Designing Sound, as the name implies, focuses entirely on the craft of audio from film to games. While there are industry-driven sites devoted to the topic, this blog is entirely the labor of love of composer and sound designer Miguel Isaza, whose writing has also appeared on Spain’s Hispasonic and Monofónicos. (Miguel also tweets to Reaktor aficionados as reaktorlovers.) That personal perspective has imbued the site with the feeling of artists talking to artists.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

All week, Designing Sound has focused on Rob Bridgett, who has worked on numerous sound designs for games. Despite the massive growth of the game industry, most top artists have worked largely in obscurity – even less so in sound. There isn’t an equivalent of Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, Walter Murch, or others. (Those greats have been featured in Designing Sound specials, too.) Gaming is a young industry, to be sure, but that’s no excuse for simple ignorance.

In this week’s interviews with Isaza, Bridgett talks frankly about every last detail of what goes into sound production. He’s frank not only about what can go right in a game production – Scarface, pictured above, gets special treatment – but also what can go wrong. The brutal deadlines, fluid production parameters, and tangled production process of games can exact a toll on sound in gaming. The high point of this: Bridgett has gotten to employ the full resources of Skywalker Sound and has been at the forefront of bringing Hollywood-style sonic treatment to gaming.

I’m sure many readers here are curious about the games industry. There’s still time to forward your own questions to Miguel to pass along to Rob Bridgett.

Exclusive interview

Rob Bridgett Special

Ask your own questions

Incidentally, this is beyond what we even imagined for our fledgling noisepages.com, which we’re readying for a full launch as a community and blogging platform. Miguel created Designing Sound without prompting or assistance – it’s entirely his vision. It’s great to have people sharing information in this way. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

Max For Live Sneak Peak from max4live on Vimeo.

Suddenly, I have an image of American Ableton hackers patching on their MacBook over Thanksgiving turkey.

After a long, long wait, a public beta of Max for Live is available. The software incorporates the full version of Max/MSP/Jitter – complete with visual output, video processing, and 3D capabilities – with the Live host. Max patches operate with all their usual capabilities as devices inside Live. User interface elements are available to give Max patches conventional Ableton device interfaces, and there are even pre-built elements for useful functions like frequency displays and MIDI patterns. Via the Live API, Max for Live patches are also able to control most elements of the Live interface.

Because of Max’s networking capabilities, Max for Live devices can also be used to route OpenSoundControl data into Live. That isn’t necessarily with the same ease as you might route MIDI, and there’s still no native support in the Live interface, but it is a step forward.

Our friend Michael at max4live.info has been busy documenting the new software. His overview video is at top, and for OSC coverage, see his tutorial [part 1 | part 2].

Updated: Pricing has now been announced.
Max for Live is not included with Live 8 or even (perhaps surprisingly) Live Suite. It will be a US$299 / EUR249 download, available separately, on top of the cost of Live 8 or Live Suite 8. If you already own Max, you’ll have a set of crossgrades available:
1. You own Live. You can add Max for Live for US$99.
2. You don’t own Live, and want just Live. You can get that and Max for Live for US$449.
3. You don’t own Live, and want the whole Suite. Suite plus Max for Live crossgrade, US$699.

Total cost:
Max owners without Live: US$449-699
Live owners without Max: US$299 + cost of the upgrade to Live 8
Max + Live owners: US$99 + cost of the upgrade to Live 8

I think this could arguably be worth the investment, but given the discontinuation of support for developing VST, RTAS, and AU plug-ins in Max – a feature that was formerly free – I expect some resistance. Also, as previously announced, there is no known Max for Live “runtime,” meaning Max patch developers don’t really have a distribution outlet for work made in Max for Live, other than other Max for Live users.

Sign up for the public beta on Ableton’s site, and you’ll be able to grab the downloads (details below). You must be an Ableton Live 8 owner, though you don’t need to own Max 5:
http://www.ableton.com/maxforlive/beta

At the bottom of the page, you’ll have a direct link to download Live 8.1 (the official current build of Live is 8.0.9 otherwise), and a link to Cycling’s site to download Max. (Note: the Max link worked this morning, then promptly disappeared, so it’s possible they’re uploading an updated build is now back up.)

There are full instructions there. I was able to simply click a button and become a beta tester; hopefully you have the same experience. You’ll need to install two pieces of software, both Ableton Live 8.1 on the Live side and Max 5.1.

For the Python-based Live API, and the MIDI and OSC interfaces based on it, this should also come as good news. Live 8.1 should theoretically represent a more stable, feature-complete, fully documented version of the Live API under the hood in Live. That means even without Max for Live, it may be possible to, say, route an OSC input into Live as easily as a MIDI control surface.

If you’d like to join in with other people working on hacking Ableton Live and ask questions, try out our Noisepages group, which should now be functioning properly with a forum, wire, and networking features. More to come with this, with Max for Live, with OSC, with other tools, with… yeah, I’m glad I own a coffee maker.

http://noisepages.com/groups/ableton-hackers

Autonomous bassline generators? Wireless, modular, infrared sync? Tiny drum machines networking together? Welcome to Texas, and the minds of Eric Archer, Bleep Labs, 4ms Pedals, the Church of the Friendly Ghost, and Andromeda Space Rockers.

One look at a floor full of blinking circuits, and most ladies and gentleman might assume they’ve stumbled upon some alien technology. “Imagine the things we could learn from this civilization – advancements far beyond our own,” as the stock line from sci fi goes. “Man and woman are not meant to learn such things. You’re meddling in things beyond your comprehension.”

In other words, you couldn’t build something like this, right?

Or could you?

In Austin, Texas, Eric, Dann, and Dr. Bleep are launching a new Handmade Music series, kicking it off with kits and classes so that anyone – including beginners – can start building stuff. For the 101 crowd, there’s a free beginner class even if you’ve never touched a soldering iron, so you can build your own analog drum. “I’m no n00b,” you say, “impress me.” Sure – the “upper division” gets to talk more advanced synth design and walks through the full-blown modular, networkable kit.

At the end of it all is an open jam and featured performance.

If you’re anywhere near Austin, Texas – or can find a bargain plane fare – you’ll want to clear your calendar for October 18!

Full Event Details, October 18 Handmade Music in Austin [Handmade Music @noisepages]

That’s just the first of more events to come, so stay glued to the Handmade Music site for events in Austin, New York, Portugal, Germany, and beyond.

“That’s right / you’re not from Texas / Texas wants you anyway.” For those of us in New York, Lisbon, Rio, Sydney, and Jakarta, there’s still hope. The kits will be online, and I”m looking at ways of putting together a full Handmade Music curriculum of projects online for all of us on the site we’re developing this fall, noisepages – ideas welcome.

I certainly didn’t expect to get deep into these geekier topics in high school while I was busily trying to fail Calculus and screw up science lab results in ways that baffled my teachers. But it’s a glorious age we live in, in which we get to assimilate alien technology as our own. Stay tuned.

“UP” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.

Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.

Reminder: we’re meeting Saturday in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District to chill out, hear some music, and share strange and wonderful and hacked hardware controllers for Ableton Live as part of DubSpot’s Live Sessions tour. If you’re in the NYC area, you won’t want to miss out on music-controlling ironing boards, handheld controllers, and folks like RJ Valeo (Isomer Transition) above.

Full details
Facebook event

But if you’re not in New York, DubSpot and CDM are working together to make sure the weekend gets videoed, and we’re doing some work online.

Friday afternoon I’m chatting and answering questions as I work with the Live API to hack in OSC support for Live, and build a simple app for Google’s Android phone (which can be ported to other platforms, as well).
irc://irc.freenode.net/cdmblogs

Join the Noisepages Ableton Live hacker group for bleeding-edge discussion of some of these topics, too:
http://noisepages.com/groups/ableton-hackers
(I’ll be doing some link dumps with resources later today)

And Sunday, I’ll be giving a workshop about some controller secrets, with more to come online. (Sign up with promo code CDM for a discount if you happen to be registering at DubSpot; otherwise, hang out here.)

Fritzcrate Project / lusidLearn Early Demo from Michael Schieben on Vimeo.

Knobs and faders can be rigid. Fancy multitouch devices can be expensive. But for the cost of a webcam and some spare materials, you can build computer interfaces with objects around the house, thanks to the power of open source software.

In just one day, a group of artists in the CDM community, from Austria and Germany to New York to Australia, got quite a lot working with tangible interfaces. At top, Michael Schieben and Christophe Stoll experimented with using soda bottles to control software like Future Audio Workshop’s lovely Circle. (Ableton Live works, too – as does any MIDI software.) As Precious Forever, these guys are responsible for some of the best UIs in music software, from FAW to recent Native Instruments designs, so it’s lovely to see them experimenting with this idea.

As you add more people to the mix, you get ideas you might otherwise never have imagined, from a game involving blocks of the Tokyo skyline to an interface built into floor toms.

We also got a lot of real-world data on what works, what needs work, and what causes trouble for beginners, which we’ll be documenting. (Adam and Martin from the Trackmate and reacTIVision projects, respectively, were both tuned in to see progress and provided lots of help – and are also collecting that data to improve their own documentation and libraries.) More commentary on all these side benefits, as well as a discussion with visitors from Argentina on the scene around the world, at Create Digital Motion.

Musical Resources

We also got some really helpful tips for working with the free, powerful, tri-platform synthesis tool SuperCollider:
Charles Martin wrote up an easy SC test script for receiving Trackmate messages (and also had the clever idea of using a floor tom)

And for connecting Trackmate to MIDI and working with Processing, lots of tips are available on Michael Schieben’s noisepages blog:
http://fritzcrate.noisepages.com/

Get Involved

More documentation:
Tangible Interface Hackday: The Projects (So Far)
http://hackday.noisepages.com/

http://trackmate.sourceforge.net/
http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

So, what’s next? You can join discussion and brainstorming for how to proceed, and how to get in on another hackday (formal or ongoing), even if you missed the first. Stop by the Tangible and Multi-Touch Interface group on noisepages:
Tangible + Multi-Touch noisepages Group

Our noisepages community is still in “alpha” state, but it’s usable – we’ve just fixed avatar uploading, which was the biggest problem. We’ll have more features, functionality, and improvements down the line, as well as more extensive documentation for how to get started. But if you’re a bleeding edge sort of person, join up free and give us some advice on what you’d like out of it.

I look forward to more work on these projects. Stay tuned for more, including some additional documentation (I’m developing some stuff around my own project).

The DJ Booth at Bily Kun where Bidule was first conceived.

Ed.: Music creation is all about the special relationship we have with certain, powerful tools. And one app that gets very little attention is unquestionably the deep but elegant modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. CDM turns to power user Primus Luta to kick off a series on learning this tool, starting with an exclusive interview with Bidule’s creators. And if the interview sounds, at times, more than a little pro-Plogue in bias, make no mistake: this is love. Primus Luta takes it away, as we look forward to his upcoming how-to series. -PK

In the modular future, the Bily Kun will be a leading tourist attraction for Montreal. Patrons will come with laptops tucked under their arms sporting fork bomb t-shirts. The bartenders by then will be used to answering the question only tourists ask with a slight wave of the hand toward seats on the other side of the bar. The tourists will follow that wave to the ultimate destination of their pilgrimage, open their laptop, and broadcast their location to bidulers everywhere, before reenacting some sort of virtual cabling ritual to mark their presence at the conception place of Plogue.

“It all started what seems a long time ago,” Sebastien Beaulieu, Plogue co-founder tells me. “David (Viens of Plogue) was coding a few VST plugins to add new toys to Ross Bencina’s AudioMulch. We would meet up one evening a week to code a few cool bits then head up for beer afterwards at the minimal techno pub in Montreal called Bily Kun, where most of the ideas for the future came into place.”

It was the late 1990’s. Modular audio was just coming out of a clumsy adolescence. Miller Puckette rewrote his then decade old MAX software in a new open source format to create Pd. David Zicarelli founded Cycling ‘74 to continue development of the original MAX codebase beginning with a new audio processing engine – MSP. Ross Bencina released the first of thirty six public beta versions of AudioMulch. It was a developing frontier, still early enough that the horizon couldn’t completely be made out. And while working on what would be the first Plogue product, the VST plugin ReBuilder, what would become the Plogue team started envisioning a horizon they could paint themselves.

“Once we had one completed VST,” Sebastien continues, “we decided we needed some kind of entity to release them. We ditched our temporary name while(1)fork();, used to provide a ‘label’ name for our various IDM/Minimal DJ sets. Found a Quebec anglicism/slang word for ‘plug’, some nice chaps to design our logo, and so Plogue was born.

Plogue Bidule

We did another VST plugin (MixedGrains) and then started on Bidule, which, at the start, was to be an app that would improve on both AudioMulch and MAX/MSP, in terms of providing the user with a smaller learning curve to do more. An application that could both be used as an easy modular application, because of high-level objects, and a more advanced one with low-level objects that, depending on your usage, interest or knowledge, you might never need to even look at to get you going making sounds.”

An ambitious endeavor to say the least, starting from scratch in an attempt to improve on a technology while decreasing the learning curve. All of this with a core team that in the decade since founding would only grow to four members, only three of whom are coders, and of those three only Sebastien spends 100% of his time on Bidule.

“Bidule was coded from the start with portability in mind,” he explains, “so the code is mostly C++ and STL. It uses OpenGL for the patchbay rendering. The ‘graph traversal code’ is optimized for various connection types and feedback paths. XML is used to ‘mirror’ the processing graph for serialization.”

Simple, but quite powerful. Powerful enough to attract the attention of some of the bigger names in audio software, such as Garritan and Sibelius, who came to Plogue looking for licensing opportunities. When asked if this was always a part of the Plogue business plan Sebastien firmly states, “Definitely not, but once the opportunity presented itself we thought of it has a good way to sustain and grow. The ARIA Project is a different case because we are developing that in collaboration, which means it’s something we can also use for our own products. This explains why it was developed as a sample playback/synth hybrid engine rather than a straight sample playback one.”

With a reliable buisiness to business revenue stream one can’t help but wonder what influence that has in the development of Bidule. “Our licensing work does not have much influence on what is Bidule,” Sebastien explains. “Licensing work is usually started from our base components/libraries, some Bidule-borrowed code and our knowledge from doing audio plugins and applications. There are way too many things in Bidule to use that as the basis of a licensable audio engine without ending up with either an awful amount of #ifdef or too much code separation in different files.”

On the business end of things he states, “While the added income enables us to pay ourselves and employees it also takes time to do and that time is taken away from our own projects. There’s no way to know what would have happened if we strictly worked on our stuff, would we be at the same point we are now with a physical office and employees? Would we still be working from home? Or would we have given up on doing much more interesting work for less money and gone back to your typical programmer job full time and code the fun stuff evenings and weekends?”

There’s a constantly growing community of bidulers who are thankful not to have to worry about those possibilities. Congregating in the forums, the community in many ways acts as the additional staff for Plogue. It’s an interesting model, because while bidule is proprietary the communal nature of development is reminiscent of open source. One only need look at the Feature Request section of the forums to realize the high percentage of requests that end up in future releases of the software.

“There are several possible way to use Bidule,” Sebastien explains, “and we obviously cannot think of all of them. That is where the community input is important. We can’t even count the number of times forum posts, discussions and emails have led to new features in Bidule or changed the way we were going to approach a specific feature.” As such, you can find Seb (as he’s known in the community) in the forums regularly logging bugs, discussing problems, and ensuring user needs are met. Three years ago those user needs resulted in an SDK. “The SDK came up as a quick way to add new modules. There are times when users need something totally specific to their use or setup and it doesn’t make sense to add it inside Bidule. With the SDK, anyone having some basic code skills can add their own module.”

The true testament to the power of Bidule are what the users are able to do with it. When asked for example use cases Sebastien replies, “Building a setup for an art gallery installation where control comes from external sources. DSP companies using Bidule for quick prototyping of larger algorithms and systems through building blocks and SDK-built modules. People playing live in all sorts of music styles from experimental to jazz and even faith gatherings!

“Some things have just surprised us to find out that they were even possible with Bidule,” he continues. “For example Bram de Jong made a basic time-stretching algorithm out of basic bidules. Someone else made some noise reduction algorithm out of side effects of Bidule’s FFT algorithms. There’s also what you’re doing, which we found interesting because you’re basically building a complete instrument within Bidule and documenting the process.”

All of this with a software still in beta. Easily surpassing the thirty six beta versions of Audio Mulch and going into its seventh year of public beta, perhaps the Guiness Book of Records should be contacted. When asked whether the 1.0 version of Bidule would see release this year, Sebastian navigates his web browser to a virtual Magic 8 Ball site and types the question. The answer is: Very Doubtful.

“Bidule 1.0,” he explains, “has been a long standing internal debate in here. If you made a list of programmers that can’t let go until it’s perfect, you would find us in the upper portion. Lets just say we especially dislike ‘version 6.x’ applications that crash when you just look at them and the endless cycle of pay the yearly (or so) update fee to get a few bugs fixed.” Strangely enough for active bidulers, 1.0 may not be that important. The communal style of development is perhaps the most valuable part of Bidule. Would that come to an end if it were to come out of beta?

“I don’t see why it would stop because we think it has served us very well so far. More importantly, everyone at Plogue uses Bidule as their main development/test tool for everything else they do (like ARIA and chipsounds for instance). It’s our pen, if you will. With that mindset, as long as Plogue is alive, so will Bidule.”

An Alpha Version of Bidule Running on Linux Circa 2001

If Bidule has any limitations, it is perhaps the lack of a Linux version. When asked what’s keeping the software from being ported to the open OS, Sebastien quickly responds, “A time machine might help!” As it would seem back in 2001 there was an alpha version of Bidule which did run on Linux, development on which has since ceased. “I think our main concern is that we are not yet totally convinced of the viability and welcomeness of closed-source applications to Linux. Pretty much every thing else would fall into the lack of time category (most of our other concerns would probably be answered by research and testing), chasing two major platforms is already a time-consuming task, we’re not yet ready to add a third major one.” That shouldn’t be read as the end of the conversation for Linux users. If there’s anything which cannot be overstated about the Plogue team it is that community demand moves them.

This week Plogue launches the latest public version of Bidule 0.9685. As with all public releases it comes with a three month trial period for users to demo the software. To coincide with this, I’ve been given a space over on CDM’s NoisePages where I will be providing a series of introductory and advanced tutorials in Bidule, using the instruments created for my Heads Project as examples. You can read all about the latest Bidule release and after you’ve downloaded you’re copy make your way through the first tutorial. If you’ve ever wanted to have a look at what Bidule is all about, now is the perfect time.

In the modular present, Plogue Bidule has achieved much of what it set out to do – smaller learning curve, doing more. The modular future is bright.

“Total freedom to experiment, and try ideas fast.”

You’ve seen plenty of live rigs with mile-high stacks of keyboards and sound modules. But this setup is different: one of the world’s best bands is using an elaborate setup of software synths. Binding it all together is one of the most sophisticated software configurations I’ve ever seen, the fruits of labors by of our friend Jonathan Adams Leonard – a talented musician and technologist – in Kore 2. I wouldn’t exactly recommend this kind of setup to anyone else; it involved pushing Kore to its bleeding edge. But Jonathan’s walk-through of the hardware and software programming for this show is an inspiring one. (For us mere mortals, Jonathan does have a fantastic, free collection of modular tools for Kore, built and editable in Reaktor.)

Jonathan goes through every gory detail of the setup on our special Kore minisite. We’ll have more on Interpol’s tour soon to follow up:

Behind the Scenes with Interpol: Obsessive Details of Hardware, Kore Software Rig [Kore @ CDM, kore.noisepages.com]

And in addition to the software, there’s the rich hardware setup, as assembled by Chad Miller (Lenny Kravitz), assisted by Ally Christie (QOTSA, Mogwai). Yes, these are some of the best techs on the planet, working hard for one of the biggest bands. Good stuff. I wish I could have been in Gdansk, Poland (seen below).

CDM’s Peter Dines and Liz McLean Knight (Liz literally on her honeymoon) are keeping us posted with the latest events from Detroit’s Movement and Montreal’s MUTEK festivals. You can keep track of their travels and live impressions on our new CDM events blog, and I look forward to some artist interviews planned with some of our favorite people, coming soon.

So far, Peter is getting his synesthesia on with live audio and visuals at A/Visions, while Liz notes the spooky near-ubiquity of UC-33e controllers running Ableton Live at Movement. (Guess they need to invite us with some odder controllers, huh?)

Lots more coming soon — if you’re at either of these events, too, send in your reports and we’ll publish or link them:

events.noisepages.com

The events site will soon feature more information on CDM-hosted events, as well.

To really work with music software as an instrument, you have to focus on a set of tools and get deep into what they can do. Today, we’re launching the first of a limited series of minisites that lets us do that. It’s called Kore @CDM, devoted to NI’s Kore and Komplete lines. We’ve built a special blog which will feature regular tips on how to work with this set of tools, basic and advanced tutorials, and downloadable content, all free and open. (The contents of the site will be Creative Commons-licensed, so you’re free to share and modify what we do, with credit to the authors.)

Kore Minisite @CDM, http://kore.noisepages.com

 Subscribe in a reader [RSS]

Subscribe to Kore Minisite by Email

Why choose this product now?  I’ve felt really strongly, even having been critical of Kore’s first release, that Kore 2 has the potential to live up to its promise of creating a "meta-instrument" for working with sound and effects. Combined with the rest of the Komplete family, including Reaktor’s open-ended patching environment and the scriptable sampler Kontakt, NI has some deep tools — not perfect, not for everyone, but tools that matter to us. We want to really get into how to use them, and to develop a set of techniques and tools for others, both for sound design and live performance, in combination with hosts like Ableton Live. And this means not just doing stuff "by the book," but really seeing how far we can push these tools, sonically and in playability.

Kicking things off is Eoin Rossney, who talks about how to create feedback loops intentionally in Kore for special effects. It’s something mentioned in the manual, but there haven’t been instructions on how to accomplish it until now. Eoin takes that challenge on, and produces some really oddball sounds just by routing effects into themselves. Have a listen to the samples — just be sure to turn your speakers’ volume down first.

How to Route Feedback Loops in Kore – On Purpose [Kore @CDM]

Peter Dines, a Reaktor whiz and author of the Reaktor Tips blog, will also be writing and screencasting for us soon. Both Eoin and Peter have been CDM regulars, so it’s great to have them onboard.

Why we’re partnering with NI: So that we can provide as much content as we can for free, we’ve gotten sponsorship from Native Instruments to produce the site. But that doesn’t mean we want to make an "advertorial." NI has been generous enough to give us full control over the contents, and the goal isn’t a review, or an ad — it’s as much actual knowledge of these tools as we can provide. And, hey, it’s basically our job to demonstrate that by doing as good a job as we can and listening to your feedback. I’m happy to answer questions about why we’re doing things this way and what it means; we can talk in comments or contact the site.

Most of all, though, I hope you’ll check out the site. If you don’t own Kore or the other tools, we’ll still have sound and video samples and will include instructions for trying out projects in the demo, if you just want to kick the tires a bit. And definitely let us know what you think as we roll out more stories, because we want this to be as useful to you as possible.

Oh, yeah, and if you’re wondering about what the "noisepages.com" thing is about, you’ll be hearing more soon. Suffice to say the Kore site isn’t all we’re working on.

Bonus points to anyone else who had the "opportunity" to see the movie Deep Kore Core.