The novelty of the iPhone or [your favorite device here] may fade. But part of what matters in mobile design is thinking about how to create interfaces and uses that can scale to the size of your palm. That can mean embracing radical simplicity, and reducing an interactive, digital musical object down to its essential noise-making functions. In acoustic instrument design, that means economizing sound production in a form. In the digital world, it means finding the interactive role you’d want to bring with you onstage, in the length roughly equivalent your fingertips to your wrist.

I’m a few weeks overdue actually writing about it, but one design I really admire is Star6, developed by Jason Forrest and Agile Partners. There are no awkward, gimmicky emulations of hardware interfaces here; it’s clear this was an interface that was illustrated in two-dimensions. It has funky nerdster chic color combos, with neon pink atop wood grain. It demonstrates that, in the space of a grid, you can fit triangles. It makes use of computer wifi capability to easily load samples without mucking around with over-designed clients – or record right on the iPhone. And it’s – surprisingly – one of the few apps to make heavy use of the accelerometer, which means rather than looking like you’re trying to text message someone, you can move it around. There’s a “grain” mode so that you can randomize sounds and not have everything synced all the time. I also enjoy the “reset” button. These are all design decisions that could make sense in more commercial software – and our own home-brewed Max/Pd patches and such, too.

Apparently Agile Partners were also influenced by the brightly-colored, handheld fun of the Buddha Machine, too; see their interview with the creator.

Star6
A lovely lineup of free samples, including the Buddha Machine

It’s not a perfect app (no mobile app really can be – that’s the fun of it), and it doesn’t do everything, but I find Star6’s personality rather irresistible. The real test of all of this is whether you can use it in real music-making. And, while my inbox is full of cheezy bands trying to ride the iPhone wave, I love the offbeat Star6 music launch party from Berlin, as documented in the video below. It ranges from Jason’s own work to Warp Records artist Jackson and ex-Chicks on Speed Kiki Moorse. And there’s a crazy iPhone + banjo + accordion cover of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” There are even some genuinely experimental sounds – not the sort of thing you’d expect at a launch event, sadly. (I wish we could have more of that.)

An Evening With Star6 – Berlin (Compilation) from Star6 on Vimeo.

More on the artists, and some of Star6 creator Jason Forrest’s own unique work:

Jason’s own artistic aesthetic, as seen in this video for “War Photographer,” does have this quirky efficiency to it, the sense of cut-out animation (in both visuals and music, I’d argue), and saturated, rich, retro colors.

The eclectic Berlin launch.

Jackson (Warp, FR)
Kiki Moorse (ex-Chicks On Speed,DE)
Song Band (US)
Jason Forrest (CRD, US)
Guido Mobius (Karaoke Kalk, DE)
Ben Butler & Mousepad (SCT/DE)
DJ’s: Finkobot & Marius Reisser

Jacki Terrasse / Joseph (@ Maria)
An Der Schilling Brücke
10243 Berlin

For more on the artists:
myspace.com/moorse
myspace.com/jacksonand
myspace.com/benbutlerandmousepad
myspace.com/guidomoebius
myspace.com/jason_forrest
myspace.com/songbandmyspace
myspace.com/finckobot
myspace.com/mariusreisser

Video shot by Martin Sulzer
Photos by Marco Macrobi

Complete sets:
Ben Butler and Mousepad
Guido Mobius
Kiki Moorse
Jason Forrest

GPS Beatmap from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

“Locative art,” the idea that somehow location will feed into music and visuals, has eluded culture. We have the technology, in the form of sophisticated databases of location information and highly accurate, publicly-available GPS satellites. But it’s one of those solutions in search of a problem, and begs the question, why?

That is, until you unleash a nearly 6-liter V8 Ford LTD Crown Victoria on the legendary Bonneville Salt Flats, and your driving gets translated to music. Now it makes sense. And sweeping through the salty dust in one of America’s greatest action-car-chase cars of all time, manipulating music on a Max/MSP software patch, all becomes right with the world. (That’s how it is in my head, anyway.)

The planet is your control surface.

Such is the project sent by co-creator Jesse Stiles, who worked with Rich Pell (and editor/documentarian Olivia Robinson) under the name Face Removal Services to perform this vehicular musical production. (Thank, as well, The Center for Land Use Interpretation / GPS Expo 2006. PS – I think we now know what to do with all those clunkers Americans are turning in for Cash for Clunkers.)

Now, this covers only X and Y axis. I think we need to add the Z-axis, for base jumpers. (I had a dream last night in which I was hang gliding from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River below, a reminder that the Earth – and computer interfaces – do not have to be flat.)

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.

Skeptical about the connection of music-based games and actual music making? Think again – even as music education unravels worldwide, games are actually encouraging real music. That revelation was the impetus of the music box project:

Research commissioned by Youth Music found that up to 2.5 million young people in the UK – or 1 million aged between 12 and 18 – have been inspired to progress into ‘real’ music-making because they have played music-based console games.

You got it – they hit those plastic buttons, got inspired, got bored, then decided to go to the real thing. And otherwise, they might have remained passive musical consumers: the game was a gateway drug. Of course, that means that any such interactive experience has to stand up to polished Guitar Hero and Rock Band-style games. But anyone who believes the music games genre has peaked and is on its way out may be dead wrong on many, many levels. On the contrary, this may only be getting started – and the real growth could come in music beyond the realm of games, as people graduate to the unlimited set of possible music experiences.

Chris sends lots more documentation of this project, if you’d like to learn more:

by silent studios and me for uk charity youth music to get kids turned on to music
http://www.vimeo.com/6210259

watch some bbc coverage here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8160000/newsid_8168800/8168881.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8154449.stm

Ed.: The video at top doesn’t play outside the UK, because we don’t pay BBC license fees. What, all those Doctor Who videos I bought in the 80s and 90s didn’t make up for it?

here is a press release from roland. the box is ‘powered by roland’
http://www.audioprointernational.com/news/1329/Roland-unveils-Music-Box-for-Youth-Music

some launch pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621466657993/

making of pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621404410234/

this goes into some of the ideas and details about the musical kit
http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/blog/24/youthmusicboxlaunchesatlondonssouthbankcentre/

on the website there is a very simplified flash version you can try out on a mini timeline, just click play online :)

its quite funny to read these comments on it
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/07/youth-music-box-democratizes-music-creation.html

And yes, you can try this yourself and play online! The official site:

http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/youth_music_box/

The production company:

http://www.silentstudios.co.uk/

And Chris’ own site:

http://www.chrisoshea.org/

Roland is involved, and donated an E-09 Interactive Music Arranger to give kids some toys to explore.

And yes, I did notice a certain kindred spirit in the form of Moldover’s Octamasher. The underlying technology and its results are different, but to me what’s most interesting isn’t the superficial similarity of these projects, but the fact that they array the instruments in a circle. Computer production often simply orients a single person to a screen – not so ideal for collaboration. And even Rock Band and Guitar Hero, like an onstage band, line up artists for a (now nonexitent) audience. Perhaps the circle is about to make a comeback as music restores its social aspect.

Curious to hear other thoughts on these projects as they evolve.

Float away with Mujik… from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Musical technology is often designed to be “hard” in character. Interfaces are cold and technological-looking, futuristic like spaceships, or made to replicate antique gear to make guitarists feel nostalgic. Musical interfaces consciously avoid anything “childish” – calling something a “toy” being the worst possible insult – and they’re certainly never whimsical.

That’s why the real news about Mujik isn’t that it’s a new iPhone app, or that, after a few weeks of teasers, you can download it today on the iTunes store. (The app is free for a limited time.) The news is that it’s a musical interface with lightning bugs.

Mujik teaser… from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

The creators, led by Yann Seznec, clearly had this goal in mind:

Do you want an iPhone app to make beats? And produce like totally awesome tracks with a zillion channels and plugins and automation and 808 simulators and stuff yeah? Oh. Well, this is not for you. Mujik is more than a music app – get away from fake sliders and buttons and enter the world of Mujik, with charming graphics, lovely music, and a wonderfully tactile interface. It’s not rocket science, it’s just fun.

Mujik is brought to you by Lucky Frame, a small team of awesome people based in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s lovely here, you should come visit.

You can’t save yet, but I rather like that. And while you can’t yet add your own sounds (which they’re also working on), I actually can imagine this would be something you’d share with your friends who are intimidating by the arcane, unreadable tracker you have installed on your hacked Game Boy.

On the team: Yann Seznec is also known as The Amazing Rolo, who we’ve seen previously on CDM making a free Wii looping machine, and who recently did a three-part series just for CDM on the Maker Faire. (one, two, three)

Thanks to Chris Hahn on Twitter for the tip!

For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.

Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.

(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)

The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.

Download MP3 of the interview

Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.

Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!

More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano

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Matti Niinimäki is back DJing with flea market, broken appliances as physical interfaces – and the whole project is getting better and better. We saw an early prototype of the Beat Blender, a re-purposed Osterizer with fake fuzzy fruit that stand in for loops. Now, Matt has added a handheld mixer for scratching.

The Mixmaster 1200 is a wireless scratching device for the turntablist who prefers to deliver his/her scratches like a 5 star chef. As you can see, the Mixmaster does not have any beaters attached to it. This is because it has small laser powered plasma emitter beaters that actually heat up the airwaves around the device itself producing the unique sounding aural explosions.

Motion – Mixed Up (2009) [originalhamsters]

I recently got to see a Numark NS7 in the flesh, the controller that company hopes will be the last word in DJing. It’s got nothing on this.

I’ve got to hook something up to my Breville… maybe temperature sensors.

Matt may have beat you to this idea, but I guarantee, if you’ve been thinking about alternative controllers, you will never see a flea market in the same way again.

David Merrill, working with Jeevan Kalanithi and (for the audio engine) Josh Kopin, wowed audiences at the TED conference with his Siftables interactive blocks. These strike me as what the Audiocubes have tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to be — physical objects that react to the proximity of other objects, allowing you to manipulate music and media by moving around tangible blocks. Siftables are gifted with multiple expressive controls (tilt helping them break the plane of the surface), and intelligent screens that make them more adaptable and provide more visual feedback.

The music sequencer is very cool, though I think it’s actually the Scrabble-like game that may be the winner among the demos. But while TED celebrates all things cool and futuristic for their easily-digestible novelty, sometimes I think the most important design achievements are as significant in their shortcomings as their successes. Siftables raises some important questions. Sure, you can now use two hands, as opposed to the single mouse pointer. But do those same tangible blocks actually limit the kinds of interactions you can have, even compared to a traditional UI? Does it sound any different/ And note that — a little bit of tilting aside — the interface is still essentially two-dimensional. I’m personally really stumped by the question of how you can make a successful three-dimensional controller. Yet three dimensions is how all of us interact with space and movement daily. Maybe it’s the fact that we do so much of this, comprehend movement so richly, and take it for granted, that makes mapping those gestures so challenging.

That’s not a criticism of the project – or a claim that I can do any better. On the contrary, I think it’s important to do this sort of work because it can raise those kinds of questions. We’re gifted as a generation to try out and test these ideas with flexibility that was never before possible — and the intelligence built into these objects shows the potential of that power.

More of Siftables after the jump. And it’s well worth checking out David’s other projects, too – when I last ran into him, he was showing off the totable, Linux-powered Audiopint sound-processing box. Oh, yeah — and he’s the face control for guitar guy!

Siftables Music Sequencer from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.

Siftables project page

More Merrill Goodness

I want to highlight two sequencers that you play as if they’re games. (Just don’t play a Vulcan – they always win.)

Robots on a Grid

Al-Jazari is named for a 13th-Century scholar and musician who apparently invented an entire band of water-powered hydraulic robotic musicians with more than fifty facial and body movements per song. (Okay, that clearly deserves a separate post later. So, our Western education is so eager to avoid the achievements of Arabs that we skipped over the fact that he basically invented Disneyland in the Middle Ages.)

Al-Jazari in the 21st Century iteration takes the idea of robotic agents and builds a sequencer around them. Creator Dave built a grid on which you can give the robots symbolic instructions (like up, right, down, left), selected from a gamepad. Each grid square represents a note, with pitch modulated by moving bricks up and down. Like Elysium, the music is generated as events are triggered on the grid. And like Microsoft Research’s (non-musical) game Kodu, the gamepad and a set of symbols make what is essentially scripting easy and transparent. (Few would likely call this “programming” because it doesn’t look scary, but that’s what it actually is.)

Al-Jazari is open source, built in the elegant coding language Scheme (a Lisp dialect) atop a game engine called Fluxus. Dave has extensive documentation on its development, and not only the code but even the textures and models. You can use this yourself on Mac and Linux, but it’ll require some messy compiling. (Thanks for this link, MattH – this is layered with things that blow my mind!)

Al Jazari [pawful.org]

reacTogon

Mark Burton’s reacTogon was the influence for Elysium. It’s a “chain reactive performance arpeggiator” – that is, it takes the usual, static, repeating patterns of an arpeggiator and turns them into something altogether different, by allowing events to transform dynamically in two dimensions across a hexagonal grid. The interface is a multi-touch controller with physical objects, so there’s a tangible element, as well.

Looking at reacTogon alongside Al-Jazari really demonstrates some of the advantages of a hexagonal grid versus the more traditional square grid. (And if you think about most musical applications, most of what we have is relatively non-dynamic right-angle grids. There’s movement, but only left to right, with start/stop or loop points. One exception: Follow Actions in Ableton Live.)

Al-Jazari requires movement only to tiles with adjacent edges. reacTogon, since it tiles hexagons, has six adjacent tiles instead of four. It can also map a harmonic table, as other musical hexagonal grids do. Now, that’s not to say reacTogon is better than the other – on the contrary, it demonstrates that just one choice – a grid of squares or a grid of hexagons – can create very different musical possibilities. So even if you’re not musically impressed by these examples just yet, think about the possibilities here. We’re still early in software design and musical interface, so early that something as simple as a simple geometric pattern can become an entire composition.

That’s something to ponder on the eve of the music manufacturers’ trade show.

(If anyone has more documentation on Mark or his creation, let me know.)

I’m going to make this a minimalist post because I’ve said what I’ll say about Kodu, the one really cool part of Microsoft’s keynote yesterday, on Create Digital Motion. (Am I the only person who wishes Sparrow had just done the whole keynote?)

But have a look at the shot above. One of the complaints about generative and algorithmic music software (and music software in general) is that the interface has been so complex. Clearly, there are many other ways to design these interfaces, and in turn, to shape the way we use these to compose and perform music. Forget for a moment that games are “games,” and this this thing is “for kids,” and I think you’ll agree – there are lots of areas to explore, and lots of potential.

It doesn’t even require some futuristic music software. Imagine more complex rules in Ableton Live’s follow actions, made graphically.

Excuse me, I’m going to pick up some Tinker Toys to think about interactive design.

You Know, For Kids: Game Design, World Creation as Microsoft Research Previews Kodu [Create Digital Motion]

PS, I believe now more than ever that Music and Motion deserve separate sites, but have a look and I think you will find some overlap.

It’s official: we had heard rumblings that game maker Harmonix was about to announce something, and it’s here. It’s a collaboration directly with the Beatles to make something that isn’t Rock Band or Guitar Hero — something completely new. And something completely new is exactly what’s needed.

Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, before being purchased by MTV/Viacom, game developer Harmonix were a very different creative house. Co-founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy were MIT friends whose first project was an application that let you play guitar with a joystick. (Sounds like a research project you might read about here.) Their interactive music games were influenced by the explosion of Japanese titles like PaRappa the Rapper and Beatmania, to be sure. But part of what made FreQuency and Amplitude so important was that they offered more than just a simplified music experience. They were digitally-powered acid trips, with VJ-style video clips playing up buildings and surprisingly sophisticated interfaces that remixed the music as you played.

Make no mistake about it: Guitar Hero and Rock Band are brilliant titles with a fair dose of musical integrity in the way they abstract playing experiences for broader audiences. But there’s no question some of the original creativity — the sense that the game experience was unlike any other experience — is missing. And in this pumped-up HD age, in which surreal game experiences like intra-dimensional navigation in Portal or ambient floating cartoon paramecia in Spore, it’s hard to wonder if gamers who weren’t ready to snap up FreQuency a few years ago might be ready now.

So while rival Activision bakes a watered-down GarageBand-style app into another iteration of Guitar Hero, it’s intriguing, at least, that Harmonix is working with the Beatles. And they really are working with surviving Beatles and Beatles Significant Others: Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon, and Olivia Harrison. (Okay, I’d like to see a special Yoko-inspired game on Xbox Live Arcade.) Most interesting, producer Giles Martin, heir to production legend Sir George Martin
and producer of the Love project with Cirque due Soleil, twice a Grammy winner, and the man behind The Beatles Anthology is involved, too. (See a great story on him in Sound on Sound.)

Let’s get straight to the point: for the band that made virtual acid trips mainstream decades ago, it’s time for a new, digital trip. (They do describe it as a “journey” through the Beatles’ work, after all.) I think the Beatles make a perfect choice. I can’t count the number of people I know in music composition who were addicted to Beatles records as kids — not the Beatles’ generation, but their offspring in the 80s and 90s.

And despite the intervening decades, Yellow Submarine still looks imaginative and bizarre. If gaming can do anything, it can take music we’ve heard a zillion times and make it new. It can make our regular experience, the reality around us feel a little different. Rock Band has proven to be a trojan horse: it’s literally driven up sales of real instruments. That’s proof that making something palatable to a mass market can help get them hooked on new kinds of experiences. Can a Beatles game feel less like interactive documentary or re-hashed Guitar Hero, and more like a groovy, retro journey into the strange imagination that turned a lot of us on to recording, music, visuals, and … uh … animations of strange creatures? I think so. Can’t wait to see what comes out.

PS — I want to play as George.