If you want new ideas about design and interaction, ask a musician. Before the Wii remote, the iPhone, Microsoft’s Surface, and Minority Report, musicians were trying oddball ideas for music performance. That hasn’t slowed down, either, from the futuristic and space-y to down-and-dirty acoustic techniques. We’ve got quite a gamut coming up for our madcap, sound and noise-packed hour of competition happening this Saturday at NASA’s Ames Research center during Yuri’s Night, and we’d love to share them with everyone online.

For starters, here’s the rundown of the projects with links to project sites and artists, and all the judges:

Futuristic Music Design Challenge: Meet the Competitors, Judges

Join the event on Facebook

The projects: the Bubblegum Sequencer (previously on CDM), The Box custom hardware with colored lights + Reaktor ensemble, the surface-temperature tangible interface table Weather Report (previously on CDM), the strange polygonal Kromatron wireless instrumental interface, the Thimbletron gloves-as-samplers with lab coated performers project (previously on CDM), the bicycle wheel and analog tape Looping Pedal (previously on CDM), the computer-powered musical saw WaveSaw, the 28-string just-intoned microtonal casmolyra, the turntablist custom software ammoBox and the GrooveStep DS pattern maker (previously on CDM).

I’m also pleased to announce…

The judges:

• Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine (in my opinion, anyway) and creator of the MPC60 for Akai, plus recent creations — and he plays the mandolin
• Liz Enthusiasm, lead singer of Freezepop (check out their albums or just play a Harmonix game) and evidently an expert on Dr. Pepper
• (Matt) Ganucheau, a mastermind of Yuri’s Night’s music and art, a composer and sound designer (and teacher of sound design for games), an electronic musician, and creator of the NSFW "foreplay robot" Moaning Lisa
• … and yours truly as emcee

Speaking of Roger Linn, Tom at Music Thing just posted an auction on the pre-Akai prototype.

Hopefully we’ll get to do some quick interviews with the judges, as well, for Planet CDM. Stay tuned on yuricdm.com.

Hello from Ground Control: this week, I’ll be coming to you live from CDM’s micro-blog for Yuri’s Night Bay Area, ground zero for the global space rave celebrating human exploration of the cosmos. CDM’s challenge: to bring all the goodness up close and personal to you, from California to wherever you are on Planet Earth.

Watch the minisite now, during the event, and in the couple of weeks following at:

http://yuricdm.com

or subscribe to the yuricdm.com RSS feed.

Yuri’s Night needs special nerdster love for a number of key reasons — a huge lineup of music, art, and science, plus a special CDM event and booth:

• Music: The likes of Amon Tobin, Tycho, Christopher Willits, and many others … and our friend Ganucheau, too
• Motion: Interactive installations and visualists everywhere, including our man Joshua with his incredible Wii-powered SuperDraw, built with Processing
• Space and Science and Games: Here’s where I get especially excited — it’s an event on the airfield at Ames Research Center, not typically a place non-NASA employees can go, and we actually get to play there and listen some of the world’s top scientists. And Will Wright (creator of SimCity, Sims, and the upcoming Spore with its generative music) will be there, too, just in case your geek circuits weren’t overloaded yet.
• CDM @ the Hangar: We’re running a special Futuristic Music Design Challenge competition, and we’ll have the CDM booth for much of the evening where various musical / visual makers will be showing off their inventions (with more of our friends elsewhere at the event). So stop by and say hi.

How nerdster-chic is this: a global convergence of the exploration of space exploration, ecological savvy, technological innovation, and musical-motional performance, in honor of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launching the first-ever human flight into space? Described as “Cinco de Mayo” for space, Yuri’s Night is a 35-nation cosmorave. It was big last year. It’s going to be much bigger this year.

What’s all this space stuff got to do with music and motion? Everything: music and visual performance are a big part of this party, as Sun Ra-loving, space-inspired, Space Age technologist artists push creative tech. (Amon Tobin is headlining, Will Wright is keynote speaker.) Winter Music what? I want my space fiesta.

Attention, Cosmonauts

CDM is involved, and you can be, too, wherever you are in the world:

Texas, here we come. Before the armies of bands hit Austin for South by Southwest, we’ve got some events going during SxSW Interactive — the “spring break for Web geeks” festival of online tech.

Laptopists battle it out Saturday night 3/8: The Digital Showcase at the Austin Museum of Art is holding a Laptop Battle for Texan laptop artists. I’ll be judging, along with CDM reader favorite (and reader) proem, and two other judges. The night also  features performances from New Berlin and Richard Gear, plus live visuals from CDMotion contributor Dan Winckler. Details at AMODA, upcoming.org. (A paltry $4-$7, and even 18 year-olds can get in.)

Explore creative interfaces for data Sunday 3/9: My panel with interaction design pioneer S. Joy Mountford (Apple, Yahoo) will look at how Web information can become a fluid, artistic medium for visualization and sonification. Details at Create Digital Motion. (Requires SxSW Interactive badge.)

Live CDM music and motion party Monday 3/10: Bring your musical, visual toys, custom code, and DIY projects and hang out with other CDMers at 8pm, then stick around for live performances from musicians and visualists. Details below; let us know you’re coming at upcoming.org, Facebook, SXSWHERE party guide. Free, no badge required.

More on the CDM party — good chance to chill before SxSW Music unloads on you!

Some of you might be surprised to learn that people don’t just read this blog, they also make music. Digital music.

In fact, the Create Digital Noise forums have a whole active community of musicmakers, encompassing a broad range of styles, sensibilities, and production techniques. Let’s sift through some recent works by the CDM community, shall we?

Leading the pack in can-do professionalism is UK’s Creature and his new album Distant Horizon:

Creature Audio

Creature is the project of Stephen Haunts, who some of you may recognize from last year’s Circuit-Bending Challenge. Stephen is the proprietor of Haunted House records, and his album is available directly from Haunted House, or via download from iTunes, CDBaby, and a whole slew of others.

A name you may recognize in pairing with the phrase “Buchla Modular Synthesizer” or “Haaken Continuum controller” is that of Richard Lainhart.

lainheart

This track, “The Orchestra Of The Damned” is a track from Richard’s new MusicZeit release “The Beautiful Blue Sky“, a collection of electronic landscapes for the Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum. It was performed and recorded live without post-processing or editing.

First and foremost, thank you. In just over three years of CDM — and roughly five thousand stories on Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion — you have blown me away. You’ve shared countless news tips, ideas, discussion, projects, art and music, and helped create a unique spot on the Web. That success allows us to deliver hundreds of thousands of views each month, and more importantly, has helped CDM be recognized beyond even musicians and visualists as a leading resource for creative technology. That’s really your success: the ideas you’ve given us, and your work in spreading this stuff to everyone else.

Three years is often the point where people experience some fatigue, but we’re feeling quite the opposite. We want to do more than we’ve done in the past. But we need your help.

CDM Costs, and a New Ad Policy

Running CDM costs money. At the beginning of 2007, after a horrible period of site outages that nearly caused me to shut down CDM permanently, we made the move to a dedicated server, because in hosting, you tend to get what you pay for. That server, bandwidth, and other direct costs of the site have cost me thousands of dollars — nearly all of which I’ve paid out of pocket. More importantly, CDM requires an enormous investment of time, much of it behind the scenes administering the site — and to do what we want to do on CDM, it’s going to take more time.

We are tuning our advertising and affiliate models, and we have some other income ideas we’re developing. But we also know we want our ad model to be different, because it needs to fit CDM. We’ve decided that, beyond Google Ads, any direct ads we take on CDM will be considered an endorsement. That means we need to believe in — and personally use — anything we advertise. We want to remain content-driven rather than ad-driven. If you think you would like to partner with us, do contact us, as we have some affordable schemes for providing ads that are useful to readers — just be aware we do things a little differently. We are serious about advertising — but we’re serious about keeping it in the spirit of the site, as we move forward.

And doing things differently means we can’t continue to survive without some reader support.

Real Reader-Supported Content

I want to do better than simply asking for your support, though. I want to make a promise: support CDM, and we’ll turn that support into content. We want to do more on CDM than we’ve done in the past. We want 2008 to be a breakthrough year for the site, and we’ve got a lot of ideas. We will absolutely make it clear that CDM is publishing some reader-supported stories, and we’d love to hear what you’d like that to be. Got ideas for the kind of videos or articles you’d want to see? Let us know in comments here, or on the CDM Forums.

Donating just a few dollars will make a difference.

I also have ten copies of my book Real World Digital Audio, a near-600-page guide to making music on computers, which I can ship to the first ten people to donate over US$50 (which is actually the book’s list price). If you want the book, don’t forget your address and specify an amount of $50.00 or greater.

I know a lot of you are on a tight budget as we are. But we really do appreciate your support — and with your help, CDM can be an even better free online resource in the future.

Pay what you can, pay what you want. Thanks for your support, and thanks for reading.

Friday we’re pleased to co-host a party with trash_audio and vjkungfu.tv in Mid-City Los Angeles. If you’re in LA or visiting NAMM in Anaheim, you won’t want to miss this - Richard Devine headlining, terrific music and live visuals, and workshops.

If you don’t know the other two sites, by the way, trash_audio (featuring Richard, Justin, and Deep Element) is a fantastic blog that regularly profiles creative workspaces for music. vjkungfu.tv, helmed by VJ momo the monster, has in-depth video tutorials for live visualists; we hope to feature it more on createdigitalmotion.com in the near future.

Here’s the lineup:

1. MAKE + MINGLE. 8:00pm.

• Bring your own DIY music or motion creations and other hardware toys and geek out with an international crowd of hipster-nerdsters! All projects welcome (space first come, first served — think small, bring portable speakers if you can
• Put together free kits to make your own ribbon controllers without soldering
• Learn how Bryant Davis Place (future-tense-cpu) built his own DIY VJ sequencer for M8 using the Lemur multi-touch controller.
• Learn about the wonders of wireless MIDI sync in AV Performance with Acid&Bass&Momo producing a live remix of Karate Kid.

2. MIX + MASH. 9:30pm.

RICHARD DEVINE
The Deep Element
Justin McGrath
Liz Revision (Quantazelle)
Moldover
dj halon (Fake Science, False Profit)

Visuals:
Image8nineteen (Mat Hale)
Momo the Monster
Peter Kirn

CDM is on the road to California! If you’re at NAMM, mark your calendars now.

In addition to our full coverage of the NAMM trade show (covering new and odd music things with video, photos, and sound), we’ve got a party planned. (Whoo!) Attending / playing / organizing: myself, the wonderful audioist Liz McLean Knight, and the also wonderful visualist Surya aka momo the monster, to whom we owe the space and the LA magic. Full details soon, but here’s a teaser:

Where: Basswerks, a hip but comfy gallery/studio at 5411 W Adams Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90016. (Directions)

When: Friday, January 18, eight to late

What:

• a handmade music night, for people to come and show-and-tell DIY music projects informally and just hang out, whether hardware or software, as we’ve been doing with Etsy and Make in NYC.
• a chance to swap demo discs, as seen in Chicago. (don’t forget to check resources for making great demos)
• a lineup of great music and live visuals from LA, CDM, and the world. Cash bar available.

Who: You, if you’re in the LA area for NAMM or local — all are welcome. RSVP will be up soon; stay tuned. And that includes our friends among the vendors, etc., who will be desperate by then to escape Anaheim hotels for the city.

Contact us now if: you have a project you want to bring for handmade music and if you’re interested in playing music or visuals for a short set — no guarantees, but we may have a couple of slots open; if not, there will still be time to play around during the handmade music time.

And we’ll be roaming the NAMM floor, too, so anyone wanting to schedule a meeting, do get in touch.

Contact us