Summer 2009. Mega project. The Cart Computer Game Group founded by Ramy Daghstani and myself aims to push independant game development within the Computation Arts department at Concordia University. We currently have a team of about 15 people coming from various digital creation backgrounds: programmers, 3D artists, animators, riggers, concept artists. The works.

We hold a website of our ramblings, information, minutes from meetings and the such. I won't go into specifics from the game in this post.
Here is a link to our site.
The group accepts anyone with sufficient qualifications for participation so don't hesitate to give us a hand!

Recently, a move away from complex DJing and electronic music has been occuring. An effectively growing number of artists are using lo-fi equipment to produce a very particular sound. Hacked gameboys, nintendo DSes and the sort.

For a proposal, I wish to create an audio texture comprised of unchanged, but unrecognizable sounds. Sounds we are used to hearing at the same time we usually are stimulated visually. Relating to the field of video games, this sound texture will be comprised of various button presses and commands inputed onto video game related devices, recorded using a simple computer microphone.

Much in the spirit of what John Cage did with his piece 4'33'', I will put the listener in the place of the electronic equipment so that he can hear what goes on when the sound and video feeds are turned off.

Also, I will inlcude scarcely sounds from video games. Mostly "old school" and/or performance games (from the very few who do exist). Sounds will come from the Mario Paint Composer for Windows and from Electroplankton for Nintendo DS.


Here are some links of interest :
DSMI DS Music Interface
Little Sound DJ software
Mario Paint Composer
The beautiful result
Electroplankton Webpage

Brandon laBelle brings up interesting topics by treating the human body as the noise producing machine it is. How many times have we produced a sound we were unable to replicate because we didn't know where it came from on the body?

The whole idea of discociating voice, sound and meaning isn't all that new but oh so compelling. Our speech is so encoded that we don't even notice it most times. When talking to someone over the phone, how many times have-you interpreted a moan, grunt or hum for a word?

I leave you with a vocal electroacoustics artist, Miguel Azguime.

Miguel Azguime: Composer, Poet, Percussionist
A gift
A hearing test

I think the idea of making music with sound and noises is simply brilliant. Luigi Russolo was obviously a precursor of sound art. This makes his approaches all the more important as he paved the way to some great things (that I will probably talk about next week). His work, as I have listened to quite a bit, doesn’t sound all that great. The main thing is that this man actually got the idea to make something completely different. With the means of the time, that didn’t signify much and meant mostly playing back recordings and creating musical scores built not necessarily built with pitch or tempo or any rules of regular music.

Canadian Electroacoustics Community
http://cec.concordia.ca/

Luigi Russolo Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Russolo

Listening Score Example :
http://demeter.revue.univ-lille3.fr/analyse/couprie/Bayle.swf

All the new hardware that comes on every year increases the pheasablility of more ubiquitous manners to control computers. Obviously, the mouse and keyboard approach that we all know is a bit outdated now. These artists display a great amount of creativity in their pieces. But here's the catch : what to do of involuntary actions. How many times haved I played the Wii and had to scratch and that actions made me fail at whatever game I would be playing. I believe the norm among non-KBAM (keyboard and mouse) is the touch interface. That is as "point-and-click" as you can possibly get. It is the interface model that has had the most success in my opinion for integration into society and efficiency.

Nintendo DS
iPod Touch
Microsoft Surface