In two ambient works, musicians Cory Allen (Austin, Texas) and Marcus Fischer (Portland, Oregon) chart connected sound worlds mined from shared samples, in a sweeping opus of a musical environent. Released yesterday on February 22, coinciding with birthdays of the artist and Chopin, it generously has the you’ve-just-got-to-buy-this price of US$2.22, well worth adding to your downloaded collection.
The first track is nothing if not womb-like. It begins with a warm, pulsing hum, delicate tones peeking above the blur. Then it gradually succumbs to binaural fuzz, producing a whitened atmosphere of timbral architecture, an eneveloping mist punctuated by soft, insistent ticks. The second track feels more expansive, a trip on an alien sea that begins with creaking, ship-like wooden planks and sails into waves of sound and ringing timbre. With the arrival of the piano and strings in the second track, there is a renewed sense of musical groundedness: this is not just an endless drone, but a set of extended gestures.
There is a regular sense in the sound design of tonal centers, of lines and connections and progression behind the spray of sound. Accordingly, our friend Marc Weidenbaum, whose blog disquiet has been a compass for online releases of ambient and experimental music, has contributed some thoughts on just that topic of congruity in notes for the album. He fits those, of course, into 222 words: Continue reading »
As Max for Live has matured, this tool for extending the functionality of Ableton Live has played host to a growing wave of brilliant custom tools – enough so that it can be hard to keep track. This month saw a few that deserve special mention. In particular, two tools help make MIDI mapping and automation recording easier in Live, and point the way for what the host itself could implement in a future update. (Live 9, we’re looking at you.) And in a very different vein, from Max for Live regular Protofuse, we see an intriguing alternative approach to sequencing.
Clip Automation does something simple: it patches a limitation in Live itself, by allowing you to record mapped automation controls directly in the Session View clips. (As the developer puts it, it grabs your “knob-twisting craziness in Session View.”) The work of Tête De Son (Jul), it’s an elegant enough solution that I hope the Abletons take note.
Mapulator goes even further, re-conceiving how mapping in general works in Ableton – that is, how Live processes a change in an input (like a knob) with a change in a parameter (like a filter cutoff). Live does allow you to set minimum and maximum mappings, and reverse direction of those mappings. But the interpolation between the two is linear. Mapulator allows you to ramp in curves or even up and down again.
There’s more: you can also control multiple parameters, each at different rates. And that can be a gateway into custom devices, all implemented in control mappings. BentoSan writes: Continue reading »
FRACT is a curious combination of music studio and puzzle game, merging elements of games like Myst with the sorts of synths and pattern editors you’d expect somewhere like Ableton Live. You have to make sounds and melodies to solve puzzles; by the end of the game, say the creators, you’re even producing original music. The work of a small student team out of Montreal, FRACT looks like it has all the makings of an underground indie hit – at least for music nerds.
As the creators describe it:
FRACT is a first person adventure game for Windows & Mac much in the vein of the Myst titles, but with an electro twist. Gameplay boils down to three core activities: Explore, Rebuild, Create. The player is let loose into an abstract world built on sound and structures inspired by electronic music. It’s left to the player to explore the environment to find clues to resurrect and revive the long-forgotten machinery of this musical world, in order to unlock its inner workings. Drawing inspiration from Myst, Rez and Tron, the game is also influenced by graphic design, data visualization, electronic music and analog culture.
You know the type. The drummer who, even robbed of drum sticks, is tapping on the walls, the car door, the desk… and maybe you are that person. When rhythms and musical gestures are bouncing around your head, the whole world just feels like something you want to play. It seems as natural as breathing.
So, given your computer can make anything an input, why shouldn’t it let you play like that?
A new controller and software combo seeks to make that possible. The work of one enterprising musician and creator, Stephan Vankov, it includes an affordable accessory with a piezo microphone and companion software to map it your taps to MIDI messages, for use with your favorite software musical instruments. Plug in the mic sensor, and you can tap your desk or slap your laptop or play any other surface.
We’ve seen this idea in various iterations before – most recently, at the party we co-sponsored in Los Angeles last month, we witnessed an entire ensemble using the motion sensors in their laptops. (That tool is available as an open source download, if you fancy hitting your computer.) Until now, though, these piezo controller rigs been a DIY affair. Stephan’s solution includes what appears to be nicely-made hardware — so you can dump it in your carry-on without worry. And the software includes a wide array of settings to map more easily to percussion and melodic instruments. (The software is now available for Mac, but with Windows and Max for Live versions on the way.) I hope to get one to test soon.
It seems a simple instruction, in the teaser video for this project by Stockholm-based producer/composer Håkan Libdo. But for those of us used to having vision, focusing in on one sense – even the sense on which we rely for music and sound – can be an extraordinary experience. If digital interface design has done anything, it has forced new ways of looking at design across senses, and not just in a weary repetition of “we always do it this way.”
Playing tennis in InvisiBall becomes a new experience. Sonic cues along direct the ball from side to side. And apart from experiencing the game – blindfolded or even as a non-seeing person – the result can be a performance. Developed with programmers Magnus Frenning and Jonatan Liljedahl, the game relies on three-dimensional sound and senses user play, a new musical game.
A computer, while tracking the players, seamlessly mixes sonic cues with a musical soundtrack, so that the results are melodic and not only sound effects. Played in a darkened room, the rackets emit infrared light. Wiimotes here don’t move, as they do when playing games like Nintendo’s Wii Tennis; instead, they’re just IR sensors.
An audience gets to “see” the position of that invisible ball, so that spectating is a slightly different sensation; a TV displays where the ball would be.
More information on Håkan Libdo’s site; he tells us this could be making appearances at festivals this year. (So… if you’ve got a festival, and you’re reading… uh, send CDM some tix, too, and we’ll visit?)
The iPad as a controller is at its best when it plays to its strengths, letting you use that continuous finger control do something useful. So that makes MidiPads worth a look. It’s a strikingly-versatile drum pad controller with all of the kinds of features you might want, and with a major version 1.5 release this week, looks even more useful as a control addition to your studio.
First off, it’s got all of the I/O you could want:
USB MIDI (so, use the Camera Connection Kit and a class-compliant interface, or dedicated interfaces like iRig MIDI and MIDI Mobilizer II)
Wireless MIDI over a WiFi connection
Virtual MIDI, for connecting to other apps (we need to do a round-up of these soon, so give a shout if you have a moment, devs)
Once connected, MidiPads sets itself apart with flexible control on each of those pads. Just tapping rectangles isn’t much fun on the iPad, of course – you lack tactile feedback and pressure sensitivity found on a physical pad. So, instead, MidiPads provides other modulation to exploit the touchable surface for continuous control. In fact, thinking of it as a “drum pad” is almost a bit unfair. New in this release:
Presets, which you can share with other users – which could in turn make a nice little community of users here
“Bouncing mode” for touch pads and sliders
Send multiple messages with each axis and knob
Individual up/down messages for each touch pad and slider, if you so wish
Enhanced views, settings reset, and MIDI connection settings
Resize pads and pad area (essential for either fat fingers or getting more controls!)
Despite how it might seem to some, Apple probably isn’t turning its back on the Mac – even if it’s dropping the “Mac” from the name of its OS. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Shane Doucette.
See a significant correction below; an earlier version of this story claimed incorrectly that Windows on ARM would be limited in how it can exploit native audio code.
I hear a lot of pro users afraid that Mac OS X will suddenly turn into iOS, making their computer into a giant, hinged phone they can’t use any more. Mountain Lion, the update Apple introduced privately to a handful of journalists hand-picked by their PR, may throw more fuel on those fears. Apple brought over some familiar features from iOS to Mac OS, and even prods users into installing apps from the App Store or containing some special developer key.
But let me give away the punchline in one line: With Mountain Lion set to default, developers can distribute software without using the App Store. That’s really all you need to know. For our community, my guess is that plug-ins shouldn’t be impacted at all, which makes this even more of a non-news-item.
I spend a lot of time talking to developers about what it’s like to work with Mac OS, and looking at how this impacts your experience as a user. So, even though I wasn’t on Apple’s short list, I can say with some confidence that this announcement – unless we hear something new – most likely means:
1. You’ll probably switch off this new Gatekeeper feature and use whatever software you want.
2. The name “Mac OS X” will be “OS X,” but you’ll keep calling it the Mac. (Heck, some of you will still call it Macintosh. Just don’t say “ex,” okay?)
3. The notification system isn’t all that different from Growl. If anything, that continues an Apple tradition of aping ideas from the third-party that goes back to the days when OS releases began with the word “System.”
4. Those of you using Mac OS to make music will probably continue to do so, because the OS still has the benefits that are the reason you use it. Those of you who use other operating systems, we’ll continue to look at how to get the most out of those.
That’s it. Really. You can safely ignore the debate – on all sides – likely to rage about what this OS update means. The stuff that matters most to us as musicians isn’t necessarily what matters to other people. (Now, you might personally decide you like iCloud and notifications and other little features; I’m just saying they don’t directly impact all music software. Nor do I see any indication they’ll get in the way if you don’t like them – and to the extent they do, you should be able to switch them off, as in notifications.)
In fact, even if music devs decide they want to make themselves compatible with the new app safeguards without getting on the App Store, they can get a developer certificate (apparently a few minutes’ work). My guess is, given almost no music devs have jumped into the App Store as distribution model, this means this changes nothing. And because those same developers usually certify their software before they say it’s compatible with a new OS update – on Windows as well as on the Mac – the certificate could even be a good indication that an app was tested on Mountain Lion. Continue reading »
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