What you’re watching in the video above doesn’t involve cameras or motion sensors. It’s the kind of brain-to-machine, body-to-interaction interface most of us associate with science fiction. And while the technology has made the occasional appearance in unusual, niche commercial applications, it’s poised now to blow wide open for music – open as in free and open source.

Erasing the boundary between contracting a muscle in the bio-physical realm and producing electronic sound in the virtual realm is what Xth Sense is all about. Capturing biological data is all the rage these days, seen primarily in commercial form in products for fitness, but a growing trend in how we might make our computers accessories for our bodies as well as our minds. (Or is that the other way around?) This goes one step further: the biological becomes the interface.

Artist and teacher Marco Donnarumma took first prize with this project in the prestigious Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech in the US. Born in Italy and based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Marco explains to us how the project works and why he took it up. It should whet your appetite as we await an open release for other musicians and tinkerers to try next month. (By the way, if you’re in the New York City area, Marco will be traveling to the US – a perfect chance to collaborate, meet, or set up a performance or workshop; shout if you’re interested.)

Hypo Chrysos live at Trendelenburg AV Festival, Gijon, Spain, December 2011.

CDM: Tell us a bit about yourself. You’re working across disciplines, so how do you describe what you do?

Marco: People would call me a media and sound artist. I would say what I love is performing, but at the same time, I’m really curious about things. So, most of the time I end up coding my software, developing devices and now even designing wearable tech. Since some years now I work only with free and open source tools and this is naturally reflected in what I do and how I do it. (Or at least I hope so!)

I just got back from Atlanta, US, where the Xth Sense (XS) was awarded the first prize in the Margaret Guthman New Musical Instrument, as what they named the “world’s most innovative new musical instrument.” [See announcement from Georgia Tech.]

It’s an encouraging achievement and I’m still buzzing, specially because the other 20 finalists all presented great ideas. Overall, it has been an inspiring event, and I warmly recommend musicians and inventors to participate next year. My final performance:

Make sure to use a proper soundsystem [when watching the videos]; most of the sound spectrum lives between 20-60Hz.

Music for Flesh II live at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Atlanta, USA, February 2012. Photo courtesy the artist.

You’re clenching your muscles, and something is happening – can you tell us how this XS system works?

Marco: My definition of it goes like “a biophysical framework for musical performance and responsive milieux.” In other words, it is a technology that extends some intrinsic sonic capabilities of the human body through a computer system that senses the physical energy released by muscle tissues.

I started developing it in September 2011 at the SLE, the Sound Lab at the Edinburgh University, and got it ready to go in March 2011. It has evolved a lot in many ways ever since.

The Xth Sense wearable biosensors by Chris Scott.

The XS is composed of custom biophysical sensors and a custom software.

At the onset of a muscle contraction, energy is released in the form of acoustic sound. This is to say, similarly to the chord of a violin, each muscle tissue vibrates at specific frequencies and produces a sound (called Mechanomyographic signal, or MMG). It is not audible to human ear, but it is indeed a soundwave that resonates from the body.

The MMG data is quite different from locative data you can gather with accelerometers and the like; whereas the latter reports the consequence of a movement, the former directly represents the energy impulse that causes that movement. If you add to this a high sampling rate (up to 192.000Hz if your sound card supports it) and very low latency (measured at 2.3ms) you can see why the responsiveness of the XS can be highly expressive.

The XS sensors capture the low-frequency acoustic vibrations produced by a performer’s body and send them to the computer as an audio input. The XS software analyzes the MMG in order to extract the characteristics of the movements, such as dynamics of a single gesture, maximum amplitude of a series of gestures in time, etc.

These are fed to some algorithms that produce the control data (12 discrete and continuous variables for each sensor) to drive the sound processing of the original MMG.

Eventually, the system plays back both the raw muscle sounds (slightly transposed to become better audible, say about 50/60Hz) and the processed muscle sounds.

I like to term this model of performance biophysical music, in contrast with biomusic, which is based on the electrical impulses of muscles and brainwaves.

By differently contracting muscles (which has a different meaning than simply “moving”) one can create and sculpt musical material in real-time. One can design a specific gesture that produces a specific sonic result, what I call a sound-gesture. These can be composed in a score, or improvised, or also improvised on a more or less fixed score.

The XS software has also a sensing sequencing time-line: with a little machine learning (just implemented few days ago) the system understands when you’re still or moving, when you’re being fast or slow, and can use this data to change global parameters, functions or to play with the timing of events. For example, the computer can track your behaviour in time and wait for you to stop whatever you’re doing before switching to a different set of funcions.

The XS sensors are wearable devices, so the computer can be forgotten in a corner of the stage; the performer has complete freedom on stage, and the audience is not exposed to the technology, but rather to the expressivity of the performance. What I like most about the XS is that is a flexible and multi-modal instrument. One can use it to:

• capture and playback acoustic sounds of the body,
• control audio and video software on the computer, or
• capture body sounds and control them through the computer simultaneously.

This opens up an interesting perspective on the applications of the XS to musical performance, dance, theatre and interaction design. The XS can also be used only as a gestural controller, although I never use it exclusively this way. We have thousands of controllers out there.

Besides, I wanted the XS to be accessible, usable, hackable and redistributable. Unfortunately, the commercialized product dealing with biosignals are mostly not cheap and — most importantly — closed to the community. See the Emotiv products (US$299 Neuro Headset, not for developers), or the BioFlex (US$392.73). One could argue that the technology is complex, and that’s why those devices are expensive and closed. This could make sense, but who says we can’t produce new technologies that openly offer similar or new capabilities at a much lower cost?

The formal recognition of the XS as an innovative musical instrument and the growing effort of the community in producing DIY EEG, ECG and Biohacking devices are a clear statement in this sense. I find this movement encouraging and possibly indispensable nowadays, as the information technology industry is increasingly deploying biometric data for adverts and security systems. For the geeky ones there are some examples in a recent paper of mine for the 2012 CHI workshop on Liveness.

For those reasons, the XS hardware design has been implemented in the simplest form I could think of; the parts needed to build an XS sensor cost about £5 altogether and the schematics looks purposely dumb. The sensors can be worn on any parts of the body. I worked with dancers who wore them on the neck and legs, a colleague stuck one to his throat to capture the resonances of his voice, I use them on the arms or to capture the pumping of the blood flow and the heart rate.

The XS software is free, based in Pd, aka Pure Data, and comes with a proper, user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) and its own library, which includes over one hundred objects with help files. It is developed on Linux, and it’s Mac OS X compatible; I’m not developing for Windows, but some people got it working there too. A big thumb up goes to our wonderful Pd Community; if I had not been reading and learning through the Pd mailing list for the past 5 years I would have never been able to code this stuff.

The Xth Sense software Graphical User Interface. Built in Pd.

The public release of the project will be in April. The source code, schematics, tutorials, will be freely available online, and there will be DIY kits for the lazier ones. I’m already collecting orders for the first batch of DIY kits, so if anybody is interested please, get in touch:
http://marcodonnarumma.com/contact

I do hope to see the system hacked and extended, especially because the sensors were initially built with the support of the folks at the Dorkbot ALBA/Edinburgh Hacklab. I’m also grateful to the community around me, friends, musicians, artists devs and researchers for contributing to the success of the project by giving feedback, inspiring and sharing (you know who you are!).

Thanks, Marco! We’ll be watching!

More on the Work

http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/xth-sense/
http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/music-for-flesh-ii/
http://res.marcodonnarumma.com/blog/

And the Edinburgh hack lab:
http://edinburghhacklab.com/

Biological Interfaces for Music

There isn’t space here to recount the various efforts to do this; Marco’s design to me is notable mainly in its simplicity and – hopefully, as we’ll see next month – accessibility to other users. I’ve seen a number of brain interfaces just in the past year, but perhaps someone with more experience on the topic would like to share; that could be a topic for another post.

Entirely unrelated to music, but here’s the oddest demo video I’ve seen of human-computer interfacing, which I happened to see today. (Well, unrelated to music until you come up with something this crazy. Go! I want to see your band playing with interactive animal ears.)

Scientific American’s blog tackles the question this week (bonus 80s sci-fi movie reference):
Brain-Machine Interfaces in Fact and Fiction

I’ve used up my Lawnmower Man reference quota for the month, so tune in in April.

In the words of Yogi Berra, the future ain’t what it used to be. Drawing from futurist philosophy and the machine aesthetic of bands like Kraftwerk, the moment at which techno comes into the world is a seminal birth in the creation of the age in which we live. Its creative energy is focused a the nexus of technology and music, set against the impoverished landscape of Detroit as America’s industrial urban centers implode. And while we’ve lost the people who could tell the story of the creation of jazz, the people who created techno continue to play.

We’re fortunate to get a rich look at this story, and pioneering artists like Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, from Wax Poetics, the terrific music lovers’ magazine. That publication devoted an issue to dance music, January/February 2011, issue 45, available as a back issue.

Wax Poetics 45

From that issue, Andy Thomas recounts the development of Detroit techno, through the eyes of the people who built it.

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ELECTRONIC ENIGMA: The myths and messages of Detroit techno
By Andy Thomas
Wax Poetics issue 45; reproduced by permission

“The music is just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company,” Derrick May famously proclaims in the liner notes to the pivotal 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit.

Through a series of interviews during this time, May and Belleville High School friends Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson helped both codify and mystify the electronic music of ’80s Detroit. In the process, the Belleville Three—as they became known—created a manifesto that reached far beyond the postindustrial streets that had inspired them. In Stuart Cosgrove’s article “Seventh City Techno” in the U.K.’s The Face magazine in the same year, Juan Atkins rips up the deep musical roots of the city as he looks to the future of Detroit as a landmark in the sonic imagination: “Within the last five years or so, the Detroit underground has been experimenting with technology, stretching it rather than simply using it. As the price of sequencers and synthesizers has dropped, so the experimentation has become more intense. Basically, we’re tired of hearing about being in love or falling out, tired of the R&B system, so a new progressive sound has emerged. We call it techno!” It’s been thirty years since writer Alvin Toffler coined the term “techno rebels” in his study of postindustrial society, The Third Wave. An avid reader of Toffler, Atkins did not have to think too hard for a name for this futuristic music when the journalists arrived to intellectualize the scene. But looking back almost a quarter of a century on, how much was techno actually a break from America’s Black musical heritage? And how discrete was it from the sonic experimentations bursting out of neighboring underground dance scenes?

In a scene from the independent French documentary Universal Techno, Derrick May, surveying with camera in hand, snaps away at the worn grandeur of the disused Michigan Theatre like an inquisitive tourist. As his lens moves down the elegant arches, the image jolts as you witness the reality of the situation. “Inside this building was a theater, and they tore out the theater and they made a car park,” he laments. “So you are parking your car in a theater. And it’s fucking scary… I mean, look at these arches. They’ve been broken off, totally destroyed.” Visibly moved, he states with a quiet intensity: “Being a techno-electronic-futurist, high-tech musician, I totally believe in the future, but I also believe in a historic and well-kept past. I believe that there are some things that are important. Now maybe this is more important like this, because in this atmosphere, you can realize just how much people don’t care, how much they don’t respect—and it can make you realize how much you should respect.” This poignant scene from the documentary not only characterizes the planning decisions that have blighted Detroit but also typifies the devotion to the city by its musical futurists, who have sought sanctuary from the decimation through the soul of the machine.

“The general attitude here with the powers-that-be is that industry must die to make way for technology,” explains Juan Atkins, in the same film, sitting before a backdrop of empty buildings typical of inner-city Detroit. “The climate has definitely affected us, and I think that we probably wouldn’t have developed this sound in any other city in America… There is a certain atmosphere here that you can’t find in any other city that lends to the technological movement.” To feel the atmosphere of the city in the ’80s, you only have to look at some of the economics and the conditions that allowed a once prosperous town to crumble. No American city was as tied to one industry as Detroit was to car manufacturing. The realization of Henry Ford’s dream had led to a huge increase in industrial production. Between 1900 and 1930, Detroit’s population soared from less than 300,000 to over 1.5 million, the vast majority of the new workers employed in the car plants such as at Ford and General Motors. At the same time, under the direction of Albert Kahn, downtown Detroit became home to elegant structures like the art deco Fisher Building and cultural institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts. However, by the mid-’60s, just as the hits factory of Motown promised better times, the stark reality was that the automation of the car industry (from which the label took its name) and the movement of remaining plants outside of the city were ripping the heart out of Detroit’s center.The downturn became personal when Interstate 75 ripped apart the cultural hub of the Black Bottom neighborhood, Detroit’s own Harlem. With the economics compounded by increasing police oppression, the tensions boiled to the surface, and in July 1967, what be- came known as the Twelfth Street riots resulted in the death of forty-three people and the destruction of over 1,500 buildings. It was in Detroit’s Cobo Hall where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an earlier version of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. But that dream seemed a long way off, and by the mid- ’70s, Detroit’s center had become a post-urban ghost town with boarded-up shops and crumbling buildings. This backdrop, though, would inspire an alternative culture whose influence would be felt far and wide—as new technology aroused a bold new vision of the future.

It’s a romantic image perhaps, but one that rang true for any young music lover brought up in the Detroit area in the early ’80s—teenagers hiding under the covers on a school night listening to the life-changing signals being transmitted by Charles Johnson, a DJ known as the Electrifying Mojo, whose Midnight Funk Association radio show can rightly claim to have shaped the social and cultural development of a generation of music lovers in southeastern Michigan. “Mojo’s show was monumental in every single way you can imagine,” reflects Derrick May nearly thirty years on. “It was unique. FM radio was still very, very new and in its experimental stage. It was free and open, and anyone could listen to it. And a guy like Mojo came on the radio to do what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it.” The music he played was radical and far-reaching, mixing up Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince, and Zapp with the alternative rock of the B-52s and Talking Heads, and importantly, the alien electronic music of Kraftwerk and other Euro- pean futurists like Telex and Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra. “He was more album orientated,” adds Juan Atkins. “You could hear him play half an hour of James Brown, and then after that, play half an hour of Peter Frampton. You know what I’m say- ing? He would go off on tangents like that.”

While the authorities did their best to break up the community, The Midnight Funk Association responded with music as a weapon, and a communal force. Harold Mansfield, whose Midnight Funk Association website is dedicated to the memory of the show, recalls how it united all those who listened: “At the top of the show, Mojo opened membership to the MFA, and members new and old were asked to stand up to show solidarity [with the immortal line: ‘Will the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise’]. If you were driving, you were to flash your headlights. If you were at home, you turned on your porch light. If you were in bed listening to the show, you were required to dance on your back. And every night for years, people did it. To become a card-carrying member of the MFA, listeners wrote into the radio station and would receive their official ID card.”

Kevin Saunderson recalls how the friends eagerly consumed the music and messages from their radios in their suburban bedrooms: “It was kind of like a cult. We would listen to him religiously every night. He provided the youth with a positive direction and a new kind of energy.” From leafy Belleville, the three friends took a studious pleasure in analyzing the music. “We used to sit back and philosophize about what these people thought about when they made their music,” Derrick May says in Simon Reynolds’s book Generation Ecstasy. “We’d sit back with the lights off and listen to records by Kraftwerk and Funkadelic and Parliament and Bootsy and Yellow Magic Orchestra.” May now recalls, “We thought it was really cool and almost animated. We’d go to the record shops and look at the sleeves and be entranced by the artwork alone, and we’d just fantasize about what the records would sound like.”

Juan Atkins had already glimpsed the future when he heard the Mothership land over the airwaves with his music-loving grandmother who raised him: “I first heard Parliament-Funkadelic on the radio, tracks like ‘Funky Dollar Bill’ and the Mag- got Brain album… I think I was in elementary school when I first heard ‘Loose Booty’ [off the visionary 1972 LP America Eats Its Young]… The first time I actually saw anyone play a Minimoog or Korg MS-10 was Bernie Worrell.” While Detroit techno would stake a claim for a bold new future, it could be argued that it was also continuing a line of Afrofuturism that reached back to not only P-Funk but also to the other- worldly music of everyone from Sun Ra to Lee Perry. And rather than doing away with the “R&B system” under a post- soul future, cats like Juan Atkins were actually traveling the same progressive path as eminent voyagers like Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock; “Nobu” (a track from Herbie’s 1974 LP Dedication, recorded live in Tokyo nearly ten years before his prescient electro-jazz LP Future Shock) was “techno before the event that opens up a new plateau in today’s electronics,” according to Kodwo Eshun in his book More Brilliant than the Sun.

Despite acknowledging a great debt to this Black musical heritage, when Atkins bought his first piece of electronic equipment (a Korg MS-10 from the back room of a shop where his grandmother was having her Hammond B-3 organ repaired), it was to the mechanical soul of urban Germany that he looked. “I was really mesmerized by the precision of their music; everything was really robotic,” he explains on first hearing Kraftwerk. “Man—a light went on in my head.” While Kedwo Eshun recognizes techno’s debt to the Black futurism so evident in the progressive fusion of “Nobu,” he also notes in his book that for Atkins and his associates, “Kraftwerk are to techno what Muddy Waters is to the Rolling Stones, the authentic, the original, the real.” In truth, techno’s futuristic path probably began somewhere between Düsseldorf and
Detroit. In Dan Sicko’s book Techno Rebels, Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos suggests as much when he explains the origins of their own influences: “We were all fans of American music: soul, the whole Tamla/Motown thing… We always tried to make an American rhythm feel, with a European approach to harmony and melody.”

The turn of the ’80s had seen kids in Detroit’s Black middle- class neighborhoods make up for the lack of cultural activi- ties in the city by creating their own network of parties, where aspirational fashions were the order of the day. “The scene was made up of lower-middle-class and upper-working-class Black people, basically preppy college kids wanting to be different,” remembers Saunderson. “They dressed a certain way and thought they were more important than they were.” Derrick May, whose first experience of clubbing was through the athletics club where he was a member, agrees: “It was really a highfalutin thing, really just for kids who lived in a certain community. Rich Black kids from places like Palmer Woods and Indian Village.” However pretentious and cliquey the scene might have been, it revolved around some forward-thinking music. “Although it was college based, the music was very progressive,” recalls Saunderson. “A mix of disco with lots of European stuff, especially all the Italian.”

The scene was epitomized by the influential party Charivari, where the soundtrack was a diverse mix of European and American dance forms. As Sicko explains in his book, European new wave and Italo disco “became the most popular music of the high school set.” The writer goes on to make the case that Italian dance groups such as Kano were actually every bit as important to the development of the early techno sound as Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Witness the archive footage from The Scene, Detroit’s take on Soul Train, and you’ll see how huge Italo disco was for Black dancers in the city in the early ’80s. Such was the influence that what is often credited as the first techno record, “Sharevari” (produced by a Number of Names, a group of regulars off the high school scene) borrowed heavily from the B-side to Kano’s hit “I’m Ready.” “Detroit DJs would work two copies of ‘Holly Dolly,’ repeating the sparse intro over and over again and doubling up on the chorus,” explains Sicko. “A Number of Names mimicked this interpretation.”

At the same time around 1981, as the high school scene dominated Detroit nightlife, May and Atkins joined forces with their friend Eddie “Flashin” Fowlkes and started the DJ and party collective Deep Space Soundworks, which Saunderson would later join in ’84. With competition intense, the friends had to learn quickly both in terms of technical skills and also branding. May recalls to Sicko how their parties were as conceptual as the music they were playing: “We had amazing flyers back then, [which contained] these subliminal messages of an alternative way of thinking. We were trying to attract people that wanted to be alternative and wanted to be different.”

At the same time as A Number of Names was concocting its sonic landmark, Atkins had spent 1980 experimenting with the equipment his friend Rick Davis, a Vietnam veteran, had collected as an avant-garde electronic musician with a penchant for numerology and mysticism. “I went into his room, and it was like going into a spaceship,” Atkins recalls. “All you could see was the LED lights flashing. It was like I’d stepped into a whole new dimension.” Taking the name Cybotron from a term used by Alvin Toffler, the pair firmly saw themselves as techno rebels providing the soundtrack to an alternative future—where the people reclaimed technology for the benefit of the community.

While the pricing of electronic keyboards in the ’70s had been out of reach for all but the most established of musicians, by the early ’80s, the speed of technological advancements meant keyboards and synthesizers were quickly outdated. All of a sudden, drum machines and synthesizers became afford- able, and Atkins and his peers became fascinated by them. “I just liked the weird sounds,” he says, “the UFO and spaceship sounds you could make. So I was mainly into the synthesizer not so much for musical stuff but more for effects. But then I realized that it was dependent on how you tune the filters. You could tune the filter to make it sound like drums, snare sounds, or a hi-hat. So I would just combine all these sounds and ping- pong between my cassette deck.” But it wasn’t just Detroit’s young music obsessives who were accessing this cheap technology. Listen to Cybotron’s early records like “Clear” and “Alleys of Your Mind,” and you are reminded not only of their debt to Kraftwerk and Funkadelic but also of the similarities with the electronic music coming out of New York’s outer boroughs. Atkins was in New York City when Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force burst across the airwaves like a futuristic flash. “It was a very bittersweet type of thing,” he tells writer Sheryl Garratt in her book Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture, “seeing something along the lines of what I was doing go national like that.” While New York claimed the electro crown, the stark machine soul of Cybotron would be an important building block for Detroit techno, helping to dis- tinguish it from the sonic reverberations of mid-’80s Chicago. “That was the beginning for me,” reckons Saunderson. “Right there with that electro sound [with] which we would go on to build on and create our own thing.”

Although much has been made of the intellectualization of Detroit techno, in truth, the music of the early pioneers was made for the feet rather than the head. While the Belleville Three did take an academic approach to the consumption of music, they were all avid clubbers who had been inspired by Ken Collier, the godfather of Detroit dance music and, in particular, the city’s gay club scene. “He had a mix show on WDRQ,” recalls Derrick May, “and Juan came to me and said, ‘Hey, man, there’s this guy on the radio, and you’ve got to hear what he’s doing—he’s mixing records on the radio.” While Collier is considered to be something of an underground disco and house-music legend whose name evokes reverence in anyone who heard him spin, his name is often missing in the history of dance music in America. “It’s because it’s Detroit and the fact that it’s not one of the major music markets. And it’s also this very superficial, very, very jaded country and the way it sees things,” suggests May. “Our media decides to leave out the facts and doesn’t even try to find out what is the real story, what is the scene behind the scene, who was really important.”The truth is that Collier’s time behind the decks at clubs like Chessmate and Todd’s (alongside his brother Greg) in the late ’70s and early ’80s, as well as his later tenure at Club Heaven, were as important for Detroit as Ron Hardy’s tenure at the Music Box in Chicago or Larry Levan’s at the Paradise Garage in New York. “I would say Ken was important to the whole ecosystem of the music in Detroit,” May states thought- fully. “Without him, Darryl Shannon would not have existed. Without him, Delano Smith would not be here.”Shannon was an influential progressive DJ renowned for his mix of music at parties like Charivari, while Smith was another much-overlooked figure who played alongside his mentor Collier at both L’Uomo and the Downstairs Pub. “Without [Collier],” May continues, “there are music scenes that would not have happened, because he opened the doors for all those guys to learn how to be DJs.”Chez Damier,who had arrived in Detroit from his hometown of Chicago, also sees Collier as a pivotal figure in the city’s club scene. “He was very, very important to dance music in Detroit,” he states. “Because he had the gay kids as well as the straight kids—so he inspired everyone, really.”

Derrick May also regularly made the trip to Chicago, where Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles were bringing down the walls at the Music Box and the Power Plant respectively. “Frankie was really a turning point in my life,” May explains to Sicko. “When I heard him play, and I saw the way people reacted, danced, and sang to the song… This vision of making a moment this euphoric…it changed me.” However, the energy of Ron Hardy had even more of an impact on the aspiring DJ: “That blew me away. The first time I went to the Music Box, I lost my mind, I truly did. I was dancing like crazy, I was emotional, and almost in tears. I had never felt that power and emotion from the human soul all at once. All these people were feeling the same thing. It was as if they had been touched by the Holy Ghost… To hear the crowd screaming and calling Ron Hardy’s name, to go in there the first time and to wit- ness these people the way they were dancing and screaming his name. And to see Ron with no shirt on and playing with his eyes closed, just in it, and lost in the music. Man, it was the most important moment of my young life towards develop- ing and becoming a musician and DJ… How he slipped and twisted records and the edits he did and all the shit he was doing—it was psychotic.”

Detroit’s musical pioneers maintained close ties to their neighbors. Chez Damier, who was raised in Chicago but became a key figure in the Detroit techno scene, explains: “The dance music from Detroit and Chicago both came from the soulful disco sounds coming out of New York combined with the electronic music from Europe. At the same time, both cities have such a strong Black musical tradition that it was inevitable that when this new technology became affordable, they would both give birth to such strong electronic dance music.” Ron Hardy would use Detroit tracks in his sets, alongside those of the European futurists who had inspired them. And while the argument continues about which city laid down the first electronic dance tracks, Saunderson admits that ultimately the scenes developed in tandem: “At the time, I think we were really running neck and neck with Chicago. We had a relationship with most of them, you know, Farley [ Jackmaster Funk], Chip E., most of the guys. And so when we started to take our records there, they would all play them.” Chez Damier recalls dropping off Juan Atkins’s first solo release with Hardy. “We brought the test pressing of ‘No UFO’s’ to CODs where Ron Hardy was playing, and to our surprise, he played both sides. And we completely freaked out.” Such were the ties that during one of their trips to Chicago, Derrick May gave Frankie Knuckles the 909 drum machine that he’d use to create beats to bolster old disco records at the Power Plant and that would be featured on some of the first house productions by the likes of Chip E.

At the same time as Chicago’s early house pioneers had the infamous Trax label to release their DIY beat tracks, Atkins used “No UFO’s” to launch his own small imprint, Metroplex. There was a vision and direction to his art that inspired those around him, in particular a young May. “If Atkins was the prophet, the one to tap into the unseen and unheard possibilities of electronic music, Derrick May was the high priest who brought them about with forceful incarnations,” claims Sicko. In 1986, May launched Transmat, taking its name from one of Atkins’s techno-speak terms and originally planned as a subsidiary of Metroplex. “Juan has been the most integral part of the whole thing; without him it really doesn’t happen,” May fondly admits in Sicko’s book.

While “No UFO’s,” released under the name Model 500, sat somewhere between the electro of Cybotron and the jack- ing DIY music of mid-’80s Chicago, May launched Transmat with a track that really started to define a new sound for Detroit. Released under Rhythim Is Rhythim in 1987, May’s “Nude Photo” (co-written by Thomas Barnett) “represented a totally different approach from that taken by Chicago house— closer to the vest and definitely more personal,” writes Sicko. Saunderson is eager to give credit where it’s due for the dis- tinctive sound of early techno: “I think Mojo influenced us greatly. We had a more European sound, and that came from him. He opened our ears and made us believe we could play this music… I mean, if you listen to [my first release under the Kreem moniker] ‘Triangle of Love,’ it’s really a New Order bass line. It’s got the same chord progression.”

If anyone was to epitomize the sound of early Detroit techno, it was Derrick May. While “Beyond the Dance” furthered the stark atmospherics of “Nude Photo,” his next track, “Strings of Life” (co-written with Michael James), revealed a classicism and refinement that placed the electronic music of the city apart from the more raw, beats-driven sound of early Chicago house. Drawing incredible warmth from the cold- ness of the machine, May’s early productions as Rhythim Is Rhythim were as haunting as they were uplifting—creating a fitting soundtrack to Detroit’s post-urbanization. At the same time, if one wants to hear where the jazz of Detroit went after labels like Tribe, one only has to lend an ear to the man who has been called, maybe somewhat lazily, “the Miles Davis of techno.”

If the appetite of May and Atkins for high-energy tracks and stark beats had been the result of nights dancing at the Music Box, it was at New York’s hallowed Paradise Garage where Saunderson had received his education. “The Garage influenced me subconsciously,” he explains. “When I went into this big room and heard that huge sound system, it changed the way I heard the music. When you listened to the radio, you heard things like ‘Good Times’ and ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,’ but at the Garage, it would sound different because of the way Larry [Levan] played it. He would just keep the mu- sic going and stretched it out, playing these incredible vocal tracks.” Although releases on Saunderson’s own KMS label and under his Reese moniker could be as deep and dark as any of the early techno tracks (with the brooding “Reese bass” becoming a staple sound in drum and bass), his love of New York garage and what became known as “deep house” brought out the soul in the young producer. “I had always loved the great divas like Chaka Khan and Jocelyn Brown,” Saunderson continues. “And hearing Larry play the music in that way made me want to make underground Detroit music but with vocals, just using the tools I was used to instead of the full band on those records I loved from the Garage.” Just as instrumental tracks like “Strings of Life” became anthems in the fields and warehouses of England during the late-’80s acid-house boom, Saunderson’s soul-drenched releases “Good Life” and “Big Fun” (under the Inner City moniker) stormed the clubs and the charts across Europe. “It happened so quickly,” recalls Saunderson, who became a regular at Spectrum in London and the Hacienda in Manchester when he toured with Inner City in the U.K.

Such was the boom in Detroit’s electronic music scene that 1486–1492 Gratiot—the street where the studios of Metroplex, Transmat, and KMS were located—became known as “Techno Boulevard,” as the city’s music scene experienced a boom not seen since the days of Motown. Interestingly, it was Motown fanatic Neil Rushton from Birmingham, England, who was to make the journey to Detroit to check out the scene and to instigate the release of the first and most influential techno compilation, the aforementioned Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit on the Virgin subsidiary 10 Records. Sheryl Garratt recalls in her book that when Rushton arrived back at Derrick May’s home studio loaded with soul 45s, the young host had to tell his guest to “turn the crap off.” As Rushton explains, “Mute Records [English label home to Depeche Mode and Yazoo] had been much more of an influence on them, than say Stax.” But it was this northern-soul lover with the help of eager British journalists that broke Detroit techno to the masses. “He has done so much for us, and I think he kind of gets knocked out of the loop a bit,” says May thoughtfully. “The guy discovered us. We were making music, but he brought us together and unified us and gave us the opportunity to attack the world and send our message out.”

In the same year that techno was exploding onto the dance floors of Europe, the scene finally had a place to call home with the opening of a new club at 1315 Broadway, the Music Institute. “I think we captured magic in a bottle,” states May. “The timing was perfect. I had my radio show and had really honed my skills as a DJ. Jeff Mills was doing his thing. Kevin, Juan, and myself were making those records. All this was happening at the same time, and then the club opened… It was unbelievable.” Opened by George Baker, Chez Damier, and Alton Miller in the spring of 1988, the club became a sanctuary for Detroit’s alternative community. “It had a profound effect on the city’s development, culturally,” says May, who like all of Detroit’s electronic music makers had been waiting for a truly egalitarian space for their culture to grow. “The MI was important because it took our scene to the next level,” adds Saunderson. “[With] all that stuff that had been happening in New York and Chicago for years, it gave us our own version of that. It was definitely our Music Box or Garage.”

A former coat-check boy at the MI and now producer and label owner of NDATL Muzik—which has just released a series of old unreleased MI classics—Kai Alcé goes one step further: “Well, at that time, there was no ‘techno’ scene really; just a few house/club parties thrown by party groups such as Charivari and other groups like it. But as far as for Derrick and those who were about to create what we now know as techno, there was no better testing ground.” Kai vividly recalls the excitement of those formative days: “Fri- days after school, I would go down to the club and we’d go through all the promos sent to the club and to KMS, which was down the block. Around midnight, the cool kids would start showing up in the parking lot and chilling, drinking, smoking, doing whatever in their cars. The line would some- times be long but always worth the wait… As you walked through the door, you saw the famous sign that is now the graphic on the first MI 12-inch. Then a right and quick left, and you are now in the future!”

Friday nights at the MI would open with D Wynn, Saunderson, or Atkins before May took to the decks at the height of his art. “Mayday was the star of the show,” enthuses DJ/ producer and MI regular Alan Oldham on the Hyperreal web- site. “Many times, he’d play tracks right off a Fostex two-track recorder that he’d just cut hours before at his studio, some- thing I never got over. He’d beat mix between the reel-to-reel and 1200s and back, using the pitch control on the reel. He’d cut, edit and destroy other people’s tracks, too, as he did with his fucked-up psycho re-edit of the MI theme ‘We Call It Aciiiieeed’ by D-Mob.” In an interview with Andy Battaglia in the A.V.Club, Carl Craig explains how the younger generation were inspired: “If he wasn’t Derrick May the producer and DJ, he would have been Reverend Derrick May, because he was so spiritual at the time, and into how the music related to what he felt and what he was doing—how the music can change the world… So there was a lot of teaching there, whether he was doing it on purpose or not.”

Chez Damier, who took care of Saturdays with fellow DJ Alton Miller, recalls the importance of the club to Detroit’s next wave of producers: “It was very much needed in Detroit at the time. Because it was a juice bar, it allowed kids to come in and experience the music. And through that, it raised a whole new crop of people.” Kai Alcé remembers how the club be- came a hotbed for Detroit techno’s second wave of producers and DJs: “Seeing folks like Carl Craig, Jay Denham, Kenny Larkin, Eddie Fowlkes, and Anthony Shakir on any given night and hearing them come up with their own sounds, but all stemming from this one vibe, was amazing.”

At the same time as the MI created a home for Detroit’s alternative arts scene, the likes of Derrick May grew increas- ingly opposed to how their music was being consumed in some quarters. “I don’t even like to use the term ‘techno’ because it’s been bastardized and prostituted in every form you can possibly imagine,” he explains in Generation Ecstasy, being particularly turned off by the heavy drug use on the European rave scene. Eddie Fowlkes, who had been a con- stant companion of the Belleville Three throughout the ’80s, went so far as to title his 1996 album Black Technosoul to reconstruct the links.

If the approximation of techno became in many cases a watered-down or misrepresented version of the raw electronic soul of the original pioneers, back in Detroit, the second wave went deep. At the head of the pack, Carl Craig took the jazz influences that ran through the work of Derrick May to the next level with releases on his own Planet E label such as Innnerzone Orchestra’s “At Les” and “Bug in the Bassbin,” a journey that would lead to his recent collaboration with elders from Tribe Records.

While Music Institute regulars Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva’s Plus 8 label continued in the vein of Transmat and Metroplex, the ’90s also saw a more hard-core form of techno both in sound and appearance emerge from Detroit. If Der- rick May was the Miles Davis of techno, Mike Banks was its Archie Shepp. Rallying against the commercialization of their culture, Underground Resistance, the label Banks started with Jeff Mills, became a breeding ground for militant yet moving electronic music. Retreating deep into the underground, UR brought some much needed mystique to a scene that was in danger of suffering vertigo after its sudden ascent. “There’s a very strong, individualistic mentality here in Detroit,” the elusive Mike Banks explains in a rare interview in 1992. “You develop it without even noticing. I didn’t notice until I went overseas, where everyone has several really close, dear friends. Here, it’s like Vietnam—I’m not getting close to anyone.” The UR uniform became as militant as their music with Banks’s regulation army boots and flight jackets drawing comparisons with another crew fighting the power through music. The Un- derground Resistance collective created no-holds-barred, syn- apse-crushing slabs of electronic music with names like “Riot” and “The Punisher,” and rather than celebrating their success, the makers decamped to their Detroit bunkers to radicalize their art.

Equally as suspicious of the industry and the commodifying of their culture were producers like Kenny Dixon Jr. (aka Moodymann) and the Three Chairs collective of Theo Parrish, Rick Wilhite, and Marcellus Pittman, whose deep productions of the mid-’90s represented for many what was a third wave of Detroit electronic music. As dedicated to preserving the arts in their hometown as the pioneers of original Detroit techno, these fiercely independent music makers would take Black electronic dance music back to its roots. As Theo Parrish claims, “The medicine in the dance is originally African.” At a time when much techno and house was being commercialized in the same way that R&B had been in the ’60s, figures like these were essential in reclaiming the soul of Black dance music. Whereas the original pioneers of electronic music in Detroit were sometimes penned in by the myth that had been created around their music, the understandably press-shy third wave refused to be boxed by media-friendly titles, producing instead what the Art Ensemble of Chicago termed just “great Black music.” But at the same time, in the music of Theo Parrish and Kenny Dixon Jr. and new heads like Omar S and Kyle Hall, we are hearing Black electronic funk that could only have come from Detroit.

As for the Belleville Three, they remain in Detroit and continue to produce breathtakingly raw and soulful electronic music both in the studio and behind the decks. While Detroit techno has, more than any other dance music, found itself intellectualized and analyzed to the point of distraction, the original pioneers have never lost their focus on what is, at the end of the day, music to move your soul and make you sweat. And like many Detroit music makers, they remain fiercely loyal to the hometown that shaped them. With Detroit “being isolated from the rest of the popular world, that whole pop culture didn’t really have a big impact. So there was none of that Andy Warhol–style phenomena,” concludes Derrick May. “The common man of Detroit, the working stiff, didn’t know anything about Warhol or Salvador Dalí, didn’t grow up having any off-Broadway productions; he didn’t have that. Detroit has had it [in the past], but the latter-twentieth-century man didn’t have it. So I think the impact of what happened is totally tied to the fact that it’s a city of improvisation. And that improvisation is more or less tied to an impoverished community that has had to find new ways of entertainment and new ways of survival. And I think you have to say that creates a subculture. It means that people have to look another way to find some sort of level of enjoyment, entertainment. Some sort of outlet, some sort of euphoria.”

-Andy Thomas

Playlist

Wax Poetics assembled a playlist for this issue, relevant both to this article and, well, with some good listening in general. Look it up and enjoy – or stream free and buy directly from their site.

Issue 45 Playlist

Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied) – B.T. Express
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (JM 4AM Mix Pt. 1) – Inner Life
Dance and Shake Your Tambourine – Universal Robot Band
Hunk Of Heaven – Lemuria
Don’t Take My Shadow (A Tom Moulton Mix) [Extended] (A Tom Moulton Mix – Extended Vocal) – Kings Go Forth
Slipped Disc – Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Your Life – Konk
Crusader – Knightlife
Love Me Like This (Nonsense Dub) – Floating Points
Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto – Philadelphia International All-Stars

Digital models and acoustic instruments have traditionally been studies in contrast. And instrument making has by definition been a craft and an art. But what if making an acoustic instrument was a matter of hitting “print”?

That’s the question asked by MIT Media Lab researcher Amit Zoran. Using the Objet Geometries Connex500 3D printer, one capable of on-the-fly use of multiple materials, he made a flute in 15 hours. The results are surprisingly good for a first attempt. The instrument is playable, but Amit plans additional iteration and improvement. (Be sure to watch through the video for some feedback on the details from flutist Seth Hunter.)

Initially, it’s hard to hear about a 3D printer spitting out a flute from a digital model and not worry a bit about what happens to craft and skill. But that may miss the point. For one, the more access we have to 3D printers, the more we may appreciate the subtleties of human fabrication that these printers can’t reproduce – in case decades of (often inferior) mass production haven’t done that for you already.

Moreover, the 3D printer could represent new potential for instrumental research. Acoustic instrument design hasn’t produced a popular instrument, arguably, in over a century. Part of the problem is that it’s too difficult to prototype ideas. Being able to rapidly prototype a lot of variations inexpensively could mean wild, new instruments (see the fanciful multi-pipes trumpet Amit proposes), new designs that can’t be fabricated by hand, as well as new revelations about historical designs. (Imagine being able to produce a dozen variations of a prehistoric flute, for instance, and be able to try them out with a musician.) Those prototypes might, in turn, ultimately be fabricated by a skilled artisan after perfecting the basics of the design.

I’ve sent some questions to Amit to hear more about his research, but let us know if you have questions for him or thoughts about the project. In the meantime, some great coverage from NPR’s Renee Montagne and Engadget’s Sean Hollister, who each beat us to the story:

3D printed concert flute rapidly prototypes sound (video) [Engadget]

3D Printer Produces Working Flute [NPR Morning Edition / Audio]

You can also visit Amit’s own site, which includes designs for everything from sci-fi motorbikes to re-imagined acoustic guitars:

Amit Zoran homepage at MIT

The history of music and the history of music notation are closely intertwined. Now, digital languages for communicating musical ideas between devices, users, and software, and storing and reproducing those ideas, take on the role notation alone once did. Notation has always been more than just a way of telling musicians what to do. (Any composer will quickly tell you as much.) Notation is a model by which we think about music, one so ingrained that even people who can’t read music are impacted by the way scores shape musical practice.

All of this creates a special challenge. Musical notational systems had traditionally evolved over centuries. Now, we face the daunting question of how to build that language overnight.

This question has been a topic I’ve visited in a couple of talks, first here in New York at in/out fest last December, then most recently for a more general audience at RSVP, a new conversation series in Hamburg, Germany hosted by the multi-disciplinary design studio Precious Forever. (See photo at top, by which we can prove that the event happened. Check out more on the event and how the Precious gang hope this will inspire new interchange of ideas in Hamburg – something perhaps to bring to your town.)

What I’ve learned in talking to people at those events is, music notation matters. It’s more relevant to broad audiences than even those audiences might instinctively think. The most common lingua franca we have for digital music storage, MIDI, is woefully inadequate.

But perhaps most importantly: replacing MIDI’s primitive note message is far from easy. The more you try to “fix” MIDI, the more you appreciate its relative simplicity. And engineering new solutions could take re-examining assumptions Western music notation has made for centuries.

Musical notation and culture

Explaining the importance of notation to expert musicians is easy. But to convey its importance to lay people, you need look no further than the game interface developed by Harmonix for the hit titles Guitar Hero and Rock Band (and in turn descended from a similar interface paradigm used in the Japan-only Konami GuitarFreaks). These games demonstrate that, even among non-musician gamers, certain received wisdoms from Western notation endure. (In fairness, many of the designers of music games have a fair bit of musical experience, but the fact that their work is received by audiences in the way it is nonetheless speaks volumes.)

The Guitar Hero interface actually is a Western musical score, rotated 90 degrees to make it easier to see how the events on-screen are matched to game play input. (For visual effect, the “track” is also rotated away from the screen, so that events further in the future recede into the background – a bit of visual flair that helped differentiate Harmonix from flatter-looking Japanese games.)

Whatever the rotation, the assumptions of the game screen itself are rooted in notation. Pitch is displayed along lines and spaces, just as on a score. Rhythm is displayed along a metrical grid, which reads as a linear track. Not coincidentally, I believe, when Harmonix has deviated from this formula, their titles have tended to be less successful. More sophisticated interactions in titles like Amplitude and Frequency (and the iPod game Phase) were big hits among gamers, but less so among the general public, perhaps in part because they require a more abstract relationship to the music.

Games are just one example, of course. Musical scores reflect basic cultural expectations, and in turn shape the music that people in that culture produce. As with most Western languages, text flows from left to right and top to bottom. Ask people to describe pitch in any culture that uses this notational system, and they’ll use the notions of “up” and “down,” “higher” and “lower” – even though these metaphors are meaningless in terms of sound. (Indonesian culture, for instance, gets it more physically correct, by describing what we call higher pitches as “smaller” and deeper pitches as “larger,” as they are in gongs.) And music in Western cultures are also deeply rooted on a grid, on 4/4 time and equal subdivisions. It wasn’t always so: even in the West, prior to the advent of notation of these meters, metrical structures flowed more freely.

It’s little surprise, then, that some of the biggest successes in electronic musical instruments have adopted the same conventions. From the Moog sequencer to the Page R editor on the Fairlight CMI sampler to the array of buttons on Roland’s grooveboxes, rhythmic sequencers that follow the grids devised in Western music notation are often the most popular. Even if the paradigm of the interface is one degree removed from the notation, the assumptions of how rhythms are divided – and thus the kinds of patterns you produce – remain.

Nowhere is this more true than in MIDI. MIDI is itself a kind of notational system, around which nearly all interfaces in software and hardware have been based over the past two and a half decades since its introduction.

MIDI, keyboards, and piano rolls: An incomplete “standard”

The first thing to understand about MIDI is that it began life as a keyboard technology. A complete history of MIDI should wait for another day, but even as its early history is told by the MIDI Manufacturing Association, it’s a technology for connecting keyboard-based synthesizers, not a solution to the broader question of how to represent music in general.

Many of the tradeoffs in MIDI, though, were made long before the 1980s or the invention of digital technology. When the 19th Century creators of the player piano needed not only standardization but reproduce-ability – before the advent of recording, the power to recreate entire musical performances – they turned to the piano as a way of modeling musical events. Indeed, the first player pianos quite literally reproduced the process of playing a piano, using wooden, mechanical fingers to strike notes on the keys just as a human would, before that mechanism was replaced with the internal players familiar to us today. What these inventors found in the piano was an instrument that, in the name of accessibility, aligned pitch to a simple grid.

The piano is a beautiful instrument, but its great innovation – the grid of its black and white keys – is also its greatest shortcoming. That grid is an imperfect model even of Western musical pitches, let alone other cultural systems. The 12-tone equal-tempered tuning used on modern pianos makes tuning multiple keys easier, but only by way of compromises. Even a modern violinist or singer may differentiate between the inflection of a G flat and an F sharp, based on context, but to the piano, these pitches are the same. And tuning is only the beginning. Piano notes begin with a note being “switched” on and end with it being “switched” off – no bending or other events within that pitch as on most other instruments.

It’s little wonder, given MIDI’s origins as a protocol for communicating amongst keyboards, that the editing view most common in music software is the piano roll, labeled as such. The piano roll is the perfect paradigm for sequencing events played on a keyboard, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best language for describing all music. And the obligation of a digital protocol is actually greater than that of musical notation, because there’s no human being at the other end to fill in missing expression and context.

Consider what’s missing in MIDI:

• Pitch reference: By convention, MIDI note 60 is C4. However, musical practice internationally lacks a consistent standard for what the tuning of C4 is, and any number of variables can interfere, from independent tuning tables to the use of the pitch bend to the activation of an octave transpose key.
• Pitch meaning: MIDI note values use an arbitrary pitch range from 0 to 127, a hypothetical 128-key piano, which itself makes no sense. 4? 8? 15? 16? 23? 42? The numbers themselves don’t mean anything.
• Pitch resolution: Because of the 0-127 resolution constraints, to get notes in between the pitches, you need a series of separate messages like pitch bend, giving you two values with only an incidental relationship to one another. Since pitch range is kept in yet another message, the results are confusing and un-musical, far more complex than they need to be. (Why wouldn’t 60.5 be a half-tone higher than 60?)
• Real expression: Events between note on and note off are represented independently as control change values. But that causes problems, because it means there’s no standard way to represent something as simple as a musical glissando. On a synth, making an expression (like twisting a knob or turning a wheel) separate from a note (pressing a key) makes sense. But that doesn’t make musical sense, and it doesn’t match most non-keyboard instruments. Only aftertouch is currently available, and that again assumes a keyboard and doesn’t expose pitch relationships created by adding the data.
• Musical representations of tuning and mode: The MIDI Tuning extensions require that you dump tuning information in fairly unstructured System Exclusive binary dumps. The standard itself is in some flux, and at best, its reliance on byte messages means that it’s not something a human being can read. And it still must be aligned with 128 otherwise arbitrary values. It’ll work, but it only makes sense on keyboards, and even then, it’s not terribly musical. Looking at number 42 in your sequencer, you’d have no idea of the tuning behind it, or the position in a mode – something any rational musical notational system would make clear.

Ironically, it was this very set of constraints that early innovators on the Buchla and Moog synthesizers hoped to escape. They were fully aware that the very genius of the keyboard was restricting musical invention. Analog control voltage, the basic means of interconnecting equipment prior to digital tech, was more open ended than MIDI, which replaced it. But that’s not to say it was better. Standardization is an aid in communication, as is the ability to describe messages. The question is, how can you do both? How can you be open ended and descriptive at the same time?

How do you build a new system?

Deconstructing is easy; constructing is hard. We certainly have the ability to send more open-ended messages and higher-resolution data; that’s not a problem. (Even by the early 80s when MIDI was introduced, its tiny messages and slow transmission speeds were conservative.) We also have OpenSoundControl (OSC), which has some traction and popularity, including near-viral use on mobile devices and universal support in live visual applications. It’s telling that that protocol is itself not really an independent protocol in the sense that MIDI is, but built on existing standards like TCP/IP and UDP. 2010 is, after all, not 1984.

The hold-up, I think, is simply the lack of a solid proposal for how to handle musical notes. And there are plenty of distractions. It’s tempting to throw out the simplicity of MIDI’s note on and note off schema, but it’s partly necessary: with a live input, you won’t know the duration of a pressed key until that key is released. It’s equally tempting to cling to Western musical pitches, even though those pitches themselves lack solid standardization and don’t encompass musical practices in the rest of the world. (12-tone equal temperament is a recent invention even in the Western world, and one that doesn’t encompass all of our musical practice. World tunings should best be described not by majority, but plurality, anyway – have a look at the current demographics of Planet Earth.)

One solution is simply to express musical events by frequency. That’s not a bad lowest common denominator, or a way to set the frequency of an oscillator. As a musical representation, though, it’s inadequate. It’s simply not how we think musically. The numbers are also unpleasant, because we perceive pitch roughly logarithmically. Pop quiz:

Can you do logarithms in your head? Yes or no?

Can you count?

MIDI gets it half right by using numbers, but then it’s hard to see octave equivalence, another essential concept for perceiving pitch. MIDI note 72 is probably equivalent to MIDI note 60… assuming 12 steps per octave. Or it might not be.

If you need a common denominator that covers a variety of musical traditions, mode (or more loosely, pitch collection) and register aren’t a bad place to start. I don’t think a system needs to be terribly complex. It could simply be more descriptive than MIDI is – while learning from the things MIDI does effectively.

Consider a new kind of musical object, described over any protocol you choose. It would ideally contain:

• Mode/pitch collection: As with MIDI and the MIDI tuning tables, tuning would need to be defined independently, but it can be done in a musical, human-readable way. It then becomes possible even to define modes that have different inflections based on context, as with pitches that are slightly different in ascending and descending gestures (common in many musical systems).
• Relative degree: a notation like “1 1 2 3 5 6″ can work in any musical language. You simply need to know the active mode or pitch collection.
• Register: Instead of conflating register and scale degree, you could simply define an octave register and starting frequency. This retains modal identities and octave equivalence, and makes relative transposition easy to understand. (A “transposition” message could be defined as an actual message, which is more musically meaningful.)
• Standardized inflections, connected to pitch: Pitch bends and glissandi should be relative to a specific note, because notes can have pitches that bend around their relative scale degree. (Think of a singer bending just below a note and into the actual pitch. These aren’t independent events.) A trombonist would never have invented MIDI notes. They would likely have immediately turned to the question of how to universally describe bending between notes.
• Yes, frequency: There will be times when directly referring to frequency makes sense, and that should be possible, as well.
• Relative duration: Musical notation, regardless of musical culture, uses some kind of relative indication of duration. Only machines use raw clock values. The result is that it’s possible to make musically meaningful changes in tempo and have durations respond accordingly. And whereas note on and note on events make sense on input, a musical event would not logically separate these events; there’s some notion of an event with a beginning, middle, and end. If you sing an ‘A,’ that’s one event, with a duration, not an independent beginning of the note and end of the note.

Far from replacing existing standards for music notation, this kind of standard could interchange more gracefully with printed notation. If you import a standard MIDI file into notation software, you get results that are typically full of errors, because the SMF lacks musical information about the events it contains. With more of that information stored, and stored in standard ways, translating to paper would become vastly more effective.

I’m sure attempts to model this in OSC have been attempted before, but it’s worth compiling those ideas and resurrecting the discussion.

What about input?

Ah, you say, but then, let’s go back to the keyboard. None of these events makes sense on a keyboard. You don’t know when a note is pressed how long it’ll last. You don’t know the modal degree of a particular, arbitrarily-played note.

I was stuck on the same problem, until I realized what I had been taking for granted: MIDI conflates two very separate processes. It makes input and output the same. Musical notational systems have never done that. When you look at a score, it’s a set of musical ideas, given meaning and context. If you record a series of events from an input, those events don’t immediately have meaning or context. It’s confusing the mechanical with the musical. It’s the reason MIDI is not just like a player piano – it is a digital player piano.

Separate out the issue of recording mechanical input events, and you can have a system that’s more flexible. That system should fit whatever the input is. An organ, a shakuhachi, a didgeridoo, and an electric guitar aren’t the same thing. Why would they be represented with the same set of input events? That’s pretty daft.

Look at it this way: imagine if instead of being invented by synthesizer people, Aeolian Harp players had invented MIDI. (It’s not so far-fetched: the Aeolian Harp has a millenia-long history and was once quite popular.) An Aeolian Harp sequencer would feature elaborate, high-resolution data recording for wind pressure relative to different strings. It might measure, even, wind direction. In fact, it’d look a lot more like meteorological data than musical data per se. It certainly wouldn’t involve integers from 0 to 127.

This should lead to a simple conclusion with profound consequences:

Physical input and musical output should not be the same thing.

One of the advantages of a protocol like OSC (or any open, networked, self-described protocol) is that it can be open-ended and descriptive, meeting our earlier challenge. For instance, using a hierarchy of meta-data attached to the message, you could describe a set of variables relevant to wind input. If you wanted to transcribe the results in musical terms, you could then use a musical notation, as above – one that used musical identity attached to the resulting frequencies, as in relative modal pitch and rhythmic duration. But the input would be a separate problem. That’s a far piece from MIDI, which is adequate neither as a complete description of the input device, nor of any kind of resulting musical system.

But wait a minute – how is there a standard? How do you standardize something that could include an Aeolian Harp, a vuvuzela, and a bagpipe? Welcome to the problem of music. Music is by its very nature resistant to standardization, because the possibilities of the physical world are so broad. This also suggests how input protocols (and output protocols) can go beyond musically-exclusive data. Again, we can turn back to MIDI as a model. MIDI was intended with specific applications in mind, with messages that referred to MIDI notes and filter cutoff. But that didn’t stop it from being warped to accommodate tasks well outside the standard, ranging from triggering videos to controlling amusement park robotic characters (literally). This suggests to me that what defines a standard protocol of this kind is not what is most strictly standardized, but what is most flexible.

The real challenge with something like OSC, then, is to come up with standardized ways of defining non-standardized events, and using some kind of reflection or remote invocation to allow devices or software that have never communicated before to handle unexpected messages intelligently. At the very least, they should give users clear, understandable options about the data they send and receive. This independent question has been one the OSC community has raised for some time. To me, all that remains is to make some compelling implementations and let the most effective solution evolve and win out. Recent reading on the topic (though this absolutely deserves a separate post, which I’ll get to soon):
Best Practices for Open Sound Control
Minuit : Propositions for a query system over OSC

That’s a separate problem from how to make events musically meaningful. But that to me is the central revelation, and something MIDI completely misses: these are two separate problems, not one problem. Handle input events as input. If it makes sense in a sequencer to record them as musical events (like scale degree pitches), do that. If it makes sense to record them as a series of time-stamped, physical events, do that – but with actual information relative to what was recorded, so that the wind across an Aeolian Harp is recorded in a way that makes sense for that input. And when describing musical events, describe them in musical ways.

This isn’t relevant only to music communities, either: it’s relevant to anyone recording events in time. It’s part of the reason the “sound” needs to be dropped from OSC. MIDI is as specific as it is partly because the specification has messages too small to contain information describing what the events mean. We now have standard network protocols that do that, so they can include information about other kinds of events. There’s no reason someone monitoring water levels in their herb garden and someone recording a sousaphone solo couldn’t use some of the same underlying protocols. There’s also every reason they’d record different kinds of data content.

Promising venues and a call to action

There’s really no need to try to “replace” or “fix” MIDI – if MIDI has endured for a specific application, maybe it actually is well-suited to that application. I think it’s time, instead, to think about how new systems can encompass more musical meaning from our own traditions and traditions around the world, and how we can standardize broad ranges of events instead of trying to fit everything into narrow, rigid boxes.

There is every reason to believe new things can happen now, too. Whereas hardware standardization once was a slow process, requiring the involvement of major manufacturers, we now carry around programmable computers inside our pockets as “phones” and learn to write embedded code in Freshman college classes using $30 Arduino boards. If you want new hardware standards, you can literally make them yourself. We have the ability to share musical notation directly in a Web browser using standard descriptions, as covered here recently. Because browsers in general are demanding newly distributed, networked applications, communicating in standard ways – as Web APIs do naturally – is becoming imperative.

But there’s one thing that makes me especially optimistic: you. Via the Web, we have instant access to your collective knowledge and experience. That means it’s a sure thing that all of us, collectively, knows more about previous research in this area, previous ideas, and what has and hasn’t worked. We also have the opportunity to communicate with each other, to make ideas evolve, at least experimentally. That doesn’t remove the need for eventual standardization, but good standards follow practice, not the other way around – something has to work in one place before it can be a shared standard. We also have mechanisms for self-standardization that didn’t exist before. Spoken languages evolve because people collectively work to share common means of communication. You might argue that this leads to a tower of Babel, but then, I’m writing this in English and you’re reading it in the same language and (hopefully) understanding. The same is true of Mandarin, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Hindi, and so on. It’s also true of volunteer adoption on the Internet of HTML, XML, JSON, and RSS.

Music is not the result of notation or standards. It’s the other way around. Musical practice long predated any attempt to write it down. And mathematics and written language each have abilities to describe music and many other media.

To me, two questions remain:
1. What would an implementation of structured messages for pitch and duration look like, perhaps implemented via OSC? What history has been there in this area, and what do you need?
2. How can smarter implementations of a protocol like OSC allow software and hardware to better handle unfamiliar input – as musicians, as they have done since the dawn of time, invent novel physical interfaces?

I look forward to kicking off this discussion and hearing what you think.

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.

For a long time, technologists have described a world of in which computing experiences naturally incorporate touch and gesture. The question is, how do we bridge the intuitive desire for those interactions and the actual technologies that get us there?

Few activities test the expressive potential of interaction quite like music. It’s in our cultural DNA; musical activity may even predate written language. So it’s fitting that the story of touch in computing and digital music would be intertwined, as they are with touch pioneer JazzMutant. Years before well-known Apple products, the Lemur, prototyped in 2003 and shown as a musical multi-touch screen, suggested the importance of fusing display and touch, and of tracking more than a finger or two at a time.

The history, and products like Apple’s iPad and iPhone, you may know well, though. The question on everyone’s mind now is, what’s next? (And for some impatient futurists, the question may even be, what’s taking so long?)

To begin to answer that question, I turned to Guillaume Largillier, original co-founder and CEO of JazzMutant, now Stantum Technologies. There aren’t many people on the planet closer to where touch has been and where it might be going. Even as the Lemur gets new features like integration with popular music production and performance tool Ableton Live, Stantum is working to bring the same enabling technologies to other device makers. And even though this is “Create Digital Music,” it’s telling that that technology is showing potential in everything from phones to aviation, not just DJing. Musicians have had a role in technological history before, from Leon Theremin’s work to Max Mathews and computer synthesis. It may be musicians who invent the future, again. This time, the trick is who delivers that future to the hardware makers who can popularize it.

http://jazzmutant.com/
http://jazzmutant.com/behindthelemur.php
http://www.stantum.com/en/
http://www.stantum.com/en/offer/technology-ip

To accompany the story, we also have an exclusive look inside Stantum’s labs, all the way back to the original 2003 prototype of the Lemur.

On Designing for Touch, and the Music Tech Industry

Peter: I remember when I first talked to Darwin Grosse about Lemur, when it was being distributed by Cycling ’74. Darwin just kept saying, “You know, I just think Star Trek: The Next Generation.” (That’s my recollection, Darwin; I hope I’m not misquoting you.) I tended to agree. It’s a cliche, perhaps, but this was clearly hardware that brought into our century part of an imagined vision of a much further-off future (the 24th Century). Was that a conscious influence? In an industry that has sometimes been aggressively traditional, is there a way to channel ideas from something as far out as science fiction?

Guillaume: Before answering your question, allow me to challenge your statement about the computer music industry. I think “ill nostalgic” would describe this industry much better than “aggresively traditional.” Most music software companies have kept being innovative over the last decade, but their creativity has been a slave to this nostalgic obsession. Emulating an analog channel strip, a tube amplifier, or a vintage synth is far from a trivial job. It actually requires as much engineering time and resources as developing a disruptive product such as Ableton Live or Max/MSP/Jitter! On the hardware side, the innovation killer is the price pressure. Despite a common misconception, the computer music industry is not and will never be a mass market. Companies such as M-Audio [Avid], Behringer, or Native Instruments may look like giants compared to JazzMutant, but they are nano-particles compared to large consumer electronic brands such as HP or Nokia. The volume and the gross margins are too small to amortize ambitious research and development plans. When we launched the Lemur in 2005, a lot of people predicted, and somewhat hoped, that Behringer would release a similar device at $200 within the next eighteen months. Five years later, the first serious competitor of the Lemur is about to land – Apple’s iPad – and its entry level price is $500.

Back to the USS Enterprise, whether we want it or not, this parentship is likely to follow the Lemur forever. This is kind of ironic insofar as I’ve never been acquainted with science-fiction culture. I don’t even remember having ever watched a full episode of Star Trek. That being said, I acknowledge that this association has settled spontaneously and durably in people’s mind. Does this association come from the product concept itself? I don’t think so. In my opinion, it comes first and foremost from the fluorescent graphic design of the UI objects, not from the tactile technology.

So, the real question would rather be: “Why did we design the graphic interface this way?” First, we wanted to stand clear of those boring pseudo-vintage brushed-aluminium graphic skins – the cutaneous symptom of the nostalgic flu! Moreover, we anticipated that converting users to virtual controllers would be a difficult task and that trying to mimic the appearance of real-life objects would generate frustration; hence, impeding the adoption of the product.

Having said that, the main purpose of this flashy design was pragmatic and ergonomic. The Lemur is ontologically a live controller, though it might be used in other contexts. This requires that the interface must be visible wherever and whenever a user might be performing, from night clubs to outdoor venues. This is particularly tricky with a touch screen laid horizontally, because the display backlight cannot compete with the specular reflection of sunlight. Human-factor sciences taught us that contrast perception prevails over brightness perception. Hence, highly contrasted graphics- ie, flashy objects on dark background – is the most efficient way to ensure a consistent readability. This is something the aerospace industry has understood for decades. So, if there was one conscious influence behind the Lemur, it would be the Boeing 747 dashboard, not the USS Enterprise.

“If there was one conscious influence behind the Lemur, it would be the Boeing 747 dashboard, not the USS Enterprise.”

I know for me, the appeal of the science fiction aspect was more conceptual than superficial, the idea of the ubiquitous touch interface. But I agree, having experimented with this, that the high contrast, light foreground, dark background formula is really an essential solution. I’m seeing some interfaces on a white background that look aeshtetically lovely, but that I can’t imagine using onstage. I’d at least want a switch for dark environments, when you’re not at your desk.

That reminds me a funny episode of JazzMutant’s story. As early as February 2004, we started showing early prototypes of the Lemur to our friends at [Paris sound research center] IRCAM. At this time, the graphic skin was based on a palette of blue shades, with a few touches of warm yellow for emphasizing elements that needed to stand out, such as text, levels, etc. One day in July of 2004, about one year before the commercial launch of the product, we brought them a new prototype, featuring a brand new touch panel along with the final graphic design. Their only reaction was, “wow, this display is much brighter!” They did not even comment on the tremendeous improvement to the touch panel! That being said, there are other approaches to improve the psychological perception of readibility. I sometimes regret that other developpers are reluctant to dig into them, and mimic the “Lemur style” instead.

Talking about drawing on screen, did you know that Iannis Xenakis’ Upic project has been my main source of inspiration – and also my main motivation to step from music making to technology creation ?

I didn’t know that, but it makes a lot of sense. [UPIC is a tablet-based, visual composition system developed by ground-breaking experimental composer Xenakis. It is now decades old but continues to evolve in new incarnations.]

Below: DJ Mike Relm demonstrates the Lemur for G4 Tech TV. Yes, this is the video to show all your friends who aren’t regular CDM readers and have no idea what the heck this is all about.

Lessons of Lemur

Let’s talk about the place of Lemur’s technology in the current landscape. How does it hold up in 2010? I know a lot of people do get hung up on the price, but can you talk about how it differs from other options out there, or what the source of the cost is?

Once again, the music market being a small niche, it’s hardly possible to be both innovative and affordable at once. In addition, the Lemur is still manufactured in France with components imported from various locations around the globe – not to mention that the US dollar’s agony doesn’t help [when exporting] the manufactured product! Lastly, a large part of the product assembly is still handcrafted. For all the reasons above, the product is far from cost-optimized. I cannot disclose further our plans now, but we are working hard to address most – if not all – of these issues.

Have there been uses of the Lemur in performance and creation that surprised you, or went beyond what you imagined?

Oddely enough, and despite of what I said before, the most surprising uses of the Lemur are sometimes the most conservative ones! As an example, for Björk Volta tour, Damian Taylor and LFO made the most archaic interface layouts one could imagine — a fistful of colored labelled pads and eventually a pair of faders –- nothing more. Their brilliant idea was to create one unique interface for each song. This way, at each moment of the gig, they just had at their disposal the few commands they did actually need. The other big surprise came from video performers. Whereas most musicians are reluctant to use the advanced features of the lemur during their live performances – such as the objects’ physics – video artists do not hesitate to play the Lemur as an instrument, rather than a remote control. For instance, I warmly recommand you to visit Ali Momeni’s website. Of course, it would be unfair to forget all the advanced users who have developed inspiring and unique instruments, but this is less surprising, since the Lemur was designed specifically for that purpose.

OSC is a technology that many of us have advocated, but there’s also, admittedly, a big gap between where we believe it could be and where it is, especially in regards to the lack of mainstream music tech adoption. That said, what would an ideal implementation of OSC look like? What could the protocol do to be better? And what might you imagine could be a tipping point in adoption?

Indeed, it’s fair to say that OSC failed to become the industry standard we hoped it will be! I can see a few reasons for that. First, there is an obvious chicken-and-egg issue, as with any protocol. At JazzMutant, we’ve done our best to evangelize OSC in the industry for about 5 years now, without success. Why should a software company implement OSC if there is no hardware to support it, apart from a $2k product? Why should a hardware manufacturer develop an OSC-compatible controller if there are no mainstream applications to support it? Finally, there are also some intrinsic technical reasons that prevent OSC from becoming a standard anytime soon. In order to overcome them, we started developing a new protocol a few years ago called “Minuit” (“Midnight” in French), as a successor to OSC and MIDI (“Noon” in French). We were discouraged from pursuing this project after assessing the amount of human resources its evangelization would require.

The Big Picture, Stantum, and the Future

We’re looking at an explosion of interest in multi-touch display surfaces in the consumer space. Are any of these, in your view, promising for music? Are there ways in which some of these technologies are deficient for musical performance applications?

The responsiveness of a touch system is the most under-estimated parameter, even though it tremendously influences the perceived usability, transparency and trustworthiness of an input device. This is why a vast majority of Multi-touch systems available fails to meet music makers’ expectations.

Absolutely — you mean responsiveness in terms of latency, accuracy, precision in tracking multiple points, or (I presume) all of the above?

I was pointing out the latency more specifically – even though the perceived responsiveness is a complexe imbrication of all these parameters.

Can you talk about Stantum’s role in the evolution of multi-touch? What can we expect to see in the future?

We envisioned the real potential of the technology we invented long before the iPhone announcement, though we could not imagine that Steve Jobs’ crew would accelerate the market demand [to the extent they did]. We started investigating how we could bring our technology to OEMs in parallel to our computer music activity as early as 2005. We finally made this step in 2007. The role of Stantum in this ecosystem is quite singular. However pretentious it may sound to you, Stantum is still the only company beside Apple to have developped a real multi-touch product, top-down, including all the software and hardware technology bricks. So, despite the small size of our company, we are better placed than any other player in this field to understand the complexe imbrication of software and hardware. You might ask, “Aren’t all these Windows 7 convertible notebooks real multi-touch products?” In my opinion, they are not, insofar as the only multi-touch services these devices offer so far are rotating videos or ten-finger painting. I do not want to offend anyone, but watching videos is much more pleasant fullscreen and if Neanderthal people gave up painting with ten fingers 45,000 years ago, there might be a good reason. At JazzMutant/Stantum, we’ve always considered the multi-touch technology as a milestone, not the final destination. With what we’ve been incubating in our labs for a few months, we expect to reach the next big milestone quite soon.

Do you mean that these PC vendors are missing the actual application of the multi-touch technology in the software they ship with these devices? Certainly, no argument there — the demos, the marketing, the demo apps outside of Apple have just looked horrendous and awful to me. But surely there are developers out there who want to do better? Hasn’t what’s held them back simply the lack of available hardware?

I do agree with you. Unfortunately, that leads to a chicken-and-egg situation; insofar as developing a meaningful, multi-touch-capable application requires a preliminary awareness of the objective capabilities and limitations of a given hardware solution. On the other side, a vast majority of multi-touch panel providers doesn’t look willing to raise the bar until the market identifies a “killer app” requiring full multi-touch capabilities with zero performance tradeoff. Hopefully, the iPad will contribute to reschuffle the cards. Unfortunately, Apple decided to stand clear of handwriting capability – which, I believe, is a huge limitation for creative and productive applications.

“I do not want to offend anyone, but … if Neanderthal people gave up painting with ten fingers 45,000 years ago, there might be a good reason.”

Let’s assume Stantum is successful in popularizing the technology. At some point, will the Lemur be obsolete – and could that perhaps even be a good goal?

The Lemur as it is today is likely to become obsolete at some point – the pet is more than 5 years old in an industry that usually sends hardware products to retirement manu militari at 18 month old! Having said that, there is much more to develop on the hardware side than what we have done in the past. If we succeed in what we are working on today, I believe the Lemur will keep playing in its own category for quite a long while.

Now, that said, how do Stantum’s efforts to engage the larger electronics industry impact these issues of scale and cost?

We understood as early as 2005 that there was only one path to spread this technology – and the underlying vision of how computerized equipments should work – out of the small niche of professional musicians and Max/MSP users. Then we did what we had to do : we licensed the technology to tier-one semi-conductor companies such as ST Microelectronics to embed our multi-touch know-how into dedicated chips. We also teamed up with some of the largest and most trusted touch panel makers to bring our solution onto the consumer market place. The whole supply chain is now in place and you’re likely to see a few Stantum-based multi-touch tablets shipping in the coming months. Will these products match musicians’ expectation ? That’s too early to risk an answer at this stage, since we have no control over what OEMs will make out of our technology. And as you know, a good user experience does not only depend on the quality of the touch system – it’s also a matter of CPU and OS choice, hardware optimization, not to mention the software application running on top of it. That’s why we believe there’s still some room for a dedicated hardware that takes in consideration the very specific needs of electronic musicians and visual artists. In a not-too-far future, we expect the hard work we have done with our partners will have a positive impact on the cost structure of our music products.

Stantum’s Latest Technology, and What it Means

Guillaume is a bit limited in what he can say about his future plans, but that leaves me free to do a bit of (informed) speculation. This is largely my own analysis, so it’s my message, not necessarily Stantum’s.

First, unless it isn’t already clear, JazzMutant is Stantum. Stantum is JazzMutant. Stantum is now the official name of the company, and JazzMutant is just the brand by which their technology caters to musicians. It says something about the company’s lineage – all the founders have a background in electronic music – that they have in the past, continue now, and plan in the future to keep a strong connection to musicians. That’s meant that the rigorous demands of live music have informed their touch technology and made it a better product.

The idea that Apple’s iPad would drive JazzMutant out of business, therefore, is the opposite of correct. JazzMutant is Stantum. Stantum is in the business of licensing its specialization to OEMs. The Lemur shows just how potent that specialization is, in a way that literally gets rooms full of people dancing and gaping at projections. Apple’s technology is available only to Apple. With Microsoft, Google, phone vendors, and PC vendors all getting into the touch business, that means Stantum just became very big news – even if that’s something musicians and VJs figured out years earlier.

Part of the challenge of multi-touch development is that you have to get a lot of pieces working together. You need the physical surface of the controller, the sensors built into that surface, and the firmware that interprets the sensors all to work in tandem. Apple does it, and does the OS and applications, too. 3M is working on a product for OEMs, also working with multiple touch points. But the other big source right now is Stantum.

It’s also significant that Stantum’s technologies are heavily patented (a fact that they advertise on their site). While I’m no big fan of patents, unlike Apple, Stantum is licensing their technology into the marketplace. Given the need to have a patent portfolio just to protect your work, Stantum’s patents give it effectively the right to play ball. By licensing their technology to the manufacturers big enough to make this stuff on a grand scale, Stantum’s OEM program could provide ready access to touch for software developers beyond just the iPad platform. Even if you’re a huge iPad fan, that means greater accessibility in the market, and more than one vendor to provide that access. I’m a great advocate for DIY, but making displays isn’t yet a garage operation. (Yes, I know people building their own multi-touch tables, but they don’t make their own cameras or projectors.)

Stantum’s technology itself is also unique. Their sensing approach supports pen input and even handwriting recognition, features Apple leaves out. For many of the world’s languages, handwriting recognition is a “killer app,” which could further drive touch adoption. For the rest of us, until we evolve smaller fingers, the ability to use a pen can mean amplified accuracy for painting and writing, and yes, even pen-driven music applications. (Somewhere in the great beyond, Xenakis smiles.)

This is not an advertisement for Stantum, either – the list of companies anywhere close to being able to provide this functionality is short enough to count on your (ahem) fingertips.

So, okay, you buy into the concept – when can you get it? (After all, even the Lemur doesn’t quite count. It isn’t set up for pen input, even if its sensing method could work. And the Lemur is a controller, not a computer.)

Right now, Stantum’s technology is available in a series of multi-touch demonstration kits, including one with the guts of a Dell netbook inside:

http://www.stantum.com/en/offer/evaluate

In other words, we’re waiting for someone to ship a product that incorporates their technology. Windows 7 already includes multi-touch APIs out of the box in all but its Starter edition, so the Windows platform is a major candidate. Windows, while proprietary, has none of the developer, language, software, or hardware restrictions that the iPad platform does, so if your application doesn’t fit the iPad model or needs pen input, Windows’ stock just rose. Free software is possible too. Linux already supports the Stantum Slate PC and a number of other digitizers, support that will be baked into the kernels shipping in this year’s major Linux distros. We’re not just talking drivers, either: the whole Linux community is working on everything from libraries for environments like Java to support in the windowing system to touch-centric distros. (More on the Linux situation later this week.) Google’s Android has a multitouch API, too. I’ve used it, and got frustrated quickly not because of the OS, but because the hardware on current phone handsets just doesn’t work well with more than one finger. That could change if Stantum’s tech starts to appear in licensee products; Android as a touch OS could take off.

For specifics on the Windows 7 aspect (old news, from way back in November – but of course, everyone is taking a second look because of the iPad phenomenon):
2009-11-03 Windows 7 Certification

Right now, the one thing Stantum doesn’t have a lot of – aside from OEMs shipping their tech – is competition. Most of the other touch competitors either can’t accurately track fingers in close proximity, or limit tracking to two fingers, or lose tracking fidelity around the edges of the screen, or can’t handle pens, or some combination.

You need musicians, creative artists, and gamers to tell you this, because the mainstream computer market thinks multi-touch has something to do with pinch-zooming their photos. If that were all you could do with multi-touch, this would indeed be an over-hyped technology. But the responsiveness of the Lemur and the demonstration technology from Stantum is something that can be powerful and expressive.

Apple has already brilliantly demonstrated what happens when scale, creativity, and technical competence meet. Now the question is, who else will be able to put this formula together, thus making other options available to developers? Stantum has the competence, and the connection to creative artists and music specifically. If OEMs start to sign on with Stantum’s tech and build useful hardware, we could see both off-the-shelf machines – and cheaper JazzMutant-branded products – for musicians. Indeed, with this larger Stantum perspective, whatever happens with OEMs could in turn be good for JazzMutant-specific, music-specific customers, too. Even with competition from the likes of 3M, the technology is so specific to certain hardware devices, and the emerging markets so large, it’s hard to imagine Stantum not having a big role.

What might surprise people in the larger tech world is how important music has been – and will continue to be – to the big picture.

When it all comes together, the days of computer musicians, DJs, and visualists standing behind screens, able only to stare blankly into them but unable to manipulate what they see directly, could become a relic of the past.

Want a flying car? Dream of the flying car. Build the flying car.

A competition I’m hosting with Digitópia, the musical-technological community of Porto, Portugal, extends to readers worldwide a challenge to dream up the digital musical instrument/interface/creation you want. Got something practical you wish could be built? Got something impractical and bizarre? Either way, articulate it in the best way you can — images, words, videos, mock-ups, stop motion animation, beat poetry, whatever you think is best — and send it in. We’ll share the most interesting entries, and pick one that the folks at Digitópia will actually build. (So, if it is unfeasible, we’ll have to find one that at least can be made feasible.)

I hope it’s just the beginning of this kind of big-picture thinking in digital music.

Here’s organizer Rui Penha on the concept behind the call for entries:

Digitópia = Digital Utopia. We strongly believe in the power of communities, of open source endeavors, of sharing and spreading inspiring ideas, either simple or utterly crazy ones. Our goal is to empower the individual with means to achieve a more fulfilling, rewarding and personal musical expression, regardless of his or her experience and motivation. New interfaces and instruments can overcome the steep technique obstacles of some old ones and create new musical languages and thus we want to make them available to everyone. We want to help you build your idea and, together, we’ll share it with the whole world!

We want your ideas, but you have to act fast. The deadline is this Saturday, midnight GMT, April 3.

Submit ideas via email to competitions@digitopia-cdm.net, using whatever medium of illustration you wish. Works will be judged on innovation, originality, feasibility and inclusive potential. If you win, you get your instrument, built for you.

http://digitopia-cdm.net/competitions/

Full rules after the break / bottom of this post.

By the way, if you’re near Porto, Portugal, there’s a Handmade Music event this Saturday 3/27! Go, take videos, photos, enjoy! Details:

In Portugal, Now

Por favor divulgue. Obrigado! / Please spread. Thank you! (english version below)

A quarta edição da Handmade Music Porto terá lugar já no próximo sábado, dia 27 de Março, na Digitópia: uma festa que junta um mostra&conta a uma jam session com instrumentos únicos. De hardware a software feito em casa até circuit bending, kits personalizados ou instrumentos acústicos originais, todos estão convidados a aparecer na Casa da Música pelas 21h30 para montagem de instrumentos. Estarão disponíveis algumas mesas e tomadas, contudo os canais de amplificação serão muito limitados, pelo que será melhor vir prevenido. Pelas 22h abrimos o evento ao público geral – a entrada é livre e recomenda-se -, ocupando a Digitópia e a zona do bar do Foyer Sul. Contamos convosco!

Teremos dois convidados muito especiais: Rolf Gehlhaar e Luís Girão, que trarão alguns dos instrumentos criados para o projecto “instruments 4 everyone”, no âmbito do Festival Ao Alcance de Todos, edições de 2009 e 2010, que agora começa.

Rolf Gehlhaar – http://www.gehlhaar.org/

Luís Girão – http://www.artshare.com.pt/

——

The fourth Handmade Music Porto, a party + show&tell + jam session with unique instruments, will take place at Digitópia next saturday, March 27th. From handmade hardware or software all the way to circuit bending, customized kits or original acoustic instruments, everyone is welcome at Casa da Música around 9:30pm for assembling the instruments. We’ll provide some tables and power sockets, but only a few channels for amplification, so it is advisable not to rely on them. At 10pm we’ll open the doors – admission is free and we’ll have a bar! See you there!

We’ll have two very special guests: Rolf Gehlhaar and Luís Girão, who will bring some of the instruments made for the “instruments 4 everyone” project, part of the Ao Alcance de Todos festival in 2009 and 2010, starting this week.

Rolf Gehlhaar – http://www.gehlhaar.org/

Luís Girão – http://www.artshare.com.pt/

——

You may view the latest post at
http://digitopia-cdm.net/2010/03/handmade-music-digitopia-2703/

Entering the Competition (worldwide)

Rules (PDF download):

RULES · Digitópia Dreams Competition · Digitópia 2010
1 ·
WORKS
1.1 · Entrants shall submit an idea for their dream instrument, interface or software.
1.2 · Only original and yet to be materialized ideas will be admissible.
1.2 · The winning entries shall be developed under a Creative Commons license – http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses .
2 · SUBMISSION
2.1 · Works shall be submitted by email to the address competitions@digitopia-cdm.net , with the contact information of the
applicant – full name, nationality, date of birth, email address – on the email body.
2.2 · Each applicant is free to choose the best way (text, schemes, videos, etc.) to present his or her idea.
2.2 · The closing date for entries is 03/04/2010, at 23:59 GMT.
2.3 · All successful submissions will receive an auto-reply by email.
2.4 · Each applicants may submit up to three ideas.
3 ·
JURY
3.1 · The jury will be comprised of Peter Kirn (president), Paulo Maria Rodrigues and Rui Penha.
3.2 · Judging will be based on each submission’s innovation, originality, feasibility and inclusive potential.
3.3 · The jury will announce its decision on 02/06/2010, through Digitópia’s website – http://digitopia-cdm.net .
3.4 · The jury may decide that none of the works submitted merit selection.
3.5 · The jury’s decision shall be final.
4 ·
PRIZE
4.1 · The winning applicant will be invited to collaborate with Casa da Música and Digitópia’s team on the development of his or her
project.
4.2 · At least two copies of the project will be built, one for the applicant and other for Casa da Música.
4.3 · The complete process will be documented and shared under a Creative Commons license – http://creativecommons.org/
about/licenses attributed to the applicant.

Good luck! I look forward to the results.

As multitouch becomes more widely available, there’s an opportunity to re-imagine all sorts of interfaces. And yes, that includes the guitar.

I’m way behind on mentioning it, but thanks to all the readers who spotted the fascinating Misa digital guitar. Strings and frets are each replaced with digital touch controls, and the soundboard touchscreen is set up to control notes, velocity, pitch, and filters. In fact, it makes the guitar more like a keyboard, and less like a guitar. But as with all digital instruments, abstracting the gesture from the actual sound means that you can arbitrarily redefine what the instrument really does.

Engadget wrote up the Misa last month

Misa Digital of Sydney has a bare-bones site and waiting list / queries via email.

Don’t want to wait around on a list for the fully-integrated version? Thinking about how you could just strap an iPod touch or iPhone to an instrument and use that instead? You’re in luck. In fact, if you’ve got an Apple mobile and Ableton Live, you can start right now.

Jim Purbrick first experimented with iPhone performance at an open OSCestra. Unlike the Misa, his guitar remains a real guitar. The addition of an iPhone (or an iPod touch, if you’d rather) is simply a way to augment the instrument. In the grand tradition of the one man band, touch control with the open-source control application Mrmr allows him to manipulate Ableton Live tracks.

The solution is an open source Python hack that connects his mobile device to Ableton Live through Live’s LiveAPI. And incidentally, this solution requires far less effort – and yields more immediate integration – than running a Max for Live device. (I have to point that out, because while I’m impressed by Max’s extraordinary capabilities inside Live, there are practical ways in which direct OSC integration is better for controlling Live itself.)

And good news, Windows users – this all works on your OS, too. In fact, the only problem is the lack of an interface builder for Mrmr on Windows, which is something I think we’ll soon solve. (JavaFX would be a nice choice, as you’d have a cross-platform Java interface that looks nice but runs anywhere, without the pain of developing in Swing. That last sentence will be meaningful only to Java developers; everyone else, pretend I just temporarily started speaking in tongues.)

Details and full instructions for the hack:

An Open Source, Guitar Mounted, Multi Touch, Wireless, OSC Interface for Ableton Live [The Creation Engine No. 2 (Jim's blog)]

Videos

For further inspiration, here’s both the Misa and Jim’s own (real) guitar augmented by touch, in action:

In Anaheim this week, the music manufacturer trade gather to show their wares. But 8pm – 4am Friday night, we party.

“Wham Bam Thank You NAMM” has become an annual tradition, an unofficial afterparty of sorts for the first two days of the trade show.

This year’s lineup: John Tejada, Richard Devine, Flashbulb, Deru, Laura Escude, Scott Pagano, CPU, DJ Kero, Acid Circus, Derek Michael, Baseck, Eezir, Trifonic, DJ G Ov, Moldover, Henry Strange, and myself, among others.

Escaping from the Anaheim Convention Center doldrums, the event is held in the lovely, artistically-blossoming Los Angeles downtown. The Downtown Independent is a gorgeous space with a movie theater and rooftop for full audiovisual-party immersion. This year, we have a couple of new features with which I’m assisting on behalf of CDM. There’s a VIP lounge / “industry room” which will be filled with music toys. You need a NAMM badge to get in, but inside you’ll find some unusual sonic toys you can’t find on the NAMM floor.

Also in the spirit of going beyond NAMM, I’m moderating a panel on how people are using computers in performance, and how we can all make the future of music tech shinier, sooner. When you’re living in a cool-sounding year like “2010,” there’s really no excuse not to take matters into your own hands (oh, yeah, and maybe I want to make sure I’m on the same side as the evil robots when the bad s*** starts going down):

2010: It’s gonna be the future soon
A conversation on live electronic performance technique, and how to make music tech better

There’s no need to dream of futuristic, expressive live performance on computers. It’s here. And there’s no reason to wait for technology to improve: let’s talk about how to make it happen. Moderated by Create Digital Music’s PETER KIRN, this conversation with some of the artists at the edge of sound and live electronic music provides a glimpse into the ways people are working in 2010, and an open discussion about what we can do this year to extend our technique and make technology work better.

JUSTIN BORETA and edIT (Glitch Mob, etc.)
RICHARD DEVINE (Schematic/Warp), DSP mad scientist and composer
LAURA ESCUDE, violinist and music technologist
FLIPMU, the duo of Owen Vallis and Jordan Hochenbaum
MOLDOVER, Mojo controller creator, musical supervillian
DERU, composer and musician (Ghostly, etc.), recent Paris Opera Ballet score
BRIAN TRIFON (TRIFONIC), electronic musician and sound designer (Avatar)

and other guests

Hands-on "snap" demos of live rigs + topics of discussion:

Unusual interfaces, including graphical, touch, gestural, and multi-touch interfaces
Monome, Arduinome, MidiDuino and the Minicommand
Max/Max for Live, Reaktor, Pd, Processing, and other tools
Collaboration, synchronization, and open control
New Year’s Resolutions for making technology and performance practice better
…topics to be continued online
Followed by live performances kicking off a night-long party

Presented by Electronic Creatives, Dubspot and Create Digital Music

When: Friday, January 15, 2010, 8pm – 4am

Where: The Downtown Independent, downtownindependent.com

251 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 [Map]

What: Wham Bam Thank You NAMM [official site/artist bios]

Cost: $20; $10 discounted (21+)

RSVP: droidbehavior@gmail.com Information: 213-915-6120 Facebook: Event page

Note on NAMM badges: the NAMM badge gets you into the “industry room” and a discount on admission, but you do NOT need a NAMM badge to get into this party! It is 21+, though – sorry about that.

View Larger Map

Major kudos to the wizards of Electronic Creatives who’ve been a huge part of making the whole evening happen (whereas I largely get to just show up). That includes in particular the talented violinist, composer, technologist, educator, and creative mind Laura Escudé, who has worked with everyone from Cirque du Soleil to Carmen Rizzo; I hope we get to introduce more of her work.

Electronic Creatives “produces events centered around Ableton Live and new music technology coupled with envelope-pushing performances.” (I’m going to try to make sure not to interpret that last phrase as “making my laptop crash onstage,” okay?)

Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Lusine, “Gravity” – this cut comes from A Certain Distance, a CDM favorite album in 2009. Lusine aka Jeff McIlwain is on Ghostly Internationaland, whether it’s  “abstract” electronica or downright electronic songwriting, always manages to put a unique sonic stamp on his work.

Atlas Sound, “Walkabout (with Noah Lennox)” is by Bradford James Cox of Deerhunter fame, from his album Logos.

Hudson Mohawke, “Fuse” – the Glasgow-based artist just debuted on Warp with Butter, including this track.

White Rainbow, “Raw Shanks a Million” comes from Kranky artist Adam Fornker of Oregon. It was my introduction to his work, but see more on this track below. I love its spare, pulsing beats; it sounds like what I’d listen to while jogging to Caprica City’s cybernetics research institute.

King Midas, Sound “Outta Space (Slow Version)” comes from a project started by London’s Kevin Martin, the man behind The Bug. It’s a future-dub track for people who believe space is the place.

Low Limit, “Turf Day” is by San Francisco producer Bryan Rutledge, whom I knew as half of Lazer Sword, and who seems to be right at the center of the good stuff happening in electronic music in California.

Willits & Sakamoto, “Toward Water” comes from 2008’s “Ocean Fire,” the collaboration between experimental guitarist and composer Christopher WIllits and master composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. If you don’t know that full album already, it’s well worth owning.

The Field, “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet (Gold Panda Remix) revisits the track off The Field’s latest, “Yesterday and Today” – another top pick for 2009, and nicely reimagined here. You can check out Gold Panda, too; his mixes have become big Internet hits, and I love the quality of his work.

Tyondai Braxton, “Uffe’s Woodshop” is off his solo album Central Market and premiered on Pitchfork. The Battles singer is a Warp artist, composer, looper, and yes, indeed the son of Anthony Braxton. It’s an explosion of acoustic sounds amidst the other works here.

Untold, “Luna” is by London’s up-and-coming Jack Dunning, familiar on dance floors both for his original productions and remixes.

Nice Nice, “See Waves” will be a 7” from Warp Records in February, but you get to hear it here first. I love that it brings an entirely different rhythmic feel to this group.

Richard Devine, “Matvec Interior (Feat. Otto Von Schirach)” really is science fiction, an intricate set of colliding sonic forms from the composer and mad-scientist sound designer. It’s a favorite from his 2005 Cautella, but Richard revisits his sonic process for CDM here today.

Peter Kirn, “Anaxagoras” is my own track, premiering here, named for the Greek philosopher who attempted to explain astrological events through science, and fled after being called a heretic. The music, with some sounds of viola da gamba and others synthesized (or resynthesized), fall on that boundary between re-processed past and imminent future.

Now, some notes from behind the scenes:

White Rainbow

CDM: Tell us about the inspiration for this track. What was the process like?

I don’t get inspired to make something in the sense of looking at a butterfly and then writing a song. For me, it’s more like the act of making inspires where things go. The sounds as they come out inspire me to react and create on top of them.

This track was made by recording about an hour of live improv and then editing and cutting down and doing a few overdubs. My set up is:

INPUTS:
mic, computer running ableton using drum racks to trigger samples with a padkontrol, various iphone/ipod touch drum apps (beat maker, idrum etc), synth, electric guitar

MIXED/OUTPUT:

delay, multi –fx, dd-20 giga delay as looper, kaoss pad kp3 as multi-fx and looper

…and this all getting recorded into ableton on another computer in the studio.

I let that sit for a few months, then came back to it, cut things down and added vocal (with the Ableton Looper…one of the only times I’ve used that) and weird synth pad overdubs.

I’ve been making looper based music for a really long time now (going back to the original boomerang pre turn of the century). It’s really tough to keep it interesting… so I’m always looking and searching for new ways to keep myself interested and inspired to make new music in new ways.

I also play in an improvised electronic group called Rob Walmart, wherein we get very wrong and stupid and on tons of crappy gear. Tons of Casio keyboards, MicroKORGs, iPod Touches, Nintendo DS, microphones, etc.A new 3xLP of Rob Walmart will come out on Marriage Records early this year.

People probably still brand me as a new age or psychedelic ambient guy, and that’s cool but to me there is a direct line between synth future funk from the 70s and 80s and say, tangerine dream or Klaus Schultze. Just technology inspiring different people to make wild, "out there" space sounds. I would like to continue along that line.

Richard Devine

CDM: What can you tell us about this track?

I originally produced it in 2005, in collaboration with my good friend Otto Von Schirach. I was a going for something very alien, futuristic, scifi, scientific and unusual for this piece. The sonic timbres and textures are a combination of hybrid computer synthesis and field recordings. Think Aliens vs. Predator happening inside the world of HR Gigers head=)  The track initially started out in Logic Audio, I began cutting up sections and pieces of various field recorded bits. I went to many locations to get some of the sound sources. Many of them quite unusual and disturbing.

CDM: Your work always has these extraordinary layers of sound. What was the production process like on this track?

I started out on this farm near my house here in Georgia. It was during fall, and we went to this Halloween festival pumpkin patch place with my girlfriend. It was a huge field that had a petting zoo, and various other farm animals. I was intrigued by this fairly large turkey they had in a small metal wired cage. I record several takes of him frantically moving around as I got closer with my microphone. I also recorded the sounds of pigs, breathing heavy into the microphones.

I had a pair of DPA 4060′s Miniature Body Microphones clipped and tucked into my shirt sleeves to capture the animals up in close proximity. I also recorded sounds of water, sand, rocks, trees, leaves and debris in my backyard. I used a lot of these sounds and then imported them into the computer for heavy processing and manipulation. One of the main processing engines was the Kyma system by Symbolic Sound. I took a few sounds and converted them into spectral analysis files in which I morphed and re-synthesized some of the acoustic sounds into synthetic grains, or partials. Creating these very alien artificial sounding sounds to the mix. I also did a bit of FM synthesis for some of the percussion. Lots of intense programming in hundreds of layers of processed bits. You will notice that each bar in the composition never repeats, the same sounds or sequences. This was completely intentional. I wanted the entire sonic experience to be kinda like a roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics. I also tried to experiment with interesting new breaks, and redefine what could be considered song structure adhering to no rules or constraints.

CDM: Given the complexity, structurally, of this music, do you tend to iterate through a track over many layers?

I spend weeks, months sometimes designing the sounds, and trying to get all the pieces to work together. Almost like a complex microsound jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are very fractalized and tiny. Each sound I painfully program by hand. I take each sound as if it was a sculpture piece. I look at the sound in 3D structure. I often compare the sounds to architectural shapes, structures, and manipulate them one section at a time. I read the waveforms and sculpt them into what I want. I then add the pieces together to work into a composition as a whole. This is the most difficult part in my work in making everything seem fluid and natural. It is often difficult to make the transitions work within a short amount of time especially when you have so many sounds and textures you want to squeeze into a 5 or 6 minute track.

Lusine

CDM: What was your process like, creatively – particularly in regards to the vocals?

It was a very long process. It started off as something totally different. Some sort of downtempo disco type track with much more lyrical vocals. But, after several months I realized it wasn’t working for me, so I approached the whole thing from scratch, resampled everything and made a more minimal downtempo track out of it.

The vocals started off a lot more obviously upfront, but I decided to use them more as a musical layer, so I resampled the completed vocal track and started shuffling the bits around. It felt better to me, like the musical layers in the song weren’t competing with the vocals as much.

Ed.: I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on the compilation, especially since it represents three very different musical perspectives (which to me wound up making the experience richer). The TV show Caprica, for its part, premieres January 22 with another great Bear McCreary soundtrack (I’ve been listening already, as a fan of his scores).