The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is a cash prize contest for new musical instruments held this month at Georgia Tech, judged by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk, Harmonix co-founder Eran Egozy, and Georgia Tech’s Parag Chordia. There are some familiar faces in there, but some fascinating, new ideas, too, like a motorcycle engine you can play with a keyboard. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Wired.com has a slide show of images with audio samples and videos for many of the projects:

New Musical Instruments Battle for $10K in Prizes

CDM held a similar contest judged by drum machine pioneer Roger Linn and the members of tech-loving band Freezepop, held at NASA’s Ames Research Center and Yuri’s Night last year. The difference: we offered one Tenori-On; this had $10,000 in cash prizes. Oh, and we sort of had folks show up randomly and judged them partly based on how loud the crowd cheered. But I love the idea, and hope we see more of this kind of spirit of experimentation.

I know we have some Georgia Tech readers here, and I expect a few of the contestents – did anyone get video of the competition itself? Anyone want to send along some additional documentation of your project? Remember, you’re Always a Winner on CDM (SM)!

I quite like this self-contained sampler tool with monome-style controller:

Touch interfaces abound on this site, but Usine has one edge: it’s built right out of the box to enable touch interfaces with custom, modular creation of whatever you might like. And there’s now an Ableton Live template in testing, with a lovely 5×5 controller.

The advantage of working this way, as I see it, is that you can begin to expand Live sessions beyond endlessly-looping, pre-built audio clips or DJ-style mixing.

Discussion on the Sensomusic forum:

5 x 5 Live Control Patch

More on Usine:

Modular Sound by Touch: Usine

And for two significant new multitouch tools, from last week:

Roll Your Own Multitouch Screens, Tables: Max Multitouch Framework, PyMT

Depeche Mode’s latest album, “Sounds of the Universe,” is due April 20 internationally. I got the chance to cover the band for Keyboard Magazine, speaking with Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher as well as returning producer Ben Hillier, who was a big part of the signature sound of 2005’s “Playing the Angel.” Martin developed eBay and KVR Audio addictions during the making of the album, so you can imagine just how much gear love was part of the process – with the talent of the musicians and Hillier’s vision as a producer managing to keep the resulting sound open and polished.

You’ll get to read the finished story in the May issue of Keyboard – meaning there’s still time to subscribe if (ahem) your subscription may have lapsed. But my editor at Keyboard got a great brainstorm. Ben Hillier and 140 dB sent us some spy photos from inside the studio, so Keyboard has posted those shots and challenge their readers to identify just what’s going on.

Depeche Mode Behind the Scenes – Part I
Part II (with contest)
Part III

I’m doing this for entirely selfish reasons. One, I’d find it hilarious if a CDM reader won the contest. Two, I’m quite curious about the gear that isn’t identified with numbers or labeled in the captions. Now, I know what some of it is, but consider it a bonus challenge to those who find the first five too easy. (Well, some are very blurry shots, so that should help keep the difficulty amped up…) For those extras, feel free to comment here. (Well, obviously not the contest entries, or you’ll spoil the contest.)

As a thank-you, the winner gets the new album and a free subscription to the magazine.

This is not the contest image at top – it’s Martin Gore with the very gifted recording engineer Ferg Peterkin (whose name I also find strangely comforting).

Good luck. I’ll keep my mouth shut. We’ll have more available online, including some words from Ben Hillier on the techniques used in production, when the issue ships – stay tuned.

c

Ever feel like you’ve found the seam dividing past and future?

The past: restrictive UI frameworks requiring pages and pages of code to produce dated-look 2D displays. Proprietary software with rigid interfaces. Input bottlenecked through the x and y coordinates of a single mouse pointer.

The future: UIs whipped together graphically or with a few lines of code. 3D mixed with 2D. Open-source, friendly frameworks. Creating your own interface or drawing upon a community of creative software makers. Input that uses multitouch for gestures, collaborative input, manipulation of 2D and 3D space, and … well, just a lot more fun.

There’s no need to wait around for the future. Creative software inventors are building it for themselves. Here are two of the most promising multitouch interface projects I’ve seen in my inbox.

In no time at all, you’ll be painting a cow! (Okay, more on that in a moment…)

Look out, Akai APC40. There’s another contender in the emerging Controller With Lots of Buttons And Also Faders and Knobs and Crossfader product category. Livid’s Ohm64 combines the light-up button grid with faders, knobs, trigger buttons, and most importantly, unique customization options and a lovely wooden case. What’s unique about this one:

• High-end materials: anodized aluminum faceplate, “immersion gold-platted circuit boards” (guess that’s circuit bling), an optional wooden body (aluminum is available, as well, but wood is more fun).
• Not mass-market: hand-assembled, small-production Austin creation.
• Fully class-compliant, no drivers (also true of the APC as far as I know, but nice – and ideal for Linux, too, in case you want to run this with a netbook or a Pd-running souped-up *nix laptop)
• Open-source, customizable MIDI talkback: when you’re ready to customize just how those LEDs light up, there are included open source tools and fully programmable MIDI mapping

Bonus: it comes with a powerful, full-featured VJ app in the box, Cell DNA, though of course you can use it with anything you like.

The real story to me is the customization. Whereas the APC40 is entirely proprietary in design, has evidently limited MIDI mappings, and a mysterious mechanism for programming two-way communication, the Ohm64 is open, open source, and software-agnostic. If the open source thing catches on, that could mean a community of friendly folk thinking of smart ways to reprogram this thing for different apps. Ironically, that means that in the long run, the Ohm64 could wind up with better Ableton Live integration than the hardware Ableton chose to back – though all bets are off until we get these devices in our hands.

I would say the APC is probably more direct competition for the Ohm64 than the Monome, despite the 8×8 light-up buttons. The Monome is much lighter and slimmer, it takes a minimalist approach (no big knobs or faders), and uses OpenSoundControl in place of MIDI. The Ohm64 seems likely to appeal to those who weren’t Monome fans, and visa versa. And some lucky bastards are naturally going to own both.

But the important thing is that the Ohm64 joins the Monome in its crusade for open-source customization of a commercial product. Whatever the Ohm64 is when it ships, it’s that question of what people can do with it that may determine its real value. I have no doubt people will be reverse engineering the APC40, too — starting with figuring out how to fake the hardware “handshake” it uses so other devices can emulate it in Live. But it’ll be interesting to see how these different philosophies pan out, so to speak.

I hope to sit down with the Ohm64 as soon as they ship to Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from me in Livid’s NYC-area offices. Stay tuned.

No pricing yet; the existing Ohm with fewer buttons is priced at US$599-699 on sale.

Ohm64 Product Page