Amo Navas Bravetti – Raw (live video) from Gustavo Bravetti on Vimeo.

Sure, novel controllers are fun to watch, like our friend Gustavo Bravetti, driving a Brazilian crowd wild by waving his Wii remote live. But what if you can’t see the performance gimmick, if you’re just listening to the track?

The pitch behind the track “Raw,” celebrating the fifth anniversary of Fresco Records, is just that. It’s a studio-produced track, but the artists wanted to maintain some of the improvised feel of the live music. The track pairs the hit DJ/producer duo of David Amo and Juli Navas with Gustavo Bravetti of Uruguay – the Ableton and alternative controller wizard who regularly feeds tutorials to CDM.

Of course, this trio aren’t the only folks thinking this way. The first sequencers gave us the power to arrange everything in advance, meaning people immediately began to seek ways to restore live feel, turning off the metronome and doing everything in one take. But it’s nice to see these high-profile artists – and our friend Gustavo – taking it on specifically with something as off-the-wall as a Wii remote.

CrudBox by Steven Litt at ITP from Core77 on Vimeo.

How much performance power can you pack in a briefcase? What if you could have a magic box that did whatever you wanted?

That’s the question asked, in various different ways, by the artists we’re showcasing at this month’s Handmade Music NYC, Thursday evening 7/16 in Brooklyn. It’s a free event if you’re in the New York area, and we’ll be bringing as much of the work to you online around the world. Full event details:

Brooklyn, July 16: Suitcase Sequencers, Handmade Loopers, APC Hacking, Shake That Egg

Facebook event/RSVP

Join the global Handmade Music group on noisepages

The projects:

Sequence everything: CRUDBOX / STEVEN LITT
The CrudBox is an original hardware step sequencer in a briefcase, which plugs into and sequences everything from cassette decks to power tools and turns them into musical patterns.

Looping hardware: LOOOP-R / RUI PEREIRA
Looop-R is a musical, visual, hardware, software instrument.

Shake the beats: EGGBEATER / TED HAYES
This wireless, egg-shaped controller lets you mash loops, control filters, and play music using live gestures.

Ableton hacking: AKAI APC40, HACKED / MICHAEL HATSIS
Live laptop fans, take note: the commercially-available Akai APC40 Ableton Live controller warped to make new musical performances possible.

Handmade Music is FREE and, as always, made possible by our hosts at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward creative space, plus our friends at XLR8R Magazine, MAKE Magazine, and DIY marketplace Etsy.com.

Handmade Music’s Brooklyn home:
http://www.3rdward.com/handmade-music/

Handmade Music in NYC and (soon) around the world, @ CDM’s Noisepages:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com

Barry Threw demos the K-Bow at Maker Faire from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Yann Seznec aka The Amazing Rolo brings CDM his coverage of
music tech at the Maker Faire in three episodes today.

As long as there have been computers, violinists have looked for ways of extending the nuances of their physical performance into the digital realm. (Us keyboardists have it easy – we’re used to pressing an array of levers, and a lot of the gestures we make are, arguably, superfluous.) Many of these concepts return to the idea of the bow.

The K-Bow by Keith McMillen Instruments is a Bluetooth-enabled bow with sensors that read bow angle, length, acceleration, grip pressure, and even hair tension. It’s accompanied by software developed in Max/MSP. The bow itself is one of those “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it situations,” at US$4000-5000 retail, though they claim the bow itself – specially-designed kevlar and carbon graphite, anyone? – can compete with more expensive bows even before you add in the sensors.

http://www.keithmcmillen.com/kbow/index.html

In the video at top, developer Barry Threw of Keith McMillen Instruments demonstrates the K-Bow.

Here’s what you get out of the software screen:

Barry has also written up a visit to the STEIM research center and work with sensor bow pioneer Jon Rose.

Jon Rose with the K-Bow

And yes, you can rock out hard with this thing:

I know what you’re thinking – you could also just hook your violin into a pickup and some distortion pedals. I think it’s really the experience of playing it that changes, though I’m just guessing, since I’m not a string player.

Previous research projects:

Jon Rose’s own Hyperstring project (warning: loud hyperviolin audio auto-plays, and I don’t see any mute button!)

The Augmented Violin project at IRCAM: see Emmanuel Flety’s development blog, IRCAM project page and references

And that’s by no means a complete list, of course.

This is worth posting for this line alone:

“Who needs a Natal when you’ve got a theremin!”

(If you don’t know what he’s talking about, see here.)

Yes, in case you’re looking for a creative way to practice your Theremin playing, here you go. Now, where’s our Theremin Hero game? From the description by Glasgow-based YouTuber conquerearth, previously seen using the Theremin to play “Still Alive.”

This is even more fun with two people playing! One person controls left/right, the other controls jump.

Its not just limited to the theremin. Its even possible to hook up a microphone and use your voice to control the game! Or a guitar! Or a violin!

Heres how it works:
The sound from the theremin is split into its frequency and amplitude components in real time, which are then mapped to values in a linear scale representing the X and Y axis. Pitch becomes horizontal control, and Volume becomes vertical control.
The X and Y scales are then cut up into different zones. In this case, Left; Right and dead zones for the horizontal, and a single trigger and dead zone for the vertical.

The trigger zones are then mapped onto a virtual joystick hooked into an emulator.

The end result is a fairly usable input control for playing games like mario. The bars give the much needed visual feedback as to how “in tune” you are, so you have a better feel of where the trigger points are.

I’m sure there’s a deeper meaning I could extract about gestural controllers, expressive musical instruments, and the meaning of life, but it’s Friday and it’s lunch break time. If you can do my job, feel free – add in comments. (If your cat walks across your keyboard, it’ll still probably come across as more intelligent than an average YouTube comment, so have at it!)

Your pocket is bulging with power.

Wait… okay, that sounded really wrong.

Anyway, the mobile software revolution continues. There’s so much stuff out there that it can actually be hard to track. Here’s a round-up to help you navigate everything that’s going on this week.

And even if you can’t stand another word about the iPhone, consider this: the explosion of iPhone software, more than just a fad, illustrates what happens when you give developers tools to make multimedia capabilities easier, then provide a distribution outlet. I don’t love everything about the iTunes approach, but those are lessons that could easily be learned in desktop and mobile development alike. The iPhone platform, if nothing else, is surprisingly uncompromising in the sound and visual interaction departments, especially for a mobile platform. And even desktop platforms could benefit from this kind of distribution mechanism (see also: Steam for games).

Also, we do have some of the first signs that the iPhone won’t be alone for long – new functionality on Google’s Android could take that platform in new directions. See my next story, Android/Linux/open source fans.

Disclaimer: don’t worry. I’m not giving up on desktop apps. Relax. In fact, even now as I look across these applications, while there are lots of cool ideas, it’s still clear this is a nascent area. The experience is nowhere near as rich as you get on the desktop. But it’s nonetheless worth exploring some of the ideas before we return to our (more powerful) desktop applications for music.

Field Recording, Microphones for iPhone + iPod touch

The big news this week was FiRe, which promises to be the “first professional field recorder” for the iPhone and iPod touch. The developer behind it is one of which we’re already big fans: Audiofile Engineering. AE make Wave Editor, which has rapidly become the secret weapon of choice for Mac audio producers and sound designers, as well as the batch-processing Sample Manager and adoptive parents of the excellent Rax plug-in host. Anything these guys do would get our attention, and then they go and add specs you wouldn’t expect to see on the iPhone:

• Accurate real-time waveform display
• Live, touch-controlled waveform navigation
• Audio markers
• Broadcast WAVE metadata
• Instant downloading in multiple formats – and easy sharing via FTP, Web server, or even a SoundCloud account
• Tag recordings with location data
• Overdub mode
• VU meters for input and output
• Configurable time units
• Mic flexibility: use Blue Mikey, Alesis ProTrack or even the internal mic

US$5.99, available now.

(Update) Hardware Requirements:
iPhone 3G
iPod Touch (second generation)
First Generation iPhone (headset ONLY)

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/

iTunes link (which is tricky to find otherwise)

Let’s just cut straight to it: this is, bar none, the most full-featured app out there. It’s the first one that would make me seriously consider using this platform for recording.

This, of course, raises the question of which mic you might want to use.

If you’re on the iPod touch, you don’t have even a built-in mono mic. (Don’t knock it: I’ve put together entire pieces based on simple mono mic samples. Creative sampling artists will use anything.)

Even on the first-generation iPod touch, you can use some simple solutions that will let you do basic sound.

The Smule blog has a terrific round-up of recommendations for touch owners wanting to use their Ocarina app. Their technical needs are much lighter than what you might need for FiRe, but this is still worth a look if you have any interest in recording at all:

Microphones for iPod Touch Ocarina

The Griffin SmartTalk wins out for 2G owners. I have Griffin’s TuneBuds mobile, which has worked well enough for applications like RjDj. (Note that Smule have managed to get their app working with the first-gen hardware; FiRe requires the newer generation.)

At the fancier end:

Blue Microphones’ Mikey is a slim-line stereo condenser capsule that plus into the iPod accessory port. It’s hinged so you can play with placement at least a little, and there’s basic gain control (3 settings). It runs about US$80 street, which means it doesn’t have to compete with standalone recorders. Update: Audiofile Engineering say they’ve seen some issues with FiRe and Blue Mikey, and can’t officially support the combination. Readers have had some issues themselves. If you’ve already got a Mikey, this might be worth a try, but otherwise, you can await updated information as Blue and Audiofile Engineering attempt to address the problem.

Specific update: The problem sounds as though it is the combination of the production Mikey with second-generation iPod touch units running the current OS. This is expected to be fixed with the next OS release. Stay tuned for more.

Tha Alesis ProTrack is even more impressive-looking, but at US$249 list, it does start to get into the realm of “you could just go buy a dedicated recorder.” The ProTrack extends the iPhone by adding a shell with an X/Y stereo mic pair – one that looks quite a lot like the Zoom H4 mics – and even has onboard XLR jacks and phantom power. You also get LED monitoring, a limiter, additional power (four AAA’s), a mic stand mount – basically, it turns your iPhone into a real mobile recorder.

The Alesis has its own app, but the Audiofile Engineering option is looking more powerful. Naturally, that’s the advantage of software – because the iPhone is essentially a computer, you can add whatever software you like.

I still think there’s a good place for a dedicated recorder. I’ve started testing the Zoom H4n, seen at right. (Not an iPhone hiding in a shell.) I’m already blown away – it corrects most of the navigation and quality issues with its predecessor, and unlike an iPod or iPhone, has fantastic battery life and onboard XLR input jacks. (Okay, the ProTrack does have XLR’s, so this is getting a little more interesting.) In other words, I’m not sure I’m giving up on dedicated recorders in favor of one of these yet. It’s still handy to have, though – and who says you can’t use both, given how essential it can be to have a backup recording in many situations?

Updated: Officially, here are the mics supported by FiRe:

• Alesis ProTrack – http://www.alesis.com/protrack
  (Requires iPhone 3G or 2nd gen. iPod Touch)
• Blue Mikey – http://www.bluemic.com/products/mikey
  (Requires iPhone 3G)

Thanks to Gaëtan Gravel and everyone else who sent this in.

Paul Van Dyk’s DJ Tools

This one was a bit of a surprise: Paul Van Dyk has released a DJ app, but it’s not just a quick, attention-grabbing, “DJ on your iPhone” gimmick. It’s more like a utility belt for DJs. I’m surprised to see that as a result it’s actually gotten some criticism. To me, finding some genuinely useful stuff you might want to have on your mobile device is the whole point.

What’s in there?

• BPM counter
• Frequency analyzer
• Noise level (the “NYPD Application”), with an oddly beautiful visualization
• Seismic reader (for testing your turntable, not for telling if there’s an earthquake happening – that you’ll probably figure for yourself)

And then some silly stuff, too – glow stick, anyone?

http://www.paulvandyk.com/

Not yet available – coming late May 2009

All interesting, but you know what this means: now we need Live PA Tools. (I can think of some ironic choices for that. Nominations welcome.)

Nine Inch Nails App

NIN, of course, had their app become available on 4/14. There’s been quite a lot written about it – so much, in fact, that I feel like the whole thing is a bit overhyped. The basic development here is that NIN is taking all their fan data and making it location specific. On the upside, this is a lot more than many high-profile bands have done with iPhone development. But then, these guys should be doing more – they have the budget to hire real developers. I do like the idea of fans being able to interact on their mobile device; that clearly makes a lot of sense. But few artists will inspire the kind of loyalty NIN does, which means the real question is, will someone be able to build a platform for everyone else? And if you are a more obscure artist, what should you be doing?

The app is free, so just a conduit for fans, really.

iTunes link

http://www.nin.com/

Gestural Beat Sharing, Celebrate Cinco De Mayo

ZoozBeat is the application I looked at in the fall: the idea is to make musical improvisation more accessible by allowing people to use fun gestures, taps, and the like to assemble beats. The software is not only for iPhone, but the powerful Nokia N95, too.

That story is worth checking out from the perspective of gestural music in general, not just iPhone or mobile apps:

Gestures, Mobile Music, and the “Low Floor” for Novices: ZooZBeat on iPhone, Nokia

The latest news: the guys have gotten funding, for one. More importantly to end users, ZOOZ Mobile is adding a sharing component, much like what we saw with Smule’s Leaf Trombone. New upgraded software adds a Latin component with Samba and Tejano rhythms and is ready-to-go for Cinco de Mayo. Sounds great to me – and the Latin market has been oddly ignored by a lot of musicians and developers. There are also new Pop, Hip-Hop, and Techno beats.

http://www.myzoozbeat.com/

Unusual Instruments

You’ve got plenty of faux-808 apps for the iPhone now. Our friend Henry Lowengard is taking a very different tack, with drone-friendly creations and detuned pianos. He describes this as well as I could, so here’s what he writes to tell us about.

Imagine a piano in a summer home on a small lake, far in the north of the Northeastern United States. Imagine the piano sitting there for 60 or 70 years, untuned and unmaintained.
The naturally prepared timbres of the Lake Piano are now here for you, each missing felt, each individual nuance of the key action and character-filled tones. Briskly recorded one summer in lo-fi, these samples also contain sounds of children, cats, screen doors, and the summer breeze.

The first version of Lake Piano is relatively minimal, Henry says, played as a double row of scrolling piano keys and the ambient sounds stolen from a videotape he recorded. Henry promises more playability and more ambience in an upcoming upgrade, but you’ll get that automatically when it’s done, so you can always go play now.

And for droning on and on – literally:

Hi Droning fans:
I just sent in my new droning app Droneo to Apple for approval, so with luck, it’ll be in the store next week.
I’ll send a more widely distributed email when that happens, but I though you (pl.) might like to take a look at the Droneo "instruction site", http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/Droneo/ and listen to this tantalizing demo:
http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/Droneo/Audio%20Examples/Mp3/complex1.mp3
It’s basically my iPhone SrutiBox simplified to 8 oscillator voices, allowing a little more CPU time for complexity, and removing the preconceptions about Carnatic music and harmonium sounds that Sruti box engenders with its somewhat unpronounceable name.

For more on the SrutiBox, see our previous story.

Okay, I’m exhausted. Back to the desktop.

And of course, for the best source of up-to-the-minute mobile music creation news – well beyond just iPhone – be sure to read:

Palm Sounds

Based on work with the Oblong g-speak “spatial operating environment” gestural system – research that inspired the film Minority Report – our friend Trey Harrison has been doing some wonderful work with new Theremin-style interfaces. He writes:

I have been working with Oblong Industries (http://oblong.com) and
took some of my
spare time to combine their technology with my Salvation project
(http://slvtn.com)
and build a theremin-like instrument.

There are three degrees of control:

• Pitch is adjusted by moving hands left and right.
• Volume is adjusted by moving hands up and down.
• Vibrato is adjusted by moving hands foward and backward.

Many players and hands are possible, and the control can be applied to any MIDI instrument.

I like the fact that two hands are only the beginning — invite friends for collaborative sessions and get an octo-armed version! The pitch scaling certainly makes it easier to hit the notes, although it does remove some of the expressive pitch bends of the original Theremin. It’d be nice if an additional gesture (pinching, perhaps?) could allow you to warp between scale degrees.

I love the project; I hope we get to see more.

Friend of the Site Gustavo Bravetti is back, getting the young Brazilian boys and girls on their feet with his virtual reality glove and Wiimotes and gesturally-controlled electronica. Gustavo sends us this video from the 2009 Tribaltech SC Edition in Campinas. Having seen a lot of DJs take the easy way out at festivals in front of throngs of people, it’s great to see someone really play his laptop – and while some of us, ahem, look goofy waving Wiimotes around, Gustavo makes it look good.

Gustavo also gives us the scoop on a new track release, orange. It’s inspired by … wait, Henry Purcell? (Indeed; see also: Wendy Carlos.)

I did produce this track specially for the Tribaltech 2009 SC edition, it was inspired on the classic piece by the baroque composer Henry Purcell (century XVIII), “The Funeral Of Queen Mary”. As usual all synthesizers and fx was made using only Ableton stuff, this time Operator, Analog, and Tension was used to create all synths and effects.

Gustavo also gets a rather eloquent review by our friend David Cross.

The incredibly simple melody of the short ‘Bocuma’ becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man’s place in the universe through subtle pitch shifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on ‘An Eagle in Your Mind’ is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off.” Why not listen to, Only the Proletariat Floss’s by Screaming at the Mirror. With a truncated syncopation and approach that rivals only Tosh Guarrez pre “FartFlap”, “S.A.T.M” has taken steps to dismantle what was previously only dared mantled by the great Gilda Thrush when she fronted “Cycle Clause”. It’s as if Genghis Kahn got together for breakfast with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Virginia Wolfe and ordered just a bowl of homemade granola and then skipped out on the check. RATING: 11.-111 -David Cross

Previous Gustavo action on CDM:
Live + FM8 = Drum Kit Love: Free FM8 Drum Kit Download
Weekend Inspiration: Ableton Live Follow Actions, Dummy Clips, Making Snares
Gustavo Bravetti Show Us How To Glitch out Ableton Live
Interview: Gustavo Bravetti, Playing Music with Light and Interactive Gloves

Since the dawn of time, musicians have crafted their own acoustic instruments. Now, “handmade” extends to electrically-powered, digital instruments, including carved-wood gestural controllers, wearable drum pads, and rescued mannequin parts.

We got to enjoy another edition of Handmade Music in Brooklyn last week, getting together with our friends from XLR8R, Make Magazine, DIY marketplace Etsy.com, and venue host 3rd Ward. A huge thanks to our sponsor Pabst Blue Ribbon.

There are two things I especially love about these events. One is, we get to hang out and just make a racket. Performances are a wonderful thing, but getting to mix it up a little with total sonic chaos is great fun. Two, we connect people who haven’t met – non-musicians, people with no background in this stuff discovering what’s going on, but also people doing related work who may not have met before, even in a city like New York. On this particular occasion, we had two artists working with gestural controllers who were able to exchange ideas.

I think all of this can be replicated, of course, even if just hanging out with friends (in music or other fields). So, since Make Magazine and Popular Science were both nice enough to shoot some footage, here’s a look at what was on offer at this month’s edition of the event. And stay tuned for more for next month, now that we really are on a once-a-month schedule.

Handmade Music – 1/15/09 from make magazine on Vimeo.

Video from Handmade Music 1/15/09 [MAKE]

Brooke Borel of Popular Science’s DIY blog did a great piece on the event:

Making Electronic Music By Hand

Last Thursday’s event had the air of an interactive science fair, and while some attendees sat in the corner drinking, chatting, and soaking in the sounds, most crowded around the projects for demonstrations and the chance to take the controllers and make a little music of their own.

That’s a good point, too — while each of the projects could be an instrument you master over time, practicing and really getting good at, it could also be something a non-musician could pick up and play.

More on the December event and some of the technical details behind the projects — including skills you can apply to your own work and music — coming soon.

From the time we’re kids, we use gestures to make music – shaking, tapping, moving our bodies around, and connecting physical movement to sound. The idea of using these kinds of gestures to control digital music has been something researchers have worked on for many years. But with increasingly smart phones, equipped with mics, tilt and acceleration sensors, cameras, and other inputs, it’s possible to actually deliver these tools to average users.

The latest entry in the field is ZooZBeat. Its life as a mobile app is just a matter of months, but the research behind it involves years of work at Georgia Tech (which recently opened the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology). The work comes from Gil Weinberg and and co-designers/programmers Andrew Beck and Mark Godfrey. We’ve followed Gil’s work with smart music apps for some time. I got the chance to talk to him about ZooZBeat.

ZooZBeat Website

Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology

Shake it Like a Polaroid

The idea behind ZooZBeat is to use gestures to build up music ideas. Shake and tilt, touchscreen taps, and (Nokia) keypad presses add rhythmic and melodic lines, as seen in the video. Now, if this seems to lack some of the precision of a musical instrument, it’s not just you: the early apps are primarily built to be friendly to novices.

“You can go and you can practice and be much better,” says Weinberg. “But … it helps you get started, even if you’re a novice.”

The free ZooZBeat Lite version already lets you play individually with up to 2 beats running in the background and 10 instrument sounds, and a full-blown version adds voice recording (minus the iPod touch), song saving, more customization, and more sounds. A “Pro” version is coming, too, for more serious use.

If you have an iPhone, an iPod touch, or a Nokia N95, you can try this out for yourself. (Interestingly, the Symbian-based N95 actually trumps the iPhone when it comes to wireless sharing.) The Apple-platform app is available now, with the Nokia app coming within the next few days.

Lowering the Floor, Raising the Ceiling

I talked to Gil about the development process and the ideas behind the project.

“The main issue is how to create low floor and high ceiling — how to allow everyone, kids to [older people] to make music they like and have a meaningful beginning,” says Gil. “People try a cello and it sounds terrible and they drop it. I’m trying to make it easier [to] connect to sound.”

That idea is a familiar one, of course, and something that comes up regularly in new digital instrument design. (In fact, one might wonder if it causes people to neglect the potential of design with instruments intended for more depth.) But the interesting thing is always just how you go about it. Gil says this is the culmination of about ten years of research. For ZooZBeat, it involved doing a lot of testing and development, including interviews, surveys, and user testing.

“Sometimes I did it with musicians, but with the cellphones we focused on novices,” says Gil. “We have kids — friends of my kids from school, a group of them played with [the instrument], and also students at Georgia Tech. observations were very useful, just watching as people used it.”

And the idea wasn’t just to focus on making the design novice-friendly. “The low floor is easy if you just care about the low floor,” Gil observes. “The trick is how to make a high ceiling — once you start, you can also grow up in the house, become better musically.”

As it happens, working with testing and allowing novices and kids to try the instrument yielded some surprises. “The way I played it was tapping. I took it with one hand and tapped on the other hand, the way I thought it would be expressive. Kids came and preferred to shake it.”

With shaking the primary interface, the question of how to accurately measure shakes becomes important. I note some of the challenges of using this as a input, as witnessed by early game development on the Nintendo Wii; recently Nintendo even announced it was adding additional hardware to allow the Wii remote to be more accurate. Gil answers that Georgia Tech is working with providers that may be able to add additional data.

Buzz around the iPhone aside, Gil had a lot of success working cross-platform. Both apps share a common engine for gesture recognition. Building specifics for the platforms wasn’t such a major challenge, thanks to the work both Apple and Nokia have done. “We did it pretty quickly,” says Gil. “We started with the Nokia, believe it or not.” After Apple released the 2.1 SDK for its iPhone and iPod touch, Gil says the team got the work done in under a couple of months. They’re examining other platforms, as well. (By the way, another reason to be interested in Nokia as a development platform: Nokia Labs has already completed a Symbian mobile library for computer vision applications — read, easy camera analysis. Hear that, Gil and programmers?)

Gil promises more developments soon, including that Pro app. We’ll be watching – and it’ll be interesting to hear your feedback.

Previous Research

Mobile software is one delivery platform, but it’s worth looking at some of Gil’s previous research to see where this came from. I suspect some people may actually prefer the tangible objects to mobile phones.

For an overview of what Gil has done:

Music Shapers: These squeezable balls created soft, squishable musical inputs

Beatbugs: Networked physical objects for kids, the Beatbugs are intelligent “rhythm computers” – handheld percussion for the digital age

iltur: Inventing is one thing – and some point, composition and performance matter, actually using those inventions. iltur is a series of compositions realizing musical applications of the Beatbugs.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive guide to gestural music research, just Gil’s own contributions. Doing that kind of round-up wouldn’t be a bad idea, so if you have suggestions, I’m all ears (or squeeze-ready fingers).

Stay tuned; more soon.

Facial music, indeed. Daito Manabe has made the music the controller and his face the controlled in a new project. (As several commenters were quick to note, I got this exactly backwards when I posted this a few minutes ago: his face is the output, and the music the input.)

Daito Manabe is a Japanese-based composer, media artist, and DJ who does strange and wonderful things with inputs. This time, he’s hooked up electrical outputs to his face, so multimedia software Max/MSP, his usual tool of choice, can sequence muscle movements via electrical pulses transmitted directly to the surface of his face.

This is just one tech demo, but as an artist he does work in more fully-formed, full-length works — and happens to be coming to New York in November as part of a multimedia show at the Japan Society. Daito, if you’re out there reading I hope to catch up with you then, and perhaps buy you a Kirin, my honorary beer since it’s typically how my name is misspelled. (Peter Kirin is my typo Japanese alterego; the more popular Peter Kim my typo Korean doppelganger.)

Here’s another video; thanks to oscillateur and cptn for catching my jet lagged error.