You probably think of social networking and messaging as being about text, about saying things like “Wow, this tuna salad sandwich I’m having for lunch is delicious!” But the next Tweet you get on Twitter could be a synthesis preset.

Say what?

Working in Max/MSP, Andrew Spitz has developed a tool called Tweet a Sound. It uses Twitter as a communications platform for “social sound design.” Instead of just saying, “Wow, I be makin’ phat basslines,” you can actually share the sound. Whip up a sound using typical FM synth parameters and Max/MSP’s sound engine, then click “send.” You’ll send a string of numbers to your Twitter account, confusing those friends not in the know. But other users will be able to grab and play with your sound.

Andrew even encourages synthesis n00bs to play without fear – grab those envelopes and mysterious-looking settings and see what comes out. So, I hope you synth geeks do share this with some friends new to synthesis, as I think they’ll have a great time.

Right now, Tweet a Sound is Mac-only; we just need someone to save a Windows standalone version. Someone has asked about a Pd port, but let’s put it this way: this is the tip of a very, very big iceberg of sharing. It’s something worth considering in anything you’re doing, not just with Twitter, but whether you can provide networked capabilities in whatever you’re happening to build.

Ableton, of course, recently added the Share functionality to Live. But with open APIs and basic networking protocols, there’s no reason you can’t explore other features. Why not build a drum machine that lets you collaborate with one of your friends on your IM list, or a sequencer that automatically posts ideas as you revise them? Just doing these things for the sake of it could be a waste of time, but on the other hand, these social features could turn Web 2.0 sites into places that actually inspire you to make and share music rather than distract you with mundane activities.

I love the idea; let us know if you have some fun with it.

Tweet A Sound { sound + software } [Andrew Spitz Blog]

Quick – you’ve got a music file that someone (a collaborator, a client, a friend) needs to hear. How do you send it to them?

It seems countless Web entrepreneurs have new ways for sharing media – there are online Flash-based music editing applications, social networks, elaborate MySpace and Facebook killers. We’ve been impressed with some, like the rich player and commenting and fans on Soundcloud or the ability to create artist/band pages that really work on Bandcamp. (The latter, I do really want to spend more time with.)

But sometimes, these services are overkill. This week, I had to get some revised sound scores to a choreographer so he could have them in a rehearsal. I didn’t want to share them with my network of friends or let people remix them in Flash – I just needed to get them to him in the easiest way possible.

That’s where drop.io is just absolutely gorgeous and lovable. Using something else? This is probably better.

1. There’s not even a login. Click a button, upload a file, done. You can add your email address and password if you need to be updated, but even that isn’t necessary.
2. You get an instant short URL – either automatically generated or customizable.
3. Drop any media you want – images, music, etc.
4. You get instant in-browser playing / viewing, and embeddable links and downloads.
5. Control: non-public if you like, expire whenever you want, let others add files.
6. It’s free for basic usage, and the free account isn’t crippled. You get 100MB of space per drop. Need more than that, and you can upgrade, but I think a lot of folks will be pleased with the free plan. Fortunately, the premium plan is powerful enough (branding, bigger drops) that premium users may be able to subsidize the occasional, casual user.
7. Integration: Firefox add-in, Twitter, etc.

In other words, this kicks YouSendIt’s sorry, badly-designed, clunky and non-functional a**.

drop.io
playlist.io, announced this week, allows easy, playable playlists, so ideal if you have a set of tracks – all with the same features of drop.io

It’s probably not how you want to share video or whole projects. But for a quick audio bounce of your current track, photos of the venue you’ll be gigging at, and the like, it’s about perfect. There’s a place for more complex tools that allow you to collaborate on, say, custom designs for music software or hardware or elaborate session sets. But that makes it even nicer to have a quick tool that solves a simple problem.

And speaking of “tools that get things done up against tight deadlines,” drop.io has added a whole new dimension:

Real-time functionality

The folks at drop.io (who work just over the river from me in DUMBO Brooklyn, that “other” Silicon Alley) have been hard at work on new real-time functionality.

What this means is, you can instantly add media, notes, and chat message, even via a mobile device, and everything is there instantly. So, someone calls on the phone and wants a file. It’s up there instantly, and you can even comment on it, make changes, and get it done.

Speaking as someone who is constantly missing deadlines, um, I mean regularly procrastinating things until the last minute, uh, erm …. uh, always overbooked and dealing with crises … uh, I mean, “moving at the speed of innovation,” this sounds like a lifesaver / problem solver.

There’s no question this is of use to music pros and the ilk. I know the people doing music and sound design for South Park have regularly emailed MP3 files in order to get them on the air on Comedy Central the same day. We’re a “just-in-time” — or, perhaps, “barely on time” crowd, the digital creatives.

I’ll be really curious to hear how you use this, and what other tools are out there you like. And because drop.io is a relatively simple tool, I’m equally interested to see what might be possible with their open API. Let us know what you think.

Updated: Via comments, Kyran notes that Dropbox is also a really strong option. What I like about Dropbox: desktop clients, sync capabilities, easy sharing of whole folders, revisions, and most of the chat features. What I like about Drop.io: stupidly-simple quick file uploading one file + url. Drop.io is to me sort of Twitter-style file uploading. Dropbox is also a really terrific solution. I could actually see using a little of both, which is why lightweight solutions are nice.

News may filter through Boing Boing, Slashdot, and Reddit – and certainly, this story already has. But oddly, I learned of this item when I happened to meet up with the blog item’s author in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has digital analysis he believes may prove that a track was recorded to a click track.

Paul Lamere is a developer at Echo Nest, a brainy think-tank of music geeks developing new ways of processing musical metadata in the cloud. Whereas services like Last.fm focus mainly on content and community, Echo Nest’s API wants to make the computers in the cloud smarter about how they listen to your music. We’ve had a look at their work twice before:

All Christmas Music, Boiled Down to Sixteen Droning Singles
Musical Brain API: An API for Music on the Web – And it Makes Pretty Pictures

The Remix API crunches data about rhythmic information at a number of levels. Since we first saw it, that API has led to an SDK (read: something you can program more directly), all assembled in Python. The Python-based SDK is now capable of creating the world’s most unlistenable mash-ups, among other things – some oddly compelling. On Friday, I got to listen to tunes with every other eighth note removed and Michael Jackson crossed with tunes – that is, until the programmers in the office started to complain because they were about to lose their mind. (Echo Nest uses a Sonos system to pipe music office-wide. I hope we can give you a preview of those clips soon.)

Remix SDK (currently Python)

But perhaps the most interesting thing this team has done so far is Paul’s work on plotting rhythmic analysis. Plots of tempo deviation, measured in beat durations, yield two interesting revelations:

In search of the click track [Music Machinery]

1. Much of the music you know has a lot of rhythmic variation. (Dizzy Miss Lizzie by the Beatles, anyone? No Ringo Starr jokes, please.)

2. A lot of the other music has disturbingly little rhythmic variation.

Yes, indeed, the use of click tracks (and, I suspect, metronomes, drum machines, quantized loops, and the whole lot) seems to be sucking some of the rhythmic spice out of music. You’ve already heard complaints about the “loudness wars” that have quantized out dynamic range. But, after decades of drum machines and digital tech, there’s surprisingly little complaint about quantized rhythmic values. Okay, perhaps I should scratch that – some people complain an awful lot. What we haven’t had until now is a visual representation of what’s going on.

Note/update: Just for the record, I’m not opposed to quantized beats. We’re very big fans of techno around here. The post Paul wrote begins, “Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years, rock drumming has changed.” Note, rock drumming. I think there are all sorts of rhythmic possibilities in different musical expressions.

I could go on, but I’m not having a very smart day. (The evening pot of coffee is on; I have high hopes.) Instead, I’m curious what people think of Paul’s methodology. This was just a programmer working along a line of thought with some experimental code, so I’m sure he doesn’t claim this to be an entirely scientific method. But that said, do you think his conclusions are correct? Is there more to be said about this subject?

For that matter, would there be a way to do more scientific work along these lines?

As for the engine that powered this: the Remix API and SDK from Echo Nest should be capable of quite a lot more, from gorgeous animated visualizations like the album art for Matmos we saw last year to unusual, new collaborative Web remix apps. The one catch is the analysis must be performed on their servers, so it’s not something you can apply without sending your content to the cloud – but you do get the metadata back, so I still think some sort of self-remixing applications might be possible, too. I’m eager to see a Java version of the SDK and not just Python, because that’d make it easier to add 3D elements or work with tools like Processing. Can I get an amen?

Well worth checking out Paul’s blog for lots of commentary on a variety of musical enthusiast topics:
Music Machinery

Assuming you haven’t already hit Ableton overload with all the news announced this week, Ableton has posted a set of videos that do a pretty nice job of demonstrating the features. I’ve assembled them into a playlist here. (Stumbled on these videos thanks to Synthtopia.)

There are four videos in the playlist, covering Live 8, APC, Max for Live, and Share.

In particular, one video shows how the Share collaboration feature will work, with the ability to easily upload sets and share them either publicly or privately. (There’s a long introduction, but skip halfway through and it starts to talk about the actual solution.)

To me, the big question there is how much it’ll cost. It is nice to see an embeddable widget. Even better would be to have an open API – any chance of that, Ableton? That’d allow web developers (cough) hook into these features for other tools. Imagine if SoundCloud, for instance, which offers audio sharing and commenting, could also link more easily to projects uploaded for Live. Now, Ableton could keep control over Share and work with SoundCloud individually, but then they might miss Bandcamp or some other service they didn’t see coming — you get the idea.

Note that Live isn’t the first to ponder online sharing features, either. FL Studio has its own Collab feature, which nicely enough offers its own chat client – something I wrote about for Keyboard Magazine. I can imagine a world in which the Live Share option is just one of a number of similar features — making an open API all the more interesting. (I can’t actually find that Keyboard article, but I know I wrote it!)

More on Ableton at NAMM here on CDM:

Akai APC40 Video from Ableton; More Controllers Coming

Ableton’s Upgrade Options: Easier to Understand than a Large Hadron Collider

Ableton Live 8, Now with Grooves: The Top 8 New Features

What Makes the APC40 Special: Interactive Clip, Device Control, Dedicated Buttons

Ableton: You’ll Be Able to Customize Akai’s APC40 Using Max for Live

Akai APC40 Ableton Live Controller, in Detail: Plug-and-Play Live Control For Everyone?

Updated: It seems that Collab is no more?

And Key of Grey has a nice story wondering about alternatives to this kind of integrated tool:

Collaborating on a music project online

It’s been a long, long wait, but it’s now official: Ableton and Cycling ‘74 have collaborated on Max for Live, which integrates Max/MSP with Ableton Live. There’s tons of information on the Cycling ‘74 site, and I’ll be doing some follow-up interviews for CDM soon with more details, but here’s the overview.

What is Max for Live?

Max is an add-on product for Ableton Live 8, which will be announced in a press conference shortly. Note that it isn’t just Max or just Live – it’s a separate, add-on product. No pricing information yet; availability later in 2009.

What Will You Be Able to Build?

• Step sequencers
• Instruments
• Effects
• Stuff to control Live
• New hardware integration features, with your own instrument / effect / sequencer creations, and with Live itself – think, build your own hardware mappings

What I’ve heard is that via native controls, you’ll be able to control anything you can control in Live with a mouse, down to moving warp markers around. That’s obviously huge, but expect the specifics of these details (and eventually, how to do it) on this site over the coming days and months. I’m also eager to find out if it’ll be possible to use Max for Live with OSC inside Live.

How Integrated is It?

• Native Live API controls: Max now gets a native API for controlling Live, with live.object, live.path, live.observer objects. This is actually arguably the most important part, because it means you could in fact use Max to control Live in place of the Python-based Live API. That raises a bunch of questions and unfortunately, this is the part of Max for Live about which we know the least, but you know this site will be all over the details as soon as we can get hold of them. (The only bad side of this that I can see is that it may mean fewer options for Live users who want to use their own development tools instead of Max, but I’ll investigate.)
• Preview mode: This lets you edit in Max while devices continue processing audio/MIDI as if running inside Live. It updates in-place in Live’s device view. That’s been possible previously using things like Native Instruments’ Reaktor plug-in or the combination of FL Studio and Synthmaker, but it’s certainly new to the Max environment.
• UI controls: You can create Ableton-style interface controls for your patches. This is really extraordinary: you build a patch as normal, and what Max 5 calls its Presentation Mode now looks like an Ableton-standard UI in the program, with full support for color schemes. You even get descriptive text in Info View when you mouse over something, just like the official Ableton stuff.
• Multiple undo: Undo in Live applies to Devices created with Max for Live.
• Tempo sync, sample-accurate automation: I need to get the details of this, but normally syncing tempo is a major pain using MIDI, ReWire, or even plug-ins – this appears to allow more direct integration.
• A step sequencer object: Previous efforts like SynthMaker in FL have made it pretty easy to build instruments and effects, and it’s certainly possible to build sequencers in tools like Reaktor or Pd. But what’s unique about Max in Live is that it provides a sequencer with a Live-style interface that integrates with tempo.
• File/preset integration: This is where it gets really awesome – juggling Reaktor patches, for instance, can be a pain.
• Web collaboration: Ableton Live 8 adds web collaboration options, which extends to Max devices. 

What Devices Are Included?

So far, you get a nice set of Devices to use with Max for Live:

• Step Sequencer, with four 16-note sequences, shift, random, MIDI control
• Loop Shifter, with automated mapping and playback, for Max-style looping
• An extension for the new Akai APC40 that turns it into a step-sequencer editor for Live MIDI clips

Now, note, on that last item, you don’t necessarily need to run out and buy Live 8 and Max for Live and a new APC (though there are worse things to happen to someone). The new features should open up new controller integration features and custom software-controller creations for all kinds of hardware. For instance, the monome (site | cdm tag) should greatly benefit from the features in Max for Live. It’s already got a rabid community of Max patchers behind it, and there’s no reason you couldn’t do something wild with Live, Max for Live, and the monome – including additional features you can hack into the monome, like tilt sensors/accelerometers/IR range finders. (Yum.)

And in fact, the monome community is already on it without the aid of Max for Live: Pages, built in Java, is an elaborate app for automating access to some of Live’s power. You can imagine that the availability of Max for Live should mean even more of this sort of thing.

Where to Read Up

I’ll update this as more information comes through, but here’s what to get where:

David’s Tools for Creating Devices in Live is probably the most important read, as it shows how the integration works – already juicy, though we need to find out more about those native controls for actually manipulating Live

David Zicarelli’s "Perspective on Integrating Max and Live" talks about the genesis of the project and what it means to existing Max users

If anyone stops by NAMM booth 6314, we’d love some other perspectives.

What this stuff means:

Max for Live is best understood as Max/MSP/Jitter in Live. Here’s a full explanation, with more details to come on exactly how they integrate:

Max For Live is Max In Live: MSP, Jitter, OSC, and All; The Open Source Side?

And yes, I will be following up on open source alternatives, because they have their own strengths and weaknesses.

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

SoundCloud, an online sharing community for sound and music, is now hours from public launch. I’ve been playing around with a closed beta for several months, and have to say, I’ve been really impressed. SoundCloud isn’t the first attempt to provide places to share music files with others, but previous attempts have been lackluster when it comes to easy sharing, features necessary to make music listening more enjoyable, and upload capacity. Most importantly, none has accomplished the community “stickiness” that has been the cornerstone of successful media services like Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube. In fact, there’s been so much of a noise-to-signal problem with the Web space, I expect a lot of you have simply tuned out new Web services. There are some good reasons to pay attention to SoundCloud, though:

• Singing telegram, anyone? Music on SoundCloud acts more like a messaging service. Tracks from people you’re following appear in an inbox for you to sort through. You can even create a DropBox for other people, so this could be huge for people running labels or live events. (That’s especially welcome now that a lot of people have given up on individually clicking myspace links to hear what someone sounds like.)
• Easier uploads and sharing: Getting files on the service in your favorite format, with whatever length you want, is a whole lot easier than on competing services.
• Smart player interaction: Services like this now live and die on their embeddable player. SoundCloud’s is really clever and attractive. Download links are everywhere. Also, SoundCloud attacks the biggest problem with music – it’s invisible. There’s a waveform view, and people can comment on specific points in your music. That feature has been annoying in a lot of video players, but here comments appear only if you want them to, and I’ve found them really helpful in getting feedback. (See my example track below, for instance.)
• Open API: A full API means you can built interesting apps atop SoundCloud. Check out the lovely Radioclouds by Matas Petrikas for an example of how interesting this can be; source code is available.

SoundCloud, indeed, seems to have all the kinds of features that made Flickr stand out from a crowd of photo services. Labels are already onboard, too: Compost, BPitch Control, and Goldie are already making it part of their workflow, says SoundCloud.

One very significant missing feature: it’s not yet possible to embed licenses in your music, so it’s not possible to tell what’s copyrighted and what’s Creative Commons-licensed. SoundCloud founder Alexander Ljung tells us this feature is coming very soon, though, and as on Flickr, you’ll be able to set a global default for your music, so if you want to release everything under a CC license, you can. That should make SoundCloud absolutely explode as a place for CC-licensed remixing.

Now, the only bad news: pro accounts are a bit pricey when compared to a service like Flickr, priced at EUR9-EUR59 each month. The EUR9/mo account is actually probably what most people will need: 15 tracks per month (that seems like plenty), plus basic stats, dropbox, and support. If you were a beta tester like me, you probably got a complimentary Light account through the beginning of next year. And importantly, there’s no limit on file sizes on any of the accounts. That means you could easily upload 15 live/DJ sets a month, so no complaint here. My guess is that the rates are a reflection of what it costs now in bandwidth for an ad-free site. And you can always go for a free account and see how the service works. But I do expect price to be the major obstacle to this service’s popularity. Update: comment to that effect in, what, five minutes of me posting?

Alex and the team say they’re CDM readers, and I’ll get to meet with them next week while I’m in Berlin. So if you’ve got any questions or feedback, let us know. I’d also love to see this stuff integrated more tightly in other communities; Facebook is there, for a start. Stay tuned.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud Tour

SoundCloud Blog

Here’s an example of my player (just an informal live improv set, not a full track). I need to go upload more content but plan to do that over the coming weeks. But it gives you a sense of how this works in action.

Here’s the upload interface, which I find quite usable. Note that you can also use SoundCloud for private files:

Everything has an “API” these days, but what that means in practice is often not so exciting. You can make little widgets for Facebook, or post recent Twitter messages, or do other simple developer tricks. Echo Nest’s “Musical Brain” API is more far-reaching: it’s an API for music. All music online. The first of a series of developer tools, “Analyze” is designed to describe music the way you hear it, figuring out tempo, beats, time signature, song sections, timbre, key, and even musical patterns. More developer tools will follow.

Twelve years in development, the Musical Brain is a bit like a digital music blogger. It’s been crawling the Web while you sleep, reading blog posts, listening to music to extract musically-meaningful attributes, and even predicting music trends. It’s like almost like a robotic, algorithmic Pitchfork. (And I’m serious — it may be April Fools’ Day, but this is real. That’s what the “brain” claims to do, backed by research at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and MIT.)

What does all of this mean? The Musical Brain may not be replacing your friendly local music blog any time soon, but what it can do is infuse some musical intelligence into applications like music visualization. The Matmos album at top used the Analyze algorithm to map the timbral profiles of songs on an upcoming album; that graph was then rendered by an artist in watercolor, translating the digital into traditional paint media.

The Analyze API could also enable everything from Web music apps and mash-ups to live audiovisual performance tools, or even smarter music games. That’s the reason co-creators Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan, both with PhDs from the MIT Media Lab, chose to open up development to a broad audience. I got to speak to Brian a bit about the project.

Machines that Get Music

“We’ve had it internally in code for a long time — but we want other people to make cool stuff with this,” Brian explains. “We have friends who make visualizers, VJ-type things, music mash-ups. So some of the things we’ve seen are visualizers. Video games is another one. We have a lot of friends who make electronic music, making Max patches and stuff, making chop-up kind of things [mash-up tools] now.”

Brian’s background was natural language processing. Tristan had worked in acoustic analysis. Both had seen research in automated music listening and machine listening, as well as new abilities to train computers to understand musical properties and human language. What’s been missing, says Brian, is a way to bring together these different research developments — mature after years of academic research — and put them out to a broader audience, not only of programmers, but artists, as well. Echo Nest is a way to do this.

Mash-up Machine

Right now, you can upload songs to the Musical Brain and try out analysis, and you can read up on the documentation and try some stuff yourself.

But if you’re anxious to see where this may be going, there’s also a first Web application so you can see how these tools could work in online development. It’s called “thisismyjam”, and it uses the API to create “micromixes”, instant mixes of your music. Type in music (it was able to handle a wide range, though it missed some more obscure examples I threw at it), and it will mash them together into a consistent mix.

Here’s my first experiment. I intentionally chose some disparate stuff that I liked to see how it would handle it, and let the algorithm decide automatically on ordering to try to match the music.

Because thisismyjam knows something about music, it was able to match my tune to something related.

Now, thisimyjam is mostly just a curiosity and demonstration for the moment. The attention deficit-style mixing of tunes was intentional, says Brian. The project grew out of their frustration with licensing rules, which limit the length of audio excerpts on sites like iTunes. “What we were trying to do is, if you want to hear an entire album in a minute, do it our way,” he says.

That said, it does suggest some of the possibilities of working with large-scale musical information. As opposed to something like Pandora, this is not manually-entered musical information; it’s all an algorithm. (See, by way of contrast, our interview with Pandora’s founder.) As such, even this basic example demonstrates what machines may be able to do if given some additional human-style intelligence. Mash-ups aside, these additional analysis tools could go beyond the basic audio-analysis and beat detection tools in current music software and create new audio-processing possibilities, even with audio you’ve recorded yourself.

Get Developing; More Information

Of course, the nice thing about all of this is is, like Matmos, you can get with the happy music picture-making straight away for free, using tools like Flash and Processing.

Developer Site (you’ll want to request an API key)

Analysis API Documentation

And if you don’t want to brave coding, there are plenty of examples to play around with:

Analyze API Examples

thisismyjam.com (free mash-up community site)

The Echo Nest

We’ll be watching this as it develops — and I’ll be messing with Processing, the free, artist-friendly coding tool for Mac, Windows, and Linux, so I hope to post some examples over on CDM Labs soon.

If you’re involved in related research, we’d love to hear about that, too.