It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice.

Ableton and digital vinyl vendor Serato have announced they’re doing “something,” and then announced at the beginning of October that an announcement would be announced on January 14, 2010 at NAMM. Oh, and they said it will “unleash your creativity,” which sounds good. (It’s better than, say, “Ableton and Serato’s creative partnership will unleash two dozen angry badgers,” or “if you own Ableton Live, what we will say in 2010 is that we will unleash an unspeakable, nameless evil, known only to the ancients, which shall bring about the endtimes.”)

Here’s the surprise – you likely won’t have to wait for Serato to get integrated digital vinyl control. It’s already working with Ms. Pinky, and that means more choice, more DIY possibilities, and a broader variety of ways to integrate turntables and Live.

You see, there’s this little thing called Max for Live, which allows the use of Max patches inside Live as seamless instruments and effects. And one of the best – if least-known – vinyl control systems out there has long featured Max integration: Ms. Pinky. People have already made use of VST plug-in integration, but because Max for Live also connects to the Live API for control of Live itself, the functionality of the two can be expanded.

Via our friend Luthier.Lab, we get a first look at the Ms. Pinky plug-in. And this should be just the beginning, as Ms. Pinky and its Max/MSP support could be a great construction kit for building your own solution – something that may not be possible with Serato.

Ms.PinkyforLive [Luthier.Lab - en Español]
Google Translate (which has some very funny ideas about how to translate Spanish)
Discussion on the Ms. Pinky forum

While you ponder the possibilities, it’s time for a video from Daito Manabe demonstrating that not all turntablists sound quite the same.

Imagine a nightmarish, dark-world, alternative-reality version of Wii Music, one that sends Miyomato-san screaming. That’s what you get from tokoloten, in a very un-Nintendo noise performance, as found on comments. The Wii is just one of his tools:

tokoloten uses a variety of objects such as magnet motors, infrared devices, game controllers… in order to hide his lack of conventional technic. Depending on the venue, the show might be ambient-like, experimental or electronica with weird cinematographic references. But it most often combines all of this.
tokoloten is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

It’s proof that the controller – any controller – is in the hands of the creator, and what it sounds like is entirely undetermined.

Mapping a hardware input to a sound means making an abstract connection between one physical action and another sonic reaction. What that relationship is is entirely up to you. I was honestly a bit surprised by some of the impassioned critical reactions to yesterday’s brief mention of the use of the Wiimote as a studio recording. Of course, that proves the creed of the blogger – post first, ask questions later, and when in doubt, just post. Amidst some of the frustration, there are some good discussions, though I do dream of an Internet on which we criticize content without name-calling.

But the reality remains: controllers are always abstracted from the sound, by definition, and whether they’re satisfying to you depends on how you’ve mapped them. I don’t know what qualifies as innovative, but then, there have been times when I’ve very much enjoyed turning a knob, so “innovation” isn’t always what matters to me. I tend to fall back on Duke Ellington – “if it sounds good, it is good.” For controllers, that means “if it feels good, it is good.” You’re the one with the controller in your hands.

For an alternative example, musician/artist Kassen has an excellent session on improvising with custom software and game controllers. Below, you can catch some of his talk from Amsterdam’s famed STEIM research center, which has a long history of researching the controller-music connection. After all these years asking that question, what we have is …more questions. But that’s a beautiful thing.

Kassen (DJ, performer, ChucK programmer) from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Part of the reason I’ve never liked “controllerism” as a term – sorry, Moldover – is that there is no clear technique, no clear sound, no particular discipline. That is, I understand the case for the term and I’m glad there’s a discussion. But it seems to me that part of why controllerism is interesting is that there is no such thing as controllerism. The beauty of digital music is that you do have wide-open, blank-page possibilities. You can create your own system. It is abstract, simulation, ungrounded in physical reality. But while that is at odds with millenia of acoustic instrument-making, it’s also in tune with centuries of compositional and notational tradition, which are abstract. For the first time, the systems of how we conceive music can themselves become physical.

That to me is an exciting thing.

So, here’s a question — let’s take the example of sensors that handle orientation. How would you want to deal with them in music software, if they could be standardized, if any accelerometer or tilt sensor could announce its orientation? How do you decide which is the x, y, and z axis, for instance? How would you want the data normalized?

Amo Navas Bravetti – Raw (live video) from Gustavo Bravetti on Vimeo.

Sure, novel controllers are fun to watch, like our friend Gustavo Bravetti, driving a Brazilian crowd wild by waving his Wii remote live. But what if you can’t see the performance gimmick, if you’re just listening to the track?

The pitch behind the track “Raw,” celebrating the fifth anniversary of Fresco Records, is just that. It’s a studio-produced track, but the artists wanted to maintain some of the improvised feel of the live music. The track pairs the hit DJ/producer duo of David Amo and Juli Navas with Gustavo Bravetti of Uruguay – the Ableton and alternative controller wizard who regularly feeds tutorials to CDM.

Of course, this trio aren’t the only folks thinking this way. The first sequencers gave us the power to arrange everything in advance, meaning people immediately began to seek ways to restore live feel, turning off the metronome and doing everything in one take. But it’s nice to see these high-profile artists – and our friend Gustavo – taking it on specifically with something as off-the-wall as a Wii remote.

As computer music practice – part composition, part instrumental play – spreads, the idea of software interface as performance tool is becoming second nature. Putting those opposable thumbs and sensitive fingertips to work, multitouch controllers are growing in number, variety, and sophistication. Berlin-based artist Marco Kuhn shows off his beautiful creation, the PlayBox multitouch hardware, and its first app, PlayLive. That first software focuses on Ableton Live performance, but Live could be just the beginning – Marco has worked with Pd in the past and promises other apps to come. He’s interested in selling this device in the future, and he shares with us the tools he used to create this work for those of you doing development along similar lines.

The Project:

“Play Box” is is a User Interface for Natural User Interaction.
? allows multi-touch and object recognition (TUIO marker)
? hovering is also possible
? 22 ” TFT display , 1680 x 1050 pixel
? robust
? plug`n play

“Play Live” is a dedicated multitouch controller surface for Ableton Live.

- GUI Elements support multi-touch interaction
- easy to setup , just load the “Play” Control Surface
- you need no controller assignment
- you can control 32 tracks and 127 scenes, that are 4064 clips
- track controls are mute, solo, record, send1, send2, pan, level
- scene feedback name and state
- clip feedback color, name and state
- Transport control
- 2 Returns
- Master
- support bidirectional communication
- display track level meter, name

The whole app is coded in python.
- use Python Ableton Live API
- and libavg www.libavg.de for the GUI and Trackingengine
- PyPortMidi receive/send Midi Messages

“Play Live” Future plans:
- FX View per Track
- subpage for abstract clip controlling

I tested it with my mac book pro, “Play Live” and “Ableton Live” is running at the same machine. It should work on all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). That Project started with my Diploma Thesis in Applied Computer Science 1 year ago.

Everything is coded and built by myself. The GUI – elements has been designed by Gösta Wellmer.

In this work, I created a GUI-Controller Library which allow me to Develop very rapidly Multitouch Interfaces for other Audio Environments.
More Apps coming soon ;-)

I [plan] to sell the” Play Box” and Apps like “Play Live” if anyone is interested.
The price is yet not specified.

That`s not my first multitouch Interface. 2 Years ago I created forfour – http://forfour.hi-pi.de/
- used PD, Processing, Reactivision and OGRE.
But the “Play Box” is another level;-)

For more on the project:
www.hi-pi.de/play

I hope to have video to share soon – and yeah, it’s time to plan another visit to Berlin.

I don’t know if it’s “the most revolutionary new musical instrument of the last 60 years,” but let’s be clear on one thing: the Eigenharp Alpha is utterly, beautifully insane. It combines breath and finger input in a bassoon form factor, but with quite a lot more physical control, a computer connection, and no internal sound source of its own. The breath input comes from a crooked tube as on a bassoon, with finger input in a touch strip, a fretted, light-up keyboard, and keys that have their own various forms of expression. Launched yesterday in London, the Eingenharp is getting a lot of attention. (And yes, some of you spotted signs of its launch all the way back in June, to which I say – I’m sorry I’m so late to the party.)

From BBC: Do you drum it, strum it or stroke it?

I hope to speak to the creators soon. Already, I see some indications that there are equal parts genius and madness here. The controller itself, even in the bizarre bassoon form factor, has an extraordinary amount of control, with high-resolution keys, percussion keys, elaborate control arrangements that can adjust tone or record samples, and extremely precise breath and touch. At £3,950, many computer musicians accused of “knob twiddling” by the creators probably won’t be able to afford the top-of-the-line model, but I do believe an instrument like this can easily, fairly cost this much, it’s a cost reasonable for musical instruments – and there is a £349 “Pico” edition for mortals.

There’s some madness, too, however. For the “instrument of the future,” the creators appear to have chosen MIDI, via USB, in place of a modern control protocol. Then, they plug the instrument into proprietary Mac software. (A Windows version is expected early next year.) There are software models of a Cello, a Clarinet, and a Synth, but there are also gigs of samples oddly loaded into SoundFont format. Given the futuristic ambitions and the sky-high price, closed software and antiquated I/O seem puzzling to me. I’m also skeptical of the approach here of piling on as many controllers as possible.

CORRECTION – CORRECTION! Yes, indeed – proprietary software and the limitations of MIDI wouldn’t make any sense – and apparently the creators agree. So the software will be open sourced, as will their custom-designed protocol. I’ve got all the details – required reading for anyone working on expressive instruments.

But don’t get me wrong. I think this fascinatingly bizarre instrument is worth exploring. The hardware design looks exceptionally luxurious, and there is some genuine design innovation in the controller the likes of which we’ve never seen in an instrument beyond a prototype or two.

Oh, and yes, I already want the Pico – and I think the Pico’s fewer controls may actually make more sense.

Basic specs:

Video of the key action, among others collected on YouTube:

The “Alpha,” the flagship:

• 120 keys, plus 12 percussion keys. (Wait — 120? Yes, you read that right.)
• Two strip controllers, one on each side.
• Breath pipe and mouthpiece.
• 11-bit resolution (2048 values) in the keys and strip controllers, 12-bit resolution (4098 values) for breath.
• Internal audio interface with mic pre, converters, and headphone out – so you need to carry this and a computer, but not this, a computer, and an audio interface.
• A “Base Station” with inputs for expression pedals and foot switches, which also contains the USB connection. This connects to a floor spike on which the instrument rests.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/alpha/

The Pico:

• 22 keys (18 for playing, four mode switches).
• Keys work via direct pressure and lateral pressure in both directions, as on the Alpha.
• Breath pipe.
• Strip controller.
• Same resolution: 11-bit keys, 12-bit breath.
• £349.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/pico/

To be honest, I’m quite a lot more interested in the Pico, not because I think cheaper is better, but because I’m curious whether you can’t be just as expressive with the more limited set of controls as with the kitchen sink approach of its big brother. After all, 22 keys is roughly the number you’d find on most reed instruments, including the Bassoon. True, the piano has 88 keys, but it also doesn’t really have anything else – and it’s able to have so many because of its form factor.

In fact, I’m sorry, but I love the Pico. It looks friendly, it looks portable, it isn’t terrifying-looking like the Alpha, and it seems it’d be more at home in a variety of musical venues than the Alpha. Sometimes less is more. Let’s see if I prove to be correct.

The software, though I hope you could also customize your own software rig using the MIDI input:

• Modular, allowing the routing of control inputs, sound sources and samples, loopers, and synthesis and effects.
• SoundFont oscillator.
• Physical models of the clarinet, cello.
• AU host for adding your own plug-ins. (And yes, this is where I think you’ll have the most fun.
• A system for triggering events, takes, key, and mapping scale.
• An interactive arrangement system for step sequencing.
• Oddly, an extensive Steinway D multi-sample. On the other hand, for years we’ve all have been playing bassoon and other reed samples on the keyboard, and in organ form for centuries, so now the reed instrument gets its revenge.

Source: Eigenlabs software specs.

The instrument’s creator, John Lambert, repeats the maxim heard at new instrument design conferences: “We’ve got pretty fed up with watching people twiddle knobs on stage.” Naturally, that means… turning to the Bassoonist, that sex icon of the orchestra? I’ll run with it.

One other tidbit from that article:

He says there is one high-profile musician who is about to take delivery of an Eigenharp, but won’t give any names.

Yeah, Herbie Hancock, we know it’s you. (Okay, they are an English company, so maybe it’s an English celeb, but really the question is whether Herbie is who they mean, or whether he’s filling out the pre-order as we speak. He’s like what we would all be like if we had a budget.)

Anyway, consider this a first look. I hope to get closer to the actual instrument soon.

Imagine drawing an interface on paper, then being able to use it as a musical interface. Or, heck, don’t imagine it – do it. Unfortunately, the kinds of intelligence necessary to make the music video in yesterday’s post just aren’t practical yet. (That is, you could draw a picture of a keyboard, and even use the picture as a music controller, but while you or I could recognize a keyboard from a drum pad and know that line is a fader, a computer would need some sort of advance structure for any recognition to work.) But you can do some really clever things, as folks have shared in comments.

And using some basic paper interfaces, you can make entire instruments for just a few dollars.

Of course, the awesomest way to do anything is with LAZORS. Greg Kellum and Alain Crevoisier presented a paper at last year’s NIME (a conference for new interface designs for music) proposing a system for making any surface a control surface. Like the music video yesterday, you can configure your surface to function however you like – even dividing it up into pads and faders.

By now, you’e likely seen plenty of multi-touch interfaces or means of tracking hands. But, to paraphrase the NIME paper, these either require a special surface (or transparent surface), or they can’t actually detect when you’re touching. You can even use multiple cameras or an IR beam, but there are limitations to accuracy and the size of the usable surface that would result. Kellum and Crevoisier use an infrared camera and two illuminators, each built by pointing a laser at a mirrors.

Yawn, you say, been there, done that, seen Jeff Han’s video… The advantage of this system is that you can use any surface, like your dining room table. And you can configure that surface however you like. There’s even a freely-downloadable Surface Editor you can extend in Java and Processing. The creators claim they can even get input latency down to a reasonable 10 ms using high-speed cameras.

Transforming Ordinary Surfaces into Multi-touch Controllers [PDF paper, NIME 2008]
Future Instruments > Projects
Thanks, Randy Jones!

db3ll has created a keyboard out of paper, and of course it works better than those flimsy rubber “roll-up” pianos you see for sale. “Conductive ink is what I used,” he says, “painted on as traces on the non-printed side of the paper.” That’s the twist – I had assumed you’d use the top of the paper, but the trick is to use the reverse side to provide the “wiring.” He also offers advice for making a fader:

You can make a paper thin fader in much the same way, but it requires a magnet. Cut a slot in a piece of paper, color around the slot with conductive ink (I use the “trace repair” pens sold at electronics supply places… it has a very fine tip), and glue some SVHS tape (resistive side up) under it. Put a thin piece of metal beneath the SHVS tape & use a magnet to conduct between the SVHS tape & the conductive ink. The magnet will stay in position due to the metal (I use package banding) under it, and aside from the magnet, it is roughly the thickness of a couple sheets of paper.

Simon Lacelle is also working on a project I’m eager to see:

In a pad controller I’m making using a HUGE Staples calculator, I’m using strips of aluminium foil separated by a sheet of paper with holes at each button as switches merely a milimeter thick, and these are quite responsive.

A YouTube uploader by the name of DJ Mocap appeared briefly online with a project that seems to show him controlling Traktor with a drawing. There’s a camera and some sort of analog input being fed into a circuit board, but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on – though I can think of a couple of ways to make this work. It stumped DJ Tech Tools’ readers, but I have a feeling it can’t stump CDM readers, so have at it.

UPDATED – FAKE (but possible) Okay, so this turns out to be a Stanton touch controller hiding underneath a piece of paper. Of course, that’s itself not such a terrible idea – by having a drawn overlay, you have visual feedback for specific positions on the controller. But furthermore, while this is fake, the idea remains possible – and more cheaply than buying a piece of Stanton gear to toss under your piece of paper. So I call this “fake but potentially inspiring.”

Thanks to Gizmo from Scratchworx. Now, show Gizmo and Mocap by making a real version of this!

Just to consider moving in the opposite direction, I have to point to Amit Pitaru’s Sonic Wire Sculptor, an interface for drawing virtually and digitally. Because it’s digital, you can draw in 3D, do something you can’t with real-world markers. Here it is in a Tokyo gallery installation version; see more information (or try it yourself online) at Amit’s site.

And back to the realm of the imaginary – could MPCs of the future be made out of cardboard? (Oh, how I love reading YouTube comments. “Doesn’t look too sturdy.” “Why do you have your MPC in a box?” Apparently some people thought this was somehow insulting hip-hop. YouTube comments – pushing the very frontier of stupidity.)

Thanks to dyscode on comments — brilliant.

The cardboard MPC comes from theycontrol.us and our friend Elijah Torn, as seen previously on CDM.

Doing it Yourself

If you’re interested in entering the world of paper, drawing, and controllers, there are two directions I’d suggest.

One way to go is to simply start thinking about drawing as an interface. The creator of Tablet 2 MIDI, a MIDI-graphics tablet interface, suggests that using the pen you can draw any interface you like, then map it to tablet input. That concept could certainly be applied more broadly.

As far as using paper and a conductive pen to doodle your own musical creations, it turns out this is one of the easiest ways to learn about resistance in electronics.

PAiA 2 Transistor “Ribbon” Kit from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Learn Musical Electronics, No Soldering: Free PAiA Ribbon Controller Kit for CDM Readers

This project, which we covered at the end of 2007 and featured at our Handmade Music event, is ideal for giving young people (or the solder-phobic) their first step into electronics. The whole kit fits on a business card; you just need speakers to which you can connect.

The Drawdio project uses the same basic circuit and principle, but attaches it to a pen, making the rig a little more portable and allowing other fascinating experiments. It’s also available for purchase.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~silver/drawdio/

You’ll find countless variations of the basic circuit, because it’s so simple, and it’d be a great way to get into the more sophisticated (or at least more complex) ideas here.

Other ideas? Questions? Stuff I’ve left out? Let me know, and I’ll update the story.

Note Pad from Charlie North on Vimeo.

This charming music video from Charlie North imagines creating your own simple music controllers with a piece of paper and a marker. (There’s some similarity to M-Audio pieces there, too.) Of course, that raises another question: could this actually be done?

Computer vision isn’t quite intelligent enough to work out automatically what’s going on here, but it seems to me that you could get a little closer. Another alternative would be using conductive ink or graphite to make the drawing itself a sensor. I’m going to leave you to puzzle out the rest.

It’s technically still a holiday weekend here in the U.S. of A., so I’m going to keep with the whimsical inspiration for the rest of the day.

Ten minutes. Four or five kids (or adults). Make a song. Go.

That’s the idea behind the Youth Music Box, developed by Silent Studios and Chris O’Shea. (Our friend Chris you may recall from various interactive projects and the blog pixelsumo; he sends this project our way.) The software is build in openFrameworks, the C++-based creative coding environment for artists.

With keys, drums, and yes, even a scratching DJ-style interface, the music box brings together kids for quick music making, inspired by the phenomenon of musical games. The experience is guided by genre, with some effort to make sure whatever they do sounds good, but it’s extraordinary how effective it is at conveying the experience of the successful jam. It’s a bit of a confidence builder, in other words, for a group musical experience, perhaps more so than those ear-splitting, cheap plastic recorder consorts I recall from my youth.

And oh yeah, those kids look super cute once they get rocking out. (See video below.)

Youth Music Box Experience from Silent Studios | Resonate on Vimeo.

All of this raises some fascinating questions, and not always with the answers you might expect. In a normal musical ensemble, you begin sounding like crap, amp up difficulty, and eventually sound something like this – at least as far as coherence goes, assuming you’re not aiming for experimental free jazz. But with the addition of technology, whether musical games or the presets on our favorite synths or the quantization and beat-synced loops of our sequencers, it goes something in reverse. You start out sounding like this, pull apart the mechanisms that make you sound a certain way, and eventually find your way to your own personal approach. (And at some point, you get some of the readers on this site, writing code to produce their own sounds and musical structures line by line.) In fact, one could imagine scaling difficulty of even this particular setup, gradually adding greater musical freedom and taking away the “training wheels” of all the rules-based restrictions that make the results sound a particular way.

Skeptical about the connection of music-based games and actual music making? Think again – even as music education unravels worldwide, games are actually encouraging real music. That revelation was the impetus of the music box project:

Research commissioned by Youth Music found that up to 2.5 million young people in the UK – or 1 million aged between 12 and 18 – have been inspired to progress into ‘real’ music-making because they have played music-based console games.

You got it – they hit those plastic buttons, got inspired, got bored, then decided to go to the real thing. And otherwise, they might have remained passive musical consumers: the game was a gateway drug. Of course, that means that any such interactive experience has to stand up to polished Guitar Hero and Rock Band-style games. But anyone who believes the music games genre has peaked and is on its way out may be dead wrong on many, many levels. On the contrary, this may only be getting started – and the real growth could come in music beyond the realm of games, as people graduate to the unlimited set of possible music experiences.

Chris sends lots more documentation of this project, if you’d like to learn more:

by silent studios and me for uk charity youth music to get kids turned on to music
http://www.vimeo.com/6210259

watch some bbc coverage here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8160000/newsid_8168800/8168881.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8154449.stm

Ed.: The video at top doesn’t play outside the UK, because we don’t pay BBC license fees. What, all those Doctor Who videos I bought in the 80s and 90s didn’t make up for it?

here is a press release from roland. the box is ‘powered by roland’
http://www.audioprointernational.com/news/1329/Roland-unveils-Music-Box-for-Youth-Music

some launch pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621466657993/

making of pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621404410234/

this goes into some of the ideas and details about the musical kit
http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/blog/24/youthmusicboxlaunchesatlondonssouthbankcentre/

on the website there is a very simplified flash version you can try out on a mini timeline, just click play online :)

its quite funny to read these comments on it
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/07/youth-music-box-democratizes-music-creation.html

And yes, you can try this yourself and play online! The official site:

http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/youth_music_box/

The production company:

http://www.silentstudios.co.uk/

And Chris’ own site:

http://www.chrisoshea.org/

Roland is involved, and donated an E-09 Interactive Music Arranger to give kids some toys to explore.

And yes, I did notice a certain kindred spirit in the form of Moldover’s Octamasher. The underlying technology and its results are different, but to me what’s most interesting isn’t the superficial similarity of these projects, but the fact that they array the instruments in a circle. Computer production often simply orients a single person to a screen – not so ideal for collaboration. And even Rock Band and Guitar Hero, like an onstage band, line up artists for a (now nonexitent) audience. Perhaps the circle is about to make a comeback as music restores its social aspect.

Curious to hear other thoughts on these projects as they evolve.

dromama from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo.

Turning one knob and bouncing up and down may work for some, but virtuoso electronic performers want more live control out of music. Why? Because we have more fun. Raymond Weitekamp is a monome power user based at Princeton who has organized like-minded monomists. As with Edison’s performance work yesterday, Raymond is working to develop real performance technique.

He’s already got the monome doing more that button mashing, thanks to clever mapping of tilt controls. (Check out the custom housing, too.) But to provide additional timbral controls, Raymond makes use of the Korg nanoKONTROL and the humble MIDI Remote Scripts I made and documented here on CDM. The nano provides some compact, accessible controls for adjusting the active rack. Details below.

If you want to learn from this setup, Raymond is sharing everything he’s doing, so you can take this in a direction that works in your performance rig. Here’s the full setup:

Software:
-smack-a-duck: vimeo.com/4739761
-mlr_aes_mdb: princeton.edu/~rweiteka/mlr_raw_0.2.zip
-midi_bends: princeton.edu/~rweiteka/midi_bends_0.3G_RAW.zip
-midi_bends midi remote script: princeton.edu/~rweiteka/MIDI_Bends_LiveRemote.zip
-nanokontrol midi remote script: createdigitalmusic.com/media/files/korg/korgnano_live.zip
-ableton live

Discussion:
post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=5458

Samples:
Drums from the “droms” sample pack by ro: post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=5414
Beach Boys – Mama Says
Viktor Vaughn – Raedawn

Thanks:
ro, tehn, soundcyst, peter kirn

From that discussion thread (well worth checking the whole thing out), here’s the basics on how the bits fit together:

Since it may not be immediately obvious what’s going on, I’ll elaborate for the curious amongst you:

mlr_aes_mdb => soundflower => live
midi_bends => IAC midi bus + midi remote script => live
nanoKontrol => midi remote script => live
smack-a-duck => soundflower => live

I modified Peter Kirn’s midi remote script for the nanoKontrol, and wrote my own for midi_bends. The tilting of the monome on the left (Tuppernicus) is controlling the 8 encoders of whatever the active FX rack is. The knobs on the nanoKontrol control those same 8 encoders. This way, I can use either to control the same FX parameters. I like this a lot better than 1:1 midi mapping, because it allows multiple methods for controlling the same parameters. Tuppernicus also controls the FX toggles (4 FX x 6 channels), drum rack, and active channel/effect rack. The monome on the right (Tupperbot) is running my slightly tweaked (added rowfix) version of mlr_aes_mdb 0.4.

Ableton Live is just one choice, of course. I’m actually trying to get some similar tools together on the Linux side, where this sort of combination fits naturally with the JACK audio server. I hope to have something to share by mid-fall.

Finally, we’ve got a digital instrument you can squeeze.

Arrays of buttons may be digital in character, but they’re not a recent invention. Combining the organic, physical gesture with precise control over pitch via some sort of actuator is part of the tradition of musical instrument design. So, strange as it may be, this hybrid monome-concertina is a perfectly natural combination.

Inventor and musician Esper Sommer Eide writes with more:

I have just finished a new instrument that might interest you (and your readers!). It has been over half a year in the making, so I am quite happy to finally finish it and I did a couple of concerts now this summer as “phonophani” to demonstrate and test it in action. This is a video from one of them, together with some explanation and video material from “the making of…” [Espen's video is from a concert in Bergen, Norway. -Ed.]

Hope you enjoy it! It is basically a concertino accordion (famous from Tango music) I got on eBay and refurbished one side of it into a monome clone. It runs on an Arduino Mega microcontroller and connects to a Maxmsp patch on my computer via USB. For various reasons it was not possible to use the excellent arduinome programming, so I had to do the programming from scratch myself. But the best part was adding a pressure sensor to the mix, so that I can use the air pumping action of the accordion to control various parameters. In the video it is the direction of the sample playback (in addition to volume) to give a kind of tape loop scratching effect. Highly entertaining to play, and also visually the bellows look like an audio wave being pulled and pushed. Electronic tango?

I was curious specifically about the reeds, and got this follow-up answer:

Yes, one side still has accordion reeds though I do not use them in the tune on the video. But you can hear them briefly during the end credits. Kind of like a hybrid post-digital instrument. I guess a natural development would be recording the reeds on one hand and manipulating them digitally with the other hand :-)

For the record, the concertina and its South American breed, the bandoneon, are free-reed instruments, just like the accordion. Technically, a concertina is not an accordion, though it can use accordion reeds. And I’m going to stop there, because I just don’t know a whole lot beyond that, though I will note that a major research institute happens to be housed at the university where I’ve done all my graduate work and am now finishing my doctorate.

Center for the Study of Free-Reed Instruments [The Graduate Center, The City University of New York]

They’ve never had a high-tech instrument, to my knowledge, but it’s never too late.

Espen has creating whimsical, wonderful inventions before. Last year, we saw a crank-powered, iPod-driven, Hurdy-Gury-inspired soundmaker:

Crank + Linux iPod + Pd = Deconstructed Norwegian Folk Music