Ten minutes. Four or five kids (or adults). Make a song. Go.

That’s the idea behind the Youth Music Box, developed by Silent Studios and Chris O’Shea. (Our friend Chris you may recall from various interactive projects and the blog pixelsumo; he sends this project our way.) The software is build in openFrameworks, the C++-based creative coding environment for artists.

With keys, drums, and yes, even a scratching DJ-style interface, the music box brings together kids for quick music making, inspired by the phenomenon of musical games. The experience is guided by genre, with some effort to make sure whatever they do sounds good, but it’s extraordinary how effective it is at conveying the experience of the successful jam. It’s a bit of a confidence builder, in other words, for a group musical experience, perhaps more so than those ear-splitting, cheap plastic recorder consorts I recall from my youth.

And oh yeah, those kids look super cute once they get rocking out. (See video below.)

Youth Music Box Experience from Silent Studios | Resonate on Vimeo.

All of this raises some fascinating questions, and not always with the answers you might expect. In a normal musical ensemble, you begin sounding like crap, amp up difficulty, and eventually sound something like this – at least as far as coherence goes, assuming you’re not aiming for experimental free jazz. But with the addition of technology, whether musical games or the presets on our favorite synths or the quantization and beat-synced loops of our sequencers, it goes something in reverse. You start out sounding like this, pull apart the mechanisms that make you sound a certain way, and eventually find your way to your own personal approach. (And at some point, you get some of the readers on this site, writing code to produce their own sounds and musical structures line by line.) In fact, one could imagine scaling difficulty of even this particular setup, gradually adding greater musical freedom and taking away the “training wheels” of all the rules-based restrictions that make the results sound a particular way.

Welcome to the alt-DAW scene. Last week, not only did Renoise continue its rebirth of the forgotten “tracker” genre of music making software with ReWire support, but we saw a big new version of REAPER, the beloved lightweight audio production tool from the original creator of Winamp.

What makes an “alt DAW”, or “indie” production software? To me, it’s:

• small development teams of a few people
• tightly-integrated communities directly involved in feature requests
• trusting users instead of adding significant DRM, returning to the traditional “shareware” business model of old
• affordable pricing

That’s not to take away from some of the bigger players – I was struck this week with the (unsurprising) ubiquity of Ableton Live at MUTEK; it’s a real testament to what they have accomplished. But choice is essential, and looking at the history of music technology, it’s in the periods of real choice that the most interesting things have happened. It makes everything better when developers really have to compete.

Cockos REAPER has spread almost virally as an underground DAW, partly because you can download the thing and get started with without any restrictions, then buy it for as little as US$60 for personal use.

http://www.reaper.fm/index.php

It’s not just for Windows people any more, either – the Mac version is now officially supported. You can run on Windows 7 or Windows 2000 or even 98 (with limited support). You can run on 10.4 Macs, or even PowerPC (though Intel is recommended). You can even run on Linux with official WINE support, though I’d still like to see a native Linux version, especially as Linux on netbooks is getting so lovely.

Version 3.0 came out this week. There are a huge number of improvements:

Gibson, the guitar company, has been on an utterly absurd campaign against music games, bringing lawsuits against the developers of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band and even against retailers. In the latest illustration of how screwed up patent law is, and just how over-litigious it has made technology in this country, the patent was based on a Gibson patent for a “System and method for generating and controlling a simulated musical concert experience.” Never mind that Gibson’s patent looks nothing like Guitar Hero, or that if interpreted that loosely, Gibson could theoretically sue any music software maker.

See my previous break-down of the patent and the twisted logic of the case:
Gibson Guitar to Guitar Hero Maker: We Own All Digital Musical Reality

And following development:
Gibson Guitar Loses Mind, Sues Entire Planet

Our friend Nilay Patel gets the scoop at Engadget that Gibson has lost its Guitar Hero case in California US District Court. Engadget also has a PDF of the decision:

Gibson loses Guitar Hero patent lawsuit, gets booed off stage

You can read juicy bits in the final ruling (PDF):

• Gibson’s own counsel withdrew from the case after the guitar maker refused their request for information. That’s right: Gibson wasn’t cooperating with their own lawyers. (Gibson later was represented by different counsel.)
• Gibson’s own corporate general counsel didn’t respond to requests from the court.
• Gibson started trying to force third-party Activision system providers to provide short-notice depositions, much to the dismay of the court and ACtivision, given Gibson’s own lack of cooperation.
• Gibson tried to use a YouTube video of a Guitar Hero hacker on the record, which the court found irrelevant (and, I think, laughable.)
• Gibson variously tried, unsuccessfully, legal gymnastics by which it could redefine musical instruments to enforce its ultimately irrelevant patent.

Want to hook that joystick / Wii remote / Guitar Hero controller / something odd to your music software? If you’re on Mac, OSCulator is the do-everything solution. It’s pay-what-you-like software ($19 minimum for PayPal), and it just got a big update:

Announcement: OSCulator 2.6 [Unidentified Sound Object, as seen in our sound design round-up]
Download page, with changelog [osculator.net]

There’s a lot new in release 2.6; highlights include:

• Preset management
• Graphical OSC routing editor
• Wii Guitar Hero support (preliminary)
• Hook up more: up to 2 virtual HID joysticks, up to 8 Wiimote (does anyone own that many?)
• Make keyboard shortcuts just by striking the combo

And just to be clear, this app outputs MIDI. That means you can use whatever music software you like — so don’t worry about the OSC business if it’s new to you!

It’s not even really just for OSC, any more — does all kinds of input tasks. Windows and Linux users have plenty to be jealous of in this program. Major kudos to creator Camille Troillard; USO Project points to a terrific SEAMUS newsletter article on the software and its future.

The only sad news: this is the last release that will support Tiger; future versions are Leopard-only. (I’m curious, Camille — why? Lots of us still run Tiger for audio apps. Is this just to streamline testing, or is there really something in Leopard that OSCulator needs?)

You can add this to yesterday’s good news as far as OpenSoundControl — the iPhone/iPod touch app we saw released to the app store in yesterday’s round-up.