Pure Data Mini Conference

The second annual Pure Data Mini Conference took place a little over a week ago and I was lucky enough to have been invited back to present again this year. The conference took place over two days with six presentation the first day, a concert that night and two workshops the second day. I was speaking the first day about my ongoing work with Mobile Music, talking about the prototype app that I’ve put together and some of my ideas about composing for smartphone. All the audio programming for the app is created using the libpd library which allows Pd to be run on smartphones, which was my connection to the conference. Read more

Interview with Robert Thomas from RjDj – Mobile Music #7

Robert Thomas is a composer, performer and the Chief Creative Officer with RjDj. Through his work with RjDj he collaborated with Hans Zimmer on the Inception the app and was responsible for composing the music for Dimensions. I contacted him to ask about working with mobile music and he kindly offered to do an interview. We got to talk about his work with RjDj and some of his thoughts on the future of mobile music.

–

When I think about mobile music one of the most exciting/challenging aspects is balancing creating the interactive/adaptive experience with creating something is musical. Do you think about this when you’re composing?

Yes I think this is the key challenge really. For me its really about simultaneously thinking as both a composer and a software designer. The questions which come up for me are: How important is the interactivity? How obvious do you want the control to be? When do you want to give them control and when do you want to take them somewhere? Read more

What is mobile music? – Mobile Music #5

While writing a post about the difference between mobile music and locative music I realised that I hadn’t defined what I meant by mobile music. I’ve been discussing different examples of what I’ve been calling mobile music but hadn’t been explicit about what this meant. I started thinking about it a bit and realised that I need to give a definition to avoid ambiguity.

Mobile Music is an ambiguous term. Do I mean music to move to or music that is mobile, like a marching band, or music for mobile phones? There are lots of ways the phrase could be interpreted. I did a quick search of mobile music which turned up a the Wikipedia Mobile Music entry. This describes mobile music as music streamed and listened to on mobile devices. This is not what I’ve been writing about, I looked to the top of the page and noticed “This article is about music on mobile devices, for the musical form see aleatoric music.” I clicked the link. Read more

Ambient Addition – Mobile Music #1

I’m taking a break from my series on open source controllers for a while to write about Mobile and Locative Audio. At the moment I’m working on creating a mobile music composition and wanted to share some of the interesting projects that I’ve come across in the process. The first project I’m going to cover is Ambient Addition. This was the work that got me interested in mobile music originally and started me thinking about mobile devices as a compositional medium.

Ambient Addition is a hardware device that augments the sounds your hear around you by synthesising an augmented version in real time. The goal of the Ambient Addition is to change the dynamic of personal stereo use. It mediates environmental sound so that people can still remaining connected to their environment while listening to something musical. Shifting the listening experience from a passive isolating one to a one that allows you to actively engage with your environment. It was created by Noah Vawter for a masters thesis at the Media Lab. Read more