The Keepon Robot — a bopping yellow bot — was easily the technological darling of 2007. It sent even the most skeptical, hardened technomage into spurts of giggles. So, we’re giving you more: take note, because you, too, could learn to dance to the electrical sounds in the club if this robot can. (Thanks, Mandy, for all the links!)

And yes, Carnegie Mellon is advertising how cool they are in these videos. In these days of geek chic — and with involvement on various projects just beginning with the Keepon — I can’t really argue. (I wasn’t paid to say that, really. They didn’t give me an honorary doctorate, or, uh, a week of free tuition or something.)

There’s a side narrative with recent grad Dr. Daniel Wilson on the battle of man vs. machine, which is reasonably amusing. Here’s the Keepon bit:

You know I’m often (well, sometimes, anyway) a reasonable, rational, measured person. And you can probably guess that, as a fan of design and elegance, I really appreciate the iPhone’s elegant design, the fact that it pays attention to user experience. I think it’s a major innovation, one that will have far-reaching effects. Yet, something about walking out the door of my apartment building and seeing a hundred people waiting in line just because there’s an AT&T Wireless store on the block — one of many here in Manhattan — is setting me off.

I miss computers. Remember computers? Remember the Apple II, which came pre-installed with BASIC so you could start programming it out of the box (in stark contrast to the closed nature of iPhone)? Remember the Newton, which you could turn into a drum machine if you wanted? Remember how Steve Jobs’ first product, with Steve Wozniak, was a device that actually ripped off AT&T? That sounds like fun. It’s just sort of hard to see the iPhone being the landmark 50 years from now, even if Steve Jobs told Apple employees they’ll tell their grandchildren about the iPhone launch. (I have a feeling their grandchildren will respond, you used THAT?)

I like devices that can make music, not just listen to it.

When you hear the repeated stories about how traditional recording studios are dead, I suspect your first thought is not, “Finally! The dream of in-flight recording has its day!” or “Ah-hah! Now all the bands will move into inflatable plastic bubbles as a marketing stunt!” Yet, such things have come to pass. One involves a band you may care about and actually yields some practical tips. The other involves a band I’m almost sure you don’t care about and is a silly stunt.

Respectively:

Jamiroquai played a gig at 35,000 feet on its way to Greece for a select group of fans. I know this, because Focusrite sent out a press release. We get these kind of press releases all the time: someone used something or other (usually something expensive) somewhere in a way that’s not all that interesting. This case was different. Sure, recording a live gig in flight is a gimmick. But as a recording challenge, that means they:

1. Ran entirely on battery power.
2. Set up the whole recording rig in a standard airline row. (Coach, no less!)
3. Weathered some turbulence.
4. Had to fight a sudden outbreak of poisonous snakes. (Okay, made that one up.)

… to go entirely off-topic for a moment. This has nothing to do with creating, or digital, though it is music. And it’s important: by parodying herself and the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps”, it seems as though Alanis Morisette has readjusted the balance of the musical space-time continuum itself. The universe may again be in harmony. What greater power can musical comedy have? Enjoy.

Thank you to my mate Mike of GarageSpin. Somehow, I believe Alanis may have saved the music industry forever. And she really was the best cast member on You Can’t Do That On Television.

FreelancingThingsDone (FTD): Where Your Next Action May Be Your Last.

Here in the US, it’s almost tax time for anyone who lacks an accountant and procrastinates. That’s all the more reason to consider tools for keeping your life together, from mundane stuff that has to get done to musical and creative materials that keep you inspired and artistically productive. It’s a huge volume of information.

My recent solution has been to un-tether myself as much as possible from traditional, platform-specific, offline applications. I’m not one of those people who believes music software will someday all be online, Web 2.0-style. Music DSP and complex music creation software loves to be tied to a platform, running locally, performing advanced sonic marvels on your local CPU; end of story. But that’s all the more reason to have less to deal with for everything else. With licenses for Ableton Live, Reaktor, Max/MSP, and various plug-ins to worry about, live musical sets to backup and organize, visual programming code and patches and video files and everything else, and four machines in the house, three of which regularly go out for gigs with me in alternation — well, you get the idea.

I plan to do a full writeup on this soon, but here’s a quick peak, because I’d like to get some of your feedback before I do a full feature. My organizational toolkit right now is:

1. Gmail for email, with the Greasemonkey Gmail scripts to speed things up.
2. Google Reader for RSS reading, which I’ve found bar-none is the fastest way to get through RSS feeds thanks to its latest update.
3. Google Docs and Spreadsheets for mobile document reading and sharing, though I do still rely on NeoOffice for Mac and Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows for everything else. And, of course, a local text editor (TextMate for Mac and SCiTE for Windows) is still essential.
4. del.icio.us for bookmarks, plus the Firefox extension, though I am looking for a better tool for online research — when I actually want to clip and take some notes.
5. Basecamp for organizational stuff, which is now running CDM, basically — definitely a must to have separate “groupware.”
6. Flickr for photos.
7. New — TiddlyWiki for taking notes.

We’ve talked a lot on CDM about the future of instrument design. Here’s one for you. It’s entirely wireless. It’s touchless, but it uses sophisticated gesture tracking to translate motions into sound. Incredibly, it’s able to track the exact position of your body, wherever you are. It requires no electricity. No matter your skill level or experience, or even if you have any musical background whatsoever, you always sound exactly like your favorite guitarists. It only produces music you love; it doesn’t function with music you don’t.

Sophisticated new instrument from researchers at an academic institution? Straight out of the skunkworks at a major Asian electronics company? Nope. Just some people dressed up in embarrassing outfits waggling their fingers, actually.

Gnarly. Air Guitar Nation gets its wide US release in March 2007. Via Axehole.

(PS, I think you can cancel that whole New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference. This looks like a lot less work.)

Music tech gear rarely surfaces in the mainstream. I never saw a Roland Juno and Cubase on Seinfeld. The Hercules DJ Controller did make it onto a recent episode of “24″, however, says CDM reader DJ Klachik:

I was just watching the 5th season of “24″ on DVD, and in chapter 21, I saw this Hercules! It it’s the “DJ Control MP3″ version, so it has no audio exits, so agent O’Brien is using it as a controller (God knows why). I was a long time Hercules DJ Console user myself (I switched to BCD2000 few months ago), so it was pretty weird to see it … it was the episode where Chloe O’Brien decided to leave CTU and become a Gabba DJ. Actually, she tried to play a recording (since you haven’t seen this one, I won’t tell you what kind) from an external mp3 device. But all she was doing, is to change the volume with one of the faders.

Cool I suppose, but we’ll know we’ve really made it when Caprica Six starts spinning experimental electronics on a Monome hooked up to Max/MSP or Bravo begins production on a new reality show called Top 8-bit Musician.

DJ Klachick is an Israeli DJ spinning “urban folk to drunk ‘n’ bass.” I enjoy the current track he’s playing on his MySpace page: “My brother … my little brother … he picks the pockets of hipsters on the L train.”

Man cannot live by synthesizers alone. No, really; even I’m not that dedicated. I keep something to nosh on while I work; don’t you?

So, while this time last year I was celebrating the keytar (thanks for the reminder, matrixsynth), here we’ll go off-topic and say that good food and time with family and friends goes perfectly with good music and good technology. I’m sure you’ll agree even if you’re not the part of our readership here in America.

On that note, I’m pleased to be able to share Egg and Soldier, a project I’ve been working on with my partner Jennifer. The site is a bit like create digital food, but with Jennifer’s own take. This is the stuffing on Jennifer’s Thanksgiving table, and it should be just perfect for holing up for the winter. (We have a few readers here from Berlin who I’m sure will appreciate that, even as the half of Team CDM that’s in Australia hits summer!) The vision, writing, and much of the photography is all Jennifer’s; I’m just adding some design and photo contributions and doing lots of eating and drinking.

The Omnivore’s Stuffing
Egg and Soldier

Ah, you say, but there’s really not a CDM angle on this, is there? To that, I’ll have to turn to Google for the segue … let’s see, “stuffing” plus “synthesizer” equals Chris Randall on Analog Industries talking about stuffing a DIY synth, which in turn leads to an archive page full of goodies, like Variophone pictured below. (Thanks, Google! We truly live in an age of marvels.)

Stuffing? DIY synths? Variophones? Actual stuffing? Now that’s what I call delicious. And so say all of us. Happy start to the holiday season.

Announcement: new server. And lastly, an announcement: my Thanksgiving Day present to the website is to move it to a hosting service that can actually handle the growing traffic we get. (Thanks, readers! Seriously — it’s the one problem I love to have.) After some bumps through Thursday, we now appear to be running just fine. If you find otherwise, tell us on the feedback forum. And unlike our previous hosts, both of which suspended our account for overuse, Media Temple (mt) will actually grow with us instead of just cap site traffic. Welcome to the new server; more improvements are on the way.

The good folks at The Smoking Gun are infamous for breaking confidentiality rules and leaking the surreal world of major artist tour rider documents to the world. Hilarity ensues, such as when Christina Aguilera demands “Soy cheese and Oreos. Flintstones chewables and votive candles. Nesquick and dried cranberries.” and rival Britney Spears chows on Doritos and International Foods coffees (hopefully not at the same time). The world laughed. The world vomited.

Iggy Pop is different, taking each legal item as an opportunity to add jokes — all while subtly threatening all on the tour who would deny them a properly-working gig. Smart. The whole thing is worth a read, but this being CDM, we’ll skip straight to the gear stuff.

First, I proudly present CDM’s slogan / t-shirt moniker of the week:

1 x KORG 2000 DIGITAL RACK TUNER. Digital in the sense that it works via an electronically generated number system, not digital because it only works if someone holds it together with their fingers.

And then it goes on …

3 x MARSHALL VBA BASS AMPLIFIERS Make sure they’re good ones or we’ll all end up as wormlike web-based life forms in the bass player’s online literary diahorrea. Honestly. He’s like a sort of internet Pepys or Boswell, except without the gout and the syphilis. For all I know.

And on …

We need: one(1) monitor man who speaks good English and is not afraid of death.
… in Galicia in Northern Spain, they appear to think - if they just ignore riders like this, then supply a fat, beared hippy with a digital monitor desk (doh!) who doesn’t know shit about eq-ing, and monitor wedges that would be better suited to wedging doors open, and a load of stage managers and PA geezers and promoters reps who shout a lot - that this is the same as actually providing what a band needs in order to do a gig to the best of their ability. And that if they deny that their gear is no good, it will suddenly, mysteriously, become good. I’d just like to say that the next time the Stooges get booked for their festival, I’m going to turn up with some pickled eggs, a small blue vibrator with a jelly dolphin balanced on the shaft, a set of dog-eared encyclopedias with the volumes E-G missing, and a screwdriver that’s been accidentally dropped in a toilet.

… and on and on, and I expect you’ll be reading this thing all day and laughing and not getting any work done.

Iggy Pop’s concert rider funniest in rock history? [The Smoking Gun; thanks, Jaymis!]

Feel free to add your favorite bits in comments.