The art of music is as expressive an art as you can find, so why shouldn’t the objects we use to make music be equally personal and creative? That’s the question we ask regularly on CDM, so we’re pleased to be sponsoring a contest with our friends at Instructables, along with the good people of Bleep Labs and custom speaker maker Zalytron.

Instructables, of course, are a site that let you share step-by-step instructions for making stuff. Far from keeping you art secret, they let you claim bragging rights for brilliant creations by letting you share how you’ve made them — and how other folks can do the same. It says that making things doesn’t have to be about something you’ve got that no one else does, but on the contrary, that value can actually come from other people doing the same thing. I got to meet the co-founders on the panel we gave at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon – really terrific folks.

For the Art of Sound Contest, anything’s game – homemade and modded instruments, electronics, circuit bending, speakers, controllers, the lot – even visuals. At the risk of influencing the voting, there’s already a musical light show, on the visual end, a sequencer (seen at top), an Arduino trumpet, and, yes, Spock lovers, even a Vulcan Lyre.

By the way, if you document stuff on Instructables, you can now embed the steps, as seen below. So that means you can make your own page on our in-alpha-testing noisepages community site and add additional details in blog form.

Check out the latest and most popular entries on the contest page:
http://www.instructables.com/contest/artofsound

And, of course, even if you don’t enter, you’ll have lots of things to try making. If you do want to enter, you have until July 26. Stay tuned to CDM as we keep track of the contest and the projects – even if you can’t enter, I promise we’ll have some goodies to share. And, of course, there’s an instructables for how to enter:

How To Enter the Art of Sound Contest – More DIY How To Projects

I’m especially fond of these speaker creatures. Mustache? Monocle? Check. And, hey, even if you lose, there’s an Instructables to teach you to make your own.

Too cute…

Updated: It seems Instructables has gone to a new pricing model. I’m still getting all the details as this is a recent announcement. I realize this may be cause for concern for some of our readers. Suffice to say, I understand that bandwidth-consuming sites aren’t free to run as a publisher myself, but I also understand creators being concerned about specific restrictions – particularly in regards to content they’ve created. It does appear that the “free” accounts are functional; I’m just unclear, for instance, on the “secondary images” – what sizes you have access to, etc. Stay tuned.

Out of the box, Akai’s APC40 has some lovely features for plug-and-play control of Ableton Live, with clip triggering, track control, device control, and dedicated buttons for command shortcuts. It also sends and receives standard MIDI messages for every last button and encoder. But what if you still want more? What if you need more controls to do multiple duties, or get bored with simple clip triggering and decide you want additional interaction? Enter the hackers. Already, using MIDI, clever APC40 users are squeezing more function out of this box. And while it isn’t solved yet, there are some clues to the infamous hardware handshake – a System Exclusive string exchanged between the APC and Live that locks certain Live software features to the APC and not to other hardware you might like to use.

Manual MIDI

Before we get too fancy, for power tricks, your first stop should be Akai’s own site:
Tips and Tricks June – APC40

Live allows you to manually override the APC’s dynamic control assignments using the standard MIDI Map. Let’s say you don’t use headphones for cueing. You can select the MIDI Map, pick a control to which you want the Cue Level encoder to be assigned, and you’ll manually assign just that control – the rest of the dynamic template remains in place. Akai has some tips for scrolling through scenes, selecting scenes with one of the two footswitch jacks on the back of the unit, scrubbing and nudging clips, fine-tuning tempo control, and more.

monome Emulation for APC40 and Korg padKONTROL

Our friend Michael Hatsis of trackteamaudio has been hard at work in Max/MSP patching an emulator for the creative patches for the open-source monome hardware. (Thanks on Twitter to ruaridhTVO, too.) By translating from the (and, cough, superior) OpenSoundControl messages the monome supports natively to MIDI, the emulator supports not only the APC but Korg’s padKONTROL, as well. This opens up the use of the APC for creative microsampling and other tasks.

Video demo at top (updated late Sunday night, so if you saw this over the weekend, here’s a tighter version).

Direct download:
http://www.warperparty.com/datter/Monomulator0.9.zip

Forum discussion:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=117307&start=0

And be sure to check out the Java- and Python-powered open-source library for the monome on which Michael’s work is based:
net.loadbang.shado

You’ll find plenty of documentation in Michael’s download, and the hope is that this is just the beginning — you Max patchers out there (and Pd, if we can port this) can keep hacking on it and try out some new ideas. One reason you might want to keep hacking on the padKONTROL is that you could find uses for velocity – unlike the monome and APC, Korg’s 4×4 drum pads are velocity sensitive.

As you no doubt heard, Apple today refreshed their MacBook lineup with across-the-board adjustments to pricing. I’ll let other sites comment on the news more generally, as this is a music site, not a notebook site. But the big news for audio in terms of I/O, just so you don’t miss that:

• FireWire on more models: Finally, you can again get a 13” MacBook (now called MacBook Pro) with onboard FireWire – a FW800 connector. That’ll restore the use of audio interfaces and certain high-speed storage, and means the MacBook is again a good choice as an audio machine at the US$1199 base price point.
• ExpressCard on fewer models: Oddly, the addition of a lowly SD card slot (nice for photography and mobile recorders) has supplanted the ExpressCard slot on the 15” MacBook Pro. If you want ExpressCard, you have to buy the 17” – which, in turn, loses the SD card slot.

Now, generally the news here is pretty good. For music, you probably aren’t too concerned about the GPU, so the 15” MacBook Pro at US$1699 is looking like a nice deal. But PC users are no doubt puzzled, given that all of these connections are standard equipment on the vast majority of PC notebooks, including ones that cost less than a grand. And there still aren’t as many USB ports as you’d like – you get two ports on all but the 17” model, which has three, and very often only one of those may actually be usable because of power issues.

MacBook Pro [Apple]

The battery life is also greatly improved, but unfortunately is no longer user-upgradeable. See further comments on CDMotion.

No doubt about it: touch is coming to more screens near you. But there’s no need to disappoint your current beloved laptop. $200 kits can turn your laptop into a functioning touchscreen.

Now, as I’m working with JazzMutant’s Lemur this week, before you get excited, this is no Lemur – or even anything like your iPhone or iPod touch. Sensitivity and accuracy are workable, but not exceptional, the overlay is pretty simple (as you can see in the video) rather than integrated with the display, and this is single-touch only — not multi-touch. Lastly, on a conventional laptop that isn’t convertible, you may miss the ability to fully extend your laptop perpindicular to your body. (Having the screen be parallel can put your arms in a fatiguing position.)

But that said, there’s a lot of potential once you have the ability to reach over and make quick gestures on a laptop screen that control a set. You might make your own instruments and effects or controller dashboards in a tool like Processing or Reaktor. And at $200, this could be a brilliant way to retrofit a machine and breathe new life into it. There’s support for Mac, Windows, and Linux; you just plug in via USB.

You know that viral, deeply inspirational Britain’s Got Talent clip in which a lone singer bursts the preconceptions and expectations of the whole world, dazzling audiences and bringing people to tears with her talent?

Yeah, okay, so this is pretty much nothing like that.

This is more in the category of self-deprecating artists who aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves, being exactly what you’d expect them to be – and then some. Let’s call it “dorkpop,” intentionally geeky musicians willing to be just the people they are. Three keyboards, and one man with a keytar. (Note that he basically demonstrates in the video why these should be called shoulder-mounted keyboards or something, since the only thing they have in common with a guitar is a strap.)

Artists able to laugh at themselves: always a good thing.

But the really funny thing about this clip is that Simon Cowell apparently can’t laugh. He seems somehow offended by the fact that they don’t take themselves seriously. Mr. Cowell, unable to handle irony?

Well, if Susan Boyle was so heartwarming you needed a dose of irony, here it is.

Via our friends in the UK who themsleves have quite a lot of British talent, MusicRadar (of Computer Music and Future Music):

Simon Cowell bemused by keytar trio

“This is not serious, right?” Evidently Mr. Cowell has quite a bit in common with certain grumpy readers of this site in comments. (You know who you are. We forgive you.)