You’re not cool now? You will be, as your hands dance to the rhythm through the magical lasers.

A few moments of your playing, and nothing could possibly convince me that you didn’t grow up on the streets of Jamaica, banging oil drums you salvaged and hammered into shape.

Whoops, sorry — had to snap out of that for a second.

So, okay — it seems the beamz laser harp we saw last week comes with special algorithmic software that makes music play basically regardless of what you do. The problem with laser harps in general is they tend to the button-pressing variety: that is, you’re waving your arms around like crazy, but really the laser sensor is either off or on. (There are ways around that, but … well, not here.)

Watch closely as someone leaves their hand in front of the harp and does nothing. And this, of course, is what real instruments have going for them — that you have to work hard to play them, and that’s actually kind of the fun of it. It’s like basketball: if you just held down a button the entire game and a robot played for you, it would be easier, but that wouldn’t necessarily be better. Even as a computer game, we expect multiple buttons, and actual difficulty. If you waved your hands around and wore sunglasses and had a $600 gadget from Sharper Image and pretended to play basketball, that wouldn’t be much of an improvement, either. I’m not sure why music is excepted from this rule, but then, many things about this world provide amazement and confusion.

Yes, technically Guitar Hero / Rock Band does the same thing. Except that it has actual difficulty. And has real songs. And is fun. Whereas this is painful. And it’s about as expensive than Rock Band plus a PS3.

That leaves two questions.

The Keepon is a cute, yellow robot that dances to music you may have seen bopping on YouTube. It shows how subtle changes could make robotics friendlier in the near future.

Foremost among those changes: show a little skin. By wrapping the robot’s armature with soft, rubber skin, the Keepon is both squeezable and more lifelike. (After all, how many people / pets / creature friends do you know who don’t have a skeleton and skin? Yes, you with the pet beetle, you’re an exception.)

Second, and earning the Keepon YouTube fame and glory, the BeatBots know how to shake their groove thing. Like smart puppeteers, the Keepon’s designers have kept motions simple but expressive: turning, nodding, rocking, and bobbing, the Keepon’s motions themselves are realistic, and convey attention. Those decisions were conceived to let the Keepon interact with children, but all people respond well to attention as emotional connection. Our friend Keith Lang of Plasq was recently musing on the importance of attention and eyes on his blog, as a way of contemplating software UI design. Looking into your eyes is powerful is the short version of that; big-eyed Anime characters, puppy dogs, and glaring looks from enemies all grow out of that.

Talking about it is one thing; here’s the robot in action with its creators, dancing to Spoon:

Of course, to make that work, the Keepon needs a good sense of rhythm — better than, say, that erratically flopping fish you got at the local convenience store as a gag gift. To do that, the Keepon’s creators are using music/multimedia software Max/MSP to prototype their “architecture for rhythmic social interaction.” It’s not the first time we’ve seen people programming robotic rhythmic interactions in Max: Georgian robot Haile drums in response to a human player using Max-programmed interactions.

Hey, you’re not listening any more, are you? You’re still watching that video over and over again. This is important! This is rhythmic social interaction! Though I guess if you are still distracted, the magic works.

Keepon on Tour: The Keepon has gigs in Denmark and Korea this week, followed by a set of LA appearances next month in association with Wired Magazine. They’ll even be doing a benefit concert for Creative Commons with Spoon. Details at the Keepon site:
Keepon & the Beatbots

Previously:
Robot Drummers, Compared: Like Musicians, Robots are Better When They Listen

We’ve seen robotic Guitar Hero players and robotic guitars as art installation; now, one last set of robots for the week — robotic drummers.

The Motoman robots take up taiko drumming at a 400-year-old festival in Japan. An impressive display, but you may immediately notice they lack a certain … something. (That something is definitely not creepiness, for the robotophobic.

‘Motoman’ bot shows it’s got rhythm [Cnet Crave Blog]

What you won’t see here is anything truly live or interactive. For that, Georgia Tech trumps the Japanese engineers, with the robot Haile, which we first covered nearly two years ago. Haile is an interactive robot that listens to what a human drummer has played. Rather than simply echoing rhythms, Haile is able to intelligently “improvise” responses. The results may still be early in the evolution of musical robotics, but they go far beyond the example above. Here, robots are able to extend, rather than replace, human abilities; they embody the compositional ideas of the programmer, and engage the human player’s traditional musicianship.

In other words, like a good musician, a good robot listens and makes you play better.

Robot Drummer Responds to Human Playing; How They Did It

Here’s a blast from the past — an algorithmic compositional blast from the past, that is. M is a unique piece of software for “interactive composition.” With patterns, cycles, and conducting options, you can create algorithmically-generated music, adjusting various parameters for sophisticated results rather than sequencing directly. It’s a totally different approach to working, something that’s easier to experience than to describe. M launched way back in 1987 and eventually support Atari, Amiga, Mac, and Windows; it was a big hit in the years afterward. The creators were David Zicarelli (now with Cycling ‘74, and a sort of father to Cycling’s Max/MSP), John Offenhartz, Antony Widoff, and Joel Chadabe. (Check out the whole history.) I saw it for the first time at a summer program at Oberlin and loved it immediately. Now, with a computer stacked full of soft synths and the recurring desire to get out of my head, compositionally, I think I actually have more use for it in 2007.

It’s not very often that vintage software gets update
d with current tech while retaining its original interface, but that’s exactly what Cycling ‘74 has done with M 2.7. Intel compatibility means it can run on your brand-new Mac Pro, but the angular throwback interface will make it look like a Mac II. (Got a good System 7 skin, anyone?) But the real story here is Core MIDI support. It allows you to plug M into your existing soft synths. Imagine M plus Logic’s Sculpture, or combined with a monster Max/MSP patch.

M 2.7 @ Cycling ‘74

It’s great to see someone recognize that it’s not only about the upgrade that’s just around the corner. Virtual Console games are selling by the millions on Nintendo’s Wii. Hopefully creative technology, even in limited form, could be next. I’ll be testing M soon; I’ll let you know how it goes.

PC users/Atari lovers: See details in comments on the freeware Atari version. But what’s this about an emulator? Time to scour eBay for an Atari ST, I think.

Just when we thought we might escape Will Wright’s upcoming PC game, Spore, and get some work done, it turns into a compositional must-have. Regine Debatty, who gets to hang out at hip, artsy European events like the 01 Award reception at the University of the Arts Berlin, therefore got to blog Brian Eno’s speech. It loses a little something in the translation (like, I wish I had just been in Berlin), but it’s all worth a read.

The big news: Eno will create a fully procedural sound score for Spore, to make the music as generative as the game itself. My prediction: the results will be brilliant, and will interactively generate a distortion in the space-time field around our computers in which we cease to productive for long evenings after the game is released. Generative, indeed.

For a related take on how to re-conceive composition in the age of gaming, see W. Brent Latta’s interview with Tomb Raider composer Troels Brun Folmann:

Tomb Raider: Legend Composer Troels Brun Folmann on Adaptive “Micro-Scoring”

Nat Jeanneret aka “funnel”, the musician and artist behind the CDM site design, has been busy at work on a new project: creating music my scoring those little spots of gum and dirt found on a train platform. It’s a great example of aleatoric music, not in the best-known sense of “pure” chance but in reflecting the patterns found in the world around the composer.

Nat has made a video, as well, in which you can watch him convert bubble gum-on-platform music to Sibelius digital notation. It’s the ultimate digital music, in a way: the analog (erm, disgusting old bubble gum) is overlaid on a real-world grid (the lines of the platform) and quantized to 5-line staff notation.

Full details from Nat:

Aleatoric Music Composition [onetonnemusic]
Aleatoric Composition… THE MOVIE! [onetonnemusic]

Composers out there, if you’ve ever done anything similar, we’d love to hear about it.

Raymond Scott’s Electronium is one of the great, odd sound inventions of all time. Scott developed the machine as an automatic performance and composing machine, a great, mechanical algorithmic music creation device. For an official source of information, be sure to read up at the Raymond Scott site, which has this fantastic music demo:

Electronium Music Sample

The idea of the machine, with no keyboard and the ability to “automatically” create music, is still a bit radical today. The sonic results are as whimsical and fresh now as then. But it’s the underlying technology that’s impressive: the device “suggests” musical motives, and allows contrapuntal techniques and development of the materials into music. Not bad for the 1950s — and a lot more fun to listen to than a lot of supposedly more-sophisticated computer algorithmic music.

Motown got interested in the results, I think because it was the only hardware at the time to come with a DOOWAH control.

Raymond Scott was also a major inspiration for a young Robert Moog, a relationship described in Moog’s own words on the Raymond Scott website. In fact, had it not been for Scott apprenticing him, it’s possible Bob Moog would have stuck to Theremins and never gotten into the synth business.

The instrument survives, but sadly in non-working order, in the basement of Mark Mothersbaugh’s office. It’s bittersweet looking at the instrument through this video, posted in April, and not hearing it work. But before you despair, Mothersbaugh is promising to fix his Electronium. Let’s hope he does.