What’s the big idea in designing new interfaces for music? Just about everything, judging from the finalist entries for our Futuristic Music Design Challenge. A sequencer with bubblegum balls? A synth that works with surface temperature data and maps? Microtonal guitars, sound-making boxes, Nintendo games, digitally-connected saws and tape on bicycle wheels? Gloves, buttons, lights, strings, turntables? Yep, we’ve pretty much got the gamut here. We told contestants to make the Second Space Age proud. Now we get to see how they hold up.

Check out some of the videos and photos of what’s to come to get a sense of the projects, and if you’re attending Yuri’s Night Bay Area, be sure to get there by 2:30pm to watch these artists compete with each other in front of our expert judging panel. (See the Yuri’s Night Bay Area event schedule.)

Join this event on Facebook — and say hi!

After the show, get up-close-and-personal with the artists later on at the Create Digital Music booth. On the same stage, at 3:30 pm, our friends at Instructables.com have a show-and-tell session for even more DIY goodness. And then there are the installations, acrobats, space things, major scientists and thinkers… and, of course, stick around for a huge lineup of incredible music all night long. I’m going to figure out how I can be three places at once, personally, because there’s loads I want to see.

See you Saturday afternoon, California-bound peoples. Those of you not lucky enough to be in the Bay Area, stay tuned right here for more online coverage following the competition — plus the winner.

Click above for full-size image. With four stages operating simultaneously, you can bet plenty of stuff you want to catch will be happening simultaneously. (It is for me, at least. Hope I can shuffle around a little while also manning the CDM lounge.)

If you haven’t gotten tickets already, they’re still available online, and you can even get a ride from SF.

Digitonal has gone out of their way to bring you an exclusive Yuri’s Night 2008 mix.
So sit back, relax and get ready for orbit:

• B12 - Soundtrack of Space
• Future Sound of London - Ill Flower
• Alexei Zakharov - Peace 3 (X3: Reunion)
• Future Sound of London - Everyone in the world is doing something without me
• Low Profile Society - Example 10
• Vangelis - Rachel’s Song
• Global Communication - 14.31
• The Black Dog - 18 4 3s 555 [Part 2]
• Yasume - Rengoku Condensed
• Mr Projectile - Underneath the Evening
• Abfahrt Hinwil - The Light
• Elegi - Despotiets Vesen
• Cliff Martinez - Wear your Seatbelt
• Bola - Pfane Pt. 1
• Posthuman - Beautiful Beast
• Miles Tilmann - Through the Tubes
• Flotel - Untitled (Norberg live)
• Michael Land - The Madness of the Crystals
• Biosphere - Warmed by the drift
• Digitonal - Antares (Yuri’s mix)

digitonal mix MP3

Ed. Link is not working temporarily; we’ll let you know when it’s back up.

Mixed by Andy Digitonal, April 2008.
digitonal.com for everything, always.

- matt

If a magician is never supposed to give away the secrets to his tricks, someone forgot to tell Bay Area guitarist, electronic musician, and Yuri’s Night performer Christopher Willits, when he took up the offer to create a monthly video blog about home recording for XLR8R Magazine. In the guise of that one teacher you had in high school who commands respect, but who you just know parties like a rockstar, Willits lays down incredibly dense lessons that are easy even for a novice to grasp. Granted, to make the greatest use of the knowledge he is imparting requires a few key pieces of recording equipment, but if you follow along closely, you’ll be sure to pick up a few useful ideas.

Throughout his lessons, Willits proves that he is a master of the technology at hand, and clearly demonstrates how to achieve stunning results with the minimum amount of equipment and tinkering. His methods are simple and effective, while producing material that could easily have taken a far greater sum of money and time in a professional studio just a few decades ago.

As an added side effect of his presentations, Willits showcases his own talent to the audience, which is truly an aural treat. He proves himself to be a musician who possesses an intuitive grasp of composition paired with an overwhelmingly apparent raw creative ability, even in the rough thematic elements he explores in these brief segments. If anything stands as an exciting prelude to his performance in April, this is it.

You can view the first installment of “What You Talkin’ Bout, Willits?” here.

Image sourced from christopherwillits.com. Photo credit: Charis Briley

Update: entries are closed. Stay tuned for the official contestants, and lots more details as the challenge unfolds!

In science fiction and science fact, music has been central to finding a common language to speak to the universe. Music from Bach to gamelan — a mix curated by “DJ” Carl Sagan and his committee — has traveled into space on the Voyager spacecraft. In the digital age, musical interfaces are also often the best way to understand how to interface with technology and information.

Musicians have led many of the most innovative digital technological breakthroughs — the first digital synthesizer (at Bell Labs in the 50s), breakthroughs in modular electronic systems (modular synthesizers of the 60s), pioneering advances in digital storage and processing, unusual wireless interfaces and gestural controls decades ahead of the Nintendo Wii, and touch- and multi-touch tools years before the iPhone and Microsoft Surface.

But that’s all in the past. This is a design challenge for the future. We want to hear the best, most forward-thinking, generally coolest, Second Space Age-worthy instruments and digital music interfaces. If aliens land — as they did when met by a classic ARP synthesizer in Close Encounters — we want to be able to give them a great show.

Need extra incentive? The grand prize winner will take home a Yamaha Tenori-On.

Image: Voyager’s “golden record.” Source: NASA.

Weather Report video

Space exploration has brought not only views of the outer cosmos, but critical views back of the planet. So, among the new instrument designs coming to Yuri’s Night are at least two music devices built around sonifying data about planet Earth. (I’ll be bringing one, as well — more details soon.)”Weather Report”, by Cal Arts students Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis, uses a multi-point, tangible interface to surf temperature data and translate it into music. Full details over on Create Digital Music:Weather Report: Multi-Touch + Surface Temperature = Music on Earth

The underlying technology comes from the open Reactivision library, as used in the ReacTable (popularized recently on the Bjork tour).

If you’re bringing a music or visual project to Yuri’s Night, be sure to let us know.

Yuri’s Night Bay Area: 2 PM - 2 AM Nasa Ames Research Center, Moffett Field CA

… and around the planet

Bay Area information:

• Tickets
• Event site
• Events schedule

In a collaboration between CDM and Yuri’s Night Bay Area, I would like to welcome you all to YuriCDM.com. Here we will be showcasing the musicians, artists, speakers, and innovating technologies that will make this year’s Yuri’s Night an event unlike any other.

Yuri’s Night is a celebration of space exploration—and mankind’s curiosity, scientific ingenuity, technical achievements, and spirit of collaboration that have made it all possible. Each year, in over 120 places world-wide, Yuri’s Night commemorates mankind’s first venture into space, by Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961, and the launch of the first Space Shuttle by NASA exactly twenty years later. This year, NASA’s 50th anniversary, the Bay Area will be home to the largest Yuri’s Night celebration ever, with 8,000 people joining astronauts, artists, scientists, engineers, and musicians to pay tribute to our global space heritage and to celebrate how much more is out there to be discovered!

Electronic music by:

Amon Tobin in Gent; photo: volume12 (CC) via Flickr.

• Amon Tobin (Ninja Tune, Montreal)
• A special twilight downtempo set by Tipper (HI)
• John Tejada (LA/palette recordings): live set
• Lusine (Ghostly Intl., Seattle): live set
• Scuba (Hotflush Recordings, UK)
• Digitonal vs. Posthuman (UK): with live violin
• [a]pendics.shuffle (LA): live set
• Deru (Merck, LA): live set
• Tycho (Ghostly, Merck): live set
• Mr. Projectile (Merck): live set
• Dr. Toast (False Profit) vs. Ganucheau: live

Live vocal and instrumental music by:

Cellist Zoe Keating, by ekai. (CC)

• Telstar (Featuring: Phil Lesh, Steve Molitz, & John Molo)
• Freezepop (Rykodisc, Boston): indie synthpop / new wave
• Particle (LA): instrumental space-disco-dance
• BLVD w/ Souleye (LA): hip-hop, house, & breaks
• Zoë Keating: avant garde looping cello
• MJ Greenmountain (Hamsa Lila) vs. Yossi Fine (NY): global fusion and afro-tribal funk
• Christopher Willits (12k, Ghostly Intl.): processed guitar soundscapes
• Gamelan X: the intergalactic 17-member percussive melodic marching troupe
• Lulacruza: Argentinan percussion, guitar, and vocals

Speeches by:

Will Wright at the NASA podium. Photo: MysteryBee.

• World-renowned video game designer Will Wright.
• NASA astrobiologist Jonathan Trent.
• leader of the new NASA G.R.E.E.N. team for green technology research Saul Griffith.
• MIT-trained mad scientist and founder of one of the most innovative green power companies today, Makani Power.

Live performances by:

• 60 minutes of heart-pumping, high energy airplane aerobatics by Aeronautika
• Aerial performance and dance by Capacitor.
• Alien insects by Bad Unkl Sista, featuring breathtaking costumes by Anastazia Louise
• Gravity-defying stilt performances by The VonStilt Family

… and this is not even the full list! Stay tuned for more to come.

- matt

Composer/sound designer Matt Ganucheau is one of the organizers of Yuri’s Night Bay Area. He’s co-editing the Yuri’s Night site for createdigitalmusic.com and createdigitalmotion.com.