It may be 2009, but you can still play electronic music as though you’re an invading alien visitor from the future. Just ask The Sonic Manipulator, an electronic musical performer and inventor, alias Claude Woodward. His musical creations range from warped radios to instruments derived from turntable scratches and Theremins. And then there are some instruments that seem to be sonic weapons. (Apologies to recent protesters in Pittsburgh.)

CDM reader Andrew Cordani caught Claude at the UK’s British Invention Show. Claude is apparently a Perth, Australia transplant, by way of Cambridge, though Andrew writes that he “has been known to travel about a bit (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Indi, Teegarden’s star and further).”

Andrew describes Claude’s other creations:

Met at the British Invention Show (http://www.britishinventionshow.com/show/index.html), at Alexandra Palace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace)
(Organized by [MP3 player inventor] Kane Kramer – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_Kramer)

http://www.youtube.com/user/sonicmanipulator

http://www.sonicmanipulator.com/

http://www.sonicmanipulator.com/Inventions.htm

The Claude-a-tron – a sort of pre-wireless (i.e. wired) Theremin – and is “Way cool”

The Radiolian a lot of fun – Essentially triggerable (pre-recorded) radio samples – Used to switch-between radio programs (reminds me of http://www.neave.com/television/ )

The Greet-o-metre + The Transatron should be given out to all travellers, interstellar or not!

(My fave was the Rap Rod – which does for scratching what CDs did for vinyl. The Bash-a-tron was a close second, though)

Definitely check the Sonic Manipulator site for many, many more bizarre creations if the one at top doesn’t impress you. See a couple of my faves at bottom.

Fans of DIY, the whole event sounds fantastic! Thanks, Andrew, who can be found here (with his own futuristic creations):
http://midisticks.ltd.uk/

multi-touch the storm – interactive sound visuals – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo.

What if you could mash, mangle, mush, and morph sounds with your fingers on a screen, watching the waveforms dance in response in three dimensions? That “what if” is expressed beautifully in a project by musician-developer Christian Bannister of Portland, Oregon, who works as Subcycle Labs.

The result is like being able to touch sound directly.

Three-dimensional forms morph and vibrate using visuals programmed in Processing, making architectural-organic shapes and spaces that really begin to “look” like sound. These forms can represent synthesis and effects parameters (Christian has done some work with the Massive synth from Native Instruments), or can allow navigation through loops using touch. Gestures remap offsets and duration for audio, scrub and slice, and apply granular resynthesis.

Controls use multiple touch points on a screen (apparently via Community Core Vision and reacTIVision), with sound from Logic, Reaktor, and Max/MSP, and auxiliary control with a joystick array and KORG KAOSS Pad.

Here’s what happens with a Massive bass line:

low frequency entity – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo.

It’s spectacular, gorgeous work, and I can’t wait to see more. It’s well worth reading through the whole description on the blog for more details, technical, musical, and artistic:

http://www.subcycle.org/

Take a weekend, and make something: that’s the challenge behind the Music Hack Day, which joins a growing phenomenon of events built around collective creation. (CDM held its own tangible interface hackday online, which I definitely hope to follow up soon!) Initiated by Dave Haynes of music sharing service Soundcloud, the Hack Day has already hit London. Many of the events were Web app-based and focused on consumption rather than creation of music, but we also saw a chordal synth plug-in and beer bottle percussion instrument.

The Berlin Hack Day, which wound up earlier today, offers still more projects focused on the creation side of music hacking. Having Ableton and Native Instruments as sponsors likely helped the mood. And as you’d expect from one of the world capitals of creative hacking, Berliners don’t disappoint.

Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even worked out a way to turn NI’s Maschine into a rhythm game, complete with Street Fighter sounds.

I’ve got some of my favorite projects here, but see also an eyewitness report (in English and Italian) at Audio News Room:
Just back from Music Hack Day Berlin
… and keep your eye on the wiki:
Berlin Hack Submissions

xylobot run by monome from robb on Vimeo.

Monomist Rob Böhnke and Ramsey Arnaoot created one of my favorite hackday projects so far: a monome-controlled robotic xylophone. The ingredients: one monome grid controller, one Java application for step sequencing to the output, one Arduino open source controller board, and one terrific xylophone “robot” made of an array of servos that strike the bars of the instrument. Oh, and some hot glue and wood, of course.

Project details

Debugging

Audio loop

Of course, what’s especially impressive is nailing this in just a weekend – imagine what they could do with more time and iterations.

Proof that musical visualizers don’t always have to be trippy, futuristic, Tron-like 3D landscapes (and that’s me speaking as a fan of such things), Gernot Poetsch instead chose a whimsical environment with clouds and cartoon birds, inspired by the graphic identity of Twitter. (No actual Twitter is involved, meaning you lose the, ahem, unreliable, buggy, unfiltered chat network but keep the cutesy happy sky! Works for me!)

The visuals are built in Quartz Composer, which via OSC transmits messages to synthesis language ChucK for noisemaking. The surprise is, the multitouch input is not a Lemur or an iPhone – it’s the new MacBook touchpad under Snow Leopard!

iLoveAcid is a beautiful-looking nodal sequencer by Jakob Penca which uses wireframe “tracks” to guide music playback through a sequencer, transmitting events to your soundmaker of choice via MIDI or OSC. By using curved timelines and connections, it’s a veritable model railroad of music, in which formations combine to form more complex structures instead of simply stepping across a grid. Despite appearances, it is so far only two-dimensional – but then, the z displacement could easily be assigned to some form of modulation. I’m really eager to see the video of this.

One ingredient: Processing, which makes it easier to write visual code and to connect to Java libraries.

Project Page

The hardware controller for Native Instruments’ Maschine software drum machine has been adapted to other software, like Ableton Live. But this is surely the first time it’s been made into a game. Using Maschine’s MIDI output as a game control and sounds from Street Fighter, MaschineFighter is a simple, Simon-style rhythm game. Unlike Simon, though, there’s a twist – instead of rote patterns generated in advance, you face off against a friend and try to out-rhythm each other, battle style. I think it’s actually a pretty brilliant idea, and could become a new sensation for us electronic music nerds – not to mention, it’ll finally test our rhythm in a way electronic performance often does not. (Correction: It is Mac-only, making use of the PYMIDI Objective-C based library, which, since everything else that starts with “Py” usually means Python – a la jThings that mean Java – I assumed, incorrectly, was built on Python. But anyway, if you like the idea, carry on! And, actually, having a pure Objective-C CoreMIDI interface is also pretty awesome.)

Hoping for a video of this, too.

If you have a project that didn’t make this list, or if you add documentation after the fact, let us know.

What’s the cutest conceivable musical instrument? It’d be tough to top an anthromorphic musical note, complete with eight-note flag, whose smiling face opens when it “sings.”

Boing Boing Gadgets (by way of Tokyo Mango) gets the story on this latest creation of art group Maywa Denki and lead creative instigator Novmichi Tosa. The Otamatone is only barely practical as an instrument; it sports a nasal tone from its simple electronic oscillator and, at the end of the video, demonstrates an entirely new way to render the US National Anthem slightly out of tune. (Apologies to Jimi Hendrix.) But it also exhibits sheer genius, like shaking it to get vibrato and adjusting formants by squeezing the character’s mouth open and closed. And it easily trumps those horrible plastic Yamaha recorders we were all forced to play in school.

It’s almost a surprise to see Maywa Denki with something selling at retail, as their previous creations have been designed to be completely absurd. Take the Tsukuba Series of instrumental devices, which includes:

• An instrument built to punch bubble wrap (packing tape)
• A “voice vibrator” you strap to your throat
• A Brazilian percussion robot
• “Guitar-la,” an array of six guitars played by a pedal organ.

You can see those and other creations by clicking through the “Art” section of the project’s site; there are other wonderful (and kawaii) toys, too, called “nonsense toys”:

http://www.maywadenki.com/

I previously wrote about the strange aquatic-themed musical designs, evoking the shapes of fish bodies and skeletons:

Bizarre Fish-Themed Gadgets, Musical Instruments

It’s all pure design genius, and a reminder that designs need not be bereft of personality, whimsy, and the absurd.

Thanks to Tom Betts from whom I stole found this story.

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.

GPS Beatmap from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

“Locative art,” the idea that somehow location will feed into music and visuals, has eluded culture. We have the technology, in the form of sophisticated databases of location information and highly accurate, publicly-available GPS satellites. But it’s one of those solutions in search of a problem, and begs the question, why?

That is, until you unleash a nearly 6-liter V8 Ford LTD Crown Victoria on the legendary Bonneville Salt Flats, and your driving gets translated to music. Now it makes sense. And sweeping through the salty dust in one of America’s greatest action-car-chase cars of all time, manipulating music on a Max/MSP software patch, all becomes right with the world. (That’s how it is in my head, anyway.)

The planet is your control surface.

Such is the project sent by co-creator Jesse Stiles, who worked with Rich Pell (and editor/documentarian Olivia Robinson) under the name Face Removal Services to perform this vehicular musical production. (Thank, as well, The Center for Land Use Interpretation / GPS Expo 2006. PS – I think we now know what to do with all those clunkers Americans are turning in for Cash for Clunkers.)

Now, this covers only X and Y axis. I think we need to add the Z-axis, for base jumpers. (I had a dream last night in which I was hang gliding from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River below, a reminder that the Earth – and computer interfaces – do not have to be flat.)

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.

MetaSynth has long been something special, a rare tool beloved by sound designers and fans of unusual software for music. The creation of software designer Eric Wenger, creator of the 3D modeling tool Bryce, expressed his unique vision of how computer design could work for sound with interfaces to make synthesis, filtering, and effects more graphical. At the same time, you’d be forgiven for forgetting MetaSynth, as the independently-developed, Mac-only application has been out of the headlines a long time. Imagine my surprise to see Edward Spiegel’s announcement today of a new version.

Superficially, MetaSynth 5 looks the previous version, and I’m sure some people will balk at its US$599 price. But there’s plenty here that sounds truly promising, so I’m eager to give it a test drive in the coming days and weeks. And for MetaSynth loyalists, finally getting proper Intel processor support is a welcome, if long-overdue, development.

In MetaSynth 5:

• Universal Binary, multi-processor enabled — good news, as fancier effects do get CPU-intensive.
• New synthesis Phase distortion, Pulse Width Modulation among eleven new synthesis modes for the instrument framework. Parameters can now be controlled with envelopes and velocity, as well.
• Improved Image Synth: 14 new drawing tools and real-time swapping of instruments, tunings, and samples as you play back, plus batch rendering, which should make previewing and rendering much less of a chore.
• Convolution in the Effects Room: Hmmm… that sounds racy, at least for those of us with a sound design fetish.
• Spectrum manipulation: The Spectrum Synth now lets you select pitch range and adds – whatever this means, I’m stoked – “Time and Pitch Blur.”
• Big files: Render arbitrarily long files, and handle bigger files in the Sample Room.
• Mixing, file support: Mix 24 stereo tracks in the Montage Room, which works with their VTrack video montage editor. There’s also now “native support of .wav, .caf, .aiff and SoundDesigner audio files at resolutions up to 32-bit floating point and 96 kHz.”

As ever, MetaSynth isn’t going to be for everyone, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s aging. But as one of the cabinet of secret sauce of computer sound tools, you can bet some folks will be taking notice of this new release.

http://uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/ [click the MetaSynth 5 tab for the most relevant new information]

For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.

Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.

(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)

The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.

Download MP3 of the interview

Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.

Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!

More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano

Video + Audio Subscriptions, iTunes Podcast

CDM is now launching regular audio content on the artists and inventors we cover as part of our series CDM Sounds. You can subscribe (and review the podcast) via iTunes, where you’ll also find our new video series:

cdm Sounds Podcast [audio]
cdm TV [video]

Or using your software of choice, subscribe directly to RSS. (I like to follow podcasts with Banshee and Winamp this way.)

We’ve fixed some transcoding issues for iPod touch/iPhone on the video podcast. Please do test this and let us know if you have any issues on your software/hardware.

Performance with Cubie from sadmb on Vimeo.

Music sequencing as a Rubik’s Cube-style game, or hypnotic, kinetic rotating wheels – your piano roll won’t know what hit it. New musical art is set to be performed in Argentina, but you can download both tools, free.

Computer interfaces for music date back decades now, but with ingrained notions of hardware sound sequencers, linear media like tape, and hundreds of years of notation in staves and bars, old habits can be hard to kick. Yet it seems that suddenly, a younger generation of audiovisual composers is exploding notions of how musical interface and sequence could work, fully embracing a virtual space in which they themselves have come of age.

Next month’s spectacular-looking 404 Festival could make anyone want to book a flight to Argentina. Two highlighted artists from this festival for me really embody the possibilities of new sequencing metaphors. Both are built in Java.

At top, Cubie by Sadam Fujioka of Japan is free, downloadable software that combines audiovisual performance and game in a rotating cube.

Cubie is a software instrument which provides innovative idea of musical performance, differs from existing musical performance system such as musical notation, DJ systems, DAW systems, etc… It has a novel concept incorporating a new interactive technique based on puzzle games. Music is represented from highly saturated colored letters on a 3D cube. Almost unlimited number of melodies and rhythms can be created from a combination of those letters, and it can be changed on real-time by operations based on puzzle game. Those playful operations push a performer to play repeatedly and get the skill of performing with Cubie. Cubie is free software and you can play just like sadmb do.

More information in both Japanese and English at sadmb site (with lots of other software, as well). Built in Java with the use of JSyn for synthesis.

http://sadmb.com/

If these cubes feel overly rigid to you, though, and you don’t like the mechanical repetition of these lines, enter the crazy, spinning world of Hiroshi Matoba.

Hiroshi Matoba: OVERBUG from antjeverena on Vimeo.

Overbug is a music-performance tool designed to compose Minimal and Dance Music.

Through looping and newly arranging sound patterns, called ‘Bugsounds’, the program creates complex, polyrhythmic sounds. Overbug differs from conventional linear controlled music sequencers, which arrange the sound into a linear timeline from left to right. In Overbug the sound arrangement of the repeating music loops is equal to the visual abstraction of circular actions which built the interface through circles.

I showed a very early sketch I was working on last year of a circle-based sequencer, also built in Processing, though (cough) my chops are nowhere near Hiroshi’s. I was more interested in using the circles to subdivide cycles, as in Indonesian music. Seeing this piece is a major kick in my pants to try to work on my project a bit more and go a different direction.

Here’s a demo video explaining how this works:

More information + free download (just updated this month):
http://www.dominofactory.net/Overbug/

If You’re in Argentina

Don’t miss a terrific-looking exhibition of Japanese works and the rest of the
http://www.404festival.com/
(info in Spanish + English)

These two works clearly belonged together, but I feel bad for not featuring any Latin American (or Argentinian, specifically) work — those of you associated with 404, if you’ve got hot tips, send them in.