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Dr. Woohoo & Bit Shifter: Activation Theme
Albuquerque-based artist Dr. Woohoo is in the process of teaching his brush strokes to listen and then dance to the music of New York City-based musician Bit Shifter. This time, their current collaboration will be included in the Boston CyberArts Festival: Visual Music Marathon during the 6th hour on April 28. Bit Shifter explores low-bit, high- energy music composed and performed on a Nintendo Game Boy. In Activation Theme, Woohoo uses several audio analysis algorithms to break the music down into multiple frequency ranges and amplitudes over time. This data then drives the direction of the brush stroke in a custom application called brushes.paints.stencils. that Woohoo developed. The end result is like watching kids at a high school dance - it’s outrageous!
The Visual Music Marathon
The Marathon received over 300 works from 34 countries for its open call, and we are excited to be able to present the very best of those today. We are also screening works chosen by our two principal guest curators, Bruce Wands of the School of Visual Arts and New York Digital Salon, and Larry Cuba of the Iota Center, plus several “historic” works on 16 mm film. These will be complemented by other pieces from a number of invited guest artists and by live video performances by Brian Knoth and Jeff Mission. The works on the Marathon represent a vast range of approaches to “visual music,” from pieces
in which the images and music are directly tied by the sharing of parameters, to those in which the images “interpret” the music (or vice versa), to works where the visuals are edited in tight synchrony with cues in the music. (In her excellent article found elsewhere in this booklet, Maura McDonnell of Trinity College, Dublin, explores the background of visual music in great detail.) All of these approaches can result in interesting and compelling compositions, and we hope that you will find many works of interestamong the 120 pieces presented today.
Bit Shifter
Bit Shifter explores high-energy, low-bit music composed and performed on a Nintendo Game Boy. The result is an unapologetically fun foray into an evocative and distinctive soundset traditionally reserved for video game sound effects and background music, all done on a console generally misperceived as being technically limited. Made possible by Oliver Wittchow and Johan Kotlinski’s respective home-brew Game Boy musicmaking programs Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ, Bit Shifter’s music adopts and subverts the playfulness inherent in the familiar Game Boy soundset, repurposing it into the service of novel idioms. Based in New York City, Bit Shifter has performed over one hundred shows worldwide, having recently circumnavigated the planet in a 20-date world tour with fellow chiptune compatriot Nullsleep.
Links
http://www.music.neu.edu/vmm/
http://www.drwoohoo.com/
http://bit.shifter.net/
http://www.inthemod.com/inthemod.html
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woohoo!
drew trujillo
