FL Studio, beloved to its users by its original name “Fruity Loops,” has long had a Playlist mode that could be used to assemble simple live performances by jumping to sections of your music.
But a new alpha mode takes this mode far further. It’s still based on the Playlist, but can add clips dynamically – including Audio, Automation, and Pattern. While still in early testing, developer Image-Line has released some information about how triggering works, as well as the video above. And oddly enough, just like the video we saw earlier this week in Renoise, it employs a Novation Launchpad controller. (The impact of the monome on the market is really hard to overstate.)
More details from the developers:
Controllers
Keyboards – There are 12 Clips assignable to each Playlist Track (one octave of a MIDI controller per track)
Launchpad & Mouse – Unlimited Clips assignable to each Playlist track.
Other Pad based Controllers – Limited only by the number of MIDI note assignable pads
At the moment there is basic scripting to define extra pages on the launchpad, you’re able to define actions for buttons, among transport ones, notes & controls.
The CPU load is similar to the project as it would play normally.
It’s not quite an Ableton killer – not yet, anyway, especially as it lacks Ableton’s unique Session View paradigm for working in this way. It’s even a bit short of some of the hacks we’ve seen for Renoise. On the other hand, if you’re an FL fan you should be able to make your performance plenty sophisticated – and since just trigger clips isn’t everything, you might also want to play along with an instrument or sing. And I could see this catching on. It’d be great to see something other than Ableton in live laptop performances. Variety is the spice of life.
In the latest take on sonifying data in musical form, iPhone app Astro Cantus plots star data from the universe as musical notes. It turns the the sphere of heavens above the Earth into a massive piano roll.
Co-founding developer Rocky Alvey, according to the creators, dismantled a music box as a kid, and that music box notion (yet again) is a big part of the concept here. What’s notable is that the app’s sonification does indeed represent not only the stars themselves but some of the data – spectra of the stars are translated into pitch. And there are a lot of stars in there.
The musical representation itself is a bit limited: you get either chimes or a piano playing a pentatonic mode, and some control over spectrum and magnitude. Speaking as a composer who has occasionally played with it, that’s the challenge with this sort of work: making musical paradigms represent the data is no small obstacle. But the developers also say this is just a (very pleasing) first step, with more interactive features and live modes and additional sounds and scales to come.
Amusingly, I’m writing this as my KCRW music stream is playing Bill Frisell’s cover of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” Which is more compelling as a commentary on the world? I’m not sure.
Perhaps you’ve seen the demo videos, as people do astounding things by moving their body around and using the Kinect camera to make music. Now, a set of Max for Live devices makes it reasonably easy to access your body as input inside Ableton Live. Continue reading »
Think back to playing a simply childhood game like Musical Chairs. The actual gameplay depends only on auditory clues – something you take for granted as a kid, but something apparently lost on game engineers who insist exclusively on advanced 3D rendering engines for visuals. And because you get your body involved, the game becomes dynamic. That musical cue isn’t just off in the background: in the dizzying run around the chairs, the soundtrack can become the singular focus of your brain, an urgent score to the — DIVE, got the chair!
As the scene around game experimentation grows richer, there’s a rekindled interest in how game mechanics can play to different senses. In some cases, it can be a source of whimsy; in others, it’s the only way to design games for people who are absent one of those senses. And an ongoing exploration of music and sound as gameplay mechanic – not just gameplay accompaniment – ought to interest composers and sound designers. When you look at a conventional arcade game, tuning your reflexes to the graphics is key, even if sounds provide reward and ambience. In these games, the sound is where the play is.
Johann Sebastian Joust has a lot in common with Musical Chairs. The game input is the lovely Sony PlayStation Move motion controller, which – yep, you guessed it, is where the jousting comes in. (An earlier version used the Wiimote.) But in place of graphics, listening to the music itself tells you when to act, just as in the childhood game:
When the music plays in slow-motion, the controllers are extremely sensitive to changes in acceleration. When the music speeds up for, this threshold becomes less strict, giving the players a small window to dash at their opponents. If the player’s controller is ever moved beyond the allowable threshold, that player loses.
What happens when you meld the most futuristic Microsoft technology with the most futuristic Apple technology with the most ColecoVision-esque graphics as built in Jitter? Or you create gameplay that couples physical human contortion with the step sequencing rhythms of music? A different take on music games, that’s what.
Developers Matt (“M@tt”) Boch and Ryan Challinor work, in their day jobs, on the music game as most people know it, at Harmonix. Harmonix’s roots remain in the rhythm game, so that music play, even at its most serious, is still about musical timing accuracy. Pxl Pusher is a very different mechanic: imagine a step sequencer grid on an iPad, presenting blocks that, true to the classic game Twister, require another player to balance and stretch their bodies to match.
I caught up with Matt and Ryan over the summer at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Before throngs of crowds swarmed the game – easily one of the most popular of the night – I managed to get some quick footage of the creators doing last-minute patching and trying out gameplay. (The quiet there is atypical; we got to shoot before the doors opened.) An insane travel schedule kept me from publishing sooner, but here, Matt and Ryan share their process.
Another interesting twist: Max/MSP and Jitter allowed extremely rapid prototyping with Kinect, something of interest to anyone doing this sort of work. (And dig those “3D” images … if they don’t blind you.) Continue reading »
I don’t know why you look so surprised about this, really. Photo (CC-BY) insanephotoholic.
“Lemur should just run on the iPad.”
“There’s no point to have a Lemur when you can get an iPad for $500.”
“When will the Lemur just run on the iPad?”
Soon, apparently. Sources and an in-person sighting suggest to me you’ll see this in the very near future.
The JazzMutant Lemur, the touch control hardware I reviewed over five years ago, gave musicians the first widely-available, for-sale taste of multi-touch control of music. It established a lot of basic paradigms that would appear on other platforms: high-contrast user interface objects on a black background (so they don’t blind you in a club), widgets that represent familiar elements like knobs and faders, and also some fairly powerful features like unique touch-centric widgets, simulated physics, and scripting. Some of those latter, more advanced features haven’t really been available in other control applications, and Lemur owners have wondered what their long-term solution might be.
So, a funny thing happened to me the other afternoon. I’m looking over the shoulder of M-nus DJ Ambivalent (Kevin McHugh) at Berlin’s Watergate and an afterparty, and I see – no, that’s not TouchOSC. That sure looks like a Lemur step sequencer. And then I might have spotted something similar in the front-of-house at Flughafen Tempelhof’s FLY BERMUDA show, for Richie Hawtin.
It’s possible this was all a dream, of course. So – who believes me?
You can complain about music events and festivals as they are, dream about what you’d imagine an event could be – or you can go and make it happen. And since the latter category fits friends-of-the-site Chris Gilroy and Lara Grant, it’s well worth an endorsement for this weekend’s In/Out Festival. (For their part, both Chris and Lara have been regulars at our Handmade Music NYC series; Chris as an electronic audiovisualist, and Lara as a textile-and-sound-melding felted signal processing guru.)
If you’re in New York, hope you can make it or even help cover it for CDM. If you’re not – like, for instance, if you’ve recently moved to Berlin – we’ve got some videos here to give you a taste of this particular assemblage of musical makers.
The lineup looks rich and varied on the performance side, coupling emerging artists with known names, all in genre-bending, adventurous sound:
Daedelus, Christopher Willits, Ander, Bit Shifter, tehn (Brian Crabtree), Portable Sunsets, Nick Demopolous’ Smomid, Comandante Zero, Noizmakr, Programs, Sarah Danke: Switched, Ivan Franco
There’s also a great selection of workshops:
Heatit°C prototyping workshop, which uses a heat-reactive postcard for an analog circuit alongside “thermochromic and conductive inks and batteries, switches and conductive thread,” all made with a Craft Robo for producing 2D and 3D templates. (Wait… wha? Someone definitely go and cover that.)
How to make a contact mic
Kinect and movement using free software (Pd) – with Sofy Yuditskaya, who writes about Kinect and other 3D hacking today on Create Digital Motion
Max for Live with Christopher Willits
Comandante Zero on integrating live acoustic and digital instruments into performance
Alternative musical instrument discussion
And here I’ve assembled some of my favorite videos of the artists and past In/Out events: 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