We get the “where do I go to learn this stuff” question a lot in the inbox. With Max for Live coming later this year, bringing the powers of Max to Ableton Live, I imagine the hunger for knowledge on that tool will be all the greater. (At the same time, I think the growing popularity of DIY tools means that it won’t make alternative tools like SuperCollider, Pd, Csound and the like less popular — I think we’ll see a growing trend toward all of these tools, provided we can show folks how to use them and get better at them ourselves!)

I know one route that has been successful for many people is the coursework at Harvestworks, the storied research and study center in New York. I can heartily endorse this one and say that, while I know and am friends with all the faculty, I have absolutely no investment in this. Dafna Naphtali, Hans Tammen, and Zach Seldess will all be teaching week-long intensives at Harvestworks in Manhattan. They’re not cheap – $1275 for the whole week – but I know some people have even flown to New York from other parts of the world to study up.

And what does all this mean? Well, it means you can turn Street Fighter, the game, into an improvisational ballet as instructor Zachary Seldess has done (above). Among other things, of course.

If it’s all out of your budget, don’t worry; we’ll have some other learning resources for you soon. But for those of you who can take the plunge, here are some details:

MyHome 2.0 is a promotional site for Verizon FIOS that’s enlisted some very talented DIYers. They’ve got a couple of pretty impressive interactive music projects — this is not the sort of stuff most people would take on. The Pipe Organ Chair isn’t a digital project per se, but we all love sound here, and who’s to say you couldn’t integrate bellows into your next digital instrument? The basic idea is to force air through pipes using butt-powered bellows, requiring, of course, a fair bit of assembly.

How 2.0: Pipe Organ Chair from My Home 2.0 DIY on Vimeo.

Pipe Organ Chair Project Page

The other project, by way of the multi-talented Allison Lewis (the creator of SWITCH, a DIY show for young women, and some brilliant fashion + technology work), is a wall harp. Think infrared sensors plus MIDI, using the MidiTron kit by Eric Singer, which is seen regularly around these here parts.

How 2.0: Build a Digital Wall Harp from My Home 2.0 DIY on Vimeo.

I wish that, in addition to the DIY portions, they had spent more than two or three seconds documenting the results. But I think this may be in New York, so maybe I’ll have to go over there and try it out myself.

If you’ve got your own favorite projects involving pipes or infrared sensors, let us know. And maybe this will inspire some of your own work.

Side note to Verizon: please stop torturing us poor New Yorkers with how awesome Verizon FIOS is when we can’t get it. Hurry up with that build-out, already. I can send you my address. You can come over with the fiber optic cable today, even; I’m pretty good with a wire crimper.

Eric Singer, creator of musical robots and maestro of LEMUR, the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, has unveiled a new wireless sensor-to-MIDI interface. It’s quite a bit pricier than the non-wireless MIDI models at US$495, but the payoff is a complete kit for wireless performance that promises to be resistant to both latency and interference. The receiver can be connected via either USB or MIDI, and the sensor unit has 20 inputs which you can mix and match as up to 10 analog ins and 20 digital ins. Put the sensor/transmitter unit wherever you like, then transmit data wirelessly to the receiver — so the sensors could be strapped to a dancer while a computer or synth receives the data elsewhere.

I hope to have a hands-on demo soon, but in the meantime, here are the specs — just in case that wireless project can’t wait any longer.

Vanessa from Etsy shot a great video of last month’s Handmade Music, sponsored by CDM, MAKE, and Etsy Labs. See me chatting about the idea and why working with tools like Reaktor and Max/MSP/Jitter is DIY, too, plus Eric Singer demonstrating the Sonic Banana and Slime-o-Tron slime-to-MIDI interface, Herr Professor showing off his portable GP Linux game machine, some ironing board MIDI, and more.

We also get to find out what those rubber gloves with tin foil were: a shock glove, made from the zap-friendly innards of a digital camera. A musical instrument? Phil Torrone from MAKE explains: “It makes a sound! It goes, OW!” Kind of like a Mupp-a-phone for fans of electricity.

“Tinymeat” sums it up: “It’s a motherfrellin Geekfest! How kick ass is that? Very much I must say.”

We had a fantastic time last night in Brooklyn at the first “handmade music” event at Etsy Labs, sponsored by DIY seller site Etsy.com, MAKE Magazine, and yours truly and Create Digital Music. Instead of doing long, formal presentations, we decided to set everything up “science fair” style so people got a chance to play and chat. The results exceeded our most optimistic expectations for our “pilot” event. (MAKE will continue to do this on other themes, and I’ll be helping them and will keep working on getting together music and motion folks, as well.)

Thanks to all the CDMers who came out. We had I think nearly 100 people there through the course of the evening, drawing from CDM, MAKE, Etsy, the NYC blogosphere, and beyond — a whole lot of people were new to this kind of stuff. Welcome! For those of you in other parts of the world, well, we’ll just have to do a world tour. In the meantime, here’s a quick round-up of some of the projects.

Crisp Shirts AND Music!

Ranjit Bhatnagar teaches students at Parsons to build alternative instruments and creates his own interactive art and musical gadgets. He showed off his MIDI Ironing Board, which controlled interactive music patches using heat sensors. Iron normally, and via Plogue Bidule for data patching magic, your ironing is translated into music.

More Music with Blocks

Jeff Hoefs showed his Beat Blocks, co-created with Stijn Schiffeleers and Greg Zifcak, a tangible synthesizer based on striped blocks of wood. It was probably the most popular interactive plaything of the evening, as visitors were fascinated by putting together grooves using objects. Here at CDM, of course, we’re quite accustomed to various variations on the “blocks as musical interface theme”, but this one is quite effective.