Electronic music making has had several major epochs. There was the rise of the hardware synth, first with modular patch cords and later streamlined into encapsulated controls, in the form of knobs and switches. There was the digital synth, in code and graphical patches. And there was the two-dimensional user interface.

We may be on the cusp of a new age: the three-dimensional paradigm for music making.

AudioGL, a spectacularly-ambitious project by Toronto-based engineer and musician Jonathan Heppner, is one step closer to reality. Three years in the making, the tool is already surprisingly mature. And a crowd-sourced funding campaign promises to bring beta releases as soon as this summer. In the demo video above, you can see an overview of some of its broad capabilities:

• Synthesis, via modular connections
• Sample loading
• The ability to zoom into more conventional 2D sequences, piano roll views, and envelopes/automation
• Grouping of related nodes
• Patch sharing
• Graphical feedback for envelopes and automation, tracked across z-axis wireframes, like circuitry

All of this is presented in a mind-boggling visual display, resembling nothing more than constellations of stars.

Is it just me, or does this make anyone else want to somehow combine modular synthesis with a space strategy sim like Galactic Civilizations? Then again, that might cause some sort of nerd singularity that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum – or at least ensure we never have any normal human relationships again.

Anyway, the vitals:

• It runs on a lowly Lenovo tablet right now, with integrated graphics.
• The goal is to make it run on your PC by the end of the year. (Mac users hardly need a better reason to dual boot. Why are you booting into Windows? Because I run a single application that makes it the future.)
• MIDI and ReWire are onboard, with OSC and VST coming.
• With crowd funding, you’ll get a Win32/64 release planned by the end of the year, and betas by summer (Windows) or fall/winter (Mac).

I like this quote:

Some things which have influenced the design of AudioGL:
Catia – Dassault Systèmes
AutoCAD – Autodesk
Cubase – Steinberg
Nord Modular – Clavia
The Demoscene

Indeed. And with computer software now reaching a high degree of maturity, such mash-ups could open new worlds.

Learn about the project, and contribute by the 23rd of March via the (excellent) IndieGogo:

http://audiogl.com

Design, and investigation in general, thrive on a challenge. So Bastus Trump, working with none other than Monolake co-founder and Ableton imagineer Robert Henke, took on the call to make the blank glass of an iPad behave more as an instrument might. The results, filling that screen with overlapping circles, are impressive, exploiting continuous touch movements to make pitch gestures that are more difficult on a piano-style keyboard. But it’s even nicer to see digital fuse with analog and timbral transformation as the app, Orphion, meets the more traditional Moog Moogerfooger effects.

Bastus writes CDM:

[Orphion's] interface was developed especially for a touch screen and allows very expressive — and also virtuosic — playing. You can choose between different layouts of tonally-tuned pads, which sound differently depending on the finger position when played, and can be modulated by further movements. The sound and the means of interaction is a mixture of string and percussion instruments and reaches from soft to plucked to a hard slap.

The concept of the Orphion results from my master thesis at UdK Berlin supervised by Robert Henke (aka monolake). The topic was to develop an interface for multi-touch screens that allows a maximum of expression.

So, you can see a quick demo of how it’s played. But just how would this fit into your studio? For the answer to that question, we turn to our friend Chris Stack and his excellent Experimental Synth series.

In this episode:

Playing the Orphion iPad app through a Moog MF-102 Ring Modulator and MF-104Z Analog Delay. Moogerfooger parameters are controlled with the Moog Voyager Touch Surface CV outputs.

experimentalsynth.com

Thanks for the great work, Bastus. We’ll be watching.

iPad only; download the app or provide your own review on our exclusive Apps section:
http://apps.createdigitalmusic.com/apps/orphion

[Oh, yeah. About that. Announcement coming shortly. Consider yourself with the scoop by virtue of having read to the end of this article.]

Music is deeply tied up with motion; seeing that in a machine is somehow satisfying. Soundmachines, from the enigmatically-titled Berlin studio TheProduct*, is an interactive physical installation made from optical turntables. By moving the “tone arm” – really in this case an optical sensor attached to an extended mount – you can change rhythms and sound sweeps.

We’ve naturally seen many visualizations, tangible and digital, that make loops into wheels. But it’s worth noting the particular connection to a kinetic experiment by The Books’ Nick Zammuto from the film earlier this week. In fact, my one criticism of this piece is that the rhythms are so regular. Some syncopation in a machine like this would be not only pleasing, but immediately visible to the eye and therefore understandable. Perhaps even decoupling the wheels from the motor could allow a user to experiment with sound. That doesn’t mean you have to go from minimal techno to irregular chaos, but there’s quite a lot in between.

That’s not to take away from the impact of this piece, and in particular, the beauty of its installation. The presentation in an iconic object is a message in itself. And the circle remains the ideal design for a looped rhythm, embedded as it is in the repetition we perceive in our world.

http://www.the-product.org/soundmachines

More details:

Three units, which are resembling standard record players, translate concentric visual patterns into control signals for further processing in any music software. The rotation of the discs, each holding three tracks, can be synced to a sequencer.
The Soundmachines premiered on the Volkswagen New Beetle stand at the IAA motor show in late Summer 2011. In cooperation with the sounddesigner/producer Yannick Labbé of TRICKSKI fame, we developed three unique discs, each controlling one track of an Ableton Live Set exclusively made for the Event. The show was supported by a set of realtime generated visuals, running on a 25m wide LED wall.


One/One oneone-studio.com
TheProduct* the-product.org

Client

Volkswagen

Agency

Vok Dams, Hamburg

Sounddesign/Producer IAA
Yannick Labbé yannicklabbe.com

Special Thanks

Matt Karau
 matt.karau.com
Andreas Schmelas invertednothing.com

(See also a compelling-looking visual collage. It’s supposed to be set to John Cage’s “First Interlude,” but because of copyright concerns, is instead (arguably) set to Cage’s 4’33″. Let’s hope they don’t get sued for that.

Add this to the Internet of Things: imagine data recording scratching and scratch performances.

Technologists Jamie Wilkinson, Michael Auger, and Kyle McDonald propose a new way of storing scratch moves as data. They’re not just working in traditional ways, either: they’re hacking turntables and optical mice and cameras, and imagine not only recording performances, but having machines recreate scratching. (Robots!) And they want your help. Kyle writes:

i’m going to be leading a group at art hack day ( brooklyn, january 26th-28th www.arthackday.net/ ) about scratch markup
language, a tool for recording performances from turntablists.

this describes the general idea and who we’re
looking for. we need everyone from web designers/developers, to
hardware hackers, coders and musicians. if you’re interested, or know someone who is interested, contact me or join the google group groups.google.com/group/arthackday/

(We cover the awesomeness that is Graffiti Markup Language on Motion, which goes further to explaining why this sort of data storage can be powerful and enabling.)

All is described – rather bizarrely – in an image. (Can we have plain text, please? It is, at least, a pretty picture!)

The latest in a long tradition of transforming hand-drawn graphics into music (see, in particular, Iannis Xenakis and UPIC), we see a computer-vision-powered pen-and-paper music generator. Kovacs Balazs writes:

This is a manual sounddrawer. Doesn’t need any sensors, but a camera, paper, colored pens. Doesn’t need sensor glove or reactable as well.

What I love about this, though, is that the resulting sounds are utterly crazy, a big collision of notes and sound.

By the way, UPIC lives on here in a very advanced program descended from the original tool:
http://www.iannix.org/en/index.php

From credits: Magyar Eötvös Ösztöndíj Alapítvány, UCSB-MAT, CSALÁD

More:
http://soundsofpictures.blogspot.com/2012/01/17.html

Compare the complex model of what a computer can use to control sound and musical pattern in real-time to the visualization. You see knobs, you see faders that resemble mixers, you see grids, you see – bizarrely – representations of old piano rolls. The accumulated ephemera of old hardware, while useful, can be quickly overwhelmed by a complex musical creation, or visually can fail to show the musical ideas that form a larger piece. You can employ notation, derived originally from instructions for plainsong chant and scrawled for individual musicians – and quickly discover how inadequate it is for the language of sound shaping in the computer.

Or, you can enter a wild, three-dimensional world of exploded geometries, navigated with hand gestures.

Welcome to the sci fi-made-real universe of Portland-based Christian Bannister’s subcycle. Combining sophisticated, beautiful visualizations, elegant mode shifts that move from timbre to musical pattern, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional interactions, it’s a complete visualization and interface for live re-composition. A hand gesture can step from one musical section to another, or copy a pattern. Some familiar idioms are here: the grid of notes, a la piano roll, and the light-up array of buttons of the monome. But other ideas are exploded into spatial geometry, so that you can fly through a sound or make a sweeping rectangle or circle represent a filter.

Ingredients, coupling free and open source software with familiar, musician-friendly tools:

• Two projectors
• A monome
• Processing, the elegant and artist-savvy free software for visual code
• Ableton Live and Cycling ’74′s Max for Live, acting as the interactive glue with the sound world
• Drumaxx, Image-Line’s tasty physical-modeled drum synth
• Native Instruments Battery, the sampled drum engine
• Eclipse, the free IDE, for Java coding in this case
• Community Core Vision and reacTIVision (based on our previous info, at least), free and open source community-based projects for making the interfaces you see in movies happen in real life.

Another terrific video, which gets into generating a pattern:

Now, I could say more, but perhaps it’s best to watch the videos. Normally, when you see a demo video with 10 or 11 minutes on the timeline, you might tune out. Here, I predict you’ll be too busy trying to get your jaw off the floor to skip ahead in the timeline.

At the same time, to me this kind of visualization of music opens a very, very wide door to new audiovisual exploration. Christian’s eye-popping work is the result of countless decisions – which visualization to use, which sound to use, which interaction to devise, which combination of interfaces, of instruments – and, most importantly, what kind of music. Any one of those decisions represents a branch that could lead elsewhere. If I’m right – and I dearly hope I am – we’re seeing the first future echoes of a vast, expanding audiovisual universe yet unseen.

Previously:
Subcycle: Multitouch Sound Crunching with Gestures, 3D Waveforms

And lots more info on the blog for the project:
http://www.subcycle.org/

Something I always appreciated about classical music training was learning to appreciate the particulars of each instrument, whether or not you played them yourself. A French Horn, for instance, is not an instrument without challenges: everything from tuning to balancing dynamic range to how you look when you add and remove muting can be demanding. And in technology – whether acoustic instrumental or digital – every design is about tradeoffs. You very often can’t get one thing without giving up something else. So I stand by the questions I asked about iPad synths in general last week, particularly as I had Moog’s own, brilliant analog synths and effects as a point of comparison. My aim was not to dismiss the iPad or Animoog – I was quite serious in my praise for Animoog and I think I’ve been reasonably committed to ongoing, often enthusiastic iPad coverage since its launch. Instead, I wanted to begin a conversation about how these tools are used as instruments that includes real critical discussion.

And that’s what I think we got. Readers responded en masse, and amidst some heated discussion (some of it having more to do with whether I’d lost my mind than the particular merits of Animoog), I thought there were some compelling points. I heard from developers, too, on and off the record, and I suspect this will continue to lead to experimentation in mobile software. I also really enjoyed Marc Doty’s impassioned response, which I thought raised some equally worthwhile questions about soft synths on computers. Incidentally, I also heard from a lot of people who went out and bought Animoog because they saw the story on CDM.

In the meantime, hordes of synth lovers have descended on Moog’s Animoog, making it very likely the most successful virtual iPad synth launch yet, at least in the traditional synthesizer mold.

Learning Animoog: The best of these videos is at top, a video tutorial as many readers had requested. Tip of the hat to Synthtopia here for following up on this issue. The video tutorial makes it really clear how to navigate Animoog’s deep and powerful synth interface. See also the official Moog tour at second from top for a speedier walkthrough.

Working out how to play it: Other videos investigate performance. One common theme with Animoog, and iOS apps in general, is whether you’ll focus primarily on the touch interface or external control hardware. Animoog applies a unique control solution to the touch UI, and one that many readers seem to feel is very effective. This gives you two principal advantages of the iPad as a tablet: you get the novel multi-touch controller, which allows gestures that something like a MIDI keyboard wouldn’t, and you retain the device’s superior mobility.

Mark Jenkins’ extensive video review really does the best job, I think, of examining the Animoog on its own terms, as a standalone iPad synth, using the multi-touch interface. I couldn’t possibly have topped the depth of this video review; kudos to Mark.

On the other hand, that won’t stop people from experimenting with adding an external interface. As our friend and MeeBlip co-creator James Grahame put it, the tactile experience of the iPad is the same as running your finger along a bathroom mirror. Instruments have frets and keys for a reason; tactile feedback allows you to play them without looking directly at them. So, I think it’s an advantage that iOS’ MIDI input hardware support at least gives you a choice. You still get a software instrument that runs on an instant-on tablet rather than buried in menus on a computer. And as readers point out, it’s affordable, though I’d say the cost of Animoog isn’t exactly “$1″ — you do have to buy that iPad and its dongles and keep it running, just as a computer requires care and feeding. Even if you only ever ran Animoog on your iPad, though, you’d be at the cost of a lot of low-end synths that are far less interesting in the hardware domain.

Geert Bevin has been talking to CDM behind the scenes – more on the Eigenharp soon — and I think has some real insights into comparing the iPad’s input and an external input. Like me, he has some good things to say about Animoog’s solution; he just suggests that you can have even more fun with an additional controller. A MIDI keyboard might well be disappointing, so enter the more-exotic Eigenharp. He also uses the Alesis iODock for better I/O capabilities; at least one reader via Twitter complained that the Animoog wasn’t “professional” because of the iPad’s poor built-in minijack. So, what you get in this rig is definitely not a “pure” iPad experience – you’re adding some weight and additional devices. But it might be one that you really enjoy, and that still gets you away from your MacBook for a bit.

This video gives a brief overview of the Animoog’s features and also shows how expressive it is when played with an Eigenharp Pico over MIDI using poly-pressure.

The Eigenharp and Animoog seems like a match made in heaven since the Eigenharp is able to send three independent detailed per-note performance data streams and the Animoog is able to react to this on a per-note level. Also, the visualization of the sound on the Animoog is marvelous, it gives a great representation of what your sound is doing.

The iPad is hooked up to my MacBook Pro using USB MIDI from the Alesis iODock, the Eigenharp Pico is also hooked up to the laptop and sends MIDI from the EigenD application to the ‘dock’ MIDI port. This uses a small MIDI-only Eigenharp Pico setup that loads very quickly and provides 16 MIDI playing keys with poly-pressure and three independent data streams for each key (pressure, left/right, up/down), as well as two 3D controller keys that are somewhat similar to little joysticks and are sending each three independent streams of MIDI CC data also.

The sound: A video compares audio fidelity of Animoog to the “real” thing — analog hardware. A number of commenters also noted that Animoog most likely uses sampled wavetables as its oscillator sources rather than modeling, but that approach can indeed yield good sounds. I’m not terribly surprised by the success of the Animoog in standing up to these other instruments; years of experience in soft synths suggests that you can get good results from virtual instruments. In fact, I remain more interested in what people actually do musically, and what about an instrument makes them happy more than splitting hairs about audio fidelity. If this video helps liberate you to go play with Animoog, have at it!

Synthesis, Still the Frontier: One closing thought: part of what interests me about synthesizers is that, even with a huge volume of music made with them and some generally-understood conventions, there are really no shared rules about how to play them. In acoustic instruments, there is at least a rough notion of certain folk traditions, or classical traditions, or “extended techniques” as something that stands apart from common practice. I think we’re still learning what the heck synths are.

Every aspect of the design of a synthesizer can therefore be fair game for consideration, including the spaghetti tangles of modular patch cords or the keyboard + mod wheel + pitch bend Minimoog-style arrangement. What synths are, how they might sound, and how we might play them and turn them into music remain open-ended. So, I hope that any criticism is not grounds for hand-wringing, as someone put it, but an added motivation to go and experiment and play. I know it is for me. Synth on.

Next up: we’re long overdue giving a look at the various iPad synths and how you might use them. Since Animoog isn’t the “first professional” synth, it’s time to line it up with some of its rivals. Unlike with a computer soft synth, though, you probably aren’t terribly concerned with outlay of cash; it may be a more “what are all of the synths you’d buy” question than comparing x, y, and z. If you have nominees you’d like to see explored, or ways in which you’d like to see us cover iOS (or anything else, for that matter), let us know. And remember, tell us what you really think — okay, I probably don’t have to say that. (ducks)

Touch on devices like the iPad is functional, but limited in its expression – there’s no pressure or tactile feedback. That’s why we’ve enthusiastically followed Randy Jones’ “continuous capacitive sensing” technology on the Soundplane for some time. Sensing pressure, it behaves more like an acoustic instrument might – that is, if such an acoustic instrument were possible beyond the imagination of the digital realm.

As advertised, it “transmits x, y and pressure data for every key continuously at 12 bits of resolution and about 1000 samples per second, letting players move beyond the ADSR envelope model of synthesis and articulate each note individually, as on an acoustic instrument.”

While Randy has a patent pending, he still encourages people to follow his documentation of the technology to build their own. But if you’d like one nicely built for you, the Soundplane is now available as a US$1695. There’s even a bundled version of Madrona Labs’ wonderful Aalto patchable modular software synthesizer for your computer, especially customized to work with the Soundplane. (And dig those nice three-dimensional visualizations of pressure in the video.)

There won’t be many of these first units out in the world: the first run is limited to just 30 units. Of course, if it’s successful, I’d expect to see more. And you could have something special in the first-available hardware (I’d jump if I weren’t saving my pennies!)

Our own Matt Earp is working on an interview with Randy, so here’s your opportunity – what would you like to ask Randy about his creation?

If you happen to be in California, Randy is putting together a West Coast US tour. Dates and description below.

And for more pictures, see below.

Robotspeak, San Francisco, Saturday Nov 5, 4pm
CNMAT, Berkeley, Monday Nov 7 (unconfirmed — check back to madronalabs.com for info)
UCSB, Media Arts and Technology Seminar, Tue Nov 8, 5:30 pm
Calarts Seminar, Thur Nov 10, 6:30pm

Some of the events may differ slightly from this Robotspeak description, says Randy, but this gives you an idea – I love the thesis here.

Multitouch interfaces: beyond the tablet.

Madrona Labs and Robotspeak are happy to present this seminar on music and multitouch interface. Thanks to smartphones and tablet computing, multitouch interfaces have been a common topic of discussion over the past few years. Phones and tablets are general-purpose tools that have their pros and cons for music making. As multitouch technology becomes specialized for music performance, what will future hardware and software look like?

Madrona Labs has one answer in the form of the Soundplane, a new instrument designed specifically for computer music performance, shipping in limited quantities this Fall. Randy Jones, the Soundplane’s inventor, will present a prototype, demonstrate some of what it offers to musicians, and make it available for hands-on time by attendees.

Other visions of multitouch will spring from DIY efforts and maker culture. Capacitive sensing is a simple technology that makers can easily integrate into new designs. Randy will show how to make touch sensors with little more than some foam, tinfoil and an audio interface, and discuss the benefits as well as the limitations of these devices. More hands-on play and quite possbily a cacophony of bleeps will result.

http://madronalabs.com

Here’s a software release I don’t think most observers saw coming: Roland has new software for computers and iPads that lets you edit visually. The underlying VariPhrase technology is familiar from other Roland products, though combined here with something Roland calls V-Remastering.

The upshot is this: you begin with a heat map-like visual of a sound’s spectrum, then pull on components of a mix, isolating the volume levels of different parts of a track. Think visual mash-ups and karaoke tracks, as well as clean-up.

What can you do once you have those components? Isolate components, adjust their mix, and add effects and noise cancel.

Once isolated, you can also change pitch, time, and formant independently. You don’t get note-by-note control in the same way that you do with Celemony’s Melodyne product, but you do get independent pitch and time. (I’m not yet clear on whether that’s also in the iPad version.)

There’s also a simplified iPad version called R-MIX Tab, a new move for Roland’s software lineup. As you can see in the screenshots, you can’t do as much with the iPad edition, but it still looks relatively capable. Oh, and that “Tab” name implies that maybe Roland is at least considering tablet tech running Android and Windows 8.

Pricing and availability information were not yet available; TBD. I’ll be interested to see how this works, and how people use it. Roland has a slew of announcements; more on the others by tomorrow.

http://www.rolandconnect.com/product.php?p=r-mix

While we’re on the subject of making music with Kinect, the 3D computer vision camera with depth-sensing, here are some other experiments into how music might work. As with the classic Theremin, those musical gestures tend to be mapped against two-dimensional axes in space.

And from there, things become wide open. Johannes Kreidler, a musician and artist known for irreverent and inventive experiments in music, shares his studies for the Kinect, which he terms “conceptual music.” A solo “for violin” can involve literally waving a violin around. “House music” can mean making music whilst ironing a shirt. Any gesture in space becomes musical. Without tangible feedback, that can be challenging, and since these are just gestures in air, precision and nuance may not be a strong suit. But it’s a fascinating look into what’s possible, a set of thought experiments in music with a camera.

Composer Johannes Kreidler’s other works have included provocative ideas like making a performance of a short piece with 70,200 quotations of other “sampled” works, tunes from wildly-gyrating stock market quotes, entire bodies of work (like the Beatles) compressed into seconds, and pieces from avant-garde happenings to more conventional electro-acoustic scores. See his site for more.

And he’s got a killer book on using Pd, too.