Author Archives: ranjit

MoMA John Cage Day this Thursday

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This Thursday, August 9th, is John Cage Day at the Museum of Modern Art. Lots of great stuff going on – all the info is here: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/15360

My toy piano robot will be playing Satie’s Vexations throughout the day, trying to reach 840 repetitions. Here’s a teaser video:


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I hope you can come to John Cage Day!

Other stuff: My sound sculpture for the BWAC Outdoor Sculpture Show is up at East River State Park for another month or so. Here’s a video:

Coming up in September: a sound installation at the Asian American Artists Alliance festival. No video yet, maybe soon…

(mailing list archive) Spring update

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Things are happening!

* My robot toy piano has a couple of gigs coming up:

This coming Wednesday, June 6, at Roulette in Brooklyn:
SATIEfaction!
Satie and Satie-inspired music from John Cage, Federico Mompou, Toby Twining and Milos Raickovich
Margaret Leng Tan, piano and toy piano
Roberto Rossi, narrator
Ranjit Bhatnagar, sound artist
http://roulette.org/events/margaret-leng-tan-6/

And then on Thursday, August 9, at the Museum of Modern Art’s John Cage Day:
Celebrate the centenary of legendary artist, composer, philosopher, and writer John Cage with a series of readings, performances, musical compositions, and personal reflections by poets, writers, musicians, and scholars. Participants include writer and editor Richard Kostelantez; Joan Retallack, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, Bard College; pianist and toy-piano virtuoso Margaret Leng Tan; and poet, editor, and curator Roger van Voorhees.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/15360

* The Music Box, the sound sculpture shantytown I worked on in New Orleans last year, is open to visitors again this summer, and the final performances there are happening soon. If you’re going to be in New Orleans, check it out: http://www.dithyrambalina.com

* My wind-powered sound sculpture, “Trumpet Marine”, will be hanging out in Williamsburg’s East River Park this summer as part of BWAC’s Outdoor Sculpture Show, probably starting in July. More on that soon! Meanwhile, here’s a video of the thing at the Figment Festival last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranjit/5840234686/

* I made a little algorithm that uses Twitter’s Streaming API to read millions of tweets per day (about 500 per second!) in search of the tiny fraction that happen to be in iambic pentameter. Out of those, it selects rhymed couplets and retweets them in an endless crowdsourced sonnet. You can follow it at http://twitter.com/pentametron and http://pentametron.com
Pentametron got some nice coverage from the Poetry Foundation –
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/some-conceptual-literature-on-twitter/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/05/algorithm-turns-tweets-into-poetry/
And this interview in Gawker explains how it works: http://gawker.com/pentametron/
It even got a tweet from the Globe Theater! https://twitter.com/The_Globe/status/202377080820871168

* In September I’ll have an installation in the Asian American Arts Alliance’s “Locating the Sacred” Festival, and I’ll be doing a residency at Albuquerque Open Space as part of the ISEA electronic arts festival.

* …and I discovered that Electric Violin Lutherie has created a real violin inspired by my amateur 8-bit violin. That’s the kind of thing that makes me love open source design. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:23103

with algorithms subtle and discreet / i seek iambic writings to retweet

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Pentametron, my twitter poetry engine, is now online! An experiment in finding inadvertent art in the internet’s endless outpouring of language, pentametron automatically collects twitter posts that happen to be in iambic pentameter. It processes about five million tweets per day, and finds a few dozen iambic lines in that time.

You can follow pentametron’s work in realtime at the twitter feed – @pentametron – or read the collected sonnets at pentametron.com, updated several times per hour.

RT @ginafbabey    Thanks for the love and Karma is a bitch.
RT @Lweeeeeezy    I try and find the good in everyone.
RT @ItsMe_Shay_P  Some females really get beside themselves
RT @6thRosePetals So super disappointed with myself.

RT @mordemmy      It doesn't really matter anymore.
RT @nisaeee       This drama motivated me a lot! 안구정화 짱!!
RT @jayylyrics    she always gotta ruin something good
RT @Teeyaanur     wow gonna do the #lin tonight again..

RT @TerrySupplyCo I really wanna skate a empty pool.
RT @J18mcevoy     I wanna see the hunger games tonight
RT @IamJabariJ    I'M SO EXCITED FOR THE HUNGER GAMES!
RT @valerieward95 Wait, does The Hunger Games premiere tonight?

RT @_SyMoan       Not Even Gonna Entertain The Thought
RT @breeannie     Last practice of the season. #bittersweet

This isn’t my first effort at crowd-sourcing sonnets through the internet: I organized the Exquisite Sonnet Project almost 20 years ago (!) and did a similar project through twitter for the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009. But this is the first one that’s entirely automated — and in which the contributors don’t even know they’re participating.

instrument-a-day 29: rainy day monitor

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(video link)

I stuck contact mics onto a bunch of different plates and vessels and put them out on the rain. I like this sound so much that I’m tempted to make a permanent installation that I can plug in whenever it rains. Inspired by Quintron’s Singing House, which I spent a lot of time listening to last year.

This is the last day of Instrument-a-day 2012. Thanks for following along! I’ll be giving a talk about the project at Dorkbot NYC next Wednesday, March 7th, and performing with Andrea Williams, Dan Joseph, and the Glass Bees in Brooklyn on Saturday the 10th.

instrument-a-day 28: wind up time code

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(video link)

Turning the click-clack of an old wind up motor into MIDI time code to control the playback of a recording. (I’ll try it on with a video next!)

(Inside the box, the wind up motor has a flapping arm that interrupts a light beam. Each clack of the motor generates a MIDI SPP command which tells the computer how far / fast to move through the recording.)

instrument-a-day 27: remote control

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That harpsichord bit at the beginning kind of sounds like Dead Can Dance, no?

An IR decoder plugged into an Arduino intercepts codes transmitted by remote controls. Simple software uses the manufacturer code to choose a MIDI channel, and the button code to choose a note. It plays a single percussive note for remote codes it can’t understand, like the Bose.

That synthesizer is 25 years old, and the NAD remote control probably almost the same.
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instrument-a-day 24: unpleasant reed pipe

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A friend gave me an old mouthpiece (I think it’s from an alto saxophone). I made an adapter to attach it to the pipe from yesterday’s PVC membrane pipe.

You can download the design files for the adapter from www.thingiverse.com/thing:18089

This is way harder to play than the membrane pipe! It took all my breath to get a few honks out of it.

instrument-a-day 23: membrane pipe

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I think the membrane pipe is a relatively recent invention. I’m not sure who came up with it, but there’s a lot of nice examples on youtube. Here’s a how-to video. I should have watched that video before making this thing, which is my first attempt at a membrane pipe.

I didn’t make any effort to tune it – I just drilled holes approximately where my fingers could reach, and that not very accurately. You can see my hands straining in the video.