Touchable tablets may be all the rage at the CES trade show, showcase to consumer-friendly gadgetry. But quietly, developer Sensomusic has accomplished multi-touch control of an open-ended music system on standard-issue PCs and accessories. They’ve pointed the way to just what this mechanism could be.

The latest video isn’t terribly easy to see, but it realizes something that has been the dream of fans of the music control protocol OSC (OpenSoundControl). “Learn” functionality lets you touch a control, then assign that control to something in your music software. But because these functions have relied on MIDI, they’ve generally been a bit arbitrary – touch one thing at a time, get a number for that thing, then assign that number to a controller. It works well enough, provided you step through each control. OSC promises to do more, though: an arbitrary touch controller on, say, your iPhone (or anything else) can have a plain-English name. And you can see multiple parameters appear on the screen at once, so that a sensor or multi-touch pad could have all its messages pop up at the same time.

Finally, Usine does OSC Learn correctly, with messages that pop up with names and get connected to whatever you like. I still think there’s more potential here to be plumbed, but it’s a great step.

If you don’t follow why that’s cool, check out another mapping notion from last year – here using a touch panel to make any graphic playable. And at the end of this story, check out the clever multitouch gesture recognition they’ve added.

Again, all of this you can do with standard-issue hardware – Apple iOS hardware, if you like, controlling a PC, or non-Apple hardware displays with touch or Android devices and the like. (Unlike the Emulator we saw earlier today or the original Lemur device, it’s a software solution that works with your hardware of choice.) More to watch:

More information (and more videos):
http://www.sensomusic.com/usine/

2011 has seen sweeping changes in technology and music, alongside the loss of titans Max Mathews and Tsutomu Katoh, two pioneers of our world. Some of these stories passed quietly; some with great fanfare. Here, we reveal those stories that attracted the greatest number of Internet eyeballs, a metric not necessarily of importance but certainly of what reached the widest audience on this site. And there are definite trends: a hunger for mobile, both the explosive growth of iOS and tablets, but also a resurgent interest in MIDI (not to give away the end) and a desire by owners of devices powered by Apple’s rival Android to find tools themselves. Traditional tools, too, make a strong showing – people still care about DAWs, about production. And affordable, do-everything tools fare well.

Hidden from this list are many other stories significant to me, though remembering just which occurred between January the first of last year and now strains my brain. (CDM is external memory.) If you recall a story that was significant to you on this site – or even one we missed – let us know.

In the meantime, here’s what the eyes of the Internet watched – ranked by page views in our analytics tool:

30.

The Handheld Studio Evolves: Beatmaker 2 Developers Explain their iPhone Workflow

29.

Touchable Music: At Last, Lemur’s Interactive Touch Controls Make it to iPad (Videos)

28.

Music Patchwork: Ableton Makes Max for Live Cheaper, Showcases Creations by Henke, Hawtin, More

27.

Spectral Layers Audio Editor Focuses on Editing Sound Visually, a la Photoshop

26.

Mixing and Audio Interface, in the $450 MOTU Audio Express

25.

Euclidean Rhythms in Ableton MIDI Clips for Polyrhythmic Good Times; Microtonal Operator

24.

Tsutomu Katoh, Korg Founder and Chairman, Has Passed Away

23.

Rumors Mounting for Imminent Logic Pro X, a la Final Cut Pro X; No-Brainer Speculation

Yup, those no-brainer predictions were … no-brainer predictions. Spoiler alert: Logic 9 and Updated MainStage on App Store, at Cut-Rate Prices

22.

Mobile Korg Fun: Monotribe Adds Patterns and Sync, Wavedrum Mini is On-the-go Drum; Impressions

21.

FL Studio Mobile, Now Available on iPhone, iPad; Sampling, Android Support to Come

20.

Modeling Analog in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Universal Audio’s Chief Scientist; Gallery

19.

Playing the City: An Eindhoven Pianola Makes Urban Landscape into Music

18.

Expanding Touch and MIDI, Mobile iOS Control Gets More Mature in New and Updated Apps; Round-Up

17.

Akai Turns an iPad Into a Full-Sized Music Keyboard: Akai SynthStation49

16.

FL Studio “Fruity Loops” 10 Adds 64-bit Savvy, Smarter Editing, New Pitch, Time, and Harmony Add-ons

15.

Apple Gets Into iPad Music with $5 GarageBand

14.

Cubase 6: Amidst Familiar Leapfrog Features, A New Approach to Note-by-note Expression Editing

13.

KORG monotron DUO, monotron DELAY Bring Fun Back, via Mono/Poly, MS Circuits and Pocket Size

12.

Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official

11.

Virtual DJ Controllers: New Hardware for Serato, Traktor from Pioneer, Numark

10.

Useful Music Tools for Your Android Phone, and a New Sketchpad Joins Groovebox

9.

Making Music with Free and Open Source Software: Top Picks from Red Hat, Dave Phillips

8.

Learn Mastering Technique in Free Videos: Limiting, M/S, Dubstep Bass

7.

Reason 6 Combines Record Features, Adds Effects; New Bundles and First Props Hardware Interface

6.

First Look at Roland Jupiter-80, Images, and Reflections on the Jupiter Legacy

5.

Native Instruments’ Razor Synth: Dubstep to Ambience, Free Tutorial and Loops

4.

Android Adds USB Host + Audio, Open Hardware ADK with Arduino; Good News for Mobile Music

3.

A Flute Made on a 3D Printer, and the Possibilities to Come

2.

A Few Good TouchOSC Layouts, from Waldorf to Traktor to Ableton, and a Brief Rant

1.

How to Use MIDI to Make an iPad More Musically Connected, Productive: Video, Resources

Have an uncommon yule with tools and music from the Commons.

That’s the pitch (so to speak) of the Ultimate Christmas Songbook, an iPad app built with 50 Christmas songs and a fully free and open source notation engine. Making use of public domain songs, the number of songs available continues to grow as the community contributes tunes. (Those contributors got the app for free.)

As notation proliferates on tablets, the app also suggests that “commercial” doesn’t have to mean “closed.” The scores themselves are available in open, cross-platform formats (MIDI, MusicXML, MuseScore, and PDF). But by generating revenues, the app can support further development – something that’s often been missing in open source music software projects.

And if you’re looking for a way to help family and friends play music, and they have iPads, the score reading features are quite reasonable. You get lovely display of scores, audio playback, tempo change, transpose, and the all-important font resize with reflow so you don’t have to squint.

The app is on iOS now, but other platforms are planned; an Android version is already in testing. And we hear lots more is coming from MuseScore, too, hot on the heals of a release that earned half a million downloads:
A Christmas update from MuseScore

More resources:
Open source code for mscore at SourceForge
Contributed scores to download
Ultimate Christmas Songbook, US$1.99 at iTunes
http://musescore.com/, software and community, including the desktop software for Mac, Windows, and Linux

For reference, here’s a look at how the desktop software works:

Dig into humanity’s past, and alongside the earliest tools, you’ll find some of the earliest instruments. Designing objects for expression seems to be an essential part of civilization.

Martin Kaltenbrunner, a co-designer of the Reactable tangible music interface, is also a professor in Interface Culture at the Linz University of Arts in Austria. There, in the land of Mozart and Haydn, he works with students to explore what interface design is.

So, when I got to spend some time with Martin in New York in September, I was interested in more than just the flashy coolness of the Reactable, the futuristic table-with-blocks interface for music. We got a chance to talk about instrument design generally. The funny thing about the Reactable is that it is closer to the experience of working with a modular synthesizer and oscilloscope than anything else, with the sense of physical connections of sound to object you’d get from classic synths. It is something unique, truly, but that’s its pedigree.

Martin and I got to give a talk together at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, a terrific hub in which Austrian artists frequently are paired with New York-based folks, all in a lean, tall modern landmark building in Midtown. We also performed together, which for me was a real pleasure; Martin claims not to be a musician as such, but was good fun as an improvisation partner.

The next day, we headed to Manhattan music education center Dubspot, where Martin’s creation quickly attracted crowds of interested students and educators. Dubspot filmed our encounter for the video at top. Amusingly, the prominent synth sounds you hear at the beginning are not the Reactable, but our own MeeBlip open source synth, which I brought along to illustrate conventional tangible instrument design with switches and knobs. (If you’ve been impatiently waiting for news on the MeeBlip, believe me, I’m even more impatient – more announcements on that this week and next, following a production quality issue with a contractor that required us to reboot the run of new instruments.)

Reactable Live @ Dubspot! Interactive Sound Design Workshop Video Recap [Dubspot Blog]

YouTube commenters, that subtle and thoughtful bunch, are complaining that the tangible Reactable will set you back thousands of Euros. But at ACF and Dubspot, I was also equipped with the far more economical and portable alternative: Reactable Mobile runs on both Android and iOS. (I was pleasantly surprised to discover the app runs perfectly on a Galaxy Tab 10.1 from Samsung; I’m still a long, long way from being able to recommend buying an Android tablet, but if you’ve got one, I can certainly recommend this app.) Now, don’t get me wrong: the experience was nowhere near as fun as using the table. On the other hand, you can’t fit the table into a seat-back pocket on easyJet, and the savings in cash is proportional to the sacrifice in experience. What impresses me is that the design of the physical Reactable “flattens” so nicely onto the screen; I think it’s a user experience triumph that you can make that translation. And I was able to load up a few loops of my own music and jam along with the MeeBlip and Martin on the (real) Reactable.

Looking beyond the Reactable, Martin addressed these larger issues of tangible interface design at TEDx Vienna – a fitting locale for talking the history and future of music. His whole presentation, and a sweeping concept map of what he discussed, is available.

Martin Kaltenbrunner: Tangible Music

If you just want to get your Reactable on and can’t afford the table, see Reactable Mobile below. (Seen here on an iPad 2, but I’ve run successfully on the original iPad and the Galaxy Tab – the experience is more or less identical, thanks to portable code.)

And if you can afford the table, you rockstar, uh, can we be your friend?

http://www.reactable.com/products/mobile/
[the awesome table version]
Martin Kaltenbrunner website [with plenty of academic links]

Image-Line are quick to attach lots of disclaimers about when the work will be ready, but a teaser video demonstrates they have builds of their FL Studio Mobile software running on Android devices. It looks like a particularly good match for tablets, and is the latest indication that their may finally be a horse race in tablets for music. (Insert more disclaimers here.)

The phrase “low latency” is likely to make prick up some ears. No computer is “zero latency”; digital systems introduce some delay from recording to playback. The quality of the user experience, therefore, is having things happen without too much latency, whether it’s when sounds from a microphone or line input are processed or when a touch event or MIDI input results in a sound. iOS at least puts that latency in the acceptable range. Android devices, meanwhile, have earned complaints. Some of these issues appear to have to do with the way the platform itself works, in scheduling and the hardware abstraction layer, whereas other challenges arise from the variety (and, let’s face it, inconsistent quality) of Android’s various devices.

However, there are signs that developers might make this situation more manageable. We hear there are changes in Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich release that could impact both the way native access to the audio system and scheduling work; it’s too soon to evaluate those changes, because the OS isn’t done yet. But that leads to the other important development: Android developers are beginning to test performance across devices for some harder numbers. Those kinds of tests could benefit from easy software distribution and the (relatively) open source nature of the operating system — or at least, to be fair, from freely distributing genuinely free-software apps for testing. It’s also worth saying that not all applications require low latency, or, indeed, concern themselves with input-to-output latency. (Not all apps use an audio input.)

It’s not yet clear what Image-Line’s own “low latency” engine is about, but it’ll be interesting to watch. First promised in June, at least, it seems Image-Line is making some headway. More details:
http://www.image-line.com/documents/android.html

I’m still far, far from being able to recommend purchasing an Android device for use with music – iOS wins handily. But developers naturally want to look ahead, beyond the present situation to what might be possible in the near future, especially since they’re the ones making the apps. And there, the picture is worth examination.

NodeBeat is the kind of experimental music application that’s thriving in the age of the multi-touch tablet. Its dynamic interface and sound are built on the foundation of free and open source software tools regularly covered here on CDMusic and Motion. OpenFrameworks, the Processing-like C++ library, handles the UI, as libpd, the embeddable version of graphical media environment Pure Data, manages the sound.

What you get is an open-ended plane on which you can graphically array sequences, far away from the standard grid, for generative and sequenced music. It’s good fun, which made it a hit on iOS. Developer Seth Sandler, working with Justin Windle, did a brilliant job. Then, earlier this month, NodeBeat made the jump to Android, with additional porting work by Laurence Muller. Android has been getting tablets that can hold their own — I’ve enjoyed my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, for instance. But the platform has remained severely starved of applications in contrast to iOS, but at least in place of quantity, there’s some quality: this application being one, tools like Mikrosonic’s RD3 or Reactable orControl or Nanoloop qualifying, too. (I’m not delusional; this does not make it at this point any serious competition for iOS, but it does demonstrate potential for developers. And I’ve already had the chance to use Reactable and Control in live performance, personally.)

That is, NodeBeat was temporarily available on Google’s Android Market. Then, without warning, Google suspended developer Seth Sandler’s seller account. This led to an extended discussion with Seth, other developers, and myself as we watched events unfold, ironically on Google’s own Google+. (Yes, that Google product works, despite what you’ve heard.)

It’s back now, so please, go buy and review it if you get the chance. If you’ve got a compatible Android, you’ve got truly no excuse as it’s a delightful app, and it holds up even in the crowded iOS platform:
NodeBeat @ Android Market
http://nodebeat.com/ (iOS and all versions; there’s even a free, desktop version with source code!)

Okay? Bought it? Good. Now it’s time to talk about how bad this is for a developer.

The account suspension on the Market represents a series of obvious flaws. First, of course, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place – Google support eventually acknowledged the suspension was entirely random, “incorrectly suspended” in the words of support, with no other explanation.

Second, support was largely nonexistent. Days passed during which Seth was left without any information. (Amidst discussions of how “evil” or “open” Google is, I’d sometimes be happy just to see them seem something other than desperately rushed. And that seems to be the primary “Apple-fication” of the market – the company’s rivals now are so rushed to try to compete that they screw things up constantly. “Don’t be crappy.”)

Third, and most bizarre, the application stayed available but payment was impossible, leaving customers confused and unable to buy the app.

Now, horror stories like this weren’t unheard of in the early days of the Apple App Store, and I still hear – with, happily, much less frequency – complaints from developers about Apple’s store and approval process. Apple deserves credit for ironing out those flaws, but from the skeptical perspective of a developer, It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that you may want to consider distributing your software via more than one means. Even as Apple fails to allow that on their mobile devices, that means considering going cross-platform. That’s not a philosophical claim; from the perspective of a developer, you don’t want to be dependent on only one company. Feel free to disagree, but my experience has shown otherwise as I’ve watched developers get burned. (And it’s worth noting that while Google couldn’t sell Seth’s app, Apple could.) Technically, via Android, developers are free on the vast majority of devices to sell direct or sell via alternative stores; unsurprisingly, Seth submitted his app to the competing Amazon App Store and is awaiting approval there.

None of this, of course, excuses Google from a big customer failure on Android Market. And whereas Apple’s earlier hiccups occurred as it was the only game in town, Google is making an uphill battle even worse. With Amazon’s Fire on the horizon, there are two questions to watch: one, can Amazon deliver enough tablets to create the tablet market Android has thus far lacked, and two, will their store deliver a better experience? Meanwhile, Google continues to promise a better Market; it’s all I hear about at developer events, largely because it’s the primary complaint from developers. As tech pundits make largely-unsupported claims like “Android users don’t like to buy software,” as if they’re a bunch of degenerate freeloaders, I’d point to the often-inferior Market and frustrating hardware experiences.

But, let’s put it this way: in addition to the obvious range of iOS choice, yes, there are superb applications beginning to appear on Android. For that, I credit developers like Seth and his collaborators. Even as we push for better audio performance, some of those applications are already running exceptionally well on new tablets and higher-end phones. If you have one of these devices, you can fire these up and enjoy making some sounds. And because you can’t always rely on another vendor to get things right, having cross-platform, free and open source tools behind these applications means developers have the flexibility to adapt to a changing market, and to focus on creative design and not constantly reinventing the wheel.

Here are some notes on NodeBeat’s creation on our forums.

And let us know what you think of NodeBeat, or if you do have an Android device you’re using for music (or a Fire on pre-order, for that matter).

Cyril Stoller shares this project, for a variety of multitouch devices (Mac / Windows / Linux / Android, screens and projection) through the also-free-and-open-source Kivy framework. It’s inspired by the brilliant Haken Continuum fingerboard, but whereas that more tactile controller is hard to get, this runs cheaply all over the place. (It could also be a way to practice and save up for a Haken, it occurs to me.)

Thanks to Graham Comerford for the tip. I wonder what other ideas might apply to playing multitouch as an instrument.

More discussion on the excellent NUI forum – a great spot for alternative and gestural interaction chatter and resources:
http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/13227/

Normally, you hear my voice in words on the screen, so here instead – courtesy the talented video crews at Toronto’s NXNE – is me communicating on camera, prior to a talk on tablets, music, and design.

The conversation is one I find myself having with a lot of people these days offline, away from the Web. It goes something like this: “sure, the iPad has been a big thing, and you can obviously do music with it, but what does that mean? Is it going to stay around? Does this change what we’re doing?”

For my talk, rather than examine a device like Apple’s iPad as an isolated phenomenon, I chose to look at the bigger picture, and consider what it can mean for design. Those design lessons could be applied anywhere. I’ll try to finally turn that presentation into an article next week, but as a teaser, here’s the video interview I did at NXNE. And perhaps that’ll start some conversation (or even disagreement) prior to the article. Discuss.

Side note: North by Northeast is a brilliant festival. It has the cross-media notions of South by Southwest, as well as the rich musical lineup, but it’s small enough that you can actually get around and see stuff. There’s a different content mix than you get in Texas, and Toronto doesn’t get overwhelmed by the festival in the way that Austin does. SXSW is great, too, but NXNE is like a more livable version.

Other side note: I think my head looks huge in this video. Part conehead / all egghead?

Sonaur is a US$1.99 ambient toy for Android mobile devices, with on-screen creatures you can manipulate to generate sound. It’s notable not only for being a fun toy – and on a platform that hasn’t had as many fun toys – but because the tools used to create it are also highly accessible and free.

I’ve taught Processing, a code environment popular among artists and designers to people who never before imagined they could be coders. Pd (Pure Data), here in the form of libpd, is a free graphical patching cousin of Max/MSP. You can check out libpd, which allows Pd to run on Android, at our Pd Everywhere group.

Developer Miles describes the app thusly:

I wanted to create an app that lay somewhere between an ecosystem and a musical instrument. The hope is that sonaur requires less attention both, and still provides a reasonable amount of intrigue.

Sonaur contains three distinct lifeforms. You can interact with them individually, or together; creating new sounds and visual patterns for your enjoyment.

I was also curious if he had advice for people exploring this area.

Miles tells us that he found making both the art and sound generative – rather than pre-drawn and pre-recorded – made a big difference. He also suggests reading Andy Farnell’s book Designing Sound (now on MIT Press) as a way of learning both Pd and sound design, saying it “helped me a lot to create the sound of the flying insects.” Another tip: using vectors and not hard-coded pixel values makes your work adaptable to different devices. And, “Matt Pearson’s book Generative Art talks a lot about this but I’ve found too that randomness is great in controlled amounts.” I couldn’t agree more.

It’s really great work, Miles. And by the way, readers should never be ashamed of plugging their work, individual or group, free or for-sale. We love hearing about it, even if we can’t cover it all.

Find this at:
http://app.net/sonaur

Via discussion on Noisepages.

Also on Creative Applications Network, run by our friend Filip, which covers all sorts of these kinds of creations.

If you’re looking to turn an Android phone or flashy, new Android tablet into a touch controller for music, you’ll be really glad to see OSC and MIDI controller Control. Furthermore, here’s a solid, powerful app based on the Web that lets Apple and Android fans play well together.

I’ve sung the praises of Control’s philosophy before. Templates are built on Web/HTML5 (WebKit) rendering, not proprietary, inflexible interface widgets, and can be created in JSON. You can make templates dynamic, too, because of everything JavaScript does.

(Non-jargon-filled translation: you can use the goodness of the Web to make control layouts that do whatever you like.)

The iOS version is a great option, but now Apple and Android owners (or people with both) can both get in on the action. The Android version already has multitouch on supported hardware, Bonjour/Zeroconf networking support, OSC support, and interface downloading. That means it’s already a usable wireless controller for musical and visual performance. Soon, it’ll also add sensor input and MIDI.

With new tablets from Samsung and Toshiba – the Samsung thin and slick, the Toshiba hefty but with tons of ports – the timing seems right. Also, because the app itself is open source, developers curious about adding any of those features to their own apps can share code and (ideally) contribute back to the project, which could accelerate Android development. I’ll leave our audio API gripes for another time – this is a controller app, so therefore doesn’t make sound – but for those looking for more mobile tools, this is unqualified good news.

Full feature list:

- Outputs Open Sound Control (OSC). MIDI coming soon!
- Handles multitouch on capable devices
- Bi-directional communication: use Control to set values on your computer, use your computer to set values in Control
- Dynamically add and manipulate widgets via OSC messages
- Reads and outputs data from Accelerometer and Compass sensors (on applicable devices) with adjustable update rates
- The ability to script behaviors for widgets using JavaScript
- Auto-discovery of wireless networks via Bonjour
- Interfaces can be pushed to the phone via OSC or downloaded from the web
- Supports both portrait and landscape interface orientations
- Interfaces work on both phones and tablets (tested on Droid and Asus Transformer)
- Free

And here’s some of the new, dynamic jQuery functionality, relevant to both iOS and Android users. The idea is, using OSC, you can dynamically create your own interfaces:

More documentation on that, with an example in Max/MSP:
Control 1.3: Dynamic Interfaces, jQuery integration & more

Finally, some images of the Android version, which looks – rightfully – quite a lot like the iOS version. (That’s the idea.)

Learn more about Control, and follow its development across platforms:
http://charlie-roberts.com/Control/

Or for Android users, grab a copy – I’ll be trying it on my Galaxy Tab 10.1 right away:
Control (OSC + MIDI) @ Android Market

The software is really entirely the work of Charlie Roberts – really brilliant work, mate! Thanks for keeping CDM posted!