Photos by Daniel in the Lion’s Den via Flickr.

Lee-Sean Huang: “Mumbo Jumbo Maracas” from Nisma Z on Vimeo.

“Mumbo Jumbo Maracas” at Southpaw in Brooklyn, NY on December 15, 2009. This was for the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) class, taught by Greg Shakar and Hans-Christoph Steiner at NYU’s ITP. Video by Nisma Zaman and Minette Mangahas.

An eerily impressionistic and grainy photo of my Mumbo Jumbo Maracas performance at ITP NIME 2009 by Derek Chung.

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas vs. T.I.

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas vs. Art Kleiner

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas vs. The Plastic Ono Band

Thanks to Yasser Ansari, Paul Paradiso, and Jorge Just for these brilliant mashups!

Mumbo Jumbo Maracas (excerpt) @ ITP NIME 2009, Southpaw, Brooklyn, NY from lee-sean on Vimeo.

Here is an excerpt of my Mumbo Jumbo Maracas piece for the ITP NIME concert at Southpaw in Brooklyn last night.
Featuring Eric Mika on maracas and Arturo Vidich on keytar
Thanks to Meredith Hasson and Tianwei Liu for the video

More video coming soon. Photos on Flickr.

Come out to Brooklyn next Tuesday night for the ITP NIME Show! I will be performing my Mumbo Jumbo Maracas piece with Arturo Vidich and Eric Mika.

NIME: New Interfaces for Musical Expression
Creating new performance tools for digital music.

In the eighth annual NIME concert, performers will play a series of newly designed electronic instruments that aim to keep the “live” in the live performance of digital music.

Electronic music is usually played with a keyboard and mouse. Laptop musicians often sit at a desk and give performances that feel like watching someone work in their cubicle. The idea behind NIME is to go beyond the mouse and keyboard and beyond even piano keys and drum pads. It seeks to present performance systems that make the most out of the new opportunities for musical expression that digital technology offers.

This year’s NIME concert will feature such innovations as a musically enhanced sewing machine, sonified floor tiles, performative knitting needles, turntablism for live instrumentalists, electronically controlled cartoon antics, novel realizations of the rock guitar, and a host of other exciting approaches to the creation of music.

NIME is an end-of-semester performance by 16 graduate student artists from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU.

Entry is $7 (Free for NYU ID holders)
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Doors open at 7, Show starts at 8

Southpaw
125 Fifth Avenue (at Sterling Pl)
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.230.0236

Here is the score for my new musical composition, Mumbo Jumbo Maracas, a trio for Wiimote MIDI controller playing a custom MainStage patch, keytar, and maracas.  I will be playing the Wiimote, with Arturo Vidich on keytar and Eric Mika on maracas.  We will be playing the world premiere of the piece as part of the ITP NIME show on December 15.  Details coming soon!

On the way home, a lullaby-like melody and lyrics came into my head while I was in the subway.  Here are the words.  I think they will help guide me in what I want to say with the Mumbo Jumbo Maracas project.

I forgot my native language
I forgot my mother tongue
I forgot the tales you’ve told me
I forgot the songs you’ve sung

YouTube video tutorial on how to get a Wiimote to talk to a Mac

“Inspirational Actions”: Think about a performance you have witnessed that made a indelible mark in your life, a performance you would aspire to give, a tool/system you would aspire to perform – and bring a short audio and/or video clip of it to share with the class. This can be something you have already done, but we encourage you to look to the work of other artists/musicians/performers for inspiration.

The name of my NIME instrument, Mumbo Jumbo Maracas, just came to me one day. I wanted an instrument that would allow me to make wild flailing gestures and a thick texture of noise. For my performance, I want to combine elements of primitive shamanistic ritual with good silly fun, sort of post-colonial re-appropriation of mid-century exotica.  I find maracas fun and festive (as this Señor Coconut track demonstrates), and as user interfaces, the simplicity of how they work is intuitive and they become in a way instant noise-making appendages in the hands of their player.

I created a 1 minute audio sketch in Logic that approximates what I want my final project to sound like.

While we are on the topic of maraca-related inspiration, here are a few YouTube clips I like.

As for the mumbo jumbo ritualistic performance part of my NIME project, I admit, I am totally ripping off Terence Koh.

“Inspirational Sounds”: Think about the music you would aspire to make – and bring a short audio clip of it to share with the class. This can be something you have already done, but we encourage you to look to the work of other artists/musicians/performers for inspiration.

For my inspirational sounds, I decided to share some Steve Reich music. This clip includes parts of “4 Organs” and “My Name Is” from a 1970 performance at the Berkeley Museum.  I am attracted to the strong rhythmic pulse of Reich’s music and the mesmerizing use of repetition and slowly evolving patterns.  For my own NIME instrument, I want to do something involving maracas (like in “4 Organs”) as well as incorporate some form of sampled human voices (like in “My Name Is”).

I am starting to get a clearer idea of the instrument that I want to build.  I am calling my project Mumbo Jumbo Maracas.  I would like to mount accelerometers on a pair of maracas.  In performance, I would play the maracas as purely acoustic instruments, while the sensors would be used to trigger various looped vocal samples (the “mumbo jumbo” part.

Make a journal entry of all the ways in which you or people you observe ‘use’ music during the next week. It can be music to wake up to, to fall asleep to, to blow off steam, to make the subway ride more private or tolerable, for dancing, etc. Include an one minute example of music you made, heard or heard made.

Music is so ubiquitous in an urban environment like New York that I often try to tune it out, but obviously I can’t, it always gets in my head.  As soon as I leave my apartment and head out, I hear music that is out of my control.  My building has music piped into the elevators and music piped into the lobby.  In fact, there are “theme” elevators tuned to different satellite radio channels– jazz, classic rock, lounge.  They are all pretty cheezy.  I have an iPhone with music on it, but I only listen to music with it during my commute ever so often.  I am more likely to listen to foreign language lessons or news podcasts on my iPhone.  Or I just enjoy listening to the sounds of the subway.  I listen in on people’s conversations.  I love to listen to people speaking in foreign languages or regional accents and try to guess where they are from.  Or I will be serenaded with buskers.  On the R/W between Lower Manhattan and NYU, it’s usually guys who play guitar and sing in Spanish who perform on the subway.  I see lots of people on the subway listening to iPods or other musical devices.

There is always music playing when I go to the gym.  It’s usually thumpy happy techno pop.  I have no choice in the matter really, but the beat does help pass the time.  I work out for vanity, not out of enjoyment per se.  No point in trying to listen to my own music on my iPhone.  I feel like the headphones and the iPhone just get in the way.  And there is no way my own music can compete with the loud music playing on the speakers at the gym.

I met some friends visiting from Barcelona at a bar last night.  There was some cheezy club music playing.  I don’t normally hang out in Chelsea, but it was near where they are staying.  The music didn’t really add value to my experience, in fact it just made it harder to communicate.  They don’t speak English as a first language, and I don’t speak Spanish as mine.  Loud music in bars is frustrating for me even in situations where everybody has the same native language.  I have sensitive ears and I find it difficult to separate signal from noise.  I’m easily distracted by background noise.  I hope I don’t have a hearing problem.  That makes me feel old.

I just listened to the Ghanian Postal Workers’ Song on WFMU. Very haunting whistled melody and catchy beat.  I’ll probably sample some of it for a future musical project.  It reminded me a bit of “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White, even if very different stylistically, it seems to serve a common function of helping to pass time while working.

I am one of those crazy people who like to hum to themselves while walking down the street.  I’m often humming the melody of some popular song stuck in my head, or some new song I am writing.  Inspiration for my songs just comes to me while I’m walking, rarely when I am sitting still.  I try to hum it to work out the melody and to repeat it so I don’t forget.  When I get home, I try to work things out on the piano as I sing the melody line over what I play.  I can’t transcribe music very well, so I just find it easy to write down some basic chord shapes or to record audio of my songwriting experiments.  Sometimes I can write a full song in 10-15 minutes.  Other times I have fragments of songs that take years to write.   Sometimes the fragments remain fragments and never grow up into full songs.

Here is a 1-minute fragment of some lyrics and a melody that I was working out this week.  The words and music just came to me suddenly.  The inspiration was obviously my recent trip back to Arizona.  It’s still very rough.  Maybe a little too earnest and a little cliché.  I don’t know what I will do with it, but I need something to share in class, so here it is.