From comments on the Eigenharp round-up, I think this is simply beautiful. I also think it will be the video to which I link people whenever comments get out of hand. (Heck, I may refer myself.)

“Music to soothe the savage commenter?”

Back to the music:

First entry to the Eigenharp ALPHA competition.
A small piece created on the TENORI-ON, from my new show Ti-To-Tis – Dance and Music for Babys.
(babies from 0 to 3 years listen to live acoustic and electronic music, “dance” with two dancers and “play” with an actor/ puppetier, all around a magic clock; Ti-To-Tis – magical lights, ilusions and fantasy on a comfortably atmosphere.

http://www.passosecompassos.pt/dancarte/index2.html

There’s one dislike on YouTube, which makes me think some people either hate happiness, or miss when clicking the thumbs-up sign. (Maybe they’re from a culture where thumbs down is good.) Also, I dare you to “dislike” the following composition (though we may need a new body of work for a Well-Tempered Eigenharp):

Thanks, Zero Reference!

Something I always appreciated about classical music training was learning to appreciate the particulars of each instrument, whether or not you played them yourself. A French Horn, for instance, is not an instrument without challenges: everything from tuning to balancing dynamic range to how you look when you add and remove muting can be demanding. And in technology – whether acoustic instrumental or digital – every design is about tradeoffs. You very often can’t get one thing without giving up something else. So I stand by the questions I asked about iPad synths in general last week, particularly as I had Moog’s own, brilliant analog synths and effects as a point of comparison. My aim was not to dismiss the iPad or Animoog – I was quite serious in my praise for Animoog and I think I’ve been reasonably committed to ongoing, often enthusiastic iPad coverage since its launch. Instead, I wanted to begin a conversation about how these tools are used as instruments that includes real critical discussion.

And that’s what I think we got. Readers responded en masse, and amidst some heated discussion (some of it having more to do with whether I’d lost my mind than the particular merits of Animoog), I thought there were some compelling points. I heard from developers, too, on and off the record, and I suspect this will continue to lead to experimentation in mobile software. I also really enjoyed Marc Doty’s impassioned response, which I thought raised some equally worthwhile questions about soft synths on computers. Incidentally, I also heard from a lot of people who went out and bought Animoog because they saw the story on CDM.

In the meantime, hordes of synth lovers have descended on Moog’s Animoog, making it very likely the most successful virtual iPad synth launch yet, at least in the traditional synthesizer mold.

Learning Animoog: The best of these videos is at top, a video tutorial as many readers had requested. Tip of the hat to Synthtopia here for following up on this issue. The video tutorial makes it really clear how to navigate Animoog’s deep and powerful synth interface. See also the official Moog tour at second from top for a speedier walkthrough.

Working out how to play it: Other videos investigate performance. One common theme with Animoog, and iOS apps in general, is whether you’ll focus primarily on the touch interface or external control hardware. Animoog applies a unique control solution to the touch UI, and one that many readers seem to feel is very effective. This gives you two principal advantages of the iPad as a tablet: you get the novel multi-touch controller, which allows gestures that something like a MIDI keyboard wouldn’t, and you retain the device’s superior mobility.

Mark Jenkins’ extensive video review really does the best job, I think, of examining the Animoog on its own terms, as a standalone iPad synth, using the multi-touch interface. I couldn’t possibly have topped the depth of this video review; kudos to Mark.

On the other hand, that won’t stop people from experimenting with adding an external interface. As our friend and MeeBlip co-creator James Grahame put it, the tactile experience of the iPad is the same as running your finger along a bathroom mirror. Instruments have frets and keys for a reason; tactile feedback allows you to play them without looking directly at them. So, I think it’s an advantage that iOS’ MIDI input hardware support at least gives you a choice. You still get a software instrument that runs on an instant-on tablet rather than buried in menus on a computer. And as readers point out, it’s affordable, though I’d say the cost of Animoog isn’t exactly “$1″ — you do have to buy that iPad and its dongles and keep it running, just as a computer requires care and feeding. Even if you only ever ran Animoog on your iPad, though, you’d be at the cost of a lot of low-end synths that are far less interesting in the hardware domain.

Geert Bevin has been talking to CDM behind the scenes – more on the Eigenharp soon — and I think has some real insights into comparing the iPad’s input and an external input. Like me, he has some good things to say about Animoog’s solution; he just suggests that you can have even more fun with an additional controller. A MIDI keyboard might well be disappointing, so enter the more-exotic Eigenharp. He also uses the Alesis iODock for better I/O capabilities; at least one reader via Twitter complained that the Animoog wasn’t “professional” because of the iPad’s poor built-in minijack. So, what you get in this rig is definitely not a “pure” iPad experience – you’re adding some weight and additional devices. But it might be one that you really enjoy, and that still gets you away from your MacBook for a bit.

This video gives a brief overview of the Animoog’s features and also shows how expressive it is when played with an Eigenharp Pico over MIDI using poly-pressure.

The Eigenharp and Animoog seems like a match made in heaven since the Eigenharp is able to send three independent detailed per-note performance data streams and the Animoog is able to react to this on a per-note level. Also, the visualization of the sound on the Animoog is marvelous, it gives a great representation of what your sound is doing.

The iPad is hooked up to my MacBook Pro using USB MIDI from the Alesis iODock, the Eigenharp Pico is also hooked up to the laptop and sends MIDI from the EigenD application to the ‘dock’ MIDI port. This uses a small MIDI-only Eigenharp Pico setup that loads very quickly and provides 16 MIDI playing keys with poly-pressure and three independent data streams for each key (pressure, left/right, up/down), as well as two 3D controller keys that are somewhat similar to little joysticks and are sending each three independent streams of MIDI CC data also.

The sound: A video compares audio fidelity of Animoog to the “real” thing — analog hardware. A number of commenters also noted that Animoog most likely uses sampled wavetables as its oscillator sources rather than modeling, but that approach can indeed yield good sounds. I’m not terribly surprised by the success of the Animoog in standing up to these other instruments; years of experience in soft synths suggests that you can get good results from virtual instruments. In fact, I remain more interested in what people actually do musically, and what about an instrument makes them happy more than splitting hairs about audio fidelity. If this video helps liberate you to go play with Animoog, have at it!

Synthesis, Still the Frontier: One closing thought: part of what interests me about synthesizers is that, even with a huge volume of music made with them and some generally-understood conventions, there are really no shared rules about how to play them. In acoustic instruments, there is at least a rough notion of certain folk traditions, or classical traditions, or “extended techniques” as something that stands apart from common practice. I think we’re still learning what the heck synths are.

Every aspect of the design of a synthesizer can therefore be fair game for consideration, including the spaghetti tangles of modular patch cords or the keyboard + mod wheel + pitch bend Minimoog-style arrangement. What synths are, how they might sound, and how we might play them and turn them into music remain open-ended. So, I hope that any criticism is not grounds for hand-wringing, as someone put it, but an added motivation to go and experiment and play. I know it is for me. Synth on.

Next up: we’re long overdue giving a look at the various iPad synths and how you might use them. Since Animoog isn’t the “first professional” synth, it’s time to line it up with some of its rivals. Unlike with a computer soft synth, though, you probably aren’t terribly concerned with outlay of cash; it may be a more “what are all of the synths you’d buy” question than comparing x, y, and z. If you have nominees you’d like to see explored, or ways in which you’d like to see us cover iOS (or anything else, for that matter), let us know. And remember, tell us what you really think — okay, I probably don’t have to say that. (ducks)

A hive mind mentality is quickly infected with a meme, engaging partly consciously, partly unconsciously in a shared hallucination, projecting a common fantasy, as the planet’s population is wrapped up in a single idea. I’m speaking, of course, of myself and the Internet, as I and friends skittered across the Web’s social networking tools giggling over the common joke that May 21 was to be the end of the world, inside joke gone viral. In fact, I’m not sure which was the commentary on religion and faith: the handful of people who believed the world would end, or the far-larger media and Web commentary, “worshiping” at Foursquare check-ins. Thanks be to Facebook. The lesson: it’s fun to play along.

Music can respond to these imagined scenarios in moving ways. (Scientists and atheists are pretty good at conceiving the apocalypse, too, so this doesn’t cease to be topical, at least until the end.) Here are just two examples that, even though the occasion has passed, I know I’ll be listening to this week — an Eigenharp jam and a Loscil mix.

Via Synthtopia’s Sunday Synth Jam, our friend bar|none has a gorgeous live jam on the alternative instrument Eigenharp. (Recently, I pointed to Philip Glass covers and GPL software for the instrument; see also extended commentary from the players.)

The otherworldly sounds come from KYMA, the inconceivably-deep digital synthesis environment. bar|none explains:

This is a bit of noodling with a KYMA sound designed by Edmund Eagan for the Continuum that I adapted for the Eigenharp.

As you can hear, it has a lot of per note expression. Each key controls, velocity, pitch, timbre (reresonation of the strings), volume. phase, pick sound mix using roll, yaw, pressure, velocity of the keys, each key sending all this information INDEPENDENTLY!

There is a bit of bowed cello added which comes in only when I use the strip controller, everything else is one KYMA sound.

I’d like to extend my appreciation to Geert Bevin who designed the new MIDI configuration options for EigenD and made this connection possible. And of course to Edmund Eagan for this amazing sound, and to Symbolic Sound for KYMA.

For more of bar|none’s music, visit the blog of this Washington state-based “software developer by day, music enthusiast by night.”
http://bar0.blogspot.com

In other news, CDM favorite and ambient maestro Loscil contributes an entire mix of end-of-the-world music. It’s streaming on the terrific Web streaming service Mixcloud, with music by the likes of Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Max Richter, but also Nick Cave, Estonian composer Arvo Part, and film composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, among others.

I believe I owe a Facebook friend the original pleasure of listening, but when I couldn’t find that, I found this on a wonderful music blog. This one post alone could give you great listening for the rest of the day.

Passing by: Dauwd, sgnl_fltr, Adam X, Loscil & Matthias Rock [astrangelyisolatedplace]

There’s an insanely rich set of ambient and electronic mixes, and links to appropriate blogs. Whoever you are, sir, thinks for the great work, described as:

Biosphere’s Norwegian Winter.
Eno’s inspirational airports.
The Orb’s psychedelic London.
Aphex Twin’s Cornish isolation.
The KLF’s American road-trip.
Harold Budd’s Mojave desert humming telephone wires

To me, the power of music remains that it can make you feel better when it seems as though your world is apocalyptic. And if we do ever find ourselves in the midst of an apocalypse and have the strength to make a sound, I imagine the band will play on.

Speaking of futuristic instrumental design, the Eigenharp – an instrument that looks like the bassoon was redesigned by Vulcans – brings two big developments with its appearance this week in the Bay Area of California. First off, if you’ve doubted its utility in musical practice and you’re a fan of American minimalism, we’re treated to it covering the music of Philip Glass’ landmark Koyaanisqatsi. Geert Bevin, Eigenlabs’ Senior Software Developer, explains how he did it:

I’m using SonicCouture’s Glass/Works Kontakt instrument in a four-part multi-timbral setup in Native Instruments Kontakt. Each key individually controls pitch, velocity and the resonance of the convolution filter cut-off frequency (which creates a faint scraping-like sound).

The vocals are done through the DPA microphone that’s clipped onto the breath pipe and plugged into the Eigenharp Alpha. It uses the built-in Eigenharp Alpha pre-amp and is routed through a series of Audio Unit effects in EigenD for pitch shifting, stereo spreading, EQ and
compression. I’m monitoring directly from the headphone output of the Eigenharp Alpha with my Etymotic ER-4P earphones.

The single instrument cables carries all the information, data and audio, in both directions.

Geert has good news for those who hope to modify the software, or see it become a platform on which other instrumental innovation can happen. As originally promised, key components of the software are now covered by the GPLv3. It’s not the whole software stack, but I think it’s the stuff that most matters. Full details:

http://www.eigenlabs.com/wiki/Developers/

I can imagine this will open up some new possibilities for the Eigenharp’s dedicated band of players to mod the instrument for their own needs. But players, I’d love to hear from you – does the GPL here matter to you? Will you be able to dig into the code, or know someone who could? (Or want to try to motivate developers to do so?)

Is there anything genuinely new in digital instruments? Isn’t it just a load of repeated novelty, without the ability to actually make useful musical noises? Hasn’t the technology just gotten in the way of the music? Isn’t … (sigh) .. all you see … all you get … (repeat ad infinitum)

Even among technologist futurists, skepticism about the iterative process of new digital design runs rampant. But if you yearn for a bit more optimism, here are four strong counter-examples, projects that, building upon previous research, begin to reach a level of maturity and expressivity that could inspire. They’re inventions that you might want to pick up and spend time learning, play into late evenings for the joy of the challenge of them, creations with which you’d build a relationship. They’re not alone, but you can catch all four in the Bay Area starting today through this weekend, and I hope that they help kick-start a new conversation about what instruments can be. In place of the novelty of new invention, they might just start to raise questions about what could really last.

None other than our friend Roger Linn, creator of the LinnDrum, MPC, and new designs, is hosting the event. Geert Bevin of Eigenlabs fills CDM in on the details, and has some reflections on what’s special about these four examples:

One thing that makes these instruments so uniquely expressive is their ability to sense the precise movements of each finger in 3-dimensional space (for example, pressure for note expression, left/right for pitch, and forward/backward for timbre), and to do that for all fingers simultaneously. But each instrument also presents many other innovative ideas and improvements over the limitations of traditional mechanical-age instruments.

The instruments:

The Eigenharp, demonstrated by Geert Bevin, Senior Software Developer from UK-based Eigenlabs.
http://www.eigenlabs.com

The Continuum from Haken Audio, demonstrated by Bay Area pianist Ed Goldfarb.
http://www.hakenaudio.com

SLABS, a new instrument designed by David Wessel, director of Cal Berkeley’s CNMAT computer music department.

SLABS: Arrays of Pressure Sensitive Touch Pads

The LinnStrument prototype by Roger Linn.

http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/products/linnstrument

If You’re Going to (Be Near) San Francisco…

Live event details, from Geert – if you make it and can help document for CDM, we’d be hugely grateful (hello from, for the moment, Montreal)

Here are the events:

Thursday, May 5 from 7 to 9 p.m.
Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Audio (CCRMA)
660 Lomita Dr. Stanford, CA 94305
Directions: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/about/directions
At this event, the Eigenharp, Continuum and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Friday, May 6 from 7 to 9 p.m.
University of California Berkeley’s Center For New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT)
1750 Arch Street, Berkeley, CA 94709

http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/

At this event, the Eigenharp. SLABS and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Saturday, May 7 from 2 to 4 p.m.
Guitar Center San Francisco, Pro Audio Department
1645 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94109
At this event, the Eigenharp and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.

Monday, May 9 from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m.
SF Music Tech Conference
Hotel Kabuki, 1625 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94115
At this event, the Eigenharp, Continuum and LinnStrument will be demonstrated and discussed.
Note: Conference entry fee is required–see www.sfmusictech.com

Please join us to see, learn about ~ and even try out for yourself ~ these radical new instruments that are changing the way music is made.

Please note that these instruments are not otherwise available in the bay area to see or try out.

Additional events might still be added, keep an eye on http://eigenzone.org/events

Enjoy if you make it. Aside from these four, what new instruments would make your short list?

Novel instruments come and go; futuristic ideas appear in demos, wow crowds, and then vanish just as quickly. In order to really become part of musical practice, they require practice. And with something as unusual as the Eigenharp – a digital music controller that looks like the love child of a bassoon and a fretboard and connects to a computer – they even necessitate new techniques and strategies.

Enter musician Geert Bevin. As the creator of the fan site Eigenzone, he’s been a tireless champion of the instrument. He’s been compiling videos revealing player techniques and ideas for putting together a practical performance setup. And even Geert concedes that making music takes time.

“Six to nine months seems to be the time required to become confident enough to play the Eigenharp Alpha in front of an audience,” says Geert with a smile.

Here, Geert explains in great detail how he played the instrument in a recent video – one that should make Galactica fans happy. (You may have seen the video making the rounds, but we have some additional technical specifics.) And he shows us some of what other players are doing. They’d better be practicing, because the instrument shown, the flagship Alpha variation of the Eigenharp, costs £3995 and up. (Fortunately, if that’s out of your price range in this tough economy, there’s a cute, more portable version with many of the same features at £449. The Pico actually winds up being a pretty good deal for this kind of unusual product.)

Inventing the technology is only half the equation: it’ll take players, and time, for that creation to come into its own. Guitars and drums and flutes have had millennia. Here’s what a few months have done for the Eigenharp.

Detailed breakdown of a performance setup

Geert shares the technical details for one video and musical performance. Some of what makes the instrument special may not be immediately apparent. He’s making use of the broad pitch area, the access afforded to a range of pitches by the key layout, and features like per-key pitch bending, per-key vibrato, and expressive details in playing the notes. Those are then connected to a range of soft synths intelligent enough to respond to those messages, and sonically detailed enough to make some useful sounds in reply.

Here’s Geert with all the gory details.

As a follow-up on the Eigenharp Alpha post on CDM a few months ago, I thought I’d let you know that I finally recorded a video that I feel comfortable about pushing into the wild.

It’s a rearrangement of Battestar Galactica ‘Kara remembers’ theme song for the Eigenharp Alpha. The main melody of this theme is heard by the Final Five Cylons when they’re ‘switched on’. Kara Thrace (Starbuck) tries to remember this song in the series while sitting at an old piano in a bar. When she recalls how’s being played, it explodes into a full-blown arrangement.

My personal rendition of the song also starts off hesitant, inspired by Kara trying to remember the chords, the melody and the tempo. I’m using Tonehammer’s Emotional Piano for the piano in the first Eigenharp Audio Unit slot. [All the instruments] are tuned to A major; this allows me to play standard chord patterns and have them sound correct within the song’s scale. By doing that, none of the keys on the keyboard are playing any key outside of the selected scale. [In the Eigenharp's software, you can configure that setting] on a per-instrument basis as opposed to globally, you can create your own scales, and you can also play fully chromatically.

The beginning of the song is played on the third Alpha keyboard split, which provides a small rectangular area at the bottom and a single area of playing keys on the majority of the keyboard. I set up the bottom area to control the Eigenharp drum loops section, so that I can quickly change them later while playing the piano at the same time.

Eigenharp, up close. Image courtesy Eigenlabs.

Once I ‘remembered’ the chords and the melody, I start the Eigenharp’s metronome, which also starts the two drum loops I’ve activated by default. This gives me a sense for the rhythm of the song and I can start playing the piano part in tempo. After a few bars, it’s clear that also the rhythmical part of the song has ‘come back to me’ and I can dive into the meat of it.

I do this by activating four new drum loops on the control area while playing the piano chords an octave lower with my left hand. After two measures, I press the record trigger for the active instrument on the keyboard split and play the piano chords together with the main melody for two measures. The looping automatically starts immediately after the recording.

Having the accompaniment section built up, I can now switch to a first solo instrument, which is the native model of a cello. I used an Audio Unit effect [insert] on it to reduce the dynamics and to make it louder. The Softube CL-1B compressor is great for that as it also adds a touch of warmth. The cello on the Eigenharp can be bowed in a variety of ways. My preference is to use the left strip controller since it’s the closest to the real physical action of bowing on the actual instrument. While playing the cello, each course of keys acts as a string, playing only the highest note. You can thus play with a polyphony of five tones when pressing down keys on all courses. This also allows you to play smooth legato on the same course since you can leave existing fingers pressed down while adding next ones. Just as with regular strings, you can individually add vibrato to each note. At the end of the cello solo section, I use the second strip controller together with the first one to modulate the global pitch while bowing at the same time.

The next section is a more atmospheric intermezzo that builds up tension before exploding into the final part. I play this on the fourth keyboard split that evenly divides the playing surface into two sections. The upper one uses the same Emotional Piano as before, together with a sweeping synth sound that comes from FabFilter Twin2 in the second Audio Unit slot of the Eigenharp [software]. The lower section only plays the piano. This allows me the play chords with sweeps using my left hand and have just a piano sound for the melody with my right hand. Note that this demonstrates that splits on the Eigenharp are merely different ways of accessing the same instruments and functionalities. All the capabilities of the Eigenharp are always active; they’re just accessed differently at different times, depending on what’s most comfortable for you while you’re playing. At the beginning of this section, I switch off the metronome and turn it on again at the end; this also switches the drums loops and recorded accompaniment off and on.

When I move on to the next section, the first two measures of the drum loops don’t play the recording since I actually started playing slightly ahead of the first beat when creating it. The Eigenharp therefore only starts playing the notes at the end of the first round. This is a matter of practice and since I’m not always at the correct time while recording, I take a precaution and continue playing the chords on the keyboard while waiting for the recording to start up again. When that happens, I switch to the fifth keyboard split, which gives you access to four independent areas.

The final section of the song uses Orange Tree Samples Evolution Electric Guitar Strawberry (EEG) as an instrument in the third Audio Unit slot. I play this with my right hand in the third area of the split. This is then fed into the insert Studio Devil AMP Audio Unit to provide the amplifier and effects simulation. Playing EEG with the Eigenharp feels very responsive and natural due to the precision and expression of the keys — hammer-ons and pull-offs feel just right. I’m also using per-key pitch bending, which is understood by EEG and allows you to naturally bend one note while keeping others steady (as I like doing on my regular electric guitar).

I join the electrical guitar part with the cello again, played with my left hand in the second area of the keyboard split. Since my right hand is playing already, I can’t use the strip controller to bow, so I use the breath controller instead. This allows you to move the virtual bow back and forth by exhaling and inhaling. Using tonguing technique makes it possible to do create rapid bow movements, which is exactly what I’m doing when I’m playing chords on both the guitar and the cello.

The end of the song plays the lead melody in unison on the guitar and the cello, I set the first split area up to have both instruments active so that I have my right hand free to turn the metronome off at the right moment. The outro simply has me using the breathpipe to wrap up the song with some soft cello notes.

More Demos, More Players

Geert points to more examples that explain the instrument. First up, a look at the whole product range:

Since it’s not easy for people to imagine how an Eigenharp is actually used in practice, Eigenlabs posted a new video that demos the three models: Pico, Tau and Alpha in very different styles of music. Afterward they briefly highlight how the instruments are used:

And other players demonstrate live performance.

Geert in particular notes this video by David Jameson, who talks more about his setup:

In this video, I am running Apple MainStage inside of which several instances of Omnisphere are running to produce string and choir sounds. Kontakt 4 is responsible for the Uillean Pipes solo. The background chords are being triggered one at a time by Max (a real-time programming language) in response to key presses by my right hand on the Eigenharp. The chord data produced by Max is sent to Apple MainStage. My left hand is playing the solo, going directly to MainStage.

The music notation is being displayed on the Apple iPad using Scorecerer, the product we developed for managing and publishing sheet music to tablet devices. (see www.deskew.com)

Lament (Caoineadh Cu Chulainn) is a beautifully haunting instrumental from Riverdance, written by Bill Whelan.

I imagine not everyone here is quite ready to jump down this particular rabbit hole, but then, that’s not entirely the point. To me, it’s always fascinating to see the different ways in which people develop performance practice and set up their rig, and the extraordinary range that covers. Even if I don’t immediately resonate with what people are doing, I find there’s something to learn or take as inspiration. Let us know what you think.

eigenzone.org : Eigenharp Alpha Unboxing from Geert Bevin on Vimeo.

Eigenharp Alpha Experiment 20100624 from Geert Bevin on Vimeo.

A genuinely new instrument isn’t something you can expect to simply pick up and judge. Part of what makes music so addictive, so satisfying, is the amount of time and energy we put in. One would expect the same of new digital instruments.

And so, we’re fortunate that musician Geert Bevin is giving the Eigenharp, a new digital instrument combining touch-based, real depth and attention. The Eigenharp itself is a strange animal, with a crooked wind input and larger model form factor inspired by the bassoon, plus wind-style keys coupled with a fretted touch surface. Geert has followed the invention since its introduction, and shares an in-depth discussion of what it’s like playing the flagship Alpha instrument after three months of use.

EigenZone: Eigenharp Alpha Review

Of course, as with any instrument, different players will discover different techniques and have, well, different musical ideas. So Geert has also co-founded an Eigenharp video group on Vimeo, on which users share their experience.

Don’t judge these tracks as polished, finished, perfect performances. In fact, on the contrary, what makes these videos useful is that, just like inviting a friend into your living room, you get to experience the music in progress. The artists are sharing their process of learning the instrument and finding musical ideas. (And Geert, I hope you forgive me for posting the video, but I got a lot out of it!)

For instance, here’s bar|none (see also his blog) trying a live jam:

Rainy Day from bar|none on Vimeo.

I wanted to know more about how Geert came to discover the instrument and what his approach was to it. He kindly shared still more insight with CDM:

Maybe my approach and discovery of the Eigenharp is a bit different than others, let me explain.

I had traditional music training in my childhood and learned to play the classical guitar and a bit of piano. Being an early computer geek, I tried to use my Amiga and a Yamaha YS-100 back in the day for music but never really felt comfortable with sequencing and the DSP capabilities back then. So I shifted gears and went full on towards being a singer-songwriter, learning to play the steel-string guitar and got vocal training. I gigged a lot back then and did a lot of busking also. I took some years of Jazz training on a basic electric guitar but realized that all that theory actually removed much of my spontaneity, so I stopped that, tried to forget much of the patterns I learned and which was quite easily done since I had already been using open-tunings a lot for my own compositions. I really focused on getting an atmosphere and a feeling out, either through music or through vocals or both, more blues and traditional folk song oriented, looking for expression more than for virtuosity. Then I recorded my CD in auto-production, too soon for this kind of thing and the music industry here in Belgium wasn’t very accepting of it, hence not even wanting to distribute my CD, even though it was produced by one of the biggest Belgian producers and I got a lot of well known musicians to play on it also. That got me to really ‘fall into a chasm’ and I kinda give up on music out of disappointment. I started my family and focused on being creative as a software engineer, building out that career for 7 years, mostly not playing music anymore.

Two years ago, I randomly picked up my acoustic guitar again and the songs started flowing out of me. I felt the need to start a band and my girlfriend (who’s a very good singer) joined me in on that. Within 6 months we had a full repertoire and started gigging quite regularly. For my band Flytecase, I moved on to the electric guitar since I discovered one that I loved: a Godin LGXT, with great magnetic pickups, a piezo pickup and MIDI out (none of the standard Fenders or Gibsons ever did it for me). Never really having liked playing an electric guitar before, I didn’t have any gear for it. So I decided to go virtual all the way. I bought a Metric Halo audio interface and created my whole performance setup with Plogue Bidule on my Mac, the built-in Metric Halo guitar amp simulations, Guitar Rig, Studiodevil and a bunch of AU effects. I also started using more and more of the MIDI capabilities of my guitar with Kontakt and Omnisphere, blending the real guitar and soft synth sounds together. The latter of course was never really expressive due to the latency of the MIDI tracking and the clean precision that was mandatory in my playing to avoid wrong detection of MIDI notes. I could however feel a great attraction towards the software instruments since they sound so authentic now.

This is when I saw a tweet about the Eigenharp’s release in November of last year. It lured me in, I felt too attracted to this instrument that promised the same expression and physical interaction as a real guitar … but with software instruments! So, I ordered a Pico, got mine mid November and fell in love. It inspired me to write a bunch of songs (which are all online on my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/gbevin) and it allowed me to treat the digital world with the same intimate passion as I did the real music instrument world. However, instead of being limited to one sound of my instrument, I was now able to venture into pretty much any direction I wanted. So I tried some classical, instrumental, jazz, … it all just felt right for me, but I couldn’t try it out before. I got into close contact with the guys at Eigenlabs since I wanted to know more of the details and internals, went to the first Pico meet-up in London and got to try out an Alpha. I liked it, but I also feared it. The Alpha is clearly different than the Pico, you don’t just pick it up and play it, its size and amount of keys requires real training. Even holding it is initially a challenge, let alone figuring out where to place your hands. I offered Eigenlabs to write a detailed review from my musician perspective after having learned to play the Alpha for a few months. They agreed and loaned me one of their final prototype Alphas, which I played daily for three months … and then I wrote the review.

My approach is different I think in that I don’t focus on learning to play the Alpha with its built-in step sequencer or looping engine. I want to be able to play whole songs in real time, just as I did with the guitar, ie. being a singer-songwriter first. I’ll probably move on to using the other features in time, but the Alpha allows so much expressiveness through its keys, that it feels a shame to loop things ’round and ’round, just as every note when you play the Eigenharp is different, it feels natural to me that every time a sequence is played, it is also expressed differently, hence no looping. As you can imagine, that’s quite a challenge since it means that I have to be comfortable enough to fill of an arrangement by playing chords, leads and/or rhythm in real time, without making mistakes … eventually while singing also

That’s why I haven’t recorded many videos with the Alpha yet, I don’t feel I’m there yet. The video I put on Vimeo is not really for ‘the public’. We’re a bunch of Eigenharp Alpha player on Twitter than like to exchange our findings (since there’s no training or teachers), so that video is more to give them an idea of what I was working on two days ago than to show something to a wider audience (hence also Vimeo and not YouTube). I’m afraid that if you add that vid to the post it will be judged as a finished work, while it’s just something I was experimenting with at that time

Perhaps more important than any of the particulars of the review, he notes that it’s that feeling of losing oneself that really makes this an instrument – and in a way that raises questions about what makes instruments most satisfying:

One aspect that I like to much about the Eigenharp is that you can get lost in it in the same way as I get lost when playing in open tunings on the guitar. You theoretically have no clue what you’re doing since all your reference points are gone, but due to the tuning, things sound good. Since the Eigenharp can be set up to play any scale in any key at the press of a button, you don’t play any ‘wrong notes’ anymore, just ‘less appropriate’ ones. I find that this on one hand limits me since I can’t play out of scale notes anymore. However, as is often the case, limitation fuels creativity since the bounds are clearly established and these are then boundaries in which you can fully express yourself. I find that I’m much more comfortable with improvising and experimenting since I’m not worried about actually playing the right key or scale, I’m just relying on my instinct and intuition to get to the notes I want to express. Of course, you can also play it fully chromatically if that’s your preference

Cool and unique as the instrument is, I do find myself wondering if I couldn’t have similar experiences on a keyboard with expression controls. Of course, that’s because I’m a keyboardist by nature; a flute player might get ideas from a Tuvan throat singer and try them out on the flute.

So, anticipating what some people might say in comments – could you try similar explorations on something like, say, a $500 iPad? You lose a lot of the precision, the comfortable form factor, and pressure sensitivity for expression. But new iPad applications are trying some of the same ideas in regards to “no-wrong-notes” tuning and exploration. (Hey, it’s not a new idea – acoustic instruments have done this since the dawn of time – but it’s an idea that can continue to pay off.)

Sure enough, Geert has been playing with Jordan Rudess‘ MorphWiz app. Have a look and judge for yourself:

MorphWiz first experiment – Tiridum from Geert Bevin on Vimeo.

Be sure to read Geert’s complete review. And if you’re using an Eigenharp yourself, we’d love to hear your thoughts and see your videos – or those on other instruments, as well.

The “space bassoon” Eigenharp seems to have landed from another planet. Today, I’ve got good news: it’s bringing alien gifts with it. By next year, both the software and the high-performance protocol the instrument uses will be open source. Taken together with other advancements in the open source community and with protocols like OSC, that could mean we’re at the vanguard of a golden age for more open, more intelligent, more expressive digital instruments.

Genuinely new music controllers made available commercially don’t come along very often. So this week’s news of a strange but wonderful-looking instrument shaped like a bassoon with customizable key controls turned many heads. With high-resolution, high-frequency data and reliance on the computer for everything from sound generation to mapping the keys to different tunings, the computer connection matters. Eigenharp’s chairman, John Lambert, sets the record straight for CDM on the software, the way it talks to your computer and other gear, and how open the tools and protocol will be.

I’ll be talking more with John next week, but I want to bring you this news now. Part of blogging means that you don’t hold back – you share that first reaction and then learn more. I’m pleased to say I was dead wrong on the Eigenharp. What looked on the spec sheet like MIDI-only communication and proprietary software turns out to be just the opposite. Sometimes, being wrong is great. Here are all the details:

What protocol do the instruments use?

The instruments talk to their base station by a dedicated, high speed, differential, transformer-coupled, error-correcting digital protocol designed (and tested) for use in noisy stage environments by ourselves. The wire used is a 4 core, standard star quad mic cable and can be up to 40M long. The base station then talks to the control software running on the host PC (Mac at the moment) via a dedicated protocol over USB2. In the host system, the native protocol used between agents (our software components) is a network protocol called Eigentalk. This can run over Ethernet wires (with slightly increased latencies due to some smart jitter buffering we do). We will be making this public and freely available (when we open-source our main software) in Febuary next year. There is an open API, to be published at the same time, for our equivalent of AU’s or VST’s, hosted in our software, EigenD. This is rather richer than the AU and VST API’s, for reasons connected with the expressiveness and configure-ability (is that a word?) of our system. A couple of interesting AU vendors are looking at producing native EigenD instruments at the moment, and I think there will be many more in time. We try to avoid MIDI wherever possible as it has so many serious performance limitations.

Had you considered OSC?

We did have a look at OSC but there are a bunch of things that our protocol does that OSC didn’t (not least of which, for example, is clock syncronisation for jitter removal, utterly vital over ethernet for live performance) so we decided to grow our own and release it. Absolutely no reason whatsoever that we can’t interoperate fuly with it though, I suspect that an OSC EigenD Agent will probably come quite soon after the open source release.

Ed.: Actually, with OSC (OpenSoundControl) moving increasingly toward broader input and assimilating other standards, I can easily imagine that a future implementation of OSC could begin to implement these features. More on both protocols in the coming months. -PK

Is it possible to use this as a controller for MIDI hardware? MIDI software?

Yes, EigenD has in and out MIDI gateway programs. The incoming [MIDI] is mainly used for pedalboards at the moment (to control scale, key, tempo, etc.), although there is no reason you couldn’t use a midi keyboard to play notes. We’re using the MIDI out to do a wide variety of things, including playing MIDI sound modules, and controlling video DJ software and lighting systems. There is a huge reduction in effective bandwidth when ‘downsampling’ to MIDI, but for a lot of things it still works very well. And of course, the AU and VST standards (which we fully support) are a kind of MIDI interface.

Is it possible to access its native protocol for custom software / Max-Pd patches and the like?

Well, we’re open sourcing the whole thing early next year, and I think there’ll be a lot of work done to glue all sorts of external stuff in then. Max/MSP has attracted a lot of interest in this area. The whole of EigenD is kind of built for this really. We’re an Open Source company: my main personal desktop is Linux and I have a strong personal commitment to open standards. I offer a number of ‘programming bounties’ for Linux improvements on my personal website at http://johnhenrylambert.com.

Tell us more about open-sourcing the software. What tools did you use to build the software.

It’s written in a mixture of C++ and Python. It’s quite scary code, but very clean and pretty, with little ‘cruft’. I think the open source community are going to have fun with it. Its a big system too, 8 years of R&D in one huge release. I don’t think that there’s been anything quite like this open sourced before in the music world – it is a bit as if Logic or Ableton were GPL’d tomorrow.

Thanks, John! Stay tuned for more details, and let me know if you have specific questions for the creators.

I don’t know if it’s “the most revolutionary new musical instrument of the last 60 years,” but let’s be clear on one thing: the Eigenharp Alpha is utterly, beautifully insane. It combines breath and finger input in a bassoon form factor, but with quite a lot more physical control, a computer connection, and no internal sound source of its own. The breath input comes from a crooked tube as on a bassoon, with finger input in a touch strip, a fretted, light-up keyboard, and keys that have their own various forms of expression. Launched yesterday in London, the Eingenharp is getting a lot of attention. (And yes, some of you spotted signs of its launch all the way back in June, to which I say – I’m sorry I’m so late to the party.)

From BBC: Do you drum it, strum it or stroke it?

I hope to speak to the creators soon. Already, I see some indications that there are equal parts genius and madness here. The controller itself, even in the bizarre bassoon form factor, has an extraordinary amount of control, with high-resolution keys, percussion keys, elaborate control arrangements that can adjust tone or record samples, and extremely precise breath and touch. At £3,950, many computer musicians accused of “knob twiddling” by the creators probably won’t be able to afford the top-of-the-line model, but I do believe an instrument like this can easily, fairly cost this much, it’s a cost reasonable for musical instruments – and there is a £349 “Pico” edition for mortals.

There’s some madness, too, however. For the “instrument of the future,” the creators appear to have chosen MIDI, via USB, in place of a modern control protocol. Then, they plug the instrument into proprietary Mac software. (A Windows version is expected early next year.) There are software models of a Cello, a Clarinet, and a Synth, but there are also gigs of samples oddly loaded into SoundFont format. Given the futuristic ambitions and the sky-high price, closed software and antiquated I/O seem puzzling to me. I’m also skeptical of the approach here of piling on as many controllers as possible.

CORRECTION – CORRECTION! Yes, indeed – proprietary software and the limitations of MIDI wouldn’t make any sense – and apparently the creators agree. So the software will be open sourced, as will their custom-designed protocol. I’ve got all the details – required reading for anyone working on expressive instruments.

But don’t get me wrong. I think this fascinatingly bizarre instrument is worth exploring. The hardware design looks exceptionally luxurious, and there is some genuine design innovation in the controller the likes of which we’ve never seen in an instrument beyond a prototype or two.

Oh, and yes, I already want the Pico – and I think the Pico’s fewer controls may actually make more sense.

Basic specs:

Video of the key action, among others collected on YouTube:

The “Alpha,” the flagship:

• 120 keys, plus 12 percussion keys. (Wait — 120? Yes, you read that right.)
• Two strip controllers, one on each side.
• Breath pipe and mouthpiece.
• 11-bit resolution (2048 values) in the keys and strip controllers, 12-bit resolution (4098 values) for breath.
• Internal audio interface with mic pre, converters, and headphone out – so you need to carry this and a computer, but not this, a computer, and an audio interface.
• A “Base Station” with inputs for expression pedals and foot switches, which also contains the USB connection. This connects to a floor spike on which the instrument rests.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/alpha/

The Pico:

• 22 keys (18 for playing, four mode switches).
• Keys work via direct pressure and lateral pressure in both directions, as on the Alpha.
• Breath pipe.
• Strip controller.
• Same resolution: 11-bit keys, 12-bit breath.
• £349.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/pico/

To be honest, I’m quite a lot more interested in the Pico, not because I think cheaper is better, but because I’m curious whether you can’t be just as expressive with the more limited set of controls as with the kitchen sink approach of its big brother. After all, 22 keys is roughly the number you’d find on most reed instruments, including the Bassoon. True, the piano has 88 keys, but it also doesn’t really have anything else – and it’s able to have so many because of its form factor.

In fact, I’m sorry, but I love the Pico. It looks friendly, it looks portable, it isn’t terrifying-looking like the Alpha, and it seems it’d be more at home in a variety of musical venues than the Alpha. Sometimes less is more. Let’s see if I prove to be correct.

The software, though I hope you could also customize your own software rig using the MIDI input:

• Modular, allowing the routing of control inputs, sound sources and samples, loopers, and synthesis and effects.
• SoundFont oscillator.
• Physical models of the clarinet, cello.
• AU host for adding your own plug-ins. (And yes, this is where I think you’ll have the most fun.
• A system for triggering events, takes, key, and mapping scale.
• An interactive arrangement system for step sequencing.
• Oddly, an extensive Steinway D multi-sample. On the other hand, for years we’ve all have been playing bassoon and other reed samples on the keyboard, and in organ form for centuries, so now the reed instrument gets its revenge.

Source: Eigenlabs software specs.

The instrument’s creator, John Lambert, repeats the maxim heard at new instrument design conferences: “We’ve got pretty fed up with watching people twiddle knobs on stage.” Naturally, that means… turning to the Bassoonist, that sex icon of the orchestra? I’ll run with it.

One other tidbit from that article:

He says there is one high-profile musician who is about to take delivery of an Eigenharp, but won’t give any names.

Yeah, Herbie Hancock, we know it’s you. (Okay, they are an English company, so maybe it’s an English celeb, but really the question is whether Herbie is who they mean, or whether he’s filling out the pre-order as we speak. He’s like what we would all be like if we had a budget.)

Anyway, consider this a first look. I hope to get closer to the actual instrument soon.