Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer.

There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum and Skittles, beer bottle caps, soda bottles, and now walnuts. Don’t stop now: someone has to do Cheetos, even if it means dealing with orange stuff all over your fingers.

That said, it’s not walnuts that make d-touch an important project. Built by Enrico Costanza back in 2003, the project is now available for free download as an open source library, a server (in case you don’t want to get into the C++ code but might want to use this in your own projects), a free, usable drum machine, and a set of documentation that can help you make your own stuff easily. Enrico worked on the original reacTable prototype and has done some really important work in this field. Right now, Enrico and co are looking for feedback, but if you’re ready to just be a tester and play with this – and see what you can do musically – now’s your chance.

d-touch also combines high levels of computer readability for accurate tracking with the ability to make your own tags. Instead of using ugly-looking glyphs, you can make patterns that make sense to human beings as well as computers. Oh, yeah – and mobile fans, this runs at a full 14 fps even on S60 phones.

For more, check out the d-touch site:
http://d-touch.org/ [Register first to make the download available]
and follow them on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/audiodtouch

Thanks to Martin (of reacTable, which is moving toward a commercial product) for sending this our way. Thanks, too, to Ben, who’s working on tangible interfaces with special needs students. I really look forward to hearing how that’s going.

You hear plenty of chatter about the powers of OpenSoundControl, the open, high-res, network-savvy control protocol for music and visuals. But standards are no good without implementation — and some implementations just aren’t very good. Now, users, you can go have a sandwich or whatever, but developers, pay attention. (And users, enjoy that sandwich in the knowledge that someone somewhere is giving you better toys to play with soon!)

Our friend Ray, co-developer of live visual app VDMX, has put up a Cocoa, Mac-based framework for OSC. While it’s all in Objective-C (natch), it wouldn’t be too hard to port a similar framework to other open-source languages and platforms. Ray is working on a kind of best-practices OSC implementation. Worth a peek — and if you’re a Cocoa dev, of course, even better.

Described thusly:

VVOSC is an Objective-c framework for assembling, sending, and receiving OSC (Open Sound Control) messages on OS X. A
simple sample application which sends and receives OSC messages is also included.

more information on OSC:
http://opensoundcontrol.org/

VVOSC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

vvosc [Code+Examples]

Cocoa fans, they’ve also whipped up an Objective-C framework for MIDI:

VMIDI is an Objective-c framework which simplifies working with MIDI in OS X. A sample application capable of sending and receiving MIDI built from the framework is included.

vvmidi

(Insert here: “Daddy? Tell me more stories about MIDI and how you used to use values from 0 to 127 back in the day!”)

“vvosc” is likely to cause confusion with the Windows-only vvvv — which is also visual, also wonderful, and also supports OSC — but hopefully you can sort that out.

Now that I have your attention, developers, I’m curious: got questions about OSC? Challenges with implementation on different operating systems and in different frameworks? What are the best implementations you’ve seen in common environments like C++, Java, and Python?