I covered the OTO Machines Biscuit early this year, in particular noting the design process of creating new hardware. Hardware today is back with a vengeance, but with the flexibility of software: the gear is contained in a single object and interface, but can be upgraded just as computer code on a desktop can. Sure enough, OTO are back this week with a series of updates, which are easier to watch and hear than to talk about. See the video above for four new effects and various other improvements, available as a free firmware update and delivered (oh, the retro glory) via SysEx.

It’s quite a success, too, for a boutique offering. 300 units have already sold, say OTO: “200 more will be available in November, with 150 already sold from this next batch.”

It’s love in a digital age.

Previously:
OTO Machines BISCUIT: 8-bit + Analog Filter Effect; Designing New Hardware

Official site:
http://www.otomachines.com

What if you could have any musical technology you wanted – if you had only to imagine something, and it appeared? That was the somewhat insane notion behind the Dreams Competition CDM organized with Rui Penha of Casa Da Musica’s Digitópia research and education program in Porto, Portugal. Earlier this week, Rui and I sat down on the banks of Porto’s famed Douro River with Paulo Maria Rodrigues to pour through stacks of imaginary instruments. Some proposals read like wish lists composed to Santa Claus. Others included exquisite renderings, mock-ups, and even video that made them into serious, near-finished product designs. In the end, we attempted to choose the ideas that seemed the most surprising and original, including a winner that – with some limitation of its scope – would be feasible to actually build.

Far from just being idle fantasy, the winner will be realized by a team of developers as an open-source, free project. And I suspect some of the other entries may yield real tools, too. The line-up offers plenty of indications of what matters to people, and what’s possible. Here are some of our favorite entries out of an impressively high-quality bunch, plus, of course, our winners and the grand-prize selection that will inspire a real project.

Winner: Dream Synthesizer, Andreas Paleologos

The “Dream Synthesizer” lives up to its name: it embodies a laundry list of ideas about how to make a more interesting synth. Building the whole instrument would be wildly impractical for this project. But one central concept caught our eye as both practical and innovative. The idea is, touch interaction with an array of LEDs creates envelopes that provide a single metaphor for all sound design. Those envelopes aren’t just one paradigm among others: every sound parameter is accessed with gestures.

To realize this idea, we’re directing the Digitopia team we’re assembling for this project to focus on the LED array itself, and working with software to produce sounds. The very limitations of the LED display itself have some appeal, even in this age of multi-touch displays. Furthermore, the constructed physical object should produce a reusable part that other people interested in building their own hardware can reuse. Mapping different software synthesis methods, all built in free software, to touch gestures means the sound side should be reusable, too.

Making a project “free and open source” isn’t just about a license; it’s about choosing something that could be a building block for a wide range of ideas, and making that building block as usable and friendly – from engineering to documentation – as possible. Here’s how Andreas describes his concept, the spark that most inspired us:

My Dream Synthesizer has 3 sound modules that together generate the sound.
Digital Sound Module.
Physical Sound Module.
Vocal Sound Module.
They’re high-quality software modules with a lot of identity. The sound is constantly routed through all three
sound modules, whether generating sound or silent.
It has a big Low Resolution LED screen, covered with a transparent high resolution multi touch film for on
screen interaction with support for up to 3 fingers.
Draw the waveform on the screen and get instant control of the sound.
Use one finger to manipulate the Digital Sound Module.
Use two fingers to manipulate the Physical Sound Module.
Use three fingers to manipulate the Vocal Sound Module.
The envelope is basically ADSR, but with looping sustain. Draw your envelope curve.
You can record and automate all waveform and envelope changes making really complex sounding sounds
with just a finger stroke, recording your particular timing.
Select whether all automation should be triggered once or whether it should loop.

There are more details in the proposal we’ll share soon. And since the project is open, it’s one I hope that we’ll share with the CDM community on an ongoing basis, including getting reactions and ideas as the project is implemented.

By the way, check out Swedish-born, Norwegian-resident Andreas’ artist site, Cuckoo — cool stuff:
http://cuckoo.no/

First Runner-Up: Odu, Nicole Weber

Nicole Weber’s (Germany) Odu was probably the most stunning design work in the lot, including a full physical mock-up and UI design concepts. It’s an unusual combination of physical interface and Web-based sonic engine. On the Web side, users find sample content through a browser interface. On the physical side, a handheld interface turns those samples into tangible objects for manipulation and performance.

Nicole describes her “modular” project thusly:

programmer

• With the programmer the user is able to program the controller with samples
• Ships with a sample archive, e.g. created in collaboration with freesound.org or similar
• The user is able to archive and search own samples
• Optional community feature like competitions are provided via the software interface

base

• The base has all the basic features like USB connection, volume and connection ports for effects or other modules
• Integration of sensors in the controller body, e.g. tilt sensor or accelerometer

See her full proposal:
http://topotropic.de/odu

Honorable Mention: Fabric Ghost Controllers, Tycho

Tycho (Germany) sent what was perhaps the most evocative idea. It’s one I hope actually will be realized, but I think one that involves very specific skills. (Our friends the Grant Sisters of felted signal processing have been working on this very problem.) Tycho writes:

I have a dream.
I imagine when playing electronic music live I have sort of a display beside keyboard and computer where seven colored silk scarves are hanging. The cloths are maybe half a meter long, they are square and fixed with their center at a pole or something, their four corners loosely hanging down. It looks remotely like seven ghosts in a row. You get the picture?

These are the scarf ghosts controllers! Blowing against the scarves or touching them of fanning at them, maybe even squeezing them for extreme results shows that all seven of them control parameters of the actual sound(s) playing.

I do sleep concerts with very very low volume electronic music in Berlin, Germany. I believe such a “silk scarf ghost controller” would be perfect to accompany my music. During my nocturnal seven hour concert (plus some wake up music) I refer to (and sort of musically render) the seven chakras––so I would choose the number seven and the six rainbow colors plus white for the “ghost controller”.

But can a cloth be a controller? I learned of a Doepfer device that transforms a signal of 0 to 5 volts into the MIDI range. Unfortunately I have no idea how to make a scarf turn out volts when blown at or touched or squeezed. Could you work in a metal wire or something? Plug in little invisble batteries?

I had the idea just a few days ago when I heard of your competition. Maybe you would like such a beautiful and subtle “ghost controller” as well. I had even the vision of using it as sort of wind chimes: hang it in a breeze with my equipment rigged up in nature and let it produce generative sounds.

Its main purpose is being a live controller though that maybe look like decoration at first but turns out to affect the sounds and music. (As such it’s naturally highly lightweight and portable: Just fold the scarves.) They maybe even interact when one scarf touches another.

And imagine taking the pole into your hand and swinging it gently all seven the scarves flapping in the air! What a finale!

More Terrific Ideas

There are really too many interesting proposals to list here, but just to give you a taste:

The Wheel Array and the Ball Array, Stefan Blixt (Sweden): Blixt proposed a kinetic interface involving physical wheels. The idea is novel and a tangible contrast for the increasingly-minimal digital interfaces in our world.

Vitus, Michael Oneppo (USA): Vitus is a “controller” suite of connected, wireless objects.

each performer has a foot panel that controls expression, recording, looping, and effects for his or her performance. through the panel, the performer can enable or disable effects, modulate parameters of the effects, and mix up to four loopable performance clips on the fly.
a number of different wireless connections are provided that allow any microphone, guitar, keyboard controller, or other instrument to be wirelessly connected to the system. in addition, these interfaces provide a one button control for activating the instrument for recording and looping with the foot panel.
finally, a main controller panel is available for the controllerist/mixer of the group. this unit provides a master view of all performers’ clips and settings, and also allows the performer to manipulate these clips to make unique mixes. the interface is an array of hybrid button knobs, which present the performer with endless possibilities and configurations. the panel instantly slices any clip into eighth notes segments that can be triggered in monome-style phrasing across the button/knob grid.
all devices are truly wireless, eliminating any messy cords and freeing the performers. being battery powered, each unit recharges inductively through a storage case that can plug into any outlet.

Boulier, Yann Girard (France): Boulier has an ingenious take on how to maximize musical functionality in an array of encoders: use color to denote pitch. Someone may have thought of this before, but the execution is lovely.

LUM from Alfredo Duarte on Vimeo.

LUM, Alfredo A. Duarte Jorquera (Chile) is already, in this mock-up demonstration video, a compelling demonstration of the use of the Sony PS3 Move controller for music. Max Mathews, maker of the Radio Baton, would be proud. I hope Alfredo continues with this project, because I think he’s got a clear vision of how it can work. Updated: that’s an actual demo, so the work has already begun! Go forth!

And the rest…

Jacob Adler (USA) easily wins the honorary Luigi Russolo Award for craziest idea. I think you can agree from the first line:

I want to turn a mountain into a giant organ.
In the millennia-old tradition of organ building, I propose to develop a new kind of instrument – one constructed from powerful train horns and heard in an open desert space. The performer of such an instrument will actuate the valves of multiple air compressors remotely through a digital signal processing program and midi keyboard controller (when an E is pressed, the corresponding horn will sound). The harmonic richness of train horns are beautiful and I believe they can be used to create a new kind of music in
vast spaces. The instrument will be mobile and may be installed in any natural, open space for a series of concerts. One ideal location for this instrument is the south face of Papago mountain in Phoenix, AZ – the
mountain itself is visually beautiful and the park is acoustically ideal.
With a rank of 48 horns (corresponding to four musical octaves), free community concerts of new and old music will be performed. Every stage of the project should be documented through digital video, audio, and photos.
Throughout the organ-building process there will be many issues that will need to be resolved such as power/air-pressure requirements, acoustics in relation to topography, tuning, scaling, voicing, shape of the pipe/horn body, aesthetics of the organ case (if any), and design of the overall instrument. I have a background in working with pipe organs (performing and maintaining), and I would love to work in close collaboration with engineers and musicians. Visually, I would like to base the design of the instrument
after a famous antique organ case in Alkmaar (Netherlands) – the Schnitger Organ in St.
Laurenskerk<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Alkmaar_organ.jpg>.
However, the design and materials used will harmonize organically with the desert landscape.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Steppophonic Looperformer, Per Boysen (Sweden) is a very practical-looking approach to step sequencing, and is labeled “please steal this!” It’s well within the range of things readers here could accomplish, so perhaps take the creator’s invitation — write back with the results!

Other ideas, like an OSC sequencer or modular musical/MIDI hardware seem like things that are destined to happen, even if this isn’t quite the forum for those problems.

A big thanks to everyone for compelling, creative contributions. If you have any more ideas or questions, if you missed this round and want to continue the conversation, the grand project of dreaming up the future of music tech is an unending one.

The sight has become ubiquitous: if you’re hearing an electronic live act or computer DJ, there will be a laptop hovering nearby. The glowing logo of one fruit-themed computer brand in particular has appeared all over shots of artists, and the phrase “computer music” has come to be interchangeable with “laptop music” or “laptop performer.”

You can hide the laptop, of course. But, while that’s a valid choice, you do have to wonder why it should be necessary. After all, we don’t hide instruments, or mixers, or microphones, or performers – and, to be sure, the performers aren’t always lookers. And so, the object is there, and reflected onto it is the aura of the performer.

Laptops as a form factor aren’t going anywhere just yet. In fact, I think we may discover by way of contrast why the design of a laptop can be useful. But if it’s not the end of the laptop, it might be the end of the laptop’s hegemony. “Computer music,” after all, once meant hauling computer towers onstage, something reserved these days for a select few. The laptop’s monopoly hold on most computer performers isn’t a sure thing. And this could be the year the tide turns.

Oh, and not just because of the iPad. But we’ll get to that.

The Forerunners

The idea of putting a computer into some other form factor for music is nothing new. Plenty of artists do carry rack-mounted equipment or small form factor PCs. PC vendors catering to musicians sell computers in racks, and there are dedicated rack-mounted machines running Linux like the MUSE Receptor.

The problem with these machines is simple. You can’t tote them back to your hotel room and continue working on your set. You lose some of the advantages of computers – like graphics.

Other solutions are simply too big, or too costly, to work for an average musician on a budget. Open Labs has put computers into keyboards, but the specs of these machines don’t differ greatly from standard computers, whereas the cost difference is significant. They may work well for someone, but the test remains: can you just put a keyboard next to a laptop and call it a day? If you can, then all but a few die-hard touring artists may move on.

Some of the happiest musicians I’ve seen are the ones who have embraced tablet PCs. “I was into tablets before tablets were cool” would be an appropriate thing for them to wear on a t-shirt, especially in 2010. These computers should have, by all estimates, been a huge success, at least among PC users. They have the advantages of a laptop, but can convert into something that will rest on a music stand. They can be used with pen input and touch. They don’t have to loom in front of artists on a table, and you can pick them up while they’re on without performing a balancing act. The reasons these tablets didn’t catch on, though, are pretty well known: they commanded a price premium, many weren’t available with higher-end specs, and they lacked compelling software tailored to their form factor.

In each of these cases, of course, some brave individuals carried on with these solutions. Some key ingredients were simply missing to catapult the idea to a broader audience. You might want to go befriend one of those individuals, because I think they were onto something. And I think the rest of us might soon have rigs closer to theirs.

Signs of Change

The iPad, Bringer of Slates

In the midst of the iPad-crazy tech bubble, Rana Sobhany aka DJ Rana June has been getting a lot of press and Twitterati attention for using iPads in place of decks to DJ. Of course, the only thing that makes this a “DJ” setup in the eyes of observers is the presence of a mixer in between the two Apple slate devices. That’s caused criticism from some – DJ Tech Tools’ Ean Golden lamented that the the whole situation was kind of irritating.

I’m not about to jump on the hype train. Novelty, by definition, wears off. So let’s consider what Rana is really doing here. I actually find it interesting to watch people pick up devices, to see how they approach them. In this case, the iPad is replacing three different categories of devices: conventional digital decks like the CDJ, DSP-based sound hardware like the ElecTribe, and, most importantly, laptops. Software developers may want to take note of the fact that she’s consuming apps in a disposable way, swapping from one $2 app to another, rather than devoting time to mastery and greater investments of time and treasure. But beyond that, the main revelation here is that the tablet is the computer. And the laptop computer, like specific sound hardware and various arbitrary devices for playing back recorded sound on circular discs before it, proves not to be as sacred as the sound-making activity itself.

Translation: look out, MacBook Pro. Read Rana’s take on what’s happening on her site. And another thing, MacBook – it’s not just the iPad gunning for your job, but a bevy of other tablets and slates in its wake.

Of course, the Revolution won’t necessarily be at the Apple Store. (Where’s Gil Scott-Heron when you need him? “The Revolution will not be presented in a keynote by Steve Jobs. The Revolution will not have an unboxing video. The Revolution will not be first seen in Williamsburg. The Revolution will not appear on Twitter.”)

The computer, in new boxes

iPads may look to musicians a bit like computers without the keyboards, but the Orange PC (“OPC”) looks more familiar. It’s a portable amp with a computer inside – or is that a computer with a portable amp outside? We still don’t know exact pricing or other details on this just-announced beast, but part of what makes it special is that it seems to have big-boy computer specs. It has 4GB RAM, runs a full 64-bit version of Windows 7, has a whopping eight USB ports and wifi, plus an optional dedicated ATI GPU. Check out more details here:
http://www.orangeamps.com/features.asp?ID=163

The computer, gone mobile and embedded

I was struck this month, even more than interest in the iPad, by interest in things completely unlike conventional computers – Apple tablet or otherwise. Digital musicians are rediscovering synth hardware. But they bring to those kinds of sonic devices some of the expectations of computers. They want synths to be customizable, modular, extensible. They want to be able to reprogram them, to make their hardware synths platforms on which they can run software.

For me, personally, instead of an iPad, I bought a Shruti-1. It may look like a synth with an analog filter. It’s actually a computer. Then again, once MPC users start running their own firmware to change its capabilities, maybe the MPC really is a computer, too.

Consider, too, the Minicommand. It uses the Arduino environment so you can run code sketches on the hardware, programming custom rhythms into your drum machine. It is, in effect, a pocketable computer. So, too, could be discarded mobile phones running Android as their operating system and connecting to physical hardware through hacks to their USB port.

But wait a minute. You’ve heard all of this before. You heard all of it years before. So what’s different this time?

Why everything will change – No, seriously, for real this time!

Advances in computing in music have, for years, been counted in processor cycles and growing performance. But aside from the fact that Moore’s Law never said we’d continue to watch machines get faster (read up on that), something else is happening. Computing is getting cheaper and lighter. It’s generating less heat and consuming less power. That means that the intelligence of computing can appear in new devices.

Um… okay, actually, you’ve probably heard that before, too. What’s different now is, well, we’re older. The technology is more mature – and so are the software and hardware designs. In fact, it may be because you’ve been hearing this story over and over again that the technologists designing the solutions are closer to getting it right.

Getting new form factors right has specific musical relevance when it comes to computer performance. Form factors matter in music. Just take a look at the history of musical instruments. Instruments are constantly redesigned in different sizes, carved with different decorations, merged with furniture, folded into walls, re-engineered to be held differently or played differently.

There are many wonderful things about laptops. They retain the greatest power-to-weight ratio for computers. They (usually) come with lots of ports for expansion. The hinge means you can see the screen without propping them up, and the screen is big enough to show lots of stuff. The keyboard lets you type. Deviate from the design, and this and many other advantages disappear. For all these reasons, expect to see traditional laptops onstage for a long time to come.

That doesn’t mean computers have to be the only solution for everyone. There are plenty of reasons to suspect we may finally see a greater number of other form factors in computing in music performance – and to me, nothing tests the use of computers more than someone going in front of a crowd of people with one.

In other words, there are reasons computer music could go from majority to plurality.

Reason #1: Computing goes cheaper, cooler, leaner. Look inside the iPad, or your cell phone, or those new netbooks, or slates, or tablets, and you’ll see the same thing: new architectures that fit in new boxes and last longer on batteries. Heck, even Roland is now touting new more power-efficient DSP on their devices, which means suddenly a lot of Roland gear runs on batteries for extended periods of time.

Reason #2: The ARM race. Remember RISC (reduced instruction set computing)? Remember the Acorn computer – which, incidentally, ran the precursor to today’s Sibelius notation software? Most people probably don’t, because these technologies were supposed to be on the losing side of a battle. The world became “Intel Inside” and the PC platform, and the rest is history. Or is it? Well, just as the 90s were about computing platforms that ran on x86 (read: PCs, Windows), the world today is all about ARM, RISC-based architectures descended from the Acorn. Some billion phones a year use almost entirely ARM architectures. Mobile tech is reaching all the parts of the world’s population who didn’t even have computers or basic infrastructure. ARM is now the largest chip architecture out there by an order of magnitude. And just as the PC platform stormed the world because it was licensed to partners, ARM, too, is growing in dominance because no one company controls its manufacture. ARM is everywhere. It’s the future. And that means it’s also the future of music making with computers. Clarification: I should note that ARM does charge its licensees, but, just as installing Windows proved lucrative for an industry of computer vendors and their associated ecosystem, so, too, a number of big hardware players have found there’s great economic incentive to build their own ARM chips.

Want something new to happen with computer music? Well, billions of people who never had a computer before are getting computers. Some of that future of electronic music likely will come from people not reading this story – and that’s a good thing. You may have scoffed at the One Laptop Per Child initiative, but in the meantime, the world is rapidly becoming One Mobile CPU Per Person.

Reason #3: Open OSes. Don’t laugh. How do you run on billions of devices with no central vendor? We may need the opposite of the kind of control we’ve traditionally seen in operating systems. Linux is a logical front-runner. (If it’s not Linux, it might be the Linux-based Android or Symbian – all three are mobile-ready and open-source, and each have some serious market share trends behind them.)

You can pick up a computer for $100 or $150, or a cell phone, or what will soon include a bunch of cheap tablets, and run something as common as Ubuntu Linux, today. A surprising amount of your software will “just work” on the ARM platform – even though there’s no direct equivalent on Mac or Windows. You’ll accordingly see a lot of big names investing. ARM is inspiring the competition, too – Intel is investing heavily in Linux and in making their x86 architecture leaner, meaner, cooler, and cheaper, too.

Put these pieces together, and things get interesting – and cheap. Think about $200 slates that run free, powerful sound creation environments like Pd or SuperCollider, $300 netbooks that could fold like a book and balance atop a keyboard, and the countless Linux, Windows, Android, Chrome, and other devices coming your way. Yep, even those Chrome browserbooks might work: you could have a UI built in HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript, with sound running native behind the scenes, and your entire music set stored on the cloud. Play the gig, output audio, and have the live set up on Facebook and Soundcloud before you’ve even wound your audio cables.

Reason #4: Build it, and they will come. The hardware is going to be out there: cheap, flexible, numerous in quantity and variety. People will use it and do stuff.

But whereas laptop musicians today sometimes seem like armies of look-alike MacBook users, I don’t think this brave, new world is going to look the same way. The Mac laptop (and to lesser extent, its PC brethren) became popular with good reason. But now, as digital performance techniques become more widespread and the artists make greater demands on their gear, maybe variety is exactly what’s needed. I think you may soon see everything from strange hardware boxes to iPads to slates and tablets and handheld gadgets and more showing up onstage.

Musical invention, when it’s healthy, doesn’t lead to one or two designs. It leads to absurd, insane chaos. Take even the piano, an emblem of standardization and mass instrumental consumption. The piano has spawned endless mutations, sizes, manufacturers, sounds, and so on. Or the guitar: the icon of the 20th century mass music culture was at its best when people were abusing it and feeding it through boxes that destroyed its sound and breaking every rule of how you’re supposed to play it. And that’s about as conventional as instruments get.

The musical applications that start to get most interesting:

• Boxes with physical controls – think stomp pedals, faders, knobs, the like – but programmable computer brains
• Intelligent, cheap synths, effects, and the like that can be easily reprogrammed
• The return of the hardware sequencer (as evidenced by the minicommand), now with the intelligence and flexibility and customizability of software
• Tablet computers, from the iPad to new devices that also handle inputs like the stylus, that – far from being just a controller – take the role of the computer, an all-in-one digital brain for a performance. Via hardware support, they could still connect to high-quality audio outputs, headphone monitoring, and external MIDI keyboards or physical drum pads. They could become interactive canvases that would make Xenakis proud.
• Computers that can double as physical instruments, music stands, amps (like the Orange) or other musical devices.

Trivia note: in 1977, Xenakis implemented his UPIC graphical system on a Hewlett Packard computer. In 2010, HP will introduce the Slate. I have no idea if the Slate will be any good, but all of this has happened in roughly the span of my lifetime. Sometimes, technology takes time.

What’s next?

I realize I’m making an argument about musical practice based on technology, and that that argument isn’t entirely complete – but that’s what blogs can be for. I just want to introduce the idea first. I actually have some ideas about technologies that could enable the sort of performance changes I’m talking about, and ways they could be more musically useful (which is what really matters). But I’ll keep that for another day. In the meantime, I’m interested to hear what you think.

I think we all know why we love laptops: they’re cheap, they’re powerful, they have big, bright, usable screens, and they can move from the desk to the tray table on a plane to a stage situation with aplomb.

And I do pick “live” as the context for a reason: desktop computers can still best even laptops when it comes to bang-for-buck in the studio, if something doesn’t have to leave a tabletop.

The question is, simply, is that all there is? Some of you are already using mobile phones, Game Boys, tablet PCs, netbooks, PSPs, embedded hardware, Arduinos, homebrewed synths, modular synths…

As the digital landscape continues to evolve in the mobile and embedded realms, what sorts of solutions are you dreaming of for playing?

For further reading…

Palm Sounds, a site that has championed alternative form factors and mobile music production in its very charter, has an interesting take on all of this:

Where will the desktop go?

He argues that Apple’s laptop line is now lagging the iPad and iPhone in innovation. I’m not entirely sure I agree. Apple’s pace with the MacBook line is dependent on the availability of chips from Intel, NVIDIA, and many other vendors. Evolution there may indeed seem slow, but then, the laptop space has long required price/performance/heat/battery compromises, and has always been more or less iterative and evolutionary. Also, I think when Apple says “mobile devices company,” they’re lumping in sales from their Mac laptops because it makes their numbers look more impressive. (I would have to look closer at their numbers, though.)

What is interesting to me is that laptops, too, may benefit from the new mobile center of gravity, with touch, stylus, low-power/low-heat, and new operating systems and user interfaces trickling “up” to the more powerl machines. Apple’s line is more streamlined, so some of this variety may appear first on the PC, but looking at laptops generally, there are some interesting changes in store – all making the laptop more mobile and more flexible as a musical device.

The pocketable DJ tool Pacemaker is now available here in the US at $499. That price is considerably more realistic than expected pricing earlier on, though it still fits in a funny sort of slot: it’s not quite the equivalent of pro DJ gear, which costs much more, but it’s still pricier than your run-of-the-mill DJ player. For those with the pocket change (cough), I could imagine it’ll be fun.

And you do have to admire the Pacemaker for being a really unique hardware gadget idea. It’s a glimpse of what music technology could be like in the very near future. Generically, you might describe it as:

• a specialized embedded mobile gadget with sonic-manipulation capabilities
• a connection between a mobile device and a computer-based editor
• a cloud-based, online community for sharing work

Take that as the template, and I think you’ll agree there’s a lot of potential in the basic concept. The specific idea here may be a tougher sell. It’s actually like the DJ-centric “Pro iPod” I remember Jason O’Grady of PowerPage.org and I once imagined in the first months of Apple’s iPod release. Whether DJs actually want that is another question – particularly with the iPhone and other mobile devices adding this functionality in software. But in the specific, as in the generalized view, the Pacemaker is nothing if not intriguing:

• 60 GB storage
• Touch controls
• DJ playback functions: auto-beatmapping, synchronized loops, reverse, bend, pitch speed, timestretch, cue points, vinyl-style scrubbing / pausing
• Visual feedback: beat graph, graphical effects visualization
• Onboard effects: EQ, normalization decimator, filter, wah, echo, delay, key, effects crossfader for adjusting levels and beat sync on a lot of the effects
• Two onboard channels (virtual channels, though – if this thing just had a line in function, I think I’d absolutely want one)
• Independent headphone out jack, adjustable mix
• Lots of audio codec support: MP3, MP3 VBR, M4A (AAC-LC), AIFF, FLAC, WAV, Ogg Vorbis and SND (!)
• MiniUSB connection for a computer

Product page: http://www.pacemaker.net/Default.aspx

US sales: Tonium Pacemaker Pocket-Sized DJ System @ Amazon

I think that’s actually a pretty extraordinary set of specs, and it reveals just how fast the embedded space is moving forward. In fact, I think it may not be too long before the music tech manufacturers (Korg, perhaps?) start to embrace mobile/embedded applications for development. The result: even if the Pacemaker isn’t your thing, mobile music gadgets are looking increasingly like computers, which could get very interesting, indeed.

Will you use it on the beach, like this? For me, um, no. I’ll be hanging out, doing beachy things. If I tried this, I think I would trip over someone’s beach chair and make a very embarrassing scene.

And yes, if you’re getting a steady diet of DJ gigs, you can afford this. Enjoy. (If anyone gets their hands on one, I’d love to hear what you think.)

Updated:

Our friend Nilay Patel at Engadget was one of the first in the US to get a Pacemaker in for review. Now, when is an unboxing of a product actually interesting? When the packaging adds touches like this:

Each cable is individually packaged in tissue paper inside its own box, and the flaps all have different little fortunes printed on them, from "Your future is looking sound" to our personal favorite "Listen to your mother."

Tonium Pacemaker unboxing and hands-on [Engadget]

David Merrill, working with Jeevan Kalanithi and (for the audio engine) Josh Kopin, wowed audiences at the TED conference with his Siftables interactive blocks. These strike me as what the Audiocubes have tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to be — physical objects that react to the proximity of other objects, allowing you to manipulate music and media by moving around tangible blocks. Siftables are gifted with multiple expressive controls (tilt helping them break the plane of the surface), and intelligent screens that make them more adaptable and provide more visual feedback.

The music sequencer is very cool, though I think it’s actually the Scrabble-like game that may be the winner among the demos. But while TED celebrates all things cool and futuristic for their easily-digestible novelty, sometimes I think the most important design achievements are as significant in their shortcomings as their successes. Siftables raises some important questions. Sure, you can now use two hands, as opposed to the single mouse pointer. But do those same tangible blocks actually limit the kinds of interactions you can have, even compared to a traditional UI? Does it sound any different/ And note that — a little bit of tilting aside — the interface is still essentially two-dimensional. I’m personally really stumped by the question of how you can make a successful three-dimensional controller. Yet three dimensions is how all of us interact with space and movement daily. Maybe it’s the fact that we do so much of this, comprehend movement so richly, and take it for granted, that makes mapping those gestures so challenging.

That’s not a criticism of the project – or a claim that I can do any better. On the contrary, I think it’s important to do this sort of work because it can raise those kinds of questions. We’re gifted as a generation to try out and test these ideas with flexibility that was never before possible — and the intelligence built into these objects shows the potential of that power.

More of Siftables after the jump. And it’s well worth checking out David’s other projects, too – when I last ran into him, he was showing off the totable, Linux-powered Audiopint sound-processing box. Oh, yeah — and he’s the face control for guitar guy!

Siftables Music Sequencer from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.

Siftables project page

More Merrill Goodness

For mobile work, your choices have traditionally come down to one of two choices: either lug your laptop and audio interface, or get dedicated recording hardware with far fewer capabilities. We’ve been following the evolution of the Linux-powered Trinity mobile recorder for over a year now because we’re interested in what could happen between those two extremes.

Prototype Trinity recorders initially failed to impress on the software side: the bundled software focused on Audacity 2.0, a fairly basic waveform editor. That already allows far more than what’s possible with dedicated hardware recorders, but maybe not quite enough to warrant leaving your laptop at home. Since we last saw it, though, the Trinity has gotten two major improvements. First, it’s not naked any more; it’s got a lovely, brushed aluminum case. More importantly, though, it’s got an application worth writing home about: a new, mobile/embedded edition of the powerful, free DAW Ardour called Ardourino.

Ardourino isn’t just Ardour running on the Trinity: it’s a special, customized version of the DAW intended for mobile devices. You get the capabilities of Ardour, a full-featured open source DAW that also runs on desktop Mac OS X (natively, no less) and Linux, but adapted to smaller screens. That shows some promise for the open source audio software; I can’t think of any other major pro audio software that’s mobile device ready. And, of course, that also means you can work directly on your desktop DAW on the road, without any import/export of files.

Since the Trinity is running Linux, other applications are possible, too; one prototype photo already shows it running the Hydrogen drum machine.

For many readers, the Trinity rightfully has competition from laptops; you may just not want another device. Nonetheless, though, the Trinity provides an interesting glimpse at what the future of mobile/embedded audio devices might look like, and some of the potential of Linux for music and audio. As far as the Trinity itself, we look forward to learning more about the finished project.

Ronald Stewart’s Blog on the Trinity (and other Linux audio musings)

Previously:
Linux-Powered Mobile Trinity DAW in the Wild
Portable, Linux-Based Trinity Recorder Development Continues; New Specs