Making your own instruments may not be for everyone, but getting to witness the bleeding edge of musical DIY can give real insight into how electronic music performance can work, and what matters in sound. Last week, the famous sound research center in Amsterdam STEIM generously hosted an edition of Handmade Music, inviting inventors to make noises and performances with their self-made creations and to talk about their work.

Ben Terwel, one of the artists, shot the video above. It includes discussion in both Dutch and English, but if you don’t speak Dutch, you’ll still get the gist of a lot of the musical demonstrations. (It’s actually nice to hear the native language included, since I came in and spoke English, which you get plenty of here on CDM!)

A number of themes emerged from the work we saw:

Argos Interface Builder, v0.20 from Dimitri Diakopoulos on Vimeo.

You know the game: you decide you want exactly 8 knobs and 10 faders. But your hardware interface has 8 knobs and 8 faders. And then you realize you could use 4 more knobs.

The appeal of touch interfaces is clear: you get controls that grow and change. So now, a generation of mobile apps is working on giving you that flexibility on touch devices. The iPhone is just the start: now the iPad, with greater real estate, will go head to head with 5″, 8″, and laptop-sized screens running Android, Linux, and Windows.

Argos is an early-stages (but usable), free and open-source tool that could help you be ready. Built in openFrameworks, the C++-based cousin to Processing, the app lets you drag in basic widgets like buttons, sliders, toggles, and x-y pads, and assign them to OSC. That opens up control to various music and visual apps. (The OSC assignment tool does bear some similarity to that on the Lemur, though it’s simpler.) The openFrameworks roots should make this easier to port to multiple platforms.

http://argos.dimitridiakopoulos.com/

RFID tags may have negative privacy associations when they’re used without someone’s knowledge. But embed these simple identifiers intentionally, and they can be a cheap, flexible way of tagging the world around you. Add OSC support with a free tool, and you can make anything into a basic music controller. That’s what Martin Kaltenbrunner – best known for his work on the ground-breaking ReacTable music table – has done with his own free software. It’s simple enough that you can easily make use of it, or take it as an opportunity to brush up on OSC and Pd.

This sort of odd, out-of-the-blue example is the perfect illustration of why OSC matters. Quietly, gradually, OSC is describing the world around computers in intelligent ways. In contrast to MIDI, with its resolution limits and arbitrary categories (vibrato rate?), OSC can standardize anything. What previously required advance standardization can now be truly open and even improvisational. The old way of standardizing: go in front of some sort of committee for approval. (RFID tags for music? Not likely.) The new way: go ahead and do the implementation, gather feedback, and if it works, other people will follow your specifications to ensure their stuff works with yours. In this case, Martin plans to add the RFID tagging to his TUIO2 protocol, which made what would have been just a cool one-off project (ReacTable) into a viral phenomenon of work with touch and tangible input. Martin writes:

There’s not really a name for it, but there’s a growing scene around advanced musical performance. Once the domain primarily of academia, the notion of creating novel controls for music – from felt to monomes – is gaining traction across many scenes, and firing up a larger-than-ever, global population of makers.

That’s why I’m excited to be part of the in/out Festival tomorrow here in New York. Sure, chip music lovers have Blip next week, and circuit benders have Bent. But In/Out is all about 16-bit-plus, not 8-bit, and not a circuit will be bent. Here’s a look at the lineup – good reason that you’ll want to be there tomorrow if you’re in the NYC area, and some folks to check out from the east coast-US scene if you’re not:

Workshops: There’s still space in the workshop lineup; you can hit the whole lineup for $25.

• Reaktor drum machine construction with Kid Sputnik
• Jitter visual performance with Kedaar
• Felt and fabric as musical interfaces with Sarah and Lara Grant
• Describing music in code, messages, with Processing and OSC, with me (and yes, working on an online curriculum for this very soon, in time for a course I’m teaching in the spring at Parsons!)
• Max for Live with max4live.info’s Michael Chenetz

Performance: By night, we’re playing from 7p on with live audio and visuals:

• Switchboard Operator aka Lori Napolean, playing a telephone switchboard
• tehn aka Brian Crabtree spinning elegant, reflective music on his invention, the monome
• Kid Sputnik aka Daniel Battaglia, the Reaktor guru and live musician
• makingthenoise, the rocking beats from the creator of 7up for monome
• Ocular Noise Machine, an experimental multimedia ensemble including Jay Smith of Livid
• Kedaar working with custom Jitter visuals, !INCLUDE of Track Team Audio doing live visuals, and myself visualizing for Brian

All at The Tank, 354 W. 45th between 8th and 9th Avenue.

So, for the 98% of you not in NYC, let me know if there are specifics you’d like covered on CDM from these workshops and artists. In the meantime, here are some quick goodies to listen to and play with from the lineup:

How much can you do with a single line of musical code?

Scoring music using archaic-looking (but relatively fundamental) audio techniques, a group of composers has produced a free album. Each track, produced in the open source, multi-platform audio tool SuperCollider, is produced via only 140 characters of code. The work ranges from electronic grooves to droning ambiences to hypnotic melodic patterns… and yes, a few strange sounds. You can listen to the output as a conventional album, or if you install a copy of SuperCollider, you can run the code yourself – some of the tracks will sound different each time the code is executed.

The album, sc140, was released earlier in the fall but I didn’t get a chance to write about it; readers reminded me as the release of Mixtikl 2 yesterday brought a similar generative score-tweeting feature. Mixtikl’s approach is a little different; SuperCollider here is building sounds from scratch, whereas Mixtikl is tweeting higher-level information about a mix.

All of the code from the project is accessible, so this is an interesting way to learn about the capabilities of SuperCollider, and to find some of the commands you might want to understand if you’re delving in yourself.

If you’re not quite ready for writing code, the track audio is Creative Commons-licensed (BY-NC-SA 3), so you can sample the audio, as well.

sc140 @ SuperCollider site

Article + artist bios at The Wire (who collaborated on this release)

Source code

Album curated by Dan Stowell.

How all this started: SCTwitting, sharing code on Twitter

Lots of interesting artists in there, too, including Sciss aka Hanns Holger Rutz, whose OSC library for Java I’ve been using.

For more SuperCollider coding insanity:

Recreating the THX Deep Note