Didgeridoo from bar|none on Vimeo.

You can’t quite dance to it, but bar|none has a beautifully-shot video of a strange, invented instrument constructed with some of the technologies we saw last week. As noted then, new support for OSC in the powerful Kyma sound system means the ability to control imagined instruments in more sophisticated, higher-resolution ways. Just days later, bar|none responded to my post with one of his first experiments. It’s just the beginning of his work, so judge it accordingly – think of the first emanations of a newly-created musical instrument – but it’s a reminder that far-out ideas are possible when you combine custom soundmakers with expressive control.

The controller is Jeff Snyder’s Manta, a touch-sensitive controller with velocity sensitivity and a 6×8 array of hexagons. Jeff showed off his instrument at Handmade Music Monday night here in New York; I hope to follow up with a closer look at the Manta soon. Notably, the Manta is not an OSC device; it’s an HID USB device, just as a typical mouse or keyboard is. HID, the standard drivers for which are included in every desktop OS, also supports high-resolution data, so it’s a second alternative to MIDI for input.

My first Kyma X patch for the Pacarana. Kyma is unreal and let’s you do almost anything in Sound Design. I took a concept of a didgeridoo patch on my modular and built it back in Kyma but with even more expression. This is still a work in progress.

The touchplate is a Snyderphonics MANTA. I spent some time coding some algorithms in MAX to enhance the performance control of the patch using velocity, aftertouch and polyphonic aftertouch + controls using OSC to Kyma.

The Manta is a fantastically wonderful controller. It shows it’s [sic] flexibility and feel here.

The patch is microtonal meaning pitches are in divisions of the western concept of half and whole tones.

Since that video, he’s been trying more sonic ideas:

Been messing with this sound and here’s a version where the didgeri is resonating as if it were a metalic vibrating tube as well. This is just trying to see the kind of sounds I can get out of the patch.

soundcloud.com/barnone/karplusdigeri

This makes me wish I could afford this setup, but if, like me, you’re on a tighter budget, the ideas here could easily be applied to other rigs. Keep the experiments coming!

Updated: bar|none aka Chris Lloyd shares his camera of choice: it’s a Canon 7D with a 50mm 1.4 lens for the “Bokeh blur effect,” a tip from stretta.

Connecting stuff is one of the things musicians naturally do with gear. So, there’s really no reason that musical gear shouldn’t network as easily as Web servers. And yet a basic protocol, built largely on existing standards, meets with responses like this:

“We’ll support OSC when there’s hardware out there.” “Name one piece of hardware that supports OSC other than the Lemur.”

OSC has some major advantages as a network protocol, as a way of connecting software with software, software with hardware, and yes, even hardware with hardware. It doesn’t have to “compete” with MIDI – you can even send MIDI message data over OSC, thus taking advantage of features OSC has that MIDI doesn’t (like time stamps, which your tools could use to calculate latency even if you don’t use them directly). Yet I’ve been listening to this argument for years now. “Any computer” counts as an OSC device, but even when tens of millions of iPhones and iPod touch devices hit the market (not to mention other mobiles), software developers were still pointing to a (completely absurd) “lack of hardware.” How tens of millions of gadgets can count as “nothing,” I don’t know, but maybe it’s because a lot of them were phones, not music devices.

Well, here’s a combination that ought to get someone’s attention. With the iPad about to launch next month – likely to be followed by more multitouch devices running Android, Linux, and Windows – we’re not just talking phones any more. And the folks at Symbolic Sound, makers of the insanely-powerful sound generation Kyma environment, are adding a proper OSC implementation. Even if you have no interest in the (wonderful) Kyma, now available in more-affordable Paca(rana) devices, this is one to watch.

What you can do:

Use OSC directly, via a direct connection and even onboard Ethernet on the Paca(rana). That opens up the use of devices like Lemur, and, yes, iPad.

Use MIDI over OSC from your existing MIDI devices and software. Explanation (again, worth reading even if you aren’t in the market for a Kyma):
http://www.symbolicsound.com/Learn/BidirectionalMIDIStreamsOverOSC

In this case, the OSC connection acts as a virtual MIDI devices, with three merged inputs and one output. The same is possible on other devices, too, however, meaning that combining OSC and MIDI doesn’t have to be a chore.

Details on the software update:

OSC-enabled Kyma X.74 is a free software update for registered Kyma X owners. OSC communication requires the Paca or Pacarana sound engine. Kyma X.74 also comes with additional features, including an 11-times speedup in the Virtual Control Surface, support for the MOTU Ultra Lite Hybrid mk3, TC Electronic Impact Twin, and Prism Audio Orpheus converters, track-pad compatible menus, refinements to the Tau resynthesis, and more.

Open Sound Control (OSC) for Kyma: Bidirectional communication between Kyma, iPad, Lemur, and other OSC-enabled devices & software

And if you’re using Max and Max for Live, you can use a custom external for MIDI over OSC in that environment, as well. (That said, control of Live could be more intuitive if Ableton were to evaluate native OSC control support in Live, as currently exists in nearly all mainstream live visual applications. There’s an unofficial method that demonstrates just how powerful this can be — see comments.)

Max and Kyma

Kyma is still a high-end solution, but at least the entry-level Paca – still absurdly powerful – is now down below US$3000. If I had $3 grand handy, I’d certainly consider buying one. I don’t, so I think of it as that Steinway grand I can’t afford or fit in my apartment. That doesn’t mean I can’t pay attention to what it does – and, indeed, OSC implementation like this could apply as well to a $5 or open source app, to mainstream hardware or DIY solutions, as much as the Kyma.

The phrase is overused in the media and culture today, but I think it’s appropriate here:
“Just sayin’.”

Thanks to Lowell Pickett, Martin Wheeler, and others who sent this in.

Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Lusine, “Gravity” – this cut comes from A Certain Distance, a CDM favorite album in 2009. Lusine aka Jeff McIlwain is on Ghostly Internationaland, whether it’s  “abstract” electronica or downright electronic songwriting, always manages to put a unique sonic stamp on his work.

Atlas Sound, “Walkabout (with Noah Lennox)” is by Bradford James Cox of Deerhunter fame, from his album Logos.

Hudson Mohawke, “Fuse” – the Glasgow-based artist just debuted on Warp with Butter, including this track.

White Rainbow, “Raw Shanks a Million” comes from Kranky artist Adam Fornker of Oregon. It was my introduction to his work, but see more on this track below. I love its spare, pulsing beats; it sounds like what I’d listen to while jogging to Caprica City’s cybernetics research institute.

King Midas, Sound “Outta Space (Slow Version)” comes from a project started by London’s Kevin Martin, the man behind The Bug. It’s a future-dub track for people who believe space is the place.

Low Limit, “Turf Day” is by San Francisco producer Bryan Rutledge, whom I knew as half of Lazer Sword, and who seems to be right at the center of the good stuff happening in electronic music in California.

Willits & Sakamoto, “Toward Water” comes from 2008’s “Ocean Fire,” the collaboration between experimental guitarist and composer Christopher WIllits and master composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. If you don’t know that full album already, it’s well worth owning.

The Field, “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet (Gold Panda Remix) revisits the track off The Field’s latest, “Yesterday and Today” – another top pick for 2009, and nicely reimagined here. You can check out Gold Panda, too; his mixes have become big Internet hits, and I love the quality of his work.

Tyondai Braxton, “Uffe’s Woodshop” is off his solo album Central Market and premiered on Pitchfork. The Battles singer is a Warp artist, composer, looper, and yes, indeed the son of Anthony Braxton. It’s an explosion of acoustic sounds amidst the other works here.

Untold, “Luna” is by London’s up-and-coming Jack Dunning, familiar on dance floors both for his original productions and remixes.

Nice Nice, “See Waves” will be a 7” from Warp Records in February, but you get to hear it here first. I love that it brings an entirely different rhythmic feel to this group.

Richard Devine, “Matvec Interior (Feat. Otto Von Schirach)” really is science fiction, an intricate set of colliding sonic forms from the composer and mad-scientist sound designer. It’s a favorite from his 2005 Cautella, but Richard revisits his sonic process for CDM here today.

Peter Kirn, “Anaxagoras” is my own track, premiering here, named for the Greek philosopher who attempted to explain astrological events through science, and fled after being called a heretic. The music, with some sounds of viola da gamba and others synthesized (or resynthesized), fall on that boundary between re-processed past and imminent future.

Now, some notes from behind the scenes:

White Rainbow

CDM: Tell us about the inspiration for this track. What was the process like?

I don’t get inspired to make something in the sense of looking at a butterfly and then writing a song. For me, it’s more like the act of making inspires where things go. The sounds as they come out inspire me to react and create on top of them.

This track was made by recording about an hour of live improv and then editing and cutting down and doing a few overdubs. My set up is:

INPUTS:
mic, computer running ableton using drum racks to trigger samples with a padkontrol, various iphone/ipod touch drum apps (beat maker, idrum etc), synth, electric guitar

MIXED/OUTPUT:

delay, multi –fx, dd-20 giga delay as looper, kaoss pad kp3 as multi-fx and looper

…and this all getting recorded into ableton on another computer in the studio.

I let that sit for a few months, then came back to it, cut things down and added vocal (with the Ableton Looper…one of the only times I’ve used that) and weird synth pad overdubs.

I’ve been making looper based music for a really long time now (going back to the original boomerang pre turn of the century). It’s really tough to keep it interesting… so I’m always looking and searching for new ways to keep myself interested and inspired to make new music in new ways.

I also play in an improvised electronic group called Rob Walmart, wherein we get very wrong and stupid and on tons of crappy gear. Tons of Casio keyboards, MicroKORGs, iPod Touches, Nintendo DS, microphones, etc.A new 3xLP of Rob Walmart will come out on Marriage Records early this year.

People probably still brand me as a new age or psychedelic ambient guy, and that’s cool but to me there is a direct line between synth future funk from the 70s and 80s and say, tangerine dream or Klaus Schultze. Just technology inspiring different people to make wild, "out there" space sounds. I would like to continue along that line.

Richard Devine

CDM: What can you tell us about this track?

I originally produced it in 2005, in collaboration with my good friend Otto Von Schirach. I was a going for something very alien, futuristic, scifi, scientific and unusual for this piece. The sonic timbres and textures are a combination of hybrid computer synthesis and field recordings. Think Aliens vs. Predator happening inside the world of HR Gigers head=)  The track initially started out in Logic Audio, I began cutting up sections and pieces of various field recorded bits. I went to many locations to get some of the sound sources. Many of them quite unusual and disturbing.

CDM: Your work always has these extraordinary layers of sound. What was the production process like on this track?

I started out on this farm near my house here in Georgia. It was during fall, and we went to this Halloween festival pumpkin patch place with my girlfriend. It was a huge field that had a petting zoo, and various other farm animals. I was intrigued by this fairly large turkey they had in a small metal wired cage. I record several takes of him frantically moving around as I got closer with my microphone. I also recorded the sounds of pigs, breathing heavy into the microphones.

I had a pair of DPA 4060′s Miniature Body Microphones clipped and tucked into my shirt sleeves to capture the animals up in close proximity. I also recorded sounds of water, sand, rocks, trees, leaves and debris in my backyard. I used a lot of these sounds and then imported them into the computer for heavy processing and manipulation. One of the main processing engines was the Kyma system by Symbolic Sound. I took a few sounds and converted them into spectral analysis files in which I morphed and re-synthesized some of the acoustic sounds into synthetic grains, or partials. Creating these very alien artificial sounding sounds to the mix. I also did a bit of FM synthesis for some of the percussion. Lots of intense programming in hundreds of layers of processed bits. You will notice that each bar in the composition never repeats, the same sounds or sequences. This was completely intentional. I wanted the entire sonic experience to be kinda like a roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics. I also tried to experiment with interesting new breaks, and redefine what could be considered song structure adhering to no rules or constraints.

CDM: Given the complexity, structurally, of this music, do you tend to iterate through a track over many layers?

I spend weeks, months sometimes designing the sounds, and trying to get all the pieces to work together. Almost like a complex microsound jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are very fractalized and tiny. Each sound I painfully program by hand. I take each sound as if it was a sculpture piece. I look at the sound in 3D structure. I often compare the sounds to architectural shapes, structures, and manipulate them one section at a time. I read the waveforms and sculpt them into what I want. I then add the pieces together to work into a composition as a whole. This is the most difficult part in my work in making everything seem fluid and natural. It is often difficult to make the transitions work within a short amount of time especially when you have so many sounds and textures you want to squeeze into a 5 or 6 minute track.

Lusine

CDM: What was your process like, creatively – particularly in regards to the vocals?

It was a very long process. It started off as something totally different. Some sort of downtempo disco type track with much more lyrical vocals. But, after several months I realized it wasn’t working for me, so I approached the whole thing from scratch, resampled everything and made a more minimal downtempo track out of it.

The vocals started off a lot more obviously upfront, but I decided to use them more as a musical layer, so I resampled the completed vocal track and started shuffling the bits around. It felt better to me, like the musical layers in the song weren’t competing with the vocals as much.

Ed.: I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on the compilation, especially since it represents three very different musical perspectives (which to me wound up making the experience richer). The TV show Caprica, for its part, premieres January 22 with another great Bear McCreary soundtrack (I’ve been listening already, as a fan of his scores).

US distributor Keyfax NewMedia reports that it has Yamaha’s Tenori-On in stock and shipping out now. (Pre-orders began at the beginning of May, but this is apparently the first the US unit has made it to our shows — unless you happened to win one from createdigitalmusic.com, that is, in April, in which case you know who you are.)

Every time I mention Tenori-On, despite the awe and lust it inspires in some musicians, someone raises the point of its somewhat retro-styled, simple sound bank. Fair enough: the minimal sounds are fantastic in the hands of creator Toshio Iwai and were specifically programmed and voiced to match his aesthetic. Other people, perhaps, not so much. So it’s interesting that reader Steven aka Nomad Cinema sends along this video (seen at top) of the Tenori-On paired with the absurdly deep luxury modular synth Kyma, along with a couple of beloved new analog synths. He writes:

In order to tap the real power of Yamaha’s new Tenori-on, it helps to pair it with external equipment capable of producing more satisfying sounds than the somewhat lackluster soundset included with the Tenori-on itself. In this video, no internal Tenori-on sounds were used whatsoever. Tenori-on is functioning purely as a sequencer with external equipment, including advanced sound-shaping from Kyma and analog synthesis from Alesis Andromeda and Dave Smith’s Prophet ’08. Sequencer data coming from Tenori-on is processed in Ableton Live (utilizing midi scale and chord filters, as well as injecting some generative randomness) before reaching Kyma, Andromeda, and Prophet ’08.

That to me remains the Tenori-On’s unique strength: to me it’s really an alternative step sequencer, exploded into an array of flashing lights and animated with game-like motion. This is to me also another way in which it isn’t a Monome, which feels more like an intelligent, programmable set of pads an an extension of your software, in comparison to the Tenori-On which seems to be re-imagining a giant pixel as a controller. I will be getting around to showing off some hands-on applications very soon, at long last.

Want to make music and motion with unusual inputs, like Wii controllers, Lemur multi-touch touchscreens, Monomes, and (now) 3D mice? OSCulator is a wonderful app that supports OpenSoundControl and sends MIDI events, with support for some hardware that can’t be supported any other way. The new 2.5 version adds new stuff:

• SpaceNavigator 3D mouse device support
• Mouse support
• Raw IR data from the Wiimote controller (Nintendo Wii)
• AppleScripting
• OSC Forward
• Keyboard combos
• “Meta events”

Software like Max/MSP and Reaktor will support OSC natively, but using MIDI input and output, you can hook up Kyma workstations and any MIDI software under the sun.

Software is pay-what-you-will, with a US$29 minimum.

Osculator page and manual

Camille Troillard is the wonderful musician you can thank for this tool, a member of the band Neimo which evidently is coming stateside, so stay tuned!