Some were disappointed that the Segway was not, as promised, “an invention that will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking.’” But there’s hope, in the form of Brisbane, Australia-based electronic duo Segue’s vision for the future. Clearly, the first Segway was just a 1.0 device. What it needs is additional accessories to make it the globe-shifting device it should have been. It needs a beer fridge, Ableton Live sync, and Monome control.

Okay, backing up to the “real” Segue, Segue is the combination of Leo Hede and Dave Dri. They regularly team up with visualist Jaymis Loveday, a big force behind CDM and co-editor of Create Digital Motion. Sadly, for now, their rig is not built out of tricked-out Segways, though I’m hopeful for the future:

With two laptops, synths, MPC sampler, MIDI controllers and FX units all triggered live on stage, Segue are willing to walk the tightrope in the live arena where some contemporaries baulk at performing without a safety net. “It’s the eternal and much argued balance between risk and self indulgence” Dri says wryly, and reaction to their sets so far suggests the risk is paying off big time. Leo is more abrupt with his explanation of the extent of their stage setup, stating with a characteristic smile “this is what we enjoy, so this is how we play”.

If you’re interested in their music, here’s some additional background:

Segue’s Chemical Brothers remix featured on Palms Out Sounds [at AU dance site inthemix.com.au]
Chemical Brothers - EBW9 Segue remix [seguesound.com]
About Segue

And if you’re in Melbourne, go check out Segue + CDM’s own VJ Jaymis at Smashbang lounge on October 5 — erm, 5 October.

But I dare someone out there to do something as outlandish as the sketch above.

Game and film composer Gary Kibler is back from Tuesday’s TENORI-ON launch event with words and images reflecting upon this new instrument. (See comments for lots more discussion, of course!) And for some reason, he’s been playing with his mashed potatoes… -Ed.

See also: Yamaha TENORI-ON Launch: Photos, Videos, Interviews, Demos, Details, and a Music Box

THE TENORI-ON : I know this. This means something …

Literally what TENORI-ON means in Japanese is "sound in your palm" but what I came away feeling after hearing Toshio Iwai’s story and later experiencing this innovative musical device for myself at Yamaha’s UK Launch event last Tuesday was more akin to the Richard-Dreyfuss-Close-Encounters quote. Never mind that the light-and-audio-synched performances can bring back visions of that film’s alien jam session.* I may not be articulate enough to explain fully why or how I was so affected by my short time with this snazzy gadget (my logical working-musician-self keeps on telling me that, measured by today’s music hardware standards, this is still just mashed potatoes, albeit in a very cool shape) but I do consider myself self-aware enough to appreciate the very real visceral impact it had on me. I’ve a sense the TENORI-ON is important, but not in a way most of us can fully appreciate today or probably anytime soon.

Let me start off by saying what the TENORI-ON is not:

• It is not a programmable synthesizer or sound module.
• Although it can hold some limited samples, it is not a sampler.
• It is not a compositional tool, not in the traditional sense at least.
• It has a tactile x/y matrix element but is not a Kaoss pad.
• It is definitely not the type of highly flexible "soup-to-nuts" production workstation device most working musicians would use to compose and produce their next musical opus on.

I find it commendable that Yamaha’s marketing manager, Peter Peck, was very upfront in stating the first two points at the outset, especially in a market where so many new music products attempt to be everything to everybody. It also appears to be the reason, although this wasn’t confirmed, why they have decided to market and sell these in record stores rather than music stores here in the UK.

What the TENORI-ON is:

• A well-designed piece of interactive art.
• An innovative and fully-contained musical instrument that allows anyone to easily produce very listenable music.
• A very tactile feedback-loop experience. The interplay of the lights with sound is incredibly mesmerizing and draws you in immediately.
• Incredibly immersive.
• Expensive - approx $1200 USD.

Afters years in development, the closely-watched TENORI-ON instrument from Toshio Iwai was officially launched in London by Yamaha last night. Noted game and film composer Gary Kibler was there, and he’s back with lots of juicy details, from the origin of the instrument’s conception to details on its launch and even a link to a PDF manual.. He’s also put loads of videos up for us on YouTube. -Ed.

Yamaha hosted an event last night in the heart of London’s Soho district to celebrate their official launch in the UK of what’s been described as a "revolutionary hands-on instrument that seamlessly fuses lights, sounds and music". The TENORI-ON is a unique handheld performance controller designed by Toshio Iwai, an established interactive media artist and designer, that has taken a full six years to go from initial concept to final production. Its basic makeup is a 16×16 matrix of LED buttons that not only provide the control interface to its 16 layers, 256 preset tones, and 6 sequence/loop modes, but also displays in lights what is often a stunning visual feedback loop on whatever is being output by the device. The device is planned only to be sold in the UK presently with a list price of £599 (approx. $1200 USD)

The highlight of the stage presentations was this first solo performance by Toshio:

Below is a short video interview with Toshio (he begins with signing my "Electroplankton"
DS game that he had designed earlier for Nintendo).

Here is the link to this and other photos I took at the event.

Peter Peck, the Marketing Manager for Yamaha, got up on stage just before the performance segment to make a few announcements, including some official details on the launch of the product:

Can you create a new electronic musical instrument and make it succeed, without relying on the models of the past? That’s the ongoing challenge of instrument design, and it’s one that’s been largely ignored by the incremental revisions of most large music instrument manufacturers. Little wonder, then, that people are paying attention to the Tenori-on: it’s nothing if not different. The creation of Japanese innovator Toshio Iwai (famous for his art installations and the Nintendo game ElectroPlankton), the instrument has to be one of the few experimental devices to receive mass-production in recent years.

Via the ever-vigilent Matrixsynth, it seems Yamaha has started ramping up for the launch of its unusual new piece of gear with official sites. Here’s what’s available from Yamaha so far:

• Official Tenori-on UK site, though there’s actually less information there now than when the device was in prototype stage
• Tenori-On minisite with another video on the bottom right, links to sample MP3s composed by artists, and more promised info for the September 4 launch date
• Tenori-on Artist videos, featuring Jim O’rourke, Atom Heart, and Robert Lippok. See, you knew you should have returned that mysterious voice mail from Yamaha in Japan. Look what an opportunity you missed.

No, I don’t know how much it costs or when it’s shipping in various parts of the world. Expect answers to these and other questions September 4.

And Yamaha has a scoop on what lucky artists have gotten their grubby hands on the prototypes, as well as details on the event:

[Tenori-on has been] road tested by cutting edge electronic music artists: Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Matthew Herbert, Mouse On Mars, Cornelius, To Rococo Rot, Jim O’ Rourke, Rei Harakami, Tortoise and Atom Heart…

The launch event will see inventor Toshio Iwai talk and answer questions on the TENORI-ON plus live performances from a selection of artists lucky enough to be asked to road test this exciting new instrument.

Flying in from Berlin To Rococo Rot’s Robert Lippok will perform an exclusive UK set alongside cutting edge disco edit maestro Secondo (Dreck Records) and the man dubbed ‘the savior of acid house’ Capracara (Soul Jazz Records)

(Note that the global site seems a little unstable as I publish this.)

Experimental rocker Jim O’Rourke is a natural for experimenting with the Tenori-on, as a ground-breaking musician himself, a Sonic Youth vet (to say nothing of Merce Cunningham), and a producer for the likes of Wilco, Stereolab, and Beth Orton. So far, though, while the Tenori-on is innovative, we’ve yet to see it prove its versatility. The music keeps coming out like Steve Reich on acid crossed with the TB-303. (Help! Crazy xylophonists have landed from Mars!) One of the criticisms of Iwai’s ElectroPlankton was that it was musically limiting. Theoretically, though, the Tenori-on could be bent to different musical intentions, so I suspect we may just need to wait a while as people discover what to do with this thing — such is always the way as an instrument one person designed has to become second nature to someone else.

Background on the Inventor

To fully understand the Tenori-on, it’s worth a look at Iwai’s past, and the development of his distinctive musical aesthetic:

Iwai’s own older site covers early installation work and inventions like SimTunes
Wikipedia has an exhaustive timeline and links
Pixelsumo features a Futuresonic keynote by Iwai himself, along with an insightful look at his earlier work

For the best first look at the Tenori-on itself, head over to Sonic State, who are lucky enough to be in the UK for the Tenori-on premiere:
Bonkers or Total Genius? The ‘Tenori-on’ Unveiled [Video interview with Yamaha]

Want to go to the launch/UK tour?

Okay, UK readers, want an inside pass to the Tenori-on launch event? Seeing as it’s in London (and then touring the rest of England) and I’ll be in — oddly enough — Pittsburgh on tour with a dance company, I can’t go. What I can do is find someone willing to photograph and write about the event for CDM, and I’ll pass along an official assignment to my contacts at Yamaha.

In the meantime, I’d better keep working on my custom Monome. Let me know, Brits, who’s up for it?

Fans of radical exploration in instrument design have watched the Tenori-On since 2001. The instrument, designed by composer / sound artist / visualist / interactive designer Toshio Iwai, is part sequencer, part sampler, but with a novel, integrated interface using a grid of buttons. And now it has a launch date from its manufacturer, instrument giant Yamaha: September 4 is the date the Tenori-On steps from design concept to commercial product.

Yamaha decided to launch first in just one country, presumably chosen for its hipness, love of design, and adventurous embrace of nontraditional instruments. And they came up with the UK. (What, not Australia, known for its unusual concentration of createdigitalmusic.com co-creators and readers? Norway, which we just generally think is awesome? Thailand, which has a brilliant music tech blog? Oh, well. Too bad they’re all logical and not compulsively impulsive like me.)

Long story short: you’ll have to be in London to see this 9/4 — erm, make that 4/9. Then, you can follow it around England as the product tours. We do expect the tool to follow with other parts of the world after that; I’ll make sure Yamaha keeps us in the loop.

Full details on the launch, UK tour, and lots of great Tenori-On coverage, at Pixelsumo:
Tenori-On is finally here

Previously:
Yamaha to Ship Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-On, But Will Open Hardware Win? — I should really qualify this one. My point was not that Tenori-On and the open-source Monome hardware were equivalent, nor that open hardware was preferable to, say, Yamaha supporting new design. What I found interesting was that, for their personal use, musicians I knew were showing greater interest in Monome than Tenori-On, and that an upstart, open project with no funding was able to similarly experiment with ideas about what instruments should be. For a long time, hardware experimentation was often limited to one-off, academic research projects. There seems to be a new resurgence in design that actually brings ideas to market, even if in limited runs, and now increasingly opens up that research to the user. The fact that the Monome and Tenori-On take very different paths to both development and resulting design in almost every way, yet share a certain design sensibility and experimental spirit, to me further validates both projects.

New Videos, Blog for Toshio Iwai’s Imaginative Musical Creations

In June 2005, we first saw the Tenori-On, a futuristic music-making device covered in a grid of interactive, lit buttons, designed by the talented interactive artist Toshio Iwai as a prototype for Yamaha. Last week, Yamaha revealed some details about plans to make Iwai’s experimental device into a shipping product. (I missed this in preparations to fly off to Oahu.)

Basic specs: 16×16 grid of buttons, MIDI out, sequencing, and perhaps most surprising, built-in sampling and Motif sound capabilities with internal speakers (plus line-out, naturally). (Notably missing: any mention of network capabilities, which was arguably the most compelling part of the prototype. MIDI out would be notably limited in this respect. Perhaps these features will resurface.)

Anticipated price: £500.
Availability: Unknown, but soon — UK launch first, evidently.

Tenori-On specs [Future Music blog]
Hands-on Tenori-On video [Sonic State]
Tenori-On official site, Toshio Iwai Tenori-On blog, neither of which have been updated as I write this

Much like a car maker releasing a concept car as a factory model, it’s exciting to see this happen. Now there’s only one problem: a lot has happened since June 2005, and light-up buttons you can turn on and off aren’t exactly inaccessible technology. Here’s a quick review of what’s been developing in the world beyond Yamaha since 2005:

Okay, first imagine that you can control drums with sound. Not a new idea; audio-driven software has been around for a while. Now imagine that the software is intelligent enough to learn from the sound input it hears. Bang a desk, clap your hands, hit your head against the wall, slap someone you don’t like repeatedly with a fish — it’ll adjust itself to the input. That’s the vision of a new project called BillaBoop.

The creator writes CDM to tell us more about it:

Hi, My name is Amaury Hazan. I’d like to introduce a software I have developed.

BillaBoop is a real-time audio driven drum controller which allows the user to control up to 3 drum instruments. The user can control any drum synth with the voice (beat box), or any object or musical instrument. Unlike other audio-driven systems wich require a lot of parameter tuning to be able to discriminate the sounds you are playing, BillaBoop incorporates an efficient Machine Learning component which enables the system to learn by demonstration.