Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores
unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog [PDF]

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/
http://www.toktek.org/
http://gieskes.nl/
http://www.niklasroy.com/
http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

It starts as just another toy to play around with in a few minutes of distraction in your Web browser – as if the Web were short on distraction. But then, something amazing can happen. Like a musical Turing Test, you start to get a feeling for what’s happening on the other side. Someone’s stream of colored dots starts to jam with your stream of colored dots. You get a little rhythm, a little interplay going. And instead of being a barrier, the fact that you’re looking at simple animations and made-up names and playing a pretty little tune with complete strangers starts to feel oddly special. The absence of normal interpersonal cues makes you focus on communicating with someone, completely anonymously, using music alone.

Dinah Moe’s “Plink” is the latest glimpse of what Web browser music might be, and why it might be different than (and a compliment to) other music creation technology. You can now create private rooms to blow off steam with a faraway friend, or find new players online. It’s all powered with the Web Audio API, the browser-native, JavaScript-based tools championed by Mozilla. That means you’ll need a recent Chrome or Firefox (Chrome only at the moment; this is a Chrome Experiment), and mobile browsers won’t be able to keep up. But still, give it a try – I think you may be pleasantly surprised. (Actually, do it right now, as you’ll probably be doing it with other CDM readers. I expect greater things!)

http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/

Thanks to Robin Hunicke, who worked with multiplayer design and play at That Game Company’s Journey on PS3 and now on the browser MMO Glitch. I think her friends were more musical than most, because the place came alive after she linked from Facebook.

The browser is becoming a laboratory, a place to quickly try out ideas for music interaction, and for the code and structure that describe music in a language all their own. As in Plink, it can also benefit from being defined by the network and collaboration.

Dinah Moe’s experiments go in other directions, as well. In Tonecraft, inspired by the 3D construction metaphor of Minecraft, three-dimensional blocks become an alternative sequencer.

http://labs.dinahmoe.com/ToneCraft/

There are many reasons not to use Web tools. The Web Audio API still isn’t universal, and native options (like Google’s Native Client) have their own compatibility issues, stability concerns, and – because of security – they don’t do all the things a desktop application will. Desktop music tools are still more numerous, more powerful, and easier to use, so if you’re a reader out there finishing a thesis project, you might look elsewhere. (Actually, you’re probably in trouble, anyway, by any nation’s academic calendar, given it’s the First of May, but I digress.)

But think instead of this as another canvas, and the essential building blocks of interface design, code, and networking as shared across browsers and desktop apps. Somehow, in the light of the Internet, its new connectedness, and its new, more lightweight, more portable code and design options, software is changing. That transformation could happen everywhere.

If you need something to help you meditate on that and wait for a revelation to occur to you, I highly recommend watching a soothing stream of dots and some pleasing music as you jam with your mouse.

Of course, in the end, like a digital mirror, it might inspire you to go out to the park with a couple of glockenspiels and jam the old-fashioned way. But maybe that’s another reason to make software.

(Here’s a video, in case you’re not near a browser that supports the app!)

More, plus reflections on adaptive music:
http://labs.dinahmoe.com/

What if your musical instrument were gelatinous? Edible?

“Noisy Jelly” is the latest project to imagine that scenario. Thanks to the capacitive quality of gelatin (known to us Americans by the brand name JELL-O and to some simply as “jelly”), you can mix up a set of colored instruments that jiggle when you touch them. Powered by the open hardware platform Arduino to read sensors and Max/MSP to produce sound, it’s the work of a couple of Paris-based students, Raphaël and Marianne Cauvard.

Check out the terrific video featuring wide-eyed children, and specs below.

What makes this more delightful is the possibility that we’ll see orchestras of squishy, organic, edible instruments. NYC Resistor and our friend Ranjit Bhatnagar built their own instrument out of JELL-O (or fruit salad, depending on the iteration). The Gel-tone made a splash (erm, squish) as a more whimsical entry at the Guthman Musical Instrument competition, and was played and eaten at our own Handmade Lounge at Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hilariously, it debuted at (and was invented for) a JELL-O mold competition. See these couple of videos (Guthman top; Solid Sound bottom) below, and find more information on that instrument:

the resistor jeltone :: an edible toy piano [openMaterials]

How to make your own: The Resistor JelTone (I dearly hope this inspires more copy-cats. Let the gelatinous musical instrument revolution continue!)

More on the Noisy Jelly project:

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/MSP, there are absolut no sound editing in the video…
More picture at this Flickr set
And download the project PDF
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L’Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)

If you do make your own project, we’d love to see it. Perhaps a gel-orchestra is next.

Several people showed this to me; notably at DE:BUG (Deutsch)
http://de-bug.de/musiktechnik/archives/5820.html

What you’re watching in the video above doesn’t involve cameras or motion sensors. It’s the kind of brain-to-machine, body-to-interaction interface most of us associate with science fiction. And while the technology has made the occasional appearance in unusual, niche commercial applications, it’s poised now to blow wide open for music – open as in free and open source.

Erasing the boundary between contracting a muscle in the bio-physical realm and producing electronic sound in the virtual realm is what Xth Sense is all about. Capturing biological data is all the rage these days, seen primarily in commercial form in products for fitness, but a growing trend in how we might make our computers accessories for our bodies as well as our minds. (Or is that the other way around?) This goes one step further: the biological becomes the interface.

Artist and teacher Marco Donnarumma took first prize with this project in the prestigious Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech in the US. Born in Italy and based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Marco explains to us how the project works and why he took it up. It should whet your appetite as we await an open release for other musicians and tinkerers to try next month. (By the way, if you’re in the New York City area, Marco will be traveling to the US – a perfect chance to collaborate, meet, or set up a performance or workshop; shout if you’re interested.)

Hypo Chrysos live at Trendelenburg AV Festival, Gijon, Spain, December 2011.

CDM: Tell us a bit about yourself. You’re working across disciplines, so how do you describe what you do?

Marco: People would call me a media and sound artist. I would say what I love is performing, but at the same time, I’m really curious about things. So, most of the time I end up coding my software, developing devices and now even designing wearable tech. Since some years now I work only with free and open source tools and this is naturally reflected in what I do and how I do it. (Or at least I hope so!)

I just got back from Atlanta, US, where the Xth Sense (XS) was awarded the first prize in the Margaret Guthman New Musical Instrument, as what they named the “world’s most innovative new musical instrument.” [See announcement from Georgia Tech.]

It’s an encouraging achievement and I’m still buzzing, specially because the other 20 finalists all presented great ideas. Overall, it has been an inspiring event, and I warmly recommend musicians and inventors to participate next year. My final performance:

Make sure to use a proper soundsystem [when watching the videos]; most of the sound spectrum lives between 20-60Hz.

Music for Flesh II live at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Atlanta, USA, February 2012. Photo courtesy the artist.

You’re clenching your muscles, and something is happening – can you tell us how this XS system works?

Marco: My definition of it goes like “a biophysical framework for musical performance and responsive milieux.” In other words, it is a technology that extends some intrinsic sonic capabilities of the human body through a computer system that senses the physical energy released by muscle tissues.

I started developing it in September 2011 at the SLE, the Sound Lab at the Edinburgh University, and got it ready to go in March 2011. It has evolved a lot in many ways ever since.

The Xth Sense wearable biosensors by Chris Scott.

The XS is composed of custom biophysical sensors and a custom software.

At the onset of a muscle contraction, energy is released in the form of acoustic sound. This is to say, similarly to the chord of a violin, each muscle tissue vibrates at specific frequencies and produces a sound (called Mechanomyographic signal, or MMG). It is not audible to human ear, but it is indeed a soundwave that resonates from the body.

The MMG data is quite different from locative data you can gather with accelerometers and the like; whereas the latter reports the consequence of a movement, the former directly represents the energy impulse that causes that movement. If you add to this a high sampling rate (up to 192.000Hz if your sound card supports it) and very low latency (measured at 2.3ms) you can see why the responsiveness of the XS can be highly expressive.

The XS sensors capture the low-frequency acoustic vibrations produced by a performer’s body and send them to the computer as an audio input. The XS software analyzes the MMG in order to extract the characteristics of the movements, such as dynamics of a single gesture, maximum amplitude of a series of gestures in time, etc.

These are fed to some algorithms that produce the control data (12 discrete and continuous variables for each sensor) to drive the sound processing of the original MMG.

Eventually, the system plays back both the raw muscle sounds (slightly transposed to become better audible, say about 50/60Hz) and the processed muscle sounds.

I like to term this model of performance biophysical music, in contrast with biomusic, which is based on the electrical impulses of muscles and brainwaves.

By differently contracting muscles (which has a different meaning than simply “moving”) one can create and sculpt musical material in real-time. One can design a specific gesture that produces a specific sonic result, what I call a sound-gesture. These can be composed in a score, or improvised, or also improvised on a more or less fixed score.

The XS software has also a sensing sequencing time-line: with a little machine learning (just implemented few days ago) the system understands when you’re still or moving, when you’re being fast or slow, and can use this data to change global parameters, functions or to play with the timing of events. For example, the computer can track your behaviour in time and wait for you to stop whatever you’re doing before switching to a different set of funcions.

The XS sensors are wearable devices, so the computer can be forgotten in a corner of the stage; the performer has complete freedom on stage, and the audience is not exposed to the technology, but rather to the expressivity of the performance. What I like most about the XS is that is a flexible and multi-modal instrument. One can use it to:

• capture and playback acoustic sounds of the body,
• control audio and video software on the computer, or
• capture body sounds and control them through the computer simultaneously.

This opens up an interesting perspective on the applications of the XS to musical performance, dance, theatre and interaction design. The XS can also be used only as a gestural controller, although I never use it exclusively this way. We have thousands of controllers out there.

Besides, I wanted the XS to be accessible, usable, hackable and redistributable. Unfortunately, the commercialized product dealing with biosignals are mostly not cheap and — most importantly — closed to the community. See the Emotiv products (US$299 Neuro Headset, not for developers), or the BioFlex (US$392.73). One could argue that the technology is complex, and that’s why those devices are expensive and closed. This could make sense, but who says we can’t produce new technologies that openly offer similar or new capabilities at a much lower cost?

The formal recognition of the XS as an innovative musical instrument and the growing effort of the community in producing DIY EEG, ECG and Biohacking devices are a clear statement in this sense. I find this movement encouraging and possibly indispensable nowadays, as the information technology industry is increasingly deploying biometric data for adverts and security systems. For the geeky ones there are some examples in a recent paper of mine for the 2012 CHI workshop on Liveness.

For those reasons, the XS hardware design has been implemented in the simplest form I could think of; the parts needed to build an XS sensor cost about £5 altogether and the schematics looks purposely dumb. The sensors can be worn on any parts of the body. I worked with dancers who wore them on the neck and legs, a colleague stuck one to his throat to capture the resonances of his voice, I use them on the arms or to capture the pumping of the blood flow and the heart rate.

The XS software is free, based in Pd, aka Pure Data, and comes with a proper, user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) and its own library, which includes over one hundred objects with help files. It is developed on Linux, and it’s Mac OS X compatible; I’m not developing for Windows, but some people got it working there too. A big thumb up goes to our wonderful Pd Community; if I had not been reading and learning through the Pd mailing list for the past 5 years I would have never been able to code this stuff.

The Xth Sense software Graphical User Interface. Built in Pd.

The public release of the project will be in April. The source code, schematics, tutorials, will be freely available online, and there will be DIY kits for the lazier ones. I’m already collecting orders for the first batch of DIY kits, so if anybody is interested please, get in touch:
http://marcodonnarumma.com/contact

I do hope to see the system hacked and extended, especially because the sensors were initially built with the support of the folks at the Dorkbot ALBA/Edinburgh Hacklab. I’m also grateful to the community around me, friends, musicians, artists devs and researchers for contributing to the success of the project by giving feedback, inspiring and sharing (you know who you are!).

Thanks, Marco! We’ll be watching!

More on the Work

http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/xth-sense/
http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/music-for-flesh-ii/
http://res.marcodonnarumma.com/blog/

And the Edinburgh hack lab:
http://edinburghhacklab.com/

Biological Interfaces for Music

There isn’t space here to recount the various efforts to do this; Marco’s design to me is notable mainly in its simplicity and – hopefully, as we’ll see next month – accessibility to other users. I’ve seen a number of brain interfaces just in the past year, but perhaps someone with more experience on the topic would like to share; that could be a topic for another post.

Entirely unrelated to music, but here’s the oddest demo video I’ve seen of human-computer interfacing, which I happened to see today. (Well, unrelated to music until you come up with something this crazy. Go! I want to see your band playing with interactive animal ears.)

Scientific American’s blog tackles the question this week (bonus 80s sci-fi movie reference):
Brain-Machine Interfaces in Fact and Fiction

I’ve used up my Lawnmower Man reference quota for the month, so tune in in April.

It started as some compelling demos or proof of concept, but it’s plenty real now: the tools for translating movement, gesture, and dance from the body to interactive music march forward. Empowered by Microsoft’s Kinect and an artist-friendly toolchain, even a single, clever developer can do a lot. Sound designer, music producer, and Max/MSP developer Chris Vik of Melbourne has been one of those busy early pioneers, with an incredible tool called Kinectar.

So, the tech is cool and shiny and impressive: what about the actual music? And, even more importantly, what if all the hand waving and moving about could be meaningful? That’s the next step. For his part, Chris is teaming up with a dancer and choreographer to combine his compositional ideas with someone who knows how to move. The Dubstep-y demos (all below) are impressive, true, but the early tests of the work with the choreographer are simply beautiful, and demonstrate that wobble bass isn’t the limit of what this can do. They also turn the arbitrary arm-waggling into a part of the art.

And as for you: the software’s alpha, but you can fire up your copy of software like Ableton Live and grab this software for Mac or Windows and try it yourself. So if you don’t like the results – be the gesture-controlled basslines too wobbly, be they not wobbly enough – you can put your music, and your movement, where your mouth is.

At top, Chris shows off an early test of the dance collab. (There’s more to come.) Below, a tutorial that shows how this works with Ableton. And read on for more from Chris on what the work with the dancer is about, and what the tool can do.

Chris writes:

Since April 2011 I’ve been working solidly with the Microsoft Kinect, developing my software, Kinectar, to enable its use as a MIDI controller for performing music live. I’ve done a number of performances around Australia since I started the project, however, it’s safe to say that, although I would consider myself an electronic musician, I’m certainly no dancer. Enter, Paul…

Dancer, Paul Walker and I have joined forces to bring the Kinect controlled music concept into the world of contemporary dance. Recently we obtained a residency at PACT theatre (centre for emerging artists), where we spent the week developing different ways of implementing my Kinect music control system in a dance context.

My system is developed in Max and uses OpenNI drivers, OSCeleton and Ableton Live.

via Chris’ blog

CDM will check back in with Chris soon, because:

I’ve got some more videos to release over the coming weeks from a range of my different Kinect music performance applications, including controlling/conducting the Melbourne Town Hall Organ and a 100+ speaker Kinect-controlled diffusion performance. I’ll keep you posted when they’re released!

More on the software:

Kinectar Performance Platform is a toolkit developed by music producer Chris Vik to allow the use of Microsoft’s Kinect motion tracking sensor in computer-based music. The software is designed for electronic musicians to expand the way they control their music in a futuristic and extremely expressive way, using only the waving of hands and a small amount of creativity. It can be used to control the simplest of parameters like a filter or LFO, play notes and chords on a sampler or synthesizer, or be programmed to control an entire live-set through nothing more than gesture.

Key Features:

Movement Tracking UI allows manipulation of the Kinect’s human tracking capabilities, displaying all relevant data extracted from the hands location in 3d-space

Instrument Builder lets the user build virtual ‘instruments’ by outputting MIDI notes in three modes:

• Static – Produces a single note value. Useful for drum triggers, turning on/off effects within a DAW or feed that trigger into Kinectar to switch between presets using your gesture
• Solo – Do sweeping solos by selecting from over 40 musical scale presets or click the notes on the UI to make your own
• Chord – Create a progression of up to 8 chords per preset to play live

Global Flags lets you turn on/off Kinectar’s instruments using a MIDI note sent from your DAW, external MIDI controller or Kinectar itself

MIDI Preset Control lets you switch between Kinectar’s presets and instruments using a single MIDI note

Value Editor enables many more MIDI/OSC outputs, for controlling device values

Visual Metronome popout window sits on top of all programs to make it easy to see if you’re in-time when the music gets messy

It’s labeled “rough alpha,” so don’t expect a finished tool here, but you can go download it and give it a try (or learn more about what’s possible):

http://kinectar.org/download

And now, the obligatory (but quite awesome, Chris) Dubstep demo videos:

FRACT is a curious combination of music studio and puzzle game, merging elements of games like Myst with the sorts of synths and pattern editors you’d expect somewhere like Ableton Live. You have to make sounds and melodies to solve puzzles; by the end of the game, say the creators, you’re even producing original music. The work of a small student team out of Montreal, FRACT looks like it has all the makings of an underground indie hit – at least for music nerds.

As the creators describe it:

FRACT is a first person adventure game for Windows & Mac much in the vein of the Myst titles, but with an electro twist. Gameplay boils down to three core activities: Explore, Rebuild, Create. The player is let loose into an abstract world built on sound and structures inspired by electronic music. It’s left to the player to explore the environment to find clues to resurrect and revive the long-forgotten machinery of this musical world, in order to unlock its inner workings. Drawing inspiration from Myst, Rez and Tron, the game is also influenced by graphic design, data visualization, electronic music and analog culture.

The hub of the game is a virtual studio, collecting patterns and timbres. It’s right now in prototype phase, but it already looks visually stunning, an alien, digital world in which more-conventional step-sequencer views seem to emerge from futuristic landscapes. And you can spot Pd in the background (the free and open source patching tool, Pure Data). Update: the developers confirm that they’re working with the embeddable Pd library, libpd. That enables synths with sounds like phase modulation and classic virtual analog sounds, all modulating and generating sounds in-game.

The developers have also published plenty of sound samples so you can experience the musical side of this. Via SoundCloud:

While never released, one place some similar ideas has shown up is a prototype game inspired by Deadmau5. As in this title, two-dimensional editing screens and synth parameters are mapped to a first-person, three-dimensional environment. However, FRACT appears to take this concept much further, expanding upon the world, building more instruments, and actually turning those interactions into gameplay elements. The video of the Deadmau5 project – apparently done in-house for fun and not endorsed by the mouse-headed artist:

That title was the work of a game house called Floaty Hybrid; music blog Synthtopia got the scoop on this in August:
http://www.floathybrid.com
Mau5Bot Sequencer Lets You Make Music In A 3D World [Synthtopia]

We’ll be watching this one develop, certainly; good luck to the team!
http://fractgame.com/

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!)