Yesterday, Bert was invited for an interview at the Time Drone show, a weekly radio show at electro-music radio hosted by Jack Hertz.

During one hour Jack asked Bert, the designer of the AudioCubes, questions about his background, how the idea of making the AudioCubes started, as well as questions about all the applications he made for the AudioCubes.

Besides answering Jack’s questions, Bert did a live demo of EVOLVOR, the latest sound design application which was released for the AudioCubes.

The audience also had the opportunity to ask questions to Bert via chat. Every question which popped up the electro-music radio chat window was discussed during the radio show.

Check out the pictures which were taken during the interview

Jack announcing the AudioCubes Interview at electro-music-radio

Bert at Jack hertz' studio

Jack Hertz asking questions

More information about Jack Hertz:

Website: http://jackhertz.com

Saturday January 28th, Bert is invited for an interview at Time Drone. Time Drone is a weekly show at electro-music radio featuring two hours of ambient music by Jack Hertz. Bert will be live in the studio with Jack Hertz to talk about the Percussa AudioCubes, and he’ll do some live demonstrations of the AudioCubes.

If you’d like to ask some questions yourself, join the chatroom. You can tune in to the live show at 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT streaming live over the Internet at http://electro-music.com/radio/

About Time Drone

Time Drone is a weekly show featuring two hours of ambient music by Jack Hertz and guests. Time Drone is focused on experimenting with very long forms of live improvisation that are meant to slow or extend the listeners’ perception of time.

About Jack Hertz

Based in San Francisco Bay Area, Jack’s focus is on exploring innovation ways to create music as electronic music was meant to do. Today, he’s working to creating new, amalgamated sounds and ways to control them. Taking queues from classic electronic and popular music. His approach is basic, yet robust. Perform on vintage hardware that is processed and controlled with cutting edge technology. In this way he can celebrate the past and introduce the future to young and old alike.

Web Site: http://jackhertz.com/

Percussa is a small company, but our main motto is to give our users the best service as possible. This week, we received a very kind message from a very happy user from LA. Bert and I were really touched by it, and decided to share it with you

“About those cubes – my buddy took them away from me and have been using them ever since =) Apparently he is having tons of fun with them and says that they are great. I have been very busy with work and recently I have moved to Los Angeles so I haven’t had enough time to completely master the cubes but from what I’ve done so far I can easily say that I spent my money for something that is 100% worth every cent. Thank you for making this product!” (Nikolay Kuzovkov)

Never hesitate to contact me or Bert in case of any questions. We’d love to hear your feedback on the cubes, as well as answer all your questions

Thursday, the 15th of December, a showcase of the current research at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead (Syndey, Australia) will take place. During the showcase several presentations will be given about the use of interactive art and design in health care and rehabilitation settings. One of the presentations will be given by Samantha Ewart.

Samantha Ewart (supervisors Associate Professor Garth Paine and Dr Amanda Third) is a PhD student from the University of Western Sydney (Australia). She researches how new forms of interactive music technology can distract teenage patients from boredom within hospital to help promote wellbeing, and the AudioCubes are part of her PhD research. During the showcase, Samantha will give a presentation about “Interactive Music for Distraction”.

If you want to have an overview of all the other presentations and speakers, have a look at the flyer below. Special guests are Vickie Sowry, from the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and Helen Zigmond, from the Arts and Health Foundation, Australia.

Interactive Art and Design in Health & Rehabilitation @ Children’s Hospital at Westmead (15th December 2011)

When: Thursday 15th December 2011, 5pm-7pm
Where: The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Ground Floor, Function Room, next to staff canteen

More information about Samantha Ewart’s research:
Interactive Music for Distraction- A PhD Journey

Related blog post:
PhD student Samantha is using AudioCubes for her research

Tralala Blip at Liquid Architecture 12 (Brisbane, Australia)

For those of you who don’t know Apple University Consortium, it is a consortium which was created when Apple first released the Apple Macintosh in 1984. Apple entered into a partnership with nine Australian Universities to create the Apple University Consortium. The goal of the consortium consists of supporting Apple technology in higher education through a fund that offers several grants.

The consortium also hosts the Create World Conference 2011. It is a “3 day performance, presentation, and professional development event, specifically for academic and higher-education technical staff in the digital arts disciplines.” This year the conference took place in Brisbane, and Tralala Blip was invited for a live performance during the conference.

This week, Tralala Blip did a gig with Sky Needle (from Brisbane) and Mad Nanna (from Melbourne) at the Lismore Regional Gallery.

Even though the holiday season is almost there, Tralala Blip keeps on working very hard. Next week, they’re doing a live performing for the opening of “Not What They Appear” exhibition together with their friends at Red Inc.

Of course, we’d like to congratulate the “Blippers”. Again they’ve been granted funding and support for 2012 from the Regional Arts Fund NSW!

More information about Tralala blip:
Homepage: http://www.tralalablip.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/tralalablip

The AudioCubes offer a wealth of possibilities for sound design, music production, as well as performing live. Besides this you can use them together with several software, hardware tools as well as different synths. We’ve already discussed how you can use them together with the Aalto synthesizer from Madrona Labs, but you can also use them to control the values of the XY pads in Zebra 2 as Mark Mosher pointed out at us earlier this week. Since every AudioCube has 4 sensors, you can control up to two XY pads using one cube! Can you imagine trying to turn 4 knobs all at the same time with your 2 hands? With the AudioCubes this is possible – your 2 hands can easily reach the 4 sensors placed around a single AudioCube.

For those of you who don’t know Zebra 2, it is a wireless modular synthesizer. Even though this software is extremely complex it has a great user interface and workflow allowing sound designers to easily shape sound.

Zebra 2 (and the included insert effect Zebrify) has a specific feature: XY pads. These XY pads allow you to modulate several parameters all at the same time. Have a look at the picture below. On the left side of Mark’s laptop you can see the 4 XY pads of Zebra 2.

AudioCubes and Zebra 2 (picture taken by Mark Mosher)

Check out the sound design experiment Mark Mosher made with Zebrify: Theremin with Zebrify Comb Filter

Although most people might think that XY pads only exist on hardware tools such as the Kaos Pad, you can do the same with the AudioCubes when you configure them in sensor mode in MIDIBridge. In addition, you can control 2 xy pads with one AudioCube, because every cube has 4 sensors

Mark Mosher is currently working on ways to control the XY values with 2 cubes and 4 cubes in senor mode. To do so he’s working on a patch to map the device parameters to CCs.

Of course, once we receive more news on this, we’ll definitely let you know

The Unsound Festival is an annual music festival about advanced music, and takes every place in Krakow, Poland. Last month, 12th of October 2011, the 9th edition of the festival took place.

During the 9th edition of the Unsound Festival, Zeb Schulz and Lawrence English gave a presentation concerning “Disability Art, Performance and Professional Musicians with Varying Abilities“.

They talked about recent developments in musical interfaces, and the possibilities they create for people with disabilities to compose music and to perform live. While traditional instruments such as keyboards and a computer mouse are hard for them to use, these new interfaces offer a wealth of possibilities for them.

As an example, they showed the video of Tralala blip’s live performance at the Liquid Architecture festival.

Tralala Blip at Liquid Architecture 12 (Brisbane, Australia)

The AudioCubes are one of the electronic musical instruments Tralala Blip is using to compose their music and perform live.

The audioCubes can help disabled artists overcome barriers, as Jeremy from Cascade Services, an organization that helps artists with disabilities, explains in one of our blog posts from last year.

“The audiocubes are an amazing piece of hardware! The great thing about it is that its enabling people who can’t use conventional controllers to add depth and dimension to their recordings themselves.”

Thanks Randolf for sharing this information with us!

Last weekend was a busy weekend for Mark Mosher: He did three concerts in 2 days. Check out: Mark Mosher Halloween 2011 Concerts for more information.

We’re happy to share some audio/video material made during Mark Mosher’s Halloween Concerts Below you can listen to his performance which was recorded at electro-music.radio:

Mark Mosher’s live performance at electro-music.radio is available on soundcloud and download mp3. A detailed overview of all the songs he played can be found on Mark Mosher’s blog.

Next to performing at electro-music radio, Mark also did an audio/video broadcast from Boulder to the Pacific Northwest Synth Fest. Matrixsynth was able to record the last 15 minutes of Mark Mosher’s skype session to Synth Fest, while he was using and explaining the AudioCubes. You can watch the video below. Of course, many thanks to Matrixsynth

Mark Mosher also made a couple of soundcheck videos as preparation for the Synth Fest and uploaded them to ustream. Check out one of the videos he made of his soundcheck using AudioCubes.

Don’t forget to sign up for Mark Mosher’s newsletter, if you like to get notified about his upcoming live performances

More information about Mark Mosher:
Website: http://markmoshermusic.com
Blog: http://modulatethis.com
9box: http://9box.modulatethis.com

During Halloween weekend, Mark Mosher will do three concerts as he recently announced on his website.

On October 29th from 1:00-1:30PST Mark will be beaming into the Pacific Northwest Synth Fest in Seattle from Boulder Colorado via Skype. He’ll be telepresently performing and doing a talk on AudioCubes as well as answer all your questions via interactive video chat:

“In this talk I’ll present an overview of the Percussa AudioCubes hardware, discuss mapping the AudioCubes to control Ableton Live and Virtual Synthesizers in real-time. I’ll also perform with the cubes, deconstruct a Live song, and discuss his free template for “9 Box Method for performance, improvisation, and spontaneous tribal jams with music, sound, and light” based on AudioCubes. Lastly, I will take questions via interactive video chat.”

The same day he’ll be performing with his old band Head Full of Zombies (Location: Ritz Grill, Colorado Spings). Before becoming an experimental instrumental electronic musician, Mark played for more than 13 years in an alt-rock band and did hundreds of shows with the band. This Saturday the band is calling its quits after over 20 years.

On Sunday 30th of October, Mark Mosher is doing an online streaming concert at electro-music radio. Mark’s online streaming concert starts at 19:00 GMT (Noon Mountain, 2PM EST). You can listen to the concert from any type of computer or mobile device here.

“I’m planning on playing both recorded and live renditions of creepier tracks from my original albums (including at least one song from the next album that has never been played live before), improvisations from the “dark side”, and a few sound cues from a haunted house I did the sound design for.”

The electro-music.com Halloween 2011 Concert that will run for six hours beginning at 1500 and run through to 0000 GMT (Sunday, 30th of October). There are 12 30 minute slots with different artists. More info about the electro-music.com Halloween 2011 Concert: http://radio.electro-music.com/index.php/

More information about Mark Mosher’s Halloween Concerts:
Third Performance Added for This Weekend – Beaming Into Pacific Northwest Synth Fest
Mark Mosher Halloween 2011 Weekend Shows

More information about Mark Mosher:
Website: http://markmoshermusic.com
Blog: http://modulatethis.com
9box: http://9box.modulatethis.com

Creating and performing electronic music isn’t a mens world only as Wamber and Hackie from openNplay clearly proof. openNplay is a dynamic female DJ set duo from Guadalajara, Mexico. Below you can listen to one of their DJ sets: Minimetric

Minimetric by openNplay

Wamber & Hackie (openNplay)

With a fresh ear and an extraordinary sense to recognize cutting edge sound trends, openNplay has formed a solid DJ set concept alongside with turntables, mixers and MIDI controllers. With minimalistic sounds and heavy basslines, they mix from progressive, deep and minimal to psychedelic trance.

Today, openNplay is currently developing an audiovisual live performance and planning to use the AudioCubes as MIDI controllers to trigger, control and play, with video projections, to create 3D mapping as the music is pumping!

More information about openNplay

House-mixes: http://www.house-mixes.com/profile/openNplay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/openNplay/128983347132450
Souncloud: http://soundcloud.com/openNplay