It’s drumming, the multi-player game. The Drummer is an open-source application for the Nintendo DS handheld, developed by Andrea Bianchi and Woon Seung Yeo and presented alongside a paper earlier this year at the NIME Conference (The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression). As with any Nintendo homebrew software, you’ll need a special DS cartridge capable of loading software from flash memory – though if this app were developed more, it could make a terrific DSi app.

The idea is this: while making a handheld game system into an instrument, why not take advantage of its networking features? Grab a friend (or friends) with the Nintendo DS, whip up a drum kit that’s to your liking, then play along.

Oddly, while we live in a networked, Internet age, the client-server model rarely gets applied to music. One of the things I try to explain about the protocol OSC (OpenSoundControl), aside from the fact that it doesn’t have to be about sound, is that it’s really a collection of best practices in open networking communication. It’s not simply about connecting devices to one another in serial fashion, as with MIDI, but forming a network – an idea familiar to anyone who uses instant messaging online. True, latency considerations and other complications can add another dimension of challenge. But I think there’s plenty to explore when it comes to networking devices, and it promises to make computer music a less solitary experience. The Drummer is a good step in that direction.

The Drummer project page + NIME paper
Google Code page

Thanks to Andrea for sending this our way!

You probably think of social networking and messaging as being about text, about saying things like “Wow, this tuna salad sandwich I’m having for lunch is delicious!” But the next Tweet you get on Twitter could be a synthesis preset.

Say what?

Working in Max/MSP, Andrew Spitz has developed a tool called Tweet a Sound. It uses Twitter as a communications platform for “social sound design.” Instead of just saying, “Wow, I be makin’ phat basslines,” you can actually share the sound. Whip up a sound using typical FM synth parameters and Max/MSP’s sound engine, then click “send.” You’ll send a string of numbers to your Twitter account, confusing those friends not in the know. But other users will be able to grab and play with your sound.

Andrew even encourages synthesis n00bs to play without fear – grab those envelopes and mysterious-looking settings and see what comes out. So, I hope you synth geeks do share this with some friends new to synthesis, as I think they’ll have a great time.

Right now, Tweet a Sound is Mac-only; we just need someone to save a Windows standalone version. Someone has asked about a Pd port, but let’s put it this way: this is the tip of a very, very big iceberg of sharing. It’s something worth considering in anything you’re doing, not just with Twitter, but whether you can provide networked capabilities in whatever you’re happening to build.

Ableton, of course, recently added the Share functionality to Live. But with open APIs and basic networking protocols, there’s no reason you can’t explore other features. Why not build a drum machine that lets you collaborate with one of your friends on your IM list, or a sequencer that automatically posts ideas as you revise them? Just doing these things for the sake of it could be a waste of time, but on the other hand, these social features could turn Web 2.0 sites into places that actually inspire you to make and share music rather than distract you with mundane activities.

I love the idea; let us know if you have some fun with it.

Tweet A Sound { sound + software } [Andrew Spitz Blog]

TUIO is a simple but powerful emerging protocol for multitouch control for live music and visuals, as used on the powerful live tangible synth reacTable. Apparently no one told Apple, however. While the App Store rubber-stamps useless toys like fake cigarette lighter flames, they bizarrely rejected a powerful application by a leading digital artist that would enable standardized TUIO control – for free. (More back story below; see an example in action above.)

As a blogger, my reaction is usually to whine and pontificate, for better or worse. The engineering approach would be to find some hack away the problem. That’s what Andrew Turley did with the TUIO protocol. So, Apple won’t allow an app that does the trick? Why not go back to what developers did before the SDK, and just use the iPhone browser?

As Andrew explains it:

After reading the story I started thinking about seeing how far one could push Safari as an application platform, using web apps to get around Apple’s tight control of the app store. Since you would be connecting to another computer anyway to use an OSC application, why not just have the app be a web app running on a web server somewhere on the local network? The web server can then take care of things like sending out OSC messages or playing music or doing whatever it is people want to do.

To that end I created a little system that implements the TUIO protocol. You use an iPhone to run a web app, which in turn talks to the web server, which in turn sends OSC messages.

Details:

touchy feely [Pillowsopher Blog]

Needless to say, there are some downsides: you have to run the Python server, you’re more limited in input and control than you would be in a real app, and you’re stuck inside the Safari browser, which could be a bit inconvenient. So I’m not backing down from my original complaint – I don’t see Apple doing anyone a service by blocking this kind of app, and the only rational explanation seems to be that the folks doing the review process don’t understand what the app is.

Most importantly, I do know that all our griping was sent to Apple, so I’m hopeful the App Store will reconsider the decision once they get it.

But I love solutions, too, and this can be one for many applications.

It also illustrates an important point: the browser on mobile devices (Apple and otherwise) could be a powerful outlet. It doesn’t always make sense to build an entire application; there will be various cases in which a little browser tool will do a job. Need a quick remote control for a live performance / art installation / club lighting rig? You might try the easy solution with the browser first.

Thanks for the great hack, Andy, and I’m curious to hear if anyone uses or extends this.

Previously:

Apple Rejects Free iPhone Tool For Artists Because of “Minimal User Functionality”

Smule, the folks who brought simulated Ocarina to the iPhone, are now thinking multiplayer. Instead of just playing a machine or a few of your friends as in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, Smule’s latest app turns your creations into a reality show with online judging. And the killer app itself? It’s a simulated, touch trombone.

It’s pretty wacky stuff, but Smule’s had some hits on their hands already, so I think the wackiness may be part of their secret. And it comes from a heavy hitter: Dr. Ge Wang, the founder, is also a professor at Stanford’s CCARMA research center, director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLORK to the East Coast’s PLORK), and creator of the ChucK Programming Language.

New in this version:

• Teaching tools: Floating leaves guide first-time musicians to learn songs in “self tutorial” mode, and a browser-based composition tool helps teach you to compose.
• Global judging: Online audiences can judge songs with emoticons and text and a 1-10 scale. Everything is integrated with the app itself (see image). Tromboning with the Stars, anyone?
• The Power of Silliness: The most important feature, though, may be that everyone sounds a little goofy playing it, which can actually be liberating. As Dr. Ge Wang puts it, “It’s like singing in the shower.” Well, except with judges.

The app is simple, but the concept I think is pretty remarkable. We’ve seen interactive instruments, and we’ve seen music games. By adding the judging element, though, this is a free-form instrument that can also be a game. Now, without getting too ahead of ourselves, you could do the same thing with a Worldwide Online Kazoo Contest. In fact, maybe that’s a great idea. I suppose you could say music itself can be a kind of social game, played out on a stage. But nonetheless, making it an iPhone app can help free people up to get that message.

Oh, yeah, and got any doubts about the business model for open source? ChucK is a completely free, ridiculously powerful programming language for synthesis. It’s infinitely deeper than Leaf Trombone. But that power, packaged for a broad audience, can become a hit business – and likely to be popular well beyond musicians. If that’s possible, I imagine more could be soon. Remember, too, that whatever the Apple fanboys tell you, the iPhone is not a dominant mobile platform – nowhere close. Apple’s proprietary hardware means it isn’t really intended to be.

I hope someone working on platforms like Symbian and Google Android takes note: pack in geeky, nuclear-powered synthesis features, and people will find ways to put them to use in consumer apps that appeal to everyone. Leave them out, and you miss the boat. Or the trombone, anyway.

Direct iTunes App Link [99 cents]

http://smule.com/

Now, some very amusing videos of this thing in action:

The song “Daisy Bell” has a special place in computer history. Max Mathews, who had by the late 50s pioneered digital synthesis using IBM 704 mainframe, arranged the tune in 1961 for vocoder-derived vocal synthesis technology on technology developed by John Larry Kelly, Jr.. Kelly himself is better known for applying number theory to investing in the markets — an unfortunate achievement in the wake of a financial collapse brought down by misuse of mathematical theory.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke happened to hear the 704 singing the Mathews/Kelly “Daisy Bell,” and the rest is (fictional) history – the HAL computer in the book and movie sings the song as he is being disconnected, as though the computer had learned this song as a “child.”

Here’s Max himself (namesake for Max, the patching language), overseeing a rendition of his arrangement:

Today, basic vocal synthesis has become part of the fabric of taken-for-granted tech, and the legendary rendition by a singing robotic voice part of our culture. These things are no longer futuristic or strange. Apple this week even launched a music player that announces its own tracks in the form of the new iPod shuffle.

But what happens when those same human beings imitate the computer? That’s the question asked by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, crowdsourcing human input by inviting thousands of participants to contribute their voice using custom recording software built in Processing. The basic technique is something Koblin has used before: his Sheep Market massed an Internet labor market, paid two cents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to draw walls full of thousands of sheep. Those sheep proved at once massive in quantity and unique in individual quality, and, if you squinted at them, presented a critique of global labor practice.

Koblin has also done various seminal pieces with the Processing coding language that change our perception of data and technology, like his now oft-cited “Flight Patterns,” tracing the paths of overhead planes.

This time, the computer/human relationship is truly inverted. Each singer participant imitates a sound component from the robot singing. The humans are then combined to synthesize the robot sound instead of the other way around. The result: organic technology combined into a cyborg, online chorus. No one singer knows what it is they’re singing in whole. It’s perhaps the first mass-human synthesis of sound, and the results are truly unusual.

And strange synthesis seems to be what Koblin’s work is fundamentally about. Perhaps it’s not Mathews’ sound experiments, but Kelly’s ideas about quantifying global markets that are most relevant. (For an extra dose of irony, Google HAL – you’ll get stock ticker HAL, for Haliburton, one of the few stocks that has grown in this economy.) In our reality, the University of Illinois didn’t create a super-smart, spaceship-controlling robotic brain – but they did create the Web browser.

And after all, all of us are now living in the aftermath of many crowds of people behaving collectively without genuine larger knowledge of what they were doing. Robots were envisioned at the beginning of the 20th Century as out-of-control automatons, crushing civilization, and were often then appropriated as metaphors for fascist government. Now, the vision can be equally apocalyptic, but the meaning is inverted. It’s human beings acting as automatons – without contact with human scale – that threaten to crush the Earth. And this time, they’re capitalists.

On the other hand, the beauty of art is its ability to mean many things at once. Koblin’s sheep and now his singers never cease to be whimsical. And in their beauty, they suggest that perhaps even massed crowds of Internet-connected people can sing in harmony.

For the future of humanity, I hope so. But then, if we fail, we’ll always have the robots.

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

Bicycle Built for 2000: Info

What if controllers were not only wireless and multi-touch, but could find software to control automatically, or share control between more than one person or more than one computer? On one-level, yes, Mrmr is a free and open source OpenSoundControl app for iPod and iPhone. But on a deeper level, it’s an illustration of how controllers could work in the future — not only Apple mobiles and multi-touch, but any control hardware and software. Imagine intelligently finding and sharing control seamlessly, whether you’re mixing music and visuals or sharing control with other people or working with more than one app or machine — or all of the above. And imagine you could do this without prior configuration (aside from designing a control template), then change that control on the fly.

We saw the beta on Create Digital Motion and have been covering it on an ongoing basis, but I want to make sure music folks don’t miss it, either.

Stay tuned, as we’ll be looking more closely at how to use Mrmr and some other OSC apps on iPhone/iPod (like the wonderful TouchOSC and Sonic Life, both by hexler). We’ll have plenty more to say. If you do go out and get something cool working, be sure to share it.

And watch for a new Mrmr project site — we’re working with Eric and others to build a new home for it.

Mrmr OSC controller @ iTunes

“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.”

And what about Ableton? I’d actually heard some of the Abletons publicly bat around the idea of some sort of API, and the LiveAPI.org developers said as much. But the concerns about support seemed to hold the company back — and wanting to do something and actually being able to take the leap are two different things. The result, in fact, seems to be even better, because the entire source code for this project is open, and the whole endeavor is fully community-based and independent.

In the end, the developers got Ableton’s blessing. Rob writes, “We’ve actually been in touch with the CTO of Ableton, and they’ve actually been quite supportive in all this and even offered to answer our questions about the API. We also gave them a preview of our works in progress, and worked out a disclaimer with them. ”

The SDK includes:

• LiveOSC: A UDP network based Open Sound Control (OSC) interface that allows both sending and recieving of OSC messages through a Python callback system. Any task that can be performed with the Python API can be triggered as well as monitored. By Nathan Ramella and Rob King.
  LiveTelnet: Telnet server access the Python CLI for exploration and programatical manipulation of the Live Python API. By Rob King.
  Ableton Live API Documentation: Full documentation on whats available in the Ableton Live Python API reprinted with permission from Ableton AG. Original extraction from runtime objects by James Andrew.

  Thoughts about what this might mean for the Live community? Will (hopefully) Ableton continue to push for core implementations of important features relative to clips, MIDI routing, and hooks for future OSC devices? What might this mean given Ableton’s announcement of a partnership with Cycling ‘74 (in that case, an official one)? And what do you personally want to do with it, if anything? (Anyone happen to be a Python coder out there?)

  ]]> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/06/06/liveapiorg-new-open-source-unofficial-sdk-in-python-lets-you-hack-ableton-live/feed/ 27 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/10/goodies-from-networked-music-review-research-blog/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/10/goodies-from-networked-music-review-research-blog/#comments Thu, 10 May 2007 14:43:13 +0000 Peter Kirn http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/10/goodies-from-networked-music-review-research-blog/ Turbulence, the net art folks, have launched a “research blog” for music technology. Don’t let the “research” part put you off: it has pictures. And ring tones featuring pig sounds. (Hint to researchers: turn off the pig ring tone when you’re in the library.) There’s also a feature article from March with Jason Freeman, talking about projects from iTunes Signature Makers to audience-interactive musical compositions.

  Networked Music Review, the new sibling to our long-time favorite Networked Performance blog

  Calling things “research blogs” is catching on in many circles, and why not? The Internet’s hyperlinked universe and Google’s interconnected search algorithm were both inspired by academic journals, and the blogosphere has broken down what had been the severe isolation of researchers, especially in smaller fields like music technology. Of course, now we also get worms crawling around on circuit boards. Turbulence has been at the Interweb thingie for a long time, but it’s nice to welcome their latest addition, especially since here at CDM we’re both part academic and part bubblegum pop.

  ]]> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/05/10/goodies-from-networked-music-review-research-blog/feed/ 3 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/04/03/how-to-run-ableton-live-on-apple-tv-live-music-visual-apple-tv/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/04/03/how-to-run-ableton-live-on-apple-tv-live-music-visual-apple-tv/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:24:13 +0000 Peter Kirn http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/04/03/how-to-run-ableton-live-on-apple-tv-live-music-visual-apple-tv/ 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.

  There are several ways to launch a program from the aTV. The most basic is using the ssh terminal into the box and
  issuing the open command:

  open blah.app

  A second way is to actually copy a file manager program like Forklift onto the aTV and use that to double-click the application.

  Step by Step

  Copy your Ableton Live program to /Applications on your aTV. Use your serial number or just enable the demo. Ed.: Note that the demo will run unlimited; it just won’t save or load instruments you’ve purchased. If you’re concerned about running out of authorizations, that could be a fine way to go; just leave the serial authorization on your main machine(s). -PK

  Once Ableton Live is on the aTV filesystem, from SSH run something like

  open /Applications/Live 5.2/Live.app

  If you have performed the USB kernel patch, your keyboard and mouse will work.

  Have fun.

  And Live is just the beginning. Apple TV already has the ability to run Core Image-style graphics, so imaging with programs like Quartz Composer and VDMX could be possible, as well. (Jerome was already playing around with Quartz Composer.) USB audio and MIDI should be possible, as well. Bluetooth might even enable the use of the Nintendo Wii controller, which can in turn be used with Ableton Live via additional intermediate MIDI software.

  Jerome said he was next interested in playing with networking, so that aTVs could be combined with other Macs — or each other — and transmit networked audio, MIDI, and other information. Max/MSP can run on the Apple TV, so that’s one possibility for networking, and for audio he was trying plasq’s Wormhole plug-in. In theory, even online collaboration tools like Ninjam could work.

  Of course, everything we’re describing here is possible because it’s possible on the Mac, and that’s really what aTV is. So why would you want to do this in the first place? Aside from “because it’s there”, think about the fact that the aTV is US$300, has capabilities of its own, and has significant appeal as an installation machine — at half the price of sticking a new Mac mini in an art gallery, you could have aTVs running visuals and sound, for instance. I’ll leave you to figure out the rest.

  If you hack your aTV for multimedia creation purposes, do let us know. Anything that takes this device beyond iTunes sounds good to me.

  Previously: Apple TV Running Ableton Live

  See also: Mac OS X running on Apple TV

  ]]> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/04/03/how-to-run-ableton-live-on-apple-tv-live-music-visual-apple-tv/feed/ 11 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/03/12/yamaha-to-ship-toshio-iwais-tenori-on-but-will-open-hardware-win/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/03/12/yamaha-to-ship-toshio-iwais-tenori-on-but-will-open-hardware-win/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:58:33 +0000 Peter Kirn http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/03/12/yamaha-to-ship-toshio-iwais-tenori-on-but-will-open-hardware-win/

  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:

  

  An open-source rival to the still-not-shipping Tenori-On, the Monome emphasizes hacking, customization, and open software support. And you can built it into nifty wooden cases like this one.
  1. Toshio Iwai goes Nintendo. We’ve all gotten a chance to play with Iwai’s brilliant sound toys in the form of the Nintendo DS game ElectroPlankton. At the same time, musicians got the first indication that interactive art doesn’t always translate to musical instrument use. As CDM’s Nat noticed, just a few key missing features could have made ElectroPlankton truly rock (like multiplayer capabilities). Now, the Tenori-On looks terrific and I won’t judge it until it ships, but I notice some similar conservatism when it comes to next-gen functionality, like the lack of a protocol that would easily network multiple Tenori-Ons.
  2. Korg goes on the grid. The KAOSS Pad KP-3 comes out sporting — what else — an interactive grid of lights. Now, unlike the Tenori-On, you can’t use these for visual effects onstage, it’s an 8×8 grid not 16×16, and they’re a touchpad rather than discrete buttons. But, powered by Korg’s experience building these sorts of devices, the KP-3 actually does more, with added effects and (as near as I can tell) more sophisticated sampling capabilities than the Tenori-On. It’s not nearly as elegant a design, with buttons and toggles hiding all these extra features, but it remains to be seen whether the Tenori-On will turn out to be musically useful or overly simplified.
  3. Grids go DIY in software. Froggy Frog built his own Windows app called gControl, with touch buttons, for use with a touchpad. Result: it works however he wants, and runs on cheap touchpad hardware that can double as a computer interface. More similar experiments may follow.
  4. Monome does Tenori-On, the open-source way. Most importantly of these, inspired by the Tenori-On, some enterprising hardware hackers built their own solution called the Monome. If the Monome were just a cheap clone, that’d be the end of the story. Instead, it shows how a simple idea (grid of buttons with lights) can yield very different results. (Ed. note: Vlad rightfully points out in comments that the Monome prototypes actually came before Tenori-On. Toshio Iwai, among others, likewise worked on similar ideas before. Ultimately, all of these ideas have been readily available, meaning this is even more a matter of execution — and your preference / working style. -PK) The Monome is 8×8 rather than 16×16, but it’s arguably more useful than the Tenori-On in that it’s completely hackable in hardware or software, and richly-documented by a user community. The Monome uses OpenSoundControl (OSC) for communication rather than MIDI, allowing much-easier communication with a computer. And its open-source nature has already yielded fruit in the form of community hacks. That’s just for lovers of soldering irons, right? Wrong: with roughly a year lead-time on Yamaha, the community have made the Monome better-documented and more widely-supported than the Tenori-On is ever likely to be.

  Of course, I regularly advocate that music manufacturers talk about products they’re developing. In this case, you could argue that what’s happened is that the Tenori-On’s public demos inspired imitators or changed expectations. But I think something very different may be happening: open-source hardware may wind up beating the big manufacturer, not by cloning it but by doing something genuinely different.

  Now it Heats Up: Which Next-Gen Hardware will Stick?

  The Tenori-On already looks like a triumph of design and elegance. But Toshio Iwai didn’t invent the idea of grids of buttons with lights. As I look at the Tenori-On demo, I’m struck by all the things I would want this device to do — and then immediately wonder whether it will let me. Hardware makers just seem to believe the flexibility of computers is bad. On the contrary, a lot of us have been spoiled by it. That’s why Yamaha’s choice of MIDI over Monome’s OSC is disappointing. It’s simply going to be easier to send data between a Monome and a computer than a Tenori-On and a computer. It also makes it worth considering losing some of the nifty internal hardware capabilities on the Tenori-On, saving a little bit of money, and getting the far-greater flexibility of the Monome.

  “But, wait!” you say. “The Yamaha is a pick-up-and-play device.” True. What’s wonderful about the Tenori-On is that it’s a fully-integrated hardware device. And what’s terrible about the Tenori-On is that it’s a fully-integrated hardware device. Flashy lights aside, what you get is a simple sampler / sequencer. Ultimately, this comes down to the question of how digital music will evolve — the question Iwai asked in his original design briefs for the Tenori-On. Anyone who can afford a Tenori-On probably already owns a laptop, and my question is, how easily will you be able to adapt the Tenori-On to your individual way of working? Iwai compared the Tenori-On to a violin. But violins have very steep learning curves, with lifelong payoff. Where will the Tenori-On sit on the toy vs. instrument continuum? Alternatively, which kind of tool would you want: one that immediately makes sense for a single task, or one that can be easily customized to adapt it to different tasks over time? There’s not a right answer to these questions, of course, but I don’t think the answer is as simple as “only hackers and geeks want customization.” My experience suggests that musicians of all types do.

  

  Unknown: the status of “collaboration” features described in the original Tenori-On prototype. By supporting OSC, the Tenori-On could be made to work with any device, but it seems networking will be proprietary or possibly even nonexistent.

  This is all speculation, mind you, until the Tenori-On ships — apparently in the UK first. I’m very, very eager to try the Tenori-On in person. I’m always inspired by what Toshio Iwai does, whether I use it in my own music or not. And I look forward to challenging this design with these kinds of questions — and, perhaps, even reconsidering the Monome in a new light.

  But how times have changed since 2005. Whether successful or not, a succession of hardware (Monome, Lemur, the continued interest in the Haken Continuum and others) have demonstrated that we’ll never again think of a two-octave keyboard with eight knobs as the final answer for digital music. They’ve also proven that far-out interfaces can turn into shipping products. And, most interestingly, the rise of open-source hardware (through the rise of x0b0x, Monome, Arduino, and Make Magazine) has made DIY gear a serious alternative to commercial hardware for specific jobs. Musicians happily use this gear alongside commercial hardware and commercial software like Ableton Live, so this isn’t just for open source nuts.

  Now, it’s time to see which of these experiments sticks in the long run. Which — if any of these — whet your palette? Or are you waiting for the Next Big Thing, while happily twiddling knobs on conventional hardware? (Hey, it gets the job done. You can always hook up flashing lights separately if you have to.)

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