This may already be the image you have in your mind of Skrillex’s fan base, but let’s get real: these are actual kids, and they really are getting introduced to electronic dance music through Skrillex for the first time.

“What is dubstep?”

Darned if I know any more, kid.

What have we learned?

1. All kids sound cooler when they have English accents. (It’s unreal. They can be throwing a temper tantrum and still sound oddly sophisticated, or at least charmingly in-character. CDM’s sizable readership of English people may wonder what the heck I’m talking about, then dare me to buy an umbrella and take up babysitting until I come to my senses.)
2. This video will prompt haterade in comments so long as you have a soul made of ice.
3. Kids can dance.
4. These kids look cooler than I do.
5. Saying you need to take substances to understand Electronic Dance Music is a fair statement – that is, provided you have entirely lost connection with your inner child or ability to dance. (That’s not to judge the use of such substances one way or another, only to say viewing any substance as a prerequisite to music appreciation may be overstatement. This does bring new meaning to candy ravers, however.)
6. VICE got kids dancing to Skrillex. What should CDM introduce them to? (Xenakis might terrify them; how about Aphex Twin?)

After all, I do hear dance music advocates routinely point out that Skrillex could be an introduction to young folks to electronic music that opens more doors later. These kids are absolutely getting a fresh start.

“Where’s the after-party?”

Updated: Answer – after-party is right here…

3-year old: “I’m a Jungalist!!!”

(Thanks, Gwydion!)

What if your musical instrument were gelatinous? Edible?

“Noisy Jelly” is the latest project to imagine that scenario. Thanks to the capacitive quality of gelatin (known to us Americans by the brand name JELL-O and to some simply as “jelly”), you can mix up a set of colored instruments that jiggle when you touch them. Powered by the open hardware platform Arduino to read sensors and Max/MSP to produce sound, it’s the work of a couple of Paris-based students, Raphaël and Marianne Cauvard.

Check out the terrific video featuring wide-eyed children, and specs below.

What makes this more delightful is the possibility that we’ll see orchestras of squishy, organic, edible instruments. NYC Resistor and our friend Ranjit Bhatnagar built their own instrument out of JELL-O (or fruit salad, depending on the iteration). The Gel-tone made a splash (erm, squish) as a more whimsical entry at the Guthman Musical Instrument competition, and was played and eaten at our own Handmade Lounge at Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hilariously, it debuted at (and was invented for) a JELL-O mold competition. See these couple of videos (Guthman top; Solid Sound bottom) below, and find more information on that instrument:

the resistor jeltone :: an edible toy piano [openMaterials]

How to make your own: The Resistor JelTone (I dearly hope this inspires more copy-cats. Let the gelatinous musical instrument revolution continue!)

More on the Noisy Jelly project:

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/MSP, there are absolut no sound editing in the video…
More picture at this Flickr set
And download the project PDF
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L’Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)

If you do make your own project, we’d love to see it. Perhaps a gel-orchestra is next.

Several people showed this to me; notably at DE:BUG (Deutsch)
http://de-bug.de/musiktechnik/archives/5820.html

Deep thought: if this is what this young person’s baby toy looks like, what will his computer look like?

Father Matt Durant writes to share a surprisingly spacey, expressive solo by his 16-week-old baby son:

My baby son, Austin, touched an iPad for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I loaded up Moog’s new Animoog app and was blown away with what happened. Mom & I have never seen him so dexterous and thoughtful with any object before. Luckily I had my iPhone within reach so I was able to record his ‘performance’ in video.

I’ve sent it to Moog and they have posted it on their Facebook page, and I have received personal emails from Michael Adams (President CEO of Moog) and their head of Marketing with praise.

cheers, great site! I’ve enjoyed CDM for years now.

http://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog

Animoog, while otherwise a beautifully-designed app, now has two downsides to consider: its cost is up from a buck cut-rate intro price to US$29.99, and you’ll know, in the back of your mind, you’d darned well better find a way to play better than a 16-week-old infant. That’s right. Austin just p0wned you.

I was accused by one commenter recently of drawing topics into a “polemic” discussion of iPads and interface design. So, true to form, let’s draw a baby – albeit an older one – into polemics. Baby Baphomet prefers the more tactile feel of a conventional Moog. The performance here is definitely less sensitive and nuanced. Perhaps we can agree to disagree – Baphomet as your top choice for your more forceful punk act, Austin clearly as the more lyrical of the two on Animoog. Watch:

(Side note: what kind of people “dislike” a video of a baby on YouTube? Like … really? Fortunately, if either of these young’ns does get trolled, they won’t actually be able to read – and, honestly, whatever they’re doing with their time is a better use of their life than us reading those kinds of comments as adults.)

Thanks, Matt, for sharing this, and hopefully CDM will last into Austin’s later years so we can find out how his playing evolves. Keep on synthin’, kid!

In the midst of all this talk of intangible digital intellectual property and arcane licensing and Internet policy, there’s something comforting about thinking of music and art as something you make with your hands and give to someone. It was a discussion of that – even in the context of technology – that first led me to the discussion of “Handmade Music.” (Tip of the hat to my friend, Etsy’s Matt Stinchcomb, with whom this discussion has crossed the Atlantic from Brooklyn to Berlin.)

Via Cool Hunting, here’s an old-fashioned way of making a music object. The music is on vinyl; the book is carved into blocks and hand-printed. Any sense of nostalgia or twee hipness is instantly forgiven once you see the results: the book looks absolutely gorgeous. Kids will have to compete with their parents to get it.

Two stories in a single canvas-covered volume that reads from the outside covers inward, ending at the center. There, a two-song 70 gram 7″ vinyl inside a hand-cranked copper block printed sleeve.

Stories written, illustrated, carved, and printed by Micah Middaugh at Cavern Lantern Wonder Welding (Jordan River Valley, Mich.)

Songs by Breathe Owl Breathe

The story sounds wonderful, too. As CH’s James Thorne tells it:

“The Listeners” is a comic tale of the friendship between an ostrich and a mole who meet by chance one day in a hole. The mole with sightless eyes and the bird with flightless wings join to form a band called “The Listeners,” and perform together in an underground concert for their friends. “These Train Tracks” is a story of metamorphosis, in which a set of train tracks transforms into everything from a caterpillar to the night sky to a set of pajama buttons. Its mood is both whimsical and soothing, a perfect end to a child’s long day.

The Listeners / These Train Tracks: Music and animal hijinks come together in a handmade children’s book by Breathe Owl Breathe [Cool Hunting]

The music is available by Bandcamp, which you’ll see allows you to sell both a digital download and physical copies. Of course, you may want to do a trailer on YouTube to promote it, which means you’ll have to contend with giant lobbying groups and collection agencies trying to destroy the Interne– okay, that doesn’t make a very good bedtime story. Let’s get back to the ostrich and the mole. They’re more likable.

Have a listen to the music:

http://breatheowlbreathe.bandcamp.com/album/the-listeners-these-train-tracks

Think back to playing a simply childhood game like Musical Chairs. The actual gameplay depends only on auditory clues – something you take for granted as a kid, but something apparently lost on game engineers who insist exclusively on advanced 3D rendering engines for visuals. And because you get your body involved, the game becomes dynamic. That musical cue isn’t just off in the background: in the dizzying run around the chairs, the soundtrack can become the singular focus of your brain, an urgent score to the — DIVE, got the chair!

As the scene around game experimentation grows richer, there’s a rekindled interest in how game mechanics can play to different senses. In some cases, it can be a source of whimsy; in others, it’s the only way to design games for people who are absent one of those senses. And an ongoing exploration of music and sound as gameplay mechanic – not just gameplay accompaniment – ought to interest composers and sound designers. When you look at a conventional arcade game, tuning your reflexes to the graphics is key, even if sounds provide reward and ambience. In these games, the sound is where the play is.

Johann Sebastian Joust has a lot in common with Musical Chairs. The game input is the lovely Sony PlayStation Move motion controller, which – yep, you guessed it, is where the jousting comes in. (An earlier version used the Wiimote.) But in place of graphics, listening to the music itself tells you when to act, just as in the childhood game:

When the music plays in slow-motion, the controllers are extremely sensitive to changes in acceleration. When the music speeds up for, this threshold becomes less strict, giving the players a small window to dash at their opponents. If the player’s controller is ever moved beyond the allowable threshold, that player loses.

Little wonder that the game resembles some of those kids’ games: the designers reveal that they got the idea after improvising “folk” games with friends. Now, there is some concession to adding additional feedback – the controllers use the light-up ball on the end and rumble feedback just to make absolutely clear what’s going on; some “sound games” are more pure in their all-sonic interface. But the idea remains the same.

The game is the work of the Copenhagen Game Collective. They describe themselves as “multi-gender, multi-national, non-profit”; I would add to that “blazing hot stuff.” CGC’s games have earned some serious accolades; for one, B.U.T.T.O.N., a group party game, was the runaway hit of the Kokoromi GAMMA party in 2010, and also showed up wowing crowds again at the same Kill Screen / Museum of Modern Art Show at which we saw Pxl Pusher, covered yesterday. (CDM and myself were also involved in that Gamma party, and co-organized a one-button art show at San Francisco’s GAFFTA art space.) But the group has in no small sense put Copenhagen on the map.

The team for this title:
Douglas Wilson: concept, programming, and video
Nils Deneken: graphics and announcer voice
Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren: music and sound

Composer Nicklas Nygren is a triple threat: game designer, coder, and composer. Check out some of his music on SoundCloud:

Latest tracks by Nifflas

There’s plenty more to say about sound games and music games and interactive music for games. I gave a presentation at the Indie Gaming Showcase in Berlin on the topic at an event hosted by arts network Platoon – see their write-up. I’ll pull those notes together; if you have any nominees of game work you’d like to see covered, let us know in comments.

But for now, I’ll leave you with the image of Johann Sebastian Joust and Musical Chairs. After all, composition and ensemble playing themselves can be seen as games with musical mechanics. They certainly can even have “win” and “fail” mechanics – ask your local orchestra player.

http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/johann-sebastian-joust/

Want to see hundreds of pieces of music kit from keyboards to oscilloscopes, plus some 1500 mini-Theremin toys for students, coupled with US-wide education to help introduce young people to science? That’s the idea behind a grant proposal by the Moog Foundation. The Foundation’s MoogLab teaches science through sound – a worthy cause. Not only was Bob Moog’s life in electronic music ignited by discovering the Theremin, but many of today’s generation of scientists and thinkers were raised on electronic sound kits a few short decades ago. Without the same exposure to science and sound, young boys and girls may not get on the same path.

If you like the idea, the project needs votes. Michael Gallant (formerly an editor Keyboard Magazine, still a contributor) writes with this update:

We are up for earning a $250K grant to take electronic music instruments into schools to teach under-served kids science via the Moog Foundation’s MoogLab program. The catch is that we’re ranked #92 now by public vote and we need to be #1 or #2 by the end of December in order to win the funding.

Voting is daily; that is, vote early, vote often. Voting every day in December gives the project you want better chances.

More information:
http://www.refresheverything.com/bobmoogfoundation

The Refresh Everything grant aside, I’d love to hear more discussion of how to bring electronics and sound to young people around the world – your ideas are certainly welcome.

Super Cute Thursday (unplanned) continues, with an adorable indie rock coloring book. It’s hardly the first. STS9 and recently the lovely Riceboy Sleeps limited edition by Sigur Ros’ Jonsi and Alex came with coloring books. Perhaps inspired by musicians entering parenthood, it’s all the rage.

If you can’t be pressured to select just one band for your (or your kids’) coloring pleasure, here’s The Indie Rock Coloring Book, a project of the Yellow Bird Project, which gives to artists’ charities. You get to not only color but solve mazes and connect-the-dots.

Hey, with music increasingly intangible in the digital age and record sales dropping, it seems the kids’ activity book could be the future. And you get artists like MGMT, Iron & Wine, Bon Iver, and – pictured here – Joseph Arthur with his various stompboxes. Other artists involved with the project include faves like Au Revoir Simone, Broken Social Scene, Of Montreal, Rilo Kiley, and … many other goodies.

Electronic artists have been having a wave of babies themselves, so it seems an all-electronic coloring book is next. Perhaps a maze in Ableton Live’s Clip View, color-the-oscilloscope, monome Sodoku, fold-your-own-Moog… I could go on, but I’ll let you suggest some ideas and artists. (CDM Activity Book, perfect for long tours?)

Daily Dose Pick: The Indie Rock Coloring Book [Flavorpill]
Coloring Book
Yellow Bird Themesong

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.

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.

From the time we’re kids, we use gestures to make music – shaking, tapping, moving our bodies around, and connecting physical movement to sound. The idea of using these kinds of gestures to control digital music has been something researchers have worked on for many years. But with increasingly smart phones, equipped with mics, tilt and acceleration sensors, cameras, and other inputs, it’s possible to actually deliver these tools to average users.

The latest entry in the field is ZooZBeat. Its life as a mobile app is just a matter of months, but the research behind it involves years of work at Georgia Tech (which recently opened the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology). The work comes from Gil Weinberg and and co-designers/programmers Andrew Beck and Mark Godfrey. We’ve followed Gil’s work with smart music apps for some time. I got the chance to talk to him about ZooZBeat.

ZooZBeat Website

Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology

Shake it Like a Polaroid

The idea behind ZooZBeat is to use gestures to build up music ideas. Shake and tilt, touchscreen taps, and (Nokia) keypad presses add rhythmic and melodic lines, as seen in the video. Now, if this seems to lack some of the precision of a musical instrument, it’s not just you: the early apps are primarily built to be friendly to novices.

“You can go and you can practice and be much better,” says Weinberg. “But … it helps you get started, even if you’re a novice.”

The free ZooZBeat Lite version already lets you play individually with up to 2 beats running in the background and 10 instrument sounds, and a full-blown version adds voice recording (minus the iPod touch), song saving, more customization, and more sounds. A “Pro” version is coming, too, for more serious use.

If you have an iPhone, an iPod touch, or a Nokia N95, you can try this out for yourself. (Interestingly, the Symbian-based N95 actually trumps the iPhone when it comes to wireless sharing.) The Apple-platform app is available now, with the Nokia app coming within the next few days.

Lowering the Floor, Raising the Ceiling

I talked to Gil about the development process and the ideas behind the project.

“The main issue is how to create low floor and high ceiling — how to allow everyone, kids to [older people] to make music they like and have a meaningful beginning,” says Gil. “People try a cello and it sounds terrible and they drop it. I’m trying to make it easier [to] connect to sound.”

That idea is a familiar one, of course, and something that comes up regularly in new digital instrument design. (In fact, one might wonder if it causes people to neglect the potential of design with instruments intended for more depth.) But the interesting thing is always just how you go about it. Gil says this is the culmination of about ten years of research. For ZooZBeat, it involved doing a lot of testing and development, including interviews, surveys, and user testing.

“Sometimes I did it with musicians, but with the cellphones we focused on novices,” says Gil. “We have kids — friends of my kids from school, a group of them played with [the instrument], and also students at Georgia Tech. observations were very useful, just watching as people used it.”

And the idea wasn’t just to focus on making the design novice-friendly. “The low floor is easy if you just care about the low floor,” Gil observes. “The trick is how to make a high ceiling — once you start, you can also grow up in the house, become better musically.”

As it happens, working with testing and allowing novices and kids to try the instrument yielded some surprises. “The way I played it was tapping. I took it with one hand and tapped on the other hand, the way I thought it would be expressive. Kids came and preferred to shake it.”

With shaking the primary interface, the question of how to accurately measure shakes becomes important. I note some of the challenges of using this as a input, as witnessed by early game development on the Nintendo Wii; recently Nintendo even announced it was adding additional hardware to allow the Wii remote to be more accurate. Gil answers that Georgia Tech is working with providers that may be able to add additional data.

Buzz around the iPhone aside, Gil had a lot of success working cross-platform. Both apps share a common engine for gesture recognition. Building specifics for the platforms wasn’t such a major challenge, thanks to the work both Apple and Nokia have done. “We did it pretty quickly,” says Gil. “We started with the Nokia, believe it or not.” After Apple released the 2.1 SDK for its iPhone and iPod touch, Gil says the team got the work done in under a couple of months. They’re examining other platforms, as well. (By the way, another reason to be interested in Nokia as a development platform: Nokia Labs has already completed a Symbian mobile library for computer vision applications — read, easy camera analysis. Hear that, Gil and programmers?)

Gil promises more developments soon, including that Pro app. We’ll be watching – and it’ll be interesting to hear your feedback.

Previous Research

Mobile software is one delivery platform, but it’s worth looking at some of Gil’s previous research to see where this came from. I suspect some people may actually prefer the tangible objects to mobile phones.

For an overview of what Gil has done:

Music Shapers: These squeezable balls created soft, squishable musical inputs

Beatbugs: Networked physical objects for kids, the Beatbugs are intelligent “rhythm computers” – handheld percussion for the digital age

iltur: Inventing is one thing – and some point, composition and performance matter, actually using those inventions. iltur is a series of compositions realizing musical applications of the Beatbugs.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive guide to gestural music research, just Gil’s own contributions. Doing that kind of round-up wouldn’t be a bad idea, so if you have suggestions, I’m all ears (or squeeze-ready fingers).

Stay tuned; more soon.