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.

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.

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.

For almost two nice September weeks RjDj has been spreading the message of the reactive music revolution in Japan. Invited by the Tokyo Max User Group RjDj was part of the APMT design festival, did two sprints and a presentation with some scene live coding madness at the super-hip “Super Deluxe” club. Read more…

We’re preparing for the London RjDj Sprint, and on Friday Oct 2 we’re hosting a release party for the new Kids on DSP application in our London offices. If you’re in London, come by and have drinks with us, we promise some reactive surprises too!

The RjDj sprint we’re hosting during the weekend will be about creating scenes, and even if you can’t attend the whole weekend, you’re most welcome to drop by during Saturday or Sunday. We’ll be doing an introduction to RjDj and reactive music on Saturday 11 am that is open to anyone interested.

As announced earlier we will also have a full sprint in Amsterdam on October 22-23, hosted by Mediamatic and Ookoi

This sprint will start with an introduction to RjDj and reactive music. The main part is about composing your own scenes. If you want to learn how to make music that plays in RjDj, that’s the event to go to. We will start at 14.00 hrs and finish the next day when your RjDj scene is ready for your iPod or iPhone. Note that the sprint takes place right after Music & Bits in Amsterdam, so its definitely worth a trip.

There is a limited number of seats available, so please rsvp on the Mediamatic RjDj Sprint site! Participation is free.

Some impression from the PicNic Sprint:

Thanks again to  Mediamatic and Ookoi for making this sprint possible

We are gonna have a one day sprint at PicNic in Amsterdam on Wednesday 23 September, hosted by Ookoi and Mediamatic.

The morning will be about a general introduction to RjDj and Reactive Music together with Harold Schellinx from Ookoi. In the afternoon max. 20 participants will do a scene composing sprint. You don’t necessarily need tickets for PicNic to vist the sprint! If you don’t have tickets for PicNic you need to do the following:

• Register on the Picnic website
• Create a profile page on the PicNic website
• Register for the RjDj-Sprint Lab
• Come to the Mediamatic lab on the PicNic terrain  (you won’t be able to go to the any other events that day)

Program:

• 10:00 – 12:00 Presentation about RjDj, developing ideas and looking at techniques at the Mediamatic Camp Site. Open to all PicNic visitors (max. 40 people) RSVP .
• 12:00 – 13:00 Break
• 12:30 – 17:00 Develop your own RjDj scene in the Mediamatic Camp Site. Please RSVP separately. This session is open to max. 20 participants.

If you can’t make it this time Mediamatic will offer a full weekend RjDj sprint at their place later this year. We will keep you posted on that. Thanks to Harold Schellinx and Mediamatic for making this sprint possible.

Florian

RjDj will be at Music Hack Day in Berlin on September 19-20. We will do a general talk on RjDj and reactive music, and do a small scene composing sprint. If you want to learn how to make music that plays in RjDj, come along to this great event. We’re very happy to join companies like Soundcloud, Ableton, Echonest and many more to make Music Hackday Berlin a great thing.

Music Hack Day is a free event where people hack on music related APIs and tools, and we had a great time at the last one in London. If you’re in or around Berlin, join us for some scene making and reactive music talk!

Check out the event here: Music Hack Day Berlin and note that you need to register to attend even if it’s free!

See you in Berlin! And check out what the last Music Hack Day was like.