Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 – 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 – 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

Shawn Pelton and laptop beatboxer virtuoso Kid Beyond will hold clinics. My colleagues Jim Aikin and Craig Anderton will hold power tips sessions on Friday and Saturday. Ableton will provide tutorials on getting started, DJing, and performing. At the M-Audio booth, DJ Sasha, Junkie XL, and Junior Sanchez will join Ableton co-founder/CEO Gerhard Behles and M-Audio’s Robert Hanson to talk about the future of DJing. (I have to admit, I’m more interested in the future of music performance, not just DJing, but still interested to hear what they have to say.) Hey, we should do these kinds of things more often, outside of NAMM. See the full PDF schedule.

If you’re here in Anaheim, be sure to stop by, and if not, with Ableton’s help hope to put as much of this online as possible.

And in the meantime, enjoy these juicy 3D renderings of Ableton’s booth. I’m sure it can’t possibly look this good in person, especially once we clog it up with me and bunches of other NAMM-goers, so don your VR helmet and make believe! (More images after the break. Don’t think they work with 3D glasses, unfortunately.)

And if you found this because you’re listening, send a quick comment (registration required, sorry) or write an email and say hello!

Reader Chad points out that, among video coverage of the likes of Al Franken and Luke/Owen Wilson, you can watch random video clips of our 'How to Trick Out Your iPod' panel (hi QT / lo QT)
Edited in, how shall we say, an unusual way — mostly random bits of me
talking and curiously completely omits Chris Breen (and most of Francis
Preve) — but I'm told they were having camera trouble.

And you get to watch Fran express mock wonder when I bring up the concept of 'RADIO.'

Going to Austin? Drop me a line via the CDM contact link and let me
know; I'd love to meet some CDM readers! Hopefully some of you are geek
enough (and, er, expense account-ed enough) to make it!

Don't miss Tuesday's session on which I'm a panelist — How to Trick Out Your iPod. I'll be sure to suggest my favorite iPod accessory, the Buchla 200e.
It's the multi-thousand-dollar, non-portable modular analog synthesis
system every iPod owner needs. Now where are those banana plug to
earbud adapters . . . I want to listen to CV, darnit!

UPDATED — Wired Magazine, "Austin is the Place for Netheads": Wired's
Katie Dean writes about the conference that "net luminaries like Ana
Marie Cox, known for her saucy political blog Wonkette, and Bram Cohen,
creator of BitTorrent will converge in Austin, Texas, for five days of
panel discussions, parties and cool tech tutorials like "How to trick
out your iPod."

Cool? Us? Wow, thanks.

My friend Scott Shepard has a great lineup for this week's Inside Mac Radio Show. There's a  theme: think iPod + Mac mini + OS X = bigger Mac market share.

• Apple's iPod Czar Stan Ng talks about the much-better battery
  life on last week's new iPod revision and how Apple plans total world
  domination (have to read between the lines for the latter)
• Former PC guy David Coursey talks about why more are likely to switch from Windows to Mac — David's got a book on the subject from Peachpit Press — and how Apple plans world domination
• Brad Gibson explains the new iPod pricing (even I'm confused, so
  thanks, Brad!) and how the iPod is inspiring switchers, allowing Apple
  to plan world domination

What? You thought Apple had become more interested in selling iPods
than selling Macs? Think again. First there's the earbuds, the warm,
fuzzy feeling associated with the Apple logo, all that time spent
looking at the Chicago typeface from the original Mac, minimalist
Ive-designed gadgets around, and then . . . it starts.

Think about it: iPod. As in Pod People. As in body snatchers, invasion of. Pretty
soon the whole planet is building strange physical modeling patches in
Sculpture on Logic Pro 7 running on their Power Mac G5 and Cinema
Display.

Wait . . . I may be projecting here.

But could expanded market share make my buddies over at Cakewalk reconsider the Windows-only status of their software?

Today I'm speaking to an audience at the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology
of Connecticut College about finding a meeting place between visual
expression and sound. For attendees (and you readers at home), here are
some helpful links:

• Physical Modeling and Sound Creation: Apple's Logic
  (Mac-only) is deep as it is, but its Sculpture synth alone points to
  the future of virtual instruments with sophisticated physical modeling
  sound generators.
• Free Lunch on Windows: Logic's price tag is a hefty $1000 ($500 academic); if you're a Windows user, check out the free VST String Theory from Ugo. No VST host? Run it in the free (but superb) Kristal Audio Engine. You won't have Logic, but you won't have spent anything, either!
• Image as Sound: U&I's new MetaSynth 4 (OS 9/X) lets you paint to create sound and filters.
• Video Control: That's an iSight camera from Apple running the interactive multimedia software Cycling `74 Jitter which adds onto Max/MSP (Windows/Mac). Eric Singer has done some work in Max/MSP-Jitter motion tracking, but there's a lot more value and capabilities in Electrotap's Tap.Tools,
  a library of essential stuff Cycling `74 doesn't give you including not
  only motion tracking but plenty of other extras. Soon you'll be able to
  take advantage of Electrotap's video control capabilities directly for
  music with the upcoming plugin library Hipno, distributed by Cycling `74. See also Miller Puckette's free/open source Pure Data for Linux, OS X, and Windows if you want a non-commercial Max alternative.
• VJing: Don't want to spend money or do programming? Witness the lines between image and sound blur directly with fun video toys from VJ Fader, like Neuromixer and VDrum. Free-as-in-beer, built in Max/MSP Jitter.

Enjoy! Now I have to take a deep breath.

UPDATED: Rumors of the death of MetaSynth were highly exaagerated; MetaSynth 4 could be under your Christmas tree.

The software star of the talk was Ableton Live, for its unique
ability to mix, mangle, loop, remix, and modify sound on-the-fly. Live
is distributed by Digidesign subsidiary M-Audio, so you can get a
limited version with a number of M-Audio and Digi hardware interfaces.
There's nothing like the full thing, though; it retails around
$300-400. Download a demo from the Ableton website and give it a spin.

Still missing in action, sadly, is U&I Software's MetaSynth, an unusual program for synthesizing sound using a graphic
interface: pixels generate pitch. I used it in my work for a
lesser-known feature: open the Effects window and there are fantastic
granular resynthesis features for stretching and chopping up sound.
Other programs do the same, but not implemented in quite the same way.
There's no OS X version and we're still waiting on MetaSynth 3; the
developers have been mum after promising something years ago. As a
result, it's hard to endorse spending cash on it (and since no one
will, they have less incentive to upgrade . . . a vicious cycle).
Butyou can run it in Classic in OS X, though it runs best booting
directly in OS 9.

Inside tip: MetaSynth was employed in the first soundtrack for The Matrix.

My full-out notation software endorsement goes to Sibelius, if you need to
produce printed scores. You can read my review in the April 2004
Keyboard Magazine cover story or online in my Macworld
Magazine review from June.

I'd like to have some links to my music and work, but peterkirn.com is
under construction at the moment. Stay tuned. If you're in Manhattan
regularly, email me at the 'Contact' link on this site and I can add
you to my event mailing list so you can hear some music live. And I'm
always available for questions.

Feel free to comment here, especially if you were at Peekskill!

David focused on the big news from Digidesign: they announced Pro Tools 6.7 this week, with tempo-dependent audio and
automation, improved drawing and management of tempo curves and meter
changes, MIDI step input, enhanced support for instrument plug-ins, MIDI
Detective and Beat Detective for Pro Tools LE.

Yes, step input seems more than a little late in coming to the leading
pro audio tool, but the tempo/beat features look quite nice — more on
that as we see them in person at Digidesign this week. If you've got
Pro Tools 6.4, the upgrade is free; owners of earlier versions must pay.

I got to rap a bit with David and talked about AES, O'Reilly, and the big picture of audio on the Mac.