Nat “funnelbc”, creator of the CDM logo and graphic appearance, took on a project the rest of us at Team CDM thought was completely insane: make 28 gig posters, in 28 days, for free.

Miraculously, Nat has escaped alive, and the results are fantastic. Good luck paying a designer to give you gig posters like this. These two warm my heart because of their digital music create-i-ness:

Day 27, Tsuki

28×28 Day 17 – Moulinex + Xinobi

For the complete set, see the lineup on onetonnemusic:

Gig Posters Archives

Have a gig coming up? Need a rocking poster to publicise said gig to the wider community? You should check out Nat’s 28 Posters in 28 Days Poster Challenge! You know you’re going to get a great result, because Nat designed this here website, and CDMo, and the forums. You should get in quick, however, because he doesn’t seem to be starting out in the most positive frame of mind:

They said I couldn’t do it! My girlfriend said I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I can do it… Let me preface this by saying that I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t one of my brightest ideas. Good? Clear? Okay.

For the month of February, I am going to attempt to do 1 FREE gig poster per day.

That means I need details for 28 gigs and bands who want posters done. Starting tomorrow, the 1st of February. 

Visual Acoustics is an online musical toy built in Flash designed by Alex Lampe (”Ample Interactive”) of the UK. (Via Music Thing.) The motion visuals are beautiful, and the music and interface is very reminiscent of Toshio Iwai’s work (see Nintendo’s ElectroPlankton, for instance). As with Iwai’s designs, just about anything you play will sound good and ambient. Now, there are two schools of thought on that. One suggests that these kind of futuristic interfaces make music accessible to anyone. The other would hold that part of what makes traditional musical instruments lovely is that, while they take a long time to learn, the rewards are much deeper. I’m not sure one is inherently better than the other, but I still wonder if it isn’t possible to build visual interfaces that are harder to master but deeper to play.

If you want some inspiration for moving in either direction, Visual Acoustics certainly shows potential. Now you just need a Wacom tablet-enabled version that, rather than conventional sliders for parameters, adjusts to gesture and pressure.

Whether you’re a graphics artist wanting to make music in new ways or just trying to rationalize the purchase of a shiny new Wacom tablet, graphics tablets are worth a look for music control. They’re highly sensitive, intuitive instruments, and they’re fairly cheap (US$100 and up). We’ve talked about doing this before, but new and updated software keeps making this easier.

Windows: Nicholas Fournel writes to tell us he’s just uploaded two new applications for Windows, for free. WMIDI converts tablet input to MIDI, with full support for Z angle and tilt; Theremin takes the next step and turns that into a musical instrument.

Nicholas has a lot of other fun stuff, including apps for painting with sound, granulating, glove using, and touch screen-inating. This is our kind of chap.

Mac: Tablet-to-music apps have a tendency to become vaporware. Not Music Unfolding’s µ midi controller. It appears they’ve updated the interface and features and have even made this a Universal app for Intel Macs. They’ve gone beyond just mapping the tablet input to MIDI: by providing computer keyboard control and lovely visual feedback, they’re really making the tablet into an instrument. Now go use the thing and prove this unusual application could have broader appeal!

The next challenge: make the tablet expressive as an instrument. I was once having lunch with Jon Appleton and talking about his work developing the Synclavier sampler, and he held up a salt shaker and said something to the effect of, as a musician/composer if you spent six months working with this, you would find a way to make it an instrument. Now I just need to re-teach myself to draw.

If you use any of these tools, do let us know how it goes — successes and frustrations alike.

[Updated:]
Loic Kessous stops by in comments to point to previous work with tablets over the past eight years, some of which I’ve mentioned here on CDM before, others I haven’t. Notably, his own site includes audio samples from a vocal synthesizer controlled by graphics tablet, as an example of some of the expressive possibilities of using tablet input.

Matt Wright, as interviewed for Cycling ’74’s site, has done a lot of work with tablets, including mapping tablet input to OSC (see paper with Adrian Freed et al, OSC site. OSC is able to maintain the structure of the data from the tablet at high resolutions, while still supported by apps like Max/MSP, Pd, and Reaktor (among others).

For Max/MSP, see the Max/MSP Wacom object for Mac, or a similar object for Windows.

SuperCollider has built-in Wacom support.

For Pd, see Moonix’s site for Moon Utils, wintablet (Windows-only), or Hans’ HID object for Linux. (There are others, too, I think, so a little Googlin’ / searching of the Pd community sites / experimentation might be in order.)

Have I missed anything?

Interactive music man Amit Pitaru is the creator of the Web sound toy Sonic Wire Sculptor:

Try Sonic Wire Sculptor on your Mac/PC browser

Thanks to Tim, who notes: “I saw it and got to play with it at the ICC gallery in Tokyo last year and on a video projector and touchscreen; it was great fun! The web version is pretty cool, too.”

Sculpting sound in your browser with virtual 3D shapes, complete with optional tablet input? Very cool. But even cooler is the tools behind the magic (mostly developed by Pitaru himself), which also drive a lot of other interactive music tech discussed here on CDM and on sites like Pixelsumo. The system was built in the free development environment Processing, but with some key add-ons:

JSyn, standard soft synth for Java

SONIA, sound library for Processing that using JSyn for lots of cool audio/FFT capabilities inside Processing

Wacom support for Processing

Got all that? Now, it’s way too hot in most of the Northern Hemisphere, so why go out? Sit at home and create new musical interfaces! Let us know how it goes.