You might not expect a handheld game console, the gadget kids use to play Pokemon, to prove much worth as a musical instrument. But even in the age of readily-available computer plug-ins and iPhone apps, the DS holds its own. In the hands of two sets of artists, we find music that stands alone, independent of the gimmick of the device on which it was made. For these artists, the limitations of a fold-up touchscreen – entirely independent of doubling as a phone, or a computer, or a Facebook-browsing engine, or a powerful 64-bit DAW – apparently prove enticing. Beginning with Korg’s DS-10 cartridge, they use a stylus-operated software synth with its own unique character.

On some level, I almost hesitate to wax poetic about the fact that these were made with a Nintendo DS at all, because what these are, really, is love letters to synthesis.

And as it happens, both are available as free downloads from Bandcamp.

First up: AuxPulse is the duo of Rutger Muller and Michael Vultoo, based in Amsterdam and Kockengen, Netherlands, respectively. Late last year, they debuted their first album at Amsterdam’s prestgious Stedelijk Museum of modern art, playing a big set (two and a half hours) on small devices. Primarily employing the Nintendo DS, they nonetheless produce sounds that are rich and layered, sometimes even tending to the ambient exploration, not just the rawer chip-music sounds regularly associated with Nintendo handhelds.

Their music is trippy but danceable, unapologetically electronic, fully exploiting the DS-10′s idiosyncratic sonic character, one that’s slightly lower-fidelity than many soft synths (or even iPhone apps), without being “chippy” in the sense of retro devices. Dark textures collide with precise, clockwork rhythms, in sounds that sometimes tend to acid techno and sci fi game realms. (Lo-acid-fi, anyone?)

As you watch them live, you also see the value of the interface compositionally, both in terms of its pattern banks and its more conventional synth controls, all manipulated with the added precision of a stylus.

As they put it:

We aim to bring experimentation back to the dancefloor by expressing a psychedelic atmosphere through the use of a variety of rhythms and moods. Some of our inspirations are analogue synthesizers, acid, IDM, hardcore, gabber, ambient and oldschool electro.

Right now we mainly use the KORG DS-10 synthesizer for Nintendo DS to compose and improvise our music. When playing live we fuck with the synths as much as we can, trying to surprise ourselves with new sounds.

Our first album was recently released in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam! Now we perform regularly, trying to open up some minds and move some feet.

The album, on Bandcamp:

And on SoundCloud:
Dream Stages (FREE ALBUM!) by AuxPulse

Bonus: an interview with them (in Dutch, naturally)

In a very different direction, Princeton, New Jersey-based DJ and producer Christian Montoya (love and tonic records) produces music on the DS-10 that’s drier and more exposed, as he programs intricate bass music on the unprocessed Nintendo cart. Christian works as a game designer by day, and channels some of the DS-10′s game music and so-called “chip music” heritage. The results, though, are a perfect marriage of game chip-waveform rawness, nude bass and synth and percussion sounds, and carefully-concocted grooves. For anyone concerned that game systems could hinder moving your butt out of the seat, this album is required listening. It’s utterly stripped-bare dance goodness – and it turns out the DS bass sounds fantastic.

Grab the record for free:

DS-10 users, got any tips for us on getting the most out of a Nintendo handheld and this KORG synth? Let us know.

Also, from comments but worth pointing out, Rutger directs us to good resources for getting the most out of DS-10:

If you’re interested in making DS-10 music you can check out http://www.ds10forum.com

I (Rutger, DS-10 Dominator, 1/2 of AuxPulse) run it with Harley (http://harleylikesmusic.com, superb DS-10 composer!) and we try to help out beginner’s and advanced users as much as we can.

The gaming industry has made their bet, and it’s that touchscreens go better with tactile controls. Might digital musicians reach the same conclusion?

A funny thing has happened on the way to the touch era. The vision of a device like the iPad is minimalist to the extreme: an uninterrupted, impossibly-slim metal slate, as impenetrable as some sort of found alien scifi object. The notion is that by reducing physical controls, the software itself comes to the fore. It’s beautiful conceptually … and then you find yourself tapping and stroking a piece of undifferentiated glass. For navigating interfaces – and even, I’d argue, exploring sound design and composition – it works brilliantly. But for live digital performance (what to game lovers is called “gaming”), for anything that wants tactile feedback, it can be imprecise or unsatisfying, or both.

Watching this shake out as a design problem is fascinating, especially coming from the perspective of music. Digital musicians were exploring alternative interfaces since before it was cool. Given the ability to make any sound we can possibly imagine, the question of how you design an interface around sound is compositional, philosophical, essential.

Whatever winds up working in the marketplace, there are some fascinating ideas for combining touch with tactile. Since both are good at certain tasks, why not do both?

We’ve seen several examples among musicians and researchers exploring how to augment the touchscreen with physical input:

Mike Kneupfel’s research at NYU’s ITP program, in the video at top, investigates adding additional inputs. See: Extending the Touchscreen.

We saw that kind of extensibility in an iPad dock concept by Livid Instruments.

While it lacks additional tangible controls, I/O extensibility is featured in a still-as-yet-unreleased “pro” dock by Alesis, and most recently in a DIY dock by circuit bending pioneer Reed Ghazala.

Now, game vendors are moving in the same direction – even with prototypes that look quite a lot like the research project above. (Sometimes, arriving at the obvious conclusion is necessary for a great design.)

Sony’s PlayStation Vita, successor to the PSP mobile game platform, augments touch input with tactile controls in much the same way as Michael Knuepfel’s work does. Notably, it also proposes how these inputs can coexist in a form factor that’s larger than a phone, but smaller than a tablet – scaled roughly to a comfortable holding distance between your two hands. (Microsoft and Apple each unveiled standard split keyboards on Windows 8 and iOS 5, respectively. The era of thumb ergonomics is now fully underway.)

Nintendo’s Wii U controller combines a lot of sensing capabilities into one device. Like Sony’s effort, the centerpiece is the combination of the interactive touch display with analog controls. But true to its Wii heritage, Nintendo is packing other sensing technology, too. While its evolution has been more piecemeal, the same is true of the Xbox 360 in the Kinect era. The Kinect camera is really a bundle of mic and stereoscopic camera sensing with software intelligence for motion analysis and even speech analysis via a variety of methods. While Kinect is touchless, the conventional gamepad still plays a role.

What’s the relevance of all of this evolution to music? Digital music’s demands parallel gaming, requiring precision, accessibility, scalability from beginners to hardcore experts, and real-time interaction. Also, music research has often been at the forefront of experimentation with a variety of means of translating sensory data to expression. And since musical practice itself is roughly as old in human evolution as language, if not older, it’s a key way of glimpsing how ubiquitous interfaces can become meaningful.

Let me put that another way: the stuff game companies are doing now looks a heck of a lot like what computer musicians have been doing for years.

While much of the acclaim for platforms like the iPad has been for their transparency and unadorned interfaces – and while I believe those are valuable concepts – bundles of capabilities for interacting with the world can become powerful. That means efforts like Apple’s addition of USB MIDI connectivity to the iPad, or Google’s nascent work to standardize USB host mode and open hardware development (based on Arduino), take on new meaning. Add to this additional connectivity via Bluetooth and wifi, and it may be that we only really see what these platforms do when, like the PC, they start geting sociable with a range of other gear.

This could also mean that communities like the music community have a chance to prove that the “post-PC era” is a little different than it’s been described in the mainstream press – and maybe a little less a radical departure. The “post PC era,” we’re told, is less about being a hub for a lot of hardware. But as people look for tactile feedback, some of the coolest applications of these platforms may not be in the mainstream use as “consumption” devices, but at the fringe.

I’ve just come from the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in New York. You’re not missing much; there were a handful of people snapping up the tablets. (I think the 10.1, and a few other Honeycomb-based tablets, do have a bright future, though their growth may be a bit slow at first as developers get their hands on them and give people a reason to buy them.)

What was most compelling to people at the launch, though, was a planned appearance by pop star Ne-Yo (at least according to some staffers to whom I spoke).

But the connection was, at best, tenuous. It may be when devices like these tablets are made more viable for musicians onstage that that connection starts to make sense. And that may mean that Apple and Google/Android vendors alike need to start to think more aggressively about the larger ecosystem and hardware applications. Remember all those futuristic promises from Apple about hardware accessories? Right now, the most significant hardware is the Square payment add-on, and it uses a hack to make it work through the audio jack. Both Apple and Google can do more work to open up hardware development.

It’s all well and good for the tablet to be a “post PC” device, to be different from PCs, to be better. But they may simultaneously need some of the openness to other gadgets that made the PC age so revolutionary.

Retro chip music appeal and the occasional Super Mario Bros. game aside, you probably think of the Nintendo NES and Famicom system as something collecting dust at garage sales. You probably don’t think of this NES running as a self-contained music production workstation, syncing to MIDI and Android, or exploiting new software for producing elaborate musical sequences, drum and bass lines. Think again.

What might to outsiders seem like the nostalgic draw of video music has become something else entirely – the NES is taking its place as a serious, studio synth.

Via Keaton Shurilla (Theta_Frost) comes a number of helpful updates on recent developments for the NES.

Your NES, a music workstation

Pulsar is the next-generation successor to NTRQ, a tracker for sequencing and synthesizing sounds directly on the NES. You don’t use a computer; you do all the work directly on the game system. (NTRQ image above; see the video of Pulsar at top.) Full details:
Pulsar: Audio at NTRQ blog

Your NES, a drum and bassline machine

PR8, from the creator of Pulsar and NTRQ, turns the NES into a groovebox. It’s almost like having an NES take on ReBirth, complete with bass and drum pattern generators. Again, it’ll run directly on the NES system, making an NES a silly-cheap instrument you can add – and as the video hints, the results may not sound anything like retro game music if you don’t want them to.

Rihanna Rude Boy NES 8-Bit Cover from thefox // Kalle Immonen on Vimeo.

Your music, on NES cartridges

PornoTracker is the latest PC-based tracker solution. Here, the idea is a bit different: sequence your musical ideas from the comfort of your computer (in this case, Windows-based), then export to a format that can be played on cartridges. PornoTracker as a result has some powerful musical features, but it still lets you repurpose vintage NES systems for playback. If you think about it, that’s a pretty great deal: you save toxic hardware from the landfill, and at an absurdly cheap price.

PornoTracker (the Finnish developer has other crazy projects, like custom libraries and his own NES game engine)

PornoTracker write-up from our friends at TRUE CHIP TILL DEATH (ed.: Peter Swimm)

DIY cartridges for antique game systems? In case you’re wondering how all of this is practical, you can thank the…

Flash memory on a cart

…PowerPak. This custom cartridge allows you insert convenient Compact Flash memory so you can run anything you can load from a computer onto an NES, no special hardware required. An upcoming update for the popular NES tracker Famitracker will mean extra sound expansions that the Powerpak can play, on top of those already supported. Updated: You can also play directly through the NES using the Arduino interface and Famitracker; now with the Powerpak, some Famicom cartridge soundsets can be emulated, too.

Retro USB product page

Your NES, connected via MIDI

Arduino NES-to-MIDI is an Arduino-based project for MIDI communication with the NES, and it’s open source (GPL). The result: connect your NES via MIDI without the need for proprietary hardware. This mercifully stands in for the abandonware MIDINES project. (Sadly, I regularly get comments on a years-old story with people wondering what happened to that.) I’d love to see the use of a dedicated, open source USB-MIDI project so that you wouldn’t necessarily even need a full Arduino board, since it’s overkill for the project. But as it stands, it’s already a terrific step.

Updated: For more on connecting to MIDI, don’t miss Andrew (Batsly Adams’) site:

batslyadams.com

Your NES, connected to an Android

Not music-specific, but it could be: there’s an Android project that makes use of the Arduino bridge, too. (Could be a good starting point for a wireless, Bluetooth-based solution.)
android-arduino-nes-controller

Game Boy? Game Man/Woman

The NES gives you some seriously grown-up, fun sounds on a dime. I think it’s an encouraging return to basics, all for the cost of some of those iPad cases. So, while the NES and PowerPak didn’t make our inexpensive holiday list, they sure could — or they could be a 2011 New Years’ Resolution. I’d love to hear what you do with them.

More Projects – Updated

Be sure to check out:

A build-your-own NES synth design, ready for live performance, by Jarek Lupinski, interfaces directly with 2A03 synth chip.

http://skrasoft.com/blog/ Dev Blog covers modular synth modules for using vintage synth chips, including the Pokey — brilliant!

With the recently-announced Korg M1 app and DS-10, the Nintendo DS handheld remains a surprisingly-good choice for handheld music making. A new app could take that further.

Nintendo may have struck a blow to homebrew music developers by successfully blocking hardware that allowed it to run. But while it’s not nearly as open to development as Apple’s iOS, Nintendo’s DSiWare can work for an independent developer. The proof: Rhythm Core Alpha, created by T.B. Trzepacz.

What’s unique about this application is that it emphasizes real-time production. Sound playback never stops during editing. The crowded interface packs some fairly powerful-looking features:

• A Drum Grid with 12 tracks x 64 beats x 122 sounds
• A Note Grid with 8 tracks x 64 beats x 166 sounds
• A Solo Mode that places six octaves of notes onscreen for playing
• A 1000-step pattern mode with chord, drum, and note modes, plus looping
• 7 velocity levels for everything (okay, not a lot, but that provides simple velocity control)
• Quite-nice scale mapping (see screenshots) to keep you in tune – and yes, it’s also possible to override them

See the video demonstrations below.

Pricing is 500 Nintendo Points, or US$5. Naturally, you’ll need to have a DSiWare-capable handheld in a location with access to the store, but assuming you’ve got a newer model, this is much easier than the homebrew route, and pricing is similar to iOS apps.

Rhythm Core Alpha – Unrehearsed Jam at Kulak’s Woodshed, April 2010 – V2 from SoftEgg on Vimeo.

http://www.softegg.com
Facebook group

Rhythm Core Alpha on Nintendo DSiWare panel with SoftEgg’s Tim Trzepacz at Pasadena Rock ‘n Comic Con from SoftEgg on Vimeo.

Handmade Music is a community get-together, Science Fair, noise-making happening, and party for people making things that make music. We return to NYC on Sunday, August 29 at 7p. Our new Manhattan home is Culturefix, a new electronics boutique, gallery, and tapas bar on the Lower East Side.

This month, we welcome a classically-trained guitar duo using their instruments to play games, an original string-modeling instrument, a sonic dodecahedron sculpture (really), artists using game chips, and more. Last-minute creations are always welcome.

If you’re in New York, we definitely hope to see you Sunday night. And wherever you are, it’s my pleasure to introduce some of the artists we have involved.

Presented with our friends at Make Magazine, Etsy.com, and XLR8R.

THIS SUNDAY, August 29, 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM (come at the beginning, or miss stuff!)
In Manhattan, at 9 Clinton St
COMPLETELY FREE
(cash bar/food… and you might decide to buy some designer headphones, just be forewarned)

Facebook page

That’s right. “Look at this ****ing nerdster…”

Modal Kombat: Guitarists Playing Games

David Hindman and Evan Drummond describe their act, coupling classical guitar training with a love of games:

Guitar Hero Is Dead: Guitarists Use Real Guitars to Control Video Games in a hybrid concert / public video game battle

Forget about using a plastic guitar to mimic your favorite band. What if you could use a real guitar just like any other video game joystick — and thrash your opponent while you create original music?

Two classically-trained New York City guitarists calling themselves “Modal Kombat” have hacked into classic video games Pong, Tetris, Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart. This month at The Boulder International Fringe Festival, they’ll make their characters move — and battle against each other — with a flurry of guitar-plucking.

The show is a video-game battle/performance-art hybrid that’s open to the public. The goal is to demonstrate that real guitars — or other musical instruments — can be viable video game controllers.

About Modal Kombat:
Modal Kombat is a NYC-based performance group consisting of Yale School of Music alumni David Hindman and Evan Drummond. For the past five years, they’ve performed public guitar-controlled video game battles at various venues in Europe, New York City, and around the U.S.

Before the game Guitar Hero was released, Hindman was an NYU grad student, developing hardware and software that allowed real musical instruments to control various types of existing console video games. In 2004, he created the system that became the basis for Modal Kombat shows. At each show, various musical pitches, volume levels, and other musical parameters are programmed to trigger each character’s movement, such as Left, Right, Punch or Jump.

http://www.modalkombat.com/

Smomid: Original String-Modeling Instrument

Nick Demopoulos has devised his own instrument from custom hardware and software:

The Smomid is a homemade midi controller. It’s name is an acronym for “String Modeling Midi Device.” It is made with the use of several membrane potentiometers, knobs and switches.

http://www.nickdemopoulos.com/smomidelements/smomid2.html

Neurohedron: Nonlinear Sequencer, Dodecahedronal Sculpture

Handmade Music favorite Ted Hayes brings a novel modal hardware/software combination, part original application, part original sculpture, as presented at the NIME research conference:

Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous. More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.

The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer. The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron. With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.

Neurohedron: First working video!! from Tedb0t on Vimeo.

Lots and lots of additional information (including more videos, documentation explaining the process and software design, and the NIME research paper):
http://log.liminastudio.com/projects/neurohedron

Presented by Pulsewave: Chip Music Open Mic

For some of you, I imagine that a world that has tasty New York beers, organic tapas, and chip music playing is pretty close to heaven. The good folks of New York’s famed Pulsewave series team up with us to provide us handheld chip music.

Thanks to the awesome Peter Swimm for making this happen.

Featured:

Square Wail: Square Wail is Matthew and Rebecca Kenall running an assortment of handhelds. They like fat beats with old timey melodies and try to infuse their music with such. Hailing from Seattle they are coming to the East Coast for the first time (except for once when Rebecca had a layover at JFK).

2010 Aug 10 – OMG Franz – Brooklyn – Dapantz from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Walking Like We Were Shot Through Our Heads by DaPantz

DaPantz (seen in video, heard in SoundCloud above, and with his own free EP):

Uptown New York’s satirically named DaPantz has been known to shout “BX HOLLA BACK” with reckless abandon. Often eschewing structure in favor of mood, he creates chaotic industrial, hip-hop and Latin flavored dance-punk on the Nintendo Game Boy. Using the homebrew cartridge LSDJ, DaPantz fuses heavy beats and a dissonant use of melody with the more unsettling side of the human psyche, creating the soundtracks to your nightmares (but reminding you that it’s okay to dance to them).

January 2010 – Kris Keyser at Bar Matchless from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Kris Keyser is just another guy with a Game Boy. Having hopped from instrument to instrument in his over 10 years of music making, Kris has finally found his perfect match in the portable powerhouse known as Little Sound DJ. In his relatively short time in the chip scene, Kris has jumped from relative unknown to relative known,playing chipscene institutions I/O and Pulsewave and making countless feet move and brains melt. Kris looks forward to a 2010 release on Cheese’N'Beer.

AdamGetsAwesome has been spreading beer-fueled mayhem across the world since 2008. Using the LSDJ program on the Nintendo Game Boy, Adam creates melodies ranging from the sickeningly sweet to the hauntingly atmospheric, always bringing a healthy dose of PARTY to every performance. His debut EP “AGA” is not only the inaugural CNB release, but also an exercise in actions befitting his namesake. Party.”

Website/free EP download: http://adamgetsawesome.com/album/aga

Phototheremin Chorus

Registration is now closed for the workshop, but we’ll be inviting creators of our phototheremin kit, designed by Eric Archer after an original design by Forrest Mims, to come play their instruments – boys, girls, adults, and kids.

Check out the kit.

The Party

View Larger Map

Sunday August 29
7:00 – 10:00 PM (come early)
Culturefix details

Yes, it’s free.

Yes, kids are allowed. (just not at the bar)

RSVP on Facebook.

Games really are reshaping music. Despite their relatively simple gameplay, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises originated by developer Harmonix are stimulating interest in real music making. It’s no accident that you can walk into a Best Buy and, next to aisles of video games, find a growing selection of serious musical instruments and technology.

These titles are also stimulating interest in music and artists and producing a new distribution outlet, at a time when the distribution picture for music can seem bleak. But until now, that outlet has been limited to big acts, big tracks, and big deals with big labels. It has only promoted music you already know, not the discovery of new music. Rock Band Network could change all that.

We took a detailed look in August at how Rock Band Network worked technically, and how authoring a song for RBN could give you the same level of gameplay and choreographed graphics that the official Rock Band tracks get. But now here’s the big news: at long last, RBN is opening to the general public, starting with an open beta for artists and play-testers.

What it is: Rock Band Network is a new set of authoring tools (built around Reaper), a submission process (built around Microsoft’s Xbox 360 XNA Ceators Club), and an upcoming store to host indie tracks called the Rock Band Network Music Store.

What it costs: Rock Band Network membership is free, but you’ll need a $99/year XNA Creators’ Club Premium account to submit or test music.

What you’ll need: To author titles, you need an Xbox 360, a copy of the Reaper software, a set of free plug-ins for Reaper for RBN, the XNA account, and either a Windows PC or Mac. (You’ll need Windows, either virtualized or on another machine, in order to actually load the tracks for testing, but you can author on either; see below for more.)

What it gets you (as an artist): If you make it through the peer-reviewed submission process, you stand to set your own pricing and receive 30% royalties (retail, excluding tax) on everything you sell.

What it gets you (as a peer reviewer): With the XNA Creators’ Club membership, you can play as many tracks as you want without any additional charge, in exchange for your feedback. Tired: squeezing into sweaty, overcrowded bars at CMJ and South by Southwest to hear new acts. Wired: Scouting for new acts on your cough with your Xbox 360. And that could make a nice community of music, depending on how this evolves.

Where the tracks will be distributed: Anyone with a copy of Rock Band 2 (and presumably future versions of Rock Band) can play your tracks. Releases will initially debut on the Xbox 360 store for 30 days. A “selection” of tracks will also appear on the PS3 and Wii stores after that. (The approved songs will stay on the RBN Store on Xbox 360, regardless.)

When does all of this happen? The open beta launches today for peer reviewers and artists. The store is due, um, “real soon now.” (No specific date yet.) The game itself is ready to go, at least on Xbox 360: a patch introduced way back in September added the ability to play RBN tracks.

CDM Talks to Harmonix

John Drake, Program Manager for Rock Band Network, took some time out to answer my questions on the eve of launch.

CDM: What will the Rock Band Network Store look like? Where will you get access to it? Will it be a similar store on the PS3 and Wii?

John: The RBN store will run in parallel to the existing Harmonix DLC store, and will be in the same menu location within Rock Band 2. The RBN store has more info about each song than our existing DLC store does, and it has more ways to discover new music: you can search by subgenre, album, country of origin, record label, even the author of the song.

The PS3 store will be very similar to the Xbox 360 store. Details of the Wii RBN presence are still being worked out.

Ed. note: It’s especially nice to see the RBN store on equal footing. I had high hopes for the XNA-produced games on Xbox Live, but those titles aren’t displayed or listed in exactly the same way, which I think has hurt the initiative a bit.

CDM: In addition to the XNA Premium subscription, you still need Windows to support testing your own tracks, yes? Do you need a Windows PC to be a playtester?

John: You need to run Windows in order to transfer song files to the Xbox 360, because we use Games for Windows Live to manage the transfer. We have informally tested running Windows on a Mac on a number of virtual machines, as well as BootCamp, and most of them work perfectly for transferring files.

Ed.: I can add, a number of the Harmonix guys are Mac fans, so you can believe they tried the virtualization approach!

CDM: Since we last talked, there has been a private beta. Were there any additional improvements / changes since our August conversation? What kind of feedback have you gotten?

John: The closed beta has been absolutely invaluable to help us shape the experience for the new members just now joining the program. We’ve cleaned up and organized the documents section of the website, added a great deal of new information, clarified policies for submitting songs, and generally made sure that the pipeline is running smoothly. None of the major processes are any different than initially designed, but we have changed a million small details to make it better.

It’s important to note that the members that have been in the beta have been absolutely extraordinary: patient, intelligent, hard working, thoughtful, and helpful to each other as they worked through the inevitable issues that cropped up as we readied the site for launch.

CDM: Have any currently-available tracks come through the private beta process? (Jonathan Coulton’s?)

John: We currently have nearly 40 approved tracks, including tracks by the inimitable JoCo, and a bunch more up for playtesting and peer review. We’re expecting even more great content to go up for testing in the next few days, and we’re excited for people to join our playtesting ranks to get even more songs through the pipeline!

CDM: I see TuneCore is offering track preparation services. Have you seen similar offerings begin to appear? (For some of us, doing the authoring may actually be satisfying – we’re weird that way!)

John: There’s a great variety of services cropping up from authoring houses offering with different programs to create songs for bands. These range from straight, up-front fee structures to a $0 down, pay us out of your royalties deal. It’s really exciting to see how different groups are responding!

*PS, I’m with you on the satisfaction of authoring. I’ve been working with my band to put our whole last and current record (17 songs in total) up for RBN. It’s a lot of work, but it’s super rewarding to get involved in the process! And it’s really doable if you’re used to making music as a passion!

CDM: Outside RBN, are these tools beginning to be used on Harmonix’s own tracks? (I believe that was in the works when we last spoke.)

John: It was always the intention that the tools we developed for the Rock Band Network would be integrated internally at Harmonix and that has begun to happen. With the industry leading amount of content we produce (over 1000 songs and counting) anything that makes the job of our unparalleled Audio Team easier is welcome, and in most cases the Rock Band specific tools were built by members of the Audio Team themselves!

CDM: Okay, enough of the nit-picky details… what’s it mean for you that you finally get to take this to public beta? Now with a few months more perspective on it, what do you think this will mean for musicians to get on this platform, revenue aside?

John: As our Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus said about Rock Band Network, “It completes me.” We’re already thrilled with the community working within RBN and we’re hopeful to see a lot more great content and enthusiastic playtesters signing up at Creators.RockBand.com now that we’re open!

Additionally, we’re really proud of our teams here at Harmonix and MTV Games, who have designed a really smart way of getting great music into the hands of fans. Empowering musical groups of all sizes and genres to be able to post their own content for sale is really a dream come true at Harmonix. Adding the great variety of music for our passionate fanbase only makes it that much sweeter. We’ll be even more excited when the store turns on and those first tracks sell!

Go Check it Out

I hope to help document both how artists are using RBN and the technical process for doing this yourself over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can hop on the beta yourself if you’re interested:

How to submit a song: http://creators.rockband.com/docs/Website
Scroll down to “Adding a song to the pipeline.”

How to become a peer reviewer?
http://creators.rockband.com/docs/Playtest_Process

And yes, I still want to see an Amplitude/Frequency Network that’s friendly to electronic music, minus drums + guitar. I think Harmonix knows a few of us feel that way.

Jonathan Coulton on Rock Band Network, from the awesome PAX.

PAX ’09 Rock Band Network Panel #3 from Harmonix on Vimeo.

Everything you need:
http://Creators.RockBand.com

Video interview by G4:

Commercial developers are now releasing music creation apps for mobile game systems, in the form of the KORG DS-10 for Nintendo DS and Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP. But some of the best ideas still come from the homebrew community.

What’s most impressive about ToneSynthDS is not so much what it does as its interface, fitting all its functionality into the DS’ two compact screens. Its minimal interface finds an elegant arrangement of everything you most urgently need, with a sequencer screen on one DS screen and basic virtual analog synth parameters on the other. A 4 x 4 matrix next to the main sequencer grid lets you switch between patterns, in a step sequencer reminiscent of the monome and Tenori-On. There isn’t a whole lot of depth to event editing in this early version, but it could be a lovely way to sketch melodic patterns. (And some of those limitations come from the DS itself. Note, though, that this app gets a full 16 real-time channels on the original DS hardware to the Korg DS-10′s paltry two.)

Developer Fanta/Hotelsinus Sound Design has been posting mock-ups, demos, and now builds as he goes. That means that he gets feedback from an audience of readers and incorporates those as he develops the app – another key difference between the DIY/homebrew scene and conventional commercial development.

More good news: this DS app should also run as a PC VST in a forthcoming version, opening up the fun to folks using netbooks and laptops instead of the DS and creating a nice mobile-to-computer workflow.

http://ndscomposer.blogspot.com/

In related Nintendo DS news: If you’re thinking about getting the new DS-10 Plus Limited Edition of the KORG DS-10, you’ll need to get it for the region coding of your DS. (In other words, you probably won’t want to import it.) The “Dual Mode” functions are region-locked, so North American and European users can’t use the Japanese DS-10. That’s not such a big deal, as North American distribution was announced, and other regions are expected to follow, but it’s good to know. See details on the All Things KORG DS-10 blog. (Thanks, DS-10 Dominator!)

Check out some demo videos and a quick run-down on specs, and if you’ve got the capability to run homebrew, you can give this a try. Thanks to Art/toitoy for the tip!

• Two oscillators with fixed oscillators, ADSHR envelopes
• Filter section (in development)
• Ring modulation and “cross” mixing (cross-fading between oscillators)
• 16×16 step sequencer, 4×4 pattern selection

Clearly, there’s a lot of work still to be done, so test this build at your own risk. But it’s already good fun, and the coming roadmap looks logical, with filter options, disk rendering, song mode, and more in store. It’s also an interesting read as far as wrangling with emulators and some of the challenges of DS development.

Imagine a nightmarish, dark-world, alternative-reality version of Wii Music, one that sends Miyomato-san screaming. That’s what you get from tokoloten, in a very un-Nintendo noise performance, as found on comments. The Wii is just one of his tools:

tokoloten uses a variety of objects such as magnet motors, infrared devices, game controllers… in order to hide his lack of conventional technic. Depending on the venue, the show might be ambient-like, experimental or electronica with weird cinematographic references. But it most often combines all of this.
tokoloten is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

It’s proof that the controller – any controller – is in the hands of the creator, and what it sounds like is entirely undetermined.

Mapping a hardware input to a sound means making an abstract connection between one physical action and another sonic reaction. What that relationship is is entirely up to you. I was honestly a bit surprised by some of the impassioned critical reactions to yesterday’s brief mention of the use of the Wiimote as a studio recording. Of course, that proves the creed of the blogger – post first, ask questions later, and when in doubt, just post. Amidst some of the frustration, there are some good discussions, though I do dream of an Internet on which we criticize content without name-calling.

But the reality remains: controllers are always abstracted from the sound, by definition, and whether they’re satisfying to you depends on how you’ve mapped them. I don’t know what qualifies as innovative, but then, there have been times when I’ve very much enjoyed turning a knob, so “innovation” isn’t always what matters to me. I tend to fall back on Duke Ellington – “if it sounds good, it is good.” For controllers, that means “if it feels good, it is good.” You’re the one with the controller in your hands.

For an alternative example, musician/artist Kassen has an excellent session on improvising with custom software and game controllers. Below, you can catch some of his talk from Amsterdam’s famed STEIM research center, which has a long history of researching the controller-music connection. After all these years asking that question, what we have is …more questions. But that’s a beautiful thing.

Kassen (DJ, performer, ChucK programmer) from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Part of the reason I’ve never liked “controllerism” as a term – sorry, Moldover – is that there is no clear technique, no clear sound, no particular discipline. That is, I understand the case for the term and I’m glad there’s a discussion. But it seems to me that part of why controllerism is interesting is that there is no such thing as controllerism. The beauty of digital music is that you do have wide-open, blank-page possibilities. You can create your own system. It is abstract, simulation, ungrounded in physical reality. But while that is at odds with millenia of acoustic instrument-making, it’s also in tune with centuries of compositional and notational tradition, which are abstract. For the first time, the systems of how we conceive music can themselves become physical.

That to me is an exciting thing.

So, here’s a question — let’s take the example of sensors that handle orientation. How would you want to deal with them in music software, if they could be standardized, if any accelerometer or tilt sensor could announce its orientation? How do you decide which is the x, y, and z axis, for instance? How would you want the data normalized?

Today was full of good news for people interested in carrying pads in the palm of their hand.

Fans of the Nintendo DS in North America, the Korg DS-10 Plus synthesizer for Big N’s game system is now coming to your side of the Pacific Ocean. (That also bodes well, I think, for other parts of the world.) The DS-10 I think really deserves some credit for making a straight-up music title a hit on gaming platforms, and its success certainly surpassed my own expectations. It’s not a game, it’s not an interactive experience, it’s not a music game – it’s actually a synth and music workstation that happens to run on a game platform. The DS-10 Plus beefs up the original’s features, though it now has a commercially-available rival in the form of Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP.

In Plus for both the DS and DSi:

• MUTE/SOLO built into the SONG mode
• EDIT/PLAY enabled for all modes within the SONG mode

Apparently DSi-exclusive (as I had speculated in the original story on the new edition):

• Twice the analog synths (4 of them, instead of 2)
• Twice the drum machines (8 instead of 4)
• Twice the tracks (12 instead of 6)
• Expanded song mode: programmable track mute, realtime editing (that is, edit parameters inside the song mode
• Two effects layers instead of just the usual effects routing (the equivalent of running two instances of DS-10)

(Previously: Korg DS-10 Plus Coming, with Beefed-Up Features for Nintendo DSi)

I’m also pleased that, if the Joystiq story confirming North American distribution is correct, only the extra effects layers require the newer-model Nintendo DSi. It sounds as though the rest of this functionality works just fine on other DS models.

Correction: As Liam notes in comments, and as I’ve clarified above, many of the new features are indeed DSi-exclusive. That means this is probably worth upgrading if you have a DSi, and a reasonable purchase if you don’t already have DS-10, but something you’ll ignore if you have a pre-DSi system and the earlier DS-10 title. Joystiq apparently mis-interpreted the press release, which is easy enough to do; it’s confusingly written.

XSEED press release

Via Joystiq’s David Hinkle:
XSEED bringing Korg DS-10 Plus to North America

Call it the 8-bit preservation society. Chipsounds is now available. It’s a new programmable soft synth, filled with custom oscillators and samples of famous and obscure vintage chips, accompanied by an EP of free chip tracks. Far from a threat to fans of hardware, I think this release is a major achievement for fans of digital sounds.

Oh yeah, and if you’ve been feeling burnt out on chip music in general, firing up some of the sound of some of these more obscure chips could well change your mind. If you like sound, there’s something here for you.

Chip music, championed by a supportive network of artists and fans, has unquestionably made the big time. But for those who value the unique sounds of a variety of vintage 8-bit chips, there is still cause for concern. Even though they’re digital circuits, the unique design of various chips won’t last forever. Some chips are simply disappearing, while others cease to work. At the same time, while the sound of the Nintendo game system has become ubiquitous, lots of other unusual chips don’t get heard. Software emulation and sample packs so far have been pretty shallow. Emulators tend not to model all the nuances of different chips, and samples are really only expressive if they’re presented in the context of something that’s fully programmable and playable.

Enter Chipsounds. Creator David Viens told us about the Chipsounds project back in January:
Authentic Chipmusic Soft Synth Emulation: Plogue Chipsounds Scoop from NAMM

It’s available today, with an introductory price of US$75 ($95 thereafter).

chipsounds @ Plogue [Product Page]

Something like Chipsounds could have been just an attempt to cash in on “what the kids are playing.” But David’s work is more like an epic love poem to the sounds of chips themselves, not only as a reminder of game music but as a unique sound source. And the passionate chip music community got in on the act, as well, with notable artists contributing to the product’s development and in fine form on the EP.

But forget about that for a second. What matters is that chipsounds is an exhaustive, exhaustively programmable set of sounds that almost no eBay budget could ever amass. It takes some unique sounds and allows you to warp them into arrangements and performance configurations not possible with hardware. And it might well make you explore hardware in a new way all over again.

For your listening pleasure, here is the full, free EP with downloadable tracks to set the mood. It’s all been made with Chipsounds by some terrific artists, including David Viens himself, and covers a range of genres and techniques.

Why Chipsounds

David has a really lovely intro in the manual for the tool. He’s got a story like many of us I expect have.

My father bought a Commodore VIC-20 for me and my brother when I was around nine. After a few days with it, I guess he knew I had found my calling. There is not a year that passes without me reminding him how bringing that computer home some cold autumn night changed my life.

But this isn’t just nostalgia. David also notes that some of the limitations imposed by earlier 8-bit hardware caused artists and musicians to invent new techniques that were later lost. These methods can now be rediscovered and coexist with new processes only possible with newer tech. What Chipsounds represents is an expanded “sonic palette,” not just the literal representation of the hardware included. And for those willing to dig into programming the sampling instrument itself, that palette can be even wider and more personal.

David did a whole lot of work on research and experimentation to make this work, but also drew upon the massive community online. Here’s a look at the chips included.

The Instruments

David did extensive research, testing, sampling, and A/B sound programming for the project. Just going through the chips is a nice history lesson – and could be a good introduction for those interested in working with hardware, too. You can check out extensive technical details on the hardware at the chipsounds blog.

SID (6581) and (8580) It’s the mother of all sound chips, and deserves the top space in this list. The SID was the legendary Commodore 64 chip, sampled in this collection at 96KHz. The 8580 I think doesn’t get nearly enough credit, so it’s nice to see both so you can hear the oddities of each.

RP2A03 (NTSC) and RP2A07 (PAL) and RP2A0X (unlimited): This is the big one – the chip in Nintendo’s NES and Famicom. It’s not actually a dedicated audio IC, but a clone of the 6502 CPU, but it still has some unique features and sounds.

DMG-CPU, SGB and DMG(unlimited) The classic: Nintendo’s own sound generator for its Game Boy handheld. Confession time: I’ve heard this chip so much that I’m starting to long for other things. But again, because the Chipsounds collection lets you create hybrid instruments in different ranges, there’s nothing stopping you from inserting DMG sounds where you wouldn’t expect. (And while functioning Game Boys are everywhere and run a variety of amazing homebrewed sequencing software, some of these other chips aren’t as accessible or portable.)

AY-3-8910 (various clocks sources), YM2149 (2Mhz): General Instruments’ sound chip was one of the great sound chips of the 8-bit gaming and computing age, found in the Intellivision, Vectrex, Atari ST, and Sinclair ZX, among many others. That means it’s critical not only to gaming fans, but also fans of the sounds in early tracking musicians, particularly on the Atari ST. It’s even got its own Wikipedia article.

D1867G The classic Casio VL-1 makes a surprise cameo in this collection. Result: you have the opportunity to imagine your own music console that combines the sounds of the VL-Tone with the IBM PCjr, and that’s a beautiful thing. The VL-1 may be the odd man out in this collection, but then, it also exemplifies the lo-fi digital sound of the 80s – and with the ARIA sampling engine, you can warp it to do things it has never done before.

P8244 (NTSC), P8245 (PAL) This is one of the rarer (or at least more unexpected) entries in the collection, the sound chip that drove the Magnavox Odyssey2. Intel’s Video Display Controller used this chip to make both graphics and sound (hmmm… could Chipgraphics be next?) For extreme nerding out, check out David’s full post on working with this chip. Unlike the other entries here, the VDC doesn’t have much documentation online for these kinds of applications.

POKEY (various clock configuration) Atari’s Doug Neubauer created sound capabilities for this chip, used in Atari’s 8-bit computers as well as many arcade games. (The POKEY actually handled not only audio, but keyboard, pots, timing, serial… Arduino fans, take note.) Which arcade games? Try Tempest, Gravitar, Gauntlet and Crystal Castles, for starters.

TIA (NTSC), TIA (PAL) and TIA (unlimited) Another combined graphics and sound chip, the Television Interface Adapter was the sonic soul of the Atari 2600. The variations here in Chipsounds give you a lot of choices, including the awesome “polynomial counters” which create different kinds of distortion. Using keyswitching, you can choose among these sounds live, ideal for keyboardists. And David has even included the sounds the TIA makes when the cartridge was improperly inserted.

SN76489(AN) (various clocks) Here’s my personal favorite: the classic Texas Instruments sound chip was dead-simple (three square wave generators and one white noise generator), but elegant, efficient, and unique in sound. The BBC Micro, IBM PCjr, and ColecoVision game system all used its sounds. I can still hear the echoes of Subroc in my sleep. (Yeah, okay, I was a bit jealous of my friends who had Apple IIs and NES instead of the more oddball PCjr and Coleco I had, but now I’m older and appreciate them more.)

Side note: David was nice enough to share some of his SN chips, so I’m working on building them into standalone hardware and will share the results.

UVI 2637(NTSC) and 2637(PAL): Now we get into the chips you probably haven’t heard. Signetics made this chip for the Arcadia 2001 console developed by Emerson (yeah, the electronics company) in the heady year of 1982, before the meltdown that would purge the home gaming market. That console was widely cloned, under names like the Interton, Leisure Vision, and MPT-03.

VIC-I : 6560 (NTSC) 6561(PAL) in various configuration Here’s another oddball chip: the VIC-I, used in the VIC-20, had 7-bit pitch range, giving you oddly-tuned scales, plus a truly strange noise generator. That strange sound is rarely heard, but leave it to the demoscene to exploit it. From the Chipsounds manual:

In 2003, a brilliant demo writer by the name of Viznut reverse-engineered this side effect, mapping all possible “weird” waveforms that the chip was able to reproduce in a deterministic manner, and put the to good use in his now famous “Robotic Liberation” demo.

Here’s a look at that creation:

The Software

Let’s get something out of the way: I believe in synths. I’m naturally skeptical of samples. If I believed for a second Chipsounds was about plugging in some sampled sounds and hitting a key and waiting, I wouldn’t have posted this article. Fortunately, Plogue’s ARIA sampling-plus-synthesis engine is powerful enough to allow immense programmability and playability. It’s loaded up with programs that model every last detail of these instruments, while also providing the possibility to create your own, unique performance configurations. Samples make up just a portion of the sound, used where appropriate, with lots of custom oscillators and modulators, as well. This is really a full-blown instrument, not just a sample library. (ARIA has previously been sampling-only, but Chipsounds is the first of a line of instruments to use synthesis, as well.)

Standalone, plug-in modes:

As a plug-in, Chipsounds works with VST on Mac and Windows, RTAS (for Pro Tools) on Mac and Windows, and Audio Units on Mac. And of course, in plug-in mode you can automate all your parameters.

In standalone mode, you have additional features: audio file recording, MIDI file playback, and even the ability to render MIDI to audio directly.

Mixing, Multis:

• Load up to eight chips/instruments per instance. (Each of those, in turn, can be made up of combinations of samples.) Maximum polyphony is suggested at about 4-5 voices for artistic reasons, but… rules are made to be broken, right?
• Assignable tuning, polyphony, mix parameters
• Reverb busing
• Key switching, which allows you to change between waveforms immediately using a key on your keyboard
• Snapshots

Sound editing:

Here’s where things get fun – and where you can do things more easily than you could with the original hardware. Even with the ARIA engine alone, you have a virtual studio of tools in which to place your samples.

• Arpeggiator for pitch, velocity: with configurable range, loop modes, gate, sync, etc.
• Wave sequencer: This allows you to sequence lists of pitches on an instrument, allowing tracker-style events inside the software. (Add your own tracker to the mix and – well, things get pretty hectic.)
• Live, high-performance oscilloscope.
• Pitch LFO (currently fixed), pitch and amplitude envelope generators.
• Effects, which currently includes only an ARIA-native port of the lovely Ambience reverb by Magnus Jonsson. (But then, the advantage of having these sounds on your computer is easy access to all your other effects.)

Still Want Hardware?

In order to make the Chipsounds collection, David spent time rigging quick hardware devices allowing the actual chips to be connected to a computer. That could make Chipsounds an affordable gateway drug into building your own standalone hardware with these chips as sound sources, as I hope to do soon with my TI SN’s. To get you started, check out the superb resources on the Midibox wiki:

Midibox SID
Midibox POKEY
MIDIbox AY 3 8912

The SID is the most common of these, but ironically finding working SIDs is getting to be much harder than finding these other unique, lovely chips.

I’m actually really interested in the possibilities of combining hardware with the open-source Arduino platform and creating devices that behave in new ways; stay tuned, and hopefully we can get a group of folks working on that.

One example – our friend little-scale aka Sebastian Tomczak of South Australia – has used the Arduino to connect to the SN chip and create a MIDI-controlled Sega Master System equivalent:
MIDI + Arduino + chip on little-scale’s blog

Add in new MIDI capabilities on the Arduino, and this gets quite interesting.

The Artists

A lovely collection of artists contributed to the EP and to the development of the software, so this is very much a release connected to the community. (David’s own music is on the EP, too.)

The artists:
8Bit Weapon
Computeher
nitro2k01
Chupathingy and on MySpace
James Mireau
XC3N
shrimps

And for more on the making of one of the tracks, GameBoy Genius aka nitro2k01 has documented the work of translating a hardcore chip track from Game Boy to computer, using Renoise. This is a pretty traditional approach to what to do with chip music, but on the other hand, once you’re in the world of Renoise, you could go in other directions, as well.

If you’re interested in anything covered here – the artists, the chips and digital synthesis history, how to use the software, or how to make some of these hardware creations – all of these topics are fair game for CDM. I promise a non-nostalgic (okay, maybe slightly nostalgic), musical approach to these topics.

In the meantime, let us know what you think of the software.