DMI

Digital Musical Instruments

Higher Order Gestalt Fromage

Here is a video of the piece Higher Order Gestalt Fromage for two soprano T-Sticks and 24 channel loudspeaker array, composed and performed by blablaTrains (Ana Dall’Ara-Majek and Takuto Fukuda). The piece was premiered in the live@CIRMMT concert series on 13 February 2020 at Music and Multimedia Room (MMR) at McGill University.

I love the way they played with the relationships between gesture and sound! Unfortunately those of who could attend in-person have to imagine the spatialization aspect of the performance since it can’t come across in the stereo audio here.

Workshop on the T-Stick @CIRMMT

The T-Stick DMI

Composer/instrumentalist D. Andrew Stewart performing the soprano T-Stick.

On Saturday November 16, 2019, CIRMMT hosted a workshop on the T-Stick digital musical instrument. The workshop included presentations by myself, composer D. Andrew Stewart (the other originator of the T-Stick), Eduardo Meneses, Takuto Fukuda, Mathias Bredholt, and Mathias Kirkegaard. Presentations covered the history, design, and development of the instrument; mapping and performance practice; and current advances including embedding libmapper and algorithms for high-level gestural descriptors in the instrument firmware and the addition of programmable force-feedback hardware to the physical structure of the DMI.

The workshop also served to launch the 2019 T-Stick Creation Project, a new  program supporting composition for the T-Stick which will culminate in a concert performance in February 2020.

This workshop explores the development of compositional and performance practices for the T-Sticks—a family of gestural musical controllers designed to sense performer interactions such as touching, tapping, twisting, tilting, squeezing, and shaking. Joseph Malloch—the T-Stick designer (Dalhousie University)—and D. Andrew Stewart—composer/T-Stick instrumentalist (University of Lethbridge)—will discuss the instrument design and compositional possibilities for the T-Sticks, followed by a hands-on workshop for the practical use of the T-Stick, including how to set up, perform and notate. Finally, the workshop will include a report on the CIRMMT Student Award project, Between design, composition, and performance: expanding and embedding a high-level gesture vocabulary for the T-Stick, by Eduardo Meneses and Takuto Fukuda.

Digital Orchestra Toolbox featured on Cycling74.com

Content You Need: Digital Orchestra Toolboxdot_icon

We tend to focus a lot on new Max objects in the Package Manager, but with Max there are many ways to solve problems without compiling externals. This Package Manager release brings a collection of highly practical Max abstractions from McGill University’s IDMIL, designed with music and digital orchestra projects in mind. Looking at this package, all of the well-organized abstractions are clearly the result of real-world patching that we can all learn a few tricks from.

The Digital Orchestra Toolbox is now available in the Max Package Manager

3DMIN Symposium

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Last week I was back in Berlin for an exhibition, concert and international symposium on Design, Development, and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments (3DMIN). The symposium was titled “Musical Instruments in the 21st Century — Identities, Configurations, Practices” and included a range of interesting speakers from the 3DMIN project itself and invitees like myself. The other speakers included: