Super Cute Thursday (unplanned) continues, with an adorable indie rock coloring book. It’s hardly the first. STS9 and recently the lovely Riceboy Sleeps limited edition by Sigur Ros’ Jonsi and Alex came with coloring books. Perhaps inspired by musicians entering parenthood, it’s all the rage.

If you can’t be pressured to select just one band for your (or your kids’) coloring pleasure, here’s The Indie Rock Coloring Book, a project of the Yellow Bird Project, which gives to artists’ charities. You get to not only color but solve mazes and connect-the-dots.

Hey, with music increasingly intangible in the digital age and record sales dropping, it seems the kids’ activity book could be the future. And you get artists like MGMT, Iron & Wine, Bon Iver, and – pictured here – Joseph Arthur with his various stompboxes. Other artists involved with the project include faves like Au Revoir Simone, Broken Social Scene, Of Montreal, Rilo Kiley, and … many other goodies.

Electronic artists have been having a wave of babies themselves, so it seems an all-electronic coloring book is next. Perhaps a maze in Ableton Live’s Clip View, color-the-oscilloscope, monome Sodoku, fold-your-own-Moog… I could go on, but I’ll let you suggest some ideas and artists. (CDM Activity Book, perfect for long tours?)

Daily Dose Pick: The Indie Rock Coloring Book [Flavorpill]
Coloring Book
Yellow Bird Themesong

Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig Hero video contest winners were unveiled today. At the top of the charts, players not surprisingly demonstrated fine craft, sharp execution, great playing, and so on. But let’s skip straight to the oddities in the bunch. Like the girl with the violin on a pogo stick. And there is an appearance by the NS/Stick, which earns stringed-geek cred the more-predictable entries lack.

Now, normally I’m not so interested in the online contests various developers produce. But these entries stand out enough to have a good look here. Word of warning: you may be less inclined to buy a boxed copy of Guitar Rig as to buy yourself a nice, new pogo stick. (I could use the exercise… hmmm… Santa?)

The Pogo. Yes, the self-dubbed “Pogo Girl” is a very young girl playing violin and Guitar Rig in her living room. For some reason, the embittered YouTube world has savaged her in comments and given her a 2.5-star rating. I think she deserves far better. You know what I was doing at her age? Playing the piano. Sitting down. Now, granted, today I’d probably make a much more entertaining YouTube video on a pogo stick, but that’s because it’d include extended slow-motion footage of me falling off said pogo stick. And that’s even before I try to play an instrument at the same time. So, Pogo Girl, we salute you.

By the way, novelty of this aside, guitar amp emulators can sound fantastic with instruments like violin or even sitars. I’m sorry to see more alternative instruments didn’t make their way into the NI contest results. And to Pogo Girl, I have two words for you: contact mics. Feed the sound of pogo stick through Guitar Rig, too, and you’ll have a real hit on your hands.

The Preset Cliche Man. This brilliant entry had the brainstorm of dressing up as the stereotypical players most associated with each of the presets. Lesson learned: don’t use presets. (Well, that’s the lesson I take away, anyway.) Now, on some level, this is actually a parody of Guitar Rig. I think. It’s actually possible these presets are so powerful, they will transform you into these dudes when you play them. Since I’m about as good with frets as I am performing open heart surgery, I can’t tell you – I leave that to you to find out.

Just be careful. I’ve seen Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Once you transform, you may not change back.

The NS/Stick. The most interesting entry musically to me was this extended composition on the eight-string NS/stick [wikipedia], as performed by “eccentric master” Sekiguchi Takao. Yep, leave it to the Japanese dude to do something musically inventive. (Tokyo readers, and you know who you are, I’m totally ready to come tour to your fine town. Just say the word.)

The instrument itself here is as interesting as the software: it’s a tapping instrument designed by Emmett Chapman (of Chapman Stick fame) and Ned Steinberger (of Steinberger instruments and Spector bass fame). The NS/Stick is a cross-breed between the two. It combines two awesome things into a perfect fusion, kind of like waffles and fried chicken. In fact, I’d wager that musically speaking you don’t get much closer to waffles and fried chicken than the NS/Stick itself.

So, did any CDM readers get into the top ten list?

I’m genuinely a big fan of Guitar Rig; it’s my personal favorite of the amp simulators and I’ve used it in a number of my own pieces. But I imagine this contest may prompt someone to say “ha! I’ll go use the 14-stringed microtonal instrument to record a composition with Pd and SuperCollider.” If that’s you, do send us the results. (Did any CDMers ultimately enter the NI contest, out of curiosity?)

NI Guitar Rig Contest Winners

It’s iPhones being used by cute babies! And if that doesn’t sum up the ways in which Apple’s mobile is divisive, I don’t know what does. It’s time for our Monday round-up of the latest from the Apple iStuff world.

I’ve never been an advocate of the iPhone and iPod touch; the idea is to cover all digital music platforms on CDM, and as regular readers know, I have no love of Apple’s strict NDA and restrictive developer policies. But I did find this reader comment by PLP amusing:

I was getting annoyed with the amount of iphone info on CDM as well…then I broke down and bought one today :) i really like itouch midi. little XY pad perfect.

If you’ve found yourself in that boat, today’s round-up of iPhone and iPod touch news brings some very good news: BtBx, the PSP Rhythm creators’ wonderful beat machine, in action, iDrum working with round-trip workflows and operated by babies, and a multi-touch OpenSoundControl app on the app store.

BtBx in Action

What it is: The creators of the popular PSP Rhythm for Sony PSP show off their latest beat-making app for Apple. And it costs about as much as one beer — during happy hour.
Why it matters: Designing UIs for mobile apps requires a return to efficient, minimal interface design. Mark my words – that’ll start to influence desktop UI design for music software. And, yo, Sony: this could have been an official app on your platform, except you refused to make them an official developer. Indie PSP store, please?

Louie (RCON) shares two tasty BtBx videos. First on deck: making some acid basslines with BtBx. Skip the first couple of minutes — it’s the usual beat step sequencer you’ve seen before. Things start to get interesting further in as he sequences a live bassline. Note this is also the first time we’ve seen a full-blown synth in one of these apps, which for me put BtBx at the front of the pack. Part of why I like the Sony PSP is that it’s very capable of doing a lot of hard-core synthesis; we’re still waiting to see how much the iPhone can do.

For a sense of BtBx’s workflow, here’s a video demo of mixing songs:

BtBx was later to the game than iDrum and BeatMaker, but my guess is it’s going to start to earn some attention. I’ve just gotten my refurb iPod touch for testing these apps, so watch for a three-way battle soon. They each have their own strengths, and they’re very different. But don’t think that’ll stop me from letting my own biases loose and choosing a favorite.

iDrum + iDrum = Round-Trip Ticket

What it is: An update to the iDrum desktop app means you can take samples and patterns from your Mac and PC, then to your iPhone / iPod touch, and back again.
Why it matters: The laptop/desktop computer remains the center of music making for most people, and mobile tech isn’t likely to change that. But imagine simpler, portable versions of your favorite music apps, so you can develop ideas on the road and bring them back to the main environment. (Ableton, are you listening?)

iDrum has a unique feature, which is the ability to make custom sample packs and/or patterns in iDrum on your desktop Mac or PC, load them on your iPod touch or iPhone, edit them in iDrum, and then bring the full patterns back to your desktop. That solves an important issue, which is that MIDI export from a mobile device gives you patterns but not the sounds you created them for, whereas audio export gives you both but can’t be edited as easily as MIDI. It’s the first real round-trip workflow we’ve seen on the Apple platform. (Palm and Windows Mobile have done something like that before with music apps, but it’s still big news. Any Palm/WinMo historians, did any match up the desktop and mobile app quite like this?)

The trick was, we were waiting on a desktop update to actually use this. It’s now here, in the form of iDrum 1.64 (and later):

iDrum Product Page

Here’s a great demo of how iDrum in general works:

And for all of you iPhone haters who said these are just toys with UIs that look like they were designed for babies — okay, maybe you were right. But Baby Nicolina would like to have a word for you. If you insult her mad production skills, she gets really angry.

(The uploader notes Nicolina can “* Sequences notes * Turn the sequencer on * Solo the kick drum and modify which notes play * Bring in the modified kick drum part with the overall beat!”)

OpenSoundControl App on App Store

OpenSoundControl is a terrific, open protocol for controlling music and visual software more flexibly than you can with MIDI. It’s ideal for the iPhone and iPod touch, because these devices use networking protocols to communicate with the outside world.

We’ve seen controller apps on the “jailbroken” iPhone, but OSCemote is the first to be available via the official SDK and App Store. (That should be a reasonably good sign, in that it means at least some of this functionality is possible using Apple’s official SDK.)

It’s quite a nice app, as you can see. I like the simplicity of it, actually, as there’s not a whole lot of space on an iPhone for your fingers. The killer feature is clearly the Lemur-like multi-touch mode. And because it uses OSC, it should be a snap to hook this up to apps like Processing or the new Circle synth.

iTunes links:
OSCemote
OSCemote Light

I’ll definitely be testing this and will report back. A free version gives you pads, so try that out first; the full version is US$5. I am still interested to watch for jailbroken apps to make their way through the hurdles of the new SDK and, hopefully, show up on the official store. Some of those apps do things this one doesn’t, one (mrmr) has been open source, and choice is good. (I’m unclear on the implications of Apple’s developer agreement for open source; maybe someone has some idea.)

Here’s a quick review of those apps:

iPod / iPhone Touch as Visualist Controller: Free, Multiplatform with Pd (Pure Data)
Mrmr : iPhone + 10.5 + Quartz Composer = Wireless VJ Nirvana
MIDI Control with iPhone and iPod Touch: i3L MIDI Bridge
aka.iphone 2.1: More iPhone and iPod Touch Performance Tools; launch video

These won’t work even if you jailbreak your 2.0 iPhone/iPod touch, because the firmware changes are incompatible with these 1.x jailbroken apps.

We’ve also seen one official DMX controller

More entries for our next iTouch round-up? Send them our way!

Suzanne Ciani, the synthesis pioneer, multi-Grammy nominee, and composer of everything from New Age music to classic 70s jingles and sound effects (including the distinctive synthesized Coke-unbottling sound), explains the fundamentals of acoustics and synthesis in terms children could understand:

A Prophet figures prominently, but other than that it’s almost an all-Buchla show. She’s a virtuoso at patching a Buchla patch. And between her and the host, I guarantee you’ll be extremely calm within the first few seconds.

Teething Ring Max/MSP Musical Instrument for Babies

The creators have surfaced, and posted a video of the results. At first, the baby seems confused and even upset, but by the end of the video, we’ve got the world’s youngest electronic musician:

More details, photos, and even a CD release of music made by babies, for babies, at the project site:

Teething Ring Instrument

Co-designer Jo writes with more details of the project and an explanation of some of the traditional Japanese instruments (one designed specifically for infants) mentioned in the project paper:

Hi, all. I’m jo. One of co-designer of TSI. Our project continues minutely. We’re very glad with your interest. Here, I briefly try to answer your question.

About tonality, as a practical reason, to use western tonality is easy to implement with Max and MIDI :) . I suppose that in the one of the reason we Japanese use it. Babies got strong schema of tonality in early stage of growth (about 6 month to 1 year). So, as you mentioned, we need to have an experiment with other scales to try to catch the effect of musical instrument for early stage of growth. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t test it yet because of the problem of assembling the subjects (babies).

About Japanese musical instrument, “garagara” is a percussive instrument with a grip for baby (http://e-bussan.co.jp/news/2006_03/6nisenmingei.JPG, http://www4.kcn.ne.jp/~andyjudy/dorio.jpg) and “poppen”(other name is vidro) is a blowing instrument made by glass. You can make two different sound with blowing motion (push and pull).and it’s not related to Pokemon :) .

Thanks, Jo! Now that I hear the results, I have a much better sense of the project. I also understand the initial choice of Western tuning, as the music sounds really distinctive and baby-friendly.

So we now know a garagara looks like this:

And a popen/vidro looks like this:

Thanks for all of this, and I for one am looking forward to more baby-created instruments. Anyone who’s worked on something along the same lines, as well, do let us know.

[tags]alternative interfaces, children, design, instruments, Japan, Max/MSP, oddities, physical computing, Sensors, toys[/tags]

Firmly in the “start ‘em young” category, the TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument) is designed to allow 0-3 year olds to create digital music in Max/MSP. Pressure from the baby’s mouth suckling at the teething ring is converted to MIDI messages and sent to a sound patch on a connected computer:

Pitch corresponds to the change of the sucking pressure. When the teething ring is strongly sucked, a higher note rings. The “basic part” consists of a simple 3 note C-major chord played melodically in the form of a simple musical scale. This is something the baby can identify and enjoy. In expansion part, the note changes with every suck. When the suck is repeated, ascent, descent are repeated. The change of the notes can be enjoyed even by the reflexive sucking motion. Therefore, this is ideal for use from the baby’s initial stage of growth.

TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument): A Design of the Sound Instrument for the Baby [Academic paper in PDF form; thanks, Patrick!]

The project is the creation of Naoko Kubo, Kazuhiro Jo, and Ken Matsunaga at the Science of Sound Culture department of the Kyushu Institute of Design. It’s not new, but this is the first I’ve seen it.

Interestingly, the all-Japanese design team opted for Western tonality. The “melody” application for the interface, according to the designers, is “intended for the young, somewhat cultured child accustomed to a certain degree to Western tonal music. When the baby begins to suck, a melody with the simple rhythm made on the basis of tonality structure of the Western tonal music begins to sound and stops when the sucking motion is finished.” I know many of us here are of the mind that the last thing babies need is more equal-tempered Western tonality, so fortunately at the end of the article the designers promise to experiment with Javanese pelog tuning or their indigenous Okinawan musical scales. (Patrick who sent in this link was looking up Okinawan scales.)

I’m equally curious about the children’s instruments the article mentions, though, the “garagara” and the “poppen”, which apparently are traditional Japanese musical toys for kids. Can anyone describe what these instruments are? Google curiously returns this image from Pokemon. That either means that the garagara is a cute little dinosaur, played by hitting the small creature in the head with his bone mallet Muppephone-style (whoo! I got to mention Muppephones twice in one week!), or the Pokemon is named for the musical instrument because all kids know what a garagara is! Regardless, this dinosaur is indeed cute.

Updated: Patrick sends details both on the apparent origins of this project, and the instruments in question:

According to this site, it seems to date from a conference in around 2001 although the idea didn’t seem to get anywhere, but maybe Toshio Iwai could be persuaded to take an interest…

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502348.502374

Garagara means rattle and can also describe any sort of baby rattling toy (try an image search for various examples old and new).

Poppen is also known as pokopen or bidoro, which comes from the Portuguese “vidro”, or glass, as they introduced the glass blowing technique used in its manufacture in the, err, 17th century or so. It originated in Nagasaki which the port used by Jesuits/Portuguese traders and later others. It’s a sort of one-note flute and was obviously a bit of a craze back in those simpler times and still a popular souvenir to bring back from Nagasaki. There’s a famous woodblock print by Utamaro and song about a woman playing one. Not sure which came first. They were/are used at New Year to expel bad luck:

http://www.sam.hi-ho.ne.jp/maruyosi/popen.htm

Thanks, Patrick!

[tags]physical-computing, sensors, children, toys, alternative-interfaces, oddities, Japan, design, Max/MSP, instruments[/tags]

Nigeria Orders First Million OLPC Laptops at vnunet.com, which also has two videos of working prototypes; via worldchanging

For more background on the project, see The Laptop Crusade, from this month’s Wired.

See also our previous story, Creative, Networked Music Making on $100 One Laptop Per Child, which brought some interesting debate on all sides of this issue.

Beyond the idea of giving millions of children new access to computing, there’s a separate mission that’s come up: how to create useful music software for children. As covered in that previous article, a team of developers is working on new music software called TamTam that will have two lives: one, as creative musical software for the OLPC hardware, and a second, as open source software anyone can run. That means that even if you don’t agree with OLPC’s aims and implementation, TamTam could still have potential running on used laptops here in the US. (Given the problems of toxic computer waste, I’m just as interested in how we can recycle computers without short-shrifting children that receive them.)

Reader Nat Lécaudé, who initially brought TamTam to our attention, talks about working on the project:

I got involved through the University of Montreal where I am a student. Jean Piché, my teacher is the author of Cecilia, a sound manipulation program based around Csound. Since we have a lot of Csound knowledge and that the OLPC runs Csound as it’s audio engine, people from MIT asked Jean to form a team to do a music software for the OLPC.

Regarding different tunings, we’re still not sure how it will be done but it will definitely be there. We were thinking about defining a global tuning and that the notes would snap to the good spot on a grid. Lots of solutions for this, we’ll have to wait a little to see how it will be handled. Since in Gamelan for example, each instrument is slightly detuned to create a vibrato effect, we will need a mechanism to detune a specific track slightly. That would be I guess, the most complex scenario.

Ed.: There’s actually a lot to this point. Not all instruments in gamelan feature paired tunings; “solo” instruments like the rebab can be played alone; at the opposite extreme, while individual pairs are tuned together, gamelan builders generally think of the tuning of the whole ensemble, so just doing pairing out of context wouldn’t really work. That just covers Java and Bali; other countries have various issues of their own. Talking about tuning and computer music could easily fill a book. At the very least, I hope this software will support Scala microtunings, since it’s the only real standard for implementing this on computers. Even in the Western world, 12-TET tuning doesn’t cover the full range of what people actually play. Sorry to get off on this topic, but I imagined someone would bring this up if I didn’t. It does illustrate why the challenges of creating this software are fascinating in themselves. -PK

The goal is to have multiple levels of complexity. A kid can start making music very easily by clicking some buttons that will generate music based on algorithms. Eventually he can start sequencing himself note by note. He will also be able to write python scripts to generate music based on rules of his own. Same goes for synthesis, a sound bank based around samples will
be included but it will be possible for the kid to dig into csound to create his own sounds. The OLPC being quite modest regarding performance. We won’t be able to do things like physical modeling, but simple synthesis should be possible.

The resulting software will be completely open source and the goal is to have 2 versions. A version targeted at the OLPC which will deal with the fact the machine is not powerful. Another version will be made available to other platforms so we can play with it ourselves. Even though the concept is simple, we “wasted” lots of hours with the max demo generating music and, it can be used as a composition tool or just for the fun of it. The coolest feature we did is the ability to record short samples and load the samples
as instruments. It will be interesting to see also if the community can come up with custom algorithms generated using our scripting interface. These could eventually be added to the OLPC version. It would be fairly easy for instance to write an algorithm that would generate different Gamelan music each time you run it.

Thanks for posting the story and I will keep you updated as it evolves!

Just wanted to let you know what I was working on during the summer, we’re doing a sequencer/algorithmic music generator for the OLPC project. We did all the protoyping in Max and are now porting it to Python/GTK using Csound as the sound engine.

TamTam, music app on the OLPC Wiki

TamTam is intended both as an instrument in itself and an environment for learning music. It has basic sequencing and synthesis capabilities, presented in a child-friendly format. It’s also networked so children can play together. The sounds themselves will be influenced by the countries in which the OLPC will be distributed, with instruments of various kinds from Brazil, China, India, Thailand, and Nigeria. (I’m not sure how they’ll deal with tunings, but then, early in the Dutch occupation of what is now Indonesia, Javanese composers experimented with mixing the Pelog- and Slendro-tuned gamelan with Western marching band, an experiment my Javanese teacher later applied to Scottish bagpipes and gamelan. Anything is possible.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves, as I could see it being useful internationally or other efforts being modeled on similar ideas.

For more technical background: Python is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language that’s unusually easy to learn. CSound is the powerful, free sound synthesis platform that’s shown up everywhere from experimental compositions to the guts of at least one karaoke machine (really).

See also:
Brad Fuller’s O’Reilly blog, which has a running commentary on OLPC (as well as insight on why operating systems are meaningless!)

MIT’s OLPC site and (importantly) OLPC wiki, which responds to at least some of the “why” questions discussed in comments on this story. Whether the OLPC initiative itself winds up living up to its goals, it seems to me that a cheap, accessible, open source sequencer for kids should be valuable regardless.

More on this issue: See our follow-up story, TamTam, Music Software for Kids, to be Fully Open Source; One Million OLPCs in Nigeria

In case you haven’t seen it yet, The New York Times reports today that New York-area schoolkids have resorted to an unusual solution to cellphone bans. Apparently unaware of phones’ vibrate mode, the students have opted for an incredibly annoying ringtone pitched at 17,000 Hz. Theoretically, “adults” shouldn’t be able to hear that. (The real issue is middle-aged adults, an ironic choice in New York schools where many of the faculty are younger.) I also think that’s a liberal estimate of hearing loss; while most people lose some of their high-end hearing as they age, the numbers from the private security firm quoted in the article seem a little odd — 12,000 Hz for a 50-year-old? I hope not! (Better cover your ears on the subways, huh?)

A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears [NYTimes.com; registration required and free story may expire]

The upshot of all of this is that there’s a free, if primitive, hearing test in the article (and presumably, all over the Web where these students are getting it). Hearing loss is a major problem; according to Aetna and the Harvard Medical School, 24% and 40% of adults over age 65 have difficulty hearing, and thirty percent of people over age 85 are deaf in at least one ear. For a better hearing test, here’s a free online example (I’m sure there are others online, and of course this does NOT substitute for a medical exam . . . nor can it measure just how annoying a kid with a cell phone can be):

Free Hearing Test

Anyone out there know what typical hearing loss figures are around middle age? (Lately, every time I write something some real experts show up out of nowhere, which is a pleasant experience!)

Poor Tia Thomas! Here’s a whiz kid who can spell ortstein, velocious, marmoreal, and totipalmate, and she has the misfortune to be eliminated from the National Spelling Bee on the word Theremin:

Theremin ends spelling bee contestant’s hopes [Theremin World]

(She guessed “Theramin”, which Theremin World’s Jason notes is a misspelling widely spread on eBay.) Heck, I don’t even know what those words mean, though I’ll be the World Wide Web knows, as it’s smarter than I am . . . Let’s see, totipalmate has to do with webbed feet, marmoreal means marble-like, as in, “that’s a very marmoreal Theremin case you’ve got there,” and ortstein means, um, “An indurated layer in the B horizon of Podzols in which the cementing material consists of illuviated sesquioxides and organic matter.” Try to use that in a sentence. Though I will say, Crazy Pete and the Illuviated Sesquioxides would make a killer band name.

No, let’s face it: our children are missing out on a proper Theremin education. We need children building Theremins in Physics class, fashioning gorgeous metal cases in shop, and studying the instrument’s rather elusive playing technique in extensive lessons and together in enormous choirs. (Wait, scratch that last idea, as that would throw off the calibration of the instrument . . . for chorus, they can all have Martenots.) I’m sure the Bush Administration would be game here in the U.S., since inventor Leon Theremin had a background in security and developing listening devices (for the KGB, but now we’re all on the same side). And developing listening devices and hidden microphones? Also more fun that most of what I did in school. I’m sure you’re more likely to run into a Theremin player than you are an indurated layer in the B horizon of Podzols.

Otherwise, there’s just no hope for the Tia Thomases of the world. And she, incidentally, I’m fairly certain of this, is a whole lot smarter than I am. Tia, if you’re out there and want a job as a copy editor, you know where to find us. (If I misspelled anything here, readers, do let me know.)