Nova (audio by Helios) from flight404 on Vimeo.

The rumor mill’s conventional wisdom is that iTunes 8 will be part of Apple’s music-themed press event next week. That’s a safe bet — iTunes 7 is clearly due for an update. But Allan White has some interesting speculation with which I’m inclined to agree. There’s an excellent change Robert Hodgin’s excellent Magnetosphere visualizer is going to become an official visualizer for iTunes 8. That’s be a big win for Processing (site | cdmo tag), the visual code “sketching” tool — and a likely time suck for your productivity next week, if true, as you stare into its hypnotic pulsing orbs. (Just fair warning.)

Allan White writes on his blog — a lovely visit for fans of music and visualization:

[Robert] Hodgins built a wonderful iTunes visualizer called Magnetosphere a while back - which mysteriously disappeared from his site a few months back. I wrote him, and he said that it had been sold to a third party. There’s strong evidence that this third party is in fact Apple, and that it may ship with iTunes 8, which could be shown as soon as next week at an iPod Event.

iTunes 8 Rumors: is Magnetosphere the New Visualizer?

One way or another, it looks like we will be getting the visualizer. And getting it officially would be terrific — it’s about time the fairly moribund world of visualizers was reignited. (Just remember, musicians, work with a real VJ/visualist when playing live for the full experience. End public service announcement.)

Magnetosphere Video
(Above, a reskinned take on the original — Robert does wonderful things with iterating his code)

Magnetosphere iTunes Plugin Page

Flight404 on Create Digital Motion

DIY 3D Interface: Tic Tac Toe from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

The Theremin, not too far off from its one hundredth birthday (start planning now), was a breakthrough in enabling a touch-free gestural control in space. Using the same principle that allows the Theremin to sense hand position, Kyle McDonald has created a 3D interface, and posted the process on Instructables. CDM gave him some of the inspiration:

Your recent post, "Theremin as AV Controller", inspired me to finish an idea that’s been living in my sketchbook. It operates on the same capacitive sensing idea as the Theremin, but in 3D — using just an Arduino, aluminum foil, and six resistors. I’m planning on using it as an instrument, interfacing with a wave terrain synthesis system. In the meantime, I put together a demo video and an instructable so other people interested in alternative controllers can experiment with it. The code is in Arduino outputs coordinates via serial, and the example code is done in Processing, so it’s only minutes from interfacing with your audio/visual tool of choice.

In the spirit of sharing, Kyle says he’d be happy for people to improve on the design: “If you think you can build one that is simpler and equally accurate, or slightly more complex and more accurate, share in the comments!”

DIY 3D Controller @ Instructables: “Make a 3D interface using an six resistors, aluminum foil, and an Arduino. Take that, Wii.”

Here’s the original post, which came from our friend Sarah Angliss, who’s been using the Theremin as a controller for A/V sets in Max/MSP/Jitter:

Theremin as AV Controller: Technical Details from Spacedog

Updated: Kyle writes with some additional details on what he’s doing musically, and from where he draws some of his inspiration:

Want to make music and motion with unusual inputs, like Wii controllers, Lemur multi-touch touchscreens, Monomes, and (now) 3D mice? OSCulator is a wonderful app that supports OpenSoundControl and sends MIDI events, with support for some hardware that can’t be supported any other way. The new 2.5 version adds new stuff:

• SpaceNavigator 3D mouse device support
• Mouse support
• Raw IR data from the Wiimote controller (Nintendo Wii)
• AppleScripting
• OSC Forward
• Keyboard combos
• “Meta events”

Software like Max/MSP and Reaktor will support OSC natively, but using MIDI input and output, you can hook up Kyma workstations and any MIDI software under the sun.

Software is pay-what-you-will, with a US$29 minimum.

Osculator page and manual

Camille Troillard is the wonderful musician you can thank for this tool, a member of the band Neimo which evidently is coming stateside, so stay tuned!

Chris O’Shea sends along his latest project, a collaboration with sound designer and composer Owen Lloyd called Drop Spin Fade. Part of the Future of Sound tour, Drop Spin Fade allows users to position, sculpt, and play with sound in a 3D environment using gestural control.

Drop Spin Fade

The music/sound environment: Through a series of iterations, Chris and Owen have started simple and built increasingly-sophisticated sonic control using the setup, manipulating granular samples by spinning and bouncing them around the space. It’s not just positioning at work here: you can actually shape the sounds you’re hearing by interacting with the geometric forms in the environment. Eventually, the designers hope to give users more compositional control, making this into a kind of 3D sequencer.

The guts behind the scenes: The work was built to showcase the Illustrious positional sound system, which can use positioning data to create 3D sound environments. For control, the project uses the Gametrak game controller hardware, which you may have seen used in inexpensive golf and other sport games. It happens to be a very nice gestural controller, as well, with extremely low latency when compared to video camera tracking solutions. Visuals and hardware interface are performed in Adobe Director, routing positional control to Illustrious via MIDI and playing a live sound patch built in Max/MSP via OpenSoundControl data. There will be yet another piece as work proceeds on support for the Nintendo Wii controller.

I’m actually quite surprised that more work hasn’t been done with 3D interfaces — though I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, as it’s extremely labor intensive! 3D has focused largely on positioning, but with powerful hardware and software capabilities bring 3D to the masses, 3D interfaces are surely next. Iterations and shared research are vitally important to any medium advancing, so I hope we’ll have more projects in this area. (I happen to be working on something different but related in the 3D space in my own research, which I’ll share when I’m ready.)

Previously from Chris O’Shea land: Muon Speakers, with Processing Visuals

Free tools like Quartz Composer (Mac) and Processing (cross-platform) now make it possible to run visuals and music on the same computer. Accelerated on the 3D graphics card in your machine (or integrated graphics on the new MacBooks), you can run live visuals without taxing your CPU, and use MIDI and/or audio signal to translate sound and music into interactive animation.

Translation: you jam, eye candy runs in the background. On the Mac, you can even easily assemble whole sets of songs using Rax with Quartz Composer visualizations, as seen here previously.

I’ll be teaching a workshop on some of these basic techniques and interactive animation and video/image processing in general. The workshop will be here in Brooklyn later this month, and I’d like to invite Create Digital Music readers in the area. We’ll focus on Quartz Composer because it’s quite easy to learn, but the techniques will be applicable to other software on both Mac and Windows. The fact that QC integrates so nicely with Rax should make this especially interesting to musicians wanting to add live visuals.

The class runs August 24 through September 12 at 3rd Ward, the Brooklyn studio space and gallery recently featured in the Bushwick Art Projects event. (See a video at Cool Hunting.) Unfortunately, space in New York always costs money to rent and 3rd Ward is a for-profit space, but I can offer a discount:

Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion readers will get a special discount off membership or workshops in the space:

Enter code PK0806 to receive a 10% discount on a 3-month trial membership or 1 free workshop at 3rd Ward. 3rd Ward is a 20,000 sq. ft. workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals, located in East Williamsburg.

Digital Media Classes @ 3rd Ward
More on the class and the discount/membership from Create Digital Motion

If we don’t get enough people registered, we’ll have to cancel, so please forward to anyone interested. Thanks!

As we continue physical modeling month, here’s a free piece of software that lets you create music and sound (and visuals) using real-world physics:

pmpd, free external for Pd

Johan Strandell writes:

It’s not physical modeling in the usual sense; pmpd simulates things like friction, acceleration/deacceleration etc.; i.e., more useful for control of parameters rather than synthesis in itself. Some of the examples are really intriguing, but I’ve only scratched the surface on it. An article about it would be great, to see what other people are doing with it.

Consider your challenge accepted. May take me a while, but I’m doing some other work modeling physics, so this could segue nicely. As you can see in the visual below, you can use this to model fluids, matter, particles, and other substances. That could be easily applied to sound synthesis (and they include a number examples) as a way of making control less mechanical and more dynamic and organic. Since environments like GEM run 3D visuals on your graphics card, there’s nothing stopping you from dedicating your graphics card GPU to visual feedback while the CPU plugs away on the sound.

If you’re anywhere near Manchester, England, you’ll want to clear your schedule for 20-23 July (and thereabouts). The upcoming Futuresonic festival has been all over my inbox, and it looks really cool, especially since it supplements the usual talks and presentations with some very useful free workshops:

Futuresonic: Social Technologies Summit

The keynote is by none other than Toshio Iwai, ElectroPlankton and Tenori-On creator and interactive designer we just can’t get enough of around here.

Then there are plenty of talks exploring the social aspects of digital music and interactive art, with Regine from We Make Money Not Art, the folks from laptop music circle Share here in NYC, and lots of other interesting characters.

I’m most jealous of the free workshops. As seen on the Pd mailing list and detailed over at Pixelsumo, they include sessions on gaming environments as audiovisual tools, physical computing, controlling sound with the open-source Blender game engine, and a DIY 8-bit synth.

I’m sure I’m not the only one jealous here, so please: if you are near Manchester, can you send us a full report on the workshops and events? Flickr pool, carrier pigeon, anything.

Quartz Composer is a fantastic tool for interactive visuals, and it’s free with Mac OS X (you’ll need to install the developer tools). With MIDI and audio inputs, you can hook custom visuals up to your musical performance. But the program has some limitations: mapping MIDI is generally slow and arduous because of limited MIDI input tools, and there’s no easy way to line up a set of visuals and move through them over the course of a performance.

That’s where plasq’s Rax 2.0 comes in. As we saw earlier this week, Rax lets you build set lists for performance, with different software instruments and effects loaded for each song. Here’s the cool bit: Rax also lets you load Quartz Composer visuals. Since you can load different visuals for each song, you can use Rax to easily switch between QC compositions. (In fact, if visuals are what you really care about, Rax could even be thought of as a MIDI and audio-savvy VJ hosting application.)

Gaming environments like Quake and Unreal have become easy interactive 3D development environments. Modify the game maps and objects, and you can make the visual realm in these games whatever you want. But for digital musicians imagining a 3D environment for creating music and sound, they’re limited.

Enter the latest project from fijuu2 creator Julian Oliver, together with Steven Pickles. They wanted powerful synthesis capabilities, which is something you’re unlikely ever to get in a game like Quake III. So, they found a way to send network data from Quake into the free software Pd, using Pd’s netsend object to send UDP packets containing control data from the game. In other words, instead of using a MIDI controller, you can make the game your control instrument. netsend is in Max/MSP, too, so this should work for Max, as well.

You’ll need two machines for this to work right, but the objects are freely available from Julian and Steven; follow the download link on the project page:

q3apd

I’ve been following progress on Julian’s blog; it’s a good read. For more on the work, here’s our friend Chris at Pixelsumo:

q3apd (Quake-Pure Data)

. . . and to see it in action, Julian posts a video:

q3apd in gorgeous OGG video glory

For Pd fans, Steven has a goodie of his own: an abstraction that fakes poly~ from Max/MSP inside Pd, plus some other objects.

Given the ready availability of map editors and such (at least if you have access to Windows), I expect you’ll see more projects like this. We’ve seen work before, certainly, that creates art inside the game engines, but by linking to real synthesis libraries you can do more than just mix pre-rendered sound sources. Speaking of which, any other readers experimenting with game engines? Let us know. And feel free to share in our gaming forum.

The Etch-a-Sound, shown at London’s recent Cybersonica sound art fair, lets visitors draw in 3D using their voice. It’s a bizarre idea, and the right-angle pipes recall a classic 3D animation as much as the original Etch-a-Sketch (awful model for intuitive illustration that the toy was), but it’s great fun. The creators also did a good job of documenting the process. It’s a great glimpse into a process that’s spreading rapidly: after a long drought, people are again making stuff with computers and electronics. It’s a new golden age for magical audiovisual toys.

Process of making Etch-a-Sound [flickr set]
Etch-a-Sound at Cybersonica [flickr set]
Etch-a-Sound on Pixelsumo (blog of the Cybersonica curator, Chris O’Shea)
Project Page, atoyfactory

And the video:

Brilliant work, Seulki Kang and Kenichi Okada!