Invent Music

Audiopint is going to the Maker Faire!

2007-05-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

We're taking the Audiopint to the Maker Faire, May 19-20th in San Mateo, CA. The Maker Faire is a giant DIY expo that will draw creative and crafty builders from all over the world. If you're in CA that weekend, come by and say hello, and learn how to make your own Audiopint! More info about the Maker Faire [here], and more information about Audiopint [here].

The inventmusic team going to the Maker Faire will be myself, Ben Vigoda and David Bouchard.
-Dave

Inventmusic Jam Session, Wednesday evening 4/18/2007

2007-04-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

[PDF of this poster - please post!]

Sonami, Ryan, and Inventmusic: in concert April 21st, 2007 at Killian Hall (MIT)

2007-04-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

Along with Susanna Bolle from Non-Event, I'm organizing a concert involving Laetitia Sonami and Joel Ryan. It will be an evening of live experimental music on the evening of April 21st., at Killian Hall (MIT). From the flyer:

NON-EVENT, INVENTMUSIC AND THE SCHOOL OF THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS PRESENT:

LAETITIA SONAMI
JOEL RYAN
with INVENTMUSIC
A Concert of Innovative Electro-Instrumental Performance from STEIM and Beyond

You can download the pdf flyer [here]. Some members of the Inventmusic experimental music group (including myself) will be opening the show with a performance on the PureJoy and other novel instruments. I'm really looking forward to this exciting evening of new music performance!

-Dave

Erik Nugent, on slide-whistle AND PureJoy

2007-04-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

This is amazing! At a certain point, you have to pay really close attention to figure out which sounds are coming from Erik's slide whistle directly, and which are stored and manipulated samples on the PureJoy..

Recorded at the MIT Stata center, in rehearsal for the April 21st concert at Killian Hall (described in another blog post)..

-Dave

PureJoy-JamiOki + AudioPint Installation in Stata

2007-03-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

The InventMusic interactive music kiosk is up and running this week in MIT's Stata Center! Our intrepid team of inventor/developers accomplished an incredible push to make this idea into reality. New features this time around include a raft of new JamiOki games, various background "metronome" loops for certain games, a generation-2 AudioPint powering the audio interaction, and full foot-pad control over game selection and pacing. A few more photos can be found here.

In addition to my own wooden-case mods and pure data interaction design, this effort depended on the game-design creativity of Ben Vigoda and Joe Rothermich and the killer application development chops of Shawn Hershey. Good job everyone!

The interaction will be available in the Stata Center main lobby (near Main St. and Vassar), today 3/21 through Friday 3/23. Come over and have a jam session!

-Dave
This installation is funded (in part) by the Council for the Arts at MIT. We also thank Student Life Programs for their generous contribution. Finally, we thank VIA and the rest of the consortia sponsors of the MIT Media Lab.

Invent Music on the radio :: 88.1 fm WMBR, Friday March 16th at 8PM

2007-03-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

Dear AudioPint / PureJoy fans - I'll be performing live with the AudioPint and PureJoy this Friday evening, March 16 on MIT's Boston-area radio station WMBR (88.1fm) at 8PM.

The show is hosted by my good friend and sometimes musical-collaborator Jacob Eisenstein, and his co-conspirator Lily. You can find the Friday WMBR schedule here. Future archived recordings will show up on this page. The radio show is called cargo cult radio.

Tune in this Friday - it will be rocking, experimental and brain-stretching!
-Dave

UPDATE: My photos from the radio show can be found here. And if you'd like to hear the archived recording from the show, it's here. (note that the recording starts with the last few minutes of the previous show, that had a fairly cantankerous caller on the air - that's not Cargo Cult Radio)

Preparing for MIT Stata Center PureJoy / JamiOki opening

2007-03-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

We were asked to install PureJoy+AudioPint and JamiOki in the MIT Stata Center for a week-long installation this month. The installation will be in the main lobby near Main St. and Vassar St., so it will be quite literally the first thing that visitors entering this famous building will see. It's an exciting venue to show these projects, and will give us a chance to observe a large number of people interacting with them.

I went over to Stata today to prepare the case (click here for a few photos). We will install in a large rolling wooden box with a frosted screen in the upper half, suitable for rear-projection. The setup will support four players, with a gamepad and headset microphone for each. The PureJoy functionality will let them sample, loop, and manipulate their own voice, and JamiOki will suggest structure for improvised group jams. Here are some pictures of the space that the installation will occupy.

The installation will be up and running for public use as follows:
dates: Monday 3/19 - Friday 3/23
times: 10AM-10PM (except Tuesday 3/20, when it will close at 5:30PM)

If you're in the area, do come over and give it a try!
-Dave

Noise is Signal

2007-03-11T07:18:00.000-07:00

Last night at MITERS (the MIT Electronic Research Society), I showed off the new-and-improved AudioPint! The event was called "Noise is Signal :: Invention Show+Tell", and it featured a bunch of the usual MITERS / East Campus / Senior House suspects from MIT. Lots of fun, good energy, and free pizza for everyone. Other presenters included Yael Macguire, showing how (with the help of RFID) he can read minds, and Alex Hornstein explaining how he's on the verge of achieving remote-control neon tetras (these are a type of pet fish).

The video is from my presentation of the AudioPint + the PureJoy expressive sampler / looper / manipulation interface. For my pictures of the event, click here.

-Dave

AudioPint Workshop @ the Media Lab!

2007-02-21T06:37:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, Ben, David Bouchard and I organized an AudioPint workshop at the Media Lab. The goal : for everyone to build their own AudioPint, and as a nice side effect, we get to expand our tribe of musical technologists!

We gathered at 10am on a Saturday morning, and I handed out the motherboards and power supplies that VIA has donated to the AudioPint cause. Everyone had brought a rugged box to house their 'Pint, memory for the internal computer, and some brought USB audio gear. We immediately got to work, figuring out how it would all fit inside the box. Some spent the day down in the workshop drilling holes and jig-sawing their housing, while others hacked on the linux distribution, so that it would boot cleanly from a USB pen drive. By the end of the day, we had worked out most of the technical difficulties, and AudioPints were just about ready!

photos from the AudioPint workshop can be found here

We'll be doing some AudioPint office hours over the next few weeks so that everyone can finish up their 'Pints. Then, on to some pure data patching! (to visit the AudioPint webpage, click here.

-Dave

Library Music @ the MIT Music Library

2007-01-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

Less than a week after getting back from Las Vegas, AudioPint PureJoy and Jamioki were set up as an interactive installation in the MIT Music Library as a part of the "Library Music" show curated by Tod Machover. Here's the MIT News Office's article about the show, and here's another, from an Italian website.

We'll put up audio and video from this installation as soon as we wrangle it into a more manageable form. Stay tuned!

Media Attention since CES

2007-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Some press folks that I talked to at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have posted content online about the AudioPint / PureJoy demo. Here they are:

PureJoy Project Makes Everyone Musical - from Emru Townsend's blog on PCWorld.

AudioPint PureJoy MIT Media Lab Crazy Cool - an interview with Nikki Inderlied that I did for I4U news. Here's a YouTube version of the same interview, in case you have any trouble viewing the first one..

MIT Media Lab: New Music Performance Technology - an interview with Russ Johnson representing Lunch@Piero's, the organizers of our venue

-Dave

About InventMusic

2004-03-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

InventMusic is a collaborative group of musician-technologists who share a love of creating new musical instruments and experiences.

Founded by Ben Vigoda and Dave Merrill at the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, this collection of Boston-area musicians and inventors regularly meet to build, discuss, rehearse, and perform with their newly-created devices. InventMusic has worked with and learned from John Zorn and Tan Dun, and has performed at Boston ArtRages and SIGGRAPH 2006.

We are always interested in people who build or want to build experimental musical instruments (hardware, software, or other-ware) from the MIT or Boston-area community.

Also, if you are doing something cool along these lines, give us a shout and let us know. We will feature outstanding work on this site.

Send email to "dmerrill at media dot mit dot edu"

Ben & Dave (co-founders)

PureJoy and AudioPint at CES

2007-01-10T22:16:00.000-08:00

This week I took a setup with four PureJoys and the development AudioPint system to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. My trip was sponsored by VIA, the Taiwanese company that makes the small motherboards that run the AudioPint. We were all set up at an off-site location just across the street from the main Las Vegas convention center, and received a healthy flow of press in two 2.5-hour sessions on Monday and Tuesday. Due to the commercial nature of CES, the most common question that I got was "so what are you selling?" I think that my response of "nothing, at the moment" caught people off-guard, and was a breath of fresh air to many. Lots of visitors saw the potential for fun, collaborative jamming that the system offers, and many tried it out. (one guy said "this is so cool, I'd totally buy this! let me know when it's on the market") It was a successful trip overall, for several reasons:

1) The four-person AudioPint became more ruggedized and travel-worthy. I did learn, however, how HEAVY the thing is, and that next time I take it anywhere it must have its own wheels, or at least a skateboard strapped underneath.
2) I got some total newbies to play around with the system, and observed their reactions
3) I had 5 hours over 2 days where all I did was play with the system, which increased my own chops on the system
4) I got to experience Las Vegas - a first for me.

Las Vegas is an interesting place. I don't think I could spend too much time here without sinking into utter despair, since more than anywhere else I've ever been Vegas is designed to extract as much money from visitors as it can, every minute. But for just a couple of days, it provides for nonstop entertainment. Maybe I'll be back for next year's CES, though with a much lighter PureJoy/AudioPint/Jamioki rig!
-Dave

Principles of Electronic Music Controllers, Autumn 2006: Final Projects

2006-12-29T18:05:00.000-08:00

This past autumn I was TA-ing with Joe Paradiso for his class, Principles of Electronic Music Controllers. The class explored historical and technological issues in electronic music controllers. We focused on the devices that have pushed the technological boundaries of musical interaction, analyzing their physical affordances, their mappings from gesture to sound, and their use in performance. Each student in the class completed a final project, and you can read all about them here. We had a continuous virtual piano keyboard, an augmented glass harmonica, a fabric-based tangible instrument, and many other great ones. I've also put up an album in Flickr with the photos that I took during the presentations, here.
enjoy!
-Dave

Ben's Sustain Guitar

2006-10-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here's our hero, Ben Vigoda, demonstrating his invention to the world.

With a little gypsy jazz on the side.

Go baby, go.

(You can see more sustain guitar videos and information at sustainguitar.com.)

New Videos of AudioPint / PureJoy / Jamioki

2006-09-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Invent Music band at SIGGRAPH2006. The music in this video was improvised in real time from beginning to end in real time with direction by the Jamioki system. Everyone was playing Dave's PureJoys for instruments, but I included some footage from people playing their acoustic instruments earlier in the show.

Ben and Dave, jamming on PureJoys

Ben, jamming on a PureJoy

We're excited to present some new video footage of the AudioPint / PureJoy / Jamioki system in action. This is footage from our performance at SIGGRAPH 2006, as well as footage from rehearsals and development. Enjoy, and please send us any feedback, comments, questions, etc..

Build Day Update: September 23, 2006

2006-09-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

The EMI/InventMusic crew had a successful build day last Saturday at the MIT Media Lab. Some of the highlights from the day included a demo of the AudioPint and Purejoy for Gypsy-Jazz virtuoso Stephane Wrembel. Stephane also play-tested Ben's Sustain Guitar, giving some interesting feedback about how he would use it if he had one. Dave finished laying out the circuit board for his Stream-O-Plex, a 4-channel capacitive sensing system with musical applications that will be unveiled in a few months. Joe Rothermich started down the road of building the looping pedal of the future by getting the Kraft Dancepad working in windows, and later in the weekend adapted the pad to work with the PureJoy software! The day concluded with a short PureJoy jam session, featuring Ben and Dave. See the video embedded in this post for some clips from their jam, and more of Ben rocking out here.

the ped-o-tron electronic music instrument

2006-09-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick, fun, Friday afternoon project to get you in the inventmusic mood for the coming weekend. I received a free dance dance revolution (DDR) pad in the mail today from Kraft, as a part of a promotion they are running. It turns out that the pad is - electronically speaking - a USB joystick, so it was easy to connect it to pure-data and throw together a musical mapping for it in software. Watch the video to the right to see me attempt to hop out a recognizable melody on my new instrument.

I mapped each pad to a note from the C major scale, and the [select] pad in the upper left corner switches between sine wave and sawtooth wave output. Very basic, but good enough to try it out and realize that this instrument has the potential to get a person in shape by the time they reach even a intermediate skill level!

I also created a brief tutorial on how I built the instrument, here - and another video, showing the sawtooth-wave output is here.

enjoy,
-Dave

Ben, on the Tritare

2006-08-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Ben is too modest to blog this himself, but he was recently asked to weigh in on a neat new acoustic instrument, the Tritare. Built by by mathematicians Samuel Gaudet and Claude Gauthier of the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, the Tritare is a guitar-like instrument with 3-segment string networks that produce non-harmonically related overtimes, producing a richer sound than a traditional stringed instrument.

Vigoda had the following to say: "Given that so much music experimentation these days is done with computers, the tritare may be one of the last new instruments to be invented relying entirely on novel physics without incorporating any computational element."

One of the last, eh? Well, not if our very own Erik Nugent has anything to say about it! (but yes, much of our group's work does involve a computational component) To read the full article, click here.

-Dave

John Zorn Workshop

2004-03-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

Media Lab Colloquium with John Zorn
2004, March 30, 4-6pm
MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater (lower lobby)

Pictures in the studio with John Zorn to record game piece with our instruments

Easy Button Musical Interface

2006-08-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

For the Mandala performance at SIGGRAPH 2006 we needed to create footswitches so that each musician could communicate with the Mandala program. For example, when sheet music needs to be scrolled a musician hits a footswitch button to tell the computer. Other possible uses are voting on song changes, input devices to control DSP effects, etc.

To make them cheaply and simply, we hacked eight Easy Buttons from Staples. The buttons were connected via guitar cables (or cheap custom equivalents) to a hacked apart USB keyboard. The keyboard's circuit board was put into a project box, mapped out, and then soldered to 1/4" jacks. Easy Buttons were plugged into the box which was plugged into a computer using USB. The application on the computer read-in button presses as if they were keys on a keyboard being pressed and processed the input as desired.

An instructables.com tutorial was created to show how these were made.

- Joe

Bart Hopkin, the Granddaddy of Musical Invention

2006-08-17T17:39:00.000-07:00

What a great opportunity to become a contributor to this blog! Ben and Dave are some of the most creative and intelligent people I know and I am so happy every time I get a chance to work with them!

I thought I would start off my first entry by talking about the granddaddy of the modern experimental acoustic instrument movement, Bart Hopkin. Most notably he published a Zine for 14 years called the “Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly” starting in the mid 80’s. During this time he compiled descriptions of some of the most amazing and beautiful acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments being invented. A wonderful in-depth interview with Bart is located at the website New Music Box where Bart demonstrates some of his instruments and discusses the glory and the frustrations of inventing instruments. His website, windworld, is a great resource for the instrument inventor. It includes articles describing new instruments, some of Bart’s publications and recordings, and a catalog of hard to get things that inventors might be interested in. His links page is one of my favorite places to go when I have several hours to learn about other inventors out there.

--Erik Nugent
p.s. the video to the right is me, playing my 3-note didgeridoo

AudioPint status update

2006-08-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

The AudioPint underwent massive development for SIGGRAPH 2006! In the few weeks leading up to the performance, I mounted the motherboard, power supply unit and hard drive in the aluminum briefcase, and cut ventilation holes. On the software side, I tinkered with Ubuntu and ALSA enough to get the 8-channel in/out audio card working. A nice resource for turning an Ubuntu linux computer into a recording tool can be found here. Although the AudioPint is built for live performance much of the studio recording audio related how-to is useful. For a multi-person performance (more on this in a minute), multi-channel in and out is important, since not only does everyone need their own microphone, but the sound guy needs to be able to mix everyone separately sometimes, in case someone is too loud or needs to be turned up to be heard.

At SIGGRAPH, we had 6 performers on stage, each using a PureJoy connected to a single AudioPint (that is, 6 PureJoy's, 1 AudioPint total). So a single VIA motherboard with 512MB of RAM was supporting recording/sampling, looping, effects and scrubbing for 6 performers simultaneously! That was impressive. (thanks to VIA for providing us with motherboards - they rock!) We moved up to an EPIA SP13000 from an SP8000 (the 8000 is a lower-power, fanless motherboard whereas the 13000 is faster and has a CPU fan) after finding that we would max out the 8000's processing capabilities when multiple people started using effects at the same time. Reverb, though nice, is a particularly costly operation since it requires a running convolution, hence the need for the faster board.

What's next? Then plan is to build a set of more powerful AudioPints with wireless, both WiFi for communication with other AudioPints, and wireless input (perhaps Bluetooth) for control and audio. Wireless input will free up a performer on stage to run around and entertain the crowd during a show. The InventMusic crew will continue to perform with the AudioPints, and we'd also like to get them into the hands of some professional musicians, to get more feedback about their design.

Here's a picture of AudioPint under heavy development, and the intense cableage that results!

-Dave

Thank You Note for SIGGRAPH2006! from Ben Vigoda.

2006-08-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

Slides from
SIGGRAPH Presentation (.PDF)

Thank you everyone! These shows where we try to pull together something new are admittedly very very hard work and very taxing. I was absolutely exhausted driving home and fell asleep as soon as I walked in the door of my house last night.

This morning though, reflecting on the performance, I think the music was really wonderful and beautiful. Gorgeous layers in "hey" , rich, intense sounds in the PureJoy game when it settled in. Swing Gitan was such a nice counterpoint to the other sounds, and although I can't recall if we managed to turn on the random mode for Never Grumbling But Sometimes during the performance, when we played it in random order in rehearsal it was so fascinating how well it worked to reconstruct it in this way.

As we went into the show, we were still learning how to handle the transitions and remember the functions of all of the buttonry. The sheer mass of equipment and cabling we had to manage was daunting. For a little while there we were somewhere it was a little more like being in the army corps of engineers than in a band. Of course any unfamiliar instrument or system feels unwieldy at first - just think back to your early days of playing your primary instrument! But remarkably we got beyond all of that in a very short period of time, and we actually had a glimpse of the musical promise in this system. We got beyond buttons to music and it was exciting - it sounded beautiful!

For me, it was such a pleasure to lay down harmony lines one after another within everything else that was going on, and just jamming on sections knowing that all of the high level responsibility for thinking about where the jam was going was taken care of. We managed it of course because you guys are all such tremendous musicians in addition to being in Lauren's words, "the sweetest bunch of guys you could ever want to have tramping through your house at 3 in the morning." Well actually to do her credit, she didn't say anything about tramping, she just said you were all sweet.

I want to say an especially heartful thanks to Joe Rothermich for spending entire Saturdays hacking easy buttons, which I might add, WORKED PERFECTLY! And for videotaping and just overall contributing his great energy. And to Bret Bjurstrom for painting his wonderful and painstaking images and spending at least 5 hours repeating the same copy layer, export, click, select png, in photoshop in order to animate Never Grumbling But Sometimes. The organizing committee for the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2006 did an excellent job! I also know I speak for everyone in saying thanks to Lauren for taking care of us while we were working so hard all week.

You know Dave and I were wondering aloud yesterday morning to each other why we do this. And despite my exhaustion, it was not at all a cynical question, just a reflective one during a quiet moment in the car. I guess the best answer I can come up with for myself is that we are part of a stream of human work that is bigger than us and longer than any one human lifetime. On the way home, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said, "Music is everything that War is not," and I think I sort of slept on that. During the talk yesterday, I honored several people such as Viola Spolin for having contributed new ideas and new methods to the history of music and theater. Viola had a difficult time making money doing what she did actually, but in addition to her games forming the basis for Comedy Improv, and being used daily in almost every theater and film troupe in the Western world, the games she developed gave society tools for collaboration and creativity that go beyond the art world and are also used for example in summer camps and schools, and for training political mediators. To me it is to honor the work of people like her, that we work so hard to make our own small contribution to the human river of sounds and ideas.

So thanks once again to all of you, I am so honored to play with all of you!!!

Ben

Mandala Piece at SIGGRAPH

2006-07-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Experimental Musical Instrument Workshop at MIT performs Mandala at SIGGRAPH 2006.

Mandala is a video game that structures group musical improvisation.

SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Performance Area, Monday July 31, 2006 4-5:45pm.
Boston World Trade Center Google Map

Musicians:
Shawn Hershey - Acoustic and Electric Trumpet
David Merrill - PureJoy/AudioPint, Erik Nugent - Voice, Slide Bagpipe, and Other Musical Constructions
John Rice - Acoustic and Electric Bass, Chris Scharl - Acoustic and Electric Percussion
Ben Vigoda - Acoustic and Electric Guitar, All - PureJoy/AudioPint.

Designers: Bret Bjurstrom - Artwork, Shawn Hershey - Mandala Code, David Merrill - PureJoy/AudioPint, Joe Rothermich - Mandala Easy Button Hardware Interface, Ben Vigoda - Mandala Code and Principal Agitator.