“Okay,” you say to the Web geeks, “I’ve had enough. I don’t want another little app that looks at my iTunes collection and tells me that if I like Lady Gaga, I probably also like Madonna. I want to listen in new ways and, most importantly, make music. What have you got, Web 2.0… 3.0… whatever we’re on now, that I can actually use. I want some of the deliciousness of the future, now.”

“Oh, and another thing – can I patch this Android phone of mine in absurd ways?”

Wish granted.

The latest Music Hackday in Stockholm was filled with the usual simple, first-draft hacks – as it should be; the whole idea is to do something quickly and start something real. But among them were some really strong ideas about how connecting music makers to the Web could do intelligent, new things.

Here are some of the best. Themes emerging:

There is a “there” there. Use proximity, and make location start to help people share musical tastes (and, by the same token, music making).

Put music creation in the browser – without Flash. New JavaScript-based tools can do live synthesis. There’s even a Nanoloop-style sequencer, built entirely with JavaScript and HTML. While these won’t be replacing dedicated music software any time soon, they can have the inverse effect, which is bringing musical creativity to more online apps. (Trust me, it’s more fun than most of what’s on Facebook.)

Make musicians’ online lives easier. Thanks to open APIs, all your gig info, tour info, and music uploads can finally come together.

Get physical. Hacks involving everything from big robotic visualizers to physical radio controls connect open hardware platforms like Arduino and Android.

(And yes, there were a lot of new Android apps, early proof that open mobile development could make a splash.)

Here’s a look at some of the coolest individual projects:

AlbexOne
Data as connected, kinetic sculpture

It’s one thing to talk to a Web API and put the results on the screen. It’s quite another to turn that feedback into a massive, mechanical sculpture.

Ingredients:
One Web API (Echo Nest Java API, for song analysis)
One Google NexusOne phone, running Android, receiving data on wifi and sending on bluetooth
One microcontroller, receiving signals from the Android and rotating a giant, mechanical arm to make a drawing

Here’s hoping co-creators Albin Karlsson and Alex Olwal can send us video of the project working in action.

ProximRadio + Blobble
Making software and hardware proximity-aware

The work by Michael Coffey (github | @eartle) and Jonty Wareing (github | @jonty) may seem at first like more of the usual social song-playing stuff. But it’s really a clever use of Bluetooth and proximity that could have significant implications for listening to and making music with other people in the same room.

Using new clients and servers, Michael and Jonty change the experience of listening to music. As people enter and leave a room, radio feeds respond accordingly. And the experience of “scrobbling” — writing a piece of music played on your computer to the Web — changes from solo to ensemble experience. If you and a few friends listen to Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz, now all of your Last.fm accounts respond accordingly.

Note, too, that by using the open-source GUI framework Qt4, what looks like a native Mac UI is actually portable across (cough) platforms.

Let’s say you’d rather make music than play it. Well, good news: developed could use these same tricks to build Bluetooth-enabled musical instruments that respond to proximity, not only for social interactions but better-integrated
hardware.

Radio Free Hackday
Virtual radio meets the physical radio object

Simon Hohberg and Robert Böhnke (aka @ceterum_censeo) had a brilliant, simple hardware hack: put the soul of an Arduino mini into a friendly-looking Panasonic FM radio. Result: physical controls for virtual radio, and an actual, local FM stream transmitted back from the computer into the stream.

With some minor upgrades (like a beefier, non-Arduino minicomputer), this could be a self-contained Internet radio. But it’s a reminder that making physical controls for software can be fun, frivolous, and novel. After all, it’s really the way we interact with real-world objects that makes them meaningful.

Webloop
Game Boy mainstay Nanoloop, reimagined as JavaScript

Start with Nanoloop, the unique, elegantly-designed music creation software for the Game Boy. Now imagine it as a browser application – no Flash, no standalone app, but all JavaScript, even down to the audio output.

That’s what Jan Krutisch did with his Webloop, now in its second iteration. It’s a testament to the universality of Oliver Wittchow’s design for Nanoloop, and the growing power of the browser and JavaScript as an open platform on which to make music software.

Synthism
Patching synthesis in online browser modules

This is a bit hard to see in action, so we’ll have to take their word for it. But the idea is compelling – and is another example of the action that could take place in the browser (in this case, with the actual sound work done elsewhere in a more traditional fashion):

Synthism.com our frontend to the powerful BrainBeat compiler, which is also built by the synthism.com team. This gives you the possibility to export synthesizers from synthism.com to different platforms, e.g. as a VST instrument. The flexibility of the BrainBeat compiler allows us to add support for exotic hardware such as FPGAs or special purpose built DSPs found in different hardware synthesizers, making export to such platforms available.

And yes, all of this is meant to be “collaborative,” which could add more dimension to it.

Songkick On Tour from Matt Biddulph on Vimeo.

Songkick on Tour
A Web service that adds information to your trip

It may be technologically less impressive, but part of what I think will make the Web more useful is the use of open Web APIs to reduce the amount of work you have to do to get information. Songkick on Tour is a great example of that: it figures out your travel itinerary from the awesome Dopplr and lets you know what gigs are happening when you’re traveling. I’m a big fan of Dopplr and feel it’s underused; this demonstrates the sort of thing that could be done.

Of course, this quick hack is only the start – it could make it easier for touring musicians to stay on top of information when they’re on the road.

Along the same lines, and on a grander scale…

Holodeck
One place on the Web, all your artist stuff – automatically

“A tool for artists to create their own website with music from SoundCloud, gigs from Songkick or Last.fm, news/posts from Tumblr.”

That says it all, doesn’t it? Instead of adding yet another Web service to keep track of, another dimension of complexity in your life, this mashes together information you’ve already put elsewhere.

Imagine if every time you made a note of something, you scattered it in a different part of the house. Imagine how complex your life would be.

Oh, wait. I don’t have to imagine that. I do that. Anyway, yeah, let’s have the Web not work that way so it pays for the time, electricity, and money it consumes, ‘kay?

Echonest Midi Player

A Web-to-MIDI converter

Internet comes in, music goes out. Connect an Ethernet cable to one side of this gadget (via the Arduino Ethernet Shield), connect the other to a MIDI instrument, and Bertrand Gondouin’s creation plays MIDI music automatically.

Of course, this has other creative implications, like the ability to pipe your own music or musical events to installations, remote players, to rig up an Ethernet- (or wifi-) powered MIDI band, or whatever you might imagine.

And bless the presence of simple, free Web servers, like the one on which this site runs. (Actually, CDM is LXMP – Linux nginx MySQL PHP – not LAMP with Apache, but I digress.)

More cool projects

Tired of embedding a whole Flash-powered player? the hackable SoundCloud JS player is customizable and lightweight. (It’s not Flash-free – you still need Flash as the back-end to decode the audio, as sadly HTML5 still doesn’t mean consistent MP3 and OGG codec support across browsers, at least so far.)

HacKey asks a fascinating question, which is whether people’s musical tastes are related to key.

BuddyJ for iPhone adds a dead-simple, cueable music output. Now, true, this may not look like an all-powerful DJ app, but that’s not the point: it makes the iPhone or iPod touch into a cueable “deck” you could connect to a mixer, etc.

SleepApp is a simple Android demo app, but it also demonstrates – with all the code on Google Code – how to do basic UIs and stream Internet radio, meaning it could be a good starting point if you’re dabbling in Android music development.

More coverage

Five music hacks from the future [Pocket-lint]

New Echo Nest APIs demoed at the Stockholm Music Hackday [Music Machinery, where you can also follow the Echo Nest APIs]

Hacking in Stockholm [A report from Last.fm's LAST.HQ]

48 Hours, 31 Hacks – Stockholm Music Hack Day [Programmable Web]

And here is some rough mobile video of the presentations:

New York?

NYCers, I’d really love to help host a Music Hackday here (I missed the nearby Boston event, but we have some specific folks in NY who would be great to involve.) The only remaining challenge: a venue that can host 100 or 200 people, free. Suggestions?

http://musichackday.org/

All the Stockholm hacks

Apple’s iPad is here. It starts at $499. It’s a gorgeous, brilliantly-designed device that has the benefits of Apple’s cleverly-engineered, best-in-class developer tools for mobile. A lot are likely to sell. And unfortunately, to me that means bad news for the kind of creative computing we talk about on this site.

To put it briefly, I think the new, mobile Apple is doing immense harm to the computing legacy the company has forged. We could have had a Mac tablet today. Instead, we have a giant iPhone – and that’s a decision that has some serious repercussions. It’s a blow to open source alternatives, but also to open development in general: the power of interchangeable hardware and software, on which everything we do with music and visuals on computers is based.

For years, the Mac community railed against the perceived closed nature of Microsoft. Now, many are rallying behind an Apple with a vision more closed than Redmond’s.

This is important to both CDMs, because it’s on both these sites that I, along with readers and contributors, have advocated open computing as a creative outlet, for creation, sharing, and distribution of music, visuals, and knowledge.

I’m entirely biased by my own perspective. There are certain things I care about, that I believe in. I can talk about the technical, measurable values of each of those, but I can only speak for myself. With that in mind, the iPad, in a single device, embodies the exact opposite of all the reasons I’ve invested so much time in computing for the last 25 years.

• It’s a closed platform. As with the iPhone, development for the iPad means reliance on Apple’s tools, on the use of proprietary Apple hardware and software just to build an app. Now, those could be worthy sacrifices for a great product. But it also means that Apple alone distributes applications, and decides which applications developers will be allowed to create – something that has never been true on a computing OS. Since the unveiling of the iPhone SDK, Apple apologists argued that somehow this was a decision made by phone carriers, that surely their beloved Apple was not to blame. Yet Apple has chosen that path for a device that, while it lacks a keyboard, otherwise looks for all the world like a computer – like something that could have been a Mac, with all the power and freedom of a Mac, instead of an iPhone.
• It has no standard ports. Like the iPhone, the iPad has only a proprietary dock connector, ensuring Apple has control over the hardware made for the device. You can throw away decades of the lessons of the value of standard connectors, of the freedom to connect a computer as – to use a phrase Apple popularized – a digital hub. There’s not even HDMI to connect to a display. Clarification: video out will be possible, albeit with a proprietary adapter. And *access* to that video port from software has been a huge problem on the iPhone. See additional notes on Create Digital Motion. Additionally, the possibilities of external hardware are not entirely known. Apple will offer a memory card reader adapter that uses USB. But there isn’t a native USB port on the machine, and this doesn’t necessarily suggest full support for USB; hopefully, additional details will emerge.
• It’s tied to iTunes. As with the iPhone, you can’t use the iPad’s drive as a drive. You can’t connect it to a computer and put on it what you like. You’re limited to using third-party apps as conduits or servers – and even then, you’re limited; critical files for media and reading are controlled by Apple’s market-dominating iTunes app. It’s a storage device you own, but that someone else controls. Maybe that’s acceptable for game consoles, but, again, the iPad has the appearance of a computer. (Except, of course, it’s actually not.)
• Apple alone controls the distribution of media. Apple already has a dangerously dominant position in the consumption of music and mobile software, and their iTunes-device link ensures that content goes through their store, their conduit, and ultimately their control. This means that developers are limited in what they can create for the device when it comes to media – a streaming Last.fm app is okay, but an independent music store (like Amazon MP3 on Android) is not. Now, you can add to that Apple dominating book distribution. At a time when we have an opportunity to promote independent e-book publishing, the iPad is accompanied by launch deals from major traditional publishers. What does that mean for independent writers and content? Updated: As several readers have noted, one positive sign is that Apple’s book application supports the open epub format. We’ll see how this works, and how this interoperates with other devices over the coming days and months. (And it’s important, too – this is not Create Digital Books, but a lot of the information we want to read is published in e-books.)
• It’s not an open computer. It’s not a Mac. The bottom line: you can’t do the things that an open computing experience allows. You can’t connect the hardware you want, develop or run the software you want, or have the open-ended experience computers have provided. That’s not to say a tablet or slate or pad or whatever you want to call it needs to be exactly like other computers. On the contrary: if you believe in the computing experience, you believe it should work in new and creative form factors. (There was a time when the clamshell laptop was a new idea, remember, a time when computers were giant bricks you plugged into a TV.)

Limitations are a wonderful thing. Specialized operating systems for mobile make perfect sense. But that’s a design decision – it’s about the interface, the developer tools, the hardware. A mobile device can work just as well without being tied to iTunes or with actual ports on it.

I know what the objection will be: but this computer isn’t “for” people like me. But that’s the whole problem. Apple threatens to split computing into two markets, one for “traditional,” “real” computers, and another for passive consumption devices that try to play games without physical controls and let you read books, watch movies, play music, and run apps so long as you’re willing to go through the conduit of a single company.

And, of course, this wouldn’t be worth my breath if not for my real concern: what if Apple actually succeeds? What if competitors follow this broken path, or fail to offer strong alternatives? The iPad today is a heck of a lot slicker than alternatives. It’s bad news for Linux, Windows, and Android, none of which have really workable competitors yet. It’s especially bad for Linux, in fact, which had a real chance to make its mark on mobile devices. Edit: Actually, one major advantage of a big, splashy Apple announcement – a number of those manufacturers have started talking about their rivals, already in the pipeline.

These issues have always been a matter of open debate. Jean-Louis Gassée infamously got an “OPEN MAC” license plate for his car during the early days of Apple Macintosh. The “open” vision was the vision we got. It’s the Mac II. It’s the expansion capabilities of the Mac that allowed PostScript support, which let the Mac launch computer desktop publishing and ensured the survival of the platform. And it was a vision in contrast to that of one (younger) Steve Jobs, who argued against expansion and nearly made the Mac a failure, another forgotten 80s oddity. It was after Jobs was forced out of the company that the Mac platform, the Mac community as we now know it were really forged, built on the expansion and flexibility those later Macs offered. That expansion port was what enabled early products from Digidesign, which would later become Pro Tools – the very birth of digital audio production.

Like I said, I’m biased by my own opinion. But it’d be unfair, after years of being hard on small developers when it comes to issues of openness, if I held back here. This is the world’s self-proclaimed “largest mobile manufacturer,” the company that, as it reminds us in every press release, launched the computing revolution. I wish I understood why they were now running away from some of the basic ideas that made that revolution possible.

This is what I asked in January 2007 on this site, shortly after the original iPhone was launched:

“1. Will Apple lock down the iPhone, blocking Flash, Java, custom widgets, and open development from its new platform?

2. Could Apple’s multi-touch patents actually stifle growth of new, interactive displays?”

Unfortunately, that turned out to prescient. As for point #2, and perhaps no fault of Apple’s, it’s apparent that multi-touch gestures are now missing in prominent platforms like the Android because of fear of litigation. (Yes, the Droid in my pocket has multi-touch and even a multi-touch API, but nothing in the shipping apps, apparently because someone’s legal department got involved.)

And as for point one, just compare what you can do with a Mac to what you can do with an iPhone.

Ironically, at that same show, I saw the very thing the Mac users most badly wanted: a Mac tablet. But because an independent developer had to hack that product together, it was overpriced and not terribly useful. At the same time, I know some people bought them, because that’s what they wanted. They wanted a Mac tablet.

Ironically, the biggest disadvantage of the iPad is that it’s not a Mac. So now we wait and see if someone can come up with intelligent new tablets that are at least more like PCs.

I know who I’m rooting for. And it’s not this.

Clarifications / thoughts from comments:

Of course, comments are here so that we can have a spectrum of opinions, and believe me, I do read and listen – including (sometimes especially) those with a different perspective than my own.

Some issues worth clarifying, respective to the above:

Several readers pointed out that I’m oversimplifying some of the relative historic “openness” of Apple. When the “Open Mac” battle was raging in the early Mac days (leading to the SE and Mac II), the connectors were indeed often still proprietary. The question was more whether to have ports or expansion at all. In the defense of the early Apple engineers, recall that, with the exception of formats like serial, standards were not as evolved as technologies like USB today. Even though there were already IBM clones, they were clones of IBM PCs, literally, not the open-ended PC market we have today. So readers are absolutely right – I was blurring some of the issues here. At the same time, this only underlines my point.

We’re again revisiting the question of what “consumers” need. The reason Jobs was opposed to ports, expansion, and the general ability of a user to service or upgrade a machine was because he perceived a need for a “consumer” device. In other words, he was making the argument then that his design is making now, and that some commenters are making, as well. Jobs was forced out of Apple, and the “Open Mac” won – and the rest is history. But my devil’s advocate question would be, given that computers with expandability won out in the 80s, why are we in a rush to eliminate that functionality now, in 2010, when even average consumers are more demanding and less afraid of technology? Is that who this is really for, or by the very virtue of its limitations, is this just a toy for gadget lovers? (I’m not asking that rhetorically; I think the readers making this argument have a point, and I’d be curious to hear people follow up.)

The other question is whether Apple was “open” in the intervening time period. However, here I have to invoke some history. Apple under Sculley was working very hard on interoperability with IBM, even though that ultimately failed. The Mac platform may have run a different OS, but it also embraced and/or helped popularize serial ports (hello MIDI), SCSI, and 3.5″ floppy drives (standard storage for the time). Under Amelio, Apple even pursued cloning – before Jobs reigned it in. (I’m not arguing that was a smart business decision, but it did at least qualify as “open.”) Mac OS X and modern Mac hardware are replete with standards, the Safari team is by far the most active contributor to WebKit, and the Apple OS team continues to work hard on interoperability.So, I may have been oversimplifying, too, but I can at least say this particular product is not characteristic of some of the more “open” behavior of Apple in other areas.

Finally, many of the comparisons have been made to the Lemur. I agree the Lemur hardware is aging and the software is relatively inflexible (certainly more so than apps made with the iPhone SDK). As for specifics of how the devices compare in multi-touch accuracy, or whether users will be as satisfied with the iPad as a wireless controller versus the Lemur’s Ethernet cord, that remains worth discussing.

Side note: Nowhere did I say that the alternative to an iPad has to be open source. I’m a huge fan of open source and truly free software. But by the measures above, Windows qualifies as open.

Beat Kangz, the upstart drum machine maker out of Nashville, has been cooking up a new device for some time. That creation, the Beat Thang, is finally nearing production. It may not have a nameplate like Akai or Roland, but I can testify that this independently-designed gadget may nonetheless be one to watch. The hardware feels fantastic, appears to have the right pieces falling into place, and promises release soon. The founding team behind it blends backgrounds in areas ranging from hip-hop to computer science, and even production legend Bob Ezrin (that’ll be the Pink Floyd: The Wall Bob Ezrin). I got a look at the hardware in a private meeting at a hotel in Anaheim last week.

But even those aren’t the reasons you should check out the Beat Kangz. Why was this a highlight of my NAMM trip, even when it wasn’t actually at NAMM?

• It’s made out of ionized zinc.
• It has buttons for “freak,” “bang,” and “blang.”
• No ports get left off.
• It lights up like something Tron would install in your car if he were hosting “Pimp My Ride.” (Look out, ENCOM.)

Sure, we’ll have more substantive, practical matters to consider once this thing actually ships, but at least it’s something interesting in music tech news.

More information, plus details on the virtual/software version that’s available now. (Not in the video, but also mentioned: they’ve got a simple iPhone app now, which should eventually allow you to play back loops you’ve created in the software.)
http://www.beatkangz.com/

Rockwilder, a producer who’s worked with everyone from Aguilera to Xzibit, just happened to be hanging out in the hotel room banging away on the virtual edition on his Macbook Pro. He also shares his thoughts. The gentlemen of Beat Kangz say Rockwilder will be using their creation on an upcoming Method Man production.

Best of all, before I left, we got some trash talking going. It’s on, Akai and Roland. (Incidentally, it really is true that drum machines were noticeably invisible on the floor.) Correction: I am told Roland did have their MV8800 in their arena. At the risk of starting a war, I’ve included that full footage at the end of the Rockwilder video.

Note to manufacturers: this is how I’d like you all to start talking. Roland, you think your drum triggers can kick Yamaha’s sorry a**? Let’s hear it. I mean, diplomacy is good and all, but we do risk putting people to sleep.

Product tour at top, Rockwilder and a slap at the competition at bottom.

Apple added the ability to connect custom hardware to its iPhone and iPod touch platform last year, so it was only a matter of time before someone made a music hardware interface. Ion Audio, the budget brand of Numark/Alesis/Akai, gets there first, with the Ion iDISCOVER Keyboard. It docks your Apple mobile into a case with a 25-key MIDI keyboard, pitch and mod wheels, and preset buttons for patch and octave changes.

http://www.ionaudio.com/idiscoverkeyboard

It’s just what many of us wondered when we first saw Apple’s hardware SDK; David Battino even suggested this very idea.

Of course, there is a slight problem. Part of the whole advantage of the iPhone is its mobility, which a huge honking dock tends to kill. (For less money, you could just plug a keyboard into your Mac, or buy a low-end CASIO or Yamaha keyboard.)

And then there’s the fact that most of the interesting music apps on iPhone don’t use MIDI keyboards. Ion has to provide their own app to fill the gap, which also makes me wonder whether this will work with any other software; I’m guessing not, but I’ll find out. Update: Word from the CES show floor is that Ion plans to open this developers; whether that’s anyone or just partners or even decided yet, unknown, though I hope to snag them at NAMM. Us hard-core geeks would naturally have preferred a standard MIDI interface, so you could use unusual sequencing apps with hardware synths. (Never mind; I’ll take a MIDI Command, instead.)

That raises another question, though — all due kudos to Apple for providing a hardware interface. When will we see third-party hardware support on a platform like Google’s Android? It seems the “open” philosophy of the platform would be best served by an open approach to hardware, too, and technically speaking, the job wouldn’t be that hard, thanks to the fact that Android runs a standard Linux kernel. That could allow any kind of controller — mass-produced or homemade — you want.

I’ve got lots of questions about the iDISCOVER, though; I’ll try to track down answers this week at NAMM. I’m not quite sure who would want this particular product, but it does raise some interesting issues about mobile music tech, especially given the earlier discussion this week.

Thanks to Derek Dumais for the tip. Oddly, Ion seems to have their own version of Akai’s mini-keyboard, too; it seems to be white instead of black but otherwise appears identical. (Consumers want white, pros want black?)

For all the focus on clever little music apps on your phone, it’s the slate/tablet form factor that seems to hold the greatest promise for live performance. Thanks to a larger screen area, these devices look far more usable for control – equipped with multi-touch, they could be reasonable substitutes for hardware control surfaces, a la the Lemur.And with greater horsepower under the hood, you might not need to use them as a controller – you could run an entire live gig off them.

With this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), many onlookers expected news on these devices, particularly as industry buzz anticipated a big announcement during Microsoft chairman Steve Ballmer’s keynote last night. And we got that news – sort of. Unfortunately, manufacturers teased “concepts” and prototypes, without much in the way of details – a repeat performance of 2009’s fuzzy glimpse at this device category.

That said, having been wrong about when it’ll happen, I’m still convinced we’re about to see a flood of new PC devices with interesting potential for music performance. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Dell has a tablet “concept.” Dell’s own keynote included a brief mention of a five-inch tablet. That could make a nice form factor to stow on a keyboard or music stand as a controller. That’s about all it’ll do, as the pictures show only an audio output jack. But it will evidently have multitouch. This is only a “concept,” with no details publicly released; I’ll be following up with Dell if they announce an actual product. Photos:

Dell Tablet Concept [Flickr]

More on Dell’s new lineup (the rest of it is shipping, and may interest you more, anyway — Dell is taking advantage of wildly cheaper PC component prices to deliver some amazing machines under $1000)

HP’s Slate: Seen briefly in Ballmer’s CES keynote, the Slate is a “consumer notebook” in a slate form factor. The only good news relative to Dell’s model is that this is supposedly hardware that will ship. The bad news is, HP isn’t saying much else. The device does have a nice, sizable screen, at at least 10″ or larger (if my ability to tell the scale of things relative to Steve Ballmer’s torso is correct). That could make this an appealing alternative to other devices and form factors.

And, oh yeah, Apple: Here’s the power of Apple: PC makers, who have been shipping tablets for years, and who have shipped alternative form factors for years more, are accused of ripping off an Apple product that isn’t yet public, and about which most of us know nothing about (including, indeed, if it actually exists in the form we think it does). Not only that, but sight unseen, I’ve heard many people who assume that the Apple model of this currently-nonexistent product category will be superior, even though they don’t know what OS it’ll run, what it’ll do, what it’ll look like, what size it’ll be, or what it’ll cost. PC vendors, of course, had the opportunity to provide a clear alternative, and instead made their picture somewhat murky, too.

I don’t just mean Mac fanboys, either, who could be excused the pre-emptive positive review. Even The New York Times got in the act. Ashlee Vance of the NYT Bits blog wrote in advance of Ballmer’s speech:

It could be one of Steve Ballmer’s riskiest trade-show moves in years.

On Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, will unveil a novel take on a slate-type computer … This product better be good because Apple is expected to unveil its take on the slate/tablet form factor later this month … The last thing Mr. Ballmer wants to hold up is a me-too device.

Yes, how dare he … announce … a product … that might compete with a product that no one has seen yet? What a risky move! (Deep thought: can a product be “me-too” even before there’s a “me,” or in this case, an “i”?)

That said, yes, most industry analysts expect an Apple announcement later this month. I’m skeptical about whether such an announcement will be useful to our audience, however. If Apple chooses its relatively locked-down iPhone-style operating system over the Mac OS, and if there’s no hardware input and output, and if the focus is buying magazines and books from iTunes, I think I’ll pass. Of course, some PC vendors may go a similar route.

And, in fairness, I’m sure part of what has prompted PC makers to unveil prototypes of non-shipping products is fears of what happens if Apple gets there first. It’s too bad Apple doesn’t leak a secret plan to solve global warming, or give away chocolates.

Android is a big winner. Murky as the slate announcements were, the one message that has been clear out of CES is that we’re going to see more of Android.
HP may even ship a version of HP Slate running the OS, says TechCrunch. Ordinarily, this would be relatively bad news; on Windows, you can run any music software, whereas Android is relatively limited. But I think that could improve, with open source controllers and work on porting free multimedia tools like Pd (Pure Data) and Processing.

Just keep in mind…

Don’t forget “traditional” tablets for multi-touch. Sure, these smaller slates are interesting, apparently an attempt to blend the appeal of e-readers like Kindle and Nook with handhelds like the iPhone. But why carry a tablet and a laptop when a multitouch laptop could be both? Yep, tablet PCs are back, now with multi-touch input as well as pen. And their convertible form factor means you could have multi-touch control without your arms getting tired.

Case in point: Dell’s Latitude XT2 joins entries from Lenovo and HP. HP’s TouchSmart tm2 (as seen on Engadget) finally improves on HP’s previous, somewhat underpowered entry; I’ll be looking more closely at it. Also appealing: the HP is the first of these devices I’ve seen to pack discrete graphics, which could give you a machine with enough graphics muscle to do live visuals and video, plus music, all with multi-touch control and the I/O ports you’d expect on a laptop. It could be an all-in-one live performance beast if it pans out; I hope to check it out soon.

More analysis of the options – and why the upcoming battles could be a battle for computing’s soul:

Gotta Be Mobile has long been a stalwart analyst of, and advocate for, the tablet PC. Here’s the surprise: even die-hard Tablet PC fans are skeptical about just what the new “tablet” or “slate” means. And the bigger surprise: even outside of the world of music and visualist sites like CDM, people are asking the question about whether the future of slate/tablet computing is passive consumption. Here’s Tablet PC MVP Warner Crocker writing for the blog:

Then there’s the question of what do we do with these things now that we seem to be on the threshold of seeing them everywhere? That boils down to content and in most cases that means consuming it, not creating it.

Floating on a Sea of Tablet Paradoxes

Christophe Stoll of precious, the Hamburg-based design firm responsible for everything from familiar soft synth user interfaces to rock band graphic looks, has similar skepticism. His take is even more far-reaching: in the midst of rabid gadget consumption, what about affordability, ecological impact, and truly open, community development? His first story looked at some of the shiny possibilities in the future:

The tablet innovation race: Three commented examples of what Tablet Computers could look like in the near future.

A follow-up story, however, responding to comments by me and others, wondered if a more open, sustainable, hype-free future could apply more intelligent design:
Tablet innovation race II: Some more critical thoughts regarding the ongoing hype around tablet computers.

Bottom line: by this time next year, I do expect that we’ll have some powerful, new, affordable solutions for multi-touch control and portable music and visual performance. Just what form that will take, though, isn’t much clearer now than it was this time last year. I hope that situation will change soon – and I hope Apple doesn’t prove to be the only company able to articulate a vision for the category.

Hexagons are the new squares.

After years of square grids, music is discovering the hexagon in a big way. Hexagonal lattices have advantages of their own, in terms of how efficiently they pack space and the way adjacent sides align. Don’t believe your local mathematician? Ask your local bee.

What’s interesting is that, as musicians experiment with interfaces and structures, they may wind up with either a wild, experimental music synthesizer, or a fun game.

On the game side, at top, we have a trailer for the upcoming “Fractal.” It appears to match the productivity-annihilating addictiveness of puzzle games with reactive music. As the creators put it, it’s “a fierce intersection of fractal gameplay, dynamic audio, and kaleidoscopic visuals” and “a new ambient music puzzler experience. Combo, Chain, and Cascade your way through a pulsing technicolor dreamscape that reacts to your every move, while manipulating Fractals, creating Blooms, and expanding your consciousness at 130 BPM.” They cite Andre Michelle’s ToneMatrix, a Tenori-On-like Flash app (see videos), as a major influence, in addition to games like Lumines.

It could also be that the developers have been reading CDM and decided to engineer the perfect solution to permanently steal your lives, oh reactive music-loving, gaming nerdsters.

The game is from the creators of Auditorium, a beautiful puzzler that simultaneously involved arranging ambient music. I couldn’t get entirely sucked into Auditorium’s gameplay, but now, if CDM’s blog posts suddenly disappear for a few days when this comes out, I may realize that was a good thing. For more:

Cipher Games Lifts the Veil on Synaesthetic Puzzler Fractal [Bytejacker]
playfractal.com

If you’re wondering if these same sorts of structures could be transformed from game rules to musical rules, you’ll like the next project. Paris-based Composer René Micout has built an elaborate musical application inspired by the Reactogon music sequencer / “chain reactive performance arpeggiator.”

If you’re comfortable with French, there’s an extensive three-part demo on YouTube.

Part 2
Part 3 (if you want to skip to the end and just watch the resulting demos)

As in other similar nodal and hexagonal sequencers, Rene’s work applies interactive musical events to spots on the grid. Different modules control the flow of events from one space to another, transposition, tempo, and other events.

It’s an experimental project at the moment, and not necessarily one he may distribute, but as a way to see some ideas, it’s fantastic. Rene tells us he built this application using RunRev, a rapid-prototyping development environment and spiritual successor to the legendary HyperCard. Unfortunately, that tool lacks strong music and sound components, so he actually had to hack it in, using AppleScript events to control the built-in Mac QuickTime synthesizer.

He’s got other projects on the way, too, including a “Stocastofon, Stocastovox, Ritmofon, Rizomofon, Acordofon.” Excellent!

So, keeping score, a few of our previous views of hexagons:

Music on the Game Grid: Interactive Arpeggiators Al-Jazari, reacTogon
Alternative Sequencers: Elysium Generative Mac App and the Joy of Hex

And I think it’s time for me to go visit some of these hexagonal controller manufacturers at NAMM next week.

Your help wanted: The hexagon deserves its own master list of hardware, software, iPhone applications, experimental installations, etc. Nominees? Links I may have missed? Anyone doing turn-based strategy role-play games that are also musical sequencers? (Now that I’d like to see: Machinedrum Fantasy Tactics.)

Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Lusine, “Gravity” – this cut comes from A Certain Distance, a CDM favorite album in 2009. Lusine aka Jeff McIlwain is on Ghostly Internationaland, whether it’s  “abstract” electronica or downright electronic songwriting, always manages to put a unique sonic stamp on his work.

Atlas Sound, “Walkabout (with Noah Lennox)” is by Bradford James Cox of Deerhunter fame, from his album Logos.

Hudson Mohawke, “Fuse” – the Glasgow-based artist just debuted on Warp with Butter, including this track.

White Rainbow, “Raw Shanks a Million” comes from Kranky artist Adam Fornker of Oregon. It was my introduction to his work, but see more on this track below. I love its spare, pulsing beats; it sounds like what I’d listen to while jogging to Caprica City’s cybernetics research institute.

King Midas, Sound “Outta Space (Slow Version)” comes from a project started by London’s Kevin Martin, the man behind The Bug. It’s a future-dub track for people who believe space is the place.

Low Limit, “Turf Day” is by San Francisco producer Bryan Rutledge, whom I knew as half of Lazer Sword, and who seems to be right at the center of the good stuff happening in electronic music in California.

Willits & Sakamoto, “Toward Water” comes from 2008’s “Ocean Fire,” the collaboration between experimental guitarist and composer Christopher WIllits and master composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. If you don’t know that full album already, it’s well worth owning.

The Field, “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet (Gold Panda Remix) revisits the track off The Field’s latest, “Yesterday and Today” – another top pick for 2009, and nicely reimagined here. You can check out Gold Panda, too; his mixes have become big Internet hits, and I love the quality of his work.

Tyondai Braxton, “Uffe’s Woodshop” is off his solo album Central Market and premiered on Pitchfork. The Battles singer is a Warp artist, composer, looper, and yes, indeed the son of Anthony Braxton. It’s an explosion of acoustic sounds amidst the other works here.

Untold, “Luna” is by London’s up-and-coming Jack Dunning, familiar on dance floors both for his original productions and remixes.

Nice Nice, “See Waves” will be a 7” from Warp Records in February, but you get to hear it here first. I love that it brings an entirely different rhythmic feel to this group.

Richard Devine, “Matvec Interior (Feat. Otto Von Schirach)” really is science fiction, an intricate set of colliding sonic forms from the composer and mad-scientist sound designer. It’s a favorite from his 2005 Cautella, but Richard revisits his sonic process for CDM here today.

Peter Kirn, “Anaxagoras” is my own track, premiering here, named for the Greek philosopher who attempted to explain astrological events through science, and fled after being called a heretic. The music, with some sounds of viola da gamba and others synthesized (or resynthesized), fall on that boundary between re-processed past and imminent future.

Now, some notes from behind the scenes:

White Rainbow

CDM: Tell us about the inspiration for this track. What was the process like?

I don’t get inspired to make something in the sense of looking at a butterfly and then writing a song. For me, it’s more like the act of making inspires where things go. The sounds as they come out inspire me to react and create on top of them.

This track was made by recording about an hour of live improv and then editing and cutting down and doing a few overdubs. My set up is:

INPUTS:
mic, computer running ableton using drum racks to trigger samples with a padkontrol, various iphone/ipod touch drum apps (beat maker, idrum etc), synth, electric guitar

MIXED/OUTPUT:

delay, multi –fx, dd-20 giga delay as looper, kaoss pad kp3 as multi-fx and looper

…and this all getting recorded into ableton on another computer in the studio.

I let that sit for a few months, then came back to it, cut things down and added vocal (with the Ableton Looper…one of the only times I’ve used that) and weird synth pad overdubs.

I’ve been making looper based music for a really long time now (going back to the original boomerang pre turn of the century). It’s really tough to keep it interesting… so I’m always looking and searching for new ways to keep myself interested and inspired to make new music in new ways.

I also play in an improvised electronic group called Rob Walmart, wherein we get very wrong and stupid and on tons of crappy gear. Tons of Casio keyboards, MicroKORGs, iPod Touches, Nintendo DS, microphones, etc.A new 3xLP of Rob Walmart will come out on Marriage Records early this year.

People probably still brand me as a new age or psychedelic ambient guy, and that’s cool but to me there is a direct line between synth future funk from the 70s and 80s and say, tangerine dream or Klaus Schultze. Just technology inspiring different people to make wild, "out there" space sounds. I would like to continue along that line.

Richard Devine

CDM: What can you tell us about this track?

I originally produced it in 2005, in collaboration with my good friend Otto Von Schirach. I was a going for something very alien, futuristic, scifi, scientific and unusual for this piece. The sonic timbres and textures are a combination of hybrid computer synthesis and field recordings. Think Aliens vs. Predator happening inside the world of HR Gigers head=)  The track initially started out in Logic Audio, I began cutting up sections and pieces of various field recorded bits. I went to many locations to get some of the sound sources. Many of them quite unusual and disturbing.

CDM: Your work always has these extraordinary layers of sound. What was the production process like on this track?

I started out on this farm near my house here in Georgia. It was during fall, and we went to this Halloween festival pumpkin patch place with my girlfriend. It was a huge field that had a petting zoo, and various other farm animals. I was intrigued by this fairly large turkey they had in a small metal wired cage. I record several takes of him frantically moving around as I got closer with my microphone. I also recorded the sounds of pigs, breathing heavy into the microphones.

I had a pair of DPA 4060’s Miniature Body Microphones clipped and tucked into my shirt sleeves to capture the animals up in close proximity. I also recorded sounds of water, sand, rocks, trees, leaves and debris in my backyard. I used a lot of these sounds and then imported them into the computer for heavy processing and manipulation. One of the main processing engines was the Kyma system by Symbolic Sound. I took a few sounds and converted them into spectral analysis files in which I morphed and re-synthesized some of the acoustic sounds into synthetic grains, or partials. Creating these very alien artificial sounding sounds to the mix. I also did a bit of FM synthesis for some of the percussion. Lots of intense programming in hundreds of layers of processed bits. You will notice that each bar in the composition never repeats, the same sounds or sequences. This was completely intentional. I wanted the entire sonic experience to be kinda like a roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics. I also tried to experiment with interesting new breaks, and redefine what could be considered song structure adhering to no rules or constraints.

CDM: Given the complexity, structurally, of this music, do you tend to iterate through a track over many layers?

I spend weeks, months sometimes designing the sounds, and trying to get all the pieces to work together. Almost like a complex microsound jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are very fractalized and tiny. Each sound I painfully program by hand. I take each sound as if it was a sculpture piece. I look at the sound in 3D structure. I often compare the sounds to architectural shapes, structures, and manipulate them one section at a time. I read the waveforms and sculpt them into what I want. I then add the pieces together to work into a composition as a whole. This is the most difficult part in my work in making everything seem fluid and natural. It is often difficult to make the transitions work within a short amount of time especially when you have so many sounds and textures you want to squeeze into a 5 or 6 minute track.

Lusine

CDM: What was your process like, creatively – particularly in regards to the vocals?

It was a very long process. It started off as something totally different. Some sort of downtempo disco type track with much more lyrical vocals. But, after several months I realized it wasn’t working for me, so I approached the whole thing from scratch, resampled everything and made a more minimal downtempo track out of it.

The vocals started off a lot more obviously upfront, but I decided to use them more as a musical layer, so I resampled the completed vocal track and started shuffling the bits around. It felt better to me, like the musical layers in the song weren’t competing with the vocals as much.

Ed.: I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on the compilation, especially since it represents three very different musical perspectives (which to me wound up making the experience richer). The TV show Caprica, for its part, premieres January 22 with another great Bear McCreary soundtrack (I’ve been listening already, as a fan of his scores).

Software of the year: Propellerhead Record

For all the major releases and upgrades and gear, as well as the dominance of a certain Berlin-based developer, if you had to pick one application of 2009, it’d be Record. Record tops the list not because everyone dropped everything to go use it, but quite the contrary. Record bucked industry trends, and provided a love-it-or-hate-it view of what audio software could be. In other words, it was quite reminiscent of Reason.

Centered on a mixer, emphasizing “recording” (perish the thought), and omitting expected features like MIDI out and plug-in support, Record resists modern-day conventional wisdom. That was divisive enough, even before the debates began over Record’s new hardware key. In the long run, it may be the simple fact that Record brings audio signal to Reason that gives it staying power. But in 2009, Record was the application about which everyone had an opinion.

See our original preview, May, plus details on the "Ignition Key" authorization system

Developer of the year: Ableton

What a year it’s been for Ableton. The company kicked off the year with “Share,” “Extend,” and “Touch,” as well as the release of Live 8. It sounded simple. But Ableton’s tech dominated CDM headlines in ‘09 with the variety of user tips and tricks, rants and raves. How’d they do?

New gear: Hardware was in the spotlight – and ranked highest in CDM clicks – even above the software. Many users embraced Akai’s APC40, the first commercial hardware to really balance a variety of Live’s features, as well as Novation’s affordable, simple Launchpad grid controller. But even as Ableton emphasized the ability of this hardware to work out of the box, hackers set about customizing their own control. We saw the Launchpad used with Renoise (complete with a mocked-up Renoise logo decal), and the Korg nanoKONTROL hacked to integrate more seamlessly with Ableton – even when KORG and Ableton themselves hadn’t worked on support. Lesson learned? Make tools for musicians, and you may find some support and development gets crowd-sourced, whether you intended it or not.

See: Hands-on with the Launchpad, nanoKONTROL Myr for Ableton Live, APC40 Hacking Superguide

Live, meet Max: Max for Live has already led to some incredible work, most notably stretta’s fantastic compositional toolkit for the monome. It earned praise (for setting a new bar for sheer power) and criticism (most notably for lacking a free runtime). Some jumped on M4L, some swore they’d stick to the traditional Max, and others swore they’d seek alternative or free solutions. In the end, Max for Live has wound up becoming bigger than, well, Max for Live. It’s begun a discussion of how live performance should work, and how software should integrate and be extended. And that’s a story that should be with us for a long time.

And a few wrinkles: The third prong of Ableton’s initiative was barely visible in ‘09; while a beta is underway, we don’t know much more about how Share will work in December than we did at NAMM in January. Live 8 has been beloved by some, even as others users expressed frustration with stability issues. CEO Gerhard Behles surprised everyone this month on the Ableton forum by conceding the company could do better and promising developers would re-focus on squashing bugs, even putting new features on hold.

As the saying goes, any press is good press. Ableton and their fired-up user base stayed front-and-center on CDM in 2009, even as twists and turns complicated the narrative. The story isn’t quite as clean and tidy as it is was at the beginning of the year, and you can read the full spectrum of comments calling this year everything from a triumph to a failure (and, hopefully, a few more reasonable thoughts in between). But without a doubt, Ableton is the developer of 2009.

Story of the year: Switching from Mac to Ubuntu

After years of tired debates about the merits of operating systems, the potential of the philosophies of open source versus proprietary, and whether Linux is ready for the desktop, in 2009 we saw a new spin: what if you switched to Linux to make your life easier?

That was the question Kim Cascone asked with his switch to Linux. And he wasn’t alone. One of the most-asked questions this year was how to make Linux work for music, particularly as users sought out more-reliable, more-affordable solutions for audio. (Yes, I know – “Linux” isn’t necessarily more reliable out of the box, as “Linux” could mean any number of setups, which I suspect is part of why the question was asked so much.) The popularity of Kim’s story, along with the turnkey Indamixx laptop or the Linux Laptop Orchestra we saw last week, suggest a challenge to CDM as much as a story. It’s the story we’ll likely see more of in 2010.

Linux Music Workflow: Switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu with Kim Cascone

Biggest opportunity: Rock Band Network

Want a glimpse into the future of the music business? Here’s one way it could look. Rock Band Network provides an extraordinary level of control and customization, allowing your music to work as well with the hit game as music adapted by the developers themselves. As a revenue stream, as a promotional opportunity, and as a new way to play with your music, it looks fantastic. And don’t miss the fact that what made it possible was close collaboration with the DAW Reaper – a big coup for that package. Now, if we could just have the Amplitude Network, too, for electronic artists.

See our inside look at RBN with the folks at Harmonix

Surprise vintage tech: The return of CV

MIDI? What’s that? The biggest surprise revelation in January was that MOTU was set to release a brilliant plug-in called Volta, which elegantly bridged the gap between computers and, through control voltage, analog synthesis. Matthew Davidson (who wowed us with OSC and digital tech in 2009, too, in his monome work) walked us through his creation:

Analog, Meet Digital: MOTU Volta Connects the Mac to CV Synths, Effects Graphically

We also saw other CV solutions, DIY and commercial, Control Voltage on Moog’s Theremin, and in perhaps the hardware product of the year, Moog Music’s exquisite double-band MuRF resonant filter. And yes, the Moog piece even has MIDI for pattern changes and sync, while still making use of CV.

Most annoying story of the year: Anything to do with T-Pain

Yes, the iPhone is well awesome mobile technology. Yes, 2009 was the year in which the music world went from talking exclusively about “albums” to talking about “apps,” too. Yes, it’s amazing how Smule has popularized music technology and alternative interfaces and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, it was tough to focus on some of the wonderful things going on when you had to deal with the sudden and inexplicable success of T-Pain, capitalizing on everyone’s least-favorite effect – AutoTune. Not getting enough overuse of pitch correction on FOX’s hit show, Glee, ruining talented voices of kids and Broadway stars? Now put it on your iPhone, and suck the joy out of the (otherwise fantastic) “I’m on a Boat” video. We all love you, Smule, but, I’m on a phone? I’m in a time machine, trying to escape to some year where AutoTune has finally died.

To cheer up, let’s just remind ourselves why Smule’s chief mind Ge Wang is still cool, while I try to work out how to get off T-Pain’s press mailing list:

Interview: Smule’s Ge Wang on iPhone Apps, Ocarinas, and Democratizing Music Tech

And the Rest

Most important OS release:

Windows 7, for finally making us feel good about leaving XP – and, with the help of tools like Cakewalk’s SONAR and its BitBridge 32-bit plug-in support, giving us a good reason to go 64-bit, too.

Most popular how-to’s:

Instructable: How to Build a Music Studio in an Apartment

Abusing and misusing groove extraction in Live 8

Best reason to attend NAMM 2010:

The hopes of catching Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 synth, in the flesh

Most popular feature, and a reminder of what matters more than the gear:

Take it to the Stage: Reflections on Live Laptop Music from Artists

This analysis piece from a variety of top artists started a discussion about what playing laptops is all about. There was certainly no consensus, but it was – rightfully – the most popular feature story of the year, and something we should cover as often as possible. It’s the reason we’re all here. (Thanks to Primus Luta for putting this together.)

More Top 2009 Lists

Beatportal

Francis Preve takes on the top ten releases of the year for Beatportal, and I can’t help but agree. Having made my list of what caused the most controversy, these are the tools that – big splash or not – deserve some technological recognition.

MetaSynth remains a fascinating and unique tool for sound design, finally in a more modern release, and one I hope to work with more soon.

Logic 9 was a huge DAW release, though to that list I’d add SONAR 8.5 – two radically different tools, each markedly more mature this year.

FXpansion DCAM Synth Squad looks like the most brilliant soft synth of ‘09, and I’m long overdue in spending some quality time with it.

Dave Smith’s Tetr4 synth might make the top of my list if it didn’t have to compete with other fine synths from … Dave Smith.

Then there’s Melodyne, which resulted in some unique and creative results this year.

A must-read: 2009 Studio Technology Top 10

MusicRadar

MusicRadar, the online site that accompanies Computer Music and Future Music (among others), reviews the year month by month. But the list you want is:

In pictures: the best hi-tech gear of 2009

Yours’

Of course, in the end, what all these stories have been about is the full spectrum of ideas from our readers. So have at it. And Happy New Year.

For a generation of musicians of nearly every genre, the laptop has become an instrument. It’s easy to take for granted, but the rise of the computer for music has been remarkable. Less than twenty years ago, real-time digital synthesis and audio processing was the domain of expensive, specialized workstations. Now, $700 per seat can buy you a full-blown musical rig, with the computer hardware, gestural input courtesy the Nintendo Wii controller, and even a DIY speaker made from IKEA salad bowls. The next challenge is to make this setup as flexible and reliable as possible. Enter Linux.

According with the laptop’s graduation to instrument status, laptops orchestras have spread worldwide, inspired especially by the innovative Princeton Laptop Orchestra (“PLOrk”) directed by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook. PLOrk’s alumnus Ge Wang has even gone on to greater fame making applications for the iPhone via ocarina and T-Pain app developer Smule. The sounds of these ensembles may sometimes be strange, but by pushing laptop performance, the groups are a great place to look for how to get the most out of computer music, whatever your tastes may be.

Virginia Tech’s L2Ork’s claim to faim is that it’s a laptop orchestra powered by Linux. Why does that matter? For one, it makes a big difference on cost. By using Linux-powered netbooks, they’ve slashed the per-student cost from that of the Mac laptops used in some other ensembles, on a machine that’s more compact. Far from making sacrifices to save money, the result is actually  greater reliability, flexibility, efficiency, and audio performance.

As with the PLOrk ensemble, L2Ork combines expressive input with open-ended digital sound making production, localizing the sound near the computer itself using hemispherical speakers. In this way, the laptop instrument can attempt to learn something from acoustic instruments, which are played with human gestures and have sound sources that are positioned physically where the instrument is.

L2Ork

You don’t have to enroll at Virginia Tech to apply these lessons to your own music making, however. You can apply the lessons of the L2Ork ensemble to put together your own Linux audio machine. They’ve even further-documented the process of making PLOrk’s signature “salad bowl” speakers. And you can do it all without breaking the bank.

I got the chance to speak with Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic, director of the Linux Laptop Orchestra and the DSISIS Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio at Virginia Tech.

CDM: What is your software rig for this ensemble?

Ivica: We basically use Ubuntu 9.04 (vanilla) with our own custom-built rt kernel, which apart from solid performance also offers full support of standby/hibernate/external monitor, webcam, wireless, bluetooth, etc. We also have various patches/scripts that deal with chronic UI bugs (e.g. order of panel icons in gnome getting trashed whenever a resolution is changed).

Basically, our configuration supports every single functionality of MSI Wind netbooks, which we use as the backbone of the orchestra.

FWIW, our setup offers pretty darn cool price point. The entire setup (MSI Wind, UA-1G soundcard, hemi speaker, [Nintendo] Wiimote/Nunchuk, all the cables/accessories, headset, and case) comes down to approximately $700/seat which arguably makes it as cheap as an iPhone setup, except you get to enjoy flexibility of using a laptop (ok, a netbook :-).

What music software are you using?

Our audio platform is currently exclusively [multimedia patching environment] Pd-extended 0.42.5 (running through [low-latency audio server] JACK) which we’ve also customized to allow advanced GUI setup (e.g. per-patcher configurable background, menu/ontop/resize/scrollbar toggles, what is IMHO better scrolling algorithm than what we currently have) as well as integrated several new objects whose source we are about to release (our multithreaded version of the Wiimote object for Linux has been already posted on the Pd-list a couple weeks ago, and it fully supports Wiimotes/Nunchuks without any interruptions to the Pd’s audio thread).

What do you do to get Ubuntu running properly?

Basically, it’s lightly-modded Ubuntu 9.04 that allows us to support all the hardware on the netbook, thus offering a quality desktop experience as well as RT audio performance. The kernel is custom-built 2.6.29-rc6-rt3. We have it available for download from a temporary folder off of my personal site
(http://ico.bukvic.net/Linux/). Once we clean everything up we will actually generate a full HD image and offer it for public download in hope to allow people to load that thing and thus allow them to have the best possible out-of-box experience (obviously as far as MSI Wind is concerned).

Is the hemispherical speaker something readers could build?

There are probably dozen videos on the VTDISIS Youtube channel that are designed to help potential L2Ork adopters build their own speakers, from cannibalizing/retrofitting the amps to improve their performance, to building cables and final assembly.

Videos

Rehearsal video shows how the L2Ork work out playing and soundmaking as an ensemble.

A quick look at how to make your own hemispherical speaker pod:

Local news coverage:

Virginia Tech students demo new laptop orchestra [WSLS10 NBC]

Laptop orchestra at Virginia Tech gives people an affordable alternative [WDBJ7]

More videos, and lots of how-to’s on the speakers (including the conclusion of the video above), are available on the VTDISIS channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/VTDISIS

Got more questions for the ensemble? Let us know.

I’d definitely like to offer, as well, some information on how to make Ubuntu work this well for you, and how to learn Ubuntu, Pd, JACK, and other free tools, in a way that’s beginner-friendly. That sounds like a decent New Years’ Resolution.

In the meantime, it’s worth mentioning that if you aren’t excited about the prospect of custom-configuring kernels yourself, the Indamixx Linux laptop we’ve featured previously is pre-configured in a similar way; the netbook I’m testing now even runs on the same MSI netbook. And that also, in turn, illustrates how research and volunteer efforts can go hand-in-hand with commercial solutions:

http://www.indamixx.com/

At the risk of becoming Create Digital Monomes, here are two things that make me very happy.

For anyone who thinks it’s too hard to get hold of a genuine monome, or any of those of you who got the kit and haven’t built a proper case for it, this is for you. FYXDESIGN has posted a terrific tutorial enclosing the monome 40h kit (8×8 grid) inside a custom case made from LEGO bricks. The project comes out of a group at New York University’s ITP digital tech school who saved money, beat the monome’s scarcity, and made lots of friends by group ordering a bunch of kits and then assembling them together as a group. The magic here comes courtesy of some smart design sense and a boon to prototypers everywhere, the LEGO Digital Designer software, free for Windows and Macs.

Xiaoyang Feng’s design work is in general worth checking out; if someone with his experience and skill is using LEGOs, you’ll want to take note.

Even if you’ve got a project that’s not a monome, this is clearly a fantastic way to whip up an enclosure in a hurry – and that “prototype” might be all you need. Bless you, LEGO!

With the step-by-step tutorial, this is child’s play, even for someone as tragically un-handy as me.

Build Monome LEGO Case Tutorial

In other news, here’s a lovely live video shot by duo elle p & iftah in, apparently, a bathroom (no reverb needed)! It’s a reminder that, even without velocity control, an array of buttons really can make a musical instrument. (In fact, making performance easier is part of the grand tradition of instrument design – see frets, the Autoharp, the piano, and so on.) In an age of overproduced music (sorry, Glee), it’s lovely to see the Internets striking back with live performance, warts and all, as a way of conveying authenticity and personality. Elle has in her lap another interesting DIY creation that’s not a monome. The duo describe it as a “pixiphone,” a “general purpose d.i.y grid controller based on an old siemens operator interfaced with arduino.” I’ll have to get more documentation on that.

Embedding is acting a wee bit screwy for me today, possibly on Vimeo’s end, but you can always go straight to the video.

candy for a 40h and a pixiphone from lp&i on Vimeo.