Inventor and Berkeley's Director of CNMAT, David Wessel, Has Passed Away

David Wessel, Berkley's director of the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, has passed away.  There will be an open house on Friday, October 17, from 1PM - 6PM for those that want to pay their respects. You can find details here.  People are also leaving their condolences on his Facebook Page here.

For those not familiar with David Wessel, there is a great interview with him on the Cycling 74 website from 1999 here.  From that interview:

"David Wessel is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley where he directs the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). Wessel worked at IRCAM between 1979 and 1988; his activities there included starting the department where Miller Puckette first began working on Max on a Macintosh. Since Wessel’s arrival in Berkeley over ten years ago, CNMAT has been actively involved in teaching Max/MSP as well as developing freely available Max-based software projects. In this 1999 interview with Gregory Taylor, Wessel talks about his musical background, his relationship with French composer and IRCAM founder Pierre Boulez, the origins of Max, and some perspectives on his current work."

Pictured and in the video below is David with his relatively new SLABS instrument and controller.  The instrument has been mentioned here on MATRIXSYNTH.  In 2011 he showed the instrument with the Eigenharp and Roger Linn's Linnstrument prototype at an event in San Francisco.


Uploaded on Jan 15, 2009 DavidLWessel

"Musical Demonstration of SLABS instrument with David Wessel on SLABS and Nils Bultmann on viola"

CNMAT New Instruments Event, May 6 2011, 1.15 gB.m4v

YouTube Uploaded by rogerlinndesign on May 11, 2011

"'New Musical Instruments' event at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) on May 6, 2011, showcasing the Eigenharp, LinnStrument and SLABS."

[Re-posted. This one was a casualty of the recent Blogger outage.]

SLABS: Arrays of Pressure Sensitive Touch Pads

This is a follow-up to the previous post. See that post for some events where you can check out SLABs in person.

Some info via UC Berkeley's Center for New Music & Audio Technologies:

"Goal
Arrays of pressure sensitive touch pads provide musicians with an expressive interface that can be mapped by software to behave in a variety of ways. The SLAB was designed to engage the body, to be both musically expressive and inspiring, to be easy to play at the entry level, and to be accepting of a lifelong development of virtuosity. Instead of discrete triggering mechanisms to start and stop musical events we chose continuous signal representations as the basis for the instrument. We chose Ethernet for I/O and wrote specialized Core Audio compatible drivers for OSX allowing us to send gesture data as audio data. As a consequence, gestures are tightly coupled to the sound.

One SLAB contains 24 touch pads and another has 32. We chose Interlinks’s VersaPad because of its pressure output. The x, y, and pressure of each pad is sent at 44.1 kHertz. On the SLABS32 there are 96 channels. Core Audio and Max/MSP handle this number of channels with ease using only a small percentage of the CPU. The data from the pad sensors is assembled in a Xilinx FPGA which also provides for an audio return path and connections to MIDI (Input Only) and Light Pipe. The SLABS use the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol for programming a small display and two LED’s associated with each pad. OSC is sent to the host computer from the selector switches at the top of each column of pads."

Be sure to see UC Berkeley's Center for New Music & Audio Technologies for additional details and video.

Roger Linn Events Featuring Eigenharp, Haken & SLABS

This in via Eigenharp:

"I'm writing to let you know about four events We will be attending in the San Francisco area from May 5th through 9th, Hosted by Roger Linn of Linn drum fame. We will be presenting the Eigenharps along with other revolutionary electronic instruments:

1) The Eigenharp, demonstrated by Geert Bevin, Senior Software Developer from UK-based Eigenlabs.


2) The Continuum from Haken Audio, demonstrated by bay area pianist Ed Goldfarb.


3) SLABS, a new instrument designed by David Wessel, director of Cal Berkeley's CNMAT computer music department.


4) The LinnStrument prototype by Roger Linn [see this video presentation of Roger Linn and this post announcing the Linnstrument back on May 15 of 2010.]

One thing that makes these instruments so uniquely expressive is their ability to sense the precise movements of each finger in 3-dimensional space (for example, pressure for note expression, left/right for pitch, and forward/backward for timbre), and to do that for all fingers simultaneously. But each instrument also presents many other innovative ideas and improvements over the limitations of traditional mechanical-age instruments.

Here are the events:
Thursday, May 5 from 7 to 9 p.m.
Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Audio (CCRMA)
660 Lomita Dr. Stanford, CA 94305
Directions: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/about/directions
At this event, the Eigenharp, Continuum and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Friday, May 6 from 7 to 9 p.m.
University of California Berkeley's Center For New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)
1750 Arch Street, Berkeley, CA 94709
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/
At this event, the Eigenharp. SLABS and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Saturday, May 7 from 2 to 4 p.m.
Guitar Center San Francisco, Pro Audio Department
1645 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94109
At this event, the Eigenharp and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Monday, May 9 from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m.
SF Music Tech Conference
Hotel Kabuki, 1625 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94115
At this event, the Eigenharp, Continuum and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.
Note: Conference entry fee is required--see www.sfmusictech.com

Please join us to see, learn about--and even try out for yourself--these radical new instruments that are changing the way music is made. Please note that these instruments are not otherwise available in the bay area to see or try out."