Andrew Turley writes to share his microfiche-to-MIDI music maker, which he shared at the Maker Faire. The idea: take the humble library microfiche, and translate light and dark values into MIDI, fed to a Casio keyboard. Sound like a random idea? Well, it would be — except Andrew happens to be in a band called Microfiche. (Check them out on MySpace.) None other than IEEE Spectrum — yes, from the IEEE standards body that brings us stuff like FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) — got hands-on with his project; IEEE Spectrum’s Josh Romero named it one of his favorite musical projects at the faire.

Maker Faire Highlights: Making Music the Hard Way [IEEE Spectrum]

Andrew has more impressions of the Faire on his blog Pillowsopher:

I’ve been there for the last two days presenting some of my projects, such as:

• Unicorn Vs. Dolphin
• my stomp pad
• $2 multitouch instrument (based on the water-in-a-bag design by Erling Ellingsen)
• Rock Band Keynote
• the Microfiche Machine (light to MIDI converter for the band Microfiche)
• the LED VU Meter

Cool, but I’d love to do this with microfilm — especially with the film cranked up to full speed. Wheeeee— click, click … crap. Film came off the spool. (What, am I the only person who’s done old-fashioned library research?)

More Maker Faire Videos

Make: Blog’s resident musicologist Collin Cunningham has a video with more of the music projects at Maker Faire:
Musical interfaces @ Maker Faire from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo.

Anyone else with fun Maker Faire reports, do send them our way. Sorry I couldn’t make it this year — but I’ll take this opportunity to finally edit all this footage I have from Yuri’s Night Bay Area, for more Greater San Francisco DIY Musical Goodness!

If you want new ideas about design and interaction, ask a musician. Before the Wii remote, the iPhone, Microsoft’s Surface, and Minority Report, musicians were trying oddball ideas for music performance. That hasn’t slowed down, either, from the futuristic and space-y to down-and-dirty acoustic techniques. We’ve got quite a gamut coming up for our madcap, sound and noise-packed hour of competition happening this Saturday at NASA’s Ames Research center during Yuri’s Night, and we’d love to share them with everyone online.

For starters, here’s the rundown of the projects with links to project sites and artists, and all the judges:

Futuristic Music Design Challenge: Meet the Competitors, Judges

Join the event on Facebook

The projects: the Bubblegum Sequencer (previously on CDM), The Box custom hardware with colored lights + Reaktor ensemble, the surface-temperature tangible interface table Weather Report (previously on CDM), the strange polygonal Kromatron wireless instrumental interface, the Thimbletron gloves-as-samplers with lab coated performers project (previously on CDM), the bicycle wheel and analog tape Looping Pedal (previously on CDM), the computer-powered musical saw WaveSaw, the 28-string just-intoned microtonal casmolyra, the turntablist custom software ammoBox and the GrooveStep DS pattern maker (previously on CDM).

I’m also pleased to announce…

The judges:

• Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine (in my opinion, anyway) and creator of the MPC60 for Akai, plus recent creations — and he plays the mandolin
• Liz Enthusiasm, lead singer of Freezepop (check out their albums or just play a Harmonix game) and evidently an expert on Dr. Pepper
• (Matt) Ganucheau, a mastermind of Yuri’s Night’s music and art, a composer and sound designer (and teacher of sound design for games), an electronic musician, and creator of the NSFW "foreplay robot" Moaning Lisa
• … and yours truly as emcee

Speaking of Roger Linn, Tom at Music Thing just posted an auction on the pre-Akai prototype.

Hopefully we’ll get to do some quick interviews with the judges, as well, for Planet CDM. Stay tuned on yuricdm.com.

Forget all my blathering on about the Sharper Image Beamz thing, because this video says it better than I possibly could. No, it’s not the video you’ve seen already. Think Beamz gone experimental — and keep watching until about :30. (Thanks to Chachi and Matt for this one.)

It’s official: Beamz has become stuff of Web legendz. I can haz alternative interface, or whatever.

The saga of the Beamz Laser Music System goes on: the spectacularly awful demo video has spread on the Internets, and after Gizmodo proclaimed it the most stupid promo video ever, they were challenged by the PR company to do a real review. (No such challenge yet for CDM, mercifully.)

This does reveal where the thing came from, though. The Beamz tool was “invented” by songwriter Jerry Riopelle, who had a fairly significant career penning tunes in the 60s (”The Thrill is Gone”) and went on to a solo career in the 70s. (I say “invented” because it’s certainly not the first laser harp in existence.) Apparently his dream more recently was to move to the Valley and make a gadget, so he went on to focus on Beamz — and landed an exclusive distribution deal with Sharper Image a few years ago, before the company’s finances fell apart. (Doh!) Jerry actually plays with his Beamz system onstage, and it … uh … kinda sounds like it does in the videos.

But the PR firm wants Gizmodo (and the world) to believe everyone will feel differently when they play it.. except we’d presumably have to hear it, too, which so far is a bit on the painful side. (They also say this obviously tech-savvy crowd loved it.) Yet, that’s not what bothers me — this does (from PR man Matt Silverman’s retort to Gizmodo):

It is not meant to be a traditional musical instrument because that takes so much training for people to master. The beamz was conceived and created by an accomplished Hollywood musician and songwriter whose goal was to allow the average music lover to experience the passion of making music.

This is something we hear all the time. Yet you never hear anything like this:

• Cup Noodles: Experience the real joy of cooking — finally, without needing years of apprenticeship under French master chefs.
• Hot Wheels: Why own a real car and bother with greenhouse gas emissions and drivers license exams when this fits in your pocket?
• Connect the Dots: Because deciding what to draw is just too much stress — and who wants hours and hours of training drawing nude models?
• Tetris - the non-competitive edition: Put the blocks wherever you want! You don’t want all that pressure. Heck … the blocks don’t even move.

Updated:

On a more serious note — and illustrating just what a big difference different users, different musical content, context, and purpose can make — check out what happens when the system’s creator visits a Children’s Hospital. Part of why it’s worth being thoughtful about this stuff, and not reducing it to black-and-white marketing terms, is that interface design really can be meaningful. Thanks to Koen for the link.

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 Sharper Image, a source of various amusing musical oddities over the years, now has a ready-to-use USB laser harp music controller for PC (Windows XP/Vista), at the price of — wha? US$599? Yes, this is obviously Sharper Image exercising the business and marketing acumen that allowed it to — erm — file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year.

And, in a move we haven’t seen in years, they spell the name with a ‘z’ instead of an ’s.’ Classy. And they’ve opted for a design that looks like the security fence in Jurassic Park.

The beamz Music Performance System @ Theremin World

Not sold yet? Read this feature and drool:

Choose a complementary rhythm track from 30 original songs in 19 music genres, including jazz, bluegrass, classical, hip-hop, reggae, heavy metal and more.

And it all “brings families and friends together through highly personalized music performances that elicit joy and excitement across all ages.” So, is $600 really so much to ask if it saves your family?

Make Your Own Laser Harp

As it happens, you can make a much cooler (okay, not saying much — a cool) laser harp on your own, as Stephen Hobley has done:

Stephen Hobley’s *awesome* laser harp [ladyada's ranting]

Click through to comments for more details on the project and how-to info.

Updated: Stephen’s site is back up, so go have a look. The project uses the very inexpensive Boarduino Arduino clone. I’m an Arduino vet but just picked up a Boarduino, so I’ll let you know when I do something with it.

“Totally awesome” as this may be, I still feel somehow unsatisfied. And then I know why:

Someone needs to do a laser tag harp. Ah, that takes me back. Anyone?

To celebrate Yuri’s Night, CDM is organizing a big design challenge. Bring your craziest, most futuristic musical interfaces / hardware projects / custom synths and controllers, and face off with other designers to win a Yamaha Tenori-On and other prizes.

Musical expression and space, after all, go together. The record above carried a special mix of great music made by humans around the world into space, via the Voyager spacecraft. Good thing it launched when it did: I imagine alien life would have been shocked if we sent a CD or cassette or 8-track or SDflash memory card, but LPs are cool again in other parts of the galaxy, too.

If you have any means of getting to the Bay Area on April 12 and you have something cool, we’ll want to see it. (Naturally, I’ll be one of the judges … but we should have some other judges to announce soon.) Even if you don’t win, I’ll be covering the projects on yuricdm.com.

Enter the Futuristic Music Design Challenge

Got any questions? Drop me a line.

Planet-wide futuristic design projects, too: While we won’t be able to judge them for the prize, if you have any futuristic design projects and can’t get to California — particularly if they’re inspired by space, exploration, or Earth and ecology — contact me and we’ll cover them on the yuricdm.com website and CDM as part of the global Yuri’s Night celebration.

Deadline: 11:59pm Eastern Monday, April 7

Performance/Competition: Saturday, April 12; Time TBA @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area

Official Site: yuricdm.com

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one Achilles’ heal is that automatic memory management — the very thing that makes coding easier, via something called a garbage collector — can make sound glitchy at lower latencies. (JavaSound seems worst on Mac OS X, as implementation of the sound API by Apple hasn’t kept pace with improvements in Java audio on other platforms. It is possible to build a real-time-ready Java implementation that performs as well as languages like C++ for audio, but right now there’s not yet a mainstream implementation of this type.)

That doesn’t mean Processing isn’t useful for musical applications. With experimentation, sound libraries like Minim can perform quite well, especially if extreme low-latency is unnecessary. (see Processing’s libraries page for more.) And you can always use Processing as a visual front end, while sound comes from elsewhere (Max, Pd, Reaktor, or even Ableton Live or a plug-in.)

There’s plenty of incentive to work with the environment as an artist. People who never coded before are able to build entire projects in Processing, not just uber-programmer-geeks. Even experienced coders can find it a fast way of experimenting with ideas — sometimes better-suited to tasks that are more difficult with patching environments. Despite all the hype around Flash/AIR/Flex and Silverlight, I find Processing easier to develop in, and you have far more robust development options, free and open source tools and libraries, and genuine OpenGL 3D capabilities.

I put out a call for people working with Processing for music, and we’ve already got a handful of interesting examples. Because of the open community around Processing, code is available for a couple of the ideas here, so you can have a peek and learn from fellow Processing coders.

nodeSeq from Jared Arave on Vimeo.