Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer.

There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum and Skittles, beer bottle caps, soda bottles, and now walnuts. Don’t stop now: someone has to do Cheetos, even if it means dealing with orange stuff all over your fingers.

That said, it’s not walnuts that make d-touch an important project. Built by Enrico Costanza back in 2003, the project is now available for free download as an open source library, a server (in case you don’t want to get into the C++ code but might want to use this in your own projects), a free, usable drum machine, and a set of documentation that can help you make your own stuff easily. Enrico worked on the original reacTable prototype and has done some really important work in this field. Right now, Enrico and co are looking for feedback, but if you’re ready to just be a tester and play with this – and see what you can do musically – now’s your chance.

d-touch also combines high levels of computer readability for accurate tracking with the ability to make your own tags. Instead of using ugly-looking glyphs, you can make patterns that make sense to human beings as well as computers. Oh, yeah – and mobile fans, this runs at a full 14 fps even on S60 phones.

For more, check out the d-touch site:
http://d-touch.org/ [Register first to make the download available]
and follow them on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/audiodtouch

Thanks to Martin (of reacTable, which is moving toward a commercial product) for sending this our way. Thanks, too, to Ben, who’s working on tangible interfaces with special needs students. I really look forward to hearing how that’s going.

Digital technology has made music oddly invisible, virtualized somewhere inside a screen – but it also allows music to be mapped more literally to the physical world than ever before. Some of these experiments may even be silly, but they suggest a lot of possibilities.

From Poland, BeatMachine is a project that sequences beats in a step sequencer using discarded beer bottle caps. Would-be Internet haters, I suggest you count the number of beer bottle caps on the table, and start drinking that number while watching. I guarantee eventually it’ll seem like a brilliant idea.

Make sure you keep watching to the clever-looking software they’ve evidently developed for the task.

http://mw.boo.pl/beatmachine/

If this seems familiar, it was in fact inspired by the Bubblegum Sequencer featured here previously, and its rival I Eat Beats. Through the power of the Internet, iterating and improving ideas isn’t just something you do for yourself alone – it’s something you can share with others. That’s the idea behind our own tangible interface hackday coming up on Saturday:

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Thanks to Artur Nowak for the tip. I know we have a number of readers in Poland, so is there anyone who could help with a quick translation?

(Oh, and Poland, by the way – my book was actually translated into your language!)

One of the problems with touchscreens is that, even as they have become more sophisticated about tracking multiple fingers at once, they still generally don’t respond to pressure. To make touchscreens really useful for music, we need genuine pressure sensitivity.

For that reason, you may be intrigued to see this video of Zen Piano, a demo app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The idea: respond not only to the position of your finger taps, but also to how hard you’re tapping the phone That promises “velocity-sensitive” tapping, which would make touchscreen interfaces more powerful.

Here’s the somewhat overheated description by GreatApps, who say their “patent-pending,” “cutting-edge” technology is the result of “having gone through the research and development phases.”

TapForce^TM has been developed from the ground up to provide a completely intuitive way of interaction for users. It can detect more than a hundred different levels of force, and has an accuracy that has to be seen to be believed. And all this can now be done in software, no hardware modifications are necessary. Hundreds of millions of devices currently on the market can make use of the TapForce^TM technology today.

A whole new range of games and apps has just been made possible.

http://greatapps.co.uk/technologies/

Okay, so what is it doing, exactly?

Sound is a wonderful, if invisible thing. To work with these tiny fluctuations in air pressure that make up what we hear, we always work with some sort of software metaphor. So why not make that metaphor pixels – and why not manipulate the visual element directly?

Translating between sound and image is not a new concept in music software. The deepest tool for these functions is unquestionably the Mac-only classic MetaSynth, which sprang from the imagination of Bryce creator and graphic designer Eric Wenger. To me, one of the most appealing features of MetaSynth has always been its filter tool, the one component that allows you to work directly with sound using imagery and painting tools. The core of the tool, however, turns images into a score for synthesis, which opens up powerful features for microtones and the like but can conversely make simply designing sounds more challenging. (Side note: Leopard users, read this re: MetaSynth.)

Photosounder looks like MetaSynth, but it more directly translates between sound and image. It also has a uniquely straightforward interface for precisely adjusting controls and mappings. Put these together, and you can really use Photosounder as an audio tool. That opens up not only experimental techniques, but even makes conventional tasks more accessible.

Photosounder is also under very active development, with recent additions like a lossless mode for better sound fidelity and loop modes. The result is a really compelling looking tool for audio manipulation.

What can you do with these pixel powers over sound? Users have been experimenting and posting some pretty impressive stuff:

• Isolating and removing individual instruments – making this an ideal remixing and sampling tool – using Photoshop
• Making entire tracks from photographs (which, again, was possible with MetaSynth as infamously employed by Aphex Twin, but sounds very different here)
• Processing using Photoshop filters
• Making beats by drawing
• Extreme time processing

Photosounder is currently Windows-only, but Linux and Mac versions are promised. (By the way, I think that’s going to become more commonplace as savvy developers take up cross-platform development tools, toolchains, and frameworks.)

It’s cheap enough to impulse-buy, too, at EUR25 non-commercial or EUR99 commercial.

http://photosounder.com/

Photosounder examples (with video)

I hope to get my hands on Photosounder and show off some features with this soon. Thanks to everyone who sent this in! (And yeah, after four or five people I finally get around to mentioning it!)

The best way to see what’s possible: check out the videos. Here’s a selection of my favorites:

Jasuto envelope example from Jasuto on Vimeo.

Imagine friendly creation of custom synths and sounds by dragging visual nodes. Now imagine you can do that on a mobile device and your computer – and eventually combine the two. That’s the vision of Jasuto, and while it’s not quite there yet, it’s incredibly promising.

The laws of combinatorics predict that, on a regular basis, you’ll see countless soft synths that are slight variations of one another. With the iPhone/iPod touch gold rush in full swing, we’re starting to see the pattern repeat itself, just as it did in Windows and Mac plug-ins. Some are brilliant; others are just the usual variations on a theme.

Of course, even better is the ability to build exactly what you want out of the same buildings blocks. Powerful toolkits like Max/MSP, Pd, Reaktor, SuperCollider, SynthMaker and the like let you do this, but they qualify as the more-sophisticated Erector Set of synthesis. Sometimes you just want some simple, LEGO-style building blocks that cover the basics.

That’s why Jasuto looks so promising. It’s actually two pieces of software – a plug-in for Mac and Windows VST. Combine basic modules, and you get some powerful features, even on the iPhone: