Don Buchla is another special pioneer whose impact on music technology has been far-reaching. (He turned 71 last week. Happy Birthday, Don!) He’s best known as the Chevy to Moog’s Ford — that is, the other rival US modular synth system in the 60s. Moog and Buchla were so close, in fact, in introducing their modulars and the innovations to follow that it’s often hard to say who was really first — and their approaches were different enough that it probably doesn’t matter. But Buchla also went on to be one of the key pioneers in alternative interface design. His gestural/spatial Lightning system, for instance, used IR-emitting wands to transmit position and acceleration over a decade and a half before the Nintendo Wii took gaming by storm.

If you want to catch up with Buchla’s various innovations, I suspect you’ll need to drink a lot of Red Bull. So it’s fitting that Red Bull, sponsors of the Red Bull Music Academy international educational programs, are interviewing Buchla for their series on musical innovators. Sit back in your recliner, because they’ve got two full hours of Buchla reflecting on music technology:

Red Bull Music Academy Interview

Via the excellent ambient/electronica blog Disquiet

Earlier this week:

Vintage Buchla Easel Action, and Inspiration for Modern Tangible Interfaces

Photo by fr1zz, via Flickr.

The exceptional Masayuki Akamatsu, best known around these parts as the maker of the wonderful aka.objects for Max for hooking into Wii remotes, Space Navigators, MacBook motion sensors, and more, gets an in-depth interview over at the Make:blog. They even manage to bridge the language barrier and translate to English.

“Made in Japan” Interview: Masayuki Akamatsu

The digital maestro talks about Max, the future of technology in the micro- and macrocosm, and his live-soldering electronic Breadboard Band.

He also has this to say about the darker side of technology in Japan:

This depends on the generation, but I think that in particular young people in Japan for most part think of electronic devices as being disposable. The pace of consumption and greed is pretty astonishing, and they probably aren’t even aware of it consciously.

I think there’s a growing awareness of this issue here, as well.

One bone to pick: he claims Max, compared to the open source Pure Data, is “overwhelmingly better in terms of function, extendability, etc.” I think that easily applies that to the areas of interface and documentation, but Pd has some functionality and extensibility tricks of its own — more “different” than “better” (and arguably, Pd is better in some areas). But he has done some fantastic things with Max, so I certainly see no reason to argue with his choice of tools.

Thanks, Make, for the great interview. Anyone you’d like to see on CDM’s interview list? Any volunteer translators for people of the rest of the world?

Advertising, having devoted decades to building elaborate fantasies, now has a new problem: making things seem real and believable. But that’s nothing new to people doing sound design: tiny details of sync, spatialization, and content can trick the mind into different perceptions of what they’re seeing and hearing. The release of a TV ad showing a music ensemble made from Ford parts triggered waves of skepticism online, partly because the ad’s producers and director wanted the composer and instrument builders to make a car part ensemble that sounded quasi-Classical — rather than pushing its “car-partiness.” Singapore-based blog fanatic fandom has some great musings on the irony of the whole situation, with various coverage around the Web (including CDM’s). Note that composer Craig Richey was even concerned about subtle issues of sync impacting the perceived reality of the ad. It’s a great lesson in editing and design.

Of course, the ensemble is real, and we’ve talked a bit to sound designer Bill Milbrodt about the details. Now, it seems Ford and the ad makers have finally released a video interview with Bill. There’s something about talking to people on camera that helps — and Bill has great stuff to say.

Personally, I think the confusion about what people were watching may be more interesting than the car itself. It shows just how much editing and design choices can impact perception — something to keep in mind whether your aspirations tend toward Madison Avenue or the underground.

Previously:

Interview: Building a Musical Ensemble Out of Ford Focus Car Parts

Yes, Virginia, There Really is a Ford Car Part Musical Ensemble

I think Hank Shocklee’s contribution to Public Enemy, as a producer and co-founder, had a deep influence on the approach to sampled sound and digital sound ever since. In Brisbane, Australia in December, I got to sit in a room full of students at the Art of Record Production conference and listen to Shocklee walk through the album "Fear of a Black Planet." I realized it was a bit like needle-dropping Sgt. Pepper with George Martin.

Shocklee describes his role with Public Enemy as a kind of teacher, helping Chuck D, poet, meet digital production technology. In the years since, he’s expanded that teaching role to include young people around the world, and he’s got some strong opinions about the importance of learning the craft of recording and music in general.

Fittingly, we sat down for a few moments in a classroom.

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. I - On music making from cdm tv on Vimeo.

What a lot of people may not know about Hank Shocklee is that beyond being a Public Enemy veteran, he’s also been deeply involved in the music industry. Unlike so many armchair industry quarterbacks, Shocklee has worked with the major artists (from Madonna to Peter Gabriel) and had a significant stint as Senior Vice President for Universal MCA Records. That means when Shocklee criticizes the industry as musically illiterate, he speaks from the perspective of someone who’s been on both the inside and outside of the majors. (He’s now producing and scoring music independently, and drove his entrepreneurial spirit into his own Shocklee Entertainment.)

Criticizing is one thing — but Shocklee had advice for how artists can guide the direction of their own career. He talks about the limitations of the industry, how the music community can grow beyond it, and how visual media could finally become a serious domain for musicians. (We agree with that.)

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. II - On music business from cdm tv on Vimeo.

Once the domain of the few, creating and customizing sophisticated DIY controllers is now more accessible than ever. That means, if you can’t find what you want, and you’re ambitious and knowledgeable enough, you go make your own. Josh Boughey was impressed by the Monome enough to buy one — but the Monome, a grid of on/off buttons, doesn’t provide any kind of variable control. So Josh built his own, combining a series of parallel touch strips with LED indicators. (The lights are the tricky part, requiring an obscene number of connections.)

The creation, dubbed “Stribe” by Josh, could have been a one-off. But instead, he’s working on making it into a tool for others, with completely open source hardware and software. The whole system is built on the popular Arduino platform, making it uncommonly easy to modify. It’s a work in progress, as you can see lacking an enclosure. But ten have made it out into the wild, people are already programming custom software, and more are coming.

I got to hang out with Josh while he was in town this weekend. Luckily, he’s a fan of early music, meaning we met at a concert of a viol consort that was playing my music — an unusual collision of 15th and 21st Century music technology.

Josh gave a demo of the Stribe, for myself plus Phil Torrone of Make and Limor Fried (aka lady ada), creator of the x0xb0x open-source 303 clone. It’s still a project in process– there’s more to be done in firmware and support software and documentation — but it already shows some real promise. I snapped some shots, studied the Max patches, and mostly listened to Limor and Josh talk about the challenges of starting a DIY hardware business. (I hope that DIY builders start to share experiences, even informally, as they work to make the business end work so they can keep building.)

Just what can happen when you let your baby go? Someone else can do stuff with it you didn’t expect. Here’s musician Stretta developing music ideas-in-progress with the Stribe (see blog post, Stribe forum thread):

A Brief Conversation Resulting in One Less Child from stretta on Vimeo.

Some tidbits from the hands-on session:

Cornelius’ Sensuous Synchronized tour, with The Cornelius Group, has been stunning American audiences over the past year. I got to a chance to talk to Cornelius, aka Keigo Oyamada, following the New York close to his American trip. The show blew my mind: constant visual stimulation, earnest performances (including audience interaction on Theremin), and perfectly-synced (true to the name) visuals that made the music into a dreamscape you wanted to live in all night. The interview was via email, though, and somehow I got strange and wordy with my questions — I think because I got excited. Cornelius, true to the sharp-edged economy of his music, responded in minimalistic fashion. So, given that too many useless words tend to surround music in general, I’ll be brief:

We all love Cornelius.

The Sensuous Synchronized tour is one of the best audiovisual shows on the planet.

When I feel artistically dry, I watch these videos and feel wonderful.

Cornelius reminds me why I do what I do.

The best way to get Cornelius and share him with friends is to watch the videos.

Go buy the album.

(For more on the visuals in the Cornelius tour, see Momo’s take and discussion on Create Digital Motion)

Now here’s what Cornelius had to say, with some of those videos mixed in because they’re worth countless words:

It’s always fascinating to me how people hear, what they thing of as “real” or “authentic,” and what meaning they find in the things they listen to.

Yesterday, we got a glimpse of a new car advertisement for Ford in the UK featuring instruments constructed from automobile components:

Interview: Building a Musical Ensemble Out of Ford Focus Car Parts

What you see on the screen, of course, is not literally what you hear — the TV ad and soundtrack are edited together, and this is a car ad, not a documentary. But quite a few readers (and even blogs elsewhere) wondered if they were actually hearing instruments constructed from the Ford Focus — or if there was some audio fakery going on, as well.

Following up on our interview (which was evidently an exclusive for CDM, whatever that’s worth), sound designer Bill Milbrodt actually called me last night and we got to have a long chat about the whole process.

Here’s the short answer:

Yes, the instruments are really made from a Ford Focus. (The strings are conventional strings, which has a huge impact on timbre, but until Ford starts putting something that can substitute for strings into their cars, you’ll have to live with that.) Yes, musicians really did play them. Yes, you really do hear that recording (edited) in the ad. Bill points out that they could have saved a lot of money by just creating props. This is, indeed, the real thing.

And yes, the musical effect is awfully close to classical music played on conventional instruments. That was apparently the requirement of the agency and director. The sound of the Car Music Project is very different — and I suspect a little closer to the tastes of the readers here. Here’s what the ensemble sounds like live, at least until we get live footage of the Ford Focus ensemble (got my fingers crossed for that):

I just find it really interesting that people reacted the way they did — and to the whole issue of authenticity and recordings. We’re both immediately suspicious of anything recorded, yet cling to the idea of a recording as a “factual record” — despite the fact that sound depends entirely on your point of view. Even with live sound, you might experience a different concert in a different part of the hall. With recordings, mic choice, mic placement, and other factors impact the sound even before someone’s had a shot at digital “manipulation.” You know that, I know that — but still, we have some sort of deeply-ingrained expectations about what a recording is, or what we want it to be, that go beyond even the technical knowledge of a group of practictioners.

Of course, it’s curiosity about how things are actually done that drives some of this site, so I say, keep asking questions and questioning your ears.

But, for the record, this ensemble is, for all practicality, real. And there’s really not a cello on that recording, I swear.

Here are the full technical details from Bill, with links to still more information — and this answer actually winds up going into more of the nuts and bolts (sorry) of how these instruments were used musically:

We’ve seen basses and turntables made from motorcycles, and bicycle parts turned into DJ setups, ensembles, and The Nutcracker. But The Car Music Project has gone further, building two entire ensembles out a single car, first a sound designer’s old Honda Accord and, more recently, deconstructing a brand-new Ford Focus into a full instrumental ensemble in just five weeks.

In other words, before — a five-door 2008 Ford Focus hatchback as built for the UK market looks like this:

… and after the Car Music Project gets to it, 21 parts from that car become 31 individual instruments:

The ad campaign premiered yesterday in England. Above: the extended, three-minute version.

More: More cowbell! Ford turns Focus into musical instruments [Autoblog]

I got to talk to New York-based sound designer Bill Milbrodt, who led a 22-person team to build the instruments, with Ray Faunce III managing fabrication. Composer Craig Richey, who scored The King of Kong, Friends With Money, and Lovely & Amazing (among others), wrote the music for the ensemble.

Bill describes to CDM the daunting task of going from Ford hatchback to chamber ensemble. It’s an incredible insight into instrument design and construction, whether your DIY instrument tastes tend in the acoustic or digital realms.

PS, to the Crave blog and other doubters: the music is real. They actually made some fantastic-sounding instruments out of that Ford Focus. I certainly know when I buy an automobile, I like the peace of mind that comes from buying one I could later deconstruct with 22 skilled metalworkers and play original scores on.

Circuit Bent Casio SK 1 from Gijs on Vimeo.

Note: we are temporarily having problems with Vimeo’s embedded video. (So is MAKE, evidently, so it’s not our fault!) Click through to see the video, or enjoy the lovely garbled characters if they’re there.

Regular followers of the music tech blogs know the wild and wonderful work of bender/inventor Gijs Gieskes (here or all over here), in which Casio keyboards get massive mechanical add-ons and Sega games become fuzzy, distorted video art. Phillip Torrone writes us to let us know MAKE has taken a closer look at the artist:

In the illustrious world of case-mods and console hacking, artists and makers are re-inventing the design and function of these ubiquitous consumer electronics devices by creating hybrid systems and creative artifacts that challenge the corporate status quo. Taking this credo to an extreme with his inventive hardware projects is Dutch artist and maker, Gijs Gieskes. From casting a Nintendo Gameboy in concrete in order to build a garden path with “GameBoy Bricks” to creating an analog version of the hated spinning cursor in the Mac OSX operating system with “Spinning Beach Ball of Death”, Gieskes’ work and live performances are an inventive look at how closely entrenched we’ve become in the world of glitchy hardware and scrambled noise producing machines. MAKE recently caught up with Gieskes to discuss his practice, philosophy, and exactly how important the current crop of hackable consumer electronics might be to future generations.

Modding consumer electronics devices into DJ tools with Gijs Gieskes

The author of the interview, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, is an artist himself, so for a little meta-interviewing, check out Regine interviewing Jonah for we make money not art.

Of course, if you’d like to challenge the likes of Gijs and think your bending kung fu is better, get applying to this year’s Bent Festival.

And if you’re in London, MAKE also points to what looks like a really cool toy bending workshop there. Let us know if any of you go!

The original promise of digital music distribution was supposed to be greater variety, the availability of out-of-print music, communities serving specific interests that had been under-served by mass culture, high-quality audio, and lots of choice. Slowly, I think, that promise is finally being delivered. Readers of a music technology site may not think much about Josquin motets (well, actually, I do, though I don’t know if I’m typical). But we have talked about a gradual shift away from mass-market, proprietary distribution as with the original iTunes Music Store to more choices of stores, DRM-free music that’s mobile across devices, and, most importantly, more choice in music. What’s amazing is how this trend is accelerating.

This week, Deutsche Grammophon, the classical music recording giant that’s owned by Universal Music Group, launched its own online music store. And there are a number of things that make it unique:

dgwebshop.com

• The store is truly international: No, really international. Not the US and Canada international. The store will sell to 42 countries, and will extend to Southeast Asia including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe including Russia. Two words: ’bout time.
• There’s real variety: In a genre badly abandoned by an entire industry recently — long before Napster, in fact — DG has put up a serious catalog. And in a big change, instead of publishing a subset of their current catalog, they’ve actually re-released “out-of-print” albums. Lest you think I’m shilling for UMG, they’ve released a couple of my personal faves I only had access to on vinyl, and made contemporary music far more accessible.
• Big player, small market: It’s owned by UMG, so this is no indie label — in fact, on the contrary, it’s encouraging to see a big media company let the niche division move forward instead of focusing on what’s popular in the mass market.

I got a chance to talk to Jonathan Gruber, VP New Media, Classics & Jazz, Universal Music Group International. He’s on-message as far as UMG’s pitch, as you’d expect, but he had some interesting details to share that should please classical fans, in particular. (And I know there are quite a few who read this site — no surprise, as classically-trained composers were among the first to embrace, and to have access to, electronic music technology.)