A new, free software release for Novation’s Launchpad could make your device a lot more usable – and it shows how useful OSC can be for hardware, even if that isn’t OSC hardware. (Now, imagine what OSC-native hardware can do.)

There are plenty of misunderstandings about OSC and the monome out there. Among them, there’s the notion that OSC won’t work without “extra software,” or that the only reason to use OSC messages with something like Novation’s Launchpad grid controller would be to emulate a monome.

Here’s the secret: even if you still don’t know what OpenSoundControl is, the idea is to make messages readable.

Novation released the MIDI message mappings for its Launchpad — that’s a good thing! (See previous post.) But because of the utilitarian and somewhat arbitrary way in which MIDI describes devices, MIDI messages just aren’t terribly readable. For instance, one button is called 50h (in hex), or 80 (in decimal). Where’s 80? Uh…. yeah, no one knows. And simple grid devices like the Launchpad and monome illustrate just how abstract MIDI is. The Launchpad has an 8×8 grid of buttons. You might expect them to be numbered from 0,0 to 7,7, or 1,1 to 8,8. But that’s not actually possible in MIDI.

Will Crossland to the rescue. He’s been working on an OSC wrapper for the Launchpad in Max/MSP (easily ported to other environments if you like). This makes the Launchpad more usable and more logical. It’s just one of what I think could be plenty of efforts to use arrays of buttons on music controllers more fluidly and flexibly. That, in turn, could take the DIY musical ingenuity shown by the monome community to the next level.

Oh, and Will even has an open MIDI networking tool, also built in Max – relevant to the earlier discussion of the day.

http://www.chippanfire.com/SoccoChico/Software

Will’s full description follows.

Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine.

You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant filter, decay, and some aliasing tricks for extra grit. The big news: the Arduino Piano Squealer is now under a GPL license.

Official Arduino Piano Squealer Synth Page has everything you need
Announcement of GPL v3
All at Mustalk@noisepages.com

Here’s what it sounds like:

SAP+BOM+Dodgey Eighties Ringing Reverb:
apbom.mp3

Eery piano:
ap-eery.mp3

SAP+Flanging Mini KP:
ardboy1.mp3

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

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

Oddly, while we live in a networked, Internet age, the client-server model rarely gets applied to music.

The “space bassoon” Eigenharp seems to have landed from another planet. Today, I’ve got good news: it’s bringing alien gifts with it. By next year, both the software and the high-performance protocol the instrument uses will be open source. Taken together with other advancements in the open source community and with protocols like OSC, that could mean we’re at the vanguard of a golden age for more open, more intelligent, more expressive digital instruments.

Genuinely new music controllers made available commercially don’t come along very often. So this week’s news of a strange but wonderful-looking instrument shaped like a bassoon with customizable key controls turned many heads. With high-resolution, high-frequency data and reliance on the computer for everything from sound generation to mapping the keys to different tunings, the computer connection matters. Eigenharp’s chairman, John Lambert, sets the record straight for CDM on the software, the way it talks to your computer and other gear, and how open the tools and protocol will be.

I’ll be talking more with John next week, but I want to bring you this news now. Part of blogging means that you don’t hold back – you share that first reaction and then learn more. I’m pleased to say I was dead wrong on the Eigenharp. What looked on the spec sheet like MIDI-only communication and proprietary software turns out to be just the opposite. Sometimes, being wrong is great. Here are all the details:

It’s actually paradoxical to talk about music “made” on the monome. The monome, the open controller, is after all, a grid of buttons. It has no sound of its own. But as such, perhaps its design as a blank canvas – without any indication of how a single button may function, without a screenprinted logo or name – that allows computer musicians to project upon it whatever they wish. The monome, more than any other object designed since the emergence of computer performance, is emblematic of what digital music can be. It’s an empty digital grid, like viewing the world of music software under a microscope.

It’s also, therefore, possible for the monome to disappear, leaving behind a spectrum of what people are doing with music on computers. That was what was most striking to me about the music of the monomeet on Saturday in Princeton, NJ: it covered a range of techniques, from glitchy granulation to breakbeat rhythms derived from turntables. Listen to what

In the lineup: tehn (aka Brian Crabtree), the instrument’s creator, playing on the Max/MSP patch mlr that is partly responsible for the monome’s set, through Daedelus, Brian’s friend who helped raise awareness of the strange box of buttons around the world. There are also fantastic sounds from mtn (makingthenoise), picture in the photos here, Edison, ro, %, and altitude sickness.

Here’s what the live sets sounded like. Bet you you can’t hear the monome.

Latest tracks by monomeet

More photos from the event: