We are going to be at Transmediale in Berlin next Thursday as part of a panel discussion about music apps. We hope to discuss the unprecidented range of artistic and economic possibilities that the format of reactive music affords.

In short presentations, current music gadgets and music applications for mobile electronic devices developed by artists and designers will be introduced. Afterwards, the editor of De-Bug magazine, Thaddeus Hermann, and the participants will discuss the artistic and economic potential of these new formats and applications. Are they used as an independent artistic medium, or are they merely expansions and accessories of known formats? Do they open up new artistic perspectives and new earning opportunities? How does the collaboration between artists and technology developers work? What has been the experience so far, and how do the panelists foresee the near future of this field?

We will be at the forthcoming Music 4.5 event in London on the 4th of March 2010. Robert Thomas will be doing a short talk about the vast potential for change that music becoming software enables and our vision at RjDj about reactive music for the 21st century.

Early bird tickets are available now.

Dave Kusek over at the Future of Music blog ( a great blog by the way ) linked to this great parody of music software – it really made us laugh !

Satire created for:
www.theinternetnowinhandybookform.com

Great info-graphics at:
www.informationisbeautiful.net

Enjoy and happy holidays !

Rob

Porto Sprint, second day

The RjDj Porto Sprint was part of the 10th Digital Arts festival “Olhares de Outono 2009″ at the Universidad Catolica, and took place on November 25-26. We started with more than ten people on Wednesday, and there were 6 people on Thursday. The audience already had a Pd workshop given by Christian Delecluze, which was nice because I didn’t have to start from the very beginning. So the sprint started with a presentation of the Composer Pack and RjLib which gave the participants the sonic building blocks they needed.

• Henrique Toscano made Trippy Thing, an effect-like scene that use a lot of delays, reverb and vocoder
• Ricardo Lameiro made 9 keys, a touchpad looper and drum sampler. He is going to upload a new version that has some generative behavior soon.
• João Cordero made a network setup scene based on zzSendSensors and GetSensors. The iPhone part extracts attacks and notes using bonk~ and fiddle~ and the
  desktop part generates visualizations with gem. He wants to use this setup for some prototyping during his Phd.
• Marta Luisa Santo has written a piece of generative music called Route, using many synths from RjLib. She enjoyed very much the s_guitar and s_drumelectro synths combined with the e_chorus effect.
• Samuel Von Ransbeeck and André Baltazar have created a sample-based reactive scene that dives into music layers, street and atmospheric sounds.

Puh, just in time for our NY sprints we have updated the RjDj Composer Pack. The major change is a new version of the RjzServer by our Mighty Python guru  MC Chris. It now should look much better and make you feel better, too. OS-X users will be happy to see that the newest OS version is supported as well. We also include the RjzServer for older OS-Xes, so choose your poiso wisely.

Some other changes: The ever growing “rj” library has grown a bit more. It’s sporting our reworked help files in many places (but not all yet), bugs have been squashed, features added. So give it a whirl and experience how fun it is to write scenes for RjDj and let the masses enjoy them. Don’t forget to share your results at rjdj.me/sharescene/

We have three new scene available: Atsuke from Frank Barknecht, Minimalist Style from Akihiko Matsumoto, and YA.MA.KA.SA from Yotaro Shuto,

Our very own Frank Barknecht visited Japan in September to spread the reactive music word. He worked on Atsuke while learning Japanese characters. That’s where the name  “A Tsu Ke” is from, which means absoluetly nothing in real Japanese. I am not shure how to describe the sound, probably electro trash? Sing with Atsuke. Swing with Atsuke. Whistle with Atsuke.

Minimalist Style from Akihiko Matsumoto alogrithmically generates music based on the analysis of composers such as Bach, Stravinsky, Squarepusher, and many more. Choose your favourite composer by touching one of the squares.

You can also shake the device to move forward in the musical progression, or touch the screen and tilt the device to change the timbre of the synth. The music is generated by a realtime algorithm based on schenkerian analysis. To get some more information on how this scene can be used have a look here. Or check out the video below.

YA.MA.KA.SA from Yotaro Shuto creates  a glitchy soundscape out of the microphone input signal. Shake your device to get it even more disturbing.

Florian

We have six new scenes available! Four from Martin Brinkmann, Project Icarus from  ookoi, and WindWalker from Chuck Wiggins.

On the PicNic Sprint in Amsterdam ookoi finished a scene called Project Icarus. The scene is based on ookoi’s original soundtrack for Dick Tuinder’s feature film “Winterland” (2009).

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Martin Brinkmann produced four new scenes! His latest works are: readymade, go on, r n s , and droneplay1. One astonishing thing about Martin’s scenes is that they are completely synthesized on the device. They use no soundfiles at all, its all done on your phone in realtime. Thats pretty amazing, especially if you think of the early days of synthesizers.

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Chuck Wiggins made another scene called WindWalker. You can harness the wind by moving and shaking. Try taking a walk and putting the device at various angles.

Florian

It’s been really great to be part of the discussion of reactive music across the web on numerous social networks. We felt like it would be beneficial to create a place where the experience and creation of reactive music could be discussed, both in relation to RjDj and beyond – so we have created a reactive music forum for just that !

Aside from facilitating a wider discussion, we are particularly excited about how this discussion could help us focus our composer tools development process to create the software you need and want to create amazing reactive music. These composer tools are distributed for free here.

When you log in you should be able to use your normal RjDj account so there is no need to register again. If you don’t have a RjDj account yet you can create one here. See you in the forums !

Rob

This weekend was RjDj London sprint weekend. We had some great discussions and sessions with enthusiastic scene creators and people interested in RjDj both for musical uses and other uses such as augmented reality applications. It’s going to be fascinating to see what stuff they create.

We are making progress on the development of non linear musical structures for scenes too. Robin Renwick did some great work on a forking musical structures for his scene. Look out for it being released on RjDj soon !

We had a great time last Friday evening hosting the Kids on DSP reactive album iPhone application launch party. The kids did a live set that included audio sampling from 5 mics located around the space, as well as a skype in option where party guests ( or anyone – as we advertised it on twitter ) could dial into the mix and have their voices reactively control the music. It was a wild effect ! Someone mentioned there was a recording of it somewhere, so hopefully that may surface soon …

The app has now been featured in the UK app store and iTunes store. Wagner James Au has done a nice review of it on the appleblog.com and @revdancat did a good interview here. Prior to release it was also covered by The Guardian newspaper in the UK and by MTV.