Share is an audio-video project launched 6 years ago in New-York by Barry Manalog, geoffGDAM et Newclueless. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into the system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. Some Share communities were born in Montreal, Melbourne, St Petersburg… and now Geneva. There’ll be some Share showcases on May 1-2-3 at the Contemporary Art Museum that will be part of the upcoming Mapping festival.
Eric of Sigma6 made a website for Share GVA.

I’d really like to go there and jam but I’m not sure yet I can move to Geneva next week.

I found again someone who posts amazing photos on Flickr. Her nickname is Cypherone and she’s from Taiwan. Some photos look like drawings. I’d really like to know which post-effects to apply for getting such a result.

I saw Q Bert at Montreux Jazz Festival last year. Same day as Kid Koala and Amon Tobin… that makes a great night I guess!

After the update of the firmware of my sound card (M-Audio FW410), it started clipping on the line and instrument inputs… Moreover I’ve never been happy with the latency of this card. So I’m now looking at the sound cards on the market excluding M-Audio products. I want a Firewire card with at least 4 line/instrument inputs, 4 line outputs, midi in/out and as compact as possible. Some cards that fit my needs:

• Echo Audiofire 4
• Edirol FA-101
• TC Electronic Konnekt 24D
• Motu Ultralite
• RME Fireface 400

Motu and RME are too expensive. As for now my choice would go to the Konnekt 24D which has a built-in DSP that enables to run some effects like compressor and reverb. This may be a good option as my CPU gets sometimes overloaded. As TC Electronic is known for making quality product, this card looks really great. This is confirmed by a test done by Audiofanzine (in french).

Update: I ordered it…

I’m planning to make a hydrophone. A quick search on Google and I’ve got an interesting document entitled “A cheap sensitive hydrophone for monitoring cetacean vocalisations“.

A piezo ceramic disk, 2 polycarbonate sheets, a ‘o’ ring seal, a few nylon screws, a coaxial cable, some epoxy adhesive and you’re done! The critical step is definitely the soldering of the cable to the piezo disk.

Toronto-based filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal followed the photograph Edward Burtynsky in China and Bangladesh and made the documentary “Manufactured Landscapes”: interview on PingMag.

Post in french today!

Difficile exercice que d’écrire sa biographie, quand bien même celle-ci ne doit faire que quelques lignes. Je m’y plie pour le dossier de presse d’un (merveilleux) festival auquel je participe en juin. Voilà  ce que j’ai pondu jusqu’à  maintenant (après quelques conseils de personnes avisées):

L’objet musical tokoloten est né de l’esprit d’un musicien apatride influencé par le free-jazz jusqu’au-bruitiste d’un Otomo, l’humour grinçant d’un Zappa, les syncopes saturées d’un Aaron Funk… Comprenant rapidement qu’il serait vain de tenter d’approcher leur génie, tokoloten ne se prive cependant pas d’explorer le matériau sonore à  travers l’essorage viril de programmes informatiques, le maniement sans précaution d’objets divers (moteurs électriques, hydrophones, contrôleurs de jeux vidéos…) et une petite pointe d’auto-dérision. tokoloten envisage chaque performance live comme une pièce unique, aidé en cela par les accidents qui la parsèment continuellement. Le thème des Digitales étant WASSER, préparez-vous à  une immersion brutale!

Je dois également fournir une image. Plutôt qu’un pseudo-portrait peu engageant j’ai pensé à  ça:

Finalement je crois que je vais reprendre mon dugong fétiche:

This is a panorama of the Osaka Bay I’ve made by mixing 3 photos. I did shoot from the Rokko Mountain on top of Kobe. A unique landscape with all these artificial islands…

Beijing’s market in November 2006. This market is under control of the chinese authorities, that’s why all the cooks and food stalls look the same. But the food was excellent. I didn’t try insects and snakes though… Listen to the recording below.

Next month I have a concert that is being planned at Le Bourg in Lausanne. Le Bourg was a cinema that closed some years ago and was transformed into a Café-Théâtre. I’ll say more about the upcoming event soon.

As it was a cinema, it’s a great place for projecting visuals and I want to take this chance to setup my first “visual installation”. I use Processing so I’m coding in Java… and I realize that my code starts looking like a piece of crap. I’ve been focused on visual rendering rather than modelisation I guess.

I’ve got different renderings but the main process is simple: I get the frequency spectrum of the incoming audio signal (using the Sonia library), it returns an array of values which correspond to the amplitude of frequency bands. For each value I draw an object for which the shape, position and transparency change depending on sound. The color is picked from an image so it’s easy to control the set of colors. It never gives the same results thanks to some random settings.

I hope I’ll manage to complete that work before the event. At least I have a friend who’s ok to give me his laptop for running the Processing patch during the concert.