$5 // ALL AGES // DOORS AT 7PM

• In Sonitus Lux - 8 p.m.
• Sonic Generator - 9 p.m.
• Blunt Fang - 10 p.m.
• Warehouse - 11 p.m.

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Featured Performances

Music for Kinect, Four Hands- Nathan Weitzner, Sidharth Subramanian
Two performers use their hand movements as controls for real-time composition, improvisation, and performance. The music is a manifestation of each performer’s individual choices blending into the composition through the interdependence of harmony and melody.

MISTory- Yingja Liu, Sisi Sun, Kai Sheng, Mason Bretan
Body poses and hand gestures are used to manipulate a simulated visual of smoke. As the smoke moves and changes audio is generated and morphed. The end result is a sonic “story” derived from the performer’s movements and simulated visuals.

Game Room- Andrew Colella, Aaron Albin, Luke Heerman, Neeraj Vaidya
Players match each others’ rhythmic movements in this musical adaptation of the game “horse”. As players challenge each other sounds are activated, collectively creating an evolving musical piece.

Crossole- Sang Won Lee, Avinash Sastry, Anosh Daruwalla, Sertan Senturk
Meaning crossword of music, Crossole is a musical instrument where music is visualized as a set of virtual blocks that resemble a crossword puzzle. The performer controls music by manipulating the crossword blocks using hand movements and foot stomps.

Interpretations- Mason Bretan
Featuring Shimon, Georgia Tech’s resident robotic marimba player, Interpretations is a duet for drum set and robot. As the drummer improvises Shimon makes intelligent improvised melodic responses. The responses are based on the melodic and rhythmic interpretations of these transitions and other patterns in the drummer’s play.

Installations: 8pm
Performance: 9 pm
$10, free with Georgia Tech ID

Performances:

Slow Theka
Parag Chordia, Alex Rae
Slow Theka is a piece for sarod and interactive electronics. The electronic sound is generated in realtime based on the rhythmic and timbral characteristics of the sarod improvisation. The piece is based on the feel of vlambit tintal, a distinctive rhythmic framework used in North Indian classical music.

Flou
Jason Freeman, Mark Godfrey, Andrew Beck
Flou (pronounced "flew") is not exactly a game; there is a ship flying through space, but it does not shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as the ship navigates through a 3D world and zooms through objects in space, loops are added and effects applied to an ever-evolving musical mix. Originally developed as a web application, Flou is presented here as an interactive performance piece.

Flou is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney general at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/flou/

MusiKal
Sriram Viswanathan
Traditionally, gestures have always been an integral part of music as a form of expression; gestures give music that human touch. We see the importance of gestures in games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which demonstrate how gestures alone can create fulfilling musical experiences.

MusiKal is inspired by two fields -- music and calligraphy. Calligraphy is defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner". MusiKal uses physical gestures to produce correlated musical effects.

The piece involves 4 to 5 human performers equipped with accelerometer-based devices, which enable us to detect the performers' gestures. This data is then mapped to either a visual object or an auditory trigger, or both. At any point during the performance, a player can also undo actions that he has triggered in the past, like a visual object, an audio sample or a recent audio effect.

Dangum
Alex Rae, Jagadeeswaran J
In this piece, the computer listens to a musician playing Mridangam, a traditional South Indian drum, and replies with its own percussive sounds. It is capable of understanding and responding in an intelligent manner, following the musical form of a traditional percussion duet and improvising within that structure. While the system has been designed to respond to real musical input in a meaningful way, it is not simply an emulation of a human player; at times it may play things that would be improbable or even impossible for a human player. The result is a new musical experience, both based in tradition and extending into novel areas of interaction, sound, and machine musicianship.

Keyboard Band
Xiang Cao (Hawk)
Keyboard Band is a piece of live performance software which simulates a typical pop band setup. It includes guitar, bass and drums. All of these instruments are performed by players via computer keyboard and then synthesized by the computer. This piece of software provides functions such as auto chord, pitch bend and string strumming which make guitar playing much easier. The first Georgia Tech keyboard band will perform the classic rock tune "Hotel California".

Installations:

Story Table
Ali Mazalek, Tristan Al-Haddad, Claudia Winegarden & the XMedia Group
Tables are artifacts around which people gather. They become organized spaces of exchange and consumption. Kitchens are organized around the dining table; meeting rooms are organized around the conference table; living spaces are organized around the coffee table. Tables perform two complementary and simultaneous tasks: bringing people together to promote intimacy and holding them just enough apart to provide security. As technology becomes a vehicle for tangible interactions, tables establish the framework for social interaction instances. The Story Table is a symbiosis of two social spaces: story and table collapsed onto one another. Created through a process of co-construction of digital and physical media, the Story Table is an interactive installation that encompasses shared engagement in cinematically-inspired narrative expressions that unfold on its surface and space.

Project Directors - Ali Mazalek, Tristan Al-Haddad, Claudia Winegarden
Project Managers - Susan Robinson, Andy Wu, Hyungsin Kim
Artists/Researchers - Martin Bednar, Mehdi Ben Yahmed, Jin Ah Chon, Jakob Crowder, Daniel Gibson, Sergio Goldenberg, April Headen, Chih-Chieh Hsu, Emily Kiel, Amelia Mendez, Jacob Porter, Ritesh Rathi, Martin Rojas, Joy Salter, Stephanie Sellers, Yang Ting Shen, Jasjit Singh, Kurt Stilwell, Jacob Tompkins, Joshua Tuminella, Theodore Ullrich, Cooper Welch, Sarah Williams, Crystal Wrenn, Stephanie Yang, Arseni Zaitsev

Free Field
Andrew Beck
The spaces we live in inform our experience. We project our view of the world into every room we live in, forming the silent backdrops to our everyday lives. Given modern technology, every action we make is recorded and archived somewhere, probably never to be seen by human eyes again. We are gradually becoming accustomed to the data we generate and allow it to happen behind the scenes. What happens if we were able to hear the bits and pieces of information we leave behind? Free Field is a playful exploration of these themes, picking up pieces of people's conversation and noises to play back in unique ways. Every sound that happens within its walls is recorded and analyzed, allowing participants to interact with the system in unexpected ways.

Illumination
Hyun Jean Lee, Hyungsin Kim, Gaurav Gupta, Ali Mazalek
WiiArts is an experimental video, audio and image processing art project that invites viewers into a collaborative and expressive art experience. It makes use of pre-existing sensing technologies provided by Nintendo's WiiRemotes and a wireless Sensor Bar. In its current form, three interactors work together to create and compose images and sounds. Illumination, a piece created under the WiiArts theme, is a real-time video art piece in which drawings are created with fluid candlelight traces. The projection screen becomes a shared drawing canvas, and up to three participants can draw simultaneously with their own WiiRemotes. The candlelight source imagery is captured from three burning candles in real-time, and the candlelight traces made by participants jointly compose a dynamic drawing. This process of drawing from light in a dark space provides a contemplative aesthetic experience.

Composition Kiosk
Computer Music Compition Class
This listening kiosk features music created in the Computer Music Composition course at Georgia Tech. Musique concrete works draw musical inspiration from cash registers, sewing machines, kitchen utensils, and more, while algorithmic compositions use custom software to generate sound via process.

Simon Listens
Vamsi Bharadwaj, Anand TM
Simon is a music listening agent that listens and responds to what you play. With the help of the two major modules, music analysis and behavioral systems, your music can drive the behaviors and expressions of Simon. Music analysis includes beat detection, analysis of timbre, and measuring consonance and dissonance. The behavioral system, with the help of these features, makes the agent render expressive facial gestures that include head nods, eyebrow expressions and gazes. A part of the goal is to make the agent perform these actions while making it appear as lifelike as possible by using variations in behavior. A future goal of this project is to develop a robotic musician that will create meaningful and inspiring musical interactions with humans, leading to novel musical experiences and outcomes.

An expert panel of judges will review entries based on musicality, design and engineering, for prizes of $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place and $2,000 for third place.

Judges Include:

• Gil Weinberg, Director, Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology
• Eliot Van Buskirk, Music Reporter for Wired.com
• Johannes Goebel, Founding Director of Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Tod Machover, Professor and Director of Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future Group at MIT Media Lab

Doors open at 11 a.m. for an open house showcase of unique music-making experiences from faculty and students in the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. Winners will be announced at 1 p.m., and a concert featuring the best of the best new musical instruments will follow.

Last year, 30 inventors from seven countries performed on Georgia Tech's campus. "We were blown away by the diversity and quality of the competitors - it was great to see ideas from both commercial firms and academicians and just creative young musicians,"said Tech music director Frank Clark. "Thanks to the Guthmans, we think the Musical Instrument Competition will expose new paradigms of expression year after year."

See highlights from the 2009 competition at Wired.com.

For more information, contact Leslie Bennett at 404-385-7642 or leslie.bennett@music.gatech.edu.

Lauri Stallings has again assembled a group of creative collaborators to produce a one of its kind, site specific evening of chamber works in the High Museum of Art. On December 10, dance, visual art, and music will blur to create crea. Stallings’s gloATL is known for its keen sense of innovation and invention.

crea will be the second site-specific piece to premiere on the Woodruff campus. The first, rapt, was described by the AJC as "A hipster ballet company fusing classically modern dance with the funky groove of Outkast…. rapt felt like a cultural watershed moment for Atlanta." The Woodruff sees the new piece as a way to fuse all the art forms it represents into one production... visual arts, music, and theatre. Embracing the idea of using the human body as an instrument and blending influences and performances by the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and High Museum of Art, crea promises to be a more intimately delicate piece than gloATL has performed before.

VIP tickets include admission to the High Museum anytime after 4:00 on December 10th to experience the exhibit Leonardo Da Vinci: Hand of the Genius prior to the performance; the crea performance; and a reception with the artists after the performance.

To add High Museum admission before the performance to general admission tickets, please visit high.org for 50% off tickets after 4:00 on December 10th.

Ticket prices: $25 General Admission; $100 VIP. All orders will incur added sales tax of 8% plus a handling service fee of $5.00 per ticket for VIP tickets or $2.50 per ticket for General Admission tickets. Tickets are available through the Woodruff Arts Center Box Office, (404) 733-5000 or online at www.woodruffcentertickets.org.

Prepaid parking is available for the Woodruff Arts Center Parking Garage and can be added on Internet orders. Please take note of both the date and time. Parking passes are good for entry on or after the stated time.

A free shuttle bus will run from Georgia Tech to the concert throughout the evening. Woodruff Arts Center is also easily accessible via MARTA and by car.

The program showcases Gordon’s strikingly diverse music and his unique approaches to technology and to film. I Buried Paul (1996) draws inspiration from an unusual moment in the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever, while Weather One (2005) compares the history of art to the unpredictability of the weather. The program also includes ac dc (1996) and a trio of selections from Gordon’s album Light is Calling (2004), which expertly mixes acoustic instruments and electronics with films by Bill Morrison.

Gordon's music "merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism,” in the words of The New Yorker's Alex Ross. He has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others, and he has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the internationally renowned Bang on a Can Festival.

Sonic Generator, Georgia Tech’s chamber music ensemble-in-residence, explores the ways in which technology can transform how we create, perform and listen to music. The ensemble, comprised of some of the top classical musicians in Atlanta, works closely with Georgia Tech faculty in the GVU Center and the Center for Music Technology to present concerts that bring cutting-edge technologies to the world of contemporary classical music. Sonic Generator was recently recognized by Atlanta Magazine in its 2009
"Best of Atlanta" list. Its concerts routinely attract a standing-room-only crowd.

Sonic Generator is sponsored by the GVU Center, which seeks to advance the state of the art of the interaction between people, computing machines and information. The concert series is organized in collaboration with the Center for Music Technology and the School of Music in the College of Architecture. These entities champion advancements in creativity, expression, and human-computer interaction through research and education at Georgia Tech.

For 40 years, the Woodruff Arts Center has set the arts standard for Atlanta and the Southeast. Since its inception, the Center has grown into the most dynamic center for the visual and performing arts in the South and is among the top such centers in the nation. Located in Midtown, the Center offers a bold variety of performing and visual arts - both traditional and avant-garde. Today the Woodruff Arts Center includes the Alliance Theatre, High Museum of Art, Young Audiences and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

For more information, visit www.sonicgenerator.gatech.edu.

Besides presenting a series of concerts, the group works with students and faculty across campus on specific projects involving the creation, development, and implementation of electronic music technologies. Furthermore, the ensemble serves as an educational resource for the larger university community and the surrounding local community through concerts, lectures, workshops, and masterclasses.

Please join us for this free concert presenting a broad spectrum of cutting-edge work integrating technology into chamber music performance.

Sonic Generator is sponsored by the GVU Center at Georgia Tech and organized in collaboration with the Music Department in the College of Architecture.

Learn about the new Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.

Besides presenting a series of concerts, the group works with students and faculty across campus on specific projects involving the creation, development, and implementation of electronic music technologies. Furthermore, the ensemble serves as an educational resource for the larger university community and the surrounding local community through concerts, lectures, workshops, and masterclasses.

Please join us for this free concert presenting a broad spectrum of cutting-edge work integrating technology into chamber music performance.

Sonic Generator is sponsored by the GVU Center at Georgia Tech and organized in collaboration with the Music Department in the College of Architecture.

Learn about the new Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.

Learn about the first Guthman Musical Instrument Competition presented by the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology and Harmonix (makers of Guitar Hero and Rock Band).

PERFORMANCES

Beatscape

Aaron Albin, Brian Blosser, Oliver Jan, Sertan Senturk, Akito Van Troyer

Beatscape is a mixed virtual-physical environment for musical ensembles where sound objects interact with temporal waves to create rhythmic grooves. Musical outcomes in the virtual world are determined by the ensemble’s actions in the physical world. Part of the ensemble manipulates physical objects representing sounds while the other part triggers the sound objects by generating waves with hand gestures.  In this piece, both parts of the ensemble explore the degree to which their contributions are both static and dynamic, and how combining the two elements finally results in the ensemble arriving at its full expressive potential.

Loic

Akito Van Troyer, Jason Freeman 

with performers: Aaron Albin, Akito van Troyer, Andrew Colella, Avinash Sastry, Oliver Jan, and Sertan Senturk

The Laptop orchestra live coding (Lolc) system uses real-time music scripting software to connect  a group of musicians who can collaborate and improvise musically on the fly. Lolc accomplishes musical collaboration by sharing musical resources — chat messages and musical patterns — among musician and the audience. Chat messaging empowers musicians to communicate in direct the course of performance; and musical pattern sharing enables musicians to advance the musical cohesiveness. The interaction among musicians is projected to the audience, representing the process that forms the music.

Paper Moon

Ryan Nikolaidis, Guy Hoffman, Trishul Mallikarjuna, Gil Weinberg

An arrangement of the jazz standard “It’s Only a Paper Moon” for an ensemble of humans and a robot. Shimon, our robotic marimba player, listens and learns while humans perform. He accompanies while we improvise and improvises while we accompany. Shimon uses a style he learns solely from our real-time performance, and will hopefully inspire us with new musical ideas.

Sonic Symbiotic

Meghashyam Adoni, Avinash Sastry, Andrew Willingham, Ryan Nikolaidis

We present a novel paradigm for the traditional rock band. Using four instruments, electronically interconnected, we look at new ways to create, control and shape sound, using interactions between band members as well as their instruments.

Beyond Thunderdome

Gilberto Gaxiola, Sam DeFilipp, Trishul Mallikarjuna, Andrew Colella

A post-minimalist work involving real-time composition and complex meter signatures, Beyond Thunderdome rests in ambiguity between composition and improvisation.  Throughout the piece, the conductor/composer shapes and organizes musical material in real-time.  The conductor communicates with the players (and the audiences) by projecting information and instructions regarding the music about to be played.  This rock-influenced vanguard uses ambisonic location as an important compositional parameter.

Guest appearance by Street Lotto, playing ZOOZbeat

On the schedule for the April 2 performance are:

Nico Muhly: Pillaging Music for percussion, piano, and electronic sound
Henrik Strindberg: Cheap Thrills for alto flute, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, and computer
Eric Moe: Let Me Tell U About R Specials for flute, electronic sound, and video
Eric Chasalow: Suspicious Motives for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and electronics
Karen Tanaka: The Song of Songs for cello and electronics
Nickitas Demos: passing vanities

Location and time subject to change. Check back for updates.

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT) presents noted experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson for a public workshop and lecture. Anderson will discuss her recent works and collaborative experimentation with Georgia Tech students, faculty and researchers.

During her visit, Anderson also will work with researchers from GTCMT, the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access, the School of Psychology, and the School of Interactive Computing on a study that explores how musicians translate dynamic visual displays into music.

About Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is one of today’s premier performance artists. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. Initially trained as a sculptor, she did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s.  Anderson has gone on to create large-scale theatrical works which combine a variety of media—music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture—in which she is an electrifying performer. As avisual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, New York, as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Bros., including “Big Science,” featuring the song “O Superman” which rose to number two on the British pop charts.

Anderson has invented several novel musical instrument that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, shedeveloped a talking stick, a six-foot-long batonlike MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds. In 1999, she staged “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick,” an interpretation of Herman Melville's 1851 novel. She lives in New York.

7:00 pm - Performances by finalists 

8:30 pm - Judges deliberation and reception open to all guests

9:00 pm - Awarding of prizes

The finals take place in the Reinsch-Pierce Family Auditorium at 247 Fourth Street NW, Atlanta GA 30332. Visitor parking is available in the lower level of Peters Parking Deck or Technology Square Parking Deck. View map of visitor parking.

“Each year, the competition showcases extraordinary ideas that have the potential for changing the way people make and experience music,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. “We open the final performance to the public because we encourage everyone to join the conversation and imagine the future of music technology.”

The evening culminates with the awarding of the grand prize of $5,000. In total, $10,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to the best novel musical instruments and presented by Tech alumnus Richard Guthman in honor of his musician wife, Margaret.

Instruments will be judged on musicality, design and engineering by an expert panel including Tom Oberheim, inventor of the first polyphonic music synthesizer; Sergi Jorda, inventor of the reactable tabletop musical instrument; and Georgia Tech professor Jason Freeman.

The entries include Tulane graduate student Peter Leonard’s “Hula Hoop Controller,” which translates interaction with one or more hula hoops’ circular interfaces into computer-generated sounds. Also in the ring this year is German musician Jacob Sello's “HexenKessel,” a timpani drum that uses advanced projection and multi-touch technology, and French group Interlude Consortium’s “MO Kitchen,” a software that enables music-making with everyday utensils such as cookware.

The past two competitions have hosted a broad range of inventions, from the “Silent Drum,” featuring an elastic spandex head that uses shapes and shadows to compute and emit sound, to the “Double Slide Controller,” an electronic trombone-like instrument with two independent slides and two versatile hand controllers.

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology is an international center for creative and technological research in music. Through collaborative partnerships, startup companies, interdisciplinary research projects and experimental performances, the center produces new modes of expression for performance, composition and listening.

DouglasC. Allen Lecture

Sunday, April 22 at 3 PM in the Ferst Center.

Including spectacular works:

Video Game Medley with full orchestra and dueling choirs; The Here and Now by Christopher Theofanidis of the Atlanta School of Composers; Say Naught the Struggle by Jerry Ulrich, and a premiere performance of N-400, by Gil Weinberg of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology featuring Shimon. 

There will be cool things to see, interesting people to talk to and fun things to play with. Bring your family and stop by for a day of discovery, fun and inspiration!

Visit makerfaireatl.com for a list of participants and speakers.