Before I start talking about the fact that there’s a full-featured, stylus-controlled, vintage-gear sampling, officially-sanctioned, drool-inducing Nintendo DS synth plus drum machine plus sequencer reimagining of the classic Korg MS-10 analog synth, I have three words you really don’t want to hear:

“FOR JAPAN ONLY”

Correction: Despite what the website says, the DS-10 is in fact getting an international release!

Product info, specs, samples [AQ Interactive; English]

Blog [Japanese only]

Music sample

Via Music Thing and CDM comments (thanks, Thomas)

Features:

• Dual dual synths: Two patchable virtual synths, with two oscillators each
• Drum machine: Four-part drum machines loaded with samples of the virtual synth
• Sequencer: 2 synth tracks, 4 drum machine tracks, 16 steps
• Effects: Delay, chorus, flanger
• Input methods: Touch-control screen with real-time sound control, a keyboard screen, and matrix screen

Interactive teething rings, YouTube, and traditional Japanese instruments don’t normally appear together, but here we go. Last week, we saw documentation on a system for hooking a teething ring sensor to a computer running interactive music software built in Max/MSP.

Teething Ring Max/MSP Musical Instrument for Babies

The creators have surfaced, and posted a video of the results. At first, the baby seems confused and even upset, but by the end of the video, we’ve got the world’s youngest electronic musician:

More details, photos, and even a CD release of music made by babies, for babies, at the project site:

Teething Ring Instrument

Co-designer Jo writes with more details of the project and an explanation of some of the traditional Japanese instruments (one designed specifically for infants) mentioned in the project paper:

Firmly in the “start ‘em young” category, the TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument) is designed to allow 0-3 year olds to create digital music in Max/MSP. Pressure from the baby’s mouth suckling at the teething ring is converted to MIDI messages and sent to a sound patch on a connected computer:

Pitch corresponds to the change of the sucking pressure. When the teething ring is strongly sucked, a higher note rings. The “basic part” consists of a simple 3 note C-major chord played melodically in the form of a simple musical scale. This is something the baby can identify and enjoy. In expansion part, the note changes with every suck. When the suck is repeated, ascent, descent are repeated. The change of the notes can be enjoyed even by the reflexive sucking motion. Therefore, this is ideal for use from the baby’s initial stage of growth.

TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument): A Design of the Sound Instrument for the Baby [Academic paper in PDF form; thanks, Patrick!]

The project is the creation of Naoko Kubo, Kazuhiro Jo, and Ken Matsunaga at the Science of Sound Culture department of the Kyushu Institute of Design. It’s not new, but this is the first I’ve seen it.

Interestingly, the all-Japanese design team opted for Western tonality. The “melody” application for the interface, according to the designers, is “intended for the young, somewhat cultured child accustomed to a certain degree to Western tonal music. When the baby begins to suck, a melody with the simple rhythm made on the basis of tonality structure of the Western tonal music begins to sound and stops when the sucking motion is finished.” I know many of us here are of the mind that the last thing babies need is more equal-tempered Western tonality, so fortunately at the end of the article the designers promise to experiment with Javanese pelog tuning or their indigenous Okinawan musical scales. (Patrick who sent in this link was looking up Okinawan scales.)

I’m equally curious about the children’s instruments the article mentions, though, the “garagara” and the “poppen”, which apparently are traditional Japanese musical toys for kids. Can anyone describe what these instruments are? Google curiously returns this image from Pokemon. That either means that the garagara is a cute little dinosaur, played by hitting the small creature in the head with his bone mallet Muppephone-style (whoo! I got to mention Muppephones twice in one week!), or the Pokemon is named for the musical instrument because all kids know what a garagara is! Regardless, this dinosaur is indeed cute.

Updated: Patrick sends details both on the apparent origins of this project, and the instruments in question:

Velocipede, our friend and inside man in Takarazuka, Japan, has been writing up a storm on the CDM forums, from providing hands-on impressions of Roland’s hand percussion pad to reporting back from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival.

The HPD-10 hand percussion controller by Roland could be a terrific controller for synths and clips, from its traditional purpose (drums) to lots of other applications:

My main interest in getting the unit, though, is as a midi control over softsynths. Its 10 pads can be freely assigned to any note numbers on a per kit basis (64 kits can be saved in the unit). So far, I’ve set up different kits for Live’s Impulse, Reason’s Redrum and an Alesis Micron Setup that I have dedicated for drum sounds.

Check out velocipede’s full review:
Handsonic 10 (HPD-10) [Create Digital Noise]

The news from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival is mostly what’s going away as what’s new: Alesis selling off the last stock of Ions in Japan, and Roland discontinuing their cult favorite AX-7 strap-on keyboard controller. Fortunately, velocipede dug up two gems. Vestax’s Guber line has some far-out hardware like this crazy-looking turntable:

And from the non-electronic end of the spectrum, the Xaphoon is an original hybrid instrument that packs sax-like sounds in a recorder body; velocipede assures us that it sounds far better than its toy-like looks suggest:

Music Instrument Festival in Tokyo [Create Digital Noise]
Vestax Guber players [Japanese only]
Xaphoon instruments product page

It would be unfair to mention the free Magical 8-bit Plug-in without acknowledging who created it: the insanely talented Japanese chiptune band, YMCK:

YMCK Official Site [English]
YMCK Events [Japanese]
YMCK @ Myspace

And, most importantly:

YMCK Music Videos @ YouTube

Their style is a unique mash-up of the tightly-quantized, hyperactively cheery iconic Nintendo music with even more densely-packed jazzy harmonies than Mario could muster. It isn’t about gimmick: this sounds like someone who was practicing 8-bit at age four the way some people practice violin. Or, as they put it:

While the sound is cheap, the song compositions are influenced by jazz from the 1950’s and 1960’s, with a clear and feather-light 4-beat rhythm underlying sophisticated harmony progressions. The experimental combination of these two features has resulted in the unique YMCK sound, which is neither techno music nor jazz. YMCK uses limited 8-bit sound to take you out for dreamland.

Yeah, pretty much that last sentence. The trio includes a talented 8-bit animator, so prepare to spend the next hour in dreamland on YouTube. Just a couple of quick examples:

Muchas gracias to “Pants” in comments for bringing this to our attention, and, best of all, noting that you can get their albums outside Japan, along with plenty of other gems, at:

Records of the Damned

The Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, reports today that the Japanese government is backpedaling on its plans to ban the sale of used electronics. (Thanks to velocipede for the tip, in comments on our previous story.) It sounds as though musical instruments were at the heart of the controversy, as Ryuichi Sakamoto argued for vintage synth liberation. Outraged resellers and electronics lovers took to the streets to protest the ban, as shown here . . . playing Famicom. (Which, oddly enough, proves to be at least as fun as burning down KFCs.) More after the jump now that we have some solid details . . .

Matrixsynth and Music thing have continued their coverage of Japan’s hated new PSE law, set to go in effect April 1, which would ban sales and purchase of used equipment that fails strict electrical certification — read, all that vintage game and music gear you love so much. Trying to follow this story is more than a little tricky, between changing information from Japanese bureaucrats and translation issues. Thankfully, Jun and Aaron have been trying to help us out over in Music thing’s comments, including this lovely haiku from Aaron:

Electronics spring,
New law restricts used good sales,
Kirn’s question answered?

In short, the reason none of us knows what’s going on is no one in Japan, the lawmakers included, seem to know what’s going on. First, Japanese lawmakers passed a law which must have seemed sensible to them, tightening restrictions on purchasing and selling electrical devices based on certification — thinking nothing of how this law would affect Japan’s sizable number of used electronics resellers. Protests from customers and sellers alike pressured the government to create an exemption for certified vintage gear. Great, we’re done! Nope: apparently that new certification (certifying that the gear doesn’t need the other certification) doesn’t cover the very gear it was supposed to protect, because it wasn’t certified via the older certification. And as for the free testing equipment and testing procedures . . . oh, I don’t know.

In the meantime, let’s just enjoy the photos of the mass protest in Tokyo (courtesy Asobitsuchiya) that featured people marching with vintage recorders and synths (really), and even playing Nintendo Famicom (that’s NES to the rest of us) in the streets. Now that would have made protest marches I’ve been in so much more fun. (But, yipes, you won’t even be able to buy old Famicoms?)

Anyone in Japan want to set us straight on what’s going on?

From French-language site Akihabara News: what's a pair of speakers without a nice megaphone on top?

I like it, and it looks like it may well be connected to the actual
speaker, but this is only a start: can it rotate, too, like a giant
Leslie cabinet without the cabinet?