If you could control your music with all of your digits, and get interactive feedback on a display, what would your setup look like? Expert Lemur user and software engineer Bryant Place has one such answer. It shows off just how much the Lemur’s software has evolved over a series of revisions, and reveals a bit of what can go into performing with Ableton Live.

Photos/screens: Bryant Place. Used by permission. (Click for larger versions.)

Side note: for a look at live touch interfaces with Native Instruments’ Reaktor, see our story for our NI minisite. To really understand how touch is impacting live playing, I think it’s helpful to see what’s going on with different software platforms.

Multi-touch, Lemur, and Going Live

Part of the appeal of Ableton Live is that it behaves as a hybrid between arrangement software and musical instrument. Early versions even carried the tagline “Sequencing Instrument,” but that sums up the problem: instruments generally aren’t sequencers, and visa versa. To “play” your sequencer live is challenging enough, but added to that is the fundamental mouse-pointer interface that’s been in the marketplace for over twenty years. To really control live, you need more direct access.

The Lemur multi-touch hardware promised just such control when unveiled. In an early review, I saw this as promising but cautioned that the custom software the Lemur runs was overly rigid. Since then, firmware updates have gradually added more custom features.

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I got to watch as Bryant showed off a set of templates he’s been developing that exploit these features for deeper, more interactive control of Ableton Live. Bryant’s session was brief enough that you could blink and miss it, but an awed crowd of assembled Live gurus revealed that he’d showed something really special. It’s a dream multi-touch setup. He’s using the new v2 firmware for Lemur, which we see in a screenshot from Jazz Mutant has also been used in their own template for Live. Not all the features come from v2 firmware, but those tabs make a big difference, and I can imagine continuing to go hog-wild with envelopes and such.

The basic idea: set up effects for live performance and make them readily accessible from the futuristic-looking, multi-touch, colored Lemur control surface. With a few compact screens, and interface elements that respond dynamically to what’s happening in software, it’s possible to use touch gestures to control elaborate effects arrangements in ways that would be very different than the results you could get from conventional knobs and faders.

Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation saw this coming – computer display interfaces were destined to allow direct touch from all your fingers, with no mouse or stylus or clunky single-point interface intervening. Jazz Mutant’s Lemur multi-touch hardware was arguably the first widely-available commercial solution to enabling this kind of control of music and performance. Now, several years after the launch of Lemur, multi-touch is mainstream. Apple’s iPod touch and iPhone already support it in hardware costing as little as US$200. Microsoft promises built-in support in Windows 7. HP says computers and displays are imminent. Many others will follow.

But if you want multi-touch to work for music, what’s the best approach? The dedicated multi-touch Lemur controller (and its Dexter sibling) has won over support from some musicians and multimedia artists for specifically catering to their needs. Various celebs have been spotted using them – recently we saw Justice rocking a pair in Rio.

What defines the Lemur is that you don’t use it like a conventional display. Instead, you create interfaces from pre-defined building blocks – the virtual equivalent of adding physical faders and knobs to DIY controller hardware. To me, that’s been paradoxically both its strongest and weakest point. The strength is, the display focuses on controls that make sense for performance and can be easily manipulated with fingers. The weakness is, you’re limited to these widgets – and, increasingly, the Lemur has to compete with mainstream hardware displays that have no such limitations. As mainstream hardware grows, it puts more pressure on Lemur.

In the meantime, though, Lemur’s creators keep improving the available widgets. The biggest firmware update yet, v2 has just hit beta, with the finished firmware available by the end of the year. It’s a free update for Lemur owners, so a no-brainer there. New in this release:

• Breakpoint object for manipulating multi-segment envelopes
• Gesture object: gesture recognition, pinching, rotating, and finger tracing
• Tabbed container: Now, instead of switching endlessly between control pages, you can fit different sets of controls into tabs
• Mouse/keyboard remote control: keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements now become possible directly from the Lemur

In addition, it’s easier to edit Lemur pages more quickly, aliases of objects save memory, and multi-line scripting beefs up custom options.

It’s really good stuff, which makes me wonder: does Jazz Mutant have the ability to support other third-party hardware if it becomes available?

In the meantime, there isn’t actually any direct equivalent for the Lemur, at least not with this screen size. I imagine those with the cash who want to use a futuristic interface rather than just speculate about it will continue to snap up Lemurs. For the rest of us, it’s interesting just watching the development.

Jazz Mutant [Company Site]

Here’s a unique chance to step onstage with electronic duo Justice – well, through photos, at least – on tour in Brazil. Behind a stack of Marshall Amps and other gear that looks ready to push back an invading horde of Barbarians with a battering ram, these two have some very lovely goodies for live laptop performance. No plain-vanilla DJ sets here.

Our friend Fabio “FZero” writes:

I came across some pictures of the gear Justice used to play in Rio. They were taken by a guy which works on Circo Voador (the place were they played) and uploaded to orkut. I’ve downloaded and zipped them to make things easier.

The name of the photographer is Henrique Kurtz and his orkut profile is at http://www.orkut.com.br/Main#Profile.aspx?uid=3218703684024828269

3 x Jazzmutant Lemur (THREE LEMURS. It’s good to be rich, I guess.)
2 x MacBook Pro (one is probably backup)
1 x Korg MicroKorg
1 x Korg ZERO8 Live Control
1 x Pioneer DJM800
Software: Ableton Live

Get up close and personal with the laptop rig itself. Okay, you may not be able to afford three Lemurs, but this wouldn’t be hard to scale to other setups. And there’s plenty here to make a “live PA” performance really a performance.

What looks like some huge news gets casually mentioned in descriptions for the upcoming SIGGRAPH graphics conference and on the website of JazzMutant, the developers of multi-touch hardware controllers Lemur and Dexter:

Jazzmutant is proud to have been selected by the Siggraph Emerging Technologies Committee in San Diego to demo a new prototype device for digital imaging involving multi-touch control. This solution will go beyond mere finger-drawing and clearly illustrate a new way to interact and improve productivity with drawing and video editing software. Furthermore, the solution presented will be the very first multi-touch enabled Tablet PC shown to the public.

JazzMutant news

One of my complaints when I looked at the first Lemur touchscreen was that it felt like it had in a way separated display, computer, and interface. A computer with multi-touch? Now we’re talking. Lots of questions here, though: how would a typical PC support the multi-touch interface? How much would it cost? What’s this new prototype device — is it, as the Dexter was, basically just another Lemur with the addition of new control templates?

Time will tell. We’ll be watching. But this is some of the best multi-touch news in a long time.

Thanks to Andreas Wetterberg for the tip!

Touch and multi-touch interfaces are getting lots of attention, but they pose one major problem: there’s no tactile feedback. Those supposedly “primitive” buttons and knobs and such start to look a lot better when you realize your fingers are used to touching solid objects. All you get from a touchscreen is the sensation of running your finger against an undifferentiated piece of plastic. That was one of my complaints with the multi-touch music interface, Lemur: it just felt physically wrong.

As more and more interfaces employing touch interfaces, engineers are working on solutions to the problem. ExtremeTech talks about a new deal between mobile phone maker Nokia and feedback gurus Immersion (whom you may know from the gaming market):

Nokia Touchscreen Phones to Add Tactile Feedback

Don’t expect too much here — I think the results will feel more like a vibration when you’re touching a control. Then again, a little goes a long way. The Nintendo Wii very cleverly uses basic vibration to give you a subtle cue as you hit something that can be controller, for instance. The vibration is one-dimensional, but it can be enough to give your brain a connection to what you’re doing. Even Apple’s somewhat flawed Mighty Mouse provides feedback by placing a small speaker under its roller ball, which, whether it’s useful or not, tickles your fingertip so you get the sense of scrolling.

These tools have a long way to go, but they could make touch interfaces more useful for music. Even some basic haptic feedback could make using simple touch interfaces like the Korg KAOSS Pad more fun. It’ll be interesting to watch this stuff evolve — and see if mass-market cell phone technology might trickle up to niche-market music products.

Robosonic Eclectic: Morton Subotnik, They Might Be Giants, and robotic musical instruments on the same bill? That … doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen this weekend, starting tonight.

With a lineup that includes They Might Be Giants, JG Thirlwell, Mort Subotnick, George Lewis, R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson, Lemurplex is kicking off what looks like a really packed couple of weeks of music and research into new instruments here in New York this weekend. Check out the TMBG video and JG Thirwell clip for a teaser of what’s to come. I’ll be there, so say hi if you, uh, know what I look like. (And thanks to all of you who’ve been saying hello at various events. It’s always great to know who’s out there reading.)

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots

Lemurplex, incidentally, is a terrific place to go learn this stuff if you can find a way to come to New York — not only musical robotics, but music tech in general. See also Harvestworks, which regularly has people in from other lands around the world for residencies / learning / etc. Not everything happens in New York, of course; I hope to put together an up-to-date list of educational venues beyond academia around the globe soon.

Flyer after the jump.

Being an international music superstar means you can tour with whatever fun toys you like. In the case of Bjork’s new Volta tour, that means the JazzMutant Lemur multi-touch interface and, even more fun, the fantastic reacTable, a research project involving projection and multiple objects for a tangible interactive table experience! CDM reader Mike Cohen smuggled this video out of a recent Bjork performance:

It really does work nicely in action, in terms of expressing to the audience what the performer is doing, and making nice eye candy, to boot.

More details on Bjork’s futuristic touring rig:
multitouched bjork [Byron Scullin blog]

And, of course, a big report from Boing Boing celebrity Xeni Jardin, which I’m way behind on linking as it posted 4/28:
Coachella: Björk’s wild sound machines, and report from the turf [Boing Boing]

It’s funny, but despite endless blog coverage of devices like the reacTable, some dating back before the creation of CDM, it sometimes takes a celebrity like Bjork for other people to notice the instrument. Then again, many electronic instruments have been popularized over the years by big names (Moog gear by Keith Emerson and Wendy Carlos, Fairlight CMI by Peter Gabriel, etc., etc., in a list too long to recount). So, perhaps this is something big for tangible interfaces. I noticed blocks were big at ITP last night. I think these devices just have a long way to go in terms of general accessibility and expressiveness, at least for mass music making; most importantly, they have to work on those two points in ways that can be reproduced by lots of people, if not in a commercial product, in a DIY implementation. But it’ll be interesting to watch, as always. And Bjork certainly demonstrates how to rock the instrument.

New stuff with knobs, keys, and touchscreens: yep, it’s Giant German Music Tech Trade Show time.

Our friend Rainer Knobloch got to spend a few hours on the Messe show floor, so we politely pointed him to some of the gear that inspired the most drool. Topping the list, of course, is Clavia’s new Nord Wave, just because Clavia hasn’t yet published anything on their site. (More Nord details coming later today; sorry for the delay.) But we also learn via these photos just how cool the Arturia Origin’s flip-up panel looks, and we get to see John Bowen cradle his new synth, the Solaris. (See our interview.)

Messe 07, by Rainer [Flickr Set]

If you were at Messe and shot some photos of your own, feel free to add them to our Flickr pool. More of my favorites:

Lemur 1.5 was announced today, bringing some significant improvements to this unique multi-touch display/control surface. Specifically, this update addresses a number of complaints about Lemur, including some I voiced in my review for Keyboard Magazine:

1. Easier mapping: MIDI and even OSC assignment was a bit of a chore in the existing Jazz Editor release, partly because it required multiple clicks to get to MIDI assignments, in particular. The new editor always has MIDI and OSC assignments visible in a tab, and there’s a new custom MIDI object for more complex, multiple-output assignments.
2. More templates, reusable components: While JazzMutant hasn’t released an exact list, the update includes more templates, which should help you get started out of the box. You can now also reuse components between templates, answering another complaint many of us had, since previously you had to duplicate work each time you built a new template.
3. 

   Knobs: The previous Lemur lacked virtual knobs. Now, knobs are available, both in endless rotary and fixed-rotation varieties.

4. Text: The surfaceLCD object lets you easily label tracks, etc., by feeding data from your computer. This basically acts as a virtual LCD screen you can add to your control layout.
5. More MIDI Control: You can now control the Lemur itself via MIDI, and use up to 8 input and output ports for some complex inter-gear configuration.

I’m still not convinced the Lemur is for everyone, but this is a major improvement on an already-innovative design. If you’re a Lemur user, I’m sure you’re in hog heaven. If not, and you don’t intend to be, there’s still a message here for manufacturers: make configuration as flexible and fluid as possible. It has an enormous effect on how a control surface is used.

The Lemur multi-touch touchscreen controller is the rare kind of product that breaks entirely from convention, raising fundamental questions about how we make music. It’s comforting in a way, then, to see disagreement about just how well the finished product works. After over a year of buzz, detailed in-practice reviews of the Lemur are emerging, including my review for Keyboard Magazine, and Jonathan Segel’s review for Electronic Musician. The two reviews reach somewhat different conclusions. Neither review gives an unqualified endorsement, but both see promise in the device — just different promise. And I have to ask a question: are physical controls like knobs really as limited as people seem to assume?