Chouchou's new and virtual musical instrument: The Babel

Sometime this October, Chouchou, the Japanese musical group that exists only in Second Life®, will unveil The Babel, a new virtual musical instrument that harnesses their uncommonly fresh sound and makes it possible for anyone in SL to play and compose with it.



Arabesque Choche and Juliet Heberle are Chouchou, and together they have released two albums and several Machinima, and their live and streamed music wafts over its mostly virtual listeners like tropical oxygen, restoring their equilibrium after the agitations of the day.

What's all the excitement about? Check out this recent and stunning live performance, shot and edited by tadakuma Koba, featuring their new piano piece - r.i.p. - which Arabesque composed for his beloved father who recently passed away from a brain tumor. "His father taught him piano and the beauty of music," explained Juliet.



Chouchou - the sim - is possibly the chill-est spot on the grid to unwind, and you haven’t really experienced all that SL has to offer until you’ve used the free Chouchou HUD, which delivers panoramic views and deliciously slow camera tracking for a brilliant cinematic effect.



While the music industry may be dying a little death with each new Napster clone, virtual worlds are enabling new technical and artistic possibilities for composers and performers. Chouchou’s new Babel marks a novel step forward in that interplay. It is a towering and sculptural staircase in a pure-as-driven-snow white setting surrounded by contrastingly black boxes that hang mid-air, each endowed with a pre-loaded mini-clip of Chouchou’s trademark sounds.

Touch a box to hear a few keys of Arabesque’s fingers dancing over a piano keyboard or some harp strings, for example. Touch a percussion box and Chouchou’s unforgettable static and cymbals are heard. You can mix these sounds any way you like to create your own compositions, or purchase a full set to take home with you and play there.


The music in this video was created with "The Babel." Chouchou hopes that visitors to the Babel will record their compositions via Machinima and upload them as a response to this video

Here’s Chouchou’s tutorial for how to use the Babel:



I met with Chouchou at the Babel to learn more.



“In the Bible,” explained Arabesque Choche, “before the Tower of Babel was destroyed, all people could speak same language. In our Babel, people from all over the world can communicate through music."

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”- Genesis 11:1-9 (King James Version)

Arabesque Choche studied classical music and majored in piano study: “I often play Russian post modern music, but when I listen, Ravel is my favorite composer”

Each floor at the Babel is a different “track” or composition by Arabesque, and the boxes are grouped as elements with specific codes and chord progressions, and organized according to musical rules. Beneath each grouping of elements, there are boxes that have chords that can serve as accompanists. Each box in the same "element" is compatible with those chords. Some of the stairs have sounds embedded, as well.



Chouchou expects to add floors and “tracks” featuring new compositions over time. “The tower is growing,” said Juliet. “It's alive. Those sounds – our sounds – are born in a tidy room like a laboratory at the top of the tower and fall down below to make the tower of sounds. They might look scattered and random, but they are all kept where they are meant to be with certain rules. The tower is like our virtual music album. Each level is one track of the album and people visiting the Babel are making the album with us... together. ”

“When we play music in C major, it has a strong connection with G major, which is known as the ‘perfect fifth.’ In the Babel, I made every effort to ensure that elements that are close to each other have that perfect 5th relationship,” explained Arabesque. “This prevents the cacophony of many people playing the boxes simultaneously,” added Masami Kuramoto, Chouchou’s trusted friend and promoter, “so even if there are boxes near different elements, it still works, and this is what most other sound sculptures don't get right.”

Juliet, whose ethereal voice was surely dipped in honey, adds so much to each song but had never studied singing, and instead prepared for a career in fashion. “For me, designing fashion and singing are not so different,” she said. “I just do whatever feels right, but I need good music to feel something and sing to it, and Arabesque's compositions have that effect. I'd never taken singing seriously until Arabesque asked me to sing for him.”

It turns out that Juliet’s voice is Arabesque’s instrument, too. “I had initially made additional synthetic voice elements for the Babel in the same scale as Juliet’s voice,” added Arabesque, “but then I decided not to publish those because Juliet's original voice is just perfect for the melody."

I became insatiably curious about that first moment when Juliet sang for Arabesque, and what his reaction had been. Juliet had always loved his music, “so when he asked me to sing to it, I felt like my dream had come true. Then I wrote the lyrics for Chouchou’s first song: utakata.”

“To tell the truth, I didn't expect her singing to work well with my compositions,” interjected Arabesque. “I was aware that she was talented and that she understood my music, but hadn’t anticipated that she would perform so smoothly. My feeling during that discovery was... so happy. I was so glad.”

Chouchou has just released a new song, Sputnik. Their MySpace page can be found here. You can join their in-world group in Second Life: Chouchouholic for all their updates and news. You can teleport to Chouchou, the sim, directly from here.

See also:

• Chouchou leaps from digital platform to digital platform
• Enjoy Chouchou while you can
• Chouchou gives us the Universe
• KK Jewell reports on an unforgettable Chouchou concert
• Oh, Chouchou!
• Chouchou is searching for - and finding - new ways to present its music
• Chouchou: Making music from somewhere far, far away
• Chouchou "Islamey": A club (and a video) that define Cloud Nine

Dizzy Banjo's designs on music for (virtual) environments

Not three months ago, the Czar of Second Life blogging, Hamlet Au, and his New World Notes introduced the world to a fellow by the name of Dizzy Banjo - together with his partners Eshi Otawara and Chase Marellan - when they launched Parsec, the application that enables you to move objects with your voice. This happened within days of Dizzy's putting the finishing touches on the music and sound for the artful and complex DynaFleur installation... (teleport directly from here).

Even after all that, as well as the titanic follow-up that ensued after the introduction of Parsec, Dizzy just keeps knocking out new and lofty projects.



When you visit the freshly debuted in-world Mexican "Ruta Maya" regions (teleport directly from here) and turn on your stream, you hear music. Nothing unusual about that. But what you may not realize is that this rich and enveloping music was composed for no other purpose and for no other place, and that those native sounds you are hearing are hardly incidental. All were specifically created and positioned here and there intentionally to boost the narrative of your experience by that same soundscape artist, Dizzy Banjo (rez: 1/30/2005).

Composing music for an immersive 3D environment is not unlike scoring a feature film. In both instances, you strive to elicit an emotional response that varies and grows with each encounter. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two is that rather than create music as a backdrop for one scene or another, the composer in Second Life works within small areas of a region to orchestrate the experience for those micro-zones. Very few people realize what an undertaking this is! For this reason, I thought it was time to get with Dizzy and learn more.

What are the steps you take to create a custom soundtrack, and what do you need to know from the client?

Dizzy Banjo: For me, defining what the project directors want to achieve - emotionally - is the key factor, even surpassing the actual ‘subject’ itself.

From an early stage with Ruta Maya, it was clear that we wanted to achieve a score which immersed you in the emotions of the landscape, as well as containing cultural references. To do this, we expanded the instrumentation beyond purely authentic Mayan instruments (although the score does contain many) to a full orchestra, with a large contingent of tuned percussion. With this palette, I was able to tap into a much richer, cinematic sound.


The lush rainforest at Ruta Maya was created by Kriss Lehmann, probably best known for his beloved Straylight/Botanical

I often ask many questions which the client hasn’t thought about yet, and can’t answer. But generally I find the only thing I need to do is establish a trusting open discussion – and then I can get all the information I need.

Technically, I write in a mixture of various applications, depending on the needs of the project. These days I generally compose and program directly into Nuendo. If the project budget/timescale allows for live musicians, I export out MIDI parts into Sibelius, but often the projects stay in Nuendo right up until mastering stage, which I do in Wavelab.

I use a huge range of virtual instrument and effects. Ruta Maya required a lot of South American percussion and wind instrumentation. My current core orchestral template runs across 4 PC slave machines linked with FX Teleport and consists of a mix from the Vienna Symphonic Library, the East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra, Project SAM, and bits of older libraries like Miroslav Philharmonik.

However I play violin, viola, piano, guitar, bass and banjo (hehe) myself, so I try to use as many live instruments as possible.

How much did you have to "alter as you go," between the initial plan and the final outcome?

Dizzy Banjo: Luckily, prior to working on Ruta Maya, I scored the music for the Machinima for the first Visit Mexico – Chichen Itza sim.



A lot of the musical direction and general approach to Visit Mexico inSL was developed at that stage. Ruta Maya was a development of that sound, so the process of developing the soundtrack actually went really smoothly. Also Valiant Strangelove and Lester Nefarious from Advanced Virtual really placed all their trust in me with it, which I’m very grateful for.

On all my projects, I have listening sessions with the client. We do these in Second Life ‘on location’ to test the audio visual immersion and mix. These went very well, apart from one session where one of the clients accidentally tuned into a random Internet radio station instead of the score stream – which made for some uncomfortable moments like :

Client: “I’m not sure if there should be rock drums…”
Dizzy: “WHAT?! There aren’t!”

I tend to work through the night a lot. I wanted to wait until the build was almost complete before commencing the main body of work. However I did have a number of concepts in mind prior to that. Throughout the compositional process I was often logged in to Second Life with environmental sound playing so I could soak up both the visuals and sounds as I wrote.



What does "environmental sound design" mean, and how does this apply to Ruta Maya?

Dizzy Banjo: On this project, I think environmental sound design meant exploring a way of vastly increasing immersion through Gestalt effect principles. This involved creating a highly detailed soundscape of many of the sounds of the actual environment of the Real Life Ruta Maya (these were created various sources – some recorded, some from sound design libraries and some from my environmental sound design consultant on the project, Hastur Pieterson). In this way, when you are on the beach and hear the seagulls on the cliffs – you believe there really are seagulls nesting there, even though none are present as prims.

In many ways Ruta Maya is a kind of "beyond reality," or "concentrated reality." It’s audibly very dense - the rainforest alone consists of over 40 sound sources - and so rich that you can close your eyes and still feel you are there. I’ve even navigated around the sims with my eyes closed.

What are some of the biggest challenges that Second Life presents for this type of undertaking?

Dizzy Banjo: The 10-sound upload limit is a challenge, but this has been overcome by some clever scripters. One other constraint here is that the client can only play up to 40(ish) sounds simultaneously. This can actually be nice as it reveals more sounds as you move around the islands.

Scoring for the metaverse is very different to scoring for a video game or film (which are generally single person/linear experiences). The challenge is to try to find ways of tailoring the soundtrack to individual and group experiences, which are non linear in nature. Eventually I hope to develop ways of achieving this in Second Life, but Ruta Maya makes some initial steps by splitting up the soundtrack into zones corresponding to particular environments. I’m developing various other techniques for controlling the delivery of sound at the moment, which I hope will bring a finer granularity to that experience in future projects.


Mayan instruments - all of the Pre-Columbian era - included drums and maracas made of wood, clay and sometimes the tortoise shell. Ceremonial flutes and ocarinas made of fired ceramic, bone, wood, or reeds have also been found at archeological sites. Dizzy performed all of these instruments for the Ruta Maya score.

Ruta Maya (meaning Mayan Route) in Second Life features a few (not all, by any means) of the highlights from five of Mexico's southern states: Quintana Roo (there's more to it than Cancun!), Chiapas (I love some areas of this state better than I do Paris or Venice, to give you an idea of how_much, but do try to set your base camp at San Cristobal de las Casas), Campeche and Tabasco, as well as Yucatan, where Chichen Itza is located.

AngryBeth Shortbread opens PLAY: A Collection of Sound Sketches, and talks about Twinity

AngryBeth Shortbread (aka Annabeth Robinson; rez: 7-26-2005) breaks ground with such ease that I'm not even sure if she is aware of how signifcant her work is. Certainly everyone I know in Second Life who works with sounds and physics greatly admires her. Now, this Leeds, UK-based multi-media artist and lecturer has just opened PLAY: A Collection of Sound Sketches 2006-2008, with some installations we've seen before and new ones, too. The show will be open to all throughout the month of April, and was presented at the People : Place : Prescence conference and exhibition on April 2nd at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, England. You may visit it in Second Life by teleporting directly from here.

According to Beth, who likes to encourage social play and experimentation, "Though most of these works could be recreated in other software, it is the social aspect of the virtual world that makes me stick to working in Second Life or similar. Seeing groups of online people experiment and collaborate on producing music with my pieces is more rewarding than a more solo experience on a flash based website or similar. And I still get goosebumps when I watch a group of international avatars all playing together telepresently, yet seemingly all together in one place and presence."

Here's a vid of one of her newest "toys," that is labeled PUSH at the installation:


In this video by Osprey Therian, you can see a good demo of an older piece by Beth dating back to 2006 that I find very entertaining, called the Synthy-Go-Round, an experiment in mixing two synthygorounds remixable tunes that is part of this month's show, and labeled TOUCH. Basically, you can orchestrate your own mix by adding or subtracting different tracks/instruments, available to you in each cube.



There are a few NPIRLers that are actively exploring virtual worlds other than Second Life, and Beth is definitely one of them. "I've been doing a little peek at Twinity, but it's in very early Beta. I'll return when they've added an ability to upload content - not just textures - but it looks promising," said Beth. When I asked what kind of content she was hoping for, she indicated that she's looking to them to make sound files, 3d builds and eventually scripting uploadable. "At the moment, its textures and webpages on a prim. The webpages on a prim do rock, though," she added.

I asked if it was stable at present, to which she replied, "Nope - you've got to have a patience of a saint."

While I haven't tried Twinity yet, I am fascinated by the ability to work with mirror effects there. Here's yet another video that Beth created, working only with the items made available to users inside Twinity.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse's "Fragula" as captured by Evo Szuyuan

The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM) is a playful and highly interactive collaboration that can only take place in a virtual environment, wherein several people upload various sound samples and, against a score, activate them, thus becoming musical instruments themselves.

To facilitate the viewer's understanding of who is performing, each avatar wears a rounded object on its back, and as the sounds are triggered, that avatar spins on an axis. According to Gumnosophistai Nurmi (aka Leif Inge), the inspiration for that shape is Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase."


Nude Descending a Staircase from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Now Machinimator Evo Szuyuan has created "Fragula," the best video I've seen to date that documents this strange and cutting-edge phenomenon that is taking place in Second Life.



Fragula credits

Composer: Miulew Takahe
Instruments and animations: Bingo Onomatopoeia

Participating in the Orchestra are:
Bingo Onomatopoeia, aka Andreas Müller (Regensburg)
BlaiseDeLaFrance Voom, aka Biagio Francia (Agropoli)
Bluewave Ogee, aka Leslie Jarmon (Austin)
DeThomas Dibou, aka Detlef Thomas (Regensburg)
Evo Szuyuan, aka Brigit Lichtenegger (Rotterdam)
Free Noyes, aka Pauline Oliveros (Kingston)
Goodwind Seiling, aka Sachiko Hayashi (Stockholm)
Gumnosophistai Nurmi, aka Leif Inge (Oslo)
Hars Hefferman, aka Harold Schellinx (Paris)
Humming Pera, aka Tina M. Pearson (Victoria)
Ida Aabye, aka Nathalie Fougeras (Paris/Brussel)
Lizsolo Mathilde, aka Liz Solo (St. John's)
Loop Luo, aka Loopland (Regensburg)
Maximillian Nakamura, aka Shintaro Miyazaki (Berlin)
Maxxo Klaar, aka Max D. Well (Regensburg)
Miulew Takahe, aka Björn Eriksson (Sollefteå)
Nnoiz Papp, aka Tobias Becker (Haan)
Paco Mariani, aka Chris Wittkowsky (Regensburg)
Weave Noyes, aka Sarah Weaver (New York)
Wirxli Flimflam, aka Jeremy Owen Turner (Vancouver)

A few morsels of art - four installations and the body electric

Here are four quick stops worth making to see what's new in the way of interactive art on the grid. Interestingly, all working from the basic sphere...

Wikisonic
Keystone Bouchard, founder of the RL Architects in SL group and a force behind some of the most interesting and thoughtful activities surrounding architecture in-world, recently completed a musical instrument of sorts with the scripting assistance of Dirty McLean. Stand in the middle and touch the balls in each column you wish to activate to induce a musical note. Touch several in a same column and you will hear several notes from it. Keystone invited Theory Shaw and me to play with it while he made this demo vid.



Keystone has since added another full circle of columns to enhance the sound. Thank you, Amalthea Blanc, for turning us onto this guy.
Teleport directly from here to Wikisonic, at his Gallery of Reflexive Architecture.



"Force Sun to Midnight"
Daruma Picnic wowed us with his A Cappella installation not too long ago. Now he is more playful, and he tells us, "Keystone (Bouchard) encouraged me to play with his scripts and develop new prim movement work. These scripts put a "capital I" on the word Interactive." Walk through the elements to activate sound and movement. It usually takes a couple of minutes for the sound to play in real time. Click on smaller floating elements to change color. The music is inspired by a Ravi Shankar Peace Mantra. His music files were generated with Garage Band and further edited with Audacity.

NPIRLers, the landmark I gave you in-world was borked. Please use this SLURL: Force Sun to Midnight Once there, look for the a TP ball and off you go.



The Aurora Room
Juria Yoshikawa recently set up his own sim, the Garden of Memespelunk, featuring several pieces we had hoped - but never expected - to see again, as well as a few new items, including this very immersive Aurora Room that chatters and makes noises.

Teleport from here to the: Aurora Room



The Lotus
Mark my words... DB Bailey - another RL architect - is going to amaze us all. This jewel box of a build encloses a meditation room (touch the inner bloom). DB has only been around since February, and he is really coming into his own. Douglas Story spotted him first and we are grateful.

See it here: DB Bailey's Lotus Once teleported, cross the ramp.



Miki Gymnast's Body Electric (that's my name for it anyway)

I was wearing Miki Gymnast's sensational 1,400 scripted prim outfit when I dropped in to check out DB's Lotus. Here are just a couple of the color sets it turned into. Sadly, Miki won't be putting these on the market. They are so highly customized that she doesn't have time to work with each customer. I hardly ever gawk at my avatar, but on this occasion, I (practically) only had eyes for me. :P

Dutch Ding Dong!

Three guesses what we Dutch like to build in SL... that's right; windmills! Dutch artist Edo Paulus (Edo Autopoiesis in SL) has built a "sound composition" that uses SL wind to generate sound from windmills. The result is not exactly punkrock, (more like indonesian gamelan) but I'm sure some of you hippies might enjoy. I like it for how it looks and works. Nifty stuff. Pick up the notecard that explains how it works and go take a ride.

Windmills!

Notice originally posted to the NPIRL group by Tooter Claxton on July 13, 2007

P.S. I'm just mad about Tooter's absurd avatars. His Brunhilde viking-operatic-singer is the only "other" avatar I have ever donned. - Bettina