Shop Vac from Jarret Heather on Vimeo.

Jonathan Coulton is nothing if not a hero for the age of Internet music. The Brooklyn-based troubadour inspires worldwide adoration from fans, not least in the form of music videos made spontaneously for his songs. “Shop Vac” by Jarrett Heather is easily one of the cleverest music videos put out this year, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with professional, higher-budget, commissioned videos. (And in a year full of clever gimmicks, that’s saying a lot.) It also does more than just show off visual flash: it’s got some actual wit.

More info from the creator:

A kinetic typography music video for Jonathan Coulton’s Shop Vac. Created using After Effects, Toon Boom Animate, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere.

As such, I almost put it under the “motion” heading, but for one important cameo: in the best appearance by music notation in a music video in recent memory, there’s a kick-a** notation “solo” in the middle. And yes, music notation is still damned sexy after all these centuries.

Jarret says he made that flourish with LilyPond, the brilliant, fully open-source notation engraving standard about which I raved early this year.

Not that it matters. I’d take any excuse to show this video, or watch it again. And remember, comment trolls, say what you like – I’ll just turn on my Shop-Vac.

Thanks, Wheat Williams, for the tip!

The quickest route to expressing an idea remains the gesture of a hand. That gesture may be crudely interpreted through today’s touch displays, but the immediacy remains. Presumably because of some of the device’s limitations, a lot of the experiments with the iPad have involved controllers that operate independently from sound software, like a remote control. Those interfaces, while useful, largely simulate existing hardware controls in a more flexible form, rather than introduce new ideas. But it seems the long-term potential for touch devices is in designs that unite touch, graphic, and sound in a single piece of software, exploring new paradigms for interaction along the way.

Usine is one of music creation’s most surprising secrets: it’s powerful sound software that incorporates creative touch interfaces as a core design principle. And in the video above, it’s running on a relatively cheap PC two-touch display from Packard Bell. Nay-Seven is one of the founders of the Usine community, all while lecturing internationally, and has been pushing the Usine software to its limits.

Here, he tells us about some of his latest experiments, and the potential they hold.

Always looking for a way to use the computer as a real musical instrument, my latest works try to combine graphics and music using a touchscreen interface. The software Usine from sensomusic gives me the freedom to build my own interfaces. Some examples:

Drawing pitch and pan

Here [at top], the purpose is to draw directly some pitch information on the waveform display of a sample. I’ve also added an LFO [low frequency oscillator for modulation]; this way, the drawing can move slowly according to different speed presets.

[At bottom], I play with pan and volume: the x position of the black ball on the lines gives pan information and y the volume. As I’m on working with a dualtouch screen, I can quickly draw some speed changes. Note that this panel is not only for pan and volume; I can also send this drawing to others parameters like delay and filters, here with the << button.

Geometry …or not

This workspace is also dedicated to drawing. I’ve built four layers, each one with its own color and its own sound. The XY position gives the pitch value of the notes and other parameters, like velocity or pan. The geometry provides sequences; lines give a kind of glissando.

Vertical sequencers and Pads

Using the new Matrix module (thanks to Martin Fleurent), I’ve built this vertical sequencer [seen at top]. I like the idea that notes fly under my hands this way. [At bottom], I‘ve built pads for tablet surfing on the “iPad” mode, adding also a drone option.

Multitouch gestures

On the same idea of movement, here are two screenshots of a video illustrating a new patch made by Olivier Sens (the Usine developer). This patch provides multitouch gesture recognition, opening new doors to ways in which we use our computers and touchscreen. We can easily imagine some new symbols or alphabets, and new forms of interactions in our musical practice. You draw a ‘V,’ you play with volume, you draw a ‘P,’ you play with pitch…

For more on the display, check out the Packard Bell Viseo 200T. It was previewed by Engadget last year and carried a street price – impressively – of only about US$300, all for a 20-inch screen and low latency. I’m gathering either something happened or it was re-branded for distribution outside the UK; anyone with more information, let us know in comments and I’ll update the story.

More on nay-seven’s Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usine/

All screen images courtesy nay-seven. Used by permission.

For this book review, we welcome guest writer Andy Farnell, who himself has a terrific book on interactive sound design and free modular patching environment Pure Data, entitled Designing Sound. It began as a review of a book on using free software – but it could be, more than that, a chance to fight procrastination. And while this runs the gamut, including graphics and design and not just sound, that could be even more relevant to those of us who need to delve into those other areas for our creative work. -Ed.

We all have a stack of things to get round to one day. Building a website. Making a video. Writing a book or recording an album. Allow me to share with you ten days that will transform your list of could do, would do, always going to do… into a list of exciting projects you’ve started.

That’s how long it took me to flick through Daniel James’ “Crafting Digital Media”, a light-reading compendium of software wisdom published by APress and weighing in at just under 400 pages.

It takes two of the major excuses for procrastination, “I don’t understand the interface, so I’m waiting for someone to show me.” and “I don’t have the money to buy the latest software”, and stomps them in the face with a giant boot.

There are roughly eight topics, or chunks of knowledge covered.

The first is about photography, with demonstrations in F-Spot, GThumb and GIMP — all the free tools you need to transfer, manipulate, and polish high-quality digital images.

Every software package in the book is a free, open source product that can be legally downloaded and used. These are not shareware or limited trial programs, but full versions of powerful, standards compatible applications — all modern free software with reliable, polished interfaces and powerful features. The book also comes with a CD containing Ubuntu 9.04.

The second chapter concerns illustration and font design. This is a whistle stop tour of modern scalable vector graphics tools and techniques, touching on Inkscape, FontForge, and GIMP again, showing you how to import, export, convert and edit high quality multi-layered scalable graphics.

Next comes 2D animation, where KToon and Synfig are demonstrated, showing the basic concepts of frame sequencing and tweening. And naturally, 3D modelling follows, with a look at Blender, the immensely-powerful 3D object design and rendering package with auxiliary game engine.

Although each section covers a complete production concept, it isn’t tiring or exhaustive. Just enough guidance is given to launch the program, explore the features, introduce the key concepts and leave you to play. If you actually follow along with the software examples, it’s a truly exciting journey, as you go to sleep each night with your head exploding with possibilities.

The art of publishing is the next adventure, with explorations of page layout, document structure, creating PDFs, posters, books and flyers. Subjects like fonts, typography, kerning and color processes are explained through examples with the Scribus application.

As a musician, you might be wondering where the audio tools are. The book doesn’t disappoint. There’s something for even experienced users in this compendium of tools spanning three chapters. Packages such as Mixx, Hydrogen, Jack, Seq24, Alsa Modular, Audacity, Ardour, and JAMin are explored in the context of all the common tasks like podcasting, recording, sequencing, effecting, compressing and mastering, EQ, CD production, and creating your own streaming server.

As an old fart who has just discovered YouTube, I found the next section on video editing to be very helpful since I’ve just started to explore making video tutorials. The now comical proliferation of incompatible video formats and codecs, a depressing indictment of the failure of standards, are cut through in short order. Daniel lays down the basics of formats and their conversion using AVIdemux, cropping and resizing while preserving high quality, and basic editing using Kino and the Open Movie Editor. A quick treatment of audio sync, titles and effects wraps up the section nicely.

Web development is the last chapter on software packages. Arguably there are so many choices for Web2.0 site design that it’s hard to justify any particular one. This book opts for solid and proven Drupal, along with a tour of the industry standard Apache web server, MySQL back-end, and Icecast media server to give a user-driven internet radio station as the chapter example.

Each of these topics is an entire profession in itself, about which shelves of books could be written, so don’t expect to become much of an an expert in any. What “Crafting Digital Media” does is open the door and get you started producing content very quickly. From there the opportunities are up to you.

As well as gently throwing in up-to-date anecdotal knowledge and asides from his encyclopaedic knowledge of modern media software, Daniel ties together the various threads into a whole that leaves you feeling empowered to start any new digital production project.

Let’s face it, the key to most pieces of software is a few simple steps, a few core commands, that seem so easy once you know them that you want to kick yourself for not trying sooner. Getting over that initial barrier is what this book offers.

The book would be a fantastic companion to new users of Ubuntu Studio, Pure:Dyne or 64Studio distributions, though several of the packages are multi-platform, so are available for Mac and Windows too. Ed.: Indeed, a large number of the tools are cross-platform – GIMP, FontForge, and Inkscape run on Mac and Windows, and Ardour on Mac. But then again, if you’ve got a Mac or PC, this is a great time to explore Linux a bit as a second OS, and all this software is available to you. Graphics software should even run acceptably virtualized. -PK

Title: Crafting Digital Media
Author: Daniel James
Publisher: Apress
Year: 2009
ISBN: 9781430218876
Price: $29 (RRP:$40)

Clavilux 2000 – Interactive instrument for generative music visualization from Jonas Heuer on Vimeo.

Think of playing musical notes for a moment, or close your eyes while fingering a piano keyboard. Odds are, some visual – however abstract – pops into your mind. Visualizing musical notes is second nature in the digital realm, once a note and an image can each be represented with numbers.

Clavilux 2000 by Jonas Friedemann Heuer is one of the latest works to run with the idea. As you play notes, beams of color drift up from the keyboard. In 3D mode, those beams take on a lovely, subtle quality. The model itself isn’t new, owing the notes-as-lines model to player pianos (or even music boxes), and recalling light organs. But there is something intuitive about this model – and I can imagine it being a terrific way to encourage someone to practice. (Well, that or else it could be distracting while practicing!)

Description. Thanks to Yifan Mai for the link; via infosthetics.com, a fantastic resource for exploring ways of visualizing information.

Clavilux 2000 is a music visualization installation that produces generative real-time animations of music. It consists of a computer running vvvv patch hooked up to a MIDI keyboard and projector. Every note played on the keyboard produces a stripe, whose proportions and color correspond to how the note was played. For instance, the color is mapped to the tonality of the note via the circle of fifths, thus visualizing harmonic consonance and dissonance. Besides looking really cool, it also thus creates unique “fingerprints” of each performance.

Clavilux 2000 is extremely close in design to a key 1995 work by media artist Toshio Iwai, known most recently for the Yamaha Tenori-On and Nintendo-published ElectroPlankton DS (each of which uses ideas from the earlier project). Piano–as image media and related works employed both inputs and outputs. (in the installation, visitors could use a trackball to enter note events visually on a screen; in performance with Ryuichi Sakamoto, the work used a piano. In each, events fly off perpendicular to the piano keyboard as beams of light, just as in the work here. That’s not a criticism, incidentally – even without seeing Iwai’s work, it’s a logical solution, because the keyboard organizes notes into an array of thin rectangles (the keys).

Unfortunately, Iwai’s work is not well-documented online; videos of these pieces have been removed. I do have a few resources for you, however. At bottom, there is a video of a 2006 Ars Electronica talk on the visual interface for music. (I have some video of Toshio’s similar thoughts around the launch of the Tenori-On which I should publish.) And for more:

Toshio Iwai talking about the visual-musical interface[artintelligence]

Toshio Iwai keynote at Futuresonic [pixelsumo]

http://www.nydigitalsalon.org/10/artwork.php?artwork=57

Soundbooth Beta 2 Article

Given that Audition is already bundled in the Windows video production suites, maybe this means Mac bundle customers and lower-end customers will also see the app as an included product, which would be nice. We’ll know soon enough.

Equally interesting is the reaction Soundbooth is already generating. Apparently me comparing an audio editor to Photoshop pricked up some ears:

Adobe Soundbooth Beta 2: Now Easier, More Photoshop-y [digg]

And, of course, digg’s trolls immediately took to the comments. One good idea out of the discussion: OGG export, which has a lot of appeal to me and wouldn’t even require a license fee for Adobe. Mac users are still understandably upset that there’s no PowerPC version, but given the availability of Sound Studio and Peak LE, and the Intel-specific optimizations in the Intel-native Soundbooth, this argument seems like a waste of time.

Are Graphics Tools Intuitive?

More interesting, though, a lot of readers were upset that I called Photoshop intuitive. Personally, I think the basic lasso editing tool and graphical painting metaphors are quite intuitive, and I think a spectral view is one of the best ways to visualize sound. These metaphors have become so familiar to computer users, in fact, that we forget they weren’t the creation of Adobe Photoshop at all. The lasso tool, and most other paint tools that are now as second-nature to us as windowed interfaces, are the invention of Bill Atkinson, while developing MacPaint for the original Mac (pictured at right, courtesy folklore.org):

MacPaint Evolution [Andy Hertzfeld, folklore.org]

It’s rare that someone really invents something, but in the case of the now-ubiquitous graphic editing metaphors on which most modern apps are based, Bill really did invent some of the basic tools. And I’ll argue with the commenters on digg: this doesn’t just make sense to graphics people. I remember being in school and using the original MacPaint and Hypercard for the first time. I didn’t need anyone to show me: I started messing around with the mouse, I saw what the tools did, and I’ve been using these tools ever since.

There are other lessons here, too. Apple in the early days took smart interface concepts and applied them universally. MacPaint tools were in HyperCard; shortcuts worked everywhere. Apple doesn’t do that nearly as well any more; even Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro feel like they were developed by different companies. Adobe has a lot more integration work to do, too, and certainly apps are much more complicated than they once were — not always a bad thing, as I’d rather use Photoshop CS3 than MacPaint. But leveraging good ideas across products is absolutely a good idea.

The other lesson, though, is that the possibilities are still open for new interface inventions. Before MacPaint, there was no MacPaint: Atkinson made it up. Why not make up new ways of using our computer? Of course, Apple had an advantage, in that they could build software around the hardware most people weren’t yet using (the mouse). That concept has deep implications for those of us in music, because physical activity has always been what music is about.

Bill Atkinson was one programmer with an idea, of course, not a huge corporate development effort. I suspect we’ll see more good ideas come from individual developers. Some of these interface ideas will be intuitive, others more subtle. But there are still plenty of ways of exploring sound and image that we haven’t discovered yet.

Oh, incidentally, digg doesn’t usually bring down CDM. We’re having serious server problems that seem to bring CDM crashing to a halt if we look at it the wrong way. We’re moving to a new, dedicated server next week. At that point, please digg us, slashdot us, tell everyone we’re hosting free nude photos (synth pr0n?), whatever. (Just don’t send any more spam than the 2,000 spam comments we get per day. We hate that.)