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?

The Lemur multitouch control surface is as much about software as it is about hardware, and the folks at JazzMutant and Cycling ‘74 have been hard at work updating that software and making it work effectively with more applications. Think better MIDI support, Ableton Live control, and new tutorials on exploring sound and sequencing. Thanks to updates to the JazzMutant site and a 1.2 firmware update for the hardware, the Lemur now boasts:

MIDI compatibility: It’s now easier to scale and generate MIDI data from the more complex OpenSoundControl data piped out of the Lemur.

New object physics: The Lemur’s quasi-magical use of bouncing on-screen objects, programmable with attraction, oscillation, and other features, have been revised in the 1.2 firmware, with more updates on the way.

More templates: The redesigned Jazz Mutant website now has a workshop section with tutorials. Some probably won’t surprise you (exploring granular synthesis in Max/MSP), but others might (using Lemur as a Star Trek-style step sequencer, or to control Cubase SX and Ableton Live 5).

By the way, if you’re in Santa Monica, California this Saturday, Cycling ‘74 will have a workshop at the Apple Store. Say hi for us, and let us know how it goes.

Related:

Detailed Lemur feature rundown [JazzMutant]
Cycling ‘74 Shows Lemur Touschscreen

For those of you not on the Cycling `74 mailing list, the future is now: the Lemur touchscreens are on their way. So if you thought this would never be a real product, think again. Cycling tells us that the new machines “are out of the factory” and after final testing will be in San Francisco in another couple of weeks. That’s an actual production Lemur pictured.

This also means “touching sessions” are coming soon, and really, who wouldn’t look forward to that? (Makes the Acid Tests with their Buchlas seem tame by comparison.) See Lee Sherman’s coverage of Cycling’s Lemur event for more.

Cycling ‘74 offered a glimpse into digital music’s future last night at the San Francisco Apple Store, with one of the first public appearances of the JazzMutant Lemur programmable touchscreen controller working in concert with its software editor. Unlike conventional touchscreen tablets, the Lemur can support multiple simultaneous finger taps, making it, at least theoretically, possible to even play piano on the thing.

Product Specialist Gregory Taylor showed how easy it is to create customized control surfaces merely by dragging intelligent user interface objects onto a layout of the Lemur’s screen. The software ships with some 16 of these widgets, including the expected sliders and knobs, along with more experimental ones like bouncing balls that react to friction.

Once the interface is constructed, it can be downloaded in seconds to the Lemur over an Ethernet connection using Open Sound Control. The Lemur can communicate in both directions with the computer it is connected to and used to control anything in Max/MSP or Jitter that you’d like. The possibilities are literally endless.

Taylor explained that the Lemur was designed for “idiosyncratic interface control, because nobody wants to perform all the time on a laptop.” In fact, the Lemur should probably have been called the Chameleon due to its ability to transform itself from a mixing board to a drum machine to video controller, to a way to convert incoming email into MIDI data (gee, I wonder what my SPAM would sound like?).

Ed: The Lemur is now weeks away from shipping, with a price of US$2495. Much has been made of how expensive it is, but keep in mind this isn’t just any old LCD touchscreen: anything cheaper lacks the ability to tap more than one place at once. Of course, I still can’t afford one, but if you can, let us know — and what’s really exciting is thinking a couple of years down the road as these get cheaper. -PK

Photos by Lee Sherman.