Sometimes, images and video can say far more than words, and it’s best to stand back rather than ramble on. (Cough, ahem.)

From Björk this year has come two visions of how to make new instruments. The Biophilia software for iOS is an interactive rendition of the album. As apps, you have the curious separation of tracks into individual application icons, available as separate purchases or a bundle. But the effect is one we’ve traced for a while: the music becomes non-linear and interactive, blurring the line between recording as reproduction and dynamic instruments that can transform what you hear. Most notably, it also comes, via an update, with MIDI as observed by Synthtopia. MIDI allows you to then radically transform the output of what you get, and I agree that this is probably the first “album with MIDI output.” (The deeper question: are other sequencers in some sense someone else’s musical/compositional creation?)

In the Gameleste gamelan-celeste hybrid, you also have MIDI, here controlling an otherwise entirely acoustic instrument. (Create Acoustic Music!) Starting with a conventional celeste, the original instrument was “hacked” with hand-built bronze bars made by UK cymbalsmith Matt Nolan, then constructed into the finished instrument with MIDI by Icelandic organ builder Björgvin Tòmasson.

Videos via Shocklee.com.

The videos themselves to me represent the spectrum of possible choice in instrument design on a whole number of levels – MIDI even being one fascinating such level.

Biophilia software [iTunes link]

Excellent reading –
Extended behind-the-scenes look at the release with Damian Taylor at Sonic Scoop

In late September, CDM travels to Amsterdam and the legendary STEIM, a hub for research and experimentation in electro-acoustic music. The Patterns + Pleasure Festival will explore live electronic music practice and more, from controllerist laptop musicians like Edison and Moldover to the likes of sculpture-trained artist Nina Boes working with drawing and video instruments. The afternoon of September 28, we’ll have an open celebration of DIY electronic music culture with a special installment of Handmade Music.

If you’re in the Netherlands or nearby, we hope you’ll stop by. And if you have something you’d like to share, for show-and-tell, performance, and mingling with artists participating in and attending the festival, we have an open call for works.

You can see our video from last time. The video doesn’t really convey what a blast we had. Don’t be afraid by the crackles and whistles, either; I love that there’s a range of sound in electronic inventions, from the crackly experimental to instruments that work in more conventional contexts, too.

This installment already promises to be far bigger. I can’t wait. And if you’re far from the lovely winding canals of Amsterdam seen below, we’re working on extensive coverage so you can feel like you’re there from anywhere on the planet.

Here’s the call for works; feel free to spread it around:

Open Call:
Handmade Music at STEIM

As part of the Patterns + Pleasure Festival
28 September 2011
14:30 – 17:30
Frascati Theater, Amsterdam
Deadline: Friday 9 September 2011

Hosted by createdigitalmusic.com and STEIM; curated by Peter KIRN with Takuro Mizuta Lippit

Attention, makers of things that make music! Be part of an open laboratory, a science fair-style show and tell of work. We want to see your creations, including but not limited to:

Custom circuitry
New custom synthesizers
Creative controllers
Open source hardware and software
Audiovisual software
Original acoustic and electroacoustic instruments
Sound art/sculpture
Circuit-bent designs
Instruments and composition and performance tools made with game technology, mobile technology, Kinect cameras, and the like

The essential element is that you’ve built something yourself, in hardware, software, or both.

Please be prepared to show a self-contained presentation of your work. Some display/projection and amplification will be available, but we encourage you to bring your own displays and speakers if you can.

We will setup works for show-and-tell style exploration, as well as brief (5-minute demos) and short (5-10-minute), variety style performances and jams. We’ll also lead a discussion with artists and engineers, and encourage you to meet other makers and exchange ideas and techniques.

We are unfortunately unable to provide expenses for travel, so you will need to provide your own transportation to and lodging in Amsterdam. All projects will be covered on createdigitalmusic.com.

Please submit:

1. Your name, as you’d like it to be listed
2. Your project name
3. If applicable, a link to a project site
4. Photos of your project (a link to Flickr, Picasa, blogs, etc. is fine)
5. (Mandatory) Video and or audio documentation of your project in action (Vimeo, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.)
6. Space requirements
7. Technical requirements (power / audio / safety concerns if applicable)
8. A brief description (two sentences is fine) of your project.
9. If you wish to propose a performance, please describe in short how you perform with your tool.
10. Your contact information, so we may respond

Submission form:
http://cdm.fm/pt99dq

We prefer to capture information on the submission form, but if you have difficulty with it, please email peter (at) createdigitalmedia [dot] net directly with the subject ‘STEIM HANDMADE MUSIC’

patternsandpleasure.com

The computer as bandmate is nothing new. It’s just more stable, more powerful, and friendlier than it has been ever before — and that, coupled with growing familiarity, has been making it more commonplace with artists. So just how are artists working with computers onstage when they also play instruments and sing?

Recent guests at New York’s Ableton Live user group have been demonstrating their own techniques for playing Live, live. They work with loops, recording, sampling, live effects, synths – all the things you’d expect – but find ways of navigating all that functionality while still playing their instrument. I was just editing interviews in which electronic artists made the opposite argument, that they preferred producing only electronic sounds with technology. But whatever your desire, you can find a playing technique to accommodate it.

It’s just one set of snapshots from one city — consider it the tip of a very large, very global, very diverse wave of artists getting more comfy with live laptop performance. Here’s how Cosmo D, on cello as part of the band Archie Pelago, and Erin Barra, singing and playing keys, work with software live.

Cosmo D

New York-based artist Cosmo D is doing some wonderful cello and laptop music. Even that’s something that’s becoming more frequent – a good thing, I think, as it means a range of artists will explore ways of working with instrument and machine.

In a video for our friends at the bangbang blog, he demonstrates a simplified version of his set.

And here’s Cosmo D with his band Archie Pelago, jamming away…

If you’re in the New York City area, this ensemble is playing live at the Ableton User Group at Tekserve on Thursday.

Archie Pelago on Facebook

Erin Barra

On the singer side of the spectrum, Erin Barra was also a guest this year at the New York Ableton UG. She’s working on a Live setup that’s a hub of vocal performance and keys, using the computer to host chains of effects.

A Berklee graduate with the chops to match, Erin is a recent convert to Ableton use; her publicist tells us she just dove into the manual last summer and is working on a training certification. The musical idiom is a bit different than the kind of artists’ work regularly featured on this site, but that’s further evidence that the tools aren’t genre-specific.

She walks through her live rig for the performance above in a separate video:

Also, in July she did the first of a writeup for a local New York production and recording outlet, Sonic Scoop, in which she talks more about production. The video is geared at novice and intermediate artists, so it walks through things gradually, step-by-step, and also reveals a bit of her approach to working with Live for vocal processing:

“Insert Scene” by Erin Barra: Creating a Vocal Chain in Ableton Live

It’s great to see artists being brave and patient enough to do this kind of walkthrough. (I say that because I personally find doing screencasts to be a huge pain, though I do promise more in the future on CDM anyway!)

One small nit-pick: I think the Shure SM57 is very, very popular as a vocal mic!

Erin calls herself a “one-woman army,” and deservedly so — playing keys, singing, and operating a computer requires some serious multitasking chops, and she handles her APC with aplomb.

Erin has an album out called Illusions, and a tour of the US on. (Warning: autoplays music.)
http://www.erinbarra.com/

Your Neck of the Woods?

That’s just one city’s recent Ableton user group appearances, and a fraction of the kinds of artists who have appeared in New York alone. Got artists working with laptops — using any software, not just Live — talking in your community about what they’re doing? Want to share your rig? Get in touch.

We focus primarily on new machines and technology that make music directly, but of course, these tools make instruments that make music, too. Having seen an image of a guitar string vibrating from German firm Plek A+D Gitarrentechnologie earlier this week, reader Brian Turley observes that the work that company is doing is impressive.

We’re not necessarily talking mass-manufactured, machine-made guitars, either. The device in this case augments more traditional techniques, and can be put in the hands of an expert luthier. Plek’s technique scans guitar necks in multiple dimensions, creates a virtual fretboard in which you can adjust frets, then cuts some combination of frets, nut, and saddle for the desired result. The upshot of all of this: if the frets are adjusted precisely, it’s easier to play notes and string action is least likely to impede intonation. (It plays better and sounds better, done right.)

Here’s a bit on the technique:

The computer ascertains a 3-D like graph of the fretboard surface, including the position and height of the strings. Thanks to the plek scan the relief of the neck created by the string tension is taken into account while calculating the process parameters.

In the Virtual Fret Dress menu the operator can not only determine how much needs to be cut off from each fret but can also set the fretboard radius and amount of fall-off suited for the instrument or player. You can see the height of each fret, how high each fret will be after processing as well as where fretboard buzz occurs because of frets being too high or too low.

More information:
Plek: Technology

Guitar makers and repair shops then buy these machines for their own use; it’s just one tool in a larger toolchain, and it needs a very skilled operator. Humans, therefore, are no less a part of the equation.

I’m of course way out of my depth here; I think the last time I made a guitar it involved rubber bands and a cardboard box in school. But I’d be fascinated to hear from someone working with these machines. And even for us lay people, it’s a small but fascinating window into the sorts of tools now available to luthiers.

Full disclosure: I love waves. Analog, digital, acoustic, we’re talking vibrations in sound (and other substances, as well — and light). I don’t think you get into this area without having a certain wave addiction. If you love waves, you could easily get lost in exploring videos of vibrating guitar strings and pondering the physics of the string.

This story begins not with how guitar strings actually vibrate, but a curious phenomenon when combining the regular oscillation of the string with the rolling shutter of a CMOS digital camera — namely, the iPhone’s. To accurately capture motion, you need to record an image all at once (or at least come close). Rolling shutter or line scan as exhibited in a CMOS camera sensor like the iPhone is a side effect of the capture being scanned from top to bottom, so the bottom portion of the image is saved later than the top. That causes motion to skew across the image. (Long before digital, people played around with the same effect in analog video and even using film photography – all you need is something moving and a way of capturing the image that moves gradually in a different direction.)

When the regular oscillation of the scanning combines with the oscillation of what you’re filming – as with a vibrating guitar string, or the rotating propeller on an airplane — the two frequencies effectively phase, causing some curious distortion. In the case of the guitar, this means seeing the appearance of standing waves that, while they can occur in nature, don’t occur on any conventional guitar. (You can also think of the basic effect as aliasing, as seen optically when video shutters capture the frequency of rotation of a rotating car wheel in such a way that it appears to move backwards.)

As with many concepts in physics, it’s all easier to see than explain, so I’ll turn it over to some terrific videos. I’ve contrasted two at the top of the story; here are more examples.

Below, a high-speed camera operating at 600 and 1200 frames per second, played back 20x and 40x, respectively, slower than you’d see with your naked eye.

And here’s another example of how that might appear on a camera like the iPhone:

Of course, that means – fodder for our sister site Create Digital Motion – potential for more creative abuse, beyond the mere novelty.

What’s also amusing is the heated discussion this triggered as the iPhone video went viral. Read some angry comments – and some solid science among them — at Reddit:
Guitar string oscillations captured on video [reddit.com]

I’m glad people don’t behave (yet) in person the way they do on the Internet.

In person: “Excuse me; I think your fly is open.”

On the Internet: “That guy’s fly is open. He doesn’t even know his fly is open. That’s bullshit. I mean, what kind of person leaves their pants just *(&$#ing open like that? Look, look, look at his open fly. I’m never talking to him again. I’m not even going to wear pants from now on.”

(Seriously, happily, many of the comments are perfectly polite and well-informed!)

School’s out for just about everyone, but I’m going to remember to file this away for the next time I have to explain sound vibration. Now, back to the beach, or wherever you’re relaxing.

Thanks to Alexander Chen, from whom I lifted this via Google+. (See his own work on CDM here and here. Alex is just the kind of person I want to see this, as he’s been working with the aesthetics of vibrating strings! So, hurrah, Google+…

In the latest example of kinetic, sound-producing sculpture, an Arduino-controlled organ of moving cans makes eerie, beautiful descending noises. Jakub Koźniewski, a member of the panGenerator collective, sends in details of that group’s work, sponsored in this case by the stuff in the cans:

Kinetic audiovisual installation for burn
displayed during burn Selector Festival 2011

Movement of the cans is controlled by 9 independent servos connected to the Arduino board while the sound is purely analogue – air pumped by 9 ordinary mattress pumps blows into the “whistles” at the top of plexiglass pipes. Tone is modulated by the current position of the can.

Lots of soldering, gluing, screwing, cutting and coding

Worth viewing as it sounds really terrific; I’d love to hear it in person. The additional music bed is nice, as well: it’s Krzysztof Zimmermann, from the label Few Quiet People.

Thanks, Jakub!

Like a fresh ingredient in food, sometimes all you need is a good idea. And whether your work is digital or analog, acoustic or mechanical, compositional or improvisational, sound artist and musician Ranjit Bhatnagar can provide ample inspiration. His best idea: forcing himself to come up with one musical idea a day for a month. Of course, having mad chops in instrumental invention doesn’t hurt.

Ranjit’s creations are remarkable partly in that people can pick them up and play them as instruments, as with the 8-bit violin – a pixelated concoction of the lasercutter – seen at top in action with real fiddlers at the Thingamajigs DIY Instruments Tailgate Party.

Other creations are best seen as sound design etudes, one-off timbral amuse-bouche, and all the more delightful for it. This year’s installments, gathered in the (shorter) month of February, included a number of imaginative daily, reflective productions. A rotating corn cob became a score. A speaker cable became impromptu MIDI output. A set of gears became a mechanical sequencer – the ratios producing different tones.

I’ve collected some of my favorites below, but of course the best way to inject some Ranjit-style aural inspiration into your day is to follow moonmilk.com. True, I’m more than a bit behind as these projects were developed in February. On the other hand, only now, fiddlers are picking up the fruits of those labors – and the change of season and coming of summer (or winter, southern hemisphere dwellers) means the timing couldn’t be better.

http://www.moonmilk.com/

Now, some favorite videos – whether strictly “digital” or not being entirely immaterial:

When it comes to playing a hand-built Fence Bass and recording it live, there aren’t hard and fast rules or techniques you have to follow. But musician, composer, and sound designer Diego Stocco can certainly make the mysterious timbres of his exotic instruments into evocative atmospheres. In “Dustland,” the performance and effects are all recorded live – no edits after the fact, no layering — and the results could take you to another world, planetary or psychological.

To make all the real-time performance work, Diego combined his Fence Bass with a Keith McMillen SoftStep for expressive live foot control and Ableton Live. I asked for a bit more detail.

First, I definitely want to hear about the Fence Bass. How did you build this thing? Given that it’s your own invention, did it require any special practice or technique?

I built the Fence Bass when the guys from the show Sound Builders came to visit me. They asked me if I could build something brand new on the spot, and I thought, “why not?”
After that occasion, I didn’t have a chance to continue exploring what I could do with the Fence Bass, but just a few days ago, I asked myself, “is there a way I can create a cinematic piece with one instrument in real-time?” So I started working on “Dustland” to figure out how to do it!

Below: the instrument’s creation, as featured on Motherboard.tv:

I didn’t really take the time to practice anything in particular with the Fence Bass. Actually, I think that was a good approach, anyway, because the nature of this instrument is to produce edgy and aggressive sounds and effects, not clearly-defined bass lines. I like exploring an instrument with a naive approach, without thinking too much if there’s an appropriate technique or not.

Finding the right foot controller has long been a challenge for artists. What was the experience like working with the SoftStep? I like the idea of having something that can also provide expression, not just stomp switches, but I’m curious to know if it held up in use.

I had a carpet under my feet, so it was stable even when I was stomping on it. You can tell from the video that I wasn’t going easy with it!

I found it a very interesting piece of gear, I liked the fact that for each Key I could program details like vertical range, sensitivity to pressure and response speed.

Also, I needed to set a certain range for each key. For example, one of the tonal feedback needed to stay around -23 dB in order to sound good in the mix, and the cutoff of the filter needed to move from 1KHz to 9KHz maximum (the one on the distorted channel). I could easily do that by limiting the min and max MIDI value expressed by the key.

The little display on the SoftStep is very useful, too, because I could watch the value without having to check the laptop screen. That, along with the programmable LED colors, helped me remember what I was controlling.

How did you prepare your Ableton Live set so that this did all work live and real-time?

To start with, I split the input signal into two tracks — one dedicated for the processing of low frequencies and the other for the highs.

For this project, I used only one microphone through the Apogee One [audio interface]. The idea was to have more distortion when I was playing the first and second strings, and more tonal feedback and delays on the third and fourth strings. Then I created eight Return tracks, each one processing the sound in a specific way. For example, I had four different Beat Repeat [Ableton effect Devices] that feed into each other to create this sequences of beats that could continue as long as I wanted, activated independently from different keys of the SoftStep.

One channel was the [Ableton Device] Saturator, where I was controlling the input signal and the cutoff, so I could go from a fat, filtered sound to a growling, distorted one.

The SoftStep was the right tool for this project because I couldn’t use my hands to control a fader. But because the SoftStep recognizes vertical, horizontal, and pressure movements, I was pushing the tip of my feet down to open the filter and increase the input signal.

Thanks, Diego. You can hear the results – conceived as if for an imagined “modern Western film” and purchase them or see more images and description of the process:

Listen or name your price on Basecamp

Listen to this and other tracks on SoundCloud

Gallery, description on Diego’s Behance portfolio