wavelounge

soundcloud global meetup

2011-10-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

if you haven't used soundcloud and you are a sound creator or listener, you are missing tons. soundcloud is a social platform to share sound, music, and any type of audio. you can record, upload, and share any sounds you capture from your surrounding to your musical creations or even if you want to have your own alternative radio, or even if you want to share a conversation. what i love about soundcloud is that the sound creators are not promoted depending on their recording label or sound studio, instead it's a social network that people listen to what ever sound they are more interested in from all over the world. if you are interested in adding your own features, soundcloud also has a fantastic api that you can add up your own plug-ins or apps.
good news for the users and non-users of soundcloud is that there will be a global soundcloud day this coming wednesday and there are soundcloud events all over the globe on that day. i helped with a fantastic group of soundclouders in san francisco to have one in our city. if you like to hear more about soundcloud or share your experience with it and meet some people who love sharing sounds or using soundcloud api, join us on wednesday october 5th 2011 7pm-10pm @ the summit, 780 valencia.

we will feature soundcloud user instillations and apps using the soundcloud api, and will be online on twitter under the #SCMeetupSF hash-tag, so you can join us even if you're not at the summit.

the poster of the event is generously created by max poynton.

transitions 2011

2011-09-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

don't miss these two great concerts at ccrma. every year when new students come there's a transition concert to welcome them and let them hear what kind of sounds are made at ccrma and what are all the possibilities. bring your blankets and hang out in the ccrma courtyard in these two evenings of electronic music. there will be sixteen loudspeakers, four subwoofers, and twenty seven squirrels that live under the lawn.

TRANSITIONS 2011 - night 1: soundscapes under the stars
Wednesday, 9/28, 8pm, CCRMA courtyard
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/transitions-2011-night-1-acousmatic
Acousmatic music by John Chowning, Gilles Gobeil, Jonty Harrison,
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, Ake Parmerud, Hans Tutschku, and Unknown!

TRANSITIONS 2011 - night 2: live electronic music
Thursday, 9/29, 8pm, CCRMA courtyard
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/transitions-2011-night-2-live-electronic-music
Music by Chris Carlson, Bjoern Erlach, Mark Applebaum, John Granzow&
Hongchan Choi, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, Mike Rotondo& Nick Kruge, Luke
Dahl, Locky, Cloud Veins.

sfemf 2011

2011-09-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

the 12th annual san francisco electronic music festival took place on september 8 -11 in sfmoma and brava theater. it was the first time that sfmoma hosted one of the nights and it was amazing to have some amazing sounds in that space.

one of the highlights of this year's festival was a tribute to max mathews. as you may already know we lost the father of computer music earlier this year. in sfemf marielle jakobsons and diane douglas played improv for olympiad using max's phaser filters. max mathews' phaser filters create tuned resonances within any sound played through them., the way that a room can amplify certain frequencies depending on its shape. max loved to play these filters melodically to constantly shift the resonant space. he was also interested in harmonics for example, changing the tuning of his filters to quarter tones or complex chords.

from other new composers and media artists i was most fascinated by the music of cadet kuhne. her piece stora bioern is a collaboration with visual artist alba corral. the piece is based on great bear constellation using a recursive algorithm to compose dynamics and structures. corral used processing to create visuals. since i am a fan of open source software, processing, i really enjoyed what she has done with it. there are regularly processing workshops at gaffta if you are interested in learning more about the software. also cadets pulsing sound progressing in sync with the visuals were very fascinating.

rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

2011-06-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

i'm not a literature expert to talk about getrude stein's writings, but i like them rhythmically and enjoy how she plays with phrases. also i respect her work as being a contemporary art collector. there are two amazing exhibits in san francisco now on her life, one at sfmoma, and one at contemporary jewish museum. in these exhibits, her works in literature and art, life and relationships, and even works of artists about her are exhibited.

one of my very favorite art works on these exhibits is deborah sperber's after picasso. this work is based on picasso's portrait of getrude stein which is at metropolitan museum of art in new york. what sperber has done with several classic pieces is amazing. she has recreated these classic art works by using thousands of spools of colored thread arranged in abstract patterns that pulled into focus when viewed through a circular device resampling a crystal ball. from a few feet away they look like vague, pixilated color but through the optical device you see the perfect reproduction of the painting of picasso.

another interesting installation in this exhibit is terry berlier's human tuning fork #4. i really enjoyed her pan lid gamelan when she exhibited it with us at somaarts. that was a very interactive piece that you could play gamelan on an array of pan lids mounted on the wall. the human tuning fork is less interactive but very interesting. there are circles of tiny speakers mounted on the wall, each representing one country in the world. each speaker is wired parallel to the other which means the whole system either works all together or not at all. a sound recording of getrude stein text is played by the speakers which is translated into several languages.

ccrma fall concert

2010-11-17T10:39:00.000-08:00

is time for another amazing night at ccrma in the form of a cagean musiccircus. there are all kinds of computer music in the program: installations, live performances, iphone music, and tape pieces: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/ccrma-fall-concert-cagean-musicircus

i was very inspired by benoit mandelbrot recently. since he passed away about a month ago, i went back to my mathematical interests and thought of using fractal algorithms to generate sound. i know i'm not the first person thinking about it but it inspired me to create new sound textures. in case you are not familiar with fractal geometry and are not much into mathematics to read about it i recommend this great documentary: hunting the hidden dimension.

i will be performing the piece fractale at ccrma's listening room as part of the cagean musiccircus tomorrow night. the piece has two sections; in the first one i tried to use fractals in a more rhytmic fashion whereas in the second part i have taken a more melodic approach. also having the listening room to create multichannel music is inspiring.

treasure island music festival

2010-10-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

last weekend we went to treasure island music festival. it was definitely very different from european versions of it. music-wise the first day was more beat music that i rather go to see and the second day mostly indie. i really enjoyed deadmou5's show. great visuals, entertaining, and some good beats. kruder and dorfmeister were also one of the reasons i went to the festival on sunday, but they lacked energy that day. i used to see them in flex in vienna almost every week, but they used to spin more drum and base than lounge music. their show was still good but didn't make me dance. another entertaining band that day was die antwort but not the austrian one, the south african one. their words were a bit too harsh but they were entertaining.

the festival was very well organized. there were shuttle buses all day long from sf to the festival and back, great view of the city from the island, and an an awesome silent disco for taking breaks from the crowd. you could listen to the dj's music over a headphone and dance or just chill out in the silence and see people dancing to the beats.

the chemical brothers

2010-09-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

since i have been a fan of the chemical brothers for ages and i recently saw them live again i had to write a short post about them. when i first heard their exit planet dust album in late 90s i could not resist their beats. the first live show i saw them was in 2002 in vienna where they began with the amazing track it began in afrika ka ka! it seems that they were using a proper analog set; a couple of doepfer sequencers, a nord modular, machinedrum, monomachine and ... it was one of those mind blowing live shows that i could not stop thinking about for ages and they have never moved me as much as that show any more.

last time i saw them was very different. they made less industrial beats and more melodic tracks but it was again amazing in a different way. since 2008 they have been working with two amazing visual artists: adam smith and marcus lyall. these two artists have totally brought a fresh atmosphere to the chemical brothers' live shows. two weeks ago in oakland was also very similar to what i saw three years ago; still amazing but nothing new. check out my favorite track horsepower on vimeo.

slork spring concert

2010-06-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

we are having the annual spring concert of slork tonight at 8.00 pm in dinkelspiel auditorium at stanford. the diversity of the slork members this time has made a very interesting combination of instruments and compositions which is a new and unique experience.

we are not playing any of the laptop orchestra classics such as drones, clix and chrystalis which i all love but has been performed too many times. all the pieces are brand new and also the implementations behind them.

my group has worked on a twitter piece. we have a python server that parses all the tweets related to a couple of hash-words (for example tonight will be #slork and #music) and makes trees of the tweets regarding their closeness in the number of words they have in common. then the server sends osc messages to chuck and processing where we sonify and visualize the tweets. the sonification of the tweets is more like an echo of each tweet arriving in the engine and we change the timbre, sound sequences, modes and tempo in real time.

the concept of the piece is to engage performers and audience in an interactive experience. during the concert slorkers will be tweeting on their slork machines and audience can tweet on their smart phones. if they want their tweets to be seen and heard they can use #slork, #music and #technology in the text of their tweet. if you can't make it to the concert, make sure you take part by tweeting.

there are also several other interesting compositions, from a "virtual headbang orchestra" and a "bell choir" to "sonification of the human brain waves".

slorktastik

2010-04-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

we have a chamber concert tomorrow night at the knoll. we perform all new works for laptops, ipad, iphone; all instruments and pieces developed by the members of the stanford laptop orchestra.

we have made a shaker instrument that is controlled by the laptop's accelerometer. there are several gesture based instruments that sound amazing, some drum instruments and of course a reactipad(reactable for ipad.)

more details on the website:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/stanford-laptop-orchestra-pres

modulations at soma arts

2010-04-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

modulations is a yearly event organized by amazing ccrma community thanks to carr, sasha and every one. the event is a collection electronic music performances, sound installations, djs and interactive art. please join us tomorrow night at soma arts for this years modulations.

details about the event are posted on:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/modulations-v2.2

http://blog.somarts.org/

work of women artist: barcmut + gray area

2010-03-07T20:44:00.000-08:00

come and see us this thursday at gaffta (gray area foundation for the arts) at 7.00 pm.
there'll be julia ogrydziak, cheryl e. leonard, surabhi saraf and me presenting some of our recent works in computer music.
barcmut is a fantastic community of computer musicians and audio geeks in the bay area and i have learned a lot from the experienced people in this community. i'm glad that the event is in gaffta which is an amazing non profit gallery in tenderloin that brings a variety of digital art and culture together.

the political me

2010-02-04T18:59:00.001-08:00

my mind has been very busy with all that has been going on in my birthplace in the last six months and it has been very sad to see how people are living under a brutal dictatorship. these days i have been more nostalgic because of the 30th anniversary of the dictatorship in iran and seeing how the government is celebrating 30 years of brutality by putting so many young students in prisons ...

i have a very diverse musical background. studied western classical music since childhood and never practiced persian radif music. one of my heroes was my cousin's violin professor who used to be the tehran symphony's conductor. professor heshmat sanjari has composed some masterpieces of persian symphonic music. one of them is "persian pictures". this was the first symphony i heard live in my life when i was a kid and it brings me back to my childhood. although my favorite movement "dance of dayereh" is a very happy one, it can make me dance or cry at the same time. i took a short excerpt of the theme of this movement and mixed a piece to commemorate students who have been demonstrating in iran in the last six months, who have been in prison and who have lost their lives ...

i also wanted to show my respect to the tehran symphony. i read this article in nyt and felt sorry for them having to represent a government that has been so harsh to them and to music for the last thirty years.

click on the political prisoner to listen to my piece.

inspired by trimpin

2010-02-01T20:21:00.001-08:00

on weekend "trimpin: the sound of invention directed" by "peter esmonde" was screened in "red vic movie house" in san francisco. if you don't know trimpin, you should definitely watch this movie. he is an amazing inventor, engineer, sound and multimedia artist and sculptor. i am totally inspired after watching this movie and we are very fortunate in the bay area that he'll be at stanford next year to collaborate with sica(stanford institute for creativity & the arts).

steve reich at stanford

2010-01-08T00:32:00.001-08:00

"steve reich" and "beryl korot" were at stanford last night. it was such an honor to see them in person and hearing their talk about their collaborative audio/visual works. reich is one of my favorite composers and i loved to see how modest he and his wife are and i enjoyed their sense of humor.

they mainly discussed "three tales" and "the cave". both works are from 90s. three tales shows concerns on new technology, cloning, wars and weapons ... you can either get the whole dvd or watch parts of it on a dvd of several modern pieces called ohm. unfortunately the video can't show the whole work since there were live performers and singers in addition to several screens of visuals in the live performance in 90s.

the cave is an interesting look at people from different religions. it's interesting to see how diverse the interpretations of different people about the same story could be.

mopho

2009-12-04T19:17:00.000-08:00

mopho: stanford mobile phone orchestra had it's first performance of the year last night at ccrma. the variety of interfaces were amazing and it sounds great. comparing to last year when we had only a couple of instruments on iphone making some drone-like sounds; last night's instruments were very diverse and astounding. my favorite piece was vox aeterna by ge. he used human and augmented voices generated by auto-tune of i am t-pain. another interesting piece was nick's wind chimes where he used compass and microphone of iphone to control recorded sounds slowly evolving into surround sound.

another amazing performance was jieun's colorful gathering where she brought all performers together and they jammed on her multi-touch based instrument on iphone.
i uploaded some low quality videos of the event on youtube.

ccrma fall concert

2009-11-16T11:56:00.001-08:00

we had an amazing experience at ccrma on thursday. it was in the character of a john cage musiccircus. the audience were encouraged to amble through the building with refreshments in hand and enjoy the performances and installations all over the building.

i had an installation in the listening room. this room is very special to me because i can take advantage of 16 speakers. speakers are in octagonal setup 92 inches apart in three vertical spaces around the room, above the room and under the room.

i had a a mixed media piece for 16 channels audio + text-based visuals + paper junkmail covering the hallway. my installation was called "junkmail" as a reaction to the fact that "it takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in american mailboxes each year.” this fact and a lot more on this topic can be found on forest ethics.

there were lots of good performances all over the building, inside and outside ccrma. some of the highlights were carr's lolfo. i also liked the amazing drones of sweat shop boys. i would upload a short video of my installation as soon as i have it but here a couple of pics for now.

a short video of the installation is available on youtube.

barcmut

2009-10-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

i have been going to the bay area computer music technology group meetups for a while and never got the chance to write about these amazing events. it's a fantastic gathering of computer musicians, programmers, djs and ... in the bay area.

last night's event was in an amazing venue in the middle of tenderloin: gray area foundation for the art. i totally recommend you to just visit this place even if you don't make it to go to any events. one of the amazing exhibits at the moment is tenderloin dynamic which is a series of maps and interactive objects to explore tenderloin district mostly through data sets.

the first presenter last night was jef scott. his work is an interactive biofeedback musical instrument using max/msp/jitter and ableton live. the data coming from body is transformed into audio/visual feedback. the physical and mental energy is transformed into more reddish colors and more industrial and rough sounds the more nervous the user is.

the second presenter was edison from monome community. he was djing breakbeats and creating sound using his diy yellow lunchbox. he also uses max/msp in addition to nintendo ds to transfer input from his love box.

the third presenter was preshish moments who also had his diy wooden controller shredder and control software written in max/msp.

transitions: outdoor ccrma concert

2009-09-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

we have an outdoor concert at ccrma's courtyard tonight. i have a new piece shooting stars to perform in this concert. it's a perfect summer night for laying on the grass and listening to computer music.

mixed reality performance: una serata in Sirikata

2009-09-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

we had an interesting performance on weekend performing on laptops and acoustic instruments on three different locations: ccrma at stanford, milano and banff. we met online in sirikata environment before a 300 live audience in milan. the highlight was a new realization of terry Riley's piece in c. a short video of the performance is available. the concert was part of mito festival of music in milan.

distinctive voices @ the beckman center

2009-07-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

we had a concert in march at university of irvine. the video is uploaded now, check it out. i have to mention that the sound quality is not good at all.

slork @ distinctive voices

maker fair

2009-06-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

another crazy week. we had open house at ccrma, then maker fair weekend and now preparing for slork concert.

last weekend was maker fair in san mateo. saw lots of interesting and some amazing projects. we also had a section for computer music. i presented my gestonic instrument. it was a lot of fun to see so many people exploring it.

performances

2009-05-19T00:02:00.001-07:00

the last couple of weeks were crazy. we had to prepare for two slork concerts, but it was totally worth it and we delivered two fantastic brand new performances. to see the pieces we played and access the audio files, check out the website: slorktastic!

i also composed a piece for cello and computer and performed it on IPL concert on may 4th. i also have a piece coming out on the ccrma spring concert next week. look forward to seeing you there.

also the BIG slork concert is coming up on june 4th. you shouldn't miss this one.

two more events to grab your attention to:

there is ccrma's open house on may 29th at the knoll.

we also present our projects in maker fair at the technology group booth.

i am going to demonstrate my gestonic instrument in both events.

algorithmic music and images

2009-04-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

bret battey lectured in our composition seminar last week. he creates electronic music and multimedia works and installations. he has diverse professional and educational background in music composition, computer science, graphic and electronics. his works have very strong algorithmic component in addition to their creative nature. he presented the development of his audio visual works in the last couple of decades for the class. he also performed an hour of his pieces on ccrma stage. it was a great opportunity to see his works on a big screen and hear them from very good speakers.

from kabuki to dumb type

2009-04-08T18:55:00.000-07:00

we had an interesting discussion on modern opera in japan in composition class today. our seminar started with talking about kabuki, bunarku and noh. kabuki is the popular entertainment art since 1603 in japan. bunraku is the puppet theatre. japanese puppet theatre is very fragile and detailed. noh is the most elit and sophisticated type of theatre in japan. it gets into spirit and depth of the person an it is extremely slow and needs a lot of concentration. if you don't know what these terms mean and you are still curious, check out some examples or read about it. i just wanted to introduce these art forms to you, for each of these topics i should write a whole dissertation to get into their depth.

what is more interesting for me is all the modern movements in recent decades. after second world war butoh movement started in japan. it involves taboo topics of the society performed in the form of dance by dancers in white moving their body in hyper controlled motions. if i had to translate the movements to music, i could say it has a lot of slow but exact microtones in it. check out the video and explore it yourself: butoh by sankai juku.

another interesting group in the new japan's theatre is dumb type. dumb type is an interdisciplinary group of artists in kyoto. they make amazing multimedia projects, dance and theatre performances. their most famous pieces are voyage, memorandum, and pH.

i like true as well.

gestonic

2009-04-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

Specification

Gestonic is a video-based interface for the sonification of hand gestures for real-time timbre control. The central role of hand gestures in social and musical interaction (such as conducting) was the original motivation for this project. Gestonic is being used to make computer-based instruments more interactive. It also allows the musicians to create sonorous and visual
compositions in real time. Gestonic explores models for sonification of musical expression. It does not use the direct-mapping of gesture-to-sound such as is commonly applied in acoustic instruments. Instead, it employs an indirect mapping strategy by making use of the color and timbre of the sound. The system consists of a laptop's camera, the filtering of camera input via the open source software known as Processing, the sending of OSC control messages to the audio-processing program known as ChucK, and finally the parameter-mapping and sound synthesis enabled by ChucK.

Gestonic consists of two main components:

• Gesture and Image Processing: This part of the system consists of a laptop's video camera and an Open Source software called Processing to filter and calibrate data received from the camera. In the current prototype of Gestonic, the input screen is divided into four sections: each represents a different instrument. In each section, the relative and absolute brightness and
the amount of change compared to the previous frame in red, green and blue is measured. Furthermore, four different blobs each detecting a different color (white, red, green and blue) show up on the screen. By moving objects with the same color as a blob, color tracking those objects with blob tracking is possible, so there are four more possible parameters to map to sound. Chuck and Processing communicate via OSC messages sent from Processing to ChucK in order to manipulate sound and send the opposite direction to control the video output to make the instrument more expressive.

• Data Processing and Sound Synthesis: ChucK programs are used to manipulate data received from Processing to synthesize sound.

Work in Progress

Gestonic is a work-in-progress and there is a lot more to be done to formulate expressive sounds from expressive gestures. Each section on the video frame is mapped to a different instrument. So far, the modules for four types of instruments are implemented. One is a drone like sound. The second instrument is a randomly generated, particle-like sound. The timbre and reverb of this sound is manipulated with gestures. In the future, the density of these random sounds will be indirectly mapped to the density of motion in the image. The third instrument is a beat-detecting instrument tracking the beats in motion. The fourth instrument is a set of human voices. The voices are manipulated with a granular synthesizer and grain parameters are mapped to blob motions received from the video.

Progress week 2

I started reading on Neural Networks to train the instrument by making some basic gesture recognitions possible. I looked into Neural Networks in Processing and Neural Network toolbox in Matlab. Some Neural Networks related References are added below.

Progress week 3

After playing around with matlab's nn toolbox and learning about basic concepts of image recognition such as morphology I decided to use something more practical. Matlab is good for analyzing images, but not for real time performance.

I am finally using Wekinator a free package to facilitat rapid development with machine learning in live music performance. The big advantage of this package is that it is very chucK friendly and it helps me to do real time motion extraction from camera input and the implementation of learning methods in Wekinator and sound synthesis with chuck.

Progress week 4

This week I started to make a simple one layered Neural Network in processing. It gets input from mouse, I haven't mapped it to the video camera yet. So far I can read six different drawings from the screen and train the network with those input drawings. The longer the training the less the error of recognizing the proper drawing. The next step is to get input from the camera. Then the question is how can I proceed? How can I make the training work in real time?

Progress week 5

As we approached the middle of the quarter, we have to deliver the first draft of our paper for this project, so I started to read more and get a deeper understanding of gesture based systems using neural network. I ran into at least twenty different systems and each in a way similar to the others but also unique is certain ways.

- Glove Talker

- Japanese sign-language recognition system

- Japanese manual alphabet recognition system

- Musical conducting gesture recognition system

- handshape recognition system

- Given: a handshape(postures) and dynamic gestures recognition system

- Coverbal gesture recognition system

- Sign motion understanding system

I am going to explain some details about these systems and some of their similarities that are useful in my implementation. Some main structural components of gestures that were used in most of these systems are:

- motion path length

- gesture duration

- maximum hand velocity

- flex for thumb, index, middle and annular fingers

- hand orientations

Progress week 6

This week we are submitting the first draft of our paper. I will upload my paper here soon.

In addition I worked on some image processing stuff. I have approached the problem from two different ways:

- analyzing by brightness

- analyzing by pixelation

I am still working on feeding these values to the neural net.

Progress week 7

This week I worked on making new sounds to map to gestures. It is hard to make sounds interesting enough and map in a non- linear way to make it more EXPRESSIVE!

A good inspiration was that I met with Troika Ranch Dance company. They demonstrated their software, isadora which is totally what I want to want to achieve with my software but instead of their approach, I only use open source software.

Results

The final paper that I summarized all the findings of this project is submitted and published at IHCI conference 2009, San Diego. Paper is available upon request.

Links and References

1. Machover, T.: Instruments, Interactivity, and Inevitability. Proceedings of the NIME International Conference (2002)

2. Kurze, M.: TDraw: a Computer-based Tactile Drawing Tool for Blind People. Proceedings of 2nd Annual ACM Conference on Assistive technologies. ACM Press. Canada (1996) 131-138

3. Fels, S.S., Hinton, G.E.: Glove-Talk: A Neural Network Interface between a Data-glove and a Speech Synthesizer. IEEE Trans. On Neural Networks, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1993)

4. “Processing” website

5. Wright, M., Freed, A.: Open SoundControl: A New Protocol for Communicating with Sound Synthesizers. ICMC. Thessaloniki (1997)

6. Wang, G., Cook, P.R.: ChucK: A DAFx, Concurrent, On-the-fly Audio Programming Language. Proceedings of the ICMC (2003)

7. Carette, E.C., Kendall, R.A.: Comparative Music Perception and Cognition. Academic Press (1999)

Neural Network References

1. Hunt, A., Hermann, T. : The Importance of Interaction in Sonification, ICAD (2004).

2. Kolman, E., Margaliot, M. : A New Approach to Knowledge-Based Design of Recurrent Neural Networks. (2006)

3. Franklin, K., Roberts, J. : A Path Based Model for Sonification.

4. Boehm, K., Broll, W., Sokolewicz, M. : Dynamic Gesture Recognition Using Neural Networks; A Fundament for Advanced Interaction Construction, SPIE Conference Electronic Imaging Science & Technology, San Jose California. (1994)

rocco di pietro

2009-04-03T13:21:00.001-07:00

we had the honor to have a guest composer during the winter quarter at ccrma. rocco was advising us on making music and he composed a lot himself too in this period. he even composed a piece for lap top orchestra and we performed it at ccrma and uc irvine. his piece for slork is called 'one stone flow'. it starts with some nature sounds played by laptops, then leading to drone like sounds played with laptops controlled by joysticks and the chords played at the piano. and finally laptops play interviews with the composers who have had influence on rocco's music, or were his teachers such as maderna, foss, boulez and finally john chowning. then the voices of the composers are manipulated with granular synthesis and build up a chaotic sound. the piece ends with a huge laugh played by all laptops.

if you want to hear rocco's interview with sica check out here.

more composers

2009-03-09T23:32:00.001-07:00

last week we had a very interesting guest composer "alvin curran". his music is made of electronic and environmental sounds. he has compositions from lake concerts featuring musicians in row boats to ship horn concerts. one of my favourite is his "floor plan/notes from underground" which was a holocaust memorial installation at ars electronica in linz.

good news for san francisco and bay area residents: he has a concert coming up this sunday(march 15th) at contemporary jewish museum in san francisco.

guest composers

2009-02-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

we have had very interesting composers as guests at ccrma in the last couple of weeks. first "yinam leef" was here for pan asian music festival. we had the honor to have a class with him on composition seminar. i don't need to explain how rich and beautiful his music is, you can just listen to his music yourself but i just mention what moved me in his class was that he and lots of great composers have learned composition in a very classical western style and they are not sure if that's the best way to teach it to the next generations. on the one hand having the luxury of learning harmony and counterpoint in early ages help the composer to get to a deeper level in music, but doesn't it take some of her creativity? for example in "berlin hochschule der kuenste" the composition students don't go through this classical education and they don't limit themselves to it. what do you think?

tape festival

2009-02-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

last weekend i we went to tape music festival in san francisco. it was in cellspace which is a very cool venue but not necessarily for tape music. the acoustic of the room adds another roughness to the sound, which depending on the sound could make it sound cooler or not.

i really enjoyed a piece "etude aux sons animes" by pierre schaeffer. he has made use of very unique fantastic sounds that i could feel myself floating in a metal bowl or dropping metal ball on my ears. another favourite piece of mine was a composition of thom blum which was especially clean and i enjoyed how rich the whole sound was and clean the it moved from one texture to another. and of course my very favourite wave that night was ligeti's artikulation. it was nice to hear them through eight speakers in a new environment.

waves of the week!

2009-01-23T17:03:00.000-08:00

i have a very crazy schedule and never have time to listen to music qualitatively during the week. but every weekend i borrow five to ten cds from stanford music library and take time to listen to them and some times analyzing them. if you do the same thing could be great to start some listening discussions on this blog.

one of the cds i have got for this week is voices 1900/2000 a choral journey through the twentieth century. very beautiful sounds.

another set of waves i listened to this week were tons of gyoergy ligeti's music. having lived in vienna in the last decade of my life, i didn't hear as much ligeti music there as in the last week. but some of his masterpieces were performed in wien-modern (a yearly music festival in vienna on 20th century music.) my favourite ligeti's orchestral piece is atmospheres. this piece has such a thick texture with a huge variety of timbres. you might have heard it in the stanley kubrik's 2001, a space odyssey. enjoy listening to it while looking at the scores. the score is visually as rich and thick as the sound.

why wavelounge?

2009-01-22T22:52:00.000-08:00

this blog is devoted to computer music. generating, listening, reading and discussing about electroacoustic music.

feel free to discuss and add comments and suggestions.
i take part in composing, coding and performance with slork (stanford lap top orchestra). we had a performance a couple of weeks ago at macworld. here a video to warm up this blog.
slork at macworld

who's visda?

2009-01-19T20:32:00.001-08:00

i am currently a music, science and technology student at ccrma (centre for computer research in music and acoustics) at stanford university.
i was born in tehran, emigrated to austria/vienna in the second decade of my life, then re-emigrated to california/ san francisco in the third decade of my life. next i am planning to emigrate to saturn to fulfill my childhood dreams.
my passion for astronomy and outer space led me to study physics in undergrad., then the fascination of computer science and new technologies led me to continue my education in computer science. i have always had a passion for music and played piano since childhood. while i improved my knowledge in computer technology, i learnt to use it as a musical instrument to express my passions. in order to get deeper in connecting music and technology i am studying at ccrma.
i also have a personal blog writing about my trips and culture shocks i am dealing with moving around the world: http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/sfd/

sounds

2009-01-19T20:07:00.000-08:00

junkmail

junkman is an installation in the listening room. this room is very special to me because i can take advantage of 16 speakers. speakers are in octagonal setup 92 inches apart in three vertical spaces around the room, above the room and under the room. i had a a mixed media piece for 16 channels audio + text-based visuals + paper junkmail covering the hallway. my installation was called "junkmail" as a reaction to the fact that "it takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in american mailboxes each year.” this fact and a lot more on this topic can be found on forest ethics.

shootingstars

shootingstars by visda

this piece is composed for an open air concert 'Transitions:' an evening of computer music outdoors by CCRMA in the Knoll courtyard. We have had an 8 channel surround system and projections, and space for the audience to lay out on their blankets.

rumismash

this piece is written for stanford laptop orchestra (slork) with two types of instruments and live vocals. one is smashing instrument that works by smashing on the laptop which uses the sensors of macbook as input to manipulate the drum sounds. the second one is a granulator that can change the length of the grains, pitch and their randomness which is used on vocal sounds. the piece is based on a poem by rumi (a persian sufi poet.) details about the instruments could be found on slork's website, a video of the performance is available on youtube.

chuckucello

chuckucello by visda

this is an electroacoustic piece composed for cello and laptop. the code for laptop is written in chuck and performed in real time. thanks to "broer oatis" for performing the cello part. this recording of the piece is from an IPL concert in spring 2009.

thumbs of fire

this piece is originally written for 8 channels and performed at ccrma stage where 8 channels were available. here is a stereo version of it. the fire sounds are originally fire and the sound of burning, the rest is extracted from kurdish music.

generative clouds

for this assignment we were supposed to create a live generative music system; i built three types of instruments. one has a drones sound, the second one sounds like particles with very sharp sound created by random numbers in a specific scale. another one is rendering drum buffers. the challenge in this project was to make my instruments work with computer's keyboard. for this S.M.E.L.T website has the best examples for chuck. here is my chuck code.

computer music of changes

this week in ge's class (compositional algorithms) we explored different filters and timbre escapes using fm synthesis. for our assignment we had to make a music of changes, just like john cage.

in my music of changes, the sound are somewhat random, but not so much to interrupt the flow of the piece. it starts with drones sound made by fm synthesis, followed by quarks sounds that i randomly generate and add a rhythmic features to it using shakers from chuck. for related chuck files, check out the website.

welcome to ccrma

this composition is generated by computer generated sounds welcoming people to ccrma in different languages. this piece is originally in 16 channels and is presented in ccrma's listening room. the goal was to pan voices from different parts of the world so that the listening room works as a simulation of the surrounding world.

chachachouchou

this sound is composed by using some real sounds of caltrain from san francisco to palo alto and some ambient sounds in both places. the sounds are recorded by homebrew microphone then synthesized by chuck files partly inspired by steve reich's piano phase.

rhythm + arhythmia

this composition is generated by two chuck files, one generating a rhythmic and the other one an arythmic sound. the combination is supposed to give the listener a spacey sound space.

projects

2009-01-19T20:06:00.000-08:00

gestonic: sonification of hand gestures for real-time timbre control

this project/instrument is still a work in progress as part of 220b and 220c project. my paper for this project has been accepted for HCI 2009.

fosotomo: soniﬁcation of gesture and motion

master thesis at vienna university of technology, research group for human computer interaction. available on tuwien library's website.

peddo: steps to a healthy life style

this paper is published in chi 2006 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems.

visuals

this project was a cooperation between me and my colleagues at tu wien and akademie der bildende kuenste in vienna. i implemented the audio components of this project using c++ and bass library. analyzing the sound samples with fft, sending massages to video components to control the visuals.

humanoid

256 final project: simulation of human movement using opengl and sonification of the simulation using rtaudio.

f.a.c.e.: facially articulated controller for expression

250a final project: used max/msp's jitter to determine the location and motion of eyes, nose, and mouth, controlled news tracks through granular synthesis, and mapped facial movement parameters to grain parameters using silence detection and large grains.