Tonight Ensemble Robot performed Zap! at the Boston Museum of Science's Theater of Electricity. Zap! is a piece written by Christine Southworth for live musicians, singers, robots, and high voltage equipment.

I had a fun job on this one: 'playing' a pair of half-million volt Tesla coils and the world's largest Van De Graaff generator as musical instruments. There was lots of lightning, but the buzzing purple coronas were my favorite.

I have new project that excites me a lot and creeps me out a little. And I need your help with it, gentle reader.

The plan is to create music using genetic algorithms, and using EEG measurements of the listener's pleasure response as the determinant for genetic selection.

What interests me about this is using a non-conscious part of the human psyche as an integral part of a "living" machine.

This interface provides a rich and meaningful interaction between human and machine in which the user makes no decisions, takes no conscious actions. And yet, the listener and the program are linked in a feedback loop that is far more intimate than any conscious interface. To me, this effortless intimacy is the most interesting part.

• Can this process create enjoyable music?
• Can this kind of pleasure feedback loop work like a drug?
• What happens when you use EEG readings from multiple simultaneous listeners?
• What does it mean when different listeners' responses generate different kinds of music?
• Can genetic algorithms create never-before-imagined beautiful music?
• Can a pleasure feedback loop add an emotional 'humanness' to computer-generated music?

Whatever happens will be very interesting.

So I'm looking for people with some theory and/or practice with EEGs, MAX/MSP, LISP, genetic algorithms, and electronic music theory. Part of me wants to do it all myself. But that many learning curves would take FOREVER. I'm more interested in getting it all up and running ASAP.

So if can help out, gimme a holler at andy(at)nervebox.com!

Ensemble Robot performed at the last week at the Wired NextFest in NYC. It was pretty nuts. I'll be writing about the bots, the code, the people, and the madness in this spot soon.

That there is the Whirlie-bot. You can see more details here.

Apologies to Mr. Herkimer, my 9th grade math teacher. This stuff actually *is* good for something. :) I just finished my very first math consulting project. It was some pretty straight-up geometry: a general formula for finding the boundries for a Planar Homography transformation (easier than the homography itself).

The fun part was getting to play with MathML and SVG for the first time. Firefox users can see a demo here: http://projects.nervebox.com/planar/planar.xhtml

IE and Safari users are out of luck. Sorry. MathML and SVG are W3C standards, but not supported natively in those browsers yet. I hope they are sometime soon!

Lisa Bufano is a superhero. One with fancy attachments! She spent a long weekend running all over NYC's streets, bridges, and trains in her crazy cheetah legs, turning heads and fighting crime. And I tracked and documented her on my camera bike. It's for the first of a series of video podcasts she's producing about exploring her unique body. Other podcasts will focus on her wearing stilts, a flying harness, and perhaps a submarine theme. When she finishes editing, I'll be sure to post a link up here.

Her site is here: http://www.lbufano.com

Ensemble Robot performed at Mass MoCA this weekend with the Bang on a Can All Stars.

It's all now just a blur of events that I'm still processing: re-soldering robots moments before the show, samba dancing with Meredith Monk, the huge crowd, a surprise birthday cake (for me!), and later, the police asking some of us to put our clothes back on.

The Boston Globe has a nice review of a smaller set the week before.

WBUR's story on SCUL ran this morning. They actually got it a lot more than most: the purpose, the lingo, the feeling, etc. You can listen to it here. The photo gallery for the story is here.