

 Josh Boughey brought along a couple of friends to help promote his Stribe controller, a uniquely designed fader box inspired by the Monome project. It was great to finally see the Stribe in person and meet the nice people behind it.

 Over at the CNMAT table, Adrian Freed and Michael Zbyszynski were demonstrating some peculiar interfaces built with new conductive materials and Michael's experiments in molecular gastronomy (carrot caviar anyone?).

Nearby, Jitter power-user Peter Nyboer was Maxing it up with his Livid Ohm controller and a couple of Percussa AudioCubes.

Perry Hoberman had a fantastic 3D viewing project on view that used Jitter's OpenGL to do some great tablet-controlled 3D sketching. Maybe it's our love of anything to do with 3D glasses, but we had a lot of fun watching it in action.

 Also on hand were Guillermo Galindo's Max-powered sound robot MAIZ.

The Guitar Zeros show how combining gaming, music, and computers can be a beautiful (and fun) thing.

ALERT (Active Learning Environment with Robotoic Tangibles) allowed people to interact with the iRobot Roomba by placing tiles on the floor that it can recognize.

 And there was Anomaly: an interactive adaptive scupture/installation (metal sculpture of a tree with spinning bicycle wheels combined with sensors, MidiTron and Max). The scultpure acts as a sound generator and controller.

While we enjoy seeing all the Max-related projects, we don't miss other Maker Faire highlights like the giant, rolling cupcakes and all the pedal-powered projects including a soundstage for performances.

a-look-back-at-maker-faire-2008

A Look Back at Maker Faire 2008

Gregory Taylor

I'm always curious about how someone's physical relationship with a guitar goes from the usual strumming to what some people call "tabletop guitar" - it seems like everyone has a different story about that. How'd it happen for you?

It was a gradual process - an acquired taste. I started with Rock music and classical guitar in the 70s, and played all sorts of Jazz in the 80s. After that I made a transition to music heavily influenced by the British Improvisers style.

The easy guess here would be that you're talking about players like Fred Frith or the late, great Derek Bailey. Am I on target here? If so, it seems like you're also talking about a pretty large jump away from more traditional forms of Jazz to some very different ideas about form and style and idiosyncracy. Can you talk a little bit about your influences?

As for guitarists, hearing Sonny Sharrock around 1977 screwed me up bigtime. I was listening to Coltrane, and he blew me away with his energy, but the jazz guitarists I heard at that time were just playing pling-plong guitar, that was it. Then someone played the live version of "Memphis Underground" from Herbie Mann's record "Hold on, I'm coming", and this guitarist just exploded, banging the guitar with a slide and such.... you could say I somehow discovered extended techniques. Right after that I heard Miles Davis’ "Agharta" at some party, and I tried to get a hold of every Miles record where Pete Cosey was playing. I discovered the British Improviser's scene on a "Music Improvisation Company" record where Derek was playing.

That transition towards the tabletop-guitar wasn't that large of a jump, because it took years. Anyway, towards the 90s I lost interest in melodic or harmonic development, and became infatuated with odd sounds. First I experimented with pedals and effects that were available at that time. But I quickly figured that the stompbox-approach wasn't working for me, and I was way more flexible in musical situations when I used all sorts of metals, sticks, stones and other tools. The sounds I could coax from my guitar were so much richer and more interesting than when I used pedals.

Towards the end of the 90s I regularly had my guitar lying flat on my lap. In my solo concerts – I’ve been playing solo regularly since 1994 - I often had several "voices" going on at the same time. Things like balancing a cymbal on the strings, while playing two independent sounds with my hands - stuff you can hear on my solo CD "Endangered Guitar" from 1998. In addition to that, I did reintroduce pedals into my setup, and inserted them into different channels from various piezo and other pickups situated on my guitars. It was a more and more complex setup, and lent itself to eventually putting everything onto a table. Putting the guitar on a table allowed me to exercise more control over subtle movements, because I didn’t have to balance or hold the guitar anymore. I also could execute certain ideas quicker - my tools were right in front of me, and I'm was simply faster in getting a hold of them or putting them back.

The trajectory you're describing is interesting - it's both a kind of story about emergence in terms of searching for more immediate and physical means to do something that interests you, but also this parallel interest in... quickness? lightness? fluidity? You're looking for ways of maximizing possibility in every way you can. Although it seems like an obvious question, how did Max come into your life?

 This is why you should always ask the obvious questions in an interview!

No, it's no joke - I discovered Max when I met Dafna Naphtali, who’s worked with Max as a performer, teacher and programmer for some 15 years. Dafna gave me a head start. It also helped that I programmed business applications for small companies in Germany at the end of the 80s. Today I think I was already looking for some interactive element in my solo concerts, but I wasn't aware of that then. As with so many performers who come from a "traditional" instrument background, I just wanted to rebuild my complex setup within the computer. But as usual in these cases, after a short period of time you'd come up with a million other ideas.

Could you unpack that a little? When you talk about what you were missing in your solo work, what kinds of things - outside of your own interaction with the physical system of the instrument and its treatments your listeners were you looking for? I'm not just asking about how being a programmer fits into this, since I think we're really talking about something a bit larger - the way you think about improvising in general....

After all, I'm an improviser, and I appreciate the high art of improvisation in other parts of my life as well. But it becomes stale if you just rearrange what you have in your toolbox, like some people playing the same licks in every solo. I think my playing became so controlled that I was looking to add some unforeseeable elements again. It took me a while to figure that out - at the beginning I rejected every notion of randomness in my Max patch, but eventually I introduced a bunch of routines that allow me to be surprised within certain boundaries.

Generally speaking, I do live sound processing of my guitar, and control the patch through my guitar playing. What I play controls the sound that I played before. When the live sound processing gets too crazy, I pull it back - because when it just sounds like a laptop, the guitar is useless. Over the years I became less zealous about making my guitar sounding anything else but a guitar. It's probably a phase many "experimentalists" go through, and at a certain point you'd ask yourself why you actually schlepp this instrument around. Currently I think that it is not important at all to sound weird - an evil sound doesn't make the revolution, and a beautiful sound doesn't bring Hitler back to life.

I guess this is as good a place to ask this question as anywhere: It seems as though there are a couple of generic approaches to using Max that emerge among people who actually become fluent with its use. I'd describe one of those as the "patch as piece" approach, where each major outing requires something new versus the "instrument" approach, where someone creates a larger structure that is then "learned" in the way you'd develop any other set of skills with a more conventional instrument. Where do you see yourself along that continuum?

Certainly among the latter. I very much like your word "learned' here - yes, this is a new instrument, and it has to be learned. I practice working with new routines, like I practiced scales many years ago.

Have you tried porting your patches to 5 yet? What's that experience been like, if so?

So far, so good. My Max 4 version is stored away, and I'm performing with Max 5 for quite a while now. I had to make lots of GUI changes, though, because I use every available pixel on my screen - it took a while to adjust the elements.

Can you talk a bit about how your performance patch is organized?

My Max patch consists currently of roughly 160 files. It is constructed in a very modular way, with multiple levels of bpatchers, abstractions and poly~ objects, all arranged by the main patch. The individual patches are often very simple, as soon as I have the feeling I can reuse something later, I make a bpatcher out of it. I use a lot of variables. This allows me to do changes very quickly - when I give a new routine a name, it takes me just a few seconds to completely integrate it into all GUI elements, the preset system, and send internal and external controller data to any parameter. I probably never played two concerts in a row with exactly the same patch - every concert brings a little change here and there, an adjustment, or just putting a routine on another key on the keyboard. Over the years 90% of what I ever wrote I already threw out. If a routine isn't used in a concert situation, it has to go. That's not different than practicing scales or working on certain chord progressions - you test out a lot, but if you don't use it on the next couple of gigs, forget it.

The patch really reflects the improvisational nature of my music making, if you want to look at it this way. Music for me has to be in constant flux, every concert, CD, or discussion influences me in ways that immediately effect my next move. As an improviser, you constantly push your own boundaries - the idea of creating something set in stone, played the same every time is foreign to me. Writing a fixed score is obsolete, because it's outdated as soon as I go to the first rehearsal. When writing for larger ensemble, as I currently do with my 14-piece "Third Eye Orchestra", I address this fact by creating a large score that has to be arranged by the conductor live every time it’s performed. That's also probably one of the reasons I ended up using Max - programming yourself is very suitable for this kind of approach.

By the way, Harvestworks, where I work, is soon embarking on a series of research workshops centered around the question how improvisational strategies and digital media tools affect each other, and we plan to present the outcome in a book or a conference in 2009.

Speaking of that, some people may know you by way of your work with the Harvestworks artists' organization in addition to this giant pile of CDs and list of performances. How did you come to be involved in the work there?

Would I be correct in thinking I'm detecting a pattern here?

Dafna was working at Harvestworks as a Max teacher and programmer, and when they were looking for someone to run the studios in 2001, she told me. So I applied for the job. It didn't take long to discover that this is an fun place with a great community. There are constantly students, artist in residence, or interns hanging out in our lab room working on their projects, often coming from several different countries. Things that are going on there are a good inspiration for my own work, you meet all sorts of interesting people, and discuss weirdo projects. Live sound processing of knitting needles, butterfly movements turned into music, a flock of 300 movies flying around the viewer in surround video are just some of the projects my programmers are currently working on.

Despite its great work and profile in the new media universe, I’ll wager that there are some people reading this who aren’t familiar with what Harvestworks is. It might help them to have a clearer idea of how unique an institution it is…. 

Harvestworks is a non-profit organization, helping artists create their work. It was created in 1977 by two artists, Jerry Lindahl and Greg Kramer. At that time, when you wanted to create an electronic composition, you were either part of a university that had an electronic studio, or you had to lay out a considerable amount of money to buy a synthesizer. But there has to be something for not-so-lucky artists, too!

So these guys went out and created a community center where you could go and rent a Buchla or other equipment for $3/hr to create a piece. Now we have around 250 different clients a year, an artist in residence program, audio and video studios, we're doing festivals and presentations, program interactive applications with Max/MSP/Jitter, and have a large education program. Max as a software has been around Harvestworks for a long time, actually. A while ago we found an old flyer inviting to some Max User group in 1989. And Dafna has been teaching and programming Max at Harvestworks since 1995. I have currently 7 or 8 people working with my clients, but Zachary Seldess, Matthew Ostrowski and Dafna Naphtali are doing the bulk of the work here.

One of the interesting things about Harvestworks as an entity has been the development of their "Certificate Programs," Max being one of those programs. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that came to be.

The "Certificate" came into being a few years ago. With ever more powerful computers and Max covering now audio and video, artists could go into all directions. You have to have something that addresses the individual needs more than a class situation can do. On top of it, the projects involve often several specialists, so you need someone to bring the right people together, like a project manager.

A good friend of mine says that there's no such thing as an "intermediate" Max user - merely people who haven't specialized yet. 

He's right. That's also why we gave up on "intermediate" classes. What we're doing instead are classes focusing on special topics, like "multichannel audio- and video spatialization", "feedback - taming the beast", "better and faster and things like that. That seems to work better.

It seems like the Max list is always full of beginners who want to do a surprisingly small number of things: build drum machines or loopers or synths, or get their OpenGL torii to throb along with the beat. Since you're trying to serve a really diverse group of artists, what kinds of other subjects do you see as emergent interests beyond teaching the basics?

We don’t only have audio and video performers, but also many installation artists. If I look at my artists’ needs, today two things stand out - live camera motion tracking, and audio and video spatialization. Just today someone signed up for a Certificate to focus on Ambisonic multichannel audio. We also have lots of camera motion tracking projects for dance, installations and performance as well - that seems to be the hit right now. A few years ago, everybody was into advanced audio analysis and we did lots of FFT stuff, and hybrid instruments like a shakuhachi controller, where we had to analyze the airstream. It is interesting to see how this changes. I have two artists planning to work with GPS or RFID technology, and I'm sure that's a topic that soon will become more mainstream, too.

Very interesting. I guess I’d presume that this kind of subject material would maybe require a little different relationship than, say, pedagogy about building variations on the drumbox.

Yes, it's all over the place, and you have to somehow address this. So we came up with the Certificate Program, and it is all in a one-on-one situation. We assess the student's needs, design an individual curriculum, and the student can learn on their own project. Although the program comes just with 20 hours of these regular tutorials (some people do several of these certificates in a row), you can work any time with experienced Max interns, and work together with other students that are currently around. That way we can make much more out of it than 20 hours of tutorials can give you. At any given time we have 3, 4, or 5 Max certificates running, including lots of artists coming from other states or other countries. I'm sure it's also an advantage that we're located in New York...

For those who need basic classes we recently added the full-week 40 hour Max Intensive course to our program. A crash course in basic Max, with a little MSP and Jitter.

How has the arrival of Max 5 changed your pedagogical activities at Harvestworks, if at all?

Max 5 came out shortly before one of our beginner's Max/MSP Intensive courses, so my teachers had to jump into Max 5 heads-over-heels. All courses are taught in Max 5 now, but there could be one or two [individual] Certificate Students who might still work in Max 4. It's too early to gauge our experience - certainly many things in Max 5 are a lot easier, but with so many more options available for the student, there is also more need for the teacher to reduce the complexity.

I’ll pause before asking this next question and I’ll wait while you put on your "Harvestworks Propellor Beanie": What kinds of sensor solutions do you find yourselves working with at Harvestworks, and are there any kinds of general questions that drive the choices your clients and students make?

To my clients I usually explain the extremes - the Arduino as the by far cheapest device, but you have to do a lot to make it work. On the other end of the spectrum is the iCube family from InfusionSystems. It costs far more than an Arduino board, but is practically plug and play. You can place most other devices somewhere in between those extremes. If you like to solder and you have a little place to do it and you enjoy the fun of figuring out how to program an Arduino, do it. If you don't want to solder, get an Infusionsystems interface and just plug it in and go.

If you can do at least some assembly yourself, you can look into other devices that are more affordable. Miditron, Eobody, Making Things - they're all good. There are also other issues that can be important such as networking possibilities or the speed of the data transmission. If you need a very fast interface, then any MIDI-based device such as Eric Singer's Miditron might not be the right choice. However, I haven't seen that many projects that demand a faster connection than MIDI.

And don’t forget one thing to think about... you should do what your friends are doing. Those are the people that you can ask for help - and you might be able to call them up at 11pm with a question. Sorry to say, but Harvestworks is closed at that time.

Looking at the website, I noticed that your discussion of the Max Certificates specifically mentions working with sensors. In fact, it's really the only non-Max-specific thing mentioned. 

It’s just because so many people ask for it. The majority of students has some project in mind that involves sensors. However, not every project needs them. In recent years many of the sensor projects that came in were done cheaper and easier with camera tracking.

 So often, questions about working with external hardware in general and sensors in particular are often matters of Max list personal endorsements. What kinds of sensor technologies do you work with as a performer? 

I experimented for years with sensors, but until last year I was never successful in adding a new quality to the music. But I do use a proximity sensor, sitting right in front of my guitar. It's actually funny how it came up - when I'm playing I often wave my hands around, and on numerous occasions people asked me what kind of sensor I was controlling with my hands. And at the 2007 NIME conference it just came to my mind to use exactly those movements to control certain parameters. Since I'm lazy, I bought a "microDig" from InfusionSystems - it took me literally 5 minutes to set it up and I’ve performed with it since then.

The outcome was different, though - those hand movements didn't work out musically and it turned out to be much more effective to situate the sensor on the table right in front of me. A slight movement of my head into the beam allows me to control a parameter, or to switch something on/off. That way, when I use both hands to create two voices, a move of my head can set up a third voice. What's nice about it is that you don't see how I control it, because very small movements are sufficient.

Despite your Harvestworks life, you've obviously continued to keep a busy schedule in terms of performing and recording, and that - like lots of musicians - there's a gap between what you're doing at the moment versus those things we can download or pick up as recordings since we don't live in or near Manhattan. That said, what are you working on now?

I'm working on a CD with my trio Die Schrauber right now. It’s a trio with circuit bender Joker Nies from Cologne and laptop player Mario deVega from Mexico City. The CD will use live excerpts from our recent 11-city tour in Europe, with the material centered around the rhythmic elements of our music. I am also gradually introducing grooves derived from my guitar sounds into my solo music, although I'm still looking for a musically satisfying solution to control the grooves with my guitar.

I also need to edit the material for my "Choking Disklavier" project. I am not fond of pieces that boast the "superhuman" capabilities of the Disklavier or other musical machines but instead look for their particular sound qualities. For my project, I overloaded the piano with data at the lowest possible velocity, so that the hammers do not reach the strings. Low rumbling and crackled noises emanate from the machine - often very rhythmically - with occasionally a string ringing on top.

Then I have a new CD out on Innova with my "Third Eye Orchestra", a 14-piece ensemble with live sound processing, where I wrote a large score but arrange it live, Earle-Brown-style. You might not hear it that way, but I feel it's just the continuation of my guitar work by other means. The next concert will be in March 2009, and I'm already collecting ideas for the next score.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=hansteg

In this interview, Hans Tammen describes his journey into 'Endangered Guitar'...

an-interview-with-hans-tammen-endangered-guitar

An Interview with Hans Tammen - Endangered Guitar

I think I've recovered enough from the ICMC (and the subsequent bout with an ear infection, replacing a wrecked car, and a few of the other shocks to which the mortal life is heir to say a few things about my trip to Miami....

For those of you who are acquainted with the ICMC, it's an annual international conference, held in a different place each year, that lets you hear the latest technical papers, hang out and exchange recipes for sugar cookies, and generally sit through a whole lot of concerts of all kinds of music made using computers. As has been the case since the ICMC in Berlin several years ago, there's also an off-ICMC (a kind of Salon des Refusées) just in case you need something to do during your evenings.

While I'd like to have just gone and watched and listened to everything, I was flying the Cycling '74 flag. So this will, of necessity be fragmentary in nature; my apologies to anyone whose name I've butchered or omitted.

Practically speaking, I didn't make it to all the concerts; someone with a question or suggestion would appear as I was preparing to pack up and go in, and politeness suggested that it'd be best to stay. I sure got to hear some interesting music, nonetheless.

The amount of music at these events is a bit daunting: three concerts per day. But my own impression is that this was a great ICMC in terms of the stylistic breadth of presented work, and that the concerts themselves were both well-ordered and varied in terms of content. As always, one did hear a bit of grousing here and there about "quality" (can't you hear the quote marks there?), and in the midst of an election marked so strongly by "code language," I confess that I may have heard that to mean "not enough wire whisk and breadboard music." I could be wrong.

This time out, I heard pieces that were not afraid to sit still for an instant, pieces that were perfectly happy to straddle genre boundaries or to start their audible lives as one thing and joyously morph into something else (Jenny Bernard's "Hallucination" and Jon Gibson's "Detour" come to mind right away here). For the first few days, it seemed like this it was Flute Week at the ICMC-not that I minded the chance to hear some absolutely amazing performances of stunning pieces in a bewilderingly wide range of styles by wonderful performers (Margaret, Lancaster and Elizabeth McNutt? Yikes.) for a single instant either, either. It didn't occur to me until later that I really wasn't listening to pieces to spot Our Software in action at all, so my own set of surprises were more about individual listening experiences. Jesse Allison's simple and well-conceived piece for harmonica and live processing, a really modest and stunning piece for bass clarinet by Jeff Herriot, some new video work from Christopher Penrose (who turned me onto a whole website chock full of cockamamie commercials done by big western movie stars for Japanese television-including the commercial that had Arnold Schwarzenegger pimping for some kind of nicotine-based energy drink that was used to generate his piece, "My First Electric Dragon." Check out Japander.com. Really.), Timothy Polashek's one-minute bit of candied ginger for the ear, and David Kim-Boyle's piece for piano, resonant glasses (the piece involved having the miked glasses hover right at the edge of feedback all the way through the piece. Paul the sound guy gets oak-leaf clusters for that one), and video projection that seemed waay too short for me.

Looking at that quick listing from memory, it occurs to me that I really wasn't listening to pieces to spot Our Software in action at all. But there was plenty of it-there's not much I can really say about the ubiquity of Max/MSP/Jitter at festivals such as these. It cuts both ways-some part of you is always worried whenever you see those GUI objects on the glowing screen to the right of the mixing board, and then elated when it works well. I guess that beyond some statistical increase in Max use live, it's hard not to notice the number of pieces that now include visual information this time out (I was particularly particularly taken by Michael Theodore's "Sivel").

Outside of the conferences, a sort of funny thing that happened with regard to Max/MSP/Jitter visibility-due, in part, to my own indolence. I decided that I didn't want to drag two laptops to the festival every day, so I started alternating machines. No one noticed, which I thought was a little odd. My own personal experience is that I run Jitter on my Windows box, and stick to my old trusty Powerbook for noises, but it's clearly not the case. And the relative ubuiquity at this point of third-party objects for both platforms has really contributed to the idea that, for some people, it's not really a question of what machine you're running on. It's Max/MSP/Jitter either way.

I encountered something at the ICMC that I also ran into at the AES, but probably didn't mention in my blog entry-it seems to puzzle some people out there when I pass up the opportunity to dis other people's software, and to puzzle some people even more by praising the stuff I didn't dis. It's puzzling to contemplate that one would face a world in which there are now numerous alternatives to people who want to make music with software (some of which are created or produced by people who are friends and acquaintances) with anything other than pleasure and relief. In the modern world, you're free to choose the tool that best fits your circumstances (emotional, political, technological), and-as a personal matter-I guess that I think that steering people to the right alternative (given their situation) makes everyone happier. It was sort of interesting to chat with folks who began their lives using Pd and have since migrated to Max/MSP (they're overwhelmingly Windows users, based on my admittedly unscientific sample and anecdotal experience), and to find out what their specific challenges are (or aren't). They seem to have having a pretty easy time of it, and they are really crazy about being able to use Java and Javascript for object development.

There was more interest in pluggo for Windows at the ICMC than I might have expected, although it took a rather muted form; In the same way that some electroacoustic composers seemed to be sheepish about acknowledging their use of Metasynth several years ago, I think I detected a similar interest in using pluggo plug-ins; the question usually only appeared when I was alone with one other person. In one sort of funny situation, two people who were all in the same crowd came back separately and alone to inquire about pluggo for Windows. I dunno... maybe I'm hallucinating.

The off-ICMCs have really had a personality all their own over the last few years. This year's off-ICMC was no exception, with a blistering election night Convolution Brothers fracas that featured Miller Puckette sitting in for the absent Zack Settle in Elvis wig and shades while Cort Lippe (in a fetching black balaklava that whispered "sonic terrorist") streamed the election night returns with some ah... modification (metalflake, hydroflouric acid, and sprinkles). The next evening was my chance to catch Phonaecia live (they were wonderful), and sample the local Miami laptop scene. Friday evening was off-ICMC gig time for me, and an interesting and instructive experience. I completely sucked, rather than turning in either something that was good or even kind of pedestrian. On the good side, I went second and the evening concert ran a little late, which meant that not a lot of people were there. And Doug Geers (who preceded me) and Meg, Allison, and Charlie (who followed) were sufficiently interesting that everyone was distracted from my self-basting holiday Butterball turkey of a performance, I'm hoping. It's an oddly liberating experience, I guess-if somewhat disappointing. I didn't stay to the bitter end, but Eric Lyon reportedly tore the roof off the sucker rather late in the evening. Our hosts at the Titanic microbrewery were delightful. Great cheeseburgers, and my first introduction to the awesome Conch fritter (yummy), due to the encouragements of our hosts, Kristine Burns and Colby Leider. A superior bitter on tap, too. I hope we all drank enough to keep 'em happy.

The ICMC banquet was positively stunning, complete with some kind of DEA black helicopter and interdiction boat chase thrown in. You can see some pictures of the excitement  here (Choose Day 7 and head for photos 15-18). We all quickly recovered from looking out the big picture windows or from the deck and seeing the opening footage for many episodes of CSI: Miami. Man, whatta view! What an evening! At the banquet, we found out that Ajay Kapur's paper on digitizing North Indian performance had won the "best paper" award. I was glad to get this news, since I might have missed the paper (as I did the paper on Audiosculpt 2). It didn't disappoint, although I was in and out of the session much quicker than I would have liked (prior appointment). My own personal interest had something more to do with looking at the kinds of sensing and control they'd worked with in order to gather data without strait-jacketing performers. It was a pretty extraordinary presentation, in part because I've gone to ICMCs for years and wondered at what I thought was a dearth of interest in non-western musics and performance practice. This one more than made up for those years in the desert.

I'd first met Jason Freeman during our last Cycling '74 booth time in Frankfurt; he'd taken the train up (or down) from his then working gig, and mentioned that he was working on something with Max Neuhaus. At the AES the week before, I'd run into Phil Burk, who'd also been on the project (and who was, apparently, surprised that anyone remembered that he'd done any recording at all). His presentation on the implementation of the Auracle project (particularly the kind of data capture it does, and how the data is analyzed and used over long spans of time) was fascinating. NOW I get it. Taken alongside another session paper looking at the use of spectral morphing in the film "Blackhawk Down" by Paul Rudy (it made me want to scamper off immediately, rent the film, and listen to it in the dark with the sound turned waaaaay up) it was time well spent.

But it wasn't all sitting in the dark taking notes, nosirree. This time out, there was gear to fool around with! One of the interesting things about this particular ICMC for me was the chance to see a couple of new sensor interface products up close-Eric Singer's Miditron, and the Electrotap Teabox. I'd spent a little time during the previous week at the AES with both the Kroonde Gamma wireless sensor interface and the Eobody, and the week gave me a chance to hear presentations by both Eric Singer (Mr. Miditron) and Tim Place and Jesse Allison (Tea importers to the Royal Family). The availability of all of these different products at different prices is great news-you've got a wide choice of possible solutions that work in different ways and all interface quite nicely with Max/MSP/Jitter. I even sweet-talked Tim and Jesse into spiriting a demo Teabox back to my hotel room on Tuesday evening. My pre-Cycling '74 life is partially in the teledatacomm industry, so I tend to take things apart for amusement. The Teabox is beautifully engineered, I am happy to report. Works a treat, too.

Hmm. What might I have forgotten? Comments on the use of high-powered air conditioning units as the semiotic for success in Miami? Trying to explain the minutiae of the American political system through my tears to my European colleagues? Discovering that the Mochito does not in any way, shape, or form taste like the pondwater it resembles? Naaah. This is long enough already.

I think I've recovered enough from the ICMC (and the subsequent bout with an ear infection, replacing a wrecked car, and a few of the other shocks to which the mortal life is heir to say a few things about my trip to Miami.... 

Search Results