For the last few decades, generally speaking, we’ve had computers, and we’ve had physical, modular, analog gear. Computers are endlessly patchable, but not using physical cords. Modulars use physical cords, but they lack the flexibility (and affordability) of a computer.

Now, US$25 and an Arduino can change that.

rePatcher is a simple, tangible modular interface for computers. It could work with any software, but right out of the gate it already works with two popular (virtual) patching environments, Max/MSP and the free and open source Pure Data (Pd). You use physical patch cords to make connections, and those connections are reflected in the patch you see on the screen. The patch cords are coupled with requisite encoders for dialing in additional parameter changes. (Reason comes up as a possible candidate for additional compatibility, which would, of course, be really sweet.)

rePatcher is built as a shield for Arduino, so you’ll need one of those, but that still keeps the price low enough to say I absolutely have to have one of these right now.

It’s not the first attempt to do something like this, but it might be the most accessible and affordable – and interesting. And while those cute little patch cords are fun, there’s nothing stopping someone from building on this idea and going to bigger cords and something more extensive than this 6×6 matrix.

Best of all: the magic happens entirely over USB, so if you want to make this work with something else – say, your favorite VJ software – you can do so with anything that can communicate over serial.

More information:
http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/repatcher/

Music has always moved forward when people get together to play. Groups of artists in Los Angeles’ Interface LA collective – and other California groups, like LoveTech and controllerism.com – are challenging each other to keep expanding their technique in playing electronics live.

I’m pleased with CDM and some of our friends to support a party Friday night in downtown LA celebrating playing live. Interface LA is a group centered on live electronic music performance and interactions. We’ll be bringing you video coverage after the event here, thanks to talented videographer Charlie Visnic. But we can kick things off now with videos of the artists and work. And if you are in town, be sure to preorder tickets now, as we expect this to sell out really quickly and hope to see you there!

Videos, from top: Mike Slott (Brooklyn), who’s headlining Friday night, in an interview. Second from top, check out the crew in their last event at top, that one centering on the monome grid instrument.

I’m playing, as well (hey, I’ve got to put my money where my very large mouth is). But I’m really thrilled to get to share some time with a bunch of artists I love, many coming from San Francisco’s LoveTech and controllerism.com, and from LA’s own Interface LA regulars. The lineup:

Mike Slott
Moldover
Vass Glenison
Rich DDT
‘House Band’ (Smacktop Ensemble, featuring the awesome force that is the Smacktop laptop-that-you-hit)
Nonagon
Ro and the Interface LA crew
Presented with Novation and Ableton

Friday, January 21
Doors 9pm
18+
$10 cover

We also have an interactive work entitled (con)textile:

A digital installation using the Kinect, stop-motion and digital noise, and interactive audio” by Jeff Aaron Bryant.  Jeff is a composer working in digital media and kinetics. He is pursuing his MFA in music technology at California Institute of the Arts.

Information:
http://interface-la.tumblr.com/events
http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/82413

Facebook links:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Interface-L-A/316896995011687
https://www.facebook.com/events/351095438239262/

Images

November Interface LA, in photos

San Francisco’s LoveTech crew, including their Burning Man trip

SmackTop, in Video

We’ve seen this before, but it’s still good watching someone hit their laptop.

More Events in LA This Week

I have an early flight Saturday morning back to Berlin, but there are two other great events in Los Angeles this week if you happen to live in the area or are in town for a certain massive trade show down south in Anaheim.

TRASH_AUDIO NAMM BBQ 2012 has closed its RSVP, but if you do make it, let us know how it goes or (with, uh, permission) take photos of any cool stuff you find. Really wish the TRASH_AUDIO folks the best and all our modular and sound-making friends and Matrixsynth and company; I’ll be somewhere like 40,000 feet over Ireland while that’s going on.

Also, Droid Behavior is doing a party Friday night that should go late at an undisclosed location, the fifth anniversary of their Wham Bam series. I thoroughly enjoyed getting involved in that in 2010, and might duck in if I can on my way to LAX; the event here is not related, to clear up any potential confusion.

Look around the room you’re in. Drum your fingers against some of the objects around you. Now imagine that you could turn those touches into any imaginable sound – and all you’d need to play them is a single contact mic. And we’re not talking just simplistic sounds – think expressive, responsive transformation of the world around you, all with just that one mic, thanks to clever gestural recognition.

Bruno Zamborlin has made that idea a reality, with hold-onto-your-chair results. It’s not available yet for public consumption, but it’s coming.

Bruno explains to CDM:

Mogees is a novel way for transforming any surface into a musical instrument.

By putting a (very cheap) contact microphone over a surface, the software can recognise different types of touch and associate them with different synthesisers.

Users can train the software with their own ‘gestures’, using both bare hands and objects. In the video demo we put the microphone over different surfaces such as kitchen tables and balloons.

The sound synthesis is based on two different techniques:

1 – physical modeling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws. Different materials can be simulated, such as membranes, strings, tubes and plates

2 – mosaicing, that works as follow: first, users load a sound folder; then, the noise coming from the microphone is analysed and the software continuously finds and plays its closest segment within the sound folder.

Mogees has not been realised yet. It could be published as Max4Live patch in some month.

Yes, we’ll be watching for future versions and publication, with bated breath and eager hands.

http://www.brunozamborlin.com/mogees

Update: Readers point to similar earlier work; obviously, contact mics have long been readily available. I’m not always concerned with whether something is new or not – old and cool can be cool. But what does appear to be new here is the additional gestural analysis to work more accurately with location. That takes an existing technique and refines its musicality. -PK

Come on – you know that occasionally you want technology to respond when you slap it.

As my sister watched an episode of the television show Quantum Leap, I thoroughly enjoyed watch Dean Stockwell’s character Al give his pocket computer, looking for all the world like a 7″ tablet, little helpful smacks.

SmackTop does that for music. Yes, we hear, ad infinitum, the complaint that laptop musicians simply stare inertly at blue glowing laptops as if checking their email. Now they get to put a little skin in the game, literally. And a version 0.3 update makes this humorous novelty genuinely useful:

Imagine your laptop as a MIDI drum kit. SmackTop is an open-source application for Mac laptops which translates physical motion into MIDI messages. Through real-time analysis of the built-in accelerometer’s output, SmackTop is able to classify four different ‘smacks’. Now you can control your favorite DAW by simply tapping your computer. Slap samples, ping notes and hit record – SmackTop is the MIDI controller you already own.

Try it yourself, free:

http://code.google.com/p/smacktop/ (they miss the obvious name, “SlapTop,” but…)

Got another motion-sensing laptop that’s not a Mac and feel jealous? Maybe someone can port this.

In January, we also expect to catch up in person with developer Raymond Weitekamp and Interface LA, the awesome live performance collective in southern California. Stay tuned.

Slap that laptop, make it free!

Now, a tribute to slaps we love…

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:

Innovative controls: The Lemur’s array of controls is, simply, the largest and most comprehensive anywhere. And for those who want to push beyond just fake faders and knobs, it has an array of more unusual controls, with features like:

Physics: Simulated physics and dynamic movement were, to me, one of those most interesting features of the original Lemur. Whereas I’d almost always choose a physical fader or encoder over a touch equivalent, adding physics to touch allows the controller to play to its strengths.

Scripting: This is a big one. Right now, the only other tool capable of genuinely-dynamic, interactive scripts that modify the behavior of touch is the open source Control by Charlie Roberts. (That, to me, is probably the most compelling alternative, especially as it relies on familiar Web and JavaScript rendering, but it’ll need more input to be fully mature.)

Scripting on Lemur means you get dynamic templates that actually take advantage of the touchscreen. (Think back to Star Trek: mimicking that would require scripts. They use pages and interactive feedback all over the place.)

A mature editor: Now, here, I’m of a mixed mind. I still want a touch app that lets you edit right on the device – guess I’d better go make the one I want. But if you’re going to be editing templates on your Mac or PC, then the Windows/Mac Lemur editor is now tough to beat in sheer power. I was critical of early versions when I first reviewed the Lemur hardware, but it has evolved and matured since.

An installed User Library: This could well be the thing that puts Lemur for iPad over the top – and make no mistake, it’s the biggest obstacle to any newcomer in touch. The Lemur simply has a whole bunch of templates, ready to go, many of them really sophisticated.

The competition: I imagine TouchOSC will continue to dominate the market for touch apps, though interestingly, for many of the same reasons. It has an installed user base and templates, it has a graphical editor that runs on Mac and Windows that people find reasonably easy to use, good documentation and community, and it covers a lot of needs. TouchOSC’s low price also ensures it has nothing to worry about from Lemur, but the Lemur app will appeal to people with more advanced needs, and I think it’ll be a big hit.

Also unique about the iPad: because US$50 is considered “expensive,” it’s really not a zero sum game. You could buy all of the major touch apps for your iPad, assuming you own one, and still be short of the cost of one plastic keyboard.

As for Android? Look, technically, I’m sure you could port Lemur to Android. The fact that they’re not launching with Android support is no surprise – but the problems with Google’s installed base and market and their inability to get OS updates out on devices is a subject for another post. (Preferably one that involves me writing surrounded by candles in a warm salt bath so my blood pressure doesn’t explode.)

Video: How use Lemur + WiFi

Video: How to use OSC and Lemur

Video: How to use Lemur with USB MIDI

Summary:

- Connect the USB Cable to the iConnect MIDI or similar device.
- Open a factory template in the Lemur.
- Open the settings tab and assign the MIDI Ports

http://liine.net/en/products/lemur/

Postlude: What about Existing Lemur Users

Since it’s a matter of some confusion, I asked Liine to clarify their relationship with JazzMutant (now Stantum), the developer of Lemur, and why existing Lemur owners should spend some cash to upgrade. There’s a half-off deal through the beginning of January if you owned the Lemur hardware, but some Lemur owners understandably feel a bit left out, having invested massive amounts of time and money in the now-abandoned hardware platform. On the other hand, even $50 seems to me not unreasonable for updating to the new software, even if a free release for Lemur early adopters may have been nice. I have yet to test it myself, but I imagine I would have no problem recommending the Lemur app to anyone who owns a Lemur and an iPad, certainly if they’ve nailed the software release.

Updated:

CDM: What is the relationship of Liine to JazzMutant/Stantum?

Liine: Members of Liine have a historic relationship with JazzMutant/Stantum. Richie Hawtin and Gareth Williams were very early adopters of the Lemur and have worked closely with them for years. Nick and Gareth also worked alongside Max guru Mathieu Chamagne on the Mu Ableton Live controller for the Lemur. Axel is the former lead developer at JazzMutant who were are very proud to have on board with us for this venture.

In short, Liine is a young independent company, not affiliated with JazzMutant/Stantum, but with a friendship and working relationship going back many years. We are very proud to be contributing to the future of such a revolutionary controller.

CDM: Why not give Lemur for iPad to existing owners for free?

Liine: It costs time, money and resources for Liine to move Lemur to a new platform and relaunch it. In addition, distributing any product always involves costs. Offering a full rebate of the app price is simply non-viable, we would lose money. The initial release of Lemur on iPad is only the first chapter in this second life of the Lemur. Liine is taking JazzMutant’s code and concept into the future, you are going to see a lot of exciting developments (in-app editing, new objects, streamlined workflows…). This will, of course, continue to cost Liine time and money – the small contribution from legacy owners will help ensure the future of their investment in the original machine. Their early support allowed for many updates of the original software. For this, Liine are hugely appreciative as it means that the product we’re able to bring you is the most mature and powerful solution out there. This is why we want to thank those owners by offering them a 50% rebate. We very much appreciate your support.

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!

“Folk music of the 21st Century” – radio broadcaster, jazz aficionado, and jazz-based Ableton Live instrumentalist / remix artist Nick Francis really sums up what this whole site is about. As he chops up jazz greats in Ableton, his mash-up music chops are as much musical analysis as they are performance. He walks through his controller moves in a pedagogical way, highlighting the meat of the jazz legends he puts into play. It’s a kind of digital transcription, transcribing re-imagined for Ableton’s colored blocks in place of.

Of course, you’ll only be able to reflect on this once you can take your eyes off that stunning wooden controller, which has the look of a decades-old instrument. Kraftwerk in their early days would have chuckled at the polished-wooden nostalgia, but here, it’s about care as much as memory – and Nick is a fan of Kraftwerk, DJ Shadow, and others. None other than Matt Moldover inspired all of this. (I look forward to catching up with Matt in California next month.)

We first saw Nick in May:
A Controller Love Supreme: Beautifully-Crafted Wooden Jazz Controller with Ableton Live [tons more detail there]

Our friends over at Dubspot have an extensive, illustrated video series on interviews. You can tell they didn’t have to edit too much here, that Nick just kept talking and saying great things.

The Choppertone: Custom MIDI Controller for Ableton Live – Nick Francis Video Interview [Dubspot Blog]

But seeing electronic music with Nick’s self-described “vintage fetish” – from the RCA-chic swirled woodgrain to the great old standards – is a joy. And if you can’t get enough of Nick, you can go listen to his radio show, too.

Quiet Music
Nick Francis @ KPLU (Seattle)

Flip that YouTube into 720p to hear the sound properly – yes, even in this modern age, the default setting is a bit lacking in warmth.

There’s also a second part of the video with a performance of “Canto de Wonderwall.” (Not visible in Germany due to licensing issues.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

As an addendum to yesterday’s teaser of the Evolution multi-touch keyboard, readers send along a couple of other examples. Andrew McPherson has a terrific example of an add-on, multi-touch, capacitive surface that can go on any keyboard (so, basically the same idea).

Description:

This video demonstrates a set of capacitive touch sensing piano key tops which mount on top of any existing piano or MIDI keyboard. The key tops sense up to three touches each by position and contact area, letting the performer continuously and polyphonically shape every note in multiple dimensions. The system connects to a computer by USB and uses OSC for flexible communication with a wide variety of synthesis software.

See also the paper published on the design, and of course, the video. (Thanks, Andrew! Nice work – will we see more?)

From Vol 14, No. 2 Summer 1990 issue of Computer Music Journal, none other than Bob Moog joins Berklee’s Thomas L. Rhea to evaluate keyboard instrument design, and specifically refers to touch overlays on the keys (via resistive, not capacitive sensing).
“Evolution of the Keyboard lnterface: The Bøsendorfer 290 SE Recording Piano and The Moog Multiply-Touch-Sensitive Keyboards.” (A PDF is available, albeit not a … legal one. Thanks for the tip, Dan!)

And as for the Evolution, the release date will be Wednesday, November 23. Simon Kemper explains, “In just 2 days we will answer all your questions. Also there will be some more videos and tutorials. We also offer a software to control and individualize the evo. It is called “COMM” and makes everything between MIDI and OSC possible. So mapping the evos touch sensors to poly-AT, and so on, is also no problem.”

There are definitely some skills to pick up here, but that’s true with any alternative instrument. I’m eager to try one of these out.

A new design launching this week should appeal to keyboardists who want both more expressive touch control and a keyboard – without sacrificing one or the other.

Yes, yes, multi-touch on tablets does indeed give your fingers access to continuous control for added expression and pitch. But there’s a reason keyboards evolved keys: tangible feedback about where pitches are, and the ability to control dynamics with pressure (itself with additional mechanical tangible feedback) just isn’t matched by touchscreens.

We’ll be looking on an ongoing basis at how you can take the flexibility of those touchscreens and match them with more tangible controls. But here’s one example: the German-engineered Evo keyboard really is a conventional keyboard, with all the advantages therein, but combined with capacitive touch on every single key. In other words, it navigates around the very tradeoffs of which I was recently critical in iPad developments, namely, additional expression coming at the expense of tactile feel. (I got some pretty intense criticism for things I said in that article which remain, to me, fairly obvious: a tablet is not a device you can play with your eyes closed, and – in its present form – no matter how hard you hit it, you can’t control dynamics.)

Of course, this does require buying specialized hardware, and it’s a controller only – unlike that tablet, you’ll still need a sound source and (at least for some tasks) a display, both of which are integrated in the tablet. But it is a compelling alternative that introduces a different set of possibilities for playability.

In fact, it’s also not the first time designers have thought in this direction. All the way back to the Martenot, keyboard designers have looked for ways to bend keys or add additional continuous expression – polyphonic aftertouch being the most common (though still relatively rare) solution. But none of those inventions could build on the accessibility of touch on the keys. I’m curious to see what playing this feels like; fans of getting away from the piano keyboard and all its history entirely will likely (and fairly) scoff, but for those of us who want to merge our piano background, something like this merits consideration.

Here’s how the creator describes it; I hope to catch up with this invention soon in person.

Discover the evo. Worlds first keyboard with touch sensitive keys.

With the help of capacitive touch sensors the evo is able to read your fingers movement on top of a keys surface. Next to pitch and velocity there is now a third layer of polyphonic data input.

Think of polyphonic control of pitch and expression. Think of having a pitch or mod wheel integrated into every single key. Think of never ever leaving a key just to turn or push some knobs or buttons.

So, it’s a combination of classic keyboard key and modern touch technology. The best of both worlds combined in a single keyboard. But best of all! The characteristical function of a key remains unchanged. The evo still features traditional pressure-sensitive keys. But in addition there are now all the advantages from a touch-sensitive input device in every single key.

So. At first this might sound like the evo is an all new instrument. But it’s nothing more than a traditional master-keyboard… With capacitive touch inside every key.

http://www.endeavour.de/discover_the_evo/evo.html

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:

Stephen McLeod turns an egg-cooking session into a live, improvisatory tune – fried breakfast you can dance to:

There is a certain sense of magic or alchemy in the way a good cook or a good musician can transform raw ingredients into something beautiful. I feel like there is a kinship between these two disciplines, and this series of videos and performances is a meditation on that intersection.

While I prepare for you a meal, I use microphones and a computer to process the sounds. These sounds combine to form an automatic composition, determined by the recipe and improvised on the spot.

A meditative musical creation by tehn, aka Brian Crabtree, creator of the monome, was a highlight for me in 2009. (I played visuals live, using my photography and software I built in Processing. Side note: the bio pic is Brian appearing at one of our first Handmade Music NYC installments, put on with friends at Etsy.com who are now based here in Berlin. Strange, the arc of time and space.)

Here’s protofuse, aka Julien Bayle (French artist also known for his Max development work and protofuse controller), playing Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room with Chris Gilroy on visuals.

Festival co-organizer Chris Gilroy jams at one of our Handmade Music NYC parties from earlier this year.

“Switch” by Sarah Dahnke (here with meredith Blouin) is a far-out dance confrontation, in which bodies augment one another with sound.

And to close out this set with a groove, here’s Switzerland-based artist Ander playing a truly futuristic-looking controller Station, which appears to be ready to operate the Death Star.

Incredibly, all this music runs US$20 a day, or $30 for a limited-edition two-day pass, with workshops priced at $10-15 or free.

In/Out runs at The Knitting Factory and Death by Audio in Brooklyn.

http://www.inoutfest.org/tickets