Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer.

There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum and Skittles, beer bottle caps, soda bottles, and now walnuts. Don’t stop now: someone has to do Cheetos, even if it means dealing with orange stuff all over your fingers.

That said, it’s not walnuts that make d-touch an important project. Built by Enrico Costanza back in 2003, the project is now available for free download as an open source library, a server (in case you don’t want to get into the C++ code but might want to use this in your own projects), a free, usable drum machine, and a set of documentation that can help you make your own stuff easily. Enrico worked on the original reacTable prototype and has done some really important work in this field. Right now, Enrico and co are looking for feedback, but if you’re ready to just be a tester and play with this – and see what you can do musically – now’s your chance.

d-touch also combines high levels of computer readability for accurate tracking with the ability to make your own tags. Instead of using ugly-looking glyphs, you can make patterns that make sense to human beings as well as computers. Oh, yeah – and mobile fans, this runs at a full 14 fps even on S60 phones.

For more, check out the d-touch site:
http://d-touch.org/ [Register first to make the download available]
and follow them on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/audiodtouch

Thanks to Martin (of reacTable, which is moving toward a commercial product) for sending this our way. Thanks, too, to Ben, who’s working on tangible interfaces with special needs students. I really look forward to hearing how that’s going.

The Cupertino-Mushroom Kingdom gap has been closed: you can now mix and match DS and iPhone/iPod touch for wireless control of music and visuals. DSMI, the homebrew library that has enabled wireless and serial MIDI connections from the Nintendo DS, has come to iPod touch and iPhone. That means anyone building instruments and controllers on the iThing can now add wireless MIDI controllers that talk to computers – or other mobile devices, including the DS. It also means that DSMI’s acronym standing for “Nintendo DS Music Interface” has only one word that describes all the things it does.

If you’re a developer, you can grab the open source (LGPL-licensed) code. If you’re a user, apps are already supporting the new wireless features. There’s MIDI Motion Machine, which provides tilt and 16 triggers, and iXY, a 99-cent app for KAOSS Pad-style X/Y touch control. The MIDI Motion Machine author, TheRain, takes an interesting approach: there’s both a free and pay version, and the free version has source code.

Tobias Weyand, DSMI’s original co-creator along with TheRain, writes:

My friend TheRain has ported DSMI to the iPhone! This enables iPhone deveopers to easily integrate wireless MIDI in their applications, making it possible to control any MIDI application on the PC with the iPhone. The Wifi-to-MIDI bridge is the same DSMI server application that is also used for the DS, thus it works with Windows, OSX and Linux.
Also, like on the DS, both OSC and MIDI are supported!

DSMI for iPhone is available from our Google Code site (http://code.google.com/p/dsmi/) together with an open source example application called MIDI Motion Machine that is a tilt-based xy-controller.

The cool thing is that this library takes away all the hassle of communicating MIDI messages to the PC and makes development of MIDI controllers very very simple. So, we hope that people will use the DSMI to create a lot of innovative iPhone MIDI controller apps.

Pretty cool, isn’t it? :-)

The creator of the wonderful glitchDS, repeaterDS, and cellDS Nintendo homebrew music apps has turned his sights to the free and open coding-for-artists desktop tool Processing. The result: a drum machine that mutates and morphs in wonderful ways via a command-line interface. (I almost put the command line bit in the headline, but while I actually adore command lines, I think the more interesting part of it is the way it mutates its patterns in lovely ways. No boring endless step sequence repeat here.)

The tool is called Quotile, and since it is built in Processing and the code is entirely free, you’re welcome to try it out and change it around if you like! Apparently the Mac camp are having some troubles, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work on Mac; the problem is generally that getting Java MIDI running on Mac has some tricky bits because Apple dropped support for the Java MIDI API, even though it’s a standard part of the Java platform. In this case, I expect it’s the library’s reliance on mmj or people having trouble installing that MIDI subsystem that’s the culprit. Keep the faith: it can work, and I hope we can get a standard, reliable MIDI library soon.

The sound source above: Machinedrum, of course.

I’ll give this a try on Linux later today, on the platform that I think has the best MIDI support, hands-down – yes, even compared to the Mac. (I’ll explain why I think that soon.)

Speaking of MIDI libraries, the Processing library this is based on is a new one called MIDI Bus. It’s very similar to wesen’s rwmidi, which we’ve covered before.

The project:
Quotile – new PC MIDI sequencer written in Processing at glitchDS

The free library for Processing (Mac + Windows + Linux)
Small But Digital – themidibus

Previous musical creations in Processing:
Strange, New Musical Interfaces, Built in Processing
DIY 3D Controller: Inspired by Theremin, Powered by Arduino, Processing
Tiction: Animated, Nodal Generative Music App in Progress, in Processing
Build Your Own Game of Life Sequencer in Processing: Video Featuring rwmidi
Help! I’m Trapped in an Acid-Colored Wash of a Thousand General MIDI Pianos!
Spaces and Roots: Manipulating Sound with Processing + Touch, Tangible Interfaces

Look out, PCs: you’re getting the audio engine from the Xbox 360. That’s the message from Microsoft, which abandoned the old DirectSound APIs in Windows Vista. They’ve got a new audio system called XAudio2 ready and waiting, however, and it looks good — though it also begs the question, why didn’t Microsoft ship it with Windows Vista out of the gate? (Instead, Microsoft actually suggested users turn to the OpenAL open audio architecture, and now appears to be getting XAudio2 ready for Vista SP1.)

Geek alert: the rest of this post may be interesting only to developers…

XAudio2 does look more ambitious than many other audio architectures in that it includes programmable DSP effects baked right in, plus some nice mixing and spatialization features. This stuff is largely aimed at gaming, but it could yield some interesting music applications, as well:

• Multi-channel and surround-sound support with full per-channel volume and mapping control.
• Programmable, cross-platform DSP effects framework.
• Per-voice filtering, arbitrary submixing, and multi-rate processing.
• Multicore optimized, non-blocking API design.
• Pluggable and generalized 3D spatialization support, with a full-featured implementation provided by the independent X3DAudio math library.

“Cross-platform”, though, in Microsoft fashion, should actually mean Xbox 360 + Windows Vista.

For more:

Microsoft Announces DirectX 10.1 Preview, Betas New Audio Tech [ExtremeTech]

Meanwhile, the state of true cross-platform engines is not so fantastic. OpenAL, a multi-platform, open source 3D audio library, comes closest and appears actively updated, though your mileage will vary depending on platform. DSP and many other features have to be provided on your own. Sun, meanwhile, has left the Java platform a mess; the dusty, rusty Java Media Frameworks hasn’t gotten an update since 2003, the open source Java efforts are stumbling on multimedia support because so much of what’s required is proprietary, and no one seems to know what’s happening next.