The art of music is as expressive an art as you can find, so why shouldn’t the objects we use to make music be equally personal and creative? That’s the question we ask regularly on CDM, so we’re pleased to be sponsoring a contest with our friends at Instructables, along with the good people of Bleep Labs and custom speaker maker Zalytron.

Instructables, of course, are a site that let you share step-by-step instructions for making stuff. Far from keeping you art secret, they let you claim bragging rights for brilliant creations by letting you share how you’ve made them — and how other folks can do the same. It says that making things doesn’t have to be about something you’ve got that no one else does, but on the contrary, that value can actually come from other people doing the same thing. I got to meet the co-founders on the panel we gave at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon – really terrific folks.

For the Art of Sound Contest, anything’s game – homemade and modded instruments, electronics, circuit bending, speakers, controllers, the lot – even visuals. At the risk of influencing the voting, there’s already a musical light show, on the visual end, a sequencer (seen at top), an Arduino trumpet, and, yes, Spock lovers, even a Vulcan Lyre.

By the way, if you document stuff on Instructables, you can now embed the steps, as seen below. So that means you can make your own page on our in-alpha-testing noisepages community site and add additional details in blog form.

Check out the latest and most popular entries on the contest page:
http://www.instructables.com/contest/artofsound

And, of course, even if you don’t enter, you’ll have lots of things to try making. If you do want to enter, you have until July 26. Stay tuned to CDM as we keep track of the contest and the projects – even if you can’t enter, I promise we’ll have some goodies to share. And, of course, there’s an instructables for how to enter:

How To Enter the Art of Sound Contest – More DIY How To Projects

I’m especially fond of these speaker creatures. Mustache? Monocle? Check. And, hey, even if you lose, there’s an Instructables to teach you to make your own.

Too cute…

Updated: It seems Instructables has gone to a new pricing model. I’m still getting all the details as this is a recent announcement. I realize this may be cause for concern for some of our readers. Suffice to say, I understand that bandwidth-consuming sites aren’t free to run as a publisher myself, but I also understand creators being concerned about specific restrictions – particularly in regards to content they’ve created. It does appear that the “free” accounts are functional; I’m just unclear, for instance, on the “secondary images” – what sizes you have access to, etc. Stay tuned.

Mixed Up – Beat Blender and Mixmaster 1200 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Ableton Live enthusiasts, you take very seriously what gear you plug into your laptop sets. We’ve seen painstakingly-created DIY controllers like the arcade button hardware below, and bizarre oddities like calculators and arcade cabinets and blenders and Osterizers (above). So, in celebration of New York installment of the Dubspot Ableton Live 8 Tour, Saturday, June 27, we’re going to get together in a fantastic space and have a little Live party. And we want to see what controllers you’ve made.

If you’re coming to town for the Live Tour or are in the New York area, we’d love for you to show some of your creations. Built or customized your own controller? Got your Wii remotes and webcams running your Live set? Built your own special Reaktor / Pd / Max / Python creation to customize your Live performance? Invented some hardware that works with Live? We’d love to see it. It’s a week that includes some of the most skilled Live minds in the planet presenting, plus celebrity appearances by the likes of Richie Hawtin, Scientist, and others. So we expect that even though this is last-minute, this could be a fun chance to get together.

If you’re interested, just sign up below or head directly to the Google Docs form. This is an informal, relaxed venue with drinks and finger foods. (Check out the recent New York Magazine write-up.) The idea is to bring along some headphones or small speakers and show things off in the catacomb-like former stables (and former sex club) nooks of this fantastic bar, meet up, relax, and get to know each other. We’ll also feature a live performance or two; if interested, let us know what your stuff sounds like.

The event will be open to the public; stay tuned for more details on this and the event itself.

And if you want to learn how to use controllers intelligently with Ableton Live – from the cheap and accessible to the weird – I’ll be teaching a workshop at Dubspot on Sunday 6/28.

Sign up, creative folks:

AudioMulch 2.0 live patching screencast from AudioMulch on Vimeo.

Wonderful things come from Australia. Developer Ross Bencina has released AudioMulch 2.0, the audio patching environment, now on both Mac and Windows.

Audiomulch is all pretty in black now with a new UI. But why is it special? AudioMulch has always been distinguished in its quick workflow, its ready-to-use objects that allow sophisticated patches with relatively simple structures, and its idiosyncratic soundmakers. The Metasurface multi-parameter controller is also a favorite.

The price is higher, which may scare away some – US$189, or $89 upgrade. There’s a 60-day trial that you can try out.

But the best part of this launch is that, instead of releasing a flashy demo with pans over girls in bikinis or booming drum beats and type flying through that says something like “THE FUTURE OF MUSIC IS NOW … HOLD THE SOUND IN YOUR FIST … BE THE MUSIC … WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?”, they just released a video showing someone making a piece of music. (What a concept!)

The video at top is a live-patching video, and it really reveals how, powerful as many interactive music environments may be, having some objects that get straight to what you want musically makes a real difference. (That’s something to keep in mind even as you create macros or code in other environments, too, I think.)

I like the idea of other people doing live-patching videos that work as music and not just tech demos, not only in AudioMulch but whatever your tool of choice may be.

If you give AudioMulch 2 a try, let us know what you think.

http://www.audiomulch.com

No doubt about it: touch is coming to more screens near you. But there’s no need to disappoint your current beloved laptop. $200 kits can turn your laptop into a functioning touchscreen.

Now, as I’m working with JazzMutant’s Lemur this week, before you get excited, this is no Lemur – or even anything like your iPhone or iPod touch. Sensitivity and accuracy are workable, but not exceptional, the overlay is pretty simple (as you can see in the video) rather than integrated with the display, and this is single-touch only — not multi-touch. Lastly, on a conventional laptop that isn’t convertible, you may miss the ability to fully extend your laptop perpindicular to your body. (Having the screen be parallel can put your arms in a fatiguing position.)

But that said, there’s a lot of potential once you have the ability to reach over and make quick gestures on a laptop screen that control a set. You might make your own instruments and effects or controller dashboards in a tool like Processing or Reaktor. And at $200, this could be a brilliant way to retrofit a machine and breathe new life into it. There’s support for Mac, Windows, and Linux; you just plug in via USB.

Nathanaël Lécaudé sends along a lovely video that reveals some of the brilliant hacking scene in Montreal, centering on the Foulab collective and hackspace. The mini-documentary doesn’t assume you’ve heard of things like oscilloscopes and circuit bending, so it could be a good one to pass along to friends and family who haven’t seen this stuff before. This is just one slice of what I know is a fantastically creative scene in Montreal and Québec. Featured:

• A custom oscilloscope made from a repurposed CRT, by Andrew MacGillivray
• A 1938 teletype machine, rescued by Redbeard
• An original boom box made from recycled parts by Maxster
• XC3N working with modified 8-bit game systems

The creator asks in the YouTube description:

A look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective. Why are more and more hobbyists experimenting with hacks and circuit bends? What relationship does this imply about consumer society and technological advancement? Is this a real-world analog of ‘user generated content’?

My answers: the Internet; getting your hands dirty rocks; yes. (Feel free to add your own.)

By the way, I’m trying to figure out just what quote is getting quoted at the end. I believe it may actually be a direct quote of someone slightly changing this Marshall McLuhan quote:

“You shape your tools and they shape you. It’s a loop. You start out a consumer and you wind up consumed.”

Actually, I can tell I’m an electronic musician at heart, because that sounds pretty good to me – and suggests the ways in which the consumer tools and DIY tools are both entangled in our creative process, perhaps in interesting ways. But perhaps someone can untangle the provenance of these words – please feel free; I find the readers of this site often know more than I do.