Emotion Light, work in progress, (c) Adinda van 't Klooster, 2009

Project team:

Artist: Adinda van ‘t Klooster (concept, sculptural design, porcelain model, electro acoustic composition and project management)

Hardware design and advice: Ben Knapp, Ken Brown, Marc Boon, Bob Young, Belvin Ho

Software: Vincent Akkermans, Ken Brown, Miguel Angel Ortiz-Perez & Nick Ward

Rapid Prototyping: advice: Alan Stafford, AMAP, University of Sunderland

3d modelling: Neil Milburn, Iain Barrett, Dave Knapton, AMAP, University of Sunderland

The residency at STEIM was made possible by a small grant for the arts from the Arts Council England.

STEIM RESIDENCY 7-22 April 2009

Adinda van ‘t Klooster is an international artist and currently an AHRC funded PhD researcher at CRUMB, Sunderland University. She creates responsive artworks using sensors, light and sound. Her contextual research focuses on artworks which use biofeedback in particular.http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=8405

The aim of the residency at STEIM was to further develop the first prototype ‘Emotion Light’: a sculptural light which uses biofeedback technology to visualize the holder’s physiological state in changing light patterns emerging from a portable, wireless sculpture. (more…)

The Orientation Workshop was incredibly eye-opening and inspiring. I came to STEIM to learn more about ways to combine the technical understanding of an electronics designer, the sensitivity and imagination of a musician, and the awareness of gesture-sound relationships of a contemporary percussionist. The workshop was packed with talks, lessons and performances from the STEIM artists/engineers. I was enlightened with STEIM’s philosophies on the role of new technology in music and art, and I became much more aware of current and past work in the electro-instrumental movement.

I was given a studio with a good audio and computer set-up, and started playing with STEIM’s tools, JunXion and LiSa. Rather then simply doing exercises to see all the capabilities of these tools, I figured the best and most fun way to learn would be to conceptualize a simple ‘musical instrument’ and then try to realize it with these given tools.

From the inspiration of STEIM and the city of Amsterdam, I thought to extend the metaphor of a traditional 12″ vinyl record as a source of music. It has the cultural significance as a storage medium for music which can be played back on a turntable, but I wanted to make the record itself an instrument from which one can perform or “play” music. First I considered various ways that a musician can interact with the record. The musician can shake, tilt left/right, tilt forward/backward, bend, spin, strike/press on the table, etc… all of which can be done with varying speeds, degrees of displacement, and in combination. I then thought about how these gestures can be intuitively be related (directly or abstractly) to a response in the sound, affecting different characteristics of the music. For the sounds, I used very short samples of a song I found on the STEIM lab computer, and manipulated many parameters of their playback characteristics with a high degree of nuance. Using various sensors (X-Y Tilt, Pressure, Wii 3-D Accelerometer), the JunXion HW Interface, JunXion and LiSa I was able to develop a rapid prototype to experiment with the feel of playing the record and listening to the sounds. I spent a lot of time practicing this instrument and followed my physical movements and ears to make adjustments to the gesture-sound relationships. At the end of the workshop, I performed short improvisations for Daniel Schorno and Taku Mizuka Lippit. They also played with the record themselves and gave me interesting technical and artistic feedback.

I also did a small experiment with a pressure sensor to create a short-term memory button that remembers its interaction with the user. In contrast to a traditional button where the sound begins as soon as the user presses the button, this “Post-Touch” button waits after the initial press and triggers the sound immediately AFTER the user releases the button. Before triggering the sound, the button remembers how long it was depressed, how hard/soft it was pressed, as well as any variation in the pressure. Upon release, the sound begins and then creates a sound envelope defined by press-release time window and pressure information. The user defines the envelope before the actual sound, and then activates the sound by releasing the button.

Everyone I met at STEIM was passionate about electro-instrumental music and they were all very excited to answer questions and share their knowledge. From my time at STEIM, I developed many new ideas and I look forward to contributing more to the electro-instrumental community.

Thank you STEIM.

Levy Lorenzo (US)

Greetings from Miami!

I spent two artistically inspiring weeks at STEIM. The first week I did the orientation workshop with two other artists: pianist and composer Eleonor Sandresky, and percussionist and electrical engineer Levy Lorenzo. I am a theatre sound designer and a singer/songwriter, so we were quite a mix. I found that this was great for exchanging ideas. The three of us were new to STEIM and to the concept of developing our own electronic music performance tools. I am glad that a place like STEIM opens its doors to artists entering the field, and I think this is important because it widens the span of the field.

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In March and April of 2008 I (http://www.billthompson.org) was awarded a CPD grant by the Scottish Arts Council to undertake a residency at STEIM in Amsterdam.

The project involved developing and building an instrument that combined a number of circuit bent devices, custom built modules, DIY synths, high end rack effects, and an fx-pedal or two into a modular case.

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Notes

The Bilgi Interactive Sound Project of Istanbul Bilgi University attended to a 5 day long workshop on custom built musical interfaces with JunXion Board. The group consists of Batuhan Bozkurt, Pinar Temiz, Ulas Pakkan, Ozan Sarier and Ali Bilgin Arslan as well as the project supervisor from the faculty, composer Dirk Stromberg. The group members got into soldering and building sensors for the JunXion board in order to create personalized custom interfaces which would be used as performance tools.
The soldering job was a novelty for most of the participants. During the course of individually building the Junxion board, which can be acquired also as read-made, made it possible to be involved in the process of artistic creation from scratch and helped to form a stronger connection with the artist and the tool, which is a radical thing to do, considering the commercially available musical interfaces.
A popular tool for the participants were the photosensors. The possibility of interacting with the computer by the manipulation of light surely was interesting and these sensors were built into almost all of the boards. Regular types of sensors, like faders and knobs were also used to a certain extent. But overall, the interactive quality of the photosensors were the focus of the custom interfaces of almost every participant.

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In the fall of 2006 STEIM presented a reacTable workshop and lecture. The reacTable is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The instrument was developed by a team of digital luthiers under the direction of Dr. Sergi Jordà. The “Interactive Sonic Systems” team is working in the Music Technology Group within the Audiovisual Institute at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona Spain. Its main activities concentrate on the design of new musical interfaces, such as tangible music instruments and musical applications for mobile devices.

Quicktime movie of the reacTable

http://modin.yuri.at/teaching/SteimWorkshop/

http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/