I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

People still find heroes – imperfect as they may be, people who provide inspiration. I’ve been talking a lot this year about the impact of Max Mathews; more on that soon. But in the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ death, it’s touching to see some of the reactions. French Rock band Bravery in Battle write CDM to share their music video homage to the Apple leader. They’ve gotten quite a lot of attention in French, as well (French-language links):

«Ayez faim, soyez fous»… les bonnes paroles de Steve jobs mises en musique [Liberation]
Un bel hommage à Steve Jobs en musique (vidéo) [stevejobs.fr]

We are Bravery in Battle, a French rock band. When we heard of Steve Jobs’s death, on October the 5th, we decided at once to write some music to pay him homage.
We have been using the Mac to make music for almost 15 years now and it’s completely part of our creative process. We also have been using
the iPad on stage since the very first days of its launching to trigger samples and play instruments too cumbersome to carry.
Without Apple and its products, we wouldn’t the artists we are today.
But we didn’t want to write a song, we wanted to use Steve’s very words and hear his own voice. That’s why we used his memorable 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. We have chosen the words which seemed the most meaningful for us and for the occasion.
As an additional homage, we played all the music on an iPad, with GarageBand : a Steve Jobs Tribute using only his devices and softwares.
To make a video; we used the same Stanford Address (made on a Mac, too, with Final Cut Pro X).
The original speech was very widely consulted on the Net in the hours following Steve Jobs’s death but our video tells something else. It focuses on a single point and increases its emotion.
For Bravery in Battle
Paul Malinowski

The man who gave harmonicas a boldly futuristic vision is lost to us. We’ve learned that Walter Müller, inventor of the MIDI wind controller Millioniser, died this month. Rock Erickson of Millioniser writes with the news, and updates us on plans to carry on with the Millioniser as well as to honor Müller’s memory. (See the groovy video from 1983 promoting this creation.)

I am sad to announce that Walt Miller (Walter Müller) Inventor of Millioniser (midi wind controller) has died in Switzerland on 10.13.2011. Millioniser introduces HIP™ Technology (Harmonica In Principal) which enables the user to sound notes via mouth position
rather than finger position.

(new site) http://www.millioniser.com

Walter’s family and friends visited him often and I will miss my dear friend. Walter was a famous harmonica player who entertained in
films, grand performances such as the likes of the Queen of England, and was also an inventor. Walter originated The Millioniser. Please feel free to leave your thoughts and condolences on the live site comment page –
http://www.millioniser.com/#!live-site-comments

– for Walt’s family and
friends. We miss you already, dear friend. You can learn more about Walt Miller by clicking the links with his name attached on the site.
It is being constantly updated so please feel free to contribute. Walter’s family, Ronald Schlimme Millioniser Engineer, and myself
will keep you posted of the new developments of Millioniser.

Walt Miller July 17
1927 – October 13 2011 RIP Dear Friend

My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues. And if there are any Millioniser players out there amongst the CDM readers, we’d love to hear from you.

Via comments from last month, more on the Millioniser (with videos):

Provided by Ronald Schlemme -Millioniser Engineer
The history of the Millioniser
The Millioniser is a harmonica wind synthesizer, invented by Walt Miller (Walter Müller).
From the idea to the Millioniser
The Milloniser was developed in a period of 5 years before it hit the market as the “Millioniser 2000”.
In 1979, Walter Miller together with Harald Blobel and Urs-Peter Studer developed a prototype which could control a Roland Promars analogue synthesizer. The first control unit was still quite bulky, but its functions were working exactly as expected. With this unit, the two records “Xmas and you” and “Perfidia” were produced.
In succession, a new control unit was developed by Urs-Peter Studer. This control unit was beautiful and elegant. It was intended for the use as a controller for a Promar Synthesizer. Unfortunately, the production was very expensive and complex. Because of this, Walter Miller was looking for a funding partner, which makes a redesign with its own synthesizer possible. At the same time he was looking for an engineer with experience in musical electronics.
In 1982, Ronald Schlimme of SM Elektronik AG joined the team. The first job was to implement a standardized interface to normal synthesizers. Further, different aspects of modulating the sound had to be explored. A Roland Modular System 100M, a Moog Prodigy and different additional devices like equalizer, exiter, hall, chorus and phaser were used for this. The results were truly striking. A violinist was baffled about the authenticity while listening to Walter Miller playing on the Millioniser prototype. Similarly amazed was a trumpet player who was working as an instrument maker for brass instruments. The Millioniser can control 8 octaves or in other words, from a tuba up to a piccolo trumpet.
In 1982/83, a polyphonic controller was developed, which could control a Roland Jupiter 4 synthesizer. The results were impressive.
Finally in September of 1983, the long awaited funding of the Millioniser company in London became a reality.
The development of the Millioniser
In October 1983, the development of the new Millioniser 2000 started and everything was redesigned. The team: Alex Bärtschi, Peter Benz, Walter Müller, Wolfi Peccoraio, Marcel Rothen, Ronald Schlimme, Urs-Peter Studer, Felix Thommen
Design, casing construction for the control unit and synthesizer, electronics, software, test software, manual, presets (sounds), prototype and production documents.
The design phase started in October of 1983 and in April 1984, four working Millionisers were presented in the Sheraton in Zurich and Hilton in Basel. From the idea to the finished product in only 5 months. Housing plastic design and zinc injection die casting were not an easy task for Urs-Peter Studer and Injecta AG.
Enclosure design by Walt Miller and Conran from London. The brilliant idea was to bevel the edge of the control unit, which gave it a slimmer appearance.
The very first single chip microcontroller from Motorola with analogue inputs were used for the control unit. Motorola advertised these chips with the slogan: “We produce the processor; you play the music on it”. We then sent a letter to Motorola Europe in Geneva with the note “We would like to play music on the chip, but unfortunately, they are not available”. We then got plenty of support by Motorola in the form of sample chips and the head of the department for single chip processors and one of the developers showed their interest and support by visiting The Millioniser Team in Basel.
Alex Bärtschi was the developer of the control unit electronics and software. Alex couldn’t understand why his calculations for the optocouplers didn’t match the results he observed. Then we found out that they have a memory effect. We then inverted the logic and all of a sudden it worked like a charm. The application engineer of Telefunken (the supplier of the optocouplers) was baffled when we explained that inverting the logic works better when sampled at 3000 times a second.
Rock Erickson is the original Millioniser tester from USA and played the first control unit which was white in color.
Ronald Schlimme was project leader and responsible for the Millioniser software and synthesizer design and implementation. The test software was written by Peter Benz and Ronald Schlimme. Everything was written in Assembler because the timing was critical. The engineering was finished in March 1984. Early in April, two presentations in the Sheraton (in front of the Sheraton in Zurich) and in the Hilton in Basel were held.
We sent 800 invitations and expected around 100 visitors. To our surprise, over 400 came!
The hall was very crowded and everyone was eager to see that which they had never seen before.
In April, the manufacturing documents and a prototype were sent to the producer in Cardiff, Wales.
In Closing: This whole development of Millioniser 2000 which is more complex than the modern PC of today took only 6 months from paper to production. Note, the engineering was without CAD software support. It was before the invention of the IBM-PC and the first CAD system had just been released.
I welcome any questions, comments, collaborations. -Rock

The generation of people who defined modern computing seems to be passing this year. Following Max Mathews, another Bell Labs titan is lost to us: Dennis Ritchie is the man who created the original C programming language (again at Bell Labs) as well as co-developed the UNIX operating system. President Obama commented that many people learned of Steve Jobs’ death on a device “he invented.” For all Jobs’ contributions, it is as untrue to say that as it is true to say the same of Ritchie: you are quite literally reading this story as served by software derived from his creations on UNIX, using tools written primarily in the language he, with others, devised.

For music, C endures in some form as the basis of the vast majority of tools we use for musical computation – that is, his creation is at the heart of the software with which we all make music. And just as Mathews made the computer sing for the first time, C is a lingua franca on which musical expression is based, the kernel of the vast array of sounds computers today make.

But C is important not simply because, in some form, it remains at the heart of much of the computer code written today. It also introduced in a material sense the idea of portability and cross-platform code, allowing in turn music tools like Csound and others to appear on new computers rather than pass away. It formalized coding concepts that, even in radically-different, more “modern” languages survive. That means that for people expressing musical ideas in code – and anyone using the software that results – software is not tied to specific hardware, lost as new generations of gear cause the old to pass away. The ideas behind C allow computer music to pass from one generation to another – to outlive us.

Ritchie would probably at this point hasten to add that he didn’t work alone, that his work was based on others, that he had colleagues like Ken Thompson who worked with him on C and UNIX. Such is the nature of invention, and unlike the titanic egos of the past (yes, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, we’re looking at you), some of today’s creations were built by people whose impact was no smaller, but who have been far humbler and lesser-known.

So, get to know Dennis and the many colleagues who survive him. Marvel that the “machine” is not some alien robot at all, but that in your hands, you hold the contributions of creative human beings, the thoughts of complete strangers encapsulated in front of you, and that at the end of the day, you can make it all sing a song.

Via TechCrunch

Journalist, techno organizer, lecturer, and creative director Dan Sicko has sadly passed away this weekend, the victim of the rare but devastating condition of ocular melanoma. Sicko is best known to electronic music fans as the author of the terrific Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk (Billboard: 1999). A uniquely techno-focused story, that book is a particularly good tome on the underground roots of the techno genre.

But Sicko contributed more than just that book, as a music writer (Rolling Stone, Wired, Urb), and a lecturer on Detroit music culture, as well as a fixture on the techno music scene and a key figure in the appreciation of its music. He had worked as a Creative Director with the Detroit office of Organic, Inc.

He also launched Reverb, one of the first digital music magazines – distributed on floppy disks and FTP sites, even this site owes something to its legacy. (I can relate: I ran an early e-publishing effort on CompuServe at around the same time. If anyone can find copies of Reverb…)

As reader Klaas-Jan Jongsma notes, in passing us the news:

Besides being a friend of mine, he was always willing to help people who visited Detroit (I stayed at his place a couple of times when we visited Detroit) he was a major influence on scene. He wrote with so much passion about music for several magazines, blogs and newspaper. He was also one of the driving forces between the 313 mailinglist (an essential mailinglist, especially in the 90s about Detroit techno). He was one of those unknown forces behind detroit techno, a true techno rebel.

Mr. Sicko has left behind many digital footprints, right up through this month; if you didn’t know his work, retracing them can introduce you to some great music. A few examples:

Moodmat contributions, Metromode

The [313] mailing list

Personal website

Twitter feed

Most importantly, though, you should pick up a copy of his book if you haven’t. There are still more thoughts on that site, including a response to the May NPR roundup of Detroit music picks with his own suggested gems. He leaves behind an extraordinary set of resources for those wanting to learn more about this music, and records to spin in his honor. Sincere condolences to friends and family.

http://techno-rebels.com/

Latest on gofundme.com on arrangements.

Max Mathews, the man who literally first gave voice to computer music, died yesterday at age 84. I can only offer my heartfelt condolences to Max’s friends and family.

Max was the man present at the moment when the very subject matter of this site was born. An IBM 704 playing his 17-second composition marked the first genuinely digital synthesis of music on a computer.

Max’s achievements, though, go beyond that initial breakthrough:

Digital synthesis of music.
The Music 1 software demo on an IBM 704 in New York City was the first computer music performance. While not real-time, and while Mathews himself says “the timbres and notes were not inspiring,” it was a stunning proof of concept.

The computer sings.
Mathews’ arrangement of “Daisy Bell,” for a computer-synthesized voice developed by a Bell Labs team led by John Kelly, was the first “singing” digital computer. The event found its way into pop culture via Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Computer music in code.
Computer tech is supposedly fleeting, but Mathews’ original work on the Music I – Music V series was the direct basis for languages like Csound and Cmix, used today. (Csound apparently even found its way onto a popular karaoke machine.) The basic notions of scores and instruments, the fundamental assumptions of the language, and the essential designed features all remain visible in today’s languages. Mathews indirectly influenced every other music language since. He is the namesake of Miller Puckette’s “Max,” a reference to the timing techniques used in what is now Max/MSP, which were modeled on techniques designed by Mathews. That means that there’s something of Max’s thinking in Max/MSP, Jitter, Pd, GEM, Max for Live, and others.

Innovation in gestural control.
Before the Wii remote and Microsoft Kinect would come to change popular ideas about gestural control of computers, Mathews’ Radio Baton explored similar spatial manipulation in musical performance. Add to that involvement with research and events like the “New interfaces for musical expression” conference, and Max has had a profound impact on the exploration of novel control.

Max was warm, witty, and insightful in every encounter I had with him, going on to continue to inspire colleagues and students through his late years. He played a role not only in our narrowly-appreciated realm of computer music, but the history of the computer itself.

There’s really too much to say; let us know if you have comments for CDM or contact us directly and I hope to put together something more detailed by next week.

I was saddened to learn this morning that earlier today, Tsutomu Katoh, founder and chairman of Korg, passed away. He was a rare visionary, not only the founder of one of the great electronic instrument manufacturers, but – unlike the vast majority of his counterparts – someone who stayed at the helm of the business he created. Founded nearly 50 years ago, Korg, started with Tadashi Osanai, was one of the first businesses to popularize electronic instruments as we now know them. Kato, a veteran Shinjuku nightclub owner, bet on the legendary DoncaMatic drum machine – an innovation that recently earned him a cameo with the Gorillaz – and the rest is history. One of the fathers of modern electronic music making, he will be sorely missed, and the news is even sadder in this difficult week for our friends in Japan. Our thoughts are with you, as with the former founders’ friends, family, and colleagues, as his vision lives on.

From a letter circulated earlier today:

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I would like to inform you that our founder and chairman Mr. Tsutomu Katoh passed away early this morning (March 15, 2011) after a long fight with cancer.

Since he founded Korg Inc. in 1963, Mr. Katoh has led our company with great talent, vision and leadership. He was loved and respected by all the employees, all Korg family members and made a huge contribution to the lives of countless musicians around the world.

Plans for a memorial service will follow very soon.

I would appreciate your prayers for him and hope he can rest peacefully now.

Sincerely,

Seiki Kato
President
Korg Inc.

Remembering Tsutomu Katoh:
40 Years Of Korg Gear: The History Of Korg, a three-part series by Gordon Reid for Sound on Sound; pt. 2, pt. 3

Video interview at NAMM

I welcome your memories and thoughts here, and any other obituaries you see; we’ll do a retrospective soon.

Matrixsynth has an especially nice story with more images and video and stories:
RIP Mr. Tsutomu Katoh – Founder of Korg

Hindsight normally gives perspective to history, but in the case of the 20th Century, even looking back, it’s hard to fathom the sheer magnitude of change in human thought and technology. Composers faced the twin revolutions of electronic sound — recorded, synthesized, and eventually computerized — and new systems for organizing pitch and rhythm from the early European avant garde to access to every world music culture.

One figure at the center of the academic reinvention of American music was Milton Babbitt, the experimental innovator who passed away over the weekend at the age of 94. Obituaries inevitably brought up his infamous, tragically-titled High Fidelity article “Who Cares if You Listen?” (for which the composer himself blames an editor – something I can easily believe as a writer). Much is made of the gulf between listener and composer, but perhaps that misses the point. Dig into his arguments, and you hear the struggle of a composer in the midst of revolution and turmoil, one that fragments composers from other composers, not just audiences:

…it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics The immediate and profound effect has been the necessity of the informed musician to reexamine and probe the very foundations of his art. He has been obliged to recognize the possibility, and actuality, of alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes. He lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of “common practice,” but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.

Original essay text

Oddly enough, he doesn’t argue in that article for absolutes – good or bad, popular or serious – but instead makes the (none-too-controversial, on the face of it) argument that some experimental music being made will be too complex for some ears. The part of the argument that seems not to hold, in a grand indication of just how revolutionary the 20th Century was, is the idea of separating radio technicians from theoretical physicists. Instead, we live in a world in which theoretical quantum physics becomes the stuff of dinner conversation and may soon power the memory in our computers. I just saw string theory advocate Brian Greene on The Colbert Report. (It’s hard to imagine Neils Bohr showing up on the Ed Sullivan Show to do an act, by comparison.) So great was the revolution of those thoughts that they seem inseparable from daily life.

Relevant to this site, part of that revolution was electronic. In an interview with Eric Chasalow in 1997, Babbitt recalls his own part in some of that history. It begins, humbly, with odd noises and early artifacts of the first electronic scores. New sounds start with tangible construction, even when programming, which required punching binary codes in paper. Eventually, one winds up at the part of the story that’s better known — the RCA Mark 1 and (radically different, says Babbitt) Mark 2 synths for which he was a consultant.

Extending the argument of “Who Cares if You Listen,” theoretical physics and radio repair are no longer independent in music, either. The experimental technologies and odd noises Babbitt and others helped develop now pound away on dance floors around the world and appear in pre-installed software on computers and phones.

To even begin to fathom what has happened, or what happens next, then, I can think of no better time to listen to the gravely voice of Milton Babbitt, to reflect on what his revolutionary, sometimes-unpopular musical radicalism could generate, and to listen again to his music. Some of the electronic sounds date poorly, but they also exhibit his sonic and rhythmic imagination and stand as a challenge to work to come.

There aren’t many people whose oeuvre begins before World War II and lasts past the second invasion of Iraq, who helped launch the academic computer music lab as American phenomenon and also tutored Stephen Sondheim. In 2001, he told New Music Box he had bleak hopes for the future of “serious” music, but also admitted he didn’t own a computer. The outpouring of support on the Web over the past few days for the composer suggests a lot of people did care, and did listen.

Milton Babbitt talks about “Philomel”

Sequenza and Synthtopia point to this new documentary by Laura Karpman, posted by NPR. I was also at that CUNY Graduate Center event, and saw Babbitt speak there, as well. As may come across in these videos, he was a warm presence, very different from the persona ascribed to his role in music and culture.

It’s not so often that I write obituaries for hardware, but this time, it seems appropriate. JazzMutant has announced that its Lemur, the multi-touch hardware controller, is officially at the end of its life.

Their announcement:

Since 2002, JazzMutant has been a acknowledged pioneer in the field of Creative Computing and Multi-touch technology, being the first-ever company to develop and bring to the market a product featuring a multi-touch screen as early as 2005. Since its market launch, the Lemur has been endorsed by a fascinating community of music and video artists. Nine Inch Nails, Richard Devine, Hot Chip, Ritchie Hawtin, Matthew Herbert, M.I.A, Mike Relm, Alva Noto, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Daft Punk, Bjork, … : The list of prestigious and influent artists who have made the Lemur their favorite pet companion on stage would be way too long to be mentioned here. Its visionary concept and groundbreaking technologies allowed the Lemur to win numerous international press awards and was recently elected “Innovation of the decade” by Future Music.

During five years and despite the new fever surrounding touch technologies, the Lemur remained the only Multi-touch device capable to meet the needs of creative people. From now on, this ecosystem is evolving quickly : powerful consumer tablet devices are becoming mainstream, bringing the power of multi-touch to everyone. In the meantime, JazzMutant, renamed Stantum in 2007, has become a technology-centric company and developed partnerships with tier-one industrial partners to speed up this democratization. As a result, the need for a high-end dedicated hardware is doomed to vanish in the near future. This is why Stantum is announcing today that it will close its JazzMutant activity unit and stop selling its legendary Lemur Multi-touch hardware controller at the end of December while the stock lasts! The last batch of Lemurs just came out of the factory. These very last units are now available at a special discounted price from JazzMutant’s webstore and from its authorized distributors and retailers. These very last units are now available with 25% discount! Moreover, the Dexter App and an original Lemur T-shirt will come along for free. Don’t miss this last opportunity and grab the legendary Lemur from authorized retailers while the stock last! The Technical support and after sale service will be handled until December 31, 2011. The jazzmutant website will stay online in order to let the user community access support resources and share their projects.

We would like to thank all the people involved in this fantastic adventure: first of all the user community which exceeded our wildest expectations in creating the most amazing templates; our devoted resellers, who helped us to show the Lemurs all over the world; finallymusic software editors for their support.

http://www.jazzmutant.com/press_release.php

None of this is necessarily news. To me, the surprise is that the transition away from a dedicated multi-touch controller to widespread multi-touch took as long as it did. (Well, actually, it isn’t so much of a surprise in retrospect, but perhaps the Lemur made the coming transformation so vivid that I hadn’t thought through just what that transformation would take to come to pass.)

At the end of 2005, writing a review for Keyboard Magazine of the Lemur, I concluded that powerful as touch was, it should be viewed as a complement, not a replacement, for tactile hardware – a tool ideal for certain tasks:

The Lemur is an unusual piece of hardware. Because it rethinks fundamental questions about what music hardware should be, it raises questions we normally take for granted. But it also suggests that conventional hardware interfaces aren’t as arbitrary as one might think.

If anything, I think at the time I wildly underestimated some of the Lemur’s most important contributions:

• Simple, geometric, high-contrast user interface elements improved legibility and usability.
• It pointed to physics-driven touch interfaces which still haven’t been fully explored – even by the likes of Apple.
• It demonstrated how important multiple touch points could be – not just two, or three, but the same number of touch points for which you have fingers.
• It led adoption of OpenSoundControl (OSC), leading to more intelligently-labeled controls, network-based control schemes (whether Ethernet or WiFi), and higher-resolution data.
• It showed the usefulness of floating point control precision, particularly in the visual space.

But more importantly, in my Keyboard story I said I felt that the Lemur would ultimately be replaced by computers that had touch, rather than dedicated touch controllers:

There’s no question that multi-touch touchscreens represent the future of computer interfaces, and the Lemur is the biggest leap yet toward that science fiction future. For now, the challenge is that the Lemur’s features lie somewhere between a computer display and music controller, without effectively supplanting either one. The Lemur sacrifices the sensitivity and tactile feedback of physical controls in the name of flexibility, but that payoff is limited by the restrictions of its pre-built interface objects and the difficulty of configuring new layouts and assigning them to software controls.

If the Lemur could be truly fused with the computer display, rather than requiring an entirely independent interface, it would become a must-buy. Until that happens, the Lemur could be a worthy acquisition if you need more flexible control of parameters like timbre and surround sound, or want a programmable interface you can touch, and can afford paying a premium for emerging technology. But for most of us, less-expensive and more musical physical hardware will remain the preferred way of interacting with the virtual worlds of computer sound.

In fact, in one odd sense, the Lemur’s separation of control from sound source has hindered the fusion of sound and interface on devices like the iPad; control surfaces remain arguably more popular than dedicated musical instruments and production tools that take advantage of the new touch paradigm.

I imagined that the fusion of touch displays with computers was a couple of years off; it was actually closer to six years. It really took the debut of Apple’s iPad this year – some five years after the Lemur’s introduction – for us to see the computer fused with the touch interface. And I think the year of the tablet is more likely to be 2011, as Windows, Linux (MeeGo and Ubuntu), Android, and presumably Chrome tablets all hit the marketplace. (True, we’ve seen computers with touch, but they’ve all made compromises that prevented them from even matching the Lemur, either in sacrificing performance, adding cost, losing multiple touch points and resolution, or some combination.)

Some of the coming models will seem more like conventional computers with touch displays, others more like tablets in the mold of the iPad.

What remains to be seen is whether we’ll see Stantum’s technology – technology derived from the Lemur – in some of those devices. (See my April interview with JazzMutant’s co-founder.) No new information there. Update – it bears saying, based on what I see in comments: we already know that there are a lot of tablets and touch-equipped laptops and specialized devices coming to market in 2011 and beyond. There are more devices, from what I’ve seen, than there are vendors of touch technologies. That makes this a very desirable marketplace, and could explain why JazzMutant are in no hurry to open source their code. It’s a safe bet that Stantum is still making a play for that enormous market, with everything from general consumer electronics to specialized gear for certain industries in the mix (and not just music). I don’t have any new information, but I expect when they’re able to make something public, you’ll know.

As for the Lemur touchscreen, though, it is now committed to computing history. The present is, primarily, the iPad, and the future, from Apple and others, offers multitouch as inexpensively and seamlessly integrated with computing hardware as the trackpad, keyboard, and mouse have been in the past. The knob, the piano keyboard, strings and frets, and other tactile interfaces live forever, but touchscreens can at least be powerful options for the digital realm between tactile musical control and composition, as a more direct way to reach out and touch interactive interfaces for sound.

I was stunned last week to learn of the death of Keith Barr, the founder of Alesis and a beloved, legendary engineer of music technology. He was 61. An analog engineer gone digital, he led the charge to make digital reverb and studio recording affordable, and even after his Alesis years continued to be one of music’s great engineering minds.

Our condolences to Barr’s surviving family and to the countless friends and colleagues in the music industry and beyond.

Our friend James Grahame, Retro Thing founder and himself an engineer (via Reflex Audio and others, shares his memory of Keith with us:

Keith Barr was a musician’s engineer – his chip designs were all about sounding good rather than padding out spec sheets. A case in point is the Spin Semiconductor FV-1 reverb IC he designed in 2006. It uses a cheap 32.768 kHz crystal that you’d usually see in a real time clock circuit., generating an ADC/ DAC bandwidth of only 15 kHz. He commented that you could run the device from a 48 kHz clock, but you’d simply chew through delay memory faster without dramatically increasing the quality of the audio.

He also gave back to the engineering community by writing ASIC Design in the Silicon Sandbox: A Complete Guide to Building Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits, in which he core dumps everything he’s learned about mixed signal chip design (including a business tips). The Spin FV-1 was designed at the same time he was writing his book, and it brings many of the ideas he writes about to life in stereo. In fact, the Spin Semi site is filled with stuff that’s usually kept inside R&D departments. The chip is extremely well documented with all kinds of useful design philosophies, code snippets and ideas hidden away in the knowledge base. I was stunned by his willingness to share his secrets, and by his almost childlike glee when someone did something unexpected with them.

A brief timeline:

• 1949: Keith Barr is born; spends teen years working with electronics and science
• 1973: Barr co-founds MXR Innovations, maker of a renowned line of pedals (hello, Van Halen)
• 1984: Barr founds Alesis Electronics in Hollywood. Barr focuses on engineering.
• 1985: The XT Reverb, created by Barr, is Alesis’ first product, and a landmark in making digital reverb accessible for the first time at US$799. It’s closely followed by the MIDIverb.
• 1987: Alesis makes a name for itself in sequencers (MMT8) and drum machines (HR-16), teaming up with Marcus Ryle (later founder of Line 6).
• 1987-1991: Barr conceptualizes a compact pro studio recorder, powered by digital tech. The result, released in 1991 as the ADAT, transforms the world of digital recording. (George Petersen for MIX points out this takes the price from Sony’s offering at $150,000 to the ADAT at $3995.)
• 2000: Barr is behind the Andromeda analog synth, arguably the instrument that helps launch a resurgent interest in new analog synths. He also uses his brilliant use of economy to produce cheap, fun instruments with gestural control, starting with the AirFX and 2001′s AirSynth.
• 2001: The victim of a changing business (and waning demand for ADAT), Alesis files for bankruptcy and is acquired by Jack O’Donnell, resulting in its reorganization as part of Numark. Barr leaves Alesis.
• 2002-2010: Barr goes on to innovate in integrated digital chip design, as founder and President of Spin Semiconductor. He continues to create ground-breaking designs, shares free DSP code, and literally writes the book on ASIC design for sound. Spin carries on this legacy of affordability with ASICs combining extensive processing features in single, affordable boards..

Barr remained focused on the future up to his death last week; while he cut his teeth on tube circuits, he had recently led the industry in exploiting ASICs for musical purposes. (ASIC stands for “Application-specific integrated circuit”; by building circuits specific to a purpose, they’re inexpensive, efficient circuitry tailored to a specific purpose, like audio processing.)

Spin’s own description of Barr sums up his vision:

Although an analog engineer at heart, he designs computer architectures, the most recent of which is the FV-1 processor (Spin’s first product). Keith sees ASIC design as the next step in electronics engineering, and designs all of his circuits from the bottom up, from the transistor level.

I hope that Barr’s designs will continue to have a future in production, and that we can bring more news soon.

Obituaries and more information:
Keith Barr – Alesis founder – In Memoriam: Pioneering inventor of Alesis ADAT, MIDIverb and MXR effects passes away [Sound on Sound]
RIP Keith Barr – Founder of Alesis and MXR [Matrixsynth, who also recalls the making of the Andromeda A6]

An extended obituary and history of Keith’s life by George Petersen:
In Memoriam: Keith Barr 1949-2010 [Mix]

Barr’s book:
ASIC Design in the Silicon Sandbox [McGrawHill] / Amazon link

Updated: Sean Costello adds, via comments:

I put up my own memorial post about Keith Barr on my blog:

http://valhalladsp.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/rip-keith-barr/

I shared Keith’s story about how he created the original MIDIverb, and how his intention was to create the world’s cheapest digital reverb, rather than competing with Lexicon et al. His later reverb designs were quite excellent, and he shared a great deal on the Spin Semiconductor website and via email.

Keith seemed like a really nice guy, and was clearly enthusiastic about his subject, even after several decades of being in the thick of it.

Thanks, Sean.