ICMC

Just arrived from this years ICMC staying for just a couple of days.
The most important thing was the poster-demo of the brand new sensorbow made by Hans Wilmers at Notam and Knut Güettler at NMH and myself.
We presented two different bows with with accelerometers in three directions and gyroscopes. One of the bows have an  AAA battery and pressure sensor, and  the other one with a smaller and lighter rechargeable battery and a pressure-button.
My role in this was to control the maxpatches and demonstrate how the different parameters could be controlled by a violinist.
A big challenge is the connection with the bow and the computer through blue-tooth.
When using the extern bluetooth-dongle too many mobile-phones and other bows turned up, and our two bows were not recognized.
It helped to use the build-in bluetooth.
Another challenge is the bow looses contact to the computer, and all processes stops.
We are not totally sure about the reason for this, but a theory would be  some problems with the serial port.

The day before I had the pleasure to be in BEAMfondation,s Keith MacMillan,s demo of his brand new stringport and his K-bow. I saw a demo of the K-bow at this years NIME too, and I am convinced that he has come up with many good solutions on some of the challenges with the sensorbow.
The bow is very ligt because weight is taken out on a carbon fibre bow, and his pressure-sensor is easy to reach. It seems that he has solved the problems with the very sensitive bluetooth connection. I was trying his bow and it felt confortable despite of the electronics packed in in a small box at the frog.
During my stay in belfast I visited SARC and the fantastic hall covered with loudspeakers.
I saw both works electroacoustic video-works video, sound installations and some concerts.

I had a discussion about my project with Jan Schacher from Zurich University of the Arts.
I mentioned  my attempt to develop new repertoire for electric violin, and he said that ist seamed that the methods of interaction with the computer seamed more important to me.
I think he is right in some sense, I am more into how to fill up the buffers,the variety of sounds and how to navigate through different parameters in my electronics.

improvisation

September 25th I will play a concert at the Trondheim Chambermusicfestival with pieces in open form by Lene Grenager, Øyvind Torvund and Bjørn Thomas Melhus together with two of my colleges in the research-program Else Olsen S, Michael Duch and Øyvind Storesund.
I was working with some open form pieces in April together with Oslo Chamberorchestra.
I will now l have the possibility to explore this kind of work in a smaller group.
I have thought of how much similarity it s between an open form score, and a score you often find when you work with live electronics, although many important pieces in open form goes back to the 1960,s.
Also the hyper-flutist Cléo Palacio-Quintin mentions this in her NIME-paper from 2008:
“In an improvisational context, the interactive computer environment is designed to maximize flexibility in performance. The environment must give the opportunity to generate, layer and route musical material within a flexible structure, like an open form composition”
Out of my own experience so far the live electronic pieces that have worked best is the one written in an open structure. There is no timeline in MAX5, and I guess one must find other solutions for some linear pieces from the past.

nime

April 29 and 30th I attended a workshop on hyperinstruments and GDIF at NMH.
On the first day Dan Overholt was holding a very interesting lecture and demonstration of his overtone violin and presentation on his projects.
Later in the workshop Alexander Refsum Jensenius were speaking about how to create more human-(musician) -centered sensor technologies. He also spoke about how to code mid- and high-level music related body movement data and how to use GDIF in practice.
An important question was how to move from prototype to performance.

We also had a chance to go into case-studies on Kjell Tore Innervik, s extended marimba.
How is it possible to play long sustained notes on the marimba, and what kind of controllers could you use?

We were also discussing my own project on electric violin performance.
See www. NIME.no for more information and photos from the workshop.

I was in Genova on the NIME festival from June 4-7.
Out of the many papers, posters, demos and concerts I read an abstract from Clèo Palacio- Quintin from the University of Montrèal on her 8 years of practice on he Hyper-Flute very relevant and interesting.
She refers to a Book by Joel Chadabe one of the pioneers of real-time computer music-systems.
I will definitively read his book on interactive composing soon.

He describes in the following way: ” An interactive composing system operates as an intelligent instrument- intelligent in the sense that it responds to a performer in a complex, not entirely predictable way, adding information to what a performer specifies, and providing cues to the performer for further actions. The performer, in other words, shares control over the music with information that is automatically generated by the computer, and the information contains unpredictable elements to which the performer reacts while performing. The computer responds to the performer and the performer reacts to the computer, and the music takes its form through that mutually influencial, interactive relationship” (page 144) chapter 5