Eric Singer | |
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 Eric Singer, 2024 | |
| Website | ericsinger |
Eric Singer is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician and software, electrical, computer, robotics, and medical device engineer. He is known for his interactive art and technology works, robotic and electronic musical instruments, fire art, and guerilla art. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Singer holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a diploma in music synthesis from Berklee College of Music and an M.S. in computer science from New York University. [6] [7] [8]
Singer has been an adjunct professor at both NYU and CMU, designing and teaching graduate courses in electronic art and music, interactive performance and controller design..
Singer is known internationally as a creator of alternative MIDI controllers and musical instruments, interactive and algorithmic music software and robotic musical instruments. [9]
Singer began creating interactive performance software in 1990 as an assistant to Dr. Richard Boulanger. Written primarily in the Max multimedia programming environment, this included software for MIDI controllers such as the Radio Baton and Power Glove. He quickly became known as a Max expert, releasing a series of popular Max plug-ins for video tracking, electronic conducting and artificial life bird-flocking simulation. [10] [11] [12] [13]
In the mid-90s, Singer began creating his own novel electronic instruments. One early instrument of note was the Sonic Banana, a rubber tube with bend sensors to control arpeggiators and other generative music. [14] Later instruments included the GuiroTron, ChimeOTron, SlinkOTron, SlimeOTron, CycloTron and MIDI Steering Wheel (for Joshua Fried). [15] [16] Many of these instruments were featured in his 2011 solo retrospective "Living in the Future." [17] [18] Singer also designed and marketed a sensor and robotic interface board, MidiTron, to aid other artists in creating their own MIDI instruments. [19]
In Brooklyn, NY in 2000, Singer founded the pioneering musical robotics group LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. [20] [21] [22] Over the next decade, Singer led the group to create a large body of robotic musical instruments; produce performances with renowned musicians; present installations at well-known museums and galleries; and open LEMURplex, [23] an early makerspace for performance, gallery shows, artist residencies, teaching and fabrication.
LEMUR presented installations and performances throughout the world, at venues including Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the Virgin Festival. LEMUR also collaborated with musicians and composers on live human/robot performances as well as solo works for LEMUR's instruments. Notable musicians and groups included pop artists They Might Be Giants, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, JG Thirlwell, Morton Subotnick, Ikue Mori and George Lewis.
In 2009, Grammy-winning guitarist Pat Metheny commissioned LEMUR to build a large robotic orchestra, or orchestrion. This resulted in Metheny's 2010 Orchestrion album and world tour, with LEMUR instruments as his backing band.
After to moving to Pittsburgh in 2009, Singer established as a solo artist under the name SingerBots and continues to do performances and large commissioned installations. In 2014, he was commissioned to create a robotic orchestra for the Lido Cabaret in Paris. [24] The resulting 40+ piece orchestrion is featured nightly as the club's dinner band. [25] In 2018, Singer built the SpiroPhone, a spiraling robotic xylophone sculpture that lives as a permanent installation in RoboWorld at the Carnegie Science Center. [26] [27]
From 2012 to 2014, Singer consulted for Disney Imagineering on the Touche project to enable plants to play music in response to touch. [28] [29]
Singer has also created software for generative music and algorithmic improvisation, including an animated improvising saxophone player at the NYU Media Research Lab in 1996 and a generative drum and percussion program for an installation at the Beall Center in 2005. [30] In 2018, he appeared on WNYC's Science Friday to discuss the topic of computer improvisation in music. [31]
In 1997, Singer founded the New York City Burning Man Regional Association and served as the NYC regional contact for two years, organizing events and popularizing the festival in the New York area. [32]
Around the same time, Singer co-founded the influential Brooklyn arts combine The Madagascar Institute, with Chris Hackett and Ryan O'Connor [33] [34]
Over the next decade, The Madagascar Institute would become known as a leading underground arts group with over 100 members, producing machine and fire art, expansive themed warehouse parties, guerilla street spectacles and theatrical events in abandoned urban buildings. In 2002, Singer led a Madagascar Institute team to victory on The Learning Channel reality TV show Junkyard Wars. [35]
Singer has been involved in fire arts since the inception of the Madagascar Institute, creating pyrotechnic spectacles for many events and collaborating on a Pyrophone (MIDI-controlled flamethrower instrument). [36] In 2000, he created Flaming Simon, a life-size fire-based version of the Simon electronic game. [37] In 2008, he premiered PyroStomp, a walk-on step sequencer which controlled an eight cannon pyrophone. For the 2017 Roboexotica festival, he built a robot to create flaming cocktails.
In Pittsburgh, Singer created and produced the Pyrotopia Festival of Fire Arts, first in 2012 and again in 2014. These large-scale outdoor events featured fire performers, art, games, installations, glass-blowing, forging and fire science demonstrations. [38] [39] [40]
Singer has been a saxophonist since an early age. Throughout the 90s, he co-founded, performed in and recorded with a number of popular ska bands in Boston and New York, including Agent 13, Metro Stylee, The Allstonians, The Slackers, Stubborn All-Stars and Skinnerbox. [41] [42] He can be heard on commercially released recordings by these and other bands.
Singer studied improv comedy in New York City at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and has studied and performed in Pittsburgh at the Arcade Comedy Theater, Unplanned Comedy and Steel City Improv Theater. He has formed and performed with a number of Pittsburgh long-form improv groups and duos. He has written sketch comedy and performed in the Pittsburgh comedy duo The Problem with comedian Ian Insect. He currently performs in Philadelphia.
Since 2014, Singer has worked in the field of medical device engineering. From 2016 to 2018, Singer was part of Cerebroscope, a medical startup creating an experimental EEG device for monitoring cortical spreading depolarizations (CSDs) in stroke and TBI patients. Singer designed and fabricated the device, called CerebroPatch, which began clinical trials in 2018 at the University of New Mexico Hospital. [43]
Following this, he has worked as a software engineer for various medical device companies including Philips Respironics, Moberg Research and Molecular Devices.
An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
MIDI is a technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music.
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control, and possibly audio and automation data for digital audio workstations (DAWs) and plug-ins.
Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for networking sound synthesizers, computers, and other multimedia devices for purposes such as musical performance or show control. OSC's advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility and enhanced organization and documentation. Its disadvantages include inefficient coding of information, increased load on embedded processors, and lack of standardized messages/interoperability. The first specification was released in March 2002.
Ableton Live is a digital audio workstation for macOS and Windows developed by the German company Ableton.
A MIDI controller is any hardware or software that generates and transmits Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) data to MIDI-enabled devices, typically to trigger sounds and control parameters of an electronic music performance. They most often use a musical keyboard to send data about the pitch of notes to play, although a MIDI controller may trigger lighting and other effects. A wind controller has a sensor that converts breath pressure to volume information and lip pressure to control pitch. Controllers for percussion and stringed instruments exist, as well as specialized and experimental devices. Some MIDI controllers are used in association with specific digital audio workstation software. The original MIDI specification has been extended to include a greater range of control features.
Trimpin is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle and Tieton, Washington.
New Interfaces for Musical Expression, also known as NIME, is an international conference dedicated to scientific research on the development of new technologies and their role in musical expression and artistic performance.
GuitarBot is a self-playing guitar created by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) in 2002. The instrument consists of four modular string units, each of which can be controlled with MIDI. GuitarBot was used by guitarist Pat Metheny on his 2009 Orchestrion tour.
The League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR, was a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists developing robotic musical instruments. Founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR's philosophy was to build robotic instruments that play themselves. In LEMUR designs, the robots are the instruments.
The Yamaha Tenori-on is an electronic musical instrument designed and created by the Japanese artist Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori of the Music and Human Interface Group at the Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology.
A dance organ is a mechanical organ designed to be used in a dance hall or ballroom. Originated and popularized in Paris, it is intended for use indoors as dance organs tend to be quieter than the similar fairground organ.
Gil Weinberg is an Israeli-born American musician and inventor of experimental musical instruments and musical robots. Weinberg is a professor of musical technology at Georgia Tech and founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.
I-CubeX comprises a system of sensors, actuators and interfaces that are configured by a personal computer. Using MIDI, Bluetooth or the Universal Serial Bus (USB) as the basis for all communication, the complexity is managed behind a variety of software tools, including an end-user configuration editor, Max (software) plugins, and a C++ Application Programming Interface (API), which allows applications to be developed in Mac OS X, Linux and Windows operating systems.
Sergi Jordà is a Catalan innovator, installation artist, digital musician and Associate Professor at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is best known for directing the team that invented the Reactable. He is also a trained Physicist.
An immersive virtual musical instrument, or immersive virtual environment for music and sound, represents sound processes and their parameters as 3D entities of a virtual reality so that they can be perceived not only through auditory feedback but also visually in 3D and possibly through tactile as well as haptic feedback, using 3D interface metaphors consisting of interaction techniques such as navigation, selection and manipulation (NSM). It builds on the trend in electronic musical instruments to develop new ways to control sound and perform music such as explored in conferences like NIME.
Orchestrion is a studio album by jazz guitarist Pat Metheny that was released by Nonesuch Records on January 26, 2010.
In computing, scratch input is an acoustic-based method of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that takes advantage of the characteristic sound produced when a finger nail or other object is dragged over a surface, such as a table or wall. The technique is not limited to fingers; a stick or writing implements can also be used. The sound is often inaudible to the naked ear. However, specialized microphones can digitize the sounds for interactive purposes. Scratch input was invented by Mann et al. in 2007, though the term was first used by Chris Harrison et al.
A bedroom producer is an amateur musician who creates, performs, and records their music independently using a home studio, often considered a hobbyist opposed to a professional record producer in the recording industry that works in a traditional studio with clients. Typically bedroom producers use accessible digital technology that costs less than the equipment in a professional studio, such as MIDI controller-based instruments and virtual studio technology, to create music for release to the world. While a professional record producer oversees and guides the recording process, often working alongside multiple people such as studio musicians, singers, engineers, mixers, songwriters, arrangers, and orchestrators, a bedroom producer does everything independently: creating the ideas, recording them and processing them for release. Bedroom producers are often self-taught, learning sound design, mixing and music theory by reading music production blogs and watching tutorials on the internet. As bedroom producers depend on the accessibility of music technology, bedroom production has been made easier with advances in home computing power and digital audio workstations (DAW).
Bruno Zamborlin is an AI researcher, entrepreneur and artist based in London, working in the field of human-computer interaction. His work focuses on converting physical objects into touch-sensitive, interactive surfaces using vibration sensors and artificial intelligence. In 2013 he founded Mogees Limited a start-up to transform everyday objects into musical instruments and games using a vibration sensor and a mobile phone. With HyperSurfaces, he converts physical surfaces of any material, shape and form into data-enabled-interactive surfaces using a vibration sensor and a coin-sized chipset. As an artist, he has created art installations around the world, with his most recent work comprising a unique series of "sound furnitures" that was showcased at the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2023. He regularly performed with UK-based electronic music duo Plaid. He is also honorary visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.