In college I got a degree in journalism, and even before college I was a big 1st amendment supporter. The reason it is the first amendment was to make sure that we have a set of checks and balances that keep our government in check. Today Chelsea Manning gave a keynote event at Moogfest. Unlike most conferences where a Keynote is a speech, here it is a conversation.
Sitting on the stage at the Carolina Theater Chelsea Manning talked about how music empowered her and continues to help in dealing with life as a trans individual.
After the presentation, I went and checked out Michael Stipe’s second video installation, Thibault Dance. Last year Michael debuted “Jeremy Dance” and this was the part of the same series.
After looking at the installation, I went to hear a conversation with Michael Stipe describing the installation along with an upcoming book called “Volume 1”. The cool part of the Dance installations, is how he made them. He would play a 120BPM song, and let the dancer dance. After which he would actually compose a score to go with it. So what you are seeing is a Dance that is interpreted in music, instead of the other way around. The book was cool – a bunch of pictures taken over the years. Seeing some of the behind the scenes of Athens was cool.
But the fun part of the http://g.co/magenta/demos day was the session by Cathy and Adam from google going thru the Magenta projects on using MI for creating music.
You can check out a bunch demos over here: Demos at g.co/magenta/demos