Before the iPad, before the iPhone, and indeed before the masses understood touch interfaces would be a big deal, there was the Lemur. Dazzling people with high-contrast, colorful controls, this boutique hardware, priced well over €2000 and running embedded Linux and custom resistive touch technology, brought the future a bit early to a handful of musicians. Star Trek was what you heard most frequently – sweeping your fingers over black glass was nothing if not reminiscent of Geordi LaForge helming the Enterprise. (By the way, talk about prior art: those conceptual designers on The Next Generation, working initially with all-optical effects, were also well ahead of their time.)

Now, at last, Lemur arrives on the iPad, released by a leading iOS developer, Liine. Swept away by Apple’s more-affordable hardware, with the iPad offering a higher-resolution display, slimmer form factor, accurate touch sensing, and wireless capability, the Lemur hardware suddenly looked dated. With iPad software, it’s available to the masses.

http://liine.net/en/

The first question, of course: will anyone care – and will the Lemur software compete, with various other touch alternatives? At US$49.99 / €39.99 / £29.99 34.99, the Lemur app is far cheaper than a Lemur, but spendier than a lot of other touch software. [Ed.: An early press release incorrectly listed the UK pricing as £29.99. It's actually £34.99. Just don't ask us for currency conversions. -PK]

I’ve gotten to see the Lemur in action, and actually was walked through some interactive template ideas. (Unfortunately, I was unable to talk about that, and could only tease what I knew – I got to see more than I could talk about via folks working with Liine and M-nus Records’ stable of artists – Richie Hawtin and Ambivalent, in particular – and was really impressed.)

Just like other apps, the Lemur app will let you control any MIDI or OSC application on your computer from your iPad. But the Lemur brings a few strengths that I think will make it a contender in the iPad age: Continue reading »

What do you do if you can’t find an instrument that you can play the way you want? In the digital domain, you can just invent one.

So, when Brooklyn-based artist Nick Demopoulos wanted a controller that’d allow him to articulate digital instruments more like a guitar and less like a keyboard, he built his own expressive touch controller. It uses arrays of touch-sensing strips on a guitar body. A future version, he says, will incorporate 6 “strings” (touch strips).

New York-based literary/culture quarterly BOMB Magazine shot a video in which Nick walks through his creation.

Nick has also played our Handmade Music series in New York, at Culturefix. (See documentation of that event, from 2010.)

Videos of Nick playing:
http://www.youtube.com/user/nicnut210?feature=mhee

Lots of stuff on SoundCloud, too; I enjoy the rhythms in this one:

Whispers in the Water by Nick Demopoulos

http://soundcloud.com/nickdemopoulos

It occurs to me looking at this, too, that if you could improve the sensing accuracy and physical feedback from the touch strip, you could radically improve the instrument. It’s really the quality of these kinds of sensors that will have the biggest impact on future instruments – that is, the fundamental ideas about these controllers are out there, and now implementation means everything.

Thanks for sharing your work, Nick!

What is sound? What does it mean, and why does it matter? It’s never too fundamental, too basic a question to ask ourselves again when we make music. So, I’ll leave this trailer otherwise largely without comment, except to say, it’s well worth watching (or re-watching).

Touch the Sound, produced by German director Thomas Riedelsheimer in 2004, focuses on the work and world of nearly-deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. See a trailer, below, and excerpt, above. Thanks to Morgan Hendry for the tip.

IMDB link

On this topic, and the inspiration for this link:
For a Deaf Artist, The Process of Sound Art, Transformed: Short Film

And I suspect there’s a reader out there who can tell us more about the experience of sound and music (and the technology thereof) for the hearing-impaired?

Updated: Watch the entire movie on Hulu, if you’re in the United States: Continue reading »

Gibson Guitar has announced in a press release they’re acquiring the Stanton Group, which includes, aside from the well-known Stanton DJ brand, KRK monitoring products and Cerwin-Vega loudspeakers.

It’d be easy to see this as a guitar company buying a DJ company, but it’s more than that. KRK and Cerwin-Vega are speaker/monitoring brands. Stanton and Cerwin-Vega each have footholds in the larger consumer arena, not just the pro world, a detail Gibson is quick to emphasize. And Gibson themselves have quietly, steadily grown beyond just guitars. The new “Gibson Pro Audio” banner is added to a list of brands that Gibson reels off: “Epiphone, Dobro, Kramer, Steinberger, Tobias, Echoplex, Electar, Flatiron, Slingerland, Valley Arts, Maestro, Oberheim, Baldwin, Sunshine Piano, Take Anywhere Technology, J&C Fischer, Chickering, Hamilton, Wurlitzer.” But it would seem dropping the “Guitar” from the name would be realistic.

There are two interesting details to the way the press release is worded. First, the lead is that Gibson’s move is “part of its continued expansion as a lifestyle brand.” That’s perhaps going to send a chill down the spine of anyone who prefers to focus explicitly on “musicians.” Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz even says the move “allows us access to 20 in 20 consumers instead of the one in 20 we currently hit.” That contrasts with the emphasis of, say, organizations like NAMM who talk about the general market of “musicians,” not only “lifestyle,” whatever you take that to mean. On the other hand, this is really nomenclature we’re talking here; the question I have is how “lifestyle” actually translates into a strategy, and how well it works for Gibson.

The other detail is more interesting. Gibson and Stanton Group reps each stress the potential for overlapping R&D. Juszkiewicz has touted R&D projects in the past, though largely centered around new guitar tech. We’ll see if the two companies can deliver on that R&D promise and do something really innovative. I have no idea what that’d mean in this case, so if anyone cares to speculate, I’m all ears.

Anyone?

Gibson Guitar Acquires Market-Leading Pro Audio Companies KRK, Cerwin-Vega!, and Stanton [PR Newswire]

Online chatter has in past not been very kind to Gibson on its past acquisition record, so I expect some people will raise the spectre of at least one acquisition again. Let’s see… comments…

I don’t personally view this as flame-bait; Gibson’s a perfectly-respectable guitar maker and I imagine there could be some smart business opportunity here, especially with Stanton together with Gibson in Nashville. However, let’s consider: the names Gibson and Stanton, guitars and DJing. I imagine some flame-broiled comment thread on the Internet somewhere.

And yes, reasons to be skeptical:

Promises of this sort of R&D synergy could easily fail to materialize. And whether Gibson can manage these essentially unrelated businesses is an enormous question mark. There aren’t a whole lot of acquisition success stories in this business.

Who says technology doesn’t last? The Apple II platform will be 35 years old in April, yet it’s still going strong. It even gets a brand-new drum machine software, launched this month, complete with eight wavetable-based drum sounds, and a clever sequencer. The surprise: the whole combination, delivered on a 5 1/4″ floppy disk, can be stunningly usable, as in something you’d actually want to make music with. Not bad for a computer you can typically pick up for a few bills at a flea market. (Emulators can also run the software, so you don’t even need hardware. Of course, that’s not nearly as much fun.)

Creators MJ Mahon and 8-bit Weapon released the software last week, but I wanted to wait for a full video demo and tutorial so you could see it in action. See also screen shots.

And even if you don’t want to shell up the cash, there’s a demo version.

We’ve got a sound sample of what the results sound like, via the artists:
DMS Drummer Demo by cdm

Full details: Continue reading »

In a marvel of DIY engineering, one intrepid user of the tracker-made-modern music making environment Renoise has reconstructed the basic elements of the Ableton Live interface. With quantized clip launching on channels and even a crossfader, it’s unmistakably a copy of what Ableton does. I don’t think you’d dump your install of Ableton for this; the whole reason you’d want a feature like this is really if you prefer other elements of Renoise that are different from Live. But as a proof-of-concept, it’s pretty extraordinary. (Ableton users, the ball’s in your court: someone want to make a tracker in Max for Live?)

mxb has more information on the Renoise forum:
Cells! Preview

We love the bleeding edge, but as mxb notes, “this is still at a very early beta stage; if anyone has any suggestions or feature requests, [they should] make them in the thread on Renoise forums.”

All of this is possible because of Renoise’s powerful scripting environment.

The Cells! video above is a bit primitive – mxb says it’s a result of poor screen capture software, which is also responsible for sync disappearing – but you get the idea. mxb has also built a four-oscillator synth called ReSynth, and previously-mentioned sample import.

http://tools.renoise.com/users/mxb [all of mxb's creations]
http://tools.renoise.com/tools/resynth

I was actually pleasantly surprised to see our MeeBlip open source synthesizer make a cameo in the latest teaser video for Lemur on iPad, the app I saw in action at Berlin’s Watergate. I expect we’ll have full details soon – and I hope to visit the MeeBlip-in-a-book again soon; even apart from being flattered and gratified to see it use our synth, it’s one of my favorite synthesizer housings ever. But, really, truly, I had nothing to do with this video – that’s not me being coy; I didn’t expect to see it.

Yes, it’s jerky teaser vision, but I love the jam that gets going halfway through. (Curious about the drum machine sounds; no, the MeeBlip doesn’t make that bass drum sound – at least, not at the same time as it’s playing, since it’s monophonic.) I just hope this means we see MIDI out on the Lemur app, in addition to OSC – that’s be a big jump forward from what even the original Lemur hardware could do.

And yes, the secret’s out of the bag – Lemur for iPad will be announced by http://liine.net/en/ – though note that the MeeBlip is the creation of Gwydion from Konkreet Labs. Normally, I would refrain from posting this sort of video, but I rather enjoyed it.