Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christoph Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christoph immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christoph’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

Play this track:

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer.

There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum and Skittles, beer bottle caps, soda bottles, and now walnuts. Don’t stop now: someone has to do Cheetos, even if it means dealing with orange stuff all over your fingers.

That said, it’s not walnuts that make d-touch an important project. Built by Enrico Costanza back in 2003, the project is now available for free download as an open source library, a server (in case you don’t want to get into the C++ code but might want to use this in your own projects), a free, usable drum machine, and a set of documentation that can help you make your own stuff easily. Enrico worked on the original reacTable prototype and has done some really important work in this field. Right now, Enrico and co are looking for feedback, but if you’re ready to just be a tester and play with this – and see what you can do musically – now’s your chance.

d-touch also combines high levels of computer readability for accurate tracking with the ability to make your own tags. Instead of using ugly-looking glyphs, you can make patterns that make sense to human beings as well as computers. Oh, yeah – and mobile fans, this runs at a full 14 fps even on S60 phones.

For more, check out the d-touch site:
http://d-touch.org/ [Register first to make the download available]
and follow them on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/audiodtouch

Thanks to Martin (of reacTable, which is moving toward a commercial product) for sending this our way. Thanks, too, to Ben, who’s working on tangible interfaces with special needs students. I really look forward to hearing how that’s going.

Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.

OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.

All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.

OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)

Artists Gijs Gieskes’ sequencers are almost like physical, mechanical software, an expression of musical structure in object form. As such, even as they make strange sounds, they become musical sculpture. His latest Servo Sequencer combines optical and mechanical process, as frequency circles spin on a turntable and tone arms float above them.

The Servo Sequencer is built for exhibition use – meaning, yes, he’s brave enough to let you play with this contraption. Sequence the arms using buttons, then adjust the volume mix and placement of each arm using the joystick.

Serv Seq from Gijs on Vimeo.

This project is unusually well-documented. Gijs provides complete specs, the script that controls the arms, and even a little web app that generates those lovely patterns.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=serv-seq

But for those of you near the Netherlands, you should go check this out in person. Updated: The piece will be part of an exhibition in Breda through August 23, with multiple opening events featuring local artists from Eindhoven and Breda, plus live performances and concerts including Gijs and his talented brethren and neighbors.

Here & There Exhibition, mu.nl [Info in English]

The events:
Opening Part 1:
KOP, Breda
Thursday 25/06 08.00 pm

MU, Eindhoven
Friday 26/06 08.00 pm

(It’s a bit confusing as the events swap between Breda and Eindhoven — there’s a second opening Saturday July 25. Gijs explains “the first [opening] is in breda (thursday), then a day later (friday) in eindhoven, where my machine will be. and then a month later its the other way around.”)

You know, Breda. Like, right … here. We’ve got a number of readers in the area (whom I suspect know more or less exactly where this is); let us know if you make it!

Fritzcrate Project / lusidLearn Early Demo from Michael Schieben on Vimeo.

Knobs and faders can be rigid. Fancy multitouch devices can be expensive. But for the cost of a webcam and some spare materials, you can build computer interfaces with objects around the house, thanks to the power of open source software.

In just one day, a group of artists in the CDM community, from Austria and Germany to New York to Australia, got quite a lot working with tangible interfaces. At top, Michael Schieben and Christophe Stoll experimented with using soda bottles to control software like Future Audio Workshop’s lovely Circle. (Ableton Live works, too – as does any MIDI software.) As Precious Forever, these guys are responsible for some of the best UIs in music software, from FAW to recent Native Instruments designs, so it’s lovely to see them experimenting with this idea.

As you add more people to the mix, you get ideas you might otherwise never have imagined, from a game involving blocks of the Tokyo skyline to an interface built into floor toms.

We also got a lot of real-world data on what works, what needs work, and what causes trouble for beginners, which we’ll be documenting. (Adam and Martin from the Trackmate and reacTIVision projects, respectively, were both tuned in to see progress and provided lots of help – and are also collecting that data to improve their own documentation and libraries.) More commentary on all these side benefits, as well as a discussion with visitors from Argentina on the scene around the world, at Create Digital Motion.

Musical Resources

We also got some really helpful tips for working with the free, powerful, tri-platform synthesis tool SuperCollider:
Charles Martin wrote up an easy SC test script for receiving Trackmate messages (and also had the clever idea of using a floor tom)

And for connecting Trackmate to MIDI and working with Processing, lots of tips are available on Michael Schieben’s noisepages blog:
http://fritzcrate.noisepages.com/

Get Involved

More documentation:
Tangible Interface Hackday: The Projects (So Far)
http://hackday.noisepages.com/

http://trackmate.sourceforge.net/
http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

So, what’s next? You can join discussion and brainstorming for how to proceed, and how to get in on another hackday (formal or ongoing), even if you missed the first. Stop by the Tangible and Multi-Touch Interface group on noisepages:
Tangible + Multi-Touch noisepages Group

Our noisepages community is still in “alpha” state, but it’s usable – we’ve just fixed avatar uploading, which was the biggest problem. We’ll have more features, functionality, and improvements down the line, as well as more extensive documentation for how to get started. But if you’re a bleeding edge sort of person, join up free and give us some advice on what you’d like out of it.

I look forward to more work on these projects. Stay tuned for more, including some additional documentation (I’m developing some stuff around my own project).