Creating digital music is about more than audio. Notation remains an essential way to communicate among musicians. Notation is deep and complex, so there’s plenty to talk about. As a long-time Sibelius user, though I want to discuss some core techniques that I find open up a lot of other possibilities, techniques to which I continually return. I happen to be sharing this at a discussion at the City University of New York Graduate Center today, so the timing seems right.

Teachers and experimental, avant-garde composers have something in common: you often need to convince notation software to behave in a way that’s contrary to the expected norm.

To save you time, notation software generally assumes that all music has bars, and that those bars go from left to right with everything visible. This is especially true in Sibelius, which is able to perform as quickly as it does because everything you see on a score is relative to a position in a bar, rather than being set up arbitrarily as you would in a page layout program.

That works much of the time, but what if you have music that isn’t in a time signature? What if you’re transcribing early music or world music that doesn’t operate in 4/4? What if you’re making a quiz in which you don’t need bars, or want to have a blank space for students to fill in answers?

Updated: Just days after this feature, Sibelius announces Sibelius 6. Relevant to this story, this means at least some of the manual hacks for things like beaming across bars and feathered beams will now be automatic! Neat! I’ll have to do new tips for Sibelius 6 when it arrives.

Technique 1: Staves and Instrument Types

Oddly enough, the answer to all of these questions is basically the same: change the way the staff is displayed. You’ll still need to account for bars behind the scenes, but once you learn how to handle Sibelius’ staff options, this isn’t so difficult. This step is a bit confusing for those of us (hand raised) who have been using Sibelius since 1.0, as Sibelius 5 changed the name of this option from Staff Type Change to Instrument Change. (The latter makes more sense in conventional music, even though the former will make more sense for this tip.) But the technique is basically the same.

David Zicarelli has announced that Cycling ‘74 is discontinuing Max/MSP Pluggo-based products, meaning the company will no longer develop Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, or UpMix. More significantly, this means an end to the use of Max/MSP as a way of developing plug-ins; David writes that there will be “no further development on … their supporting technology.” It’s the supporting technology that Max patchers have relied upon to make their own instruments and effects for VST/AU/RTAS Mac and Windows hosts, and its demise to me is the real news here for the Max community.

The article touts the upcoming availability of Max for Live as an alternative. Now, I think Max for Live is a very exciting technology – I’m finally editing some videos and discussion with Jeremy Bernstein, so we’ll have a preview next week. The flipside is:

One of the problems with touchscreens is that, even as they have become more sophisticated about tracking multiple fingers at once, they still generally don’t respond to pressure. To make touchscreens really useful for music, we need genuine pressure sensitivity.

For that reason, you may be intrigued to see this video of Zen Piano, a demo app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The idea: respond not only to the position of your finger taps, but also to how hard you’re tapping the phone That promises “velocity-sensitive” tapping, which would make touchscreen interfaces more powerful.

Here’s the somewhat overheated description by GreatApps, who say their “patent-pending,” “cutting-edge” technology is the result of “having gone through the research and development phases.”

TapForce^TM has been developed from the ground up to provide a completely intuitive way of interaction for users. It can detect more than a hundred different levels of force, and has an accuracy that has to be seen to be believed. And all this can now be done in software, no hardware modifications are necessary. Hundreds of millions of devices currently on the market can make use of the TapForce^TM technology today.

A whole new range of games and apps has just been made possible.

http://greatapps.co.uk/technologies/

Okay, so what is it doing, exactly?

What does it mean to truly democratize technology? When is DIY more than just the creation of an object? That’s the question asked by our friend Julià Carboneras, who curated the new Nerdeferences feature of the OFFF digital design conference in Portugal last week. DIY is more than just cool devices, argues Julià: it’s social hacking, too. He brought together myself, Instructables.com founder Eric Wilhelm, and musical inventor and artist Gijs Gieskes (who stole the show, showing some creations live onstage). But there was a bigger picture, too, that I wanted to share.

Julià wrote, in Catalan and English, an introduction to the idea for the conference catalog that I thought was really compelling. OFFF has allowed this text from their catalog to be reprinted here, and Julià has given us a Spanish translation, as well. (Spanish first, English second.)

I’m actually pleased that on CDM we have the chance to talk about radical DIY and open source ideas alongside more traditional commercial projects. In that way, you see design in a larger context. You can see the tools that allow people to be creative alongside one another. And my sense is that people do find ways to build business models and economic independence around notions of open source and DIY, which is vital in the capital-driven world in which we live. What draws together people, whether using commercial tools or building their own, is some desire for real independence instead of dependence, for expression and not just consumption.

NK Berlin is a planetary hub for wild experiments made with music, technology, and electronics. When you can’t be in Berlin soaking it up in person, you can explore the oddities assembled on their MySpace page. A recent workshop by Andrey Smirnov and Guy Van Belle on Theremins led to these unusual videos, playing a potted plant:

…and a bunch of bananas (footage from the Theremin Center, Moscow).

Via the Pd list, though, it seems that the next NK workshop will go somewhere else altogether: music with microorganisms. Really – you’ll need a USB microscope. It’s electronic music in a Petri dish.

I could try to explain, but I’ll leave it to the description by organizers Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar Koenig: