[Noisebridge-discuss] This Friday, a Phasor~ driven event! In Tandem: Max Mathews, Aaron Koblin, and Daniel Massey

[Vlad Spears]

This is going to be a wonderful event, and the first in a series  
connected to Phasor~, our data flow working group here at  
Noisebridge.  The "Max" in Max/MSP is named for Mr. Mathews. His work  
is a part of the foundation we stand on.

No RSVP necessary, but for those of the Facebook persuasion, we have  
an invite here with more info on the event:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=350323874141

Vlad


+dialog symposia series
presented by RML SF, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Phasor~

Friday, March 19, 02010
7-9 PM
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
55 Taylor St. San Francisco

Suggested Donation to our host Gray Area $5-10 – No one turned away  
for lack of funds.

The RML SF +dialog symposia series fosters discussion and interaction  
between audiences and artists, authors, theorists, educators, and  
producers of cutting-edge work.

Trace the history of the most important song in computer music through  
two groundbreaking renditions. Max Mathews, the father of computer  
music, and new media artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, will give  
presentations about their interpretations of the classic song followed  
by a open discussion moderated by digital arts technologist Barry Threw.

Some background for the event:

Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when Max Mathews made  
an IBM 704 at Bell Labs play a 17 second composition on the Music I  
program.

In 1962 Mathews synthesized the music for the song “Daisy Bell”,  
originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, as an accompaniment for a  
vocoder speech synthesizer created by John L. Kelly. Arthur C. Clarke,  
then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray  
Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in  
the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for “2001: A Space  
Odyssey” as the swan song of the dying computer, HAL9000.

In 2009, the online work Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by artists  
Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey took this first recording and created a  
crowd-sourced rendition using a custom tool made in Processing.  
Comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s  
Mechanical Turk web service, participants were asked to listen to a  
short sound clip and record themselves imitating what they heard. The  
result was a reconstructed version of the song as rendered by a  
distributed system of human voices. Instead of programming a computer,  
they used a computer program to stitch together a cross section of  
humanity.
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