Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.

OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.

All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.

OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.

Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)

If you haven’t been following Max 5 updates, the folks at Cycling ‘74 have been aggressively bug squashing. The changelog for 5.0.6 alone is exhaustive. (Via @rekkerd on Twitter, of rekkerd.org.)

Updated: Also new in Max 5, it’s now possible as of 5.0.6 to properly save your patches to a version control repository. Don’t know what that is? Now’s a perfect time to find out — it means it’ll be easier to track changes you make to your own patches, and easier to collaborate with other people. And it’s free. From adamj, on comments:

RE: the diff’ing issue I was talking about above. Timothy Place (one of the Max developers) shared this helpful tidbit:

“Since the change log is a mile long, I’ll point out an obscure new power-user feature in Max 5.0.6.

You can send a new message to Max like this (or put it in an init file):
;max sortpatcherdictonsave 1

This makes it so that the JSON files that are use by Max for saving patches will keep the dictionary in the same order (alphabetized) every time you save. If you are keeping your patches in version control (e.g. SVN, GIT, CVS, etc.) then this should make your diffs a lot more usable.”

See: Version Control and Sharing for Patching: Keep Those Max, Pd Patches in Order with Git

And in other Max news, Expo74 will be a full-blown Max conference in April in San Francisco. You still have a few days to lock in the US$295 intro price (through 3/1). On the menu:

• C74-taught workshops for users: live looping, 3D, Max for Live, new timing objects, etc.
• Workshops for developers: C programming and the Max external API
• Special guest speakers, including Robert Henke — but also Miller Puckette, the creator of the original Max and developer of Cycling ’74’s open-source rival Pd.
• An afternoon on teaching Max
• A “Science Fair” for sharing projects
• Field trips
• A “Relationship Manager” – a sort of conference concierge – plus access to the C74 folks, a bit like the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference

Expo74

It’s good stuff. And the price seems a very reasonable deal for a conference.

You know, it also reminds me that some of the events around the open-source tools could be friendlier than they are. And we like science fairs. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it out to California in April (I’ll be there in March for the Game Developer Conference), but eager to hear how this goes.

But speaking of open source, don’t want to spend April at an event for a proprietary tool? Prefer the East Coast to the West Coast? Like code better than patching? Like tools that begin with the letter “S” better than the letter “M”? Want tools that make you think of supermassive black holes? Oh, April in North America has you covered regardless of what you like. One moment while I write up another post…

DyNAmic sequencer from Lo-Fi Massahkah on Vimeo.

Ready for some musical genetic engineering?

Much of the sound of electronic music today grows out of the use – and abuse – of specific designs. The electronica beats bred in discos and techno, Detroit and Berlin have a direct lineage to analog step sequencers and the rigid precision of Roland’s early electronic devices. These designs create limitations to embrace and to oppose – just as music notation or theoretical convention did for composers for centuries.

Okay, that’s a lofty way to put it — the question here is, how do you re-engineer music, even an ounce at a time? If you’re a composer a few centuries ago, you make subtle changes to your craft, working inside a convention, and write that down. (Just as with electronic music, there is a layer of separation – only then, it was a piece of paper.) If you’re an electronic artist today, you can likewise change what you’re able to control, and how, playing live. The differences at first may be imperceptible, but just like learning an instrument, the long-term payoff can be huge.

I asked for examples of what people are doing with the Lemur multi-touch touchscreen controller and its recently updated V2 software. This isn’t just about the Lemur – it illustrates what’s possible when the musical device and the controller can flow freely out of a musician’s imagination. That could apply to hardware or software designs well beyond the Lemur.

Mikael Björk of Sweden responded with a terrific example, a “dynamic” sequencer available to all Lemur users via JazzMutant. The open-ended screen layout of the Lemur has allowed the creator to provide all kinds of unusual control over morphing beats, with your fingertips manipulating simulated physics as beats twist around you. It’s not just electronica and sampling and DJing, either – he also has an incredible clip working with a very talented vocalist. It sounds markedly different from the more conventional, Loopstation-style loop performance.

We get the “where do I go to learn this stuff” question a lot in the inbox. With Max for Live coming later this year, bringing the powers of Max to Ableton Live, I imagine the hunger for knowledge on that tool will be all the greater. (At the same time, I think the growing popularity of DIY tools means that it won’t make alternative tools like SuperCollider, Pd, Csound and the like less popular — I think we’ll see a growing trend toward all of these tools, provided we can show folks how to use them and get better at them ourselves!)

I know one route that has been successful for many people is the coursework at Harvestworks, the storied research and study center in New York. I can heartily endorse this one and say that, while I know and am friends with all the faculty, I have absolutely no investment in this. Dafna Naphtali, Hans Tammen, and Zach Seldess will all be teaching week-long intensives at Harvestworks in Manhattan. They’re not cheap – $1275 for the whole week – but I know some people have even flown to New York from other parts of the world to study up.

And what does all this mean? Well, it means you can turn Street Fighter, the game, into an improvisational ballet as instructor Zachary Seldess has done (above). Among other things, of course.

If it’s all out of your budget, don’t worry; we’ll have some other learning resources for you soon. But for those of you who can take the plunge, here are some details:

Well, this is the first time I can remember this happening. Tuesday, I covered a GBP20 Max object for independent tempo and pitch modification in Max 5:
elastic~: Pitch, Speed Control Module for Your Max 5 Patch

I wasn’t personally so blown away by it, but it looked interesting, and it uses algorithms used in a number of commercial projects. But Max guru Devin Kerr put his money where his mouth was — or is that, no money where his … um … ears are — and released a free version. Unlike elastic~, it uses all included Max objects. Aside from saving you some dough, that has the significant advantage of being able to easily share patches based on his patch with fellow Max users.

Devin writes:

So I took 15 minutes and made a simple patch and video demonstrating what I’m calling “Free_Elastic”. This Max patch uses high-quality, FFT pitch shifting and is based on the standard groove~ object. It allows for much more control and customization (fft size, overlap, etc.) than “elastic~” does, and it’s FREE!

Free_Elastic: Independent Pitch/Speed Control in Max [Devin Kerr's blog]

Even if you like elastic~, you can’t really argue with the nice work Devin did on his patch. Hope this leads to some other great patching work. Now, can we get a Pd (Pure Data) port for a truly free experience, anyone?

More Goodies

Andreas Wetterberg (of Covert Operators) points to Mattijs Kneppers’ wonderful work. Object-oriented patching? Check. An MPC-inspired drum sampler? You got it.

And most notably in this context:

Real-time, natural sounding granular time stretcher / pitch shifter, version 009, patches only. Download test sounds here.

Time stretching and pitch shifting without artifacts (Max 5 only).

This patch uses the pitch~ object by CNMAT, that you can download here:
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/downloads.

Granular time stretching has the advantage over a spectrum-based (phase vocoder) approach that it has no inherent latency. This patch aims for the same sound quality (absence of artifacts) as the time stretching features of mainstream applications such as Ableton Live or Reaktor.

That said, actually, you might enjoy those artifacts. But if you’re a Max user (or Pd user willing to do a little bit of porting), this should more than satisfy your appetite for warping. And, Andreas, I’m with you … I prefer the granular stretching sound. (Because it’s really a grain sampler and not just a delay, you may also want to check out the terrific video tutorial Peter Dines did in Reaktor. And there’s a lot more of this stuff elsewhere, as well.)