Bored with mouse pushing and knob twiddling? The d-touch tangible sequencer / drum machine makes a cheap interface (with free downloadable software) for assembling sequences. Make some (attractive) blocks, set up a webcam, and plug into your computer. I took a first look at this tool last month, and noted its use in sequencing walnuts. (Yes, the ones that fall from trees.) Since then, the developers have been hard at work on updates. Enrico writes:

We just released the d-touch sequencer, a new, more advanced, audio application. In the sequencer you can record your own samples in real time.

We also have few updates for the drum machine, which should solve the activation problems we were having at the beginning.

Go grab the markers and the software, and you have your own webcam-based drum machine.

Should you decide to go beyond their free instrument, the underlying system is really quite sophisticated. Part of what makes it beautiful is that you can design your own markers rather than settling for predefined patterns, as with most similar marker-tracking systems. There’s even a tool for correcting problems in your design. The freely-downloadable analysis software is written in C/C++, but if you use another environment (like Max or Processing or Reaktor), you can simply pipe data to your tool of choice.

The drum machine and sequencer are available now, so go download them and let you know how you fare! System requirements: a printer, a webcam, and a PC/Mac. Enjoy!

http://www.d-touch.org/

For some hands-on impressions of working with these things, the excellent PC Music Guru has a great description of the experience. Or, if you read the language, there’s a Japanese-language hands-on blog entry.

Gestural Music Sequencer from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Something as simple as remapping a single knob can give you new musical ideas. So expand that to entire gestures and live video input, and you can help push your performance in new directions and out of old habits. That’s why it’s always great to see projects like the Gestural Music Sequencer.

Built entirely in free tools – tools fairly friendly even to non-coders – the GMS lets composer and musician John Keston explore new ideas through gestures captured in a video stream. It’s easier to see than to talk about, so check out the just-completed documentary short by Josh Klos, with the aid of Julie Kistler and Brian Smith. (And yes, documentation makes a huge difference; we’d love to see more of this stuff!)

The ingredients:

• Processing, the free, multiplatform coding environment [site | cdmu tag | cdmo tag]
• controlP5, a lovely, light, quick-and-dirty library for UI controls
• Ableton Live – though you could substitute other software via MIDI, Live makes a nice, familiar interactive music engine

The translation of music from something largely invisible to a physical object is oddly beautiful, even when imperfect. That’s part of why we’re working on the Tangible Interface Hackday – less than 48 hours away now.

Here are a couple of additional sources of inspiration as we prepare.

At bottom, Guy John has made a sequencer out of one of the world’s most ancient games, Go. Over two millenia ago, Chinese people were passing the hours playing this game, so it’s an incredible way of connecting our passtimes today with the leisure time of our ancient ancestors – and a sign that gaming is a part of culture that endures. It’s fitting, too, as a lot of computer musical interfaces can be thought of as games. This particular game uses Max/MSP/Jitter and the CV Jitter externals for image analysis, then translates the game into a grid. Guy’s idea is fairly early in development, so I actually think you could go all sorts of different directions with this basic concept. (As seen in Hack a Day at the end of last year.)

At top, the Graphite Sequencer translates optical images made in the electricity-conducting material to sound in a simple turntable. It’s lovely seeing these patterns as sound objects, especially since usually we go the other way (trying to find patterns to affix to sounds). The same basic graphite-conducting process is used in the business card PAiA kit we showed at a past Handmade Music, as well as the Drawdio pencil (based on the same circuit).

Graphite Sequencer (2006), as seen recently via the blog of the fabulous-looking Montreal Elektra Festival

I’d love to see people continue to combine these fairly basic analog-style techniques – or thousands-year-old games – with the newer digital approach. Let us know what you come up with, creative folk.

Digital technology has made music oddly invisible, virtualized somewhere inside a screen – but it also allows music to be mapped more literally to the physical world than ever before. Some of these experiments may even be silly, but they suggest a lot of possibilities.

From Poland, BeatMachine is a project that sequences beats in a step sequencer using discarded beer bottle caps. Would-be Internet haters, I suggest you count the number of beer bottle caps on the table, and start drinking that number while watching. I guarantee eventually it’ll seem like a brilliant idea.

Make sure you keep watching to the clever-looking software they’ve evidently developed for the task.

http://mw.boo.pl/beatmachine/

If this seems familiar, it was in fact inspired by the Bubblegum Sequencer featured here previously, and its rival I Eat Beats. Through the power of the Internet, iterating and improving ideas isn’t just something you do for yourself alone – it’s something you can share with others. That’s the idea behind our own tangible interface hackday coming up on Saturday:

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Thanks to Artur Nowak for the tip. I know we have a number of readers in Poland, so is there anyone who could help with a quick translation?

(Oh, and Poland, by the way – my book was actually translated into your language!)

Free software, a webcam, and some stickers printed on an inkjet can turn any object into a real-world controller. That’s what Paul Rose of Institut Fatima and his team did with a soccer ball (translation for the civilized world: football). The software is powered by the same framework used for the reacTable, but in this case there’s no table and no projector: just a ball.

Institut FATIMA uses a Fussball as (des-)controller for triggering drumsamples. The camera detects the symbols on the ball, kicks numbers into the sequencer, the sequencer matches goals. The goal is always music. Software used is reactivision and ableton live. Do it at home.

As it happens, reacTIVision just got a significant update, with more improvements planned. You can read up on the full details on Create Digital Motion:

Free Tangible Tracking: reacTIVision 1.4 Here, TUIO2 Coming Soon

Martin Kaltenbrunner, co-creator of the framework (and the reacTable), has some tips for working with tangible interfaces and music, and where to find more inspiration.

In addition to TUIO, reacTIVision also has an alternative MIDI mode, where you can map the appearance of fiducial symbols to note ON and OFF events, as well as their X,Y and rotation angle to a control channel value. Quite a few people have been using this for the creation of cheap web-cam based MIDI controllers.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=reactivision+midi

Using TUIO, you have more alternatives though, you can currently use Max/MSP, Pure Data, Quartz Composer, Processing, Java, C++, C# and so on to receive the object & finger tracking data. Here are a few cool musical projects, that have been built using reacTIVision:

http://modin.yuri.at/tangibles/?list=7

Patrick H. Lauke (patch pictured, from Flickr) has a video on YouTube that shows some of the basic workflow for combining the free patching environment Pd with TUIO and reacTIVision. He cautions:

this may not be pleasant from a musical point of view, but it only serves as a first test for further experimentation.

Hopefully this gives folks some ammunition if you’re getting involved in the tangible interface hackday! [Project site | on CDMu]