New Media Art at the ICC

On the way home from spending a month in Northern Japan, I had a chance to visit Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), a new media art gallery that focuses on the intersection of science and art.

ICC

They’re currently showing their Open Space 2016: Media Conscious exhibition, which they describe as “a beginner’s guide to media art”–perfect for me.

While most of my works for the last two years have been concerned with new media art and the engagement of humans and technology, I still feel like a bit green when it comes to intermedia works, and perhaps a beginner’s guide is just what I need, especially as several of my upcoming works (including Interesting Decisions, premiering this September at KISS2016) tread a fine line between music and intermedia.

The Open Space had a great number of fun and thought-provoking works, but three were standouts for me.

The first was Fujimoto Yukio’s Still Life. Unsure of what I was getting myself into, I was ushered into the Center’s anechoic chamber, where there were a number of ticking clocks situated around the room.

anechoic

The clocks were slightly out of sync, so their clicks, emphasized by the silent environment, had the effect of moving around the room in surround sound. Sitting there silently the eight minutes flew by, and before I knew it, there was a tap on the door letting me know my time was up.

Next, was my first VR experience in The Mirror, a collaborative work by Fuji Naotaka, GRINDER-MAN, and evala.

The piece aims to dissociate the participant from the sense of self, by, in the VR world, delaying the visuals of one’s movement, transforming you into another person, and rapidly moving you through different virtual spaces.

mirror

While I’m not sure that I lost my sense of self (and I was totally game to do so), the piece was consistently engaging, and I was happy to be along for the ride.

I’m definitely more excited to see future VR art possibilities than rollercoaster experiences.

Finally, while relatively low-tech, I was impressed with Nellow Akamatsu’s “Chijinkinkutsu,” a room filled with dozens of glasses of water with pins floating on the top. Small electromagnetic coils were placed on the sides of the glasses, and these coils intermittently drew the pins to the sides of the glass for a satisfying “ding.”

One of the things I find especially appealing about all of these works is the clarity of what the artist is trying to convey.

It serves as a reminder that, in creating music, composers often run the risk of focusing on the “architecture” of music (understandable given our educational training), and neglecting actual content.

It’s always wonderful to rediscover the potential of art for expression and communication of the ineffable.

Sonic Haiku (SEAMUS Electroacoustic Miniatures 2015)

Check out my piece Lübeck Kireji on the new SEAMUS Electro-Acoustic Miniatures CD, “Sonic Haiku”

SEAMUS Miniatures 2015

While haiku are most famous for their brevity and 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, two other elements are necessary for a traditional haiku: an evocation of the season and a juxtaposition of two distinct images. The two images are separated by a “kireji” (a “cutting word”) which indicates a pause, creating a space between the two ideas and inviting the audience themselves to connect these independent thoughts.

Post-Haste Reed Duo CD available

Post-Haste Reed Duo’s debut album (which includes my piece, bioMechanics) is now available.

Thanks again to those of you who donated through the Kickstarter, and, if you didn’t reserve your advance copy, you can now get the album on Bandcamp, CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify or most other places where you might buy music.

The album already received a great review in the March issue of textura, praising the duo’s performance and describing bioMechanics as a “bold opener” where “sheets of metallic noise as well as beat patterns interact with the duo’s acoustic sonorities, making for something of a showstopper, even if it’s just seven minutes long.”

It’s a great CD all around, and a great addition to the collection of serious fans of new music or unique chamber wind repertoire.

MIDI-Controlled Intellivoice Synth

intellivoice

Mattel Electronics presents…

Intellivoice
Boom!

It’s been a long time since I started this project, but I’ve finally got my Intellivoice Synth running.

Since last time, I added MIDI control and transferred things to a smaller circuit board (and Arduino) in order to fit everything back in the original case.

intellivoice
Working out how to get the new guts into the old housing
intellivoice
USB MIDI control, 1/4″ output

So what does this little synth do? It takes MIDI notes (from a keyboard or DAW), and uses them to trigger the sounds built in to the Intellivoice chip, which, as it turns out, consist of mostly numbers.

Check it out:

I might look into a few more tweaks. Currently, each word will always play to the end, even if another word is performed before it’s finished. I’m not sure if this is a property of the Intellivoice chip, or something I could fix in my Arduino program.

Why pursue a project like this one?

Games and gaming hardware are mass-produced devices with planned obsolescence and few serviceable parts. By “hacking” and customizing gaming hardware we regain personal ownership of these devices, and we can turn obsolete equipment into performable, expressive instruments.

intellivoice
A few last-minute modifications to the audio-chain

An earlier version of this synth actually appears in the electronics of my new commissioned work, Hirazumi (more about the piece here and here), and I think the hacked Intellivoice fits perfectly into the post-digital, cyberpunk aesthetic.

Hiraizumi: Cyberpunk for Wind Ensemble

Hoping to “veg out” a bit upon returning from holiday travel, I put on one of the new Ghost in the Shell animated films.

It’s always funny how ideas connect, but, earlier in the day, I had been chatting with my friend and colleague, composer Aaron Rosenberg, about my current composition project, Hiraizumi, and, in talking about the piece, he had referred to the electronic parts as “sci-fi moments” (fondly, of course).

I previously wrote about how I was crafting the electronics to evoke distortions in digitally-mediated memory, and, revisiting Shirou Masamune’s world of Ghost in the Shell, primed to think about sci-fi music, I realized that my wind ensemble piece falls into the cyberpunk genre.

GiTS Vast Network

In Ghost in the Shell, memory (and its fallibility) is a recurring theme. People with cybernetic brains are able to directly access the internet, but this connection opens people up to having their minds and memories directly changed (and possibly hacked), and interacting with others on the web breaks down the border between self and others.

If one’s self is defined by memories and experiences, inaccurate memories (or memories curated by Facebook), might reduce the sense of individuality. This loss of individuality and the dehumanizing effects of technology are common cyberpunk themes.

As the protagonist, Kusanagi, says:

There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind, like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.

GiTS Memories of Childhood

Hiraizumi’s cyberpunk elements seemed even clearer, when, looking back on my choices of sound design in the electronics, I discovered moments that seemed inspired by sounds from Ghost in the Shell and Vangelis’s score to Blade Runner, another cyberpunk film that questions ideas of self and identity.

 

 

That all said, I wasn’t thinking about Ghost in the Shell when I started work on Hiraizumi, but I am a fan of Japanese cyberpunk, and these things are all rattling around in my head

Created without conscious intent, these cyberpunk themes are a byproduct of the expressive goals of the piece, and I look forward to where the music will take me as I finish my journey to the double bar.

(As an end note, I should also mention that it’s no surprise that one of my old musical heroes, Cornelius, did the soundtrack for the new Ghost in the Shell series.)

Hiraizumi – Japanese Instruments and Post-Digital Distortions

I’ve been enjoying focusing my recent creative efforts on a new piece for wind ensemble and electronics, Hiraizumi.

DSC00947

This work is a consortium commission spearheaded by Dr. James Smart, director of the University of Montana Symphonic Wind Ensemble, and, as I write on the consortium page, Hiraizumi draws its inspiration from the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the same name.

Hiraizumi’s collection of temples were a quick trip from where I lived in Japan for many years, and I wanted to write a piece drawing from my memories of the site, centering on my relationship with the location as an “outsider.”

As I write the piece, it has been evolving from a simple homage to the temples into a larger exploration of memory and how the past is mediated by the present. My nostalgia about my time in Japan (and that time in my life) flavors my memory of Hiraizumi, and, in addition, the centuries of history embodied by the site is mediated by our experience as citizens of the modern world (who, for example, might go home from the site to our digital lives).

DSC014772

Expressing these thoughts in prose feels a bit clumsy, so that seems good reason to unpack these ideas using the expressive possibilities of art and music.

Here’s a teaser of the electronics, a kagura-suzu brought into the post-modern world of digital distortion:

More updates to come.

Circuit-Bending Speech with the Intellivoice

I’ve finally got my workbench set back up following the move out to Connecticut for my new gig at the University of New Haven, and I’ve started to get back to some tinkering.

I had been poking around on eBay for a little while, trying to find an Intellivoice module to build my collection of vintage consumer audio chips. The Intellivoice was an add-on for Mattel’s Intellivion Game Console that strapped on to the side and added a couple of chips allowed a few games to have computerized speech output.

intellivision

It sounds a little something like this:

Anyway, I found and Intellivoice for about $10 (plus shipping).

2015-10-22 17.51.02

The seller, however, neglected to mention that it seems like he had been storing it in a bath of saltwater. I had to drill out a couple of the screws to get it open, as they had rusted beyond recognizability as screws.

2015-10-23 16.59.12 HDR

After I got the RF shield off, however, it all looked relatively clean. The whole piece isn’t particularly attractive as a collector’s item, but the chips seem to be in good shape.

2015-10-23 17.00.34

2015-10-23 17.05.58

So, let’s make this thing talk. With a little Arduino magic, I got some words out (see below), and, with a little more tinkering, I should be able to make a MIDI-controlled Intellitalker instrument.

[audio:https://simonhutchinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Intellivoice_Test.mp3]

Watch this space.

2015-11-03 16.38.18 HDR

MIDI-Controlled Sega Genesis Video-Glitch – Part 3

Back to the Sega Genesis Mods! If you’re catching up, check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Where we left off, I had found my glitch points, and I was going to get digging in to some kind of button control before moving on to MIDI control.

Wires soldered to the underside of the VRAM
Wires soldered to the underside of the VRAM

Here are the pins of the VRAM with some wires from some selected spots. Purists might fault me for not running off of all of the 44 available points (48 minus the two VCCs and two grounds), but I didn’t have that many buttons anyway.

Not a huge fan of electrical tape, but what can you do?
Not a huge fan of electrical tape, but what can you do?
Wires run to a set of female headers
Wires run to a set of female headers

After taping things down, I ran the wires to a set of headers. The reason for using headers is to keep the ability to remove the top of the Genesis if I want to get back inside for any reason.

Female headers plug into phone keypad
Female headers plug into phone keypad

I had a phone keyboard kicking around, and I figured this would be a simple alternative to setting up a matrix of buttons. How this works, then, is any one button connects two points (which two points hardly matters), and if one holds down multiple buttons at the same time, several data points start cross-talking with different visual results

Are you ready for this?

Behold!
Behold!
The Keypad-Controlled Glitch Genesis!
The Keypad-Controlled Glitch Genesis!

Here’s a video of it in action:

Now, of course, while I’m stoked about my new toy, this instrument is not yet what I set out to do (and what the title of these posts proclaims).

MIDI-Control, though is just a quick hop away. Next time, I’m going to get a new Teensy, install it in the Genesis, and program it to control the connections via USB MIDI control (likely with some simple transistor work).

Almost there!