More YouTube goodness after the jump, but let’s skip ahead to the even better news: Toshio Iwai has started a development blog for the Tenori-On. Nat, the graphics designer behind Create Digital Music, has all the details on his blog onetonnemusic.

Tenori-On Report by Toshio Iwai and Tenori-On Development Team

Aside from keeping tabs on the Tenori-On, you can watch other ideas develop, like a blue-lit sound installation on a music stand. (Clever way of making that portable!) Also, in case you weren’t jealous enough of the people who got to go to SONAR, we appear to have missed what looks like a bumper car rave. Okay, I’m officially saving up miles for next year.

Videos and additional links after the jump. (Thanks to Fabio and Señor Pantalones for the tips. Okay, there’s a silly sounding sentence.)

Toshio Iwai at SONAR (with ElectroPlankton)

Tenori-On at SIGGRAPH:

Tenori-On at Artfutura

Previously

onetonnemusic, including a great photo of a notated score for Tenori-On

Tenori-On Live Performance in Spain, From ElectroPlankton Creator and Interactive Wizard

How to Make ElectroPlankton Rock

Toshio Iwai, creator of Electroplankton, is working on a new digital musical instrument with Yamaha. It’s called the Tenori-On and, at least from an industrial design point of view, it looks beautiful. And if you’re in Spain, you can check it out live in action.

Retrospectively, it seems to be the spiritual cousin to the monome, except of course the monome is purely a control device, whereas the Tenori-On is staking out its territory as a full-fledged instrument in its own right. Of course, there will be a price premium to pay should this device reach market. I’ve been waiting for more news on this device, and I’d been wondering how or if it was progressing at all over the last couple of months.

An opportunity to see this thing in action is happening shortly though: Toshio Iwai will be performing live with it at Sonar 2006 in Barcelona Spain. (Is it just me, or is Barcelona the most amazing sounding place? They have an amazing art/music/design scene there.) It’s at the Centre d’Art Santa Monica on 16th June at 9:15 pm. Somebody go along and video this so we can see it in action! [Ed: Anyone who can get good video of this, I'll reward you with . . . well, something! -PK]

A lot of the frustration I’ve expressed (or at least sad doe eyes that I was making in Nintendo’s general direction) regarding Electroplankton really revolves around my wish for more interesting collaborative opportunities. The Tenori-On is designed to be just such a device; the result are fascinating, particularly the visual composition aspect of the unit. I would hope that the LED status for the grid could also be transmitted to VJ hardware for visual experimentation too. [Ed: Should be technically possible. Let's hope I/O from the device is fairly open. -PK]

It certainly crosses into the borders of “music as art”, but it does look like absolutely terrific fun. I’m dying to know when Behringer will be releasing the T-O-UB for $99. *hides from lawyers*

Monome.org
Tenori-On Yamaha Global Page
Previously on CDM: Tenori-On
How to make Electroplankton Rock (a wishlist)

Ed: For more of Nat’s thoughts and brilliant design sense, check out his blog

[UPDATED:] More links in comments, plus a post from Pixelsumo with some more detailed specs. The whole thing runs on MIDI — how about that?

Hence, this exposition, or perhaps exposé – you choose. For anyone who came in late, Electroplankton is a title for Nintendo DS that basically has a set of 10 “minigames” that revolve around music creation.

Electroplankton is one of those titles that you hear about and assume that will never surface with an English translation. Lots of interesting titles come out in Asia and never see the western market. But then again, there’s very little to Electroplankton and translation of the game itself would have taken all of about, say, 10 minutes. The manual is a work of art though, and well worth a look in its own right. These days most games don’t really have printed manuals of any description. Thanks be to the folks at Nintendo who have chosen to release this game and documentation in such a complete way to the western market.

What’s fascinating about this title is not so much the fact that Nintendo have released a music title for their handheld, but that the crossbreeding of music creation and art interaction could be so compelling and commercially successful.

Hopefully that’s gotten everyone up to speed. Electroplankton is a music toy. You could conceivably use it as a tool in your musical arsenal, but right now, it’s just not suited to that, at least not in a regular performance sense. However, with some changes it could be absolutely mind-bending. So, let’s call this the…

Electroplankton 2 Wishlist

Or how they could make Electroplankton ROCK…

I’m relatively optimistic, but I realize that most of these things just won’t happen. This was created bearing that in mind, and should be entirely achievable within the confines of the existing DS hardware.

1. Collaboration.

Playing music together is fun. Playing games together is fun. The DS has built-in wireless and support for online play. When Electroplankton initially came out, the multiplayer scene for the DS was pretty weak, but now it’s starting to mature and the infrastructure is there. It would be an incredibly compelling title if the wireless sent timecode and allowed collaborative composition. Given Electroplankton’s current setup which revolves around 1 plankton (instrument) at a time, the simple addition of multiple units synced wirelessly would realize it as a more complete performance instrument.

The speed of the wireless connection (802.11b 11mbits p/sec) is more than enough to support the transfer of basic control information, if not audio itself from one unit to another.

2. Two Plankton at once, on one unit.

Given that the DS is a multiscreen unit, and the second screen is at the moment mostly used as decoration (currently a closeup of the plankton that you are manipulating), the simple addition of a button on the touchscreen that swaps between 2 sets of plankton would be the ideal next step. I don’t think that it would be necessary to have more than 2 plankton at once, (it may be beyond the processor and sound chip on the DS anyway) and having a limitation of 2 plankton would be a nice way to encourage more collaboration as well.

Currently, without some recording hardware on hand, you cannot record your compositions. From the perspective of the serial public transport commuter, it would be nice to have a wider sonic canvas.

3. More plankton

I like the plankton that came with the game — some of them have fantastic little personalities (at least in my mind) — but I’m greedy, and I would love it if there were more plankton to play with. The DS game cart could hold literally hundreds (thousands?) of plankton. Also, if the plankton were user editable (make use of the stylus to modify set attributes of the plankton) how amazing would it be if you could share your plankton via the DS’s inbuilt wireless?

There’s a variety of new sounds that are easily generated with Electroplankton, and having some user-editable attributes would be a nice way to diversify the sound even more. This would also make it more functional as a reliable noisebox for performance.

4. Genepool.

Another compelling way to encourage interaction would to allow wireless gameplay that placed the your plankton and others in a pool, where you can affect the plankton by placing it in closer proximity to other plankton. As you get closer, the behavior of the plankton could change. A simple and appropriate reaction could be falling into similar tempo with the nearby plankton.

The addition of collision detection would create interesting interactions from the user’s perspective. Simple AI that affected the default behavior of the plankton when they are closer to other groups of plankton could be another useful idea for meaningful interaction. While I’m not suggesting that the plankton should fight or anything of that ilk, an appropriate auditory response to proximity to other plankton would further promote the idea of the plankton as interactive creatures in their own right.

(This thought is brought to you courtesy of flow.)

5. Add a simple sequencer/recorder

It doesn’t have to be Ableton Live, but a simple system that allows recording of your settings and songs would turn this into a performance device. Regardless of any features that could be added, the addition of this to Electroplankton as it stands would see it turning up on stages all over the place. If it could reliably record your songs & settings for playback, it would be a viable option for anyone who wants some new and interesting sounds.

Electroplankton is a fun bit of software, and I’m aware we may never even see Electroplankton 2, but if even a few of these features turned up in a new version, it would be AMAZING.

Related Electroplankton webzen

Nintendo Electroplankton Site
Mile Zero – Composition in Electroplankton
Mile-Zero Electroplankton Composition – Innsmouth Blues
Tenori-on – Toshio Iwai’s collaboration with Yamaha
MTV.com fluff piece
DJ Dave Hollands talking Electroplankton
flow – Indie microbe game with soothing ambient tunes.

Nintendo.com Electroplankton Wallpapers
Wallpaper 1
Wallpaper 2
Wallpaper 3

Nathanael Jeanneret designed the graphics and layout for Create Digital Music and the upcoming Create Digital Motion, thus making him our hero. -Ed.

The game is the work of talented interactive artist Toshio Iwai. There are nods to his past artistic work, which has involved reactive musical insects that produce compositions and pianos that are operated with waterfalls of video images. What Iwai has done with Nintendo, though, is pretty revolutionary: he’s made a leading portable game system the ultimate installation, so you can bring his art home.

CDM is working on an exclusive interview and hands-on coverage (once I get my copy), but for those of you American Nintendo DS fans rushing out to pick this up today, here’s our past coverage.

DS + ElectroPlankton for Music: More Details, Hacking Mic

How to Start a Nintendo DS ElecktroPlankton Band

Performing Live with Nintendo DS and ElectroPlankton

By the way, can anyone figure out when (or if) this is coming out in Europe and the rest of the world? (Of course, you can easily import the game, even from Japan, since there’s virtually no text.)

Ars Electronica Review [pieceofplastic.com]

Ars Electronica photostream [Flickr]

Tangible interfaces [engadgeted.net], again featuring the ReacTable — see CDM’s musical table roundup

One of the highlights was the Tenori-On, an interactive LED music toy from the creator of Nintendo’s upcoming game ElectroPlankton, as covered here before. But the coolest event sounds like the opening performance “Suspended Engines” (pictured), with video and music live in an engine shop of the Austrian Railway. (Blog details are sketchy, but see Fashionable Technology.) Now, if only they had a train controller for the performance.

Composing with ElectroPlankton: Table of Contents [Mile Zero]

There’s just one hitch: it’d be great to get audio into the Nintendo DS via a cable instead of the mic. Thomas tried hacking the built-in jack, but with less-than-desirable results. Any experienced benders out there wanna help out? Any word on headsets for the DS? Give him or me a holler and let us know.

Thomas also sends details of his experience after the jump, including how it’s going using a game that’s imported in Japanese.

He writes:

Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed the article! As of yet, I haven’t used
Electroplankton live, but I’m looking forward to trying. I don’t know if I
made it clear in the first post, but my one-man rock band basically uses a
looper and a bass guitar to play a whole band’s worth of rock and funk
songs–I do the percussion with muted slaps, and there’s a lot of upper-neck
chording for the guitar parts and solos. There are a few .mp3 samples up on
Mile Zero–just impromptu recordings done at home, but they get the idea
across. If you go back into the Music category, they shouldn’t be too hard
to find.

One of the great things about Electroplankton is that you don’t need to know
any Japanese, really. Almost everything is very self-explanatory, and there
are a few translations online. I imported it from Lik-sang and played with
it for a while (then set it aside). Recently I realized that it basically
had a drum machine and synth built-in, which would be really handy to fill
sound and give me more flexibility (cheaper than a sampler, too).

Unfortunately, although there are a couple of FAQ pages for EP out there,
they all look at it from a gaming standpoint. I couldn’t find anything to
tell me what keys the music was in, or what the limitations are in a band
context. That’s really why I’m writing this series: I’m having a lot of fun
experimenting with it, and I’m hoping that it can serve as a resource for
people will take it farther than I can. People who do programming with
Nanoloops and LSDJ just blow me away. I’m just a bass player, your modern
world frightens and confuses me…

As I continue to post the Electroplankton articles, they’ll all go in the
same games/society/art folder, and I think EP stuff is all I have in there.

Thanks, Thomas! We’ll stay in touch here at CDM. I’m going to try this, too, though with EP supposedly getting imported to the US this fall, I think I’ll wait for the English version.

Yet more Nintendo music-making — this time with the strange and fascinating ElectroPlankton music game for the Nintendo DS. Thomas at MileZero has started a tutorial on starting a “one-man band” using ElectroPlankton:

Part one: introduction and why he did it
Part two: Working with Luminaria (don’t ask; think you have to try it!)

If anyone is going to make music with game systems, this is really the way to do it. Like the music software homebrewers have created for the original Game Boy, ElectroPlankton is really tailored to the game hardware on which it runs. And it offers something different: not just a drum machine ported to a game system (like the games available for the PSP) or another look-alike synth we see every day on computers — it’s a truly unique experience.

Of course, I think soon you’ll see an increasing number of musicians building their own tools on computers, too. And if you want some inspiration for out-of-the-box design, pick up a game system. It’s a terrific tax deduction.

Introducing Downsampled: in conjunction with Computer Music Magazine (UK), CDM will look monthly at an overview of a hot topic on the site. First up: next-generation gaming and music. Here’s a roundup of just some of the relevant stories on CDM.

Nintendo markets music-making as game:
Start your own Wi-Fi Nintendo Band with the Nintendo DS and Band Brothers (+ geeky video of Nintendo execs and Miyamoto’s vision of gaming)
ElectroPlankton game interactive musical toy for the DS
Installation and duos with live violin using ElectroPlankton in Japan
PSP lovers . . . check out PSP Kick

Games as instruments:
Our friends at Harmonix develop music-themed PlayStation 2 games
Freezepop plays live with the PS2 (featuring members of the Harmonix team)

Serious game music:
Orchestras take on game music
Connection between game music and permutative scores
Past, present, and future of game music

Xbox 360 + music:
New game consoles’ music/audio compared (E3)
Visualizer app to be pre-loaded on Xbox 360 from legendary veteran developer (updated: interview link + more
Top game composers sound off on Xbox 360 features and in-game controversy (CDM interviews)

Welcome, Computer Music readers!

game ElectroPlankton. (Articles, photos, and videos at IGN, though some videos require a paid subscription.) Think cheery post-modern minimalism, with duets between the DS (video art and hypnotic patterns) and live violinist (more hypnotic patterns).

Meanwhile, Nanoloop 2.0 is running just swell on my DS, thanks to its new life as a GBA-style cartridge. (More on that soon.) Sure, it lacks ALL the credibility of real oldskool chip music . . . but how else will I switch from music to Nintendogs?

Of course, I won’t be performing with Electroplankton — this begs for a new generation of custom visual/audio interactive instruments. My tool of choice would be a computer or PDA and Flash (and, like the DS, the PDA has stylus input after all).

Convincing people to embrace new control methods is hard.
Just ask Nintendo. Sure, here at CDM we talk about making music with a
graphic tablet input, sock puppets — you love that. But the gaming
market is conservative; many still don't get the inclusion of a stylus
on the Nintendo DS.

And that, friends, has made Nintendo go completely insane and turn into high-art interactive artists:

Exhibit A: touchingisgood.com
– Nintendo is making arty films about why hand input is a good idea,
and for a while was even giving away surplus disembodied mannequin
hands so you could completely freak out your friends. (Now you have to
settle for a PDF hand — damn.)

Exhibit B: ElectroPlankton
– Nintendo's even making experimental electronic music art. It's not
too surprising that the Japanese market would go for algorithmic
generative music involving surreal animated plants that's not even
game; this is Japan, after all. But they're importing it to the US?

Quick! While Nintendo is in this experimental mood, can
someone get them to release their SDK to the digital music community?
And music developers, why haven't you figured out that stylus input
would be an insanely cool way of controlling envelopes and oscillators
(witness today's NoteGraphica)? Come on, what was the last gear to use this — the Fairlight CMI?