It barely seems as though it’s been that long, but synthesis pioneer Robert Moog died six years ago this week. That has brought a whole new wave of remembrances, including a great new EP you can remix. And if you still don’t know what the fuss is about, or want to refer a friend somewhere other than Wikipedia, a guest essay popped into our inbox here at CDM HQ, so I’ll add that, too.

The best news, from where I sit: Tara Busch has donated a three-track EP entitled The Rocket Wife to the cause of bettering the Bob Moog Foundation’s work in history, archiving, and education. You may know Tara as the writer behind AnalogSuicide, or from her synthesist/vocalist career. Regardless, give this EP a listen. It’s a fanciful, dreamily optimistic album, recalling grand pop songwriting traditions. “Motor Crash” channels another Bush (Kate) in a very good way over its all-too-brief yet oddly satisfying minute and a half amuse-bouche. (Amuse-Busch?) “Calendura” is a gliding waltz set to angular, sparse percussion. But “Rocket Wife” is my favorite, a wonderland soundscape that sounds like some sunlight of the two afternoon suns on your foreign planet streamed right into a rack of Moogs in the studio of your dreams.

And, anyway, if you think you can do better with these raw materials, you can try to prove it. 17 tracks of stems are available for purchase, too, also as a benefit. Grab them, give them a remix, and winners will receive prizes like Bob Moog merch and a collaboration with Tara. You’ve got until October 15 to make it happen.

The Rocket Wife EP

The Stems and Contest

SoundCloud-based Contest Submissions [great idea!]

About Tara Busch

What else is new in the world of Bob Moog’s legacy?

Michelle Moog-Koussa (Bob Moog’s daughter) has her own blog, Moogstress. (Does that make us dudes Moogsters? Maestroogs?) See also a great new limited poster for donors.

Here’s a beautifully-shot video about what’s now called Dr. Bob’s Sound School. It’s just this kind of engineering-rich effort I think we need now in the US and worldwide to restart the economy, though that’s perhaps a story for another post.

Finally, writer Jennifer Helfrich sent us an unsolicited bio essay on Bob Moog. I was delighted to see it show up in my inbox, and it has the Bob Moog Foundation’s technical editing applied to it, so here it is – a great introduction to Bob Moog’s life.

Side editorial: I think it’s notable that Dr. Moog was a product of New York public education, beginning his educational journey at Bronx High School of Science and receiving his first BA – in physics, initially, not electrical engineering until later – at Queens College of The City University of New York. (Disclosure: I’m a PhD Candidate at CUNY’s Graduate Center.) It shows the power of public education to help support the people who innovate — just at a time when, in many places int he world, public education can be targeted for cuts.

Here’s Jennifer’s nicely-compact story:

Robert Moog is the godfather of modern electronic music, the man whose genius and passion made synthesizers accessible and put electronic sound generation on the musical map. This past Sunday, the 21st, was the six year anniversary of Bob Moog’s passing. Let us take a moment to remember his life and his legacy.

A New York native, he was born in 1934 to a mother who taught him piano and a father who puttered with house-hold electronics. Moog showed exceptional intelligence from an early age. He built a simple Theremin on his own at 14, and the experience made music his focus. At the tender age of 19 Moog founded R.A. Moog Co. to manufacture and sell Theremin kits. The business, begun at such an early age, exemplifies Moog’s incredible productive capacity and perhaps even a desire to share the joy he found in building his own.

During his bachelor and Ph.D. studies Moog began to develop his version of the synthesizer. Electronic synthesizers commercially available at the time were made of vacuum tubes and magnetic tape – they were huge, difficult to set-up, and often had to be custom made. With the 1964 presentation of his synthesizer Moog ushered in a new era of electronic music. Smaller and easier to use, with multiple modules for modifying voltage controlled oscillations and an organ-keyboard interface, the Moog synthesizer was ready for the music studio. Moog synthesizers hit the big-time with the success of the 1967 Wendy Carlos album Switched-On Bach. It was among the first classical albums to sell half-million copies, it hit the Top 10 and stayed in the Top 40 for 17 weeks.

As Moog synthesizers improved throughout the 60s and 70s they were featured in numerous albums by a wide variety of artists. Moog’s synthesizer helped shape disco; it showed up in the Beatles, the Doors, and the Monkees; both Stevie Wonder and Tangerine Dream loved the Moog synthesizer; it made appearances in genres from country to rock to jazz.

R.A. Moog Co. began to produce the Minimoog (Model D) in 1970 – an extremely popular smaller version of the synthesizer that was better suited to live performances. But the 60s had bankrupt Moog as other producers with larger factories outstripped his namesake firm. Moog sold the company and rights to the Moog name in 1972. Five years later Moog left the company, now Moog Music, frustrated with weak marketing and bad management. For the next 30 years he continued to develop and produce analog and digital tools for synthesizers, but during the time he could not produce under his own name Moog made no new instruments. Until, in 2002, he won back the rights to produce under his own name and returned to Moog Music. He designed and improved instruments at Moog Music until his death three years later in 2005.

The Moog legacy is a powerful inspiration for innovation in electronic music. His life was dedicated to the creation of quality analog and digital sounds composed in beautiful, interesting, and instructive ways. His understanding and appreciation of sound manipulation and the joys it can bring are carried on by the Bob Moog Foundation. His daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa, as the Director, remembers her father as a quiet, introspective, cool, quirky, funny guy with a rambunctious laugh who loved to teach. The Foundation teaches science through music, has a Grammy recognized archive of the Moog legacy, and plans to build a museum. They recently released Mooged Out Asheville, Volume 2, an album exemplifying the many ways Moog changed music with songs spanning far-flung genres from hip-hop to avant electronica, from dub-step to rock. To learn more about Bob Moog and how his life still touches ours, visit http://www.moogfoundation.org/.

By the way, since this tends to come up – CDM welcomes suggestions for innovators you’d like us to cover. The Bob Moog Foundation archives alone cover lots of early designers, inventors, composers, and musicians, not only Dr. Moog himself. If you’ve got an idea, let us know.

Watch for, at long last, a series remembering the history of Max Mathews shortly — I’ve been editing it. It’s great the assemblage of people who helped build the tools we use.

Sometimes, looking back at pioneers can be nostalgic. “Back in my day,” goes the story, “electronic composers were real electronic composers.” But then you hear from someone like Curtis Roads, and his mind-blowing ideas are coupled with a belief that we’re only now reaching the Golden Age of electronic sounds. Rory Ahearn writes to share the latest episode of the show Motherboard on VBS TV, which talks to composer Curtis Roads. Roads was ground-breaking in his early granular synthesis work in the 1970s as he continues to be today.

Motherboard: Curtis Roads – Think Granular

Rory writes:

There are two divergent streams in 20th century electronic music: The one most people are familiar with starts out with goofballs like Jean-Jacques Perrey and Vangelis noodling around on synthesizers and eventually devolves into Kaja Googoo. Curtis Roads is part of the other path, the one that follows insane geniuses like Stockhausen and Morton Subotnik and uses whatever-period-it-happens-to-be’s state-of-the-art computer technology to produce compositions that completely defy conventional music logic and sometimes sound more like a freaked-out ATM than tunes you put on and listen to.

Even having heard him say it before, I never get tired of hearing Roads speak about working with music “below the note level,” and even below the surface level, to sounds that are only perceived when you hear the resulting, total composition. He describes going beyond just notes in the interview:

Electronic music extends the domain of composition from a closed, homogenous set of notes … to an open universe of heterogeneous sound objects … All of a sudden, we’re working with any sound possible. And that really changes the game.

There’s also a rather poetic comment on why synthetic sounds can be wonderful – a notion that always bears repeating:

Natural sounds are beautiful … but the virtual sound world is also beautiful, the world of sine waves, of impulses, of electronically-generated tones. That’s a vast space… Voila!

As seen, as well, on Synthtopia.

2008 has been an amazing year for music technology. But I can’t bring myself to look back on it on this New Year’s Eve: not when there’s so much to look forward to in 2009. Case in point? An extraordinary, innovative new controller that in a matter of hours was already spreading among connected music technologists around the planet.

At the end of the day, it’s not hard to describe what you might want out of an expressive music controller. Most people would agree on that. The challenge is really an engineering problem. Solve the engineering problem in an artful way, and you can spend the rest of your time just practicing playing your invention. That’s what makes the above video so exciting.

Randall Jones has built a really elegant and wonderful multi-touch hardware controller, as reported by MAKE:blog (and picked up on Hack a Day). With $50 in parts and a lot of clever hardware design and software coding, Jones has built an interface that responds to both touch and pressure and, using some smart sonic mapping, can realistically reproduce instruments like the dumbek and guiro.

Intimate Control for Physical Modeling Synthesis [Project Page / Paper Abstract]

PDF, Randall Jones MSc Research Paper

Who needs a “top 10 technologies of 2008” post for CDM when this particular instrument could pretty easily top the whole list? Let’s just call it done, and uncork the champagne: major congrats, Randy! (This is a master’s thesis!)

Jones’ work does have some precedent, but just to review how much he’s accomplished here: he’s innovated in terms of the sensing, the form factor, the software interpolation, and the way in which the control data is mapped to a synthesis method. (Whew!) That has had a number of specific achievements:

• A clever form factor: The basic design here is elegant and could be adaptable to other form factors. Most importantly, the use of polypropylene and silicone rubber means the interface deforms nicely as you press it, giving you feedback. And that opens lots of other similar design possibilities. Translation: being squishy rocks.
• Multidimensional / force-sensitive input: “Multi-touch” usually only means something that can take multiple touch inputs at one time, as in, from multiple fingers. But as I’ve complained in the past, the problem is that most multi-touch interfaces, like the Lemur and iPhone, don’t respond to the amount of pressure or deform (providing tactile feedback) when you use them. That makes them feel a bit like an ATM screen that happens to take more than one finger at a time. Jones’ prototype responds to how hard you’re pressing or hitting it, and it’s more sensitive – more like a real-world instrument. Jones calls this “multidimensional,” but force-sensitive would be another way to look at it. Translation: it’s more organic than entering your ATM PIN code.
• Audio-rate resolution: By choosing to use audio signal for control rather than … well, anything else, Randy gets an extremely responsive control signal. The controller itself is passive, requiring no power. Everything is done by processing audio created by the sensors. That’s not a new idea, but by returning to it in this context, Randy makes a much more responsive controller than most touch and multi-touch controllers before it, and returns to some of the analog-style control of instruments like the Theremin and acoustic instruments. Translation: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
• Smart centroid processing: To make touch points accurate, Randy wrote a new object for Jitter that does centroid calculation. Translation: Randy worked through the details.
• Waveguide mesh modeling for deep sonic results: None of this would be meaningful without meaningful sounds coming out of it. Here, Randy builds on previous work in creating a physical model of a drum head (back to the dumbek), but both refines the model and works intelligently through how to match it with the controller. Translation: it makes good noises.

There are some other related touch devices, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but rather than reinvent his work, I’d suggest reading through Randy’s own research paper. He does a great job talking about what’s great and not-as-great about other research and products, and makes a terrific argument for his design choices. (Basically, see also the Haken Continuum, the Korg WaveDrum, the Tactex MTC Express, the CNMAT multitouch controller, and the Audio-Input Radio Drum.)

Now, if this kind of development had come about a few years ago, the next thing we’d be talking about is how this might be commercialized. Part cost is cheap – that’s good news. I don’t know Randy’s plans for licensing and future development. But we can already compare how this might have gone had this been introduced, say, a few years ago.

The old model:

1. Spend a couple of years more refining the prototype on your own.

2. Show off the work at an academic conference in Italy. People can see it if they’re associated with an academic institution that’s also willing to pick up their airfare and let them leave for a week. (Anyone who’s had to wrestle with their department to get a couple hundred dollars for a thousand dollars in actual expenses knows what I’m talking about here.)

3. Publish in an academic journal a handful of people get, so they can try to figure out what it’s like from diagrams and grainy black-and-white photos (and no sound). Oh yeah – no one can actually comment on the story, either, so advanced researchers lack feedback and newcomers lack context and commentary.

4. Get the prototype ready for NAMM. Blow a bunch of cash on a hotel in Anaheim and a NAMM booth.

5. Work out a complex, expensive production and distribution scheme that in turn jacks up the price. Hope someone finds it and can afford it.

6. To justify the cost, make the product as finished as possible. Sell it as a “Digital Dumbek” to eccentric, loaded rock stars.

Now, I don’t want to sound grumpy or naive. The truth is, some really brilliant instruments have been down this road. But I’m not sure the description above really did a whole lot for their brilliance. I’m not necessarily saying there aren’t benefits to some of the above techniques, but clearly they won’t work for everyone.

The new model:

“Where’s my flying car?” That’s the question that often comes up when technology and a New Year coincide. With music, though, I think what we’ve really been waiting for is a convergence of new technology and new communities. Flip through the Computer Music Tutorial’s section on new instruments, and you’ll see some fantastic, exotic, and often familiar new interfaces. So what has 2009 got that the last few decades didn’t? Think cut-rate, faster tech, and a connected Web community to develop, evangelize, and use new technologies.

1. Get 20,000 Vimeo views the moment you post your first demo. No one has to fly anywhere.

2. Connect with people doing research and experiments worldwide and get instant feedback and ideas and potential collaboration – even if they’re not publishing research or flying to conferences or are even academics.

3. Instead of assuming you’ll build a finished, closed product (hello, “Digital Dumbek”), figure people will want to hack the result. (Randy has already posted parts lists, so it’s possible to build this thing right now if you’re so inclined. And he also says in Vimeo contents he’s thinking about doing a version that transmits OpenSoundControl data, so you could use it to control other instruments, music, or even visuals.)

You’ve already skipped a lot of the steps that were previously necessary just to find interested parties. And that network could in turn be used to figure out how to make the thing around the world at a lower cost and get it directly to people who might want to buy it. It also assumes those people might hack the tool for very different applications, instead of having to target one particular kind of person.

Nothing about this is a panacea for innovation: most of the hard engineering problems remain, and this doesn’t mean you can magically create new products. But there’s no question that even changing the hurdles means there’s new potential. If 2009 is about anything, I hope it’s about people finding new solutions to taking that potential and tapping into it. You can bet it’ll be a major focus of this site.

Congrats, Randy – we’ll be watching.

Happy New Year.

Minitek is a massive “electronic music + innovation festival” coming to New York this weekend. If you’re anywhere in the area, I definitely recommend finding a way to get out here. And if you’re far away, stay tuned, as we’re planning some epic coverage here on CDM. The events are split between Midtown Manhattan and the eccentric shores of Coney Island (above).

The music lineup includes some big names — think Richie Hawtin, Magda, M.A.N.D.Y., Audiofly, Audion (big highlight for me), Adultnapper, Heidi, Guy Gerber, and the like, with Francois K closing out the evening. But for those of you whose tastes tend in the more experimental, there’s quite a bit of that, too.

Under the “innovation” category, we’ll see works like James Patten on the tangible Audiopad interface, Norman Fairbanks jamming on the Tenori-On, Audiocube players, and more. There’s also a big lineup of generative visuals for the nights; we’re covering that on our sister site Create Digital Motion. You’ll also be able to chat up record labels and play with the tech during the day in the village on Coney Island.

Minitek Festival Site; ticket info (you will want to get a pass if you can!)

Set times are finally up, though that includes only the main acts, not the innovation. (I know some of the, ahem, “innovators” so when they find out themselves when they’re playing, I’ll pass it on!)

Details are constantly coming in, so you can watch the blog or mailing list on the site. And yes, Astroland just closed, but Coney Island’s other rides are up, in case you want to hop on the Cyclone between sets. (Artists playing, if anyone wants a CDM interview on one of the rides, I’m game. I think it’s be fun to do an interview mixed with screams on the coaster.)

Tangible Roots

One of the projects I’m most excited about is Roots, a new music/visual interactive installation for the Brick interface. Co-creators Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis took home a Tenori-On the last time they ran into CDM (video of that after the jump); this time they team up with London-based designer Memo Akten for some beautiful generative visuals. (They’re also behind the Arduino-based Monome clone we saw a couple of weeks ago.) Here’s a short teaser video; we’ll have more on this after the weekend.

Roots Multi Touch Tangible Installation Teaser from BricK Table on Vimeo.

And that’s just a taste of one of the innovation day projects, every single one of which have gotten a mention (or three) somewhere in the pages of CDM in the past (really)!
Here’s Jordan and Owen in the heart-stopping finish to CDM’s Futuristic Design Challenge, in the moments that won them the Tenori-On prize we gave up.

Brick Table @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008 Lightning Round from BricK Table on Vimeo.

Today, CDM is proud to announce a new feature to keep us competitive with fast-moving music technology coverage on the Web. It’s called “Industry Clipboard Connection,” and it allows us to fully connect you with the latest industry news by giving you complete, un-edited press release content, pasted up to the minute. And we kick it off with what I think is a really game-changing product that could change the relationship of vocalists to bands forever. Be sure to read the full press release for the complete details. Seriously. I think you’ll want to read to the end.

Sweetwater announces today the innovative Virtual Frontman plug-in:

(Fort Wayne, Ind.) – New addition to Sweetwater’s plug-in family brings true character to any vocalist -

Sweetwater’s Reasearch & Development Department, creators of such popular tools as the Talent plug-in, Guitar Racket, Minute Audio, and the Octavisor, has announced their latest addition to the Sweetwater family of professional music and audio tools, Virtual Frontman.

Virtual Frontman is a Mac- and Windows-compatible plug-in that supports Audio Units, MAS, VST, RTAS, Direct X, TDM, and 120-volt plug-in formats. The plug-in uses sophisticated proprietary runway modeling techniques to encode the vocal and behavioral characteristics of the world’s most iconoclastic rock frontmen onto any vocalist’s performance. According to Mark Hutchins, Sweetwater’s Assistant Director of Cable Ties, and the near-genius behind the idea of Virtual Frontman, “I’ve suffered for years with the uni-dimensional performances of the singers in my bands. I was looking for a simple, efficient plug-in tool that would allow you to add real excitement and charisma to a band’s vocals.”

Sweetwater’s R&DD utilized top-secret proprietary techniques to analyze the performance factors of rock music’s most charismatic frontmen, then concatenated the resulting data onto state-of-the-art Mead notebook paper (precision punched for mounting into a 3-ring binder) using a diamond-sharpened #2 pencil. No erasers were used when compiling the data. Don Delong, the Virtual Frontman Project Manager stated, “We spared no expense while compiling the data used to create Virtual Frontman. All pizzas we consumed during lunch breaks had double cheese, and were of the thick-crust variety.” 

Virtual Frontman works like any standard plug-in, and is compatible with any major or minor key DAW. The source vocal track passes into the plug-in, and is processed with a Multistage Attitude Adjustment Algorithm (MA3). Sliders are provided for imparting various amounts of up to ten different frontmen, ranging from Morrison to Mercury. In the future, Frontman Add-on Machismo Expander (FAME) modules will allow the user to add the attitude and behavior of a wide range of frontmen from the Country, Blues, Folk, Opera, and instrumental light jazz genres to Virtual Frontman.

Going beyond simple modeling, Virtual Frontman will turn any singer into the inappropriately arrogant, inebriated, immature, offensive stage nightmare you’ve been dreaming of for your recordings, and, using the optional VF Stage Dive adapter, for your live on-stage performances. Controls such as “Pitch Sense” will flatten the pitch of even the most rigidly in-tune vocalist, while the Maturity setting will bring a sense of true childishness to your singer’s behavior. The multi-parameter Stage Presence control can be used to take your singer from calm stasis to peripatetic stage domination. For after- concert situations, the Tear-down/Load Out preference setting will prevent your singer from straining him or herself by carrying more than a microphone or cable. If your singer is shy and retiring, the exclusive Verbosity control will make your singer as talkative as you desire, upping the annoyance factor on those long, late-night bus rides when you’re trying to sleep.

The high-resolution Egometer and Substance Abuse Blood Contents meters will provide instant visual feedback of your singer’s status, while the combination Pitch Correction/Artificial British Accent meter visually displays the results of critical parameter adjustments.

Virtual Frontman is also the first plug-in to offer Sweetwater’s patented Superficial Appearance Demarcation (SAD) technology. Using carefully calibrated Narcissism, Fashion Sense, and Hair controls you can tailor your vocalist’s look to exactly your specifications. Innovative controls such as Arrest Record, Political Activism, and Fidelity (selectable for Wife or Husband) will ensure your band’s appearance in the tabloid papers, while the Vocal Durability parameter will allow you to take a night off whether you want to or not. To further delay performances, the Latency control can make your singer anywhere from one to two hours late for your gigs and sessions.

Sweetwater founder and president Chuck Surack stated, “Ever since I founded Sweetwater nearly 30 years ago, I’ve been concerned that we’ve been unable to truly address the needs of bands with regard to their frontman, now we’ve got exactly the tool every band needs. I’m so proud of our new Virtual Frontman plug-in. This is the kind of technological innovation that could only come from Sweetwater.”

Sweetwater’s Virtual Frontman will be available in the 5th quarter of 2008, at a suggested retail price of $299. The optional VF Stage Dive live performance adapter will ship immediately following the plug-in, for $799. Additional FAME modules are expected to become available in early 2007.

For further news and information on Virtual Frontman, visit www.sweetwater.com.

Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone. I’ll admit, I wasn’t going to play, but this was too good to pass up. It reminded me of the true meaning of April Fool’s, in a sort of Scrooge-like reawakening. (PS, thanks to Mitch Gallagher at Sweetwater; the Sweetwater folks really did write the copy above and create the images. No foolin’.)