“If only Live could …”

Hard-core Live users dream of more than just an extra feature widget or two. They imagine a world in which they can hack and alter the way Live itself behaves. They want the ability to develop software that works with Live at a low-level. In short, what they want is an SDK. It’s a beautiful vision, but it would create challenges for Ableton: they’d have a whole new support burden, and any change to the program would mean having to update the SDK, in parallel. If only there were a way around this problem. If only you could use a scripting language like Python to make developing advanced Ableton Live tools easier. If only you could harness a whole community of programmers and users to undertake testing and support — you know, like have the source … but … open … like open-source.

Announced early this morning, LiveAPI.org is just that. And even if you’re not, say, a Python programmer, you may soon be reaping its benefits, whether using a more powerful clip setup in performance or hooking up a Monome controller.

LiveAPI.org

In short: it’s an API. It’ll run apps that the larger Live community could use, for tasks like using OpenSoundControl for control. It’s not affiliated in any way with Ableton, in that they’re not supporting it, but it is being done with their blessing (so they’re not about to shut it down). The project is open source. You can script in Python. You can share projects. You can expect some things will break on a regular basis — definitely keep around those old versions of Live, to be safe, when you upgrade. But you can also expect this to be a huge landmark for the bleeding-edge end of the Live community.

One bit of bad news: it is Windows-only for the moment, though the developers are Mac fans, and while Mac support seems to be more complex, it is planned — there’s just no date yet. (Okay, Mac Python gurus, go help them!)

Rob King (who did the Telnet bit, among other things) writes CDM:

I thought I should give you a heads up on a new project that I have been working on over the past couple weeks, and am pretty excited about. It’s all detailed in our release below, but basically Nathan Ramella, James Andrew, and I have uncovered a Python API in Ableton Live which gives you access to a nice chunk of the internals of Live. We have developed a couple apps so far such as a Telnet server to access the Python interpreter, and a easily extensible OSC Server to control live. And best of all, these new ways of controlling live just appear as extra remote devices in Live!

We all feel that this opens up Live significantly for developers, and hope to see some really interesting new interfaces for Live coming about. Rest assured I’ll be updating PlayLive to take advantage of this, and support features like automatically updating track/clip/controller names, and a new midi-loopback-less setup. No more need for a client and server side of PlayLive!

The exciting part, of course, is that last bit: what you can do with it: finally get around the lack of OSC support and make clips and MIDI routing more powerful. This seems like it might create a new developer/user relationship: users can actually experiment with new features that might eventually influence official development.

By the way, while all of you have evidently been making wishes, here’s an interesting tidbit about Nathan Ramella: “His next project is a custom VST for the Vestax VCI-100 with special focus on features for Ableton users.”

Imagine the Apple TV as live music and visual instrument, and not just a way of watching archived Battlestar Galactica? Our friend Jeff Gambera has been busy hacking his Apple TV for just such unusual purposes. He’s gotten the real-time audio and music workstation Ableton Live working; even the demo song runs. (Plenty of people use Ableton Live with equal or lesser hardware; the aTV should easily beat many older G4s.)

This is big news for one primary reason: it means the Apple TV is capable handling multi-channel audio with real-time virtual instruments and time stretching. That makes the ATV a reasonable live music, DJ, sound art, or (once Quartz Composer and Max/MSP/Jitter and VDMX and Modul8 and such are running) live visuals. With networked music and sound and input from MIDI devices and alternative controllers just behind, this gets all the more interesting. Sure, a cheap PC could do the same — but it’s tough to find a $300 Mac this portable, let alone one that does all the Apple TV does. And, besides, it’s cool that someone’s got it working even as a gimmick.

First, some shaky video:

Of course, it’s a little hard to follow from the video what’s going on, so I convinced Jeff to write up some instructions. Check out the generic Apple TV hacking instructions first, but then you can follow how to make Ableton work. I also spoke to Jeff about some more advanced possibilities with the Apple TV; more on that after the break.

“AbletonTV” How-To:

This process invalidates your warranty on aTV. Please refer to wiki.awkwardtv.org for precise details regarding your aTV and the steps needed to get to the point you can run applications.

Summary: The Basic Concept

Enable SSH
Patch the kernel for USB
Mount drive read/write
Remove watchdog
Replace the Finder.app

Once these steps have been completed, you can run many OS X applications on the device.

In June 2005, we first saw the Tenori-On, a futuristic music-making device covered in a grid of interactive, lit buttons, designed by the talented interactive artist Toshio Iwai as a prototype for Yamaha. Last week, Yamaha revealed some details about plans to make Iwai’s experimental device into a shipping product. (I missed this in preparations to fly off to Oahu.)

Basic specs: 16×16 grid of buttons, MIDI out, sequencing, and perhaps most surprising, built-in sampling and Motif sound capabilities with internal speakers (plus line-out, naturally). (Notably missing: any mention of network capabilities, which was arguably the most compelling part of the prototype. MIDI out would be notably limited in this respect. Perhaps these features will resurface.)

Anticipated price: £500.
Availability: Unknown, but soon — UK launch first, evidently.

Tenori-On specs [Future Music blog]
Hands-on Tenori-On video [Sonic State]
Tenori-On official site, Toshio Iwai Tenori-On blog, neither of which have been updated as I write this

Much like a car maker releasing a concept car as a factory model, it’s exciting to see this happen. Now there’s only one problem: a lot has happened since June 2005, and light-up buttons you can turn on and off aren’t exactly inaccessible technology. Here’s a quick review of what’s been developing in the world beyond Yamaha since 2005:

Why should you get excited about Nexsyn, the hybrid soft synth/sample player available starting today from KeyToSound that was developed by Max Groenlund, creator of the Studio 9000 for Koblo?

While I could ramble on about Nexsyn’s true stereo signal path, its 4 Gig Big Fish Audio sample library, its ability to load a 400MB piano in 15 seconds, blah, blah, blah, the most innovative and exciting thing about Nexsyn has nothing to do with any of that. It’s got to do with NetNotes.

NetNotes is a proprietary browser that lets you audition Nexsyn presets from other users. You can play presets via keyboard and even use them in your sequencer. You just can’t save them until you “buy” them. Hold on, relax! You don’t buy other people’s presets with real money, you buy them with NetNotes.

Move over, marching band: laptop orchestras are here. Princeton’s laptop orchestra PLOrk will be the featured guest at dorkbot in New York this week, but it’s not the only “laptop ensemble.” The Electronic Music Foundation’s Arts Electric notes laptop orchestras span the globe from New Jersey to Russia:

PLOrk @ Princeton

Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra

Oddly enough, these pictures seem to go against the zeitgeist of readers here on Create Digital Music, many of whom prefer to stow their laptop out of the way and focus on physical controllers. I’m hoping that occasionally these laptopists (?) get some more physical interaction with their machines. But there’s no question laptops open up new possibilities for ensemble playing. Challenge: find a way to build rhythms as intricate as those in Indonesian gamelans, only with new wave sounds. Not easy, huh?

Anyone got some other computer music ensembles? I saw Berklee School of Music’s ensemble (a school that also has a turntable ensemble), so that’s at least one, but I expect readers here know of / play in / direct others.

Now that the Zune has been unleashed on the wild, we’re getting some more coverage on the player and this mysterious deal with Universal Music Group. (Incidentally, I am hoping to get someone from PR to explain to me what that deal is for, whether it’s intended to cover pirated music played on the device, music ripped from UMG CDs, or just the general music-y-ness of the device. Of course, shooting my mouth off may or may not make people want to talk to me.)

Microsoft To Give A Cut Of Every Zune Sold To The Recording Industry — Though It’s Not Clear Why [Techdirt]
Microsoft Zune: Paying off the Industry One Label at a Time [Gizmodo]
Microsoft Strikes Deal for Music [New York Times]
Trying Out the Zune: iPod It’s Not [New York Times, David Pogue Review]

Now, of course, here in CDM Country readers and staff alike are hardly iPod fanboys and girls. We like playing music, and we play it on whatever works. I actually want to like Zune; it has a clever hardware design and a well-designed interface, and it’s something different in a market that has been iPod-dominated. But here are the main issues for me:

1. It’s not really a Wi-Fi device: Imagine being able to connect to Zune as a normal Wi-Fi storage device, to load and offload files, to sync your media library? Forget buying songs over Wi-Fi; why not be able to connect it to your home network? (Even Linux and Mac would work over Wi-Fi, too.) No can do. An entire Wi-Fi feature is wasted on an over-hyped sharing feature.
2. You can’t share your own files: Microsoft could become a surprise hero to the indie music market, to (ironically enough) Creative Commons lovers and the music maven audience. All they have to do is let you share files to which you own the rights — MP3s of your own band, for instance — with other people. Instead, you’re limited to the same DRM that’s applied to purchased music. That doesn’t make any sense, as Pogue observes for the NYT.


3. You can’t record: One of the things I love about the Windows players is that they have recording ability, often featuring not only internal mics but line-in capability. That makes the average Windows media player a much more versatile investment than the iPod. Not so with Zune, though, sending me back to PlaysForSure players like the iRiver clix (which, incidentally, can be made to work with other operating systems if you have the savvy to install some device drivers).

Imagine a massively multiplayer music studio, connected worldwide over the Internet. Log in, and everyone sees a set of synths, effects, sequencers, or other custom patches. Everyone’s looking at essentially the same screen, and can add beats, trip out effects, slide the bpm up and down, and reprogram synths — all at once. That’s the basic idea of netpd.

Last night I attended New York’s first “Patching Circle” at Brooklyn Polytechnic, a chance for NYC area patchers to come and work in a communal environment, whether on Max, Pd, Processing, whatever. Pd superstar Moritz Wettstein was there, in town for a few months while in residency at Harvestworks, a music technology center in Soho. He booted up his kubuntu-running Linux laptop and fired up a complex set of synths and beats. Soon, we were listening to beats being reprogrammed in Switzerland via the same software as someone across the table changed a synth line. The magic all comes from netpd, build in Max/MSP’s open source cousin Pd, and it can run entirely free on Mac, Windows, or Linux:

netpd

There’s more. The patches can be entirely redesigned by anyone accessing the server. If someone in Barcelona decides to add extra features to a synth, the new patch will be downloaded for everyone simultaneously on login so everyone has the same patches. Moritz told me that the core group of developers regularly holds all-development sessions where they patch collaboratively, so not only can you make music together, you can develop the software, together, too. (Think extreme programming.) You can listen to some results on the netpd site. The music has to be loop-oriented and sequenced so that latency doesn’t become an issue, but theoretically a wide variety of music could be possible, depending entirely on the users developing on the platform and what they choose to produce.

Thanks to GEM, visuals are possible, too, although not anything involving sampled files — sampled audio and video are out, because every user would have to download the files. Generative visuals in 2D or 3D are definitely game, and while it sounds like there’s less interest in this area, there’s lots of potential because of the power of the GEM add-on for Pd.

Enough of the technical details, though. I know what you’re asking: could I dress up in funny costumes, and answer phone lines and control netpd while in a cage? I get that question all the time. The answer, says Moritz, is yes. While I don’t entirely understand this process, he and some colleagues did a piece of performance art in a cage with various inputs (joysticks and such) controlling a custom netpd patch and a series of phone lines routing in calls from the public, courtesy a sophisticated open source phone switching solution (really!) called Asterisk.

See Moritz’s site for photos. His domain is down and there are some other problems, so I’ve included samples here.

Any netpd users out there? Sounds like we should have a CDM group.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative, aka “that $100 laptop” though it will initially cost more like $140, just got its first leg up. Nigeria has ordered one million of the custom Linux laptops. Now the big challenge will be whether the OLPC developers can deliver the machines on-budget and on time, given its wildly ambitious feature set. Interestingly, Intel and Microsoft, after publicly blasting the project as misguided, have each launched their own competing initiatives at significantly higher prices.

Nigeria Orders First Million OLPC Laptops at vnunet.com, which also has two videos of working prototypes; via worldchanging

For more background on the project, see The Laptop Crusade, from this month’s Wired.

See also our previous story, Creative, Networked Music Making on $100 One Laptop Per Child, which brought some interesting debate on all sides of this issue.

Beyond the idea of giving millions of children new access to computing, there’s a separate mission that’s come up: how to create useful music software for children. As covered in that previous article, a team of developers is working on new music software called TamTam that will have two lives: one, as creative musical software for the OLPC hardware, and a second, as open source software anyone can run. That means that even if you don’t agree with OLPC’s aims and implementation, TamTam could still have potential running on used laptops here in the US. (Given the problems of toxic computer waste, I’m just as interested in how we can recycle computers without short-shrifting children that receive them.)

Reader Nat Lécaudé, who initially brought TamTam to our attention, talks about working on the project:

Negroponte’s $100 One Laptop Per Child will include creative music making tools for children. Our friend Nathanael Lecaude writes us:

Just wanted to let you know what I was working on during the summer, we’re doing a sequencer/algorithmic music generator for the OLPC project. We did all the protoyping in Max and are now porting it to Python/GTK using Csound as the sound engine.

TamTam, music app on the OLPC Wiki

TamTam is intended both as an instrument in itself and an environment for learning music. It has basic sequencing and synthesis capabilities, presented in a child-friendly format. It’s also networked so children can play together. The sounds themselves will be influenced by the countries in which the OLPC will be distributed, with instruments of various kinds from Brazil, China, India, Thailand, and Nigeria. (I’m not sure how they’ll deal with tunings, but then, early in the Dutch occupation of what is now Indonesia, Javanese composers experimented with mixing the Pelog- and Slendro-tuned gamelan with Western marching band, an experiment my Javanese teacher later applied to Scottish bagpipes and gamelan. Anything is possible.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves, as I could see it being useful internationally or other efforts being modeled on similar ideas.

For more technical background: Python is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language that’s unusually easy to learn. CSound is the powerful, free sound synthesis platform that’s shown up everywhere from experimental compositions to the guts of at least one karaoke machine (really).

See also:
Brad Fuller’s O’Reilly blog, which has a running commentary on OLPC (as well as insight on why operating systems are meaningless!)

MIT’s OLPC site and (importantly) OLPC wiki, which responds to at least some of the “why” questions discussed in comments on this story. Whether the OLPC initiative itself winds up living up to its goals, it seems to me that a cheap, accessible, open source sequencer for kids should be valuable regardless.

More on this issue: See our follow-up story, TamTam, Music Software for Kids, to be Fully Open Source; One Million OLPCs in Nigeria