The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud — not exactly indie cred. We saw Microsoft enlisting indie musicians and animators to sell Zune, of course.

But here’s where things get surprisingly amazing: Sony is using weird and wonderful Japanese experimental music to promote Walkman.

Now we’re talking.

And whether or not Walkman is cool again, this is for sure: Japanese experimental musicians? Mind-blowingly cool. And, apparently, in love with using light as a controller for sound.

Atsuhiro Ito uses contact mics on a fluorescent bulb he dubs the Optron. Instead of just being stage eye candy, the bulbs are really making the sounds here; coupled with guitar effects, he can solo on the bulbs. It’s what the Knitting Factory will be like after the nuclear winter. I can’t wait.

Taeji Sawai uses a light pen to draw melodic lines and rhythmic onto a screen. The basic effect – track light from a single source – is old. Yet he’s clearly got a brilliant aesthetic mind that makes it all work; the elements are strikingly simple but never fail to be engaging. And there’s a strong connection to work by his fellow sonic inventor Toshio Iwai.

Thanks to our friend Donald Bell of cnet, aka very talented and (cool) musician Chachi Jones, who has a great write-up:

Sony Walkman promos are awesome, confusing

Confusing? No, I’d say Sony is confusing; the real question is why their Walkman can’t be more like these ads. Plus, since neither Don nor I can read Japanese, how do we know those characters don’t say something like “Hey, guys, sorry for that bit with the lousy boring electronics – we’re coming back from the dark side to make awesome things again”? Okay, maybe not. (Do let me know if the next one says “Fine, you damned snarky blogger, I’d like to see you run a giant multinational corporation.”)

Admittedly, the problem here is this makes me want to toss my iPod touch out the window and build my own open source MP3 player with Popsicle sticks and wire, or, at best, mod an original Walkman so I can play circuit-bent OGG files using power from a bicycle. At the very least, I’m ready to add to my Atsuhiro Ito and Taeji Sawai collection. And I don’t think their full body of work is on iTunes. That’s just as well.

So, Sony, thanks. Now, will you let us run homebrew music apps on your PSP? Please?

Hi there! my name is Tomi from AQI Inc.and I’ll be in charge of this product for international territories. For those of you out there wondering the release of DS-10 other than Japan, well, here’s a good news. YES, we will release DS-10 worldwide and currently we’re making an adjustment with each territory. So please be patient. Your support means a lot to us and we’ll keep you all with the latest update of the international release as soon as possible.

Via Matrixsynth.

Thanks to Mark Mathews for the tip!

“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

As far as connectivity, you can “exchange sounds and songs and play multiple units simultaneously through a wireless communications link.” Now, if someone in the homebrew community were able to hack that, perhaps you could add MIDI compatibility, so you could use this alongside a DS running homebrew software, or perhaps bridge to hardware MIDI and plug in a Tenori-On. (See previous discussion of DSMIDI.)

AQ Interactive is a bona fide game development house and publisher in Japan. They haven’t exactly had a spotless record, producing Vampire’s Rain for Xbox 360, but they have worked on “Cry On” with Hironobu Sakaguchi (writer) and Nobuo Uematsu (composer) of Final Fantasy legend. (I think that game may have been delayed.) Update/revision: Cavia, the Japanese game house published by AQ, appears to be the actual developer of the engine and the title. They also worked on Cry On and the Dragonball Z DS game, along with various other titles. Nothing really related to a synth, but we’ll see how they do. (Not to be confused with Clavia, the synth maker!)

Take action

Anyone familiar with the legality of, oh, CDM importing a whole bunch of these and shipping them around the world? (You’d need a DS capable of playing Japanese titles, of course.) Or we could just all meet in Tokyo this summer. Airfare sales anywhere?

Never mind! The DS-10 is going international; stay tuned for details!

Availability: July 2008

Pricing: 4,800 YEN (tax included), which works out to slightly less than US$50.

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:

Hi, all. I’m jo. One of co-designer of TSI. Our project continues minutely. We’re very glad with your interest. Here, I briefly try to answer your question.

About tonality, as a practical reason, to use western tonality is easy to implement with Max and MIDI :) . I suppose that in the one of the reason we Japanese use it. Babies got strong schema of tonality in early stage of growth (about 6 month to 1 year). So, as you mentioned, we need to have an experiment with other scales to try to catch the effect of musical instrument for early stage of growth. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t test it yet because of the problem of assembling the subjects (babies).

About Japanese musical instrument, “garagara” is a percussive instrument with a grip for baby (http://e-bussan.co.jp/news/2006_03/6nisenmingei.JPG, http://www4.kcn.ne.jp/~andyjudy/dorio.jpg) and “poppen”(other name is vidro) is a blowing instrument made by glass. You can make two different sound with blowing motion (push and pull).and it’s not related to Pokemon :) .

Thanks, Jo! Now that I hear the results, I have a much better sense of the project. I also understand the initial choice of Western tuning, as the music sounds really distinctive and baby-friendly.

So we now know a garagara looks like this:

And a popen/vidro looks like this:

Thanks for all of this, and I for one am looking forward to more baby-created instruments. Anyone who’s worked on something along the same lines, as well, do let us know.

[tags]alternative interfaces, children, design, instruments, Japan, Max/MSP, oddities, physical computing, Sensors, toys[/tags]

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:

According to this site, it seems to date from a conference in around 2001 although the idea didn’t seem to get anywhere, but maybe Toshio Iwai could be persuaded to take an interest…

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502348.502374

Garagara means rattle and can also describe any sort of baby rattling toy (try an image search for various examples old and new).

Poppen is also known as pokopen or bidoro, which comes from the Portuguese “vidro”, or glass, as they introduced the glass blowing technique used in its manufacture in the, err, 17th century or so. It originated in Nagasaki which the port used by Jesuits/Portuguese traders and later others. It’s a sort of one-note flute and was obviously a bit of a craze back in those simpler times and still a popular souvenir to bring back from Nagasaki. There’s a famous woodblock print by Utamaro and song about a woman playing one. Not sure which came first. They were/are used at New Year to expel bad luck:

http://www.sam.hi-ho.ne.jp/maruyosi/popen.htm

Thanks, Patrick!

[tags]physical-computing, sensors, children, toys, alternative-interfaces, oddities, Japan, design, Max/MSP, instruments[/tags]

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

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 . . .

The article explains a number of interesting points:

And talk about backpedaling: government officials say they won’t enforce the ban at all, on anything used, April 1, at least delaying enforcement. “Vintage” items are now officially off the table, though apparently not much has changed there — no one is sure what’s exempt. And while the Japanese government delays the ban, resellers continue to seek an exception for all secondhand items. (PSE certification stickers, therefore, would be required on all new items.)

So there you have it: some last niggling on figuring out what that exception has, vintage Japanese music devices and Famicoms alike are safe, certainly on April 1, and most likely well after that, too. Your local Shibuya used fridge dealer may still have some arguing to do, but it sounds like reason may have actually won out.

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?