The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud — not exactly indie cred. We saw Microsoft enlisting indie musicians and animators to sell Zune, of course.

But here’s where things get surprisingly amazing: Sony is using weird and wonderful Japanese experimental music to promote Walkman.

Now we’re talking.

And whether or not Walkman is cool again, this is for sure: Japanese experimental musicians? Mind-blowingly cool. And, apparently, in love with using light as a controller for sound.

Atsuhiro Ito uses contact mics on a fluorescent bulb he dubs the Optron. Instead of just being stage eye candy, the bulbs are really making the sounds here; coupled with guitar effects, he can solo on the bulbs. It’s what the Knitting Factory will be like after the nuclear winter. I can’t wait.

Taeji Sawai uses a light pen to draw melodic lines and rhythmic onto a screen. The basic effect – track light from a single source – is old. Yet he’s clearly got a brilliant aesthetic mind that makes it all work; the elements are strikingly simple but never fail to be engaging. And there’s a strong connection to work by his fellow sonic inventor Toshio Iwai.

Thanks to our friend Donald Bell of cnet, aka very talented and (cool) musician Chachi Jones, who has a great write-up:

Sony Walkman promos are awesome, confusing

Confusing? No, I’d say Sony is confusing; the real question is why their Walkman can’t be more like these ads. Plus, since neither Don nor I can read Japanese, how do we know those characters don’t say something like “Hey, guys, sorry for that bit with the lousy boring electronics – we’re coming back from the dark side to make awesome things again”? Okay, maybe not. (Do let me know if the next one says “Fine, you damned snarky blogger, I’d like to see you run a giant multinational corporation.”)

Admittedly, the problem here is this makes me want to toss my iPod touch out the window and build my own open source MP3 player with Popsicle sticks and wire, or, at best, mod an original Walkman so I can play circuit-bent OGG files using power from a bicycle. At the very least, I’m ready to add to my Atsuhiro Ito and Taeji Sawai collection. And I don’t think their full body of work is on iTunes. That’s just as well.

So, Sony, thanks. Now, will you let us run homebrew music apps on your PSP? Please?

Interested in using webcams to translate on-screen motion to MIDI? Want x, y, and z 3D tracking? Ben Tan writes to let us know about his in-development software project called Peripheral MIDI Controller (pmidic) which does just that. The current build is still a work in progress, but has added enough stability and features that it should be worth a look.

Peripheral MIDI Controller

Grab your pen light and start waving it around for filter cutoff and resonance — whoo!

Right now, it’s Windows-only, but the libraries on which it’s built are cross-platform and could be ported to both Linux and Mac. (He’s using Intel’s OpenCV, which is the most popular, open platform for computer vision — odds are if you’ve seen slick webcam tricks, OpenCV was involved, because writing these algorithms from scratch requires a heavy-duty math and computer science background. And the app itself is built with the superb super-cross-platform wxWidgets library.)

If you’ve been looking to experiment with webcam control, this could be a good start — practicing interpreting the control data, experimenting with lighting, and experimenting with inputs all take time. And if you’re a coder, the project is open, so all of us C++ beginners can slog a little collectively.

Tonight here in New York, I’ll be presenting a free workshop on detecting and visualizing motion from camera inputs, which may be of interest not only for those of you eagerly anticipating the new Create Digital Motion site, but also anyone who’d like to use cameras as controllers for music. Full details after the jump.

If you’re not in New York, don’t fret; I plan to organize this stuff and have online examples/tutorials in the near future. But if you are there, say hi! And yes, I finally plan to deliver on my New York CDM get-together promises in June; my schedule will finally allow that.

Still from a recent performance with Eric Dunlap and Mare Hieronimus at Eyewash, the visual performance series in NYC.

DETECTING AND VISUALIZING MOTION: Mechanics and Design Possibilities
by Peter Kirn

THIS THURSDAY, May 11, 6:30pm
Harvestworks
596 Broadway, #602
New York, NY 10012
Broadway at Houston Street

Please note that space is limited to approx. 15 people – please come early!

PETER KIRN presents methods of translating live camera inputs into digital visuals and control data, using Adobe Flash 8 and Max/MSP/Jitter (applicable to some other tools, as well). He will use examples from his own work, following a residency with choreographer Christopher Williams at Dance Theater Workshop and a performance via DTW and Boston CyberArts at Ideas in Motion in Cambridge. Looking behind the scenes at the mechanics of analyzing video and infrared photography, he’ll explore both the mechanics of these methods and how they might be applied to other projects, and how attendees can learn and explore some of these evolving techniques on their own.

Cycling ’74 Hipno “Subversive” Plug-in Collection

US$199 for a whole mess of plug-ins; works with everything. (Mac RTAS/VST/AU, Windows RTAS/VST.) More after the jump.

The challenge of developing Hipno was, with so many far-out sonic possibilities, how could you navigate different sounds to find the one you want? The main answer is the Hipnoscope, a color-palette circular orb through which you can explore different sounds and even morph through presets. (Yep, it’s MIDI-assignable.) It’s very Kai Krause-esque interface design. (Anyone here remember Kai’s Power Tools, the Photoshop plug-ins?)

Of course, here at CDM we’re always into alternative interfaces, and it’s great to see them making their way into a commercial product. Several of the plug-ins can be modulated or controlled with a webcam input, using motion tracking or motion detection. There’s even a modulator that uses a USB game pad.

The best feature by far, though, isn’t avant-garde at all. Hipno has XML import/export of presets, so you can switch hosts without losing your presets, and you can share your brilliant sound design work. The demo I saw at AES had Hipno loaded in Ableton Live 5′s new preset browser, and everything appeared perfectly sorted.

I can’t wait to get my hands on it, if nothing else because I think it’ll inspire some custom effects and instruments of my own. Speaking of which, if you’d like to try creating some of your own subversive instruments/effects, the whole set was developed in Cycling ’74 Max/MSP with the aid of Electrotap’s Tap.Tools. I usually avoid the use of a lot of externals in my Max work, but this set is great fun, and includes some terrific stuff for working with motion and webcams, along with more utilitarian objects. See also the GTK granular library.

If you haven’t yet seen commentary on this at Music Thing or (originally) WWMNA, David Merrill of the MIT Media Lab has a project for controlling guitar effects with his face. (It’s not new, incidentally — dates to 2003, and you can look forward to more of this sort of thing at the annual New Instruments for Musical Expression aka NIME, due next in Paris in June 2006.)

So, uh, aside from being weird, could this ever actually be useful and not just freaky? Possibly: gestural mapping gets especially interesting, as David uses a nod to trigger an event, for instance. As video processing gets less intensive relative to computer speed, and gestural processing gets more intelligent, you could eventually interact with your tech like a musician. Hell, if your musician friends ignore you the way mine do, you may have even more luck with the tech.

What’s mysterious here is the software David mentions — check the PDF for more project details. The software is a modification to something called FaceSense, running on Linux. Don’t think this is something you can just go download, though. See also:

Vicon, providers of pro-level motion capture and control systems

Visual Tracking of Movements for a Gesture-Based Interface, a detailed paper by Daniel Hunnisett

Mouthesizer, which reads mouth positions (also from NIME 2003, demoed mapping to guitar effects)

Motion capture does promise to ultimately provide performance and expression without the aid of physical objects, using full-body motion as performance. Now go build something that lets you control your synth with your eyebrows, okay?

Regine reports from Cybersonica on a “manual input” method for controlling sound and image — no, really “manual,” as in hands — on Near Near Future. Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman have developed a system that analyzes hand movements above an overhead projector. Projected imagery combines the direct output of the overhead (i.e., they shine the overhead at a screen) with digitally-modified projections. Their use of the technology is strikingly simple and elegant — check the photos and videos on their site. I’m looking forward to Regine’s report!

Cycling 74′sMax/MSP and Jitter offer awesome power for developing interactive multimedia, but building everything from scratch can get time-consuming fast. Part of the draw of reusable objects is the ability to incorporate time-saving pre-built tools rather than reinventing the wheel with each new project. That’s the idea behind the insanely-cool bundle of Max goodies, Electrotap’s Tap.Tools. Newly-released version 2.0 has over 150 “externals” (objects for Max) for tasks like:

Here’s more good news: Tap.Tools is cheap enough for artists, with a US$65-99 license. Pay the US$99 and you can even build your own collectives, standalones, and plug-ins, and distribute your creations to whomever you want. (Definitely worth the extra $34!) You even have access to Source Code. Since my C++ skills are nonexistent, I’m planning to print it out and use it in my decorating, but programmers will be glad. As for the non-programmers, we’ll be building new plug-ins with motion tracking! (Check out Electrotap’s other stuff, too, from sensor hardware to its performance-oriented Jade software.)