Meeting 45

AudioDork

Wednesday, March 5^th, 2008 at 7:30pm (get there at 7 for drinks and chat)
911 Media Arts, 402 9^th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109
Admission: Free to all ages and species, though you'll probably need ears this month.

We have machines that go PING!, machines that record the other machines going PING!, and machines to turn that PING! into all manner of wonderful sounds. But how do we turn all these possibilities into something beautiful? This month, Dorkbot will hear from three speakers with experience and insight into the art of sound, from composing with operating system sounds through capturing the sound environment of a place to creating sound environments for people to experience.

Presenters

Jim Owen

Jim has been writing music for over 25 years. At 18 he created 7 albums of songs using a cassette recorder and making album covers on cardboard sheets. They were mostly terrible, but he still has all of them. He also wrote two comic book operas, where you listen as you read, and created another opera from the text of a Star Trek episode ("Day of the Dove", if anyone is interested.) Since then he spent most of his music time writing for musical theatre, and had shows produced in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. His styles range from lounge to novelty to classical. Most recently, as Jim of Seattle, Jim has been winning songwriting competitions for an online songwriting site (www.songfight.org). More of his music can be found at www.jimofseattle.com. Jim originated and produced Opening Windows, a CD of songs by Microsoft employees to benefit the United Way.

Jim works as a technical account manager for Microsoft.

Doug Haire

Doug Haire is a composer, producer, engineer and impresario of cutting-edge music. Specifically, he has been spotted wearing any or all of these hats at different times:

• 28 years of music and sound recording in Seattle
• lead engineer and producer at Jack Straw Productions
• producer / DJ of KEXP's Sonarchy show
• founding member of Seattle Phonographers Union
• sound art composer
• Bang Kung Assn.

More information, including a discography and MP3s, is on his website: doughaire.com.

Doug will speak about the diversity of music and sound art being made in Seattle, including phonography and his own work.

Mike McCracken

Mike McCracken works in Seattle building software for a software company and art for an art company.

Mike will tell us more about his Strange Things submission—Audible Avatar—an art project that uses software to monitor movement in a space, attaching sounds to people as they move and creating an acoustic representation of the activity in the space. SuperCollider records audio input and generates the soundscape over four channels; an Arduino takes input from and provides feedback to the kiosk to facilitate the recording; and a camera connected to MAX/MSP/Jitter using Computer Vision for image analysis and custom Java software to process the information sends commands to SC via OSC. The result is an undulating ambient soundscape filled with entities that follow people around, modulating as they move.

Open Dork / Show and Tell

YOU!!! Yes, if you have a technological relic - any sort of relic, in any state of [d|r]ustiness, a project - any project, at any stage of completeness, an idea - any idea, at any stage of bakedness, an artwork - any kind of artwork at any stage of doneness, please do bring it along to the dorkbot meeting and claim your 10 minutes of fame after the presenters.

If you'd like to take part, either email [dorkbotsea] at [dorkbot] dot [org], or grab one of the Overlords before the last speaker starts.