Mixed Up – Beat Blender and Mixmaster 1200 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Ableton Live enthusiasts, you take very seriously what gear you plug into your laptop sets. We’ve seen painstakingly-created DIY controllers like the arcade button hardware below, and bizarre oddities like calculators and arcade cabinets and blenders and Osterizers (above). So, in celebration of New York installment of the Dubspot Ableton Live 8 Tour, Saturday, June 27, we’re going to get together in a fantastic space and have a little Live party. And we want to see what controllers you’ve made.

If you’re coming to town for the Live Tour or are in the New York area, we’d love for you to show some of your creations. Built or customized your own controller? Got your Wii remotes and webcams running your Live set? Built your own special Reaktor / Pd / Max / Python creation to customize your Live performance? Invented some hardware that works with Live? We’d love to see it. It’s a week that includes some of the most skilled Live minds in the planet presenting, plus celebrity appearances by the likes of Richie Hawtin, Scientist, and others. So we expect that even though this is last-minute, this could be a fun chance to get together.

If you’re interested, just sign up below or head directly to the Google Docs form. This is an informal, relaxed venue with drinks and finger foods. (Check out the recent New York Magazine write-up.) The idea is to bring along some headphones or small speakers and show things off in the catacomb-like former stables (and former sex club) nooks of this fantastic bar, meet up, relax, and get to know each other. We’ll also feature a live performance or two; if interested, let us know what your stuff sounds like.

The event will be open to the public; stay tuned for more details on this and the event itself.

And if you want to learn how to use controllers intelligently with Ableton Live – from the cheap and accessible to the weird – I’ll be teaching a workshop at Dubspot on Sunday 6/28.

Sign up, creative folks:

The pocketable DJ tool Pacemaker is now available here in the US at $499. That price is considerably more realistic than expected pricing earlier on, though it still fits in a funny sort of slot: it’s not quite the equivalent of pro DJ gear, which costs much more, but it’s still pricier than your run-of-the-mill DJ player. For those with the pocket change (cough), I could imagine it’ll be fun.

And you do have to admire the Pacemaker for being a really unique hardware gadget idea. It’s a glimpse of what music technology could be like in the very near future. Generically, you might describe it as:

• a specialized embedded mobile gadget with sonic-manipulation capabilities
• a connection between a mobile device and a computer-based editor
• a cloud-based, online community for sharing work

Take that as the template, and I think you’ll agree there’s a lot of potential in the basic concept. The specific idea here may be a tougher sell. It’s actually like the DJ-centric “Pro iPod” I remember Jason O’Grady of PowerPage.org and I once imagined in the first months of Apple’s iPod release. Whether DJs actually want that is another question – particularly with the iPhone and other mobile devices adding this functionality in software. But in the specific, as in the generalized view, the Pacemaker is nothing if not intriguing:

AR scratching from vanderlin on Vimeo.

“Augmented Reality” is a fancy term for describing ways of using computer vision to overlay digital intelligence on images. In other words, you can, for instance, scratch a vinyl record using a camera – plus a tag for identifying the object’s position in 3D space.

Cambridge-based designer Todd Vanderlin put together an elegant demonstration of the possibilities here, and his video has accordingly been making the rounds. (See: Synthtopia – and I actually heard about it this morning from a high school friend. The power of the Internet.)

Todd has more details on his site, which includes all kind of wonderful projects, like laser sound fountains and, always favorite around here, creepy circuit-bent baby dolls.

AR Scratching [Todd Vanderlin]

There’s actually some work to this: you need to figure out how the album is spinning. And of course, because this is augmented reality and not reality, there’s real potential here to imagine a new kind of vinyl DJing in which normal physics don’t apply.

From the video description:

I was playing around with some AR markers the other day and came up with this idea. taking just a plain old vinyl record and attaching an AR marker to the label you can track the record in 3D space. The next question was, can you scratch the record?

So by figuring out the velocity of the records rotation and applying it to the payback of the audio you can scratch. There is some digital noise that needs to bee worked out, but sounds pretty good. Its still really hard to scratch, it takes some practice but is super fun. The next step is to figure out some nice triggers for different modes. I like the idea of not needing a turntable but the actual spinning of the record helps with the scratching and playback. I made a couple modes, one where the record is paused and you can just scratch through the song. The other looks for zero velocity for x time and then continues on with the song. If there is velocity you then are scratching and the audio is affected. I think that this project has some legs can’t wait to play more.

I Want My Augmented Reality TV

So, this has sufficiently inspired you and you want more augmented reality? We’ve got more for you.

MSAFluid for processing (Controlled by iPhone) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

TUIO is a simple but powerful emerging protocol for multitouch control for live music and visuals, as used on the powerful live tangible synth reacTable. Apparently no one told Apple, however. While the App Store rubber-stamps useless toys like fake cigarette lighter flames, they bizarrely rejected a powerful application by a leading digital artist that would enable standardized TUIO control – for free. (More back story below; see an example in action above.)

As a blogger, my reaction is usually to whine and pontificate, for better or worse. The engineering approach would be to find some hack away the problem. That’s what Andrew Turley did with the TUIO protocol. So, Apple won’t allow an app that does the trick? Why not go back to what developers did before the SDK, and just use the iPhone browser?

As Andrew explains it:

After reading the story I started thinking about seeing how far one could push Safari as an application platform, using web apps to get around Apple’s tight control of the app store. Since you would be connecting to another computer anyway to use an OSC application, why not just have the app be a web app running on a web server somewhere on the local network? The web server can then take care of things like sending out OSC messages or playing music or doing whatever it is people want to do.

To that end I created a little system that implements the TUIO protocol. You use an iPhone to run a web app, which in turn talks to the web server, which in turn sends OSC messages.

Smule, the folks who brought simulated Ocarina to the iPhone, are now thinking multiplayer. Instead of just playing a machine or a few of your friends as in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, Smule’s latest app turns your creations into a reality show with online judging. And the killer app itself? It’s a simulated, touch trombone.

It’s pretty wacky stuff, but Smule’s had some hits on their hands already, so I think the wackiness may be part of their secret. And it comes from a heavy hitter: Dr. Ge Wang, the founder, is also a professor at Stanford’s CCARMA research center, director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLORK to the East Coast’s PLORK), and creator of the ChucK Programming Language.

New in this version:

• Teaching tools: Floating leaves guide first-time musicians to learn songs in “self tutorial” mode, and a browser-based composition tool helps teach you to compose.
• Global judging: Online audiences can judge songs with emoticons and text and a 1-10 scale. Everything is integrated with the app itself (see image). Tromboning with the Stars, anyone?
• The Power of Silliness: The most important feature, though, may be that everyone sounds a little goofy playing it, which can actually be liberating. As Dr. Ge Wang puts it, “It’s like singing in the shower.” Well, except with judges.

The app is simple, but the concept I think is pretty remarkable. We’ve seen interactive instruments, and we’ve seen music games. By adding the judging element, though, this is a free-form instrument that can also be a game. Now, without getting too ahead of ourselves, you could do the same thing with a Worldwide Online Kazoo Contest. In fact, maybe that’s a great idea. I suppose you could say music itself can be a kind of social game, played out on a stage. But nonetheless, making it an iPhone app can help free people up to get that message.

Oh, yeah, and got any doubts about the business model for open source? ChucK is a completely free, ridiculously powerful programming language for synthesis. It’s infinitely deeper than Leaf Trombone. But that power, packaged for a broad audience, can become a hit business – and likely to be popular well beyond musicians. If that’s possible, I imagine more could be soon. Remember, too, that whatever the Apple fanboys tell you, the iPhone is not a dominant mobile platform – nowhere close. Apple’s proprietary hardware means it isn’t really intended to be.

I hope someone working on platforms like Symbian and Google Android takes note: pack in geeky, nuclear-powered synthesis features, and people will find ways to put them to use in consumer apps that appeal to everyone. Leave them out, and you miss the boat. Or the trombone, anyway.

Direct iTunes App Link [99 cents]

http://smule.com/

Now, some very amusing videos of this thing in action: