The 2010 Bent Festival will take place at The Tank April 22-24, 2010…

…and I’m invited. I’ll be performing my TONEWHEELS set as well as giving a workshop to teach people how to build their own opto-electronic synthesizers.

FEATURING ::vtol::, Action Potential:Interact, Adachi Tomomi, Alpha-Bit, Brendan O’Connell, Derek Holzer/TONEWHEELS, Dr. Bleep and Handmade Music Austin, Dr. Rek, Eric Archer, Gannon, homeless of the sea and sky, Iain Sharp, Joe Mariglio + Steven Litt, KBD, LCDD, Paulo R. C. Barros, Philip White, Phillip Stearns, Stefan Jankus, Threep, Travis Thatcher…and others…

I’m in the process of hooking up other workshops, lectures and performances in Buffalo, Syracuse, New York City, Providence and Boston over the dates 14 April – 1 May. Please get in touch if interested or if you can help out (particularly with a room in NYC over 19-28 April!!!) Further dates will be posted here when confirmed.

Nizo Super 8 Analogue Noise Machine from Matt Kemp on Vimeo.

Matt Kemp was in my Neanderthal Electronics workshop at WORM in Rotterdam last summer, and worked on one of the most original case/interface designs of the whole thing. Inspired by Eric Archer’s Sound Cameras and a Nizo Super 8 camera found at the flea market, Matt got busy making a light-controlled sound machine. Matt writes:

It has a few simple analogue circuits including two oscillators, a high pass filter and a band switch, mounted where the original camera controls were. There’s also a light sensitive resistor mounted behind the lens, so the sound changes as you move the camera or zoom into objects. I just have to make a replacement nameplate for it now, I’m thinking Noizo 801..

Thanks for posting this Matt!

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Pure Data Workshop + FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint
Tusday 23 – Friday 26 February 2010, 17.00-22.00 [GMT +1]
NK Elsenstr. 52 2HH 2 Etage 12059 Berlin, Germany
Contact Derek Holzer: derek AT THE DOMAIN umatic.nl mob: +49(0)176 2812 5845
Or contribute online!
http://en.flossmanuals.net/puredata
irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

Pure Data (or Pd) is a free + open source, real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. Because all of these types of media are handled as data in the program, many fascinating opportunities for cross-synthesis between them exist. Pd is commonly used for live music performance, VeeJaying, sound effects composition, interfacing with sensors, cameras and robots or even interacting with websites.

A book sprint brings together a group of writers, editors and artists to produce a published book within several days. This sprint will combine a workshop within it, where new users will learn to create basic patches in Pd, documenting them along the way for the FLOSS Manual. This is an exciting opportunity both to acquire new skills as well as share them with others in the form of a book!

This sprint is a long-distance collaboration between FLOSS Manuals, the Berlin Pure Data users group and ITP/Tisch School of the Arts, New York.

Please bring your own laptop with Pure Data Extended installed. The workshop is free, with the expectation that participants will contribute to the FLOSS Manual.

Just back from the beautiful (and internet-less) mountains of southern Bulgaria, loved every second of it. Found some small sound treasures there that I will post later on. In the meantime, I decided to pimp my Schoolofeverything.com page to see if it can generate some new interest in the workshops that I do.

For those who don’t know, the School of Everything is a website that got started a couple years ago in the UK as an alternative educational resource. The idea is simply to use the same kinds of social networking platform that others use to…um, well, uh, “tweet” and whatever it is they do with it, to hook up people who want to learn specific skills with those who can teach them.

In general, I find this self-education idea much closer to my own way of thinking than the traditional academic model. In fact, I’ve always maintained that the only thing that separates artists using technology now from David Tudor and the other electronic art pioneers of the 60s and 70s is the internet. Whereas Tudor, the Vasulkas, Buchla, Paik, Sandin and the rest had much more limited channels to find the information they needed, we have an almost limitless supply. Which is of course the other half of the problem–trying to get the signal out of the noise.

As a result of all this, the models of teaching and learning that I use have become quite tuned towards self-initiation and self-discovery. Having someone hand over all the answers to you doesn’t really stimulate the brain, and in fact could hardly be called learning at all. So most every lesson or workshop that I do is project-oriented, to encourage that process of teaching people to teach themselves.

You can check my teacher profile at:

http://schoolofeverything.com/teacher/derekholzer

And I have listed the following as one-on-one lessons:

Circuit Bending & DIY Electronics

Field Recording Techniques

Audio Recording & Post-Production with Ardour

Introduction to Pure Data

Sound Art Technologies

I’ll be back in Cologne next week for my fellowship at KHM. Two lecture/workshops have been planned…

Tuned City:Sound+Architecture lecture

(Will Schrimshaw’s “Little Helpers”, photo by poportis)

11.00-13.00, Monday 14 December 2009
Klanglabor, KHM, Cologne

“Tuned City – Between sound and space speculation” was an exhibition and conference project taking place from July 01.-05. 2008 in Berlin which proposed a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic. In this lecture, we will see and hear some of the projects from the Tuned City event, as well as related projects covering the themes of Temporary Architecture for Sound, Buildings as Instruments and Composing the Cityscape. Following the lecture, from 14.00-18.00 the participants of the Materialize ISEA/Tuned City project will meet in a working group to discuss the projects and concepts shown.

The lecture is open to the public, however the working group is by arrangement with Materialize participants only.

Analog Synthesizer Workshop: Vocal Processing

(Frequency plot of Doepfer Vocoder module)

14.00-17.00 Thursday 17 December 2009
Klanglabor, KHM, Cologne

Building on the basic introductory workshop given in November, this special topic workshop will investigate using the Doepfer A-100 analog modular synthesizer for processing an external input–in this case the human voice. Modules such as the vocoder, ring modulator, envelope follower and various filters (voltage controlled & fixed frequency/equalizer) will be used to analyze and transform the sounds from a microphone. Previous knowledge of analog synthesizers, either from my earlier workshop or personal experience, is helpful since we will not spend much time explaining what was covered last time (voltage controlled oscillators, voltage controlled amplifiers, envelope generators, keyboards/sequencers, triggers/gates, etc etc).

Workshop instruction will be in English, and will be limited to 12 people. Preregistration required! Contact: derek AT THE DOMAIN umatic.nl

Practice your Italiano!

Nu Fest 2010 Padova, IT

Venerdì 19 febbraio

Palazzo Liviano
ore 14.00 (durata 6 ore circa)
Workshop: TONEWHEELS

Teatro MPX
ore 21.00
MIRA CALIX live set (Warp Records – Joahnnesburg.Londra SOUTH AFRICA/UK)
+ opening act by DEREK HOLZER live set (Umatic NL/USA)

Tonewheels è un esperimento che consiste nella conversione di un immaginario grafico in suono. Il workshop si ispira ad alcune invenzioni basilari come l’ANS Synth (Murzin USSR 1937-57), il Variophone (Sholpo USSR 1930) e il sistema Oramics(Oram UK 1957) sviluppate da importanti musicisti e ricercatori sin dall’inizio del secolo scorso.
Fogli di plastica trasparente e colorata verranno illuminati per poter interagire con dei circuiti elettronici sensibili alla luce che così produrranno suoni e strutture ritmiche. I partecipanti impareranno come costruire due tipi di circuiti che sono due mattoni fondamentali per la costruzione di un sintetizzatore ottico: un semplice convertitore luce-suono controllato da un motore e inoltre come disegnare e stampare dei pattern personali usando il materiale disponibile in internet gratuitamente.

Ardour is a full-featured, free and open-source hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation program suitable for professional use. It features unlimited audio tracks and buses, non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo, and anything-to-anywhere signal routing. It supports standard file formats, such as BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF and CAF, and it can use LADSPA, LV2, VST and AudioUnit plugin formats.

The “Introduction to Ardour” FLOSS Manual is a free (gratis/libre) tutorial-style book, which introduces the program without expecting a vast knowledge of computers or sound editing from the reader.

This FLOSS Manual can be read online at:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/

The Ardour FLOSS Manual was largely written by workshop participants learning the software themselves, over a one week period during a session led by Derek Holzer at the moddr_lab/WORM in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Non-profit, print-on-demand paper copies can be ordered from Lulu.com soon. Please check back with the main FLOSS Manuals page in several days for ordering information:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/

The manual is free to use, distribute and remix according to the GNU General Public License. FLOSS Manuals volunteers are currently working on French and Portuguese translations, and anyone is free to add contributions and edits for future versions of the manual at
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Ardour/WebHome

Thanks to Adam Hyde, Walter Langelaar, the workshop participants in Rotterdam as well as those who helped online from the FLOSS Manuals, Ardour and Linux Audio communities, and to all the folks at the moddr_lab and WORM!

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