Welcome to the 8th edition of the newsletter, and the last one of the year! December is a good time to look back, meditate, and celebrate - meeting family and friends, updating some dreadful CV templates or, maybe, adventuring on a deep listening experience at a remote location ;) December is also a good time to look forward, revisit plans, set intentions, and clear the mental and digital space (cloud & email catharsis). Oh, and share "gifts"? Right, on this new edition I'm sharing plenty of things to read, to play, and to engage with. If not enough, you can see the previous newsletters backed up here, as always. And because this is still an outbound-only email, I can read feedback here. Also, feel free to share this with anyone who might be interested in signing up.
WRITING
ISQCMC Berlin Proceedings
All papers from the 2nd International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity (ISQCMC Berlin) are now published and in open access. As mentioned on the previous newsletter, they all appear listed at isqcmc.github.io and hosted on Zenodo. The Zenodo entries are grouped in the new ISQCMC Proceedings community. If you look closely, you will notice that isqcmc.github.io includes some neat buttons to copy the BibTeX reference directly into the clipboard - Zenodo has a similar feature for other citation styles, but not BibTeX. Enjoy!
EVENTS
Community.quantumland.art Events
screenshot of the Events category on community.quantumland.art forum
On December 30th, 2023, at 2h30pm me and STArt are hosting a guided meditation and deep listening event at a place called The Printworks, in Tavistock, UK. We decided to host this event as a way to bring 2023 to a close on a peaceful and restoring note. We are now inviting a small group of people to join us, on a relatively remote location in South Devon, to share some somatic exploration, deep listening meditation, and a closing tea ceremony. No previous experience or training is required, only an open mind and a humble heart. You can reach out to STArt via email for questions. I'm looking forward to it :)
Me and my now old friend and collaborator Yeuda Ben-Atar (aka Side Brain) are back in action with a new max for live device called: CHIPTUNE OSC. This is a device for Ableton Live users that turns Ableton synths into Chiptune Synths. It transforms incoming MIDI notes into fast arpeggiations tuned to one of 25 chords or note cluster, with swappable direction, and smoothly (or instantaneously) changing speeds. For those of you who don't know, Yeuda is a performer, producer, and exciting music educator based in LA. Back in the day, he was one of the first people that I became aware of using hacked game controllers as musical instruments (see dubspot interview). Suffice to say that it has been a pleasure to be working with someone who was an inspiration since my earlier years, that I've come to meet in person accidentally at some point and then developed a relationship of mutual respect. It is especially gratifying to see Yeuda thrive again after the closing of the longstanding music production school in LA: Beatlab Academy. And it all comes full circle on a seemingly simple device (spoiler: it is not just 1 device, more in the making). From the "pictures on fire" song with the power glove, to a lowkeybanger demo performance on an old nintendo controller, I invite you to check out this device and rejoice with Side Brain's performance.
Today is the last Bandcamp Friday of the year! Technically, still running until midnight PST / 3am EST / 8am GMT, this is the day that bandcamp waives their commission on sales. As such, it has become a little bit of ritual for me to add other artists works on bandcamp to my public collection as well. Today I got Ex Machina (2023) by Steve Lehman & Orchestre National de Jazz, and Elements of Freedom Vol.1 (2023) by Scott Oshiro. My own page on bandcamp still has 4 albums, and you're equally welcome to check them out.
Also following up on the previous newsletter, the photographic cloud dreaming collection is now going to be dropped (a new technical term I leaned) as an NFT collection on opensea.io, on the Polygon blockchain (known for MATIC tokens). It will be my actual first series of NFTs, though surprisingly (even for myself) they'll not be the first NFTs I have collected. The Polygon network is much more cost efficient than the Etherium chain (and even though you can hold MATIC tokens on the Etherium network, please don't). The collection is called Little Slices of Heaven and it will be "a simple reminder to look up, let the mind float like a cloud for a moment, and appreciate the little slices of heaven that we should all be allowed to experience".