Thanks to everyone who came out to see Man Down! The crowd was amazing and I think it was a particularly memorable show. Someone took a video of us playing "Break in the Weather" (without me noticing, haha) and posted it on YouTube. Enjoy:
Video from YouTube
AM/PM's tour with Rhymes With Opera is done! We had a great time performing in Durham, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. It was really fun playing in four cities with such different personalities. The audience was truly amazing everywhere we played, even in the subway at Times Square, haha. AM/PM sends out a huge thank you to George Lam and Ruby Fulton for organizing the tour and composing Skeleton for us. Also, thanks to Thom Limbert for composing Numbers/Dates and for being such a generous host in Durham.
AM/PM is now shifting focus towards our performance at the Aesthetic Research Series on April 10th, featuring the premiere of Ying-Chen Kao's Frustration Factory, and at the Look & Listen Festival on May 2nd, performing Paul Leary's "I Have A Past Life Memory From The War That Blew The Fifth Planet Into The Asteroid Belt" and other stories from AM Radio.
AM/PM has completed the first leg of our tour with Rhymes With Opera! We spent two days in Durham, NC rehearsing like crazy, working with composers, and enjoying the warm weather. The tour is organized by Rhymes With Opera, a new music theater collective dedicated to bringing new opera into unconventional spaces. Ruby Fulton and George Lam, co-artistic directors of RWO, composed Skeleton (libretto by Thimble Wit) for singers and saxophone quartet. Numbers/Dates, also for singers and sax quartet, was composed by Thom Limbert (commissioned by RWO). AM/PM is performing music by Kathleen Bader, George Lam, and Mattias Sköld throughout the tour.
Our first performance was at the Broad Street Cafe in Durham, NC. The evening had the perfect blend of an engaged audience, exciting premieres, and a casual venue. It was great to have the cafe packed! Last night we performed the second show of the tour at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, MD. It is always fun to play in AM/PM's hometown and the Metro Gallery is an amazing venue. They had several really interesting video installations all around the gallery. Many thanks to everyone that came to our shows!
Next weekend we will finish off the tour with performances at IWAA in Philadelphia, the 42nd Street/Times Square Subway Station in NYC, and the Gershwin Hotel in NYC. The performers on tour are AM/PM, Elisabeth Halliday (soprano), Bonnie Lander (soprano), Robert Maril (baritone), Ruby Fulton, and George Lam. Many thanks to Jianghai Ho for the amazing pictures of our Durham show.
Update (3/10/2009): There was a recent news article in The News & Observer about Rhymes With Opera. There's also an article in The Herald Sun, but you will need to create an account and sign in to read it.
A month or two ago, Microsoft announced their research project, Songsmith. The program takes a melody (supplied by the user) and generates an accompaniment, including instrumentation, style, and harmony. Obviously designed as a simple tool for rough musical sketches, Songsmith has become much more popular as a generator of hilariously recreated popular songs. The result is a series of classic hits as recreated through Songsmith. Now, the program does allow the user to adjust the accompaniment, but its more fun to assume that these are based on the program's own choices.
One more classic hit that I have to share:
Video from YouTube
This TED talk by Keith Barry is something that I've been meaning to post for quite a while. He is described as "a hacker of the human brain" on TED's website. The pairing of magic and the brain was also presented in a New York Times article that describes brain scientists and magicians working together to gain insight into human perception. The article refers to a paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (includes several videos from the The Magic of Consciousness Symposium that are great, especially video "S6" listed under Supplementary information).
Keith Barry's presentation is really amazing and left me wondering how he did some of the magic. Certainly, seeing it via video makes me inclined to assume that I am being tricked. Barry emphasizes that, unless one is trained in the art of deception, the reasoning we apply to comprehend the magic we saw is going to be flawed. Be sure to watch until the end of the video!
A pretty amazing mix of music and comedy, this performance is from "A Little Nightmare Music" by Aleksey Igudesman and Richard Hyung-ki Joo.
I was originally going to talk about Yo-Yo Ma's remix competition but ended up getting more interested in musical interfaces (no offense to Yo-Yo Ma). In a single day, the average person interacts with audio (and video) countless times. Every time you use iTunes, YouTube, a CD/DVD player, Pandora Radio, your car radio, Hulu, or Last.fm the interaction is through an interface. Of course, if we want to widen our viewpoint we could consider the interfaces used with almost anything (showers, stoves, doors, etc.). Because interfaces play a predominant role in everyday life, it is important to design them well. Since music is almost entirely electronic, we often interface through computer programs or websites. The interesting thing here is that there are no physical constraints on the interface. Designers are free to create whatever they think will be best.
The example that inspired me to talk about interfaces is the music player from Cherrypeel.com. Cherrypeel is described as a "democratic music revolution" and is designed for users to listen to indie tracks and decide which are best. Their music player is essentially a large circle and two arrows. The center of the circle serves as both the play and pause buttons (similar to iTunes). The up and down arrows serve to vote up or down the track you are hearing. The interesting part of Cherrypeel's interface is that the play progress bar wraps around the play/pause circle, as opposed to taking up additional linear space. I really love the simplicity and intuitive aspects of this design!
Indaba Music, the website hosting Yo-Yo Ma's remix competition, uses an interesting interface that is a variant of the standard play bar that sits at the top or bottom of the screen. Their play bar includes the usual play/pause, time, progress, volume, and info about the track. What makes it unusual is the addition of a waveform, spectrogram, and comment bars. The waveform bar provides a visual representation of the track and can be used to skip to a point in that track. I think that this would be very intuitive for most people. The spectrogram bar is more nerdy and possibly not very useful (meaning it should be removed), but my recording training does make me love the option. Both of these put the My Space music player to shame, which shows an animated frequency response that doesn't actually correlate to the music playing. Seriously, it just sits there constantly claiming low frequency sounds are happening.
Technobob has a blog about the Reactagon, a "chain reactive performance arpeggiator", which is an interesting example of a physical interface that ties heavily to concepts from electronic interfaces. From Technobob:
Each hexagonal cell on the surface represents a fixed note on the harmonic table. The placement of the discs influences the whether or not a note is played, as well as its placement in the sequence. By stringing together a number of directional discs, an entire musical sequence can be created. Special discs can also initiate multiple sequences, for more complex patterns. A bank of touch-sensitive sliders are then used to change volume, timbre and rhythm of the notes.
Video of the Reactagon (excuse the cheesy electronic music):
Video from YouTube.
From a post over at Boing Boing:
If I had one of these things, I would be playing around on it all the time!this fantastic clip of a from the 1960s named Leon Berry who designed and built his own personal special-effects pipe organ, which he christened the "Beast in the Basement." Some of the sounds are done pneumatically, while others are made in a remarkably straight-forward fashion: playing the "Chinese Gong" key, for example, results in the actual hitting of a Chinese Gong. Ingenious, Leon!
About a month ago I stumbled on a blog post at Wired.com titled Google Crowdsources Carnegie Hall Concert. Google is auditioning musicians, via a judging panel and YouTube viewers, to perform Tan Dun's Internet Symphony No. 1 "Eroica" at Carnegie Hall. From the blog post:
Classical and non-conventional musicians can submit YouTube videos of themselves playing Tan's composition and a piece of standard repertoire in order to get into the orchestra. Judging will be done by a panel of experts appointed by Google and by the YouTube community.
"This is the first online collaboration of its kind," said Timothy Lee, product marketing manager for Google, adding, "classical music is hungry for innovation."
Sheet music for the pieces is available on YouTube in PDF format, along with individualized conductor video featuring Tan conducting each part -- so, if you're a timpanist, you can download Tan conducting the timpani part just for you. Instructions are available in 17 languages to put much of the world's classical talent on the same page, so to speak.
Its easy to shrug this off as an American Idol rip off, but there are some really cool things going on. The videos of Tan Dun conducting each part are a neat idea (and pretty funny to watch by itself). Seeing a major company spending resources on promoting classical music to the general public is truly amazing.
You can learn more at YouTube's Symphony Channel.
I found this TED talk by Ursus Wehrli to be particularly awesome.
Over the next couple of months I have a lot of exciting projects going on. Man Down is in the process of recording our new album. AM/PM Sax Quartet is performing at the 32nd International Saxophone Symposium, the Aesthetic Research Series in Baltimore, the Look & Listen Festival in New York City, and on tour with Rhymes With Opera. AM/PM will be premiering pieces by Ruby Fulton, George Lam, Ying-Chen Kao, and Nick Anderson. I will also be presenting my masters recital to wrap up my degree and premiering pieces by Paul Leary, Mattias Sköld, and David Witmer.