DMI

Digital Musical Instruments

TIEM database online

The online database for the Taxonomy of Realtime Interfaces for Electronic Music Performance project is now online. It currently includes information on 45 interfaces and instruments submitted to their online survey. From the website:

We are interested in exploring the practice and application of new interfaces for real-time electronic music performance. This research is part of an Australian Research Council Linkage project titled “Performance Practice in New Interfaces for Realtime Electronic Music Performance.”

This research is being carried out at VIPRE MARCS Auditory Laboratories, the University of Western Sydney in partnership with EMF, Infusion Systems and The Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at McGill University.

Another T-Stick video

Since some of my project documentation videos are longer than 10 minutes (the cutoff for YouTube), I created an IDMIL account on Vimeo, where the only limit is to stay under 500MB/week of uploaded material. The uploading interface is very nice, and I think the videos look way better…

Here’s a slightly old video: Brazilian percussionist Fernando Rocha playing the original T-Stick prototype during his first doctoral lecture-recital at McGill. The year is 2006‚ the composition is The One, by D. Andrew Stewart.

Unfortunately I used up most of those 500MB with this video, so I have to wait a week before adding another. We’ll also keep the YouTube account, since their community/user base is rather huge 🙂

The Hyper-Kalimba

One of my main goals for the summer is to catch up on some documentation of past projects, updating webpages, editing and posting photos and videos, etc. This time the documentation is a video of Fernando Rocha performing on the Hyper-Kalimba, an augmented instrument we have been working on for around a year now.

 

Fernando and I have worked together before (on the T-Stick and Digital Orchestra projects), and he approached me for some instruction in Max/MSP programming, which he required for another project he was working on. He came up with the idea of using a kalimba he owned as a tool for exploring audio signal processing. Since the kalimba already had a contact microphone installed, it was simple to connect to a computer, and was obviously more portable than many of the other percussion instruments he plays.

After working with the kalimba for a while, we decided to begin augmenting it with some sensors for controlling the parameters of Fernando’s Max/MSP programming. We were careful throughout the process to avoid interfering with tradition kalimba technique, and added new sensors slowly, allowing time for evaluating the impact of each change before moving forward. Currently, the “Hyper-Kalimba” contains FSR pressure sensors, a 3-axis accelerometer for tilt and acceleration, and 2 buttons, in addition to the contact microphone.

Michel Waisvisz Talk/Performance

I just finished uploading some video from the IDMIL archive to YouTube: a keynote lecture and performance by the late Michel Waisvisz (of STEIM, Amsterdam) from the NIME conference in 2003. Waisvisz made huge contributions to the field of gesture- and touch-controlled electronic music, inventing and performing with The Hands, the Cracklebox, and the Web.

Here is part 1 of 6:

The rest of the lecture can be viewed here.