Vanessa from Etsy shot a great video of last month’s Handmade Music, sponsored by CDM, MAKE, and Etsy Labs. See me chatting about the idea and why working with tools like Reaktor and Max/MSP/Jitter is DIY, too, plus Eric Singer demonstrating the Sonic Banana and Slime-o-Tron slime-to-MIDI interface, Herr Professor showing off his portable GP Linux game machine, some ironing board MIDI, and more.
We also get to find out what those rubber gloves with tin foil were: a shock glove, made from the zap-friendly innards of a digital camera. A musical instrument? Phil Torrone from MAKE explains: “It makes a sound! It goes, OW!” Kind of like a Mupp-a-phone for fans of electricity.
“Tinymeat” sums it up: “It’s a motherfrellin Geekfest! How kick ass is that? Very much I must say.”
Via Etsy Blog, which has details on tonight’s event, as well.
Thanks to Vanessa for producing such a fantastic video! Not seen in the video but very popular is the beat blocks tangible music synthesizer, so here’s a repost of that video:
…plus another from Popular Science, which also had a writeup, both of which I missed (though they also missed CDM — I’ll make sure we connect both ways this time!):
Resources and people mentioned in the video:
I did a project with Reaktor and Max/MSP/Jitter (sound with the former, visuals with the latter)
Eric Singer, creator of the Sonic Banana and Slime-o-Tron (see projects
MidiTron, the real-world-to-MIDI interface he used to build those projects
Lemurplex, which teaches classes on doing this sort of thing in Brooklyn, NY.
LittleGPTracker is the tracker program for the Linux GP game platform (see the GP2x wiki
Ranjit Bhatnagar, artist of sound and other things, did the ironing board. He’ll be at the BENT Festival here in NY this weekend. He used Plogue Bidule for MIDI and sound-processing tasks.
[…] As seen in the video from last month’s Music Makers event, LittleGPTracker is a tracker for Linux-based GP2X and GP32 systems. The GP-series boxes are terrific little game machines that, unlike proprietary commercial game systems from Sony and Nintendo, are completely open. (Well, even if there is a certain pleasure to hacking PSPs, Game Boys, and DS machines to play homebrew anyway.) […]
[…] Adding to our running tally of totally geeky events, electronic musician Chachi Jones writes with a report from the Yuri’s Night party at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Sure, Yuri’s Night events, in honor of the great space explorer cosmonaut, take place all over the world. But when it hits Ames, you get a full-blown rave — and fantastic electronic music, to boot. […]
[…] My favorite of Eric’s League is the Slime-a-tron. Here I am playing the slime, and getting Eric to divulge his secret formula. Ed.: We saw the Slime-a-tron at the CDM/Make night at Etsy Labs — see previous video and photos/report, especially if you like this sort of thing. -PK […]