Noise Machine

www.daphneoram.org

Our celebration of the Life and Work of Daphne Oram will commence at 12:00 midday on this Friday the 27th of June, the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre.

Click here for more info

The Symposium begins at 12:00 and is free.

The day will continue with a concert at 7.30. This concert features unheard music by Daphne Oram, and a performance by Andrea Parker. Entry to this part of the day will cost £6.00.

The day will finish with a late concert featuring People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) and Ninki V, two of London’s most extraordinary electronic artists. This is also a free event!

Finally, you can tune in to Resonance FM tonight at 11.00pm to hear a 1 hour Daphne Oram special featuring John Lely, Phil Hallett, David Rogerson and myself. This show will feature previously unheard recordings, and give a taster of what you can expect on the day.

Tune in to 104.4 fm, or if you’re outside the transmission radius, listen on-line at

http://resonancefm.com/listen

So I’ve been doing a few interviews about a couple of my projects recently, and these have been featured on radio and a few high profile websites.

There’s quite a lot of interest in my Brain Computer Interface for Music

A BBC Technology article is available here; there’s a video so you can check out my ‘electronic music studio face’

And a BBC World Service ‘News Hour’ Interview here, about half way through, 25 minutes in or thereabouts.

Also got interviewed by Perth 6PR radio

More soon.

Dr. M

Well, It’s been a long time since I posted anything. Here’s an update.

From Honey To Ashes are playing at the Whitechapel Gallery on 9th May. This event is sponsored by The Wire.

I’m really looking forward to this.

Ashley Thorpe’s new film, ‘Scayrecrow’ has been screened in Exeter and got top billing (I shit you not). Much love to him. Was great fun working on this project, as I got to compose for strings and harp (much to the amusement of Ash). I can barely remember how to make proper music these days. Maybe that’s for the best.

Played in Broadstairs last week with Roger Redgate, John Lely, Sebastian Lexer and Matt Wright. Joined by Sam Bailey on piano, this was a great day trip (nice chips) and some good music was made. I hadn’t done any improv with conventional instruments for ages so this was lots of fun, and the people who turned up seemed to enjoy themselves.

loads of other things. Sonic Arts Expo will feature Goldsmiths Electronic Orchestra, and I’ll be doing an installation in a shopping centre in Brighton. ACE.

This is all happening when I’m not writing papers and grants, or working on musical interfaces. Speaking of which, I’m about to make some software available for free that’s been used in this regard. Papers coming.

This blog will soon be replaced by something a bit more professional looking. I’ll probably leave it here as an archive and for the odd rant, otherwise I’ll forget what I’ve been doing.

late for work

M

I want to make it absolutely clear that the example below is an ERP based BCI and not ready for ‘concert use’ yet. It can be made to work a bit, but any movement results in trials being discarded, i.e. you can only measure an ERP if you aren’t contaminating the signal with other stuff. I’ve been gating these trials out.

However, you can easily use an EEG device to detect spontaneous potentials, e.g. brain rhythms. This technique is well known and easy to do. I don’t think this is as interesting as using ERPs (although you can do things with meditation). But it’s fun to perform with.

I want to make this clear because there are people contacting me asking if the erp system is ready to be used and I keep having to politely say the same thing. NO, not yet. More time. more research. more effort. I have publicly performed using the device to measure spontaneous potentials, but as I’ve explained above, it’s very different stuff to the video below.

New Scientist stuff on BCIs

O.K. Here it is. This video shows me demoing my initial Brain Computer Music Interface. There are many ways that I can improve this system (it’s still a bit slow at the moment), but I think it demonstrates the potential of the idea well enough. This video was difficult to make because someone was playing unbelievably loud Keane-esque power ballads on the frickin’ piano next door. Those of you who have experience with EEG will no doubt find this most amusing.

If you are having problems seeing it, there’s a youtube version here

Even in it’s current state, I’ve been able to use this setup to program a step sequencer. With a bit of speed improvement, I’m sure it could be used as a real-time instrument by the physically disabled. I’m writing this up at the moment and should have a paper on-line soon.

OK. So I’ve had my EEG for about a month now. Within a few days, I’d successfully run a project that allowed me to spell words with my thoughts. This took some practice, and the algorithms are really elementary at the moment. However, it’s nice to be on the edge of what is possible. I’ve just spent a few days integrating a fairly obvious matching algorithm - basically an algorithm that detects unconscious responses to stimuli on a simple level - into a synthesiser built in max/msp. This took quite a lot of effort. Anyhow, this system is a variation of those which you may have been hearing about on and off….my system now allows me (with a bit of work) to control the pitch of the synthesiser with my thoughts in real-time. This reliably allows me to play tunes - slowly. I often ‘hit’ wrong notes, but it sort of works. Has anyone else done this yet?

More Mabuse news:

Gateway School of Recording is one of the most important (perhaps even the most important) industry led recording and production training centres in the UK. So much so that I don’t think I have to say any more.

Mabuse V1.1 was featured as part of the Gateway School of Recording / Digital Village launch party. Herb’s presentation on Mabuse was one of the highlights, and there’s some awesome pictures of the event.

It’s worth mentioning that Herb also talked about the most exciting synthesiser in the world - the Roland system 100m. Some of you know how much I love this machine. That’s what I call Music Technology.

More pictures here. Mabuse photo’s go from photo 128 to about 155 (it was a big day).

The Mabuse ‘Wormhole Explorer’. Will be available soon in the upcoming version for all you hippies and Yak freaks.

Here’s a little bit of video I spat out of the machine tonight.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19626292.500-the-word-flicker-illness.html

Well, as if by magic, a live video of me demonstrating some stuff as part of the open ear series is available to watch on youtube. It’s labelled ‘Mabuse Audiovisual Synthesis’. Well, it’s actually some research that I’m doing that won’t be in Mabuse until version 2. Anyway. Check it out.

Yes, that is sonification of real-time fractals. Audiovisual Fractal synthesis, as it goes.