CDM has been publishing for over four years.

For once, I actually can say … nothing. Please provide your own snark in the comment space below. The CDM family thanks you.

Beamz ad, there’s a new sheriff in town.

Gizmodo: Beamz Infomercial Is Most Stupid Promo Video in History [Published in the more innocent times of April 2008]

Updated: Yes, this is the Microsoft Research team doing the video. So, in their defense, they don’t do promo videos or music for a living. We love you, Microsoft Research. It’s not even worth saying “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.” As we have previously learned, the best way for researchers to look really cool is either to involve head crabs or, if they must do vocals, be sure to involve particle physics.

It’s official: Beamz has become stuff of Web legendz. I can haz alternative interface, or whatever.

The saga of the Beamz Laser Music System goes on: the spectacularly awful demo video has spread on the Internets, and after Gizmodo proclaimed it the most stupid promo video ever, they were challenged by the PR company to do a real review. (No such challenge yet for CDM, mercifully.)

This does reveal where the thing came from, though. The Beamz tool was “invented” by songwriter Jerry Riopelle, who had a fairly significant career penning tunes in the 60s (”The Thrill is Gone”) and went on to a solo career in the 70s. (I say “invented” because it’s certainly not the first laser harp in existence.) Apparently his dream more recently was to move to the Valley and make a gadget, so he went on to focus on Beamz — and landed an exclusive distribution deal with Sharper Image a few years ago, before the company’s finances fell apart. (Doh!) Jerry actually plays with his Beamz system onstage, and it … uh … kinda sounds like it does in the videos.

But the PR firm wants Gizmodo (and the world) to believe everyone will feel differently when they play it.. except we’d presumably have to hear it, too, which so far is a bit on the painful side. (They also say this obviously tech-savvy crowd loved it.) Yet, that’s not what bothers me — this does (from PR man Matt Silverman’s retort to Gizmodo):

It is not meant to be a traditional musical instrument because that takes so much training for people to master. The beamz was conceived and created by an accomplished Hollywood musician and songwriter whose goal was to allow the average music lover to experience the passion of making music.

This is something we hear all the time. Yet you never hear anything like this:

• Cup Noodles: Experience the real joy of cooking — finally, without needing years of apprenticeship under French master chefs.
• Hot Wheels: Why own a real car and bother with greenhouse gas emissions and drivers license exams when this fits in your pocket?
• Connect the Dots: Because deciding what to draw is just too much stress — and who wants hours and hours of training drawing nude models?
• Tetris – the non-competitive edition: Put the blocks wherever you want! You don’t want all that pressure. Heck … the blocks don’t even move.

Updated:

On a more serious note — and illustrating just what a big difference different users, different musical content, context, and purpose can make — check out what happens when the system’s creator visits a Children’s Hospital. Part of why it’s worth being thoughtful about this stuff, and not reducing it to black-and-white marketing terms, is that interface design really can be meaningful. Thanks to Koen for the link.

Despite that, if anyone suggests that maybe a certain amount of challenge or open-ended creativity is kind of the point of music, we’re “elitists” or “pretentious.” (Nothing against, say, Cup Noodles — I enjoy a little Picante Chicken now and then, in fact — but you’d never describe them as the “passion of making food.”)

Don’t get me wrong. Making music more accessible has actually long been part of musical instrument design and music history. Think frets, tablature, shapenote notation, keyboards and pianos, the autoharp — there are countless examples of making music more accessible. A lot of them worked. Lutes were really popular in their day for a reason. Almost every great composer you can name from the Classical period wrote piano music for beginning students, often lovingly so. And don’t start with the “kids today” speech. Have you listened to From the Top? There are some terrifyingly-skilled 12 year-olds around. Music education is threatened in schools, but music making survives. And those kids get interviewed — someone invariably asks, surely you don’t watch TV, or play video games, or play sports, or have friends, right? But, of course, they do all these things.

What the PR person says about traditional musical instruments is just plain wrong. Traditional instruments run the gamut from impossible to play, impossible to tune, and impossible to lift to ridiculously easy toys for kids.

Here’s the thing: the result has to be fun. It doesn’t have to be hard, or require massive skill. But simply saying something is better because it’s easier really does miss the point. The reason all those other categories from kazoos to pipe organs fall in the same basic category is that they’re fun to play over a long period of time, and they don’t impose one kind of musical expression on the user.

I don’t care if people claim I’m pretentious. I think it’s the job of people who do have more experience with more kinds of musical inventions and systems to introduce as broad a range of instruments as possible. I don’t think Beamz really stands up terribly well to a ukulele or a steel drum or even Guitar Hero — and I don’t have any training in any of those three. You can use computers. You can sing together off-key.

And, yeah, you really can build your own laser harp, save $400-500, and have a better time.

So how do I feel about buying expensive, pre-made gadgets that have limited forms of interaction, constrict the style, content, and expressive quality of what you play with them, and then claim to be new inventions even though they deliver watered-down forms of things we’ve already seen?

Sorry.

The thrill is gone.

A few moments of your playing, and nothing could possibly convince me that you didn’t grow up on the streets of Jamaica, banging oil drums you salvaged and hammered into shape.

Whoops, sorry — had to snap out of that for a second.

So, okay — it seems the beamz laser harp we saw last week comes with special algorithmic software that makes music play basically regardless of what you do. The problem with laser harps in general is they tend to the button-pressing variety: that is, you’re waving your arms around like crazy, but really the laser sensor is either off or on. (There are ways around that, but … well, not here.)

Watch closely as someone leaves their hand in front of the harp and does nothing. And this, of course, is what real instruments have going for them — that you have to work hard to play them, and that’s actually kind of the fun of it. It’s like basketball: if you just held down a button the entire game and a robot played for you, it would be easier, but that wouldn’t necessarily be better. Even as a computer game, we expect multiple buttons, and actual difficulty. If you waved your hands around and wore sunglasses and had a $600 gadget from Sharper Image and pretended to play basketball, that wouldn’t be much of an improvement, either. I’m not sure why music is excepted from this rule, but then, many things about this world provide amazement and confusion.

Yes, technically Guitar Hero / Rock Band does the same thing. Except that it has actual difficulty. And has real songs. And is fun. Whereas this is painful. And it’s about as expensive than Rock Band plus a PS3.

That leaves two questions.

First, there’s the academic question of how generative musical algorithms could be controlled via more expressive input devices — so that generative music felt creative, and not just holding down a button and letting the computer figure out what to play. I’m not sure you’ll find the answer in the Euro-Pop-imagical beamz, but I’m just saying.

Second, how come this girl is getting totally dumped on?

Oh, sure. I see how this works. The “everyone sounds great!” caption just happens to go with this poor young woman.

The entire video is nothing but dorky white dudes (yeah, I know — takes one to know one). We’re supposed to believe that by wearing aviator glasses and cheap headphones and pretending to be totally into their own playing, these guys are really rock stars enjoying the new frontiers opened by Sharper Image laser gimmickry.

But the young girl in the penguin-emblazoned vest? It’s sheer technological wonder that she can produce the same crap as the rest of them.

I think the video captions have it backwards. I mean, she has a robot dog and stuff. She’s going to tire of the beamz and go back to programming the Game Boy tracker she coded herself.

Give Penguin Girl a break.

And, in a move we haven’t seen in years, they spell the name with a ‘z’ instead of an ’s.’ Classy. And they’ve opted for a design that looks like the security fence in Jurassic Park.

The beamz Music Performance System @ Theremin World

Not sold yet? Read this feature and drool:

Choose a complementary rhythm track from 30 original songs in 19 music genres, including jazz, bluegrass, classical, hip-hop, reggae, heavy metal and more.

And it all “brings families and friends together through highly personalized music performances that elicit joy and excitement across all ages.” So, is $600 really so much to ask if it saves your family?

Make Your Own Laser Harp

As it happens, you can make a much cooler (okay, not saying much — a cool) laser harp on your own, as Stephen Hobley has done:

Stephen Hobley’s *awesome* laser harp [ladyada's ranting]

Click through to comments for more details on the project and how-to info.

Updated: Stephen’s site is back up, so go have a look. The project uses the very inexpensive Boarduino Arduino clone. I’m an Arduino vet but just picked up a Boarduino, so I’ll let you know when I do something with it.

“Totally awesome” as this may be, I still feel somehow unsatisfied. And then I know why:

Someone needs to do a laser tag harp. Ah, that takes me back. Anyone?

Photo: carinemily. And they say this whole 8-bit music thing is about 80s nostalgia? I’ll show you 80s nostalgia.