Montreal

Nice place, if a little cold, wet and snowing. Reminds me a little of New Zealand/ Queenstown in many ways . . . Spent some time with the folks at McGill's Schulich School of Music.

Old music school

New music school

Dean, Don McLean showed me through some of the recording studios:

API Console

Mutimedia room and soundstage

I also met with Sean Ferguson, a composer and Director of CIRMMT (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology). They house six, what they term 'research axes', and each of which have dedicated labs and resources.

Must fly, (literally). Now on to Leeds and dreadful weather, I believe. Still, looking forward to catching up with friends at Sixth Annual Art of Record Production Conference.

Lowell & New York

Traveling once more, and a very good experience and entry into the US via San Francisco. Nice people, if still very busy and slightly confusing . . .
Now completed the first leg of the tour, first to Lowell MA - beautiful little town north of Cambridge and Boston.
Caught up with the good folks of UMass Lowell Music and their wonderful hospitality. They run some terrific degree programs in music education, sound recording technology, music business and performance. Many thanks to Alex Ruthmann and John Shirley:

[A great night out at Boston's Lennox Hotel, w/ an amazing glass of 'The Balvenie']

Then on to New York to catch up with Nora Farrell (now teaching part of the year in our Bachelor of Music Technology program) and Bill Duckworth who's also now supervising some of our QCRC PhD candidates. Thanks for a delicious Thanksgivings Day dinner (that's pumpkin pie, clementines and roasted chestnuts . .!)
Or, as they also call it here – Turkey Day! Pics from the spectacular Macey's Thanksgivings Day Parade:

Flying out today, onward and upward to Montreal & McGill University's Schulich School of Music. Looking forward to it.

Winter in Manhattan . .

Back at work in sunny Brisbane now . . after spending some snow time in Manhattan late Jan /Feb.

We loved the snow, being so rare in Australia. Problem is, a good thing can go a little too far sometimes: turns out we got snowed in – what the New Yorkers are calling the 'Blizzard of 2010" - they made celebratory hats and everything! Took us another five days to get a flight out, and got home just in time for those start of year 'working retreats' . . .

However, the extra days did allow me time to argue with myself some more, and finally relent to pick up a gorgeous private stock PRS 513 from the amazing people at Rudy's Soho (ask for Marco if you're there).

Back at the Queensland Conservatorium in Australia, we're now bustling the new year arrival of hundreds of new students. The research higher degree cohort is just growing exponentially - wonderful people with great ideas, in Masters, M.Phil, PhD and our Doctor of Musical Arts. Much new staff work also planned for our research centre, a couple of new albums out, and a new podcast series called 'Behind the Music'.

From the promo:

Behind the Music presents intimate insights from leading musicians into what happens ‘behind the scenes’ as they prepare their art. In music performance, technology, composition, education and research, creative activities are often a response to musical questions arising directly from their artistic practice. These presentations offer a valuable opportunity to reveal a range of creative processes as artists share their personal approaches to such issues.

http://www29.griffith.edu.au/rss/imersd_podcasts.xml

Enjoy.

Colbert at the Grammys

Check it out . . .

digital arts conference season

Lots of travel and interesting events over the last couple of weeks. I visited the very spooky Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney) for a PhD seminar.

Once a mental institution, now houses academic artists and designers (!) - very beautiful historic building, wonderful artwork and artists, but I'm positive its haunted. 'Nuff said.

Back to Brisbane next, to present a paper 'Authority 3.0' at the fourth annual international CreateWorld 2009 conference on Brisbane's beautiful South Bank.

A great turn out again, with artists from all over the country, from New Zealand and the US. This time, with a new AUC CreateWorld blogsite and well as CreateWorld09 on Twitter.

On the Tuesday (1 Dec), one of the CreateWorld keynotes featured an iChat hook-up to New York with Bill Duckworth and Nora Farrell, talking about their latest Sonic Babylon project and new iPhone app:

Right after the CreateWorld conference, I flew back to Sydney again on 4 Dec to present at the ICoMCS2 conference (that's the second International Conference on Music Communication Science), at the University of New South Wales.

My paper was about a recent album recording project 'Foreign objects & the art of interpretation'. Overall, the conference presented fascinating interdisciplinary collection of people, from psychology, music, education and science.

Xmas soon. Best wishes to everyone for the holiday season.

QCRC videos

Here's a nice little widget from vimeo, for all of our Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre (QCRC) videos.

A Glorious Dawn

A lovely piece from colorpulsemusic.com: A musical tribute to Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: 'A Glorious Dawn - Cosmos remixed'. Almost all samples and footage are taken from Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Stephen Hawking's Universe series.

Lyrics:

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it's own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

Volume

Just back from Melbourne, where I came across VOLUME, a fantastic installation in Federation Square.

The installation is the brain-child of the UK's United Visual Artists, known for their work with U2, Massive Attack, The Arctic Monkeys and others. With a soundtrack arranged by Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, this incredible fusion of light and sound is realized through a forest of luminous LED columns which light up Federation Square.

The columns respond spectacularly to human movement and visitors walk, crawl, jump and dance their way through this interactive installation.

The first installation was performed in the UK at the Victoria & Albert Royal Museum's John Madejski Garden last winter 2006, with a wonderful video posted here:


VOLUME is part of a series in 'The Light in Winter', Federation Square's annual winter festival for Melbourne centred around light. Directed by Robyn Archer, The Light in Winter brings together artists, designers and communities to explore their ideas of light, enlightenment and hope.

For more 2009 Light in Winter events, see their program, here.

Sonic Bablyon

We welcome back to Brisbane, New Yorker internet music pioneers William Duckworth and Nora Farrel who were with us for the iOrpheus project in 1997.



This time, they're here to inaugurate a multi-year project titled Sonic Babylon, an art project planting gardens of sound around the world; invisible gardens hanging in the air and heard on mobile devices when visitors pass through.


Occuring from July to September 2009, these gardens include the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre's Media Gardens in Queensland (Cairns, Noosa, and South Bank), The National Film and Sound Archive's Permanent Sound Garden and National Sound Day 2009 in Canberra, and a Sound Garden Happening at the Apple Store in Melbourne (tbc, September).


Tweets at timecurve (Bill), hypnotone (Nora) and sonicbablyon.

APAR (Artistic Practice as Research) Projects

A couple of ongoing projects at the QCRC (Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre) here in Brisbane. Both form part of the work within the Centre's 'Artistic Practice as Research' cluster.

The Art of Interpretation
A collaboration between Stephen Emmerson (pianist) and Paul Draper (sound producer), this excerpt from Schoenberg’s 3 Piano Pieces Op. 11 draws upon on various interpretive strategies including analysis, reflection, and the use of Schoenberg’s paintings to highlight certain aspects of the performance and recording. The project is based on the premise that a recording is not ‘music’ itself, rather, is a virtual artefact through which an interpretation can be manipulated and enhanced through deliberate interference in the recording and post-production processes.



The piano itself was tracked using some sixteen microphones spaced at different positions throughout the hall which enabled ‘multiple perspectives’ to be attained, then in post-production was 'vertically arranged' and through the use of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) in ways similar to that of orchestration. In contrast to the usual practice where classical piano recordings maintain a single sound and perspective, this project explores the ways in the researcher's interpretation of the music can be expanded and communicated through these manipulations of the sound recordings.

Foreign Objects
This is an excerpt from the new album 'Foreign Objects' by Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold aka 'Clocked Out', presenting new compositions that pay homage to two giants of contemporary music: Terry Riley, the master of expanded space, and Morton Feldman, the master of intricate patterns.



Produced by Paul Draper, after spending a week of recording in the IMERSD studios the project then moved directly into a live concert event in the Ian Hangar Recital Hall to premier the works, and where these performances were also recorded remotely in IMERSD. The final results are arrangements, edits and integrated sound productions that combine both environments, where the musicians extend the sound landscape of the keyboard through prepared piano to the world of ‘found object’ percussion. Mixing bowls meld into cardboard preparations, roofing tiles into buzzing screws, toy piano into miniature bells.

The QCRC also maintains a Vimeo Group at vimeo.com/groups/qcrc/videos

Kodak Zi6

We've just purchased a couple of Kodak Zi6s for our research centre at the Queensland Conservatorium. Terrific little unit that shoots in HD, directly to SD-Ram in H.264 format.

Comes with software for Windows, records .movs and so can also be easily used in Apple iPhoto or iMovie. USB flip out allows easy direct transfer to computer and on to web. In this case I've created a Vimeo group at http://vimeo.com/groups/qcrc

'The cast' of our recent Musical Futures events.

Great for interviews, PhD projects, ethnographies, etc.

CreateWorld 2008

Back in Australia now, and into CreateWorld 2008, the Australian national digital arts conference, hosted by the Apple University Consortium (AUC) and Griffith University. Now in its third year, the 2008 conference must have been the most successful, with a terrific attendance and a wide range of panels, papers, keynotes, performances and podcast program.

AUC chair, Denis Antionelle opens the conference.

Some of the highlights for me were the various performance /talk events, including some stunning music-scored-to-speech patterns from Brisbane's Topology ensemble . . .

. . and some engaging VJ work from Adelaide's Luke Toop, featuring Apple's Quartz Composer software tools.

There were also a good range of academic papers and session presentations. Stephen Emmerson and I presented some of our recent recording work in IMERSD around our paper on Music, Recording and the Art of Interpretation (see earlier blog entry). Great fun to try to squeeze that many people into a recording studio control room!

A Podcast Team (Allan Carrington, Kate Foy, Cat Hope and Ian Green) were cruising the conference, audio recorders in hand, gathering short interviews to help better understand the conference themes in their broader context, and to tease out their implications for learning, teaching, research and creative performance in higher education.

WAAPA's Cat Hope works up some new podcasts.

The podcast program from CreateWorld 2008 is available at createworld2008.edublogs.org.

Great turn-out, fantastic location at Griffith's South Bank campus.

Look out for the final series of refereed papers in the conference proceedings, to be published shortly on the Create World 2008 site. Thanks everyone, for a great conference.

New York (Part 2)

I visited La Monte Young & Marian Zazella's 'Dream House' installation, nearby to where we were staying in Tribeca. When we first entered this unassuming loft, we saw purple light and heard a very loud, constant drone. The noise and light flooded the entire floor, immersing us as we wandered about.

After a time though, we finally 'got it'. The light comprised two sources of red and blue and cast odd shadows on objects, urging you to move your head to see better. When moving then, the sound changed, in fact, by a simple left-to-right head movement, the drone now became two distinct pitches.

So in fact, the room itself became an instrument, which you 'played' with the movement of your body. Often different when seated on the floor cushions, or moving deliberately around the room. Fantastic, engaging project. For more, see the MELA Foundation.

I also had the opportunity to spend time in the wonderful Electric Lady Studios, the brainchild of Jimi Hendrix who comissioned John Storyk to build the facility in the late 60s. Many thanks to the generosity of studio manager Lee Foster who looked after me during my visit.

Lee showed me around the three studio spaces (and especially Studio A, where that great music from Hendrix was made), as well as telling me much about the historical background, more recent modifications and the recent projects which have been happening (including Dylan, Guns & Roses, Beyonce and others).

So much history here, and as Lee explained, the artwork around the building was commissioned by Hendrix himself who wanted a 'spaceship' (albeit, psychedelic). Spine-chilling really, to wander the rooms and the corridors.
Inspired, I headed off in search on Manny's, where Hendrix, Dylan and others shopped for their guitars.


I came away with this fantastic Martin CF-1, a collaboration between Martin Guitars and Dale Unger (American Archtop). Represenative of that special period where the acoustic guitar evolved into the electric, it's not simply a jazz guitar, but rather, a high quality acoustic instument with a pickup fitted.

A great piece of memorabilia from New York, Manny's and a reminder of why I started playing music in the first place: Jimi Hendrix.