Dorkbot is the geeky cultural phenomenon that somehow spread from the Computer Music Center at Columbia University all around the world. Normally, the presentations tend toward general electronics, but custom wind instruments, laptop orchestras, and open source audio rearrangers are all on tap for a special all-music Dorkbot coming up this week. If you’re here in New York, you’ll want to mark your calendars for Wednesday, but thanks to the power of the Interweb, we’ll make sure you get the full experience virtually.
Here are the details (and for those of you everywhere else in the world, you’ll find plenty of additional information at each of these links):
The 6021st dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007, at 7pm at Location One in SoHo.
It’ll be full of musical dorkiness of the highest order, to start the year off right. Please bring snacks to share!
Featured the fragrant and marvelous:
Tomas Henriques: META-EWI and META-EVI (customized wind controllers)
The META-EWI and the META-EVI are respectively a modified EWI (Akai’s Electric Wind Instrument) and a modified MIDI EVI (Steiner’s Electric Valve Instrument), to which were added a whole new set of controllers based on sensor technologies. The goal of these two projects was to achieve specific innovative levels of performance techniques and musical expressiveness that go beyond what is currently possible to do with either a monophonic wind controller or a monophonic acoustic instrument and to take advantage of meaningful performance gestures and body motions that are naturally used by a performer of such an instrument. These modified instruments succeed at stretching the expressiveness and the range of musical gestures found on the original instrument allowing the musician to have a more complete and far reaching control of a great variety of meaningful musical parameters.Dan Trueman: PLOrk The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). Dan Trueman, co-founder and director of PLOrk, will introduce the ensemble, describe its design and a number of the pieces written for it, and share video and audio recordings from recent performances.
MEAPsoft: MEAPsoft!!!
MEAPsoft is open source software for automatically segmenting and rearranging music audio recordings. It is aimed at musicians and experimenters who want to play with new ways to analyze, sort, and resynthesize audio fragments. MEAPsoft was developed by a collaborative group of students and faculty from LabROSA and the Computer Music Center at Columbia University. Members of the group will talk about the concepts behind the software and play lots of groovy examples!