Composing the sounds of an animal’s life cycle and ultimate consumption into a musical portrait, Matthew Herbert’s “One Pig” is in turns grotesque and sentimental, rock and opera. I expected squeamishness and vegetarian conversions when I saw it on tour, but instead, the crowd eagerly devoured the creature at the end. (Make of that what you will.)

One Pig is in Manchester, UK tonight before continuing to Brighton and Portugal.

As my own incurable appetite is for musical instruments, for me a highlight of the show is Scotland-based, American artist Yann Seznec’s Sty Harp. (See also our coverage of his iPad music game development work.) Gut strings in historical instruments already make use of animal parts, so a stringed instruments seems appropriate. But by dissecting obsolete, forgotten technology – a bit of a theme in these parts lately – Yann is able to make an effective, expressive instrument.

Sadly, there’s not much video of the instrument in action, but seeing it is a highlight of the live show. Yann’s performance has its own theatricality, rocking out on these extended strings around the “pig pen” like a boxer swinging against the ropes of a ring. First, Yann shares some notes on the show itself:

The album is an elegy to a life lived for the benefit of humans and raises complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.

The album is made entirely out of sounds from the pig and its surroundings – the first squeals, the sound of it being alone for the first time, and the dripping of its blood after being butchered. The result is a delicate, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying musical composition with a profundity rarely heard in electronic music.

The live show debuted at the Royal Opera House, London, in September 2011 and has since toured the world, performing at Berghain Berlin, STRP Eindhoven, Club Silencio Paris, Liquid Room Tokyo, Ancienne Belgique Brussels, and more. Future dates include headlining at Future Everything in Manchester, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

The show explores and questions the life, death, and consumption of the pig. A chef cooking onstage brings the sound and smell of cooking pig, and the performance features a brand new custom instrument – the “Sty Harp”, built and performed by Edinburgh-based artist Yann Seznec. This representation of the pig’s home is used to trigger and control elements of music, forming an integral part of the 5 piece band. The rest of the band is comprised of Sam Beste on keyboards, Tom Skinner on SPDS, Hugh Jones on samplers, and Matthew on various keyboards and samples and things.

Yann explains how the instrument itself is constructed:

In terms of the Sty Harp, the instrument is built using hacked Gametraks, which were a failed proto-motion controller from around 2003. They were sold only in the UK, and worked by using two joysticks with strings attached that you clipped onto your hands. These could then sense the distance and vague location of your hands …a few terrible games were released on PS2, Xbox, and PC for the Gametrak before they were pulled from the market.

In any case, I took apart a whole load of these (I probably have owned more gametraks than anyone in the world, ever) and used their innards for the string/joystick controllers, which are totally great! I built a whole system with Jon (from Lucky Frame) to hook up twelve of these controllers into my computer at once. I’m using an Arduino with a mux shield to handle the 36 analog inputs (x/y/string for 12 controllers) at once, converting them into MIDI and sending them over to Ableton.

In Ableton the controllers are doing a number of different things, slightly different for each song. In the Max patch I made I can send out 5 individual MIDI notes from each string, one for general movement above a threshold, and one each for a push, pull, up, or down movement. These movements are also sending out CC values, as is the pulling of the string. So each string controller is sending a whole pile of MIDI data at all times, and I pick and choose for each song which gestures to use. So in some cases I’m just triggering individual sounds using the strings, but in others I am using some strings to trigger clips, others to control effects on those clips, and still other effects to do master play/stop/effects/etc.

The climax of the Sty Harp happens about 2/3rds of the way through the show, when the whole band joins me in the sty for the symbolic butchering of the pig. For that song each band member controls different strings, building a huge sound wall.

You can read more about my building of the sty harp here: http://theamazingrolo.net/styharp/

We’re playing in Manchester on Friday the 18th, Brighton on Monday the 21st, then in Lisbon on June 29th and Porto on June 30th.

http://www.matthewherbert.com/
Matthew Herbert – One Pig: exclusive album stream [The Guardian]

It’s a beautiful thing when music hardware improves with age. And lately, that’s been what’s happening to Korg’s monotribe and monotron. Over the past few months, we’ve seen a major update from Korg for the monotribe that makes its sequencing functions easier and more useful. To save you the trouble of navigating the Korg Japan site – a difficulty for those of us who don’t speak Japanese – here on CDM, we’ve got a number of downloads for saving monotron patches, and the Japan-exclusive overlay for the monotribe update. And, courtesy enterprising hackers in Brazil unassociated with Korg, a monotribe MIDI update gives the hardware the feature it sorely lacks.

And how many videos do we have of all of this? Too many videos.

Grab some downloads, and see what’s new:

The monotron update: Over the new year, Korg updated their monotribe drum machine/synth, with expanded steps up to (at last) 16, volume automation, easier sequencing, drum rolls, gate time hold, and sample and hold, along with sync. Oddly, you update the monotribe by playing it an audio file. (Better hope it doesn’t contain a Cylon virus.)

More on the System Version 2 update (in English):
http://korg.com/monotribe

And in Japanese:
http://www.korg.co.jp/Product/Dance/monotribe/version2.html#overlay

And some words of wisdom in mangled English translation, courtesy Google Translate:

Monotribe stuck to the analog sound, even how to update the analog stick to technique. Past, as had been loaded by the cassette tape to PC data, has adopted a voice in how to update using monotribe.

(Real translation: because there aren’t any ports on the monotribe, the hack is playing it an audio file.)

And on the availability of the overlays, see if you can make sense of this:

Get in the music stores nationwide !
Reversal from heavy image of monotribe so far, has started distribution of the national musical instrument dealers in sequential overlay of vivid yellow color, such as the intensity of the synth sounds tell. Because there is limited number of people you want to soon.

(Real translation: if you don’t live in Japan, or simply missed out, print out this PDF.)

Get your circuit diagrams, patch storage sheets, and overlays. [monotron/monotribe] Thanks to reader Mutis Mayfield, we’ve got a whole bundle of PDFs for monotribe and monotron owners to enjoy. You can get your own overlays – otherwise available only apparently in dealers in Japan – provided you can work out how to print them so they look nice. And you get some terrific other additions, including the latest circuit schematics (in case you’ve missed their intentional appearance on the Interwebs), and even patch sheets. (Prior to the MeeBlip’s recent addition of patch storage, we referred to these cheekily as Hipster Patch Storage. You need a marker.)

Via Scribd, we’ve got all those downloads for you, so enjoy.

KORG monotron and monotribe goodies [cdmblogs @Scribd]

Updated: Seems Scribd couldn’t handle the complexity of those schematics. (What, no one taught their plug-in Electrical Engineering?) So here they are, switfly downloading from our servers:

monotron DELAY schematic [PDF]

monotron DUO schematic [PDF]

(Please link to this page on CDM and not to these files directly, unless you hate us.)

These PDFs are marked for public distribution, courtesy Korg. Speaking of which, it’s really nice to see Korg releasing that overlay under a Creative Commons license. (I suppose that means you could translate it and release the translated version, too, if you’re an especially big, multi-lingual monotribe fan!)

Adding MIDI to the monotribe

From Brazil, Amazing Machines have done a clever MIDI input and output mod for the monotribe. Now, some of us (cough, cough) think this should have been on the hardware in the first place, but the mod really is quite clever, so lovers of the monotribe get something that they should really love.

Even though it’s a mod, you just plug the thing in – no soldering required. And while you may have seen this mod before, the Brazilians have been busy working on improving it. New features, introduced late in February and shipping now:

• MIDI output: MIDI clock, arpeggiator from the synth section, trigger info from the rhythm section, and even the ability to use the ribbon controller as note, volume controller, and gate time.
• CC output.
• Using sync I/O on the monotribe, converts MIDI clock to sync pulse or the other way around.
• Improved DIN connectors.

All of this is now pre-assembled at US$64. You can even get US$10 off if you ordered the previous version.

Owners’ manual, more info:
http://www.amazingmachines.com.br/products_miditribe.html

Videos: monotribe v2

Korg Japan shows off those new features:

Videos: monotribe + MIDITRIBE

A look at what’s new in the revised hardware:

And from our friend Nick at Sonic State, a video review of the unit:

In an explosion of color, buttons, keys, velcro, and fur, and coupled with a cyborg-chic eyepiece, the VoltAxe is controllerism gone Mad Max, a post-acocalyptic keytar bred from salvaged parts. And if you want to make a unique construction of your own, creator Julie Covello – aka New York’s DJ Shakey – is willing to tell all her secrets, as well as why this was important to her music.

In modeling (the basement hobby variety, not the skinny fashionista one), “kitbashing” is the act of combining bits of multiple kits to produce one finished whole. Some custom new controllers are following a similar route, taking the best bits of, say, a keyboard and a Novation Launchpad, and going a bit nuts. Julie’s work deserves special mention not only because it takes that technique to an extreme, but it couples it with a heads-up, hands-free video display to keep feedback from the computer visible without being a distraction.

Julie tells us all the details:

The VoltAxe controller was created as part of my artist-in-residency at the Clocktower Gallery in New York City, made possible with support from the Jerome Foundation. I named my residency “Dj Shakey’s Audio Control Adventure” and wrote a pseudo-blog on Facebook.

To me, exploring Controllerism means trying to make my performance easier, more creative, and more dynamic. I did quite a bit of general research during this project, but with the performance controller, I focused on making a system that allowed me to walk around, not look at the controller, not look at my laptop (remove the barrier between
me and the audience and / or my bandmates), and have maximum flexibility and spontaneity with the sounds I was manipulating.

I had about 5 weeks to work, and I wanted a finished product that I could perform with, so I followed up on simpler solutions and left the hardcore hacking and studying for another time. I was also planning a huge finale party with 23 music and projection artists performing in multiple rooms, so that was on my plate as well.

Here’s a description of the final controller system…
I use Ableton Live — the way I perform, I want to see the laptop screen so I can pick clips at random to suit my mood. I don’t want to memorize my set and I don’t want to stare at my laptop screen either, so the solution was creating an eyepiece that shows my laptop screen within it. To build this I got help from VJ DoctorMojo aka Mark Alan
Johnson of Mojo Video Tech, Inc.. We experimented with a number of hacks, repurposing components extracted from the viewfinders of old camcorders. These experiments yeilded a number of functional miniature low-voltage displays, however these units were all black-and-white and a color image was what I needed. Very long story short, the final solution was to buy a pair of Vuzix
personal video glasses (US$250), flip them upside down and attach ONE screen to a regular pair of glasses so that only one of my eyes is looking at the screen and the other eye is looking out into the world. What I see with both eyes open is my laptop screen floating in the air on top of what I normally see. It’s amazing how easy this is to use!

There was more to do to make this work:
1. I had to run the output of my computer to a scan converter ($100) about the size of a cigarette pack and then run a wire to the little box that manages the glasses, adapters and cables were required.

2. I had to power the glasses, so that meant making the power cable about 10 feet longer so it could be plugged in while I walked around.

3. The image in the glasses was upside-down, since the unit was mounted upside-down (to avoid my nose!), so I rotated it 180 degrees via my Mac OS preferences.

4. The cursor size was too small, so I enlarged it with the Mac’s “Universal Access” preferences.

5. The image of my laptop screen was pretty low resolution, so low that I couldnt read any of the clip names, I referred to the Universal Access preferences to determine key commands for zoom in and zoom out and then programmed
my mouse keys to do the shortcut keys for these functions. Zoom out and I can see levels and stuff; zoom in and I can read type. I also fooled around with the screen resolution so it would be as clear as possible.

Speaking of the mouse, I did more research on the mouse than anything else! I wanted to attach it to my controller, which I was planning on hanging over my shoulders like a keytar. It had to have basic mouse functions AND I wanted buttons that could be programmed to do a series of keystrokes with one touch. There were some pretty cool mice on websites for the handicapped, but they were either absurdly expensive or they didn’t have all the functionality I wanted. I ended up using the one I had on my desk, the Kensington Expert Pro Turbo Trackball. I’ve had several over the years and I love them. They don’t make them any more, so they are hard to get and costly. (US$150 – 300) Also, the trackball is not secured in the socket. I basically just duct-taped this to my controller backing, and secured the trackball (with help from Mojo) with a piece of silver solder and a rubber band so it could move freely but securely. The mouse comes with programming software and I programmed the buttons to do — whatever I wanted!

The controller backing is 3/4 foam board ($5). I need this thing to be light! It is solid and doesn’t flex at all. I attached a number of controllers to this backing, a Novation Launchpad (triggering clips, punching clips in and out), Korg nanoPAD 2 (fx, samples), Korg nanoKONTROL 2 (mixing, fx), and two Vmeters (fx). I also messed around with a Keith McMillen Softstep foot controller which I like a lot and am still incorporating into the set-up. All of these run into a “Plugable”[-brand] 10-input powered USB hub on the back of the unit. I had to add a 12-foot usb extension to reach my laptop, as well as extending the power brick cable. All these long cables were bound into a single cable sleeve running to the laptop and power strip.

In an effort to use the controllers without looking at them, I added textures to many of the keys so I could find them by touch (velcro, rubber, fur). I covered up the keys that I had no plan to use so I wouldn’t hit them by accident. I divided the Launchpad up into 4×4 quandrants with miniature wire and ductape ridges. I’m still adapting to this set-up.

After the whole thing was put together, I hung it from a strap I grabbed off a gear case I had in the room. It took some trial and error to determine where to place the ends of the straps on the controller so that it would hang properly and my hands reached all the controls comfortably. I spent some time with the prototype attaching and re-attaching items until everything was in the right place before cutting out the foam board into the final shape. At this time, everything is attached with checkered duct tape from Home Depot; soon I will upgrade this to velcro (but keep the checkers as
decoration!).

The VoltAxe was ready to test play at midnight the day before the huge event where I was going to perform! Thanks to
Moldover and Mojo, who were with me doing ongoing troubleshooting, configuring went quickly and I was able to rehearse for a few hours and pull it together just in time! At the show, everything went as planned and I couldn’t have been happier – it was
so much fun! I can’t wait to evolve this set-up! My next move is to make it mobile and take it to the subway station to do some busking.

More information:
DJ Shakey : Clocktower Artist-In-Residency [as written up by the video whiz behind the project, Mojo]

Radio interview, talking DJing, “controllerism,” producing, and complete with remixes and original music from Shakey:
DJ Culture: DJ Shakey, The Illustrated Interview

If you like the project and want to see it developed more, you can also vote for it on Artists Wanted

Here’s a track with the controller in action:
Minor schwing by FreebassBK

Thanks, Julie!

Add this to the Internet of Things: imagine data recording scratching and scratch performances.

Technologists Jamie Wilkinson, Michael Auger, and Kyle McDonald propose a new way of storing scratch moves as data. They’re not just working in traditional ways, either: they’re hacking turntables and optical mice and cameras, and imagine not only recording performances, but having machines recreate scratching. (Robots!) And they want your help. Kyle writes:

i’m going to be leading a group at art hack day ( brooklyn, january 26th-28th www.arthackday.net/ ) about scratch markup
language, a tool for recording performances from turntablists.

this describes the general idea and who we’re
looking for. we need everyone from web designers/developers, to
hardware hackers, coders and musicians. if you’re interested, or know someone who is interested, contact me or join the google group groups.google.com/group/arthackday/

(We cover the awesomeness that is Graffiti Markup Language on Motion, which goes further to explaining why this sort of data storage can be powerful and enabling.)

All is described – rather bizarrely – in an image. (Can we have plain text, please? It is, at least, a pretty picture!)

The latest in a long tradition of transforming hand-drawn graphics into music (see, in particular, Iannis Xenakis and UPIC), we see a computer-vision-powered pen-and-paper music generator. Kovacs Balazs writes:

This is a manual sounddrawer. Doesn’t need any sensors, but a camera, paper, colored pens. Doesn’t need sensor glove or reactable as well.

What I love about this, though, is that the resulting sounds are utterly crazy, a big collision of notes and sound.

By the way, UPIC lives on here in a very advanced program descended from the original tool:
http://www.iannix.org/en/index.php

From credits: Magyar Eötvös Ösztöndíj Alapítvány, UCSB-MAT, CSALÁD

More:
http://soundsofpictures.blogspot.com/2012/01/17.html

Music lovers are hacking Apple’s Siri voice recognition technology. By connecting to some of the “intelligence” of the cloud, these tools can make your phone rap or send music files to a player piano for instant musical playback.

First up: Yamaha’s piano taking requests, thanks to music grabbed online. A Yamaha rep explains:

Yamaha consultant Craig Knudsen demonstrates a unique implementation of Apple’s incredible Airplay technology in an exciting new way.
Here’s how it works:
Take a standard MIDI songfile and convert it to an audio file (while maintaining the MIDI data). The songfile is then sent wirelessly via WiFi to an Apple Airport Express (which is mounted underneath a Yamaha Disklavier reproducing piano. The audio output of the Airport Express is then connected to the analog MIDI inputs of the Disklavier, using a standard audio cable.
Then, you simply ask Siri to play your favorite song from your iTunes library, and Siri responds immediately, by making the Disklavier’s keys and pedal move up and down, recreating the performance, including full orchestration.
The result is nothing short of magical.

Of course, the actual “playing” is thanks to the capabilities of the Yamaha Disklavier. I’m actually a bit puzzled as to how the online conversion works, exactly, and I was curious for any Disklavier-owning CDM readers whether this is something publicly available. I’m waiting to hear back from Yamaha.

And now, for something completely different: Siri rapping. (Somewhat … erm … badly, if amusingly. It is a hack.)

My friend Robert “Robb” Böhnke had a lot of fun combining Siri’s voice synthesis and the lyrics of Notorious B.I.G.

My hack for the Music Hack Day 2011 in London, a 24h Hackathon for all things music.

SiriProxy is used to intercept the communication with Apple’s servers. Notorious Siri then sends Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize to the device.

Siri’s speech synthesis is synced to the beat using the timestamps obtained from the Echonest API which were then manually tweaked, to smooth out delays in the text-to-speech engine.

Thanks to Universal Music for awarding me a nice pair of Dr. Dre headphones

The Echonest API, by the way, is an amazing do-everything “API for music,” one that analyzes musical files and connects to a vast storehouse of musical intelligence.

Warning: this video is most definitely Not Safe For Work. (Heck, even the thumbnail isn’t, exactly.) If that concerns you, just go listen to the Yamaha video again, okay?

Siri FAQ [Apple.com]

Previously: Google Translate Beatboxing

…and, of course, that means: Android, your move.

In a marvel of DIY engineering, one intrepid user of the tracker-made-modern music making environment Renoise has reconstructed the basic elements of the Ableton Live interface. With quantized clip launching on channels and even a crossfader, it’s unmistakably a copy of what Ableton does. I don’t think you’d dump your install of Ableton for this; the whole reason you’d want a feature like this is really if you prefer other elements of Renoise that are different from Live. But as a proof-of-concept, it’s pretty extraordinary. (Ableton users, the ball’s in your court: someone want to make a tracker in Max for Live?)

mxb has more information on the Renoise forum:
Cells! Preview

We love the bleeding edge, but as mxb notes, “this is still at a very early beta stage; if anyone has any suggestions or feature requests, [they should] make them in the thread on Renoise forums.”

All of this is possible because of Renoise’s powerful scripting environment.

The Cells! video above is a bit primitive – mxb says it’s a result of poor screen capture software, which is also responsible for sync disappearing – but you get the idea. mxb has also built a four-oscillator synth called ReSynth, and previously-mentioned sample import.

http://tools.renoise.com/users/mxb [all of mxb's creations]
http://tools.renoise.com/tools/resynth

Perhaps you’ve seen the demo videos, as people do astounding things by moving their body around and using the Kinect camera to make music. Now, a set of Max for Live devices makes it reasonably easy to access your body as input inside Ableton Live.

FaceOSC Mapper

Pictured at top, this builds on Kinect superstar coder Kyle McDonald’s face-tracking tool and lets you use your face – position and even facial movements – to control Ableton Live parameters.

Kinect Camera

For use with the V-Module and vizzABLE systems, you can plug in one or more Kinect cameras, and get tilt, distance filtering (to remove backgrounds), depth maps, RGB and IR modes, and plug in your depth-sensing camera for more goodness.

Kinect – OSCeleton

The home run: look at skeletal tracking for extremely precise human control of parameters, as seen in the video. It only gives your left and right hand, but stay tuned for further developments. See also this example patch.

Example video shows how to “track hand positions and translate to volume and send levels.” Not impressed? Remember, it’s a proof of concept: you can assign to other parameters, practice your movements, change the musical content, and even modify the patch to make it work better.

It’s Electronic Body Music! (Sorry, couldn’t resist. Kids, ask your … parents jeez we’re getting old, aren’t we?)

There’s a beautiful immediacy and tactile quality to hardware step sequencers. And there’s all the flexibility, convenience, and power of software.

Solution: combine them.

We’ve been following various custom creations for the music production tool Renoise – the latest being a lovely performance grid, and back in 2009, the beginnings of Launchpad grid sequencing.

You can thank Renoise’s powerful API, which allows its users to modify the way the app works with surprising ease (at least for the hack-inclined), all for free.

The latest is Lauflicht, an 8-, 16-, or 32-step step sequencer for the Novation Launchpad controller (or, alternatively, other controllers like the monome) and Renoise. What’s nice about it is, you can add as many tracks as you want, with whatever samples and instruments you want, but then trigger those steps from hardware. Now, this will appeal of course to those who want these kind of regular rhythms – I’m already anticipating some frustrated responses from our fans of non-duple rhythms and polyrhythms in comments. But if that is what you want, this looks fantastic.

The creator sells the tool for EUR24. How much that means to you is dependent, of course, on the stability of the Greek government. (Sigh.)

Side note: rockin’ domain name.
http://www.stepsequencer.net/

Via BrenMcGuire on CDM comments – thanks!

Lots more videos; check the site for the artist’s own techno tracks:

If you just want to fire up Renoise, the modern tracker/music production app, and not worry about the fact that its innards are hackable, you can. But for a reason why you might at least want to explore customization of this music tool, give the video above a look. It starts sleepy and slow … and then, part of the way through, as creator Dac Chartrand starts demoing the tool, something really special happens. (Anyway, that’s what I think. See if you agree.)

Dac explains his work, completed at the recent Montreal Music Hackday:

My Renoise hack was Grid Pie. One of the new trends in our community is the concept of a meta-interface. In essence, programmers use the Lua API to transform Renoise into something else, hide the Renoise window, and work with hardware interfaces connected to their own scripts. Three current examples: MPE, Step Sequencer Lauflicht and Duplex. Grid Pie is “yet another meta interface.” It turns Renoise into a live performance audio recombination machine. Still in alpha, but people were into the demo I gave. I got a lot of handshakes and positive feedback.

It’s an alpha, so your mileage may vary, but I’ll bet this whets some appetites for people who hadn’t yet realized the power of the Renoise API.

http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Grid_Pie