Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

When I reviewed JazzMutant’s Lemur at the end of 2005 (printed in the February 2006 Keyboard Magazine), I wondered if what we were really waiting for wasn’t a computer screen. At the time, I wrote:

There’s no question that multi-touch touchscreens represent the future of computer interfaces, and the Lemur is the biggest leap yet toward that science fiction future. For now, the challenge is that the Lemur’s features lie somewhere between a computer display and music controller, without effectively supplanting either one. The Lemur sacrifices the sensitivity and tactile feedback of physical controls in the name of flexibility, but that payoff is limited by the restrictions of its pre-built interface objects and the difficulty of configuring new layouts and assigning them to software controls.

If the Lemur could be truly fused with the computer display, rather than requiring an entirely independent interface, it would become a must-buy.

JazzMutant Lemur Review

At the same time, I marveled at what multi-touch could mean: interfaces that were as flexible as software, powerful live performance capabilities, and the ability to navigate sound spatialization and timbre in new, freer ways. Rather than a solution in search of a problem (as multi-touch image resizing is, arguably), these were tasks that just weren’t possible via any other interface.

The video above, showing multi-touch integrated with the next version of Windows 7 (expected at the end of next year), demonstrates one thing to me: multi-touch is coming, and it’ll be mainstream. And that’s huge for creative performance.

Microsoft demonstrates Multi-touch at D: All Things Digital Conference [Windows Vista Team Blog]

Cybersonica turns a gallery space into an interactive playground, filled with sound art installations that mine the power of fun in art. Curator Chris O’Shea sends this professionally-produced documentation video from the hip Phonica record store in London:

Cybersonica & Encompass Sonic Art Exhibition [YouTube]

Among the delights inside: suspended disco satellites controlled by Korg Kaoss Pads, motion tracking that translates a performer into a shadow puppet monster (complete with roaring sounds), a liquid, fully-3D interface for making music which shall be known at CDM simply as the hotness, a 3D Etch-a-Sketch for sound, an installation with an interface controlled by torn paper, and even a mechanical contraption that samples visitors onto analog tape (it’s not all digital).

Chris is gradually documenting the works on his blog, Pixelsumo. If you’re in London, don’t miss the programs Friday and Saturday, and do file a report so all the rest of us know how it goes!

The Lemur multi-touch touchscreen controller is the rare kind of product that breaks entirely from convention, raising fundamental questions about how we make music. It’s comforting in a way, then, to see disagreement about just how well the finished product works. After over a year of buzz, detailed in-practice reviews of the Lemur are emerging, including my review for Keyboard Magazine, and Jonathan Segel’s review for Electronic Musician. The two reviews reach somewhat different conclusions. Neither review gives an unqualified endorsement, but both see promise in the device — just different promise. And I have to ask a question: are physical controls like knobs really as limited as people seem to assume?

The hilarious send-up of educational films that was Look Around You: Music was only the beginning. BBC comedy show Look Around You has its own fantastic website filled with still more goodies. And it gives us a much clearer idea of the future of music technology than, say, a teaser from Moog.

Readers have been sending in “Life in the Year 2000″ entries, which include the five-string bass guitar, sex changes using Bach violin concertos, and my personal favorite, Halson Hoek’s invention that improves your keyboard chops by sending electrical shocks through metal gauntlets. At this point, that might be the only thing that can save my piano playing.

Best of all, Look Around You gives us what must be the mascot of Create Digital Music: enigmatic “musechnologist” Synthesizer Patel. He’s shown here with the watery keys of the Liquinth, perhaps inspired by a post here on the water-powered Mocean? There’s more from the new music episode, including a playable Mini-Trelm synth which has sadly been “stolen”. The TV network that gave us the Radiophonic Workshop deeply feels the trade we all ply:

“Synthesizer spends hours at these machines, carefully programming crochets, demi-clefs and arpeggionnes to achieve that special blend of sounds.”