Look around the room you’re in. Drum your fingers against some of the objects around you. Now imagine that you could turn those touches into any imaginable sound – and all you’d need to play them is a single contact mic. And we’re not talking just simplistic sounds – think expressive, responsive transformation of the world around you, all with just that one mic, thanks to clever gestural recognition.

Bruno Zamborlin has made that idea a reality, with hold-onto-your-chair results. It’s not available yet for public consumption, but it’s coming.

Bruno explains to CDM:

Mogees is a novel way for transforming any surface into a musical instrument.

By putting a (very cheap) contact microphone over a surface, the software can recognise different types of touch and associate them with different synthesisers.

Users can train the software with their own ‘gestures’, using both bare hands and objects. In the video demo we put the microphone over different surfaces such as kitchen tables and balloons.

The sound synthesis is based on two different techniques:

1 – physical modeling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws. Different materials can be simulated, such as membranes, strings, tubes and plates

2 – mosaicing, that works as follow: first, users load a sound folder; then, the noise coming from the microphone is analysed and the software continuously finds and plays its closest segment within the sound folder.

Mogees has not been realised yet. It could be published as Max4Live patch in some month.

Yes, we’ll be watching for future versions and publication, with bated breath and eager hands.

http://www.brunozamborlin.com/mogees

Update: Readers point to similar earlier work; obviously, contact mics have long been readily available. I’m not always concerned with whether something is new or not – old and cool can be cool. But what does appear to be new here is the additional gestural analysis to work more accurately with location. That takes an existing technique and refines its musicality. -PK

Ed.: Hacking Web databases to search sounds, remixing tools to automatically create dub tunes, cameras to sequence and analyze images in new ways, Montréal hackers have been busy. Trevor Knight writes from the event with full coverage from Canada, latest outpost of this global music coding phenomenon:

Music Hack Day made its first appearance in Canada at the end of September, painting the event with a Montréal flavour, complete with bilingualism, Montréal-style bagels, and even an appearance of Stephen Harper in a hack. Over the Saturday-Sunday event, musicians, programmers, and hackers scramble to create any sort of new music project.

With the help of dozens of laptops, gallons of coffee, several APIs and staff from such companies as The Echonest, Soundcloud, and Grooveshark, the assembled hackers churned out and presented 24 hacks in 24 hours.

Bruno Angeles took home first prize for his hack, FaCeQuencer, which uses computer vision and a webcam to control a squencer/looper and at the same time, outfit the user appropriately to the style of music.

Free Assembly, the hack from Graham Boyes, took second prize and recreates a target sound using a database of samples. It uses The Echonest Remix API for the analysis and finds target sounds sourced using Freesound.org’s API. The power of this hack was clear when Graham demonstrated using a drum and bass track as the target sound and a recording of a dog playing in water as the sample.

With a heavy presence of students and researchers from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media Technology (CIRMMT) and McGill University, several of the hacks incorporated data-mining. For example, David Weigl, Hannah Robertson, and Andrew Hankinson created wuzhear, a venue-based database of historical concerts in Montreal from the Montreal Jazz Festival website and last.fm’s API, including set information and playable with a Grooveshark widget.

The Wub Machine 2.0, from Peter Sobot, automatically creates Dub or Electrohouse remixes of an audio sample, while The Beatbox Machine allows one to record beatboxing and return a drum sequence replaced with actual drum samples.

For a complete list of hacks, check out http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Montreal_2011_Hacks

Now that Canada has tasted the sweet Music Hack Day nectar, there’s already buzz for a hack day in Toronto.

Dac Chartrand (Renoise) writes with more details. Dac has his own set of hacks, but I’m excited enough about it that I’ll put that in a separate post -PK:

Other "Renoisers" were on site, but used the 24 hour session to try new ideas, but not present them. For example Steve Sinclair (Radarsat1) tried to port Mark Zadel’s Different Strokes to Android. Different Strokes resembles a freehand drawing application. The drawn strokes create animated figures whose motion is mapped to sample playback. The musician performs by assembling networks of strokes live, generating audio patterns. Steve got drawing and particles working but not enough time to hook into the Android audio subsystem, so he didn’t bother presenting.

Longtime CDM readers Studioimaginaire were also on site hacking away at their multi-touch table. They were there the full two days but also didn’t bother presenting. I tried to talk them into it several times, saying that the crowd would obviously vote for them just on cool factor alone and that they would walk away with a prize, but they stuck to their principles. Something to be said about the vibe of the event. Hackers were there to have fun.

David Viens of Plogue made am appearance for the demo session Sunday afternoon.

Good times had by all.

Can’t get enough of the upcoming drum machine, Tempest, by Roger Linn and Dave Smith? Reader Josh Decker sends in this video by Josh’s friend Rob Baker, aka Redivider, tearing up the machine as a performance instrument. Also, follow the comment thread on our previous post for some follow-up from Dave Smith Instruments to reader questions. Dave tells us there will be more to say on the machine, and that we can expect a release date that should come very close to “the end of summer.” (Watch your calendar.) The Tempest may not be for everyone – and some of us simply don’t have the scratch for this kind of gear at the moment – but I nonetheless find it inspiring to see what people are doing, especially in regards to workflow.

Product page: http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/products/tempest/

I love this controller, but I think we should keep it Platonic. Solid.

Sorry, geometry humor. See, the controller in question is constructed as a convex regular polyhedron, such that all its faces are themselves congruent regular polygons meeting at each vertex, and … uh, never mind.

Above, a stunningly gorgeous video from Polish media art group panGenerator, with some lovely chiming music following by the evidently-now-requisite dubstep demo. (Tip all of us could use, guys and gals – makeup. Styling. Now, they just need some post-production so you can’t see the IR sensors or the wires.)

Hedoco, also based in Poland, is the manufacturing and distribution partner, and donated this prototype. I love their stated philsoophy: “a unique brand that connects two trends: open source design and fashion.”

No, seriously. And, seriously, why not?

The controller itself looks actually quite lovely – and it’s open source hardware, too, from top to bottom. MIT license for the source, Creative Commons for everything else. (One trick: by choosing “Non-Commercial,” they don’t technically qualify under the Open Sound Hardware Definition. I’d suggest keeping the ShareAlike, since any commercial user would have to share modifications. I know not all designers are comfortable with that, though.)

Designer Jakub Koźniewski and whole team of panGenerator, seen in these parts building a kinetic sound organ out of cans, is behind this project, too. Ingredients:

• Bluetooth. (The revolution will not have wires.)
• Infrared distance sensors. (Though if you know what those are, you already knew that.)
• Arduino, the open source hardware prototyping platform.
• Processing. (Whatever. No one cool uses that any more.)
• OpenSoundControl.

Source code is available now on GitHub, with hardware schematics coming soon. And that could lead to an all dodecahedronal music festival. You may recall the work of Ted Hayes, whose Neurohedron has the same shape. Ted’s work, by contrast, works with a drum sequencer — meaning these two could even play onstage together. Ted and Jakub each tell us that’s coincidence, and when Jakub did realize the form had been taken, the two connected. Now I say we just need more. Dodecahedronstock. Polyhedrapolaooza. Platonaroo. Euclid Fair. Let’s make it happen.

On Ted’s Neurohedron side, he tells us that his work, featured at a Handmade Music event I produced in New York as well as at NIME, has gotten significant updates, so we look forward to seeing that. Previously:

Pretty, Nodal, Non-Linear Music, on iPad + iPhone and Big Dodecahedrons

Handmade Music NY 8/29: Meet the Musical Inventors, Pong to Dodecahedrons

More:

http://www.pangenerator.com/

http://www.hedoco.com/

Following yesterday’s interview with Kyle McDonald on FaceOSC, his custom webcam + tracking application that can make music with your face, here’s another face-controlled music demo. This one uses Ableton Live for jamming. I should add, since I somewhat obscured the fact, that this isn’t Kinect: it works entirely with a built-in webcam, which means it’s completely free to try and you don’t have to tote any extra hardware, so long as you have a laptop with a built-in cam. More on this technology as we watch it evolve…

Matt Davis [namethemachine] is seen here with Microsoft’s Kinect computer vision / 3D camera controller, plus – stealing the show – lasers. The lasers in question are a rig by Henry Strange, which allows computer control of laser direction using the DMX protocol. (DMX is a protocol similar to MIDI – though actually a bit simpler, if you can believe that – generally associated with lighting and show control.)

I could say more, but I’ll let you watch the video and ponder. The ingredients:
OpenNI, the “natural interface” not-for-profit standards body and organization that allows drivers across multiple hardware (Kinect being the best-known)
Ableton Live (sound)
Max/MSP (I believe here just translating OpenNI control to MIDI and perhaps DMX, as well)

The result: audiovisual control, and The Future. (Now, the only problem is, I’m not sure I’d want to watch an entire lineup of people doing these kinds of gestures while performing, but I could certainly see this alongside other alternative control schemes, from breath to good-old-fashioned tangible controllers.)

Thanks, Laura Escude, for the tip. (Laura has her own interface for futuristic electronic performance – she uses a violin!)

Clock Trippin, Poly Rhythm RENÉ from Richard Devine on Vimeo.

Analog both in the electrical sense and in the way it combines continuous, non-discrete steps, the René is a step sequencer with a difference. The hardware uses a two-dimensional array of knobs to produce non-linear, complex rhythmic patterns from some four clock and two CV inputs. I think the proof is in watching it above, in a video this week by Richard Devine, employing a fully modular, analog working method – no computers in sight. Because, really, people who use computers and drum machines are total posers. You’ll never find any of them ’round here. Why, their music is full of numbers and destroys your brain and you probably can’t stop using Facebook long enough to even finish a track.

Kidding. In all seriousness, I think musically, compositionally, this sequencer arrangement is fascinating. I’m still struggling for a way to describe it — the creators mysteriously say “cartesian sequencer,” “geometric sequencer,” “planular sequencer,” “axis sequencer,” “non-linear sequential tuned voltage map” — but producing non-linear, asymmetrical sequences of rhythms is something as fundamentally musical as it is fundamentally analog. It’s also fairly deeply influenced by the pioneering work of Don Buchla, years ago. There’s plenty here to inspire your weekend musically, whether you’re sitting down with a computer, an analog modular (you lucky bastard), or a pencil and manuscript paper (affordable in any economy).

And yes, the computer folks will be getting at least a little drool on their QWERTY keyboards and mice with this rig from Richard:

Analogue percussion performance patch experimenting with tripping the clock input to get different polyrhythms on the MakeNoise René. The MakeNoise Brains, K4815 Pattern Generator, Z8000, 4ms RCD, SCM and Pressure points are also being clocked with René from a single LFO.

Sound sources for the drums. One noise source from the Cwejman S1 mkII to make the long clap percussion sounds. Kickdrum made on the Cwejman BLD, and snare drum made from the Synthesis Technology E350. High hats courtesy of the Malekko NoiseRing.

The Cwejman is a truly beautiful piece of gear and design. too. And I love the design of all the MakeNoise modules; it’s some brilliant stuff (see below). Sweet dreams this weekend, folks – see you on the flipside.

http://www.makenoisemusic.com/RENE.html
http://www.makenoisemusic.com/

Ed.: Social networking, online sites (this being one of them), Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace … sometimes it seems like all the connections are being done online. Naturally, the Web’s real power is when you can meet all those virtual personalities you’ve gotten to know offline. Far better than getting demo CDs in the mail or listening to someone’s tracks on MySpace: meeting them at a party over a drink and getting their music from them directly.

Such is the genius of Chicago’s Demo Swap. Co-organizer Liz has this wrap-up of what July’s party was like. Non-Chicagoans (heck, fellow New Yorkians), clearly this is a model to be replicated elsewhere. A huge thanks to all of the CDMers who showed up. It was fantastic to meet you, and I hope to see you again soon — ideally with more leisure time to hang out! (I’m in Chicagoland regularly.) I was especially impressed by Karl, who was in Chicago from Austria and was embarking on a cross-country drive across the entire length of Route 66 the following morning. Why is that foreigners appreciate America better than most Americans do?

Here’s how the demo swap went; read closely for some nice music tips and perhaps insight into how to get a demo swap going in your neck of the woods. -PK

Having done a Demo Swap for Modsquare a while back, we decided that Ramp Chicago‘s 2^nd Tuesdays at Sonotheque residency would be a great venue to host the 2007 resurrection of the networking event. On Tuesday the 17^th of July, having plugged-in and sound-checked our guest live PA artists, Protman and Bounte, the crowd started filtering in just as the doors opened at 9pm, and we slapped name badges on them and encouraged them to mingle and swap their demos.Emulsion DJd a downtempo / ambient / electro set while the crowd started to get to know each other and get their drink on, while I schmoozed with the crowd, collecting demos and handling some last minute line level issues that popped up at the last minute. As I was checking said levels in the booth, Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music and his girlfriend arrived and we started introducing them around to the patrons, which would continue to be a non-stop process, as more and more people would come up to me and ask “which one is Peter Kirn?” Thankfully he was wearing a striped shirt which made my task a bit easier.

Bounte took the stage (which usually means the two satellite tables we set up in front of the booth) and entertained the crowd with his particular style of downtempo-meets-electro pop / credible, instrumental hip hop, completely off of his laptop, mostly undeterred by curious fans who wanted to ask him about his process, software, and upcoming releases.

Protman followed up with his signature “wireless set” (photo at the beginning) which means using a wireless Xbox 360 Wireless Controller to trigger clips in Ableton Live 6 via his custom-coded PD (Pure Data) interface. As I was making the rounds with our email sign up sheet, I noticed that about a third of the interested people were confused as to why Protman was wandering around with an Xbox controller, and
where the sound was coming from. Another third told me that he was “absolutely
mindblowing” or a similar adjective, and the final third wanted to know who was DJing now (Answer: No one. Protman was playing his set with an Xbox controller. Yes, really.).

Along the way I collected a serious amount of demo discs and I find it rather inspiring that we have such a dedicated range of talent here in Chicago (mostly, as we had a few non-natives make an appearance such as Karl (CDM member from Austria).

People from the CDM community that I’ve chatted with on Tuesday include Josh Schnable, Michael Una, Nathan Koch and Karl Petermichl. Check out the post on my blog, where I give an overview of the more notable demos I received. At the end of the night, I had to excuse myself from networking so I could DJ the rest of the night, which I posted on my blog. And I was inspired enough to do a remix myself of one of the demos I received. Overall, the night was a success and I’m confident another one will be in the works. Here’s some more photos from the night.

Previously:

How To Create a Successful Demo Disc: Tips and Resources

Alternative controllers come and go, but some designers lavish attention and craft on their controllers. The Haken Continuum is one we’re likely to revisit over time, because it’s an expressive instrument with continuous control that, for a small but dedicated audience, has proved its musicality. We saw a snapshot of the Continuum alongside the Buchla 200e, courtesy Richard Lainhart’s studio, and some of you were interested. After the jump, check out the Continuum in video action, courtesy GearWire and Jordan Rudess.

Haken Audio Continuum Product Page

In other news: the Continuum, which has a starting price just over US$3000 (really not that bad for a musical instrument, let alone one of this nature) has a new keyboard stand coming, shown above. Whoever just bought that Star Trek-styled apartment, this should fit in nicely.

GearWire.com points to a video they shot at Winter NAMM with a hands-on demo of the Continuum. (Somehow I missed this in the flurry of NAMM coverage, but Richard’s snapshot brought it up again — thanks to Joe Wallace at the site.)

The Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard Video- WNAMM ’07

Still with us? Want still more video? Jordan Rudess (who, incidentally, also works regularly with Richard Lainhart) is a huge fan of great instrument design. Here he is in a video clip from late 2005 working with the Continuum. And yes, this proves even great keyboardists sometimes want a different kind of controller.