In Charlottesville, Virginia the EMMI group is working to create a human-robot experience that is sonically interesting musically fulfilling.

As we discovered when designing our own sensor interface (and the reason we started Electrotap), doing this kind of work gets really expensive in a hurry. To raise money for the Teabox we started Electrotap. To raise money for EMMI, this group has created a project on Kickstarter to receive donations.

Electrotap has no affiliation with this awesome project, except that we find it inspiring and cool, and we’ve decided to help support it. We hope you’ll consider supporting it too!

This is a nice review of a performance by Pascal Baltazar . Pascal is part of the core team developing Jamoma.

Max-for-Live is now available. Here is an official promo video:

There are also a pair of articles on Cycling’s site:

• The Edit Button has been Pressed
• An Interview with Robert Henke

All are well worth checking out.

One question I get a lot of is: Do the Tap.Tools work with Max4Live? The answer is yes.

Electrotap sells The Teabox. But why bother?

The Teabox was birthed out of the frustration of dealing with other companies’ sensor interfaces. Namely, the others all suck. Here’s why:

• They use MIDI, USB, and other technologies that are slow, prone to errors, unreliable under stress, or have other various problems
• Many of them lack an enclosure (just shipping an unprotected circuit board), or the enclosure is flimsy and does little to protect the device (the MidiTron, for example)
• None of them have any real brown-out or protection against shorting sensors/circuits
• Most of them require some sort of set-up work in software in order to function. Some examples here include the Teleo, Arduino, Basic Stamp, and the I-Cube.
• All of them use awful connectors, most of them use the cheapest (and poorest-performing) cable possible. Eowave’s Eobody interface uses quarter inch connectors: not only are they hard to extend, but they also cause the device to short-out every single time a sensor is plugged or unplugged from the device!
• Virtually anything under $2000 has suboptimal resolution and unacceptable latency for musical applications

The Teabox answers the call on all of these. But first, a story:

In the fall of 2000, Jesse Allison was working on an installation for the Belger Art Center. Jesse is a friend, so I gave a helping hand with soldering cables, debugging Max patchers, and lugging gear. He had wired-up sensors on the floor, walls, chairs, etc. Some sensors used a Basic Stamp II, and others used an Infusion System’s I-CubeX. It fed a computer with Max/MSP (by Cycling ’74). When I showed up for the opening, everything was working — and then (for no apparent reason), the I-Cube started failing and generating a combination of spurious data and no data at all.


A number of colleagues have experienced similar problems with ICube interfaces for music, art, dance, installations, etc. You can read about some of them at the end of this review of the Teabox published by the MIT Press.

The Teabox has always been the best in its class — it’s not even close. Five years after introducing the Teabox, everyone else is still asleep at the wheel. Electrotap has been very modest and we haven’t been very willing to toot our horn. But enough is enough. I think that it’s time to get over it, and we don’t need to apologize for being the best.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: in 5 years we’ve only had 1 unit returned. Just one. And it still works — we use it here all the time. Quality is obviously something we do, not just something we talk about.

^{photo courtesy of Richard Johnson}

This past week I attended fund-raising event for KcEMA at the Charlotte Street Foundation ’s Paragraph Gallery. Gallery acoustics are never known for being spectacular, but they actually worked very well with a number of the works that were performed.

The star performer of the event was Madeleine Shapiro. I saw her perform 14 years ago at the Crane New Music Festival. That was the first time I had a seen performances both of John Cage’s 4’33" and Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 3. She is still a dynamic and amazing performer, and it was great to see her perform at this event.

KcEMA also curated a concert on last weekend’s Electronic Music Midwest Festival. There is a write up of it in KCMetropolis .

Electrotap is helping to sponsor KcEMA’s 2009-2010 concert season. They need a lot more help though, so please consider donating!

CHARLOTTE STREET FOUNDATION’s URBAN CULTURE PROJECT PRESENTS

KANSAS CITY ELECTRONIC MUSIC & ARTS ALLIANCE (KCEMA): (Re)Structured

One night performance: Saturday, April 11, 8 pm (doors open at 7:30pm)
$5 suggested donation
La Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, KC MO 64018

Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance returns to Urban Culture Project’s la Esquina on Saturday, April 11, 8 pm for a one-night concert of live electronic music and video. Featuring music for bass clarinet and electronics, homemade instruments, and video of Kansas City’s unused and reclaimed industrial space. Performances by Brad Baumgardner, Michael Miller, and Scott Blasco. Music by Brad Baumgarnder, William Lackey, Jen-Kuang Chang, Richard Johnson and Christopher Biggs, Kyong Mee Choi, and Adam Hardin.

Composer and Bass Clarinetist Brad Baumgardner earned a B.A. in music from Western Kentucky University in 2003, a M.M. in composition from the University of Louisville in 2006, and is currently pursuing a D.M.A. in composition at the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance. Brad’s music has been featured all over the United States, most recently by the Trio Bel Canto at the North American Saxophone Alliance 2008 convention held in South Carolina. Brad remains active as a performer both as a solo artist and as a member of prominent area ensembles. Recent engagements include performances of Adam Hardin’s Echolalia at the Electronic Music Midwest 2007 and SPARK 2008 festivals.

The Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KCEMA) was founded in 2007 to encourage and develop understanding and appreciation of electronic music and to create an expansive sense of community for electronic musicians and other artists in the Kansas City Area. KCEMA organizes concerts of electronic music and collaborative projects with generative and performing artists. KcEMA provides a forum for electronic musicians and artists in other media to collaborate, exchange ideas, and grow as an interactive, supportive community.

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://c.web.umkc.edu%2Fcwby96%2FKCEMA%2FKCEMA.html
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.myspace.com%2Fkcema

This performance is the fifth collaboration between Urban Culture Project and KCEMA.

An initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://charlottestreet.org or e-mail info@http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://charlottestreet.org.

Version 0.1.1 of ObjectiveMax, the framework for writing Max objects as Objective-C objects, has been released. Details are at http://code.google.com/p/objectivemax/ . Enjoy!