When it comes to notation and musical scores, the iPad (and tablets, generally) has fallen on the side of reading rather than writing, display rather than creation.
Notion for iPad, a mobile version of the desktop notation software, looks poised to change all of that. See video, above, for an overview of the features. Highlights:
Entry, editing, and playback for notation and guitar tab
Built-in samples, including keys, guitar and bass, and the London Symphony Orchestra as recorded at Abbey Road Studios
Enter notes by tapping a keyboard or 24-fret fretboard, or select and drag and drop
Mixer and effects
Orchestra and guitar articulations and marks
Text/lyrics support
Import MIDI, MusicXML, GuitarPro, and export to PDF, MusicXML, and MIDI
Look for guitar tab, MIDI, and MusicXML right inside the app – this could be a huge feature
The iPad becomes a canvas for a game with an atypically-musical, interactive sound score. All images courtesy the developers. Photos by whatkristensaw.
Truly generative musical scores in games have been few and far between, and “music games” has traditionally meant arcade-style rhythm games in which you repeat phrases or whole songs as accurately as possible. Pugs Luv Beats breaks those molds. Part of a vanguard of new gaming creations that generate dynamic music on the fly, it marries grid-based sequencing and resource-gathering gaming, as music making and gameplay blur together. The interactively-produced music could itself become a new way of delivering a musical signature with sound packs.
And beneath it all lurks a free and open source library, libpd – the embeddable version of tried-and-true free graphical music environment Pure Data. (That library is now on GitHub, and vastly updated, by the way, and we’re expecting a book soon from the library’s principle author Peter Brinkmann.)
Oh, yeah, and don’t forget about some seriously addictive gameplay and adorable pugs. I’m suddenly not concerned about the 15 hours Europe-to-North-America travel I’m doing tomorrow.
Here’s what the gameplay looks like, since it’s much easier to see:
Co-creator Yann Seznec (The Amazing Rolo) is a terrific musician; I just caught up with him in Edinburgh and Berlin and watched him play a homebrewed pig gut instrument with Matthew Herbert for the performance piece “One Pig,” on tour at Berghain. Working with Pd allowed Yann to focus on those musical impulses and not just engineering, and to let him try things he otherwise would never have imagined on a mobile title. So I asked Yann to walk us through how the project was built. He responded with an exhaustively-detailed examination of the evolution of this title, right down to the Pd patches. (Click through for high-res versions.) If your New Year’s Resolution is doing something with patching, you might want to hang onto these answers. Here’s Yann: Continue reading »
I had the pleasure this year of working on a book that draws from over 30 years of coverage of Electronic Dance Music’s evolution. Collecting pages primarily from Keyboard, with additional content from Remix, we retrace the relationship of machines and music, technology and movement, in producing the sounds to which people dance.
It’s impossible to be encyclopedic in such an endeavor, but part of what I enjoyed about working on the project was getting to see through the eyes of the artists. You hear them talk in astounding detail about how they actual craft what they make. They curse their gear and long for more usable tools. They lament challenges in the scene that echo today. And they talk, musician to musician, about why they do what they do, what most personally they’re trying to express. (One advantage of being a magazine like Keyboard is that you’re not talking to a music journalist, but a fellow practitioner; you don’t have to shy away from technical details or explain to an outsider, and that comes across.)
I hope to run an excerpt here on CDM, so if there’s something you’d like to see, let us know.
I do very much want to get this out in the world and read – otherwise, I’d go get a real job — but I’m constrained by the slow trickle of print books into the channel. Stock in some places is still three weeks out; B&N as I write this says they’re in stock for immediate shipping.
If Beethoven had an iPad, he’d want annotations. Lots of them. His iPad would be covered with fingerprints.
Since today is Beethoven’s 241st birthday, it seems only appropriate to inject a little conventional notation into today’s coverage. And what better way to do that than with an iPad app that promises some musician-friendly reading features.
We’ve already looked a couple of times at Avid’s Sibelius-powered Scorch iPad reader, which features nice output and score integration, and recently added PDF support.
Scorecerer has some unique features – aside from, augh, a somewhat unpronounceable name. It goes further in page turn control, MIDI integration, and DAW integration (through MIDI program changes). A desktop version aids in scanned score management.
And it has two potentially killer features: one is the ability to manage converting your conventional notation to PDF, and the other is – at last – proper markup.
There are times when something happens that reminds you why you make the sacrifices to do what you do. A real highlight of 2011 for me was Gwydion ap Dafydd appearing with the MeeBlip, our open source synthesizer, baked into a cookbook.
I knew Gwydion had gotten creative in making a housing for his MeeBlip kit, and I knew that it was a book. But then, he opened it up to reveal the MeeBlip’s controls popping out of a cookbook page, with I/O ports conveniently located on the side, and even the ability to remove the panel to get at the board. And then… the pig’s eye lit red to indicate MIDI messages and power, and I was floored.
I can share some good news from the MeeBlip project: we’re now shipping a US$39.95 MeeBlip micro kit, an ultra-compact variation of the MeeBlip. It’s in stock in Canada, in transit within 48 hours. I’m especially excited, because the MeeBlip micro is designed to allow MeeBlip users to surprise us. With pins for analog and digital input, you could connect any arbitrary number of controls in any layout. You could have one giant filter knob if you wanted, or turn it into a wearable project in a purse. Or you could just make a nice, little housing and control it via MIDI. (We now provide full MIDI control of all of the controls.) And we’re excited that it’s forty bucks, because it makes a kit highly accessible to hobbyists. A fully-assembled version will be available soon.
We can’t wait to see what you do with it. We think the simplicity of the MeeBlip’s design, its low cost, and its straightforward MIDI operation could mean people will turn the micro into things we can’t yet imagine. (At least, that’s why we designed it that way!)
In 2012, we’ll again be offering MeeBlips in quantity that come with cases, and affordable MeeBlips (and now MeeBlip micros) that you can get pre-assembled, so the need to solder something together won’t keep your synth on a shelf. Now, with MIDI input in place, we’re ready to get back to MeeBlipping and playability. James Grahame has worked feverishly on the engineering of the current MeeBlip generation, and I look forward to us getting to share the work he did, and how he did it. He’s also been working on how to make the thing easier to manufacture and ship, so we’re ready to share that, too! Continue reading »
Back before the iPad (perhaps deservedly) hogged the spotlight, there were interactive tables. And one of the selling points of these new interfaces was collaborative play. Unlike the solo experience of using a computer, you’d gather around a display surface – just as you would a dining room table – and share the device. You’d play together.
The iPad is much smaller, but in a way, that lends a certain charm, cramming hands around its little surface. (Anyone play Hungry, Hungry Hippos?)
Tapping fingers on that shared surface, you have an experience that, while perhaps less finely-tuned than using the iPad one-on-one, you actually get to have with other human beings
And so that reason alone gives Rockmate special mention. I hear mainstream journalists ask questions like “is this the way people will play music in the future?” That’s, of course, roughly as intelligent as someone looking at Pong and saying, “well, I guess that about does it for Wimbledon, huh?” But it’s the awkwardness of playing a virtual band that makes this look like fun, like something families and friends might use. It could also be fun to play after a little too much NAMM. And the developers have lavished functionality on it (see specs below). They’ve also got an intro price of $1, or about one quarter per person. Have at it. I think it looks like brilliant fun. Continue reading »
Christopher Willits playing live at San Francisco’s Public Works in October of this year. Photo courtesy the artist.
Sound and light artist, guitarist, Max patcher, and all-around sonically-fascinating guy Christopher Willits has opened up his “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” record on Ghostly to remixing. Halfway through the project, we talk to Chris about what’s going on – and what the results so far sound like. And we share, from earlier this fall, a composition in which you can recharge.
The project begins not with stems, but with samples, the raw materials on which the album was based. Christopher walks CDM through the audio highlights, one sample at a time. Along the way – as with all these samples – you begin to appreciate the process by which Christopher makes his decisions, how he moves from samples like pieces of wood to the finished structure. And of course, by opening these up to remixing, you have an opportunity to hear the work differently in his finished, released form, as well as to find your own, distinct decision-making process. It’s perhaps obvious in a remix project, but what this does is to allow the sounds a life separate from the fixed set of decisions that produced the album.
And that can even change Christopher’s own view of the work, he says. He tells us:
I think it’s fun to play the set like an album. I’ve heard these pieces so many times that it’s really refreshing to me to hear them alone. Now I hear the pieces differently.
That was actually one of the thoughts behind sharing all of these sounds, so people can hear the layers, and if they wish, tune their ears to the subtleties and intention I wanted to create in the mixes.
“The stuff i’ve heard so far is AMAZING,” Christopher tells us. “I can’t wait to feature the best of the best. We’ll be releasing a free comp on [Christopher's experimetal label] Overlap and Ghostly will feature my favorite remix on a free comp, too.” Winning remixes get Ableton and SoundCloud prizes.
Let’s hear a few words from Christopher about the sounds he’s produced. Continue reading »
Peter Kirn
Jaymis Loveday
James Grahame
Primus Luta
michaeluna
Kim Cascone
Ben Long
Tom Whitwell
John Jacobus
Chris Stack
Marsha Vdovin
Markus Schroeder
Matt Earp
Kristin Trethewey