You’re not, in fact, a lonely bedroom musician with no friends. You’ve got friends. You’ve got collaborators. You’ve got audio and visual artists who want to play with your laptop with sync piped between you, and yet wireless synchronization for laptop performance has often been an elusive ideal. Here, in spectacular fashion, you can see it all come together over WiFi with Ableton Live, a projection-mapped coffeemaker, and everything from percolation sounds to the keypad sound effect from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This just in from Barcelona – a new Max for Live plug-in is making laptops and coffee pots jam in harmony. A proper review is in order from CDM. (Well, once we find a few friends… by astounding coincidence, I’ll be surrounded by Ableton users – visual and audio – next week in Rome. I’ll make it happen.) But that’s no reason to deny you the pleasure of the video now. It’s the best part of waking up.

More: http://www.ooeevv.com/

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become overwhelmed by choice. Max is a blank slate, and a blank slate that can do everything can make it hard to start with anything.

It’s easy to overlook simple first steps. Max was originally built just to do simple math on messages, before it even had audio capabilities. So that means simple message processing is a great place to start. The Ableton Cookbook’s Anthony Arroyo introduces Max for Live in just that fashion, by starting you out building an arpeggiator. No fancy granular audio processing, no mind-bending processing of the event engine in Live – just some simple, old-fashioned arithmetic. You’ll learn MIDI in, MIDI out, monitoring what’s going on, basic math, and sliders. You can always go deeper after that.

This is the first of more videos to come, all promising to focus on simple devices; I’m curious to see where they go.

Not quite your speed? Here are two more intro tutorials – and one advanced tutorial – to get you going.

Ready to get a little advanced? It’s an older video, but still relevant to new versions of Live – don’t let the date stop you. Here, a serious Max for Live guru goes deep into spectral mixing. It’s not at all the simple, step-by-step approach I’ve just endorsed, but … hey, you’re still with me, and this is fun. Description:

In this video new addition to the Dubspot team Dave Linnenbank, creator of Puremagnetik’s Max Fuel collection of patches for Ableton and Cycling 74′s Max For Live walks us through his Spectral Mixer patch. It allows you to adjust the volume of the loud, medium and quiet parts of a sound and create some very interesting sounds.

Blog post and downloads: Max for Live Tutorial :: ‘Spectral Mixer’ [Dubspot Blog]

Could a piece of software make you think differently about sound? Could it reflect ideas, the culture of listening?

The developers of the SUFI series of plug-ins seem to think so. In place of screencasts showing which knob to turn which way, they head with a video crew to Morocco. The “instruction” might be about the value of reflection or call to prayer, about living as much as how to use a tool. You can see the first two examples: a meditation on the idea of daily interruptions in the soundscape coming from God, and a collection of electronic drones set to a beautifully-shot backdrop. The interfaces are rendered in graphics and (for the vast majority of us) a foreign language, and instead of reverting to the conventions of plug-in design, they assimilate ideas from another culture about tonality and function.

The plug-ins will be released for Max for Live on the 8th of May, and VST plug-ins later on. (Some version of the Max for Live plug-ins are available now – links at bottom.) The collection includes:

• DEVOTION, lowering your volume five times a day at the time of call to prayer
• A drone machine (in the second video, sounding quite nice)
• Four soft synths tuned to Arabic maqam scales. (They describe these as “North African maqams,” but I believe the tuning should be consistent with the use of maqam elsewhere around the Mediterranean and Arabic world.
• One drum machine amidst the synths, Palmas, with a hand-clapping UI (see screenshot).

You have a week to practice learning to read neo-Tifinaght Amazigh script.

Updated: There are in fact no references in the videos here to Sufism, but the creators respond to questions about why they selected this name on their FAQ. As with the videos above, collaborations and friendship inspired their thinking. They write:

The title is an homage to several Moroccan Sufi musicians we’ve worked with over the years who influenced our thinking about musicianship & sound itself, as well as a way of foregrounding the complex but largely unremarked relationship between faith and technology. We’re fascinated with how software and digital environments encode cultural values and beliefs by conditioning choices and framing possibilities. For example, If Apple is a secular religion, selling contemporary magic, then should that change the way we feel about – and engage with – its operating system? The spirit of Sufi aphorisms, we hope, is manifest in these plug-ins. At a literal level, many of the roll-over infotexts come from Sufi verse.

Apart from being an interesting “cross-cultural” exercise, though, these plug-ins can serve as a reminder of two things. First, design choices are constrained only by your imagination. Aside from any perceived cultural values, you can really make software do, theoretically, anything – and make any sound. Convention can be a useful tool, but it can also become a prison. Second, the creators consider VST compatibility as a way to reach users in the Middle East and Africa. Whether this particular effort is successful or not, those are massive and growing audiences. (To anyone reading there, by the way, hello from way up at this end of the Northern Hemisphere!) Of course, these plug-ins will be just as foreign to nearly all of that audience as it is to, say, producers in Melbourne or London, but as we watch the videos from Morocco, it’s worth considering just how small our Internet-connected planet is – and how wonderfully-vast the spaces between us, and the possibility contained there, remains.

Software can serve for a medium for collaboration, as in this case, which ties together a variety of backgrounds from traditional producer to Amazigh musician. The Amazigh people, tying together modern Arabic culture and language with Phoenician roots (much like my own Lebanese ancestry), represent a rich practice of music. Just as the remote, historical world of J.S. Bach might direct a modern software plug-in, these can, too – and in living fashion.

The work is led by Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture), with programmer Bill Bowen, designer Rosten Woo, Amazigh musician Hassan Wargui , and videographers Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcón Durán. The creators report that “a physical Sufi Plug Ins Forever Box is expected for late 2012, and Clayton is currently preparing an installation version of the Sufi Plug Ins.”

Mark your calendar for next Tuesday, or join the mailing list at the site. More information:

http://www.beyond-digital.org/sufiplugins/

Thanks, Jesse Engel!

As seen on maxforlive.com (thanks, David):

Devotion: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1140/devotion
Drone: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1139/drone
Palmas: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1138/palmas
Hijaz: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1137/hijaz
Bayati: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1136/bayati
Saba: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1134/saba
Khomasi: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1133/khomasi

If you’re looking to build your own instruments and effects and sequencers and play with patching, you really don’t want this software. No, seriously – while a fascinating, fun tech demo, something like the desktop Pd or Max is probably what you want. (As we saw earlier this week, Pd-extended just got much easier to use, and it’s free.) This makes sound, but it’s also buggy and in progress and likely more of interest to coders.

Okay, now having scared off some people, let’s talk nerd-to-nerd for a second. Patchosaur, an open-source, GitHub-hosted project by BADAMSON, is nonetheless seriously cool, demonstrating not only what’s possible in a browser but what Webby technologies can do for creative music-making. Powered by network-centric node.js, it does do a lot of things Pd and Max do. And it demonstrates why some of us in the Pd community are wondering if Web-style front-ends could be the future of user interfaces.

If none of that previous paragraph made any sense to you, let’s put it another way:

The stuff in your browser will continue to make all the software you use better. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

You might be running software in a browser. You might not. You might get to the point where you don’t really care. But as what makes a computer a computer still remains more or less the same, your computer can continue to improve, free. And that’s pretty great.

If that sounds interesting, music nerdsters, then check out the guts of Patchosaur:
http://patchosaur.org/

Thanks to Brendan Adamson for sending in this project. I just hope I’ve inadvertently derailed – slash – inspired someone’s end-of-the-semester coding project. Let us know.

Pure Data is a wonder: a free and open source environment for creating your own musical and multimedia creations with graphical programming, from Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max. You can produce everything from interactive sequencers and drum machines to synths to video performance tools by connecting patch cables visually, and you can run on virtually any platform, from BeagleBoards and Rasberry Pi to Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop. Via libpd, you can target other development languages and environments, embed engines in games, or work with Android and iOS.

It’s so important, in fact, that CDM invites Hans-Christoph Steiner, one of the key developers of Pd-extended, to give us a tour of what’s new. (Note: because Pd-extended includes various additional objects or “externals” that Pd Vanilla lacks, you should be careful when building patches for libpd. What I like to do is use Pd-extended as my editing environment, then double-check patches by opening them in Vanilla to make sure I haven’t accidentally used an object that’s not part of the bare-bones version. I can then substitute an object, copy an abstraction, or if necessary build that external.) -Ed.

The Pd-extended 0.43 release has been brewing an extra long time, about 18 months now, mostly because there are lots of big improvements. We wanted to make sure we got it right, so your patches all work, but the improvements all shine, so its taken a while. It’s now solidly beta, so we’re looking for testers. Download a beta build to try here:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended/releases/0.43.1

First off, the pd-gui side of Pd has been rewritten from scratch. The focus for most of the recent work has been on the editing experience, making your patching experience as productive and flexible as possible. To give some background, Pd has always been made up of two programs: pd is the core engine and pd-gui is the GUI. Since basically all computers now come with multiple CPU cores, this means that pd-gui will usually run on a separate CPU core than pd, so they don’t step on each other’s toes. pd can entirely take over its own core. If you want to make your patch use more CPU cores, then check out the [pd~] object introduced in the last release, but fine-tuned in this one.

There are so many ideas for making a better editing experience in Pd; this release makes big strides to address the editing experience. There are new features like Magic Glass, Autotips, Autopatch and Perf Mode, all available on the Edit menu.

• Magic Glass lets you magically see the messages as they pass through the cords. Just turn it on and hover above a cord, and you’ll see the messages as they go by. You can even look at signal/audio cords.
• Autotips gives you tips about what an object does, what its inlet expects, and what comes out of the outlets.
• Autopatch mode automatically connects objects as you create them.
• Perf Mode, is a mode for performance that makes it harder to accidentally close windows that are part of your performance.

A whole new Pd Window

The Pd Window is also majorly overhauled. First of all, it’s fast. Much much faster than the old one. You can now print thousands of messages per second to the Pd Window and still edit your patch. No more will an accidental dump of info cause the GUI to freeze up (well, okay, maybe if you send 10,000 messages/second, but that is way too many). There are also five levels of printing messages to the Pd Window: fatal, error, normal, debug, all. If you are only interested in fatal errors, switch the Pd Window to 0 – fatal, and you’ll only see the worst problems. You want to see every single message to debug? Switch to 4 – all, and you’ll drink from the firehose.

There is also the new log library, which lets you easily send messages for those different levels. And all messages logged with the objects from the log library are clickable: when you Ctrl-Click or Cmd-click (Mac OS X) on the line in the Pd Window, it’ll pop up the patch where the message came from, and highlight the specific object that printed it. That even works for many messages from other objects, as well.

The Pd Window also includes very basic level meters for monitoring the input and output levels. And for those who want to play with the GUI in realtime, you can type Tcl code in the Tcl entry field, and directly modify and probe the running GUI.

Customize the GUI with Plugins

One thing that you can do now is customize the GUI using GUI plugins. You can change all sorts of colors, some fonts, and many behaviors. Want to create a new object when you triple-click? Try the tripleclick example plugin Want to make the patch cords disappear when you leave Edit Mode? Check out the “only show cords in edit mode” example. Those are the simple ones. There is also Tab Completion, a search engine for the docs, a category browser for the right-click menu, a buttonbar for creating objects, and more.

You can find many GUI plugins in the new section of the downloads page as well as documentation for making your own. (What kind of GUI plugin will you write?)

Write Pd objects in more languages

Traditionally, Pd objects are written in Pd (abstractions), C and some in C++. This new release includes two “loaders”, Lua and Tcl, which allow you to write regular Pd objects in either Lua or Tcl. Pd is not the best for processing strings, so if you need to do that, you can now easily use Lua or Tcl, both very easy scripting languages for working with strings. Lua is often used for OpenGL work, so you can also run Lua objects to work in conjunction with Gem. Also, the Tcl loader lets you write GUI objects in pure Tcl, no C needed.

Multi-processing, Pd-style!

The [pd~] object now works out of box. In case you missed the introduction of the [pd~] object in the last release, we’ll introduce you now. [pd~] is Pd itself incapsulated into an object. You can run any patch inside that instance of Pd, the difference is that the Pd in the [pd~] object runs in a totally separate process. So if your computer has multiple CPU cores, which basically all computers do these days, then the Pd process inside the [pd~] object will run on a separate core. This means you can have a heavy Pd patch spread across multiple cores or CPUs. Or for people who work with video and audio together, you can have one instance for video running at a normal priority, then another instance for audio running at a high priority to make sure there aren’t clicks in the audio caused by heavy video processing.

Autotips, generated from help patches

This release also provides a new “autotips” feature to provide instant information about objects and their inlets and outlets. It is one of the first new developments to showcase all of the meta data that is now included in all of the help patches. (Check out the [pd META] subpatches.) When you hover above an inlet or the object itself in Edit Mode, you’ll see a short text description pop up on the lower left corner. But, of course, using a GUI plugin, you could customize how they are displayed to make it how you want to see it. If you want to add autotips to your object, then just add a [pd META] subpatch to your objects’ help patches, and fill out the description, etc. Voila! They’ll have instant information.

What’s next?

The core pd process still handles a lot of the GUI stuff, but we are working on splitting that out for the 0.44 release. That is a big chunk of work, but it will also bring big gains. In particular, it means that it will be possible for people to write their own GUIs for Pd, covering not just the display of the patch, but also the editing, and everything else. You like OpenFrameworks, Python, iOS, JUCE, Qt, etc.? Write your own pd-gui using the toolkit of your choice. That’s the idea at least. That will take a solid chunk of work, so we are looking for people to join that effort.

Try it yourself:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended/releases/0.43.1
http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended

Where to learn Pd:

Resources to start learning

-Hans-Christoph Steiner for CDM

“Timelapse” usually refers to the process of sampling small bits of video or film and piecing them together to form a sped-up version of reality. (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Any recording involves sampling small bits of time. Timelapse simply plays back those samples at a rate faster than reality, so that instead of playing back film frames recorded at 30 frames per second at a playback speed of 30 frames per second, you play back film recorded at one frame every ten minutes at 30 frames per second, for example.)

What if you made a timelapse of sound, and not simply image? Reader Andrew Spitz did that, building a sound-sampling app in visual development tool Max/MSP. He’s made the resulting tool available to anyone using Mac or Windows, for free, so you can try it yourself. In the demo video, what you get is a stuttering, rhythmic montage of found sound. But change the material or setting, and perhaps you can get very different results.

I love the word he’s using here: “phonography.”

phonoLapse is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that lets you create audio time-lapses. For the 2010 Enterferenze New Art Festival I put together a little Time Lapse Phonography piece that followed me over the course of 24 hours (check the video below). I have been receiving emails from people wanting to create their own, and decided to work on a standalone version so you too can create some time-lapse phonography .

Grab it yourself:
phonoLapse {+ software} [sound+design]

By the way, Andrew is responsible for one of my other favorite recent projects:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

When we last caught up with the touch-less, gestural music-making of composer Chris Vik, the Australian musician was sharing his own Kinectar software and playing both dubstep and ambient scores for modern dance. Now, Vik is back playing a very substantial physical instrument: Melbourne’s four story-tall, MIDI-retrofitted Town Hall Organ. Here, the Max-powered software takes on some very big sound from some very big pipes.

He writes:

I’ve created my own software Kinectar, which allows the use of the Kinect to control MIDI devices, ie. playing notes through simple gestures and motion. The Melbourne Town Hall Organ got a referb in the late 90s adding the ability of MIDI messages to active the notes… this happened.

Controlling a 4-story pipe organ with the Kinect

Previously: From Beautiful Ambient Modern Dance to Dubstep, Gestures to Music in Kinect (Download the Tool)

What if your musical instrument were gelatinous? Edible?

“Noisy Jelly” is the latest project to imagine that scenario. Thanks to the capacitive quality of gelatin (known to us Americans by the brand name JELL-O and to some simply as “jelly”), you can mix up a set of colored instruments that jiggle when you touch them. Powered by the open hardware platform Arduino to read sensors and Max/MSP to produce sound, it’s the work of a couple of Paris-based students, Raphaël and Marianne Cauvard.

Check out the terrific video featuring wide-eyed children, and specs below.

What makes this more delightful is the possibility that we’ll see orchestras of squishy, organic, edible instruments. NYC Resistor and our friend Ranjit Bhatnagar built their own instrument out of JELL-O (or fruit salad, depending on the iteration). The Gel-tone made a splash (erm, squish) as a more whimsical entry at the Guthman Musical Instrument competition, and was played and eaten at our own Handmade Lounge at Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hilariously, it debuted at (and was invented for) a JELL-O mold competition. See these couple of videos (Guthman top; Solid Sound bottom) below, and find more information on that instrument:

the resistor jeltone :: an edible toy piano [openMaterials]

How to make your own: The Resistor JelTone (I dearly hope this inspires more copy-cats. Let the gelatinous musical instrument revolution continue!)

More on the Noisy Jelly project:

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/MSP, there are absolut no sound editing in the video…
More picture at this Flickr set
And download the project PDF
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L’Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)

If you do make your own project, we’d love to see it. Perhaps a gel-orchestra is next.

Several people showed this to me; notably at DE:BUG (Deutsch)
http://de-bug.de/musiktechnik/archives/5820.html

What you’re watching in the video above doesn’t involve cameras or motion sensors. It’s the kind of brain-to-machine, body-to-interaction interface most of us associate with science fiction. And while the technology has made the occasional appearance in unusual, niche commercial applications, it’s poised now to blow wide open for music – open as in free and open source.

Erasing the boundary between contracting a muscle in the bio-physical realm and producing electronic sound in the virtual realm is what Xth Sense is all about. Capturing biological data is all the rage these days, seen primarily in commercial form in products for fitness, but a growing trend in how we might make our computers accessories for our bodies as well as our minds. (Or is that the other way around?) This goes one step further: the biological becomes the interface.

Artist and teacher Marco Donnarumma took first prize with this project in the prestigious Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech in the US. Born in Italy and based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Marco explains to us how the project works and why he took it up. It should whet your appetite as we await an open release for other musicians and tinkerers to try next month. (By the way, if you’re in the New York City area, Marco will be traveling to the US – a perfect chance to collaborate, meet, or set up a performance or workshop; shout if you’re interested.)

Hypo Chrysos live at Trendelenburg AV Festival, Gijon, Spain, December 2011.

CDM: Tell us a bit about yourself. You’re working across disciplines, so how do you describe what you do?

Marco: People would call me a media and sound artist. I would say what I love is performing, but at the same time, I’m really curious about things. So, most of the time I end up coding my software, developing devices and now even designing wearable tech. Since some years now I work only with free and open source tools and this is naturally reflected in what I do and how I do it. (Or at least I hope so!)

I just got back from Atlanta, US, where the Xth Sense (XS) was awarded the first prize in the Margaret Guthman New Musical Instrument, as what they named the “world’s most innovative new musical instrument.” [See announcement from Georgia Tech.]

It’s an encouraging achievement and I’m still buzzing, specially because the other 20 finalists all presented great ideas. Overall, it has been an inspiring event, and I warmly recommend musicians and inventors to participate next year. My final performance:

Make sure to use a proper soundsystem [when watching the videos]; most of the sound spectrum lives between 20-60Hz.

Music for Flesh II live at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Atlanta, USA, February 2012. Photo courtesy the artist.

You’re clenching your muscles, and something is happening – can you tell us how this XS system works?

Marco: My definition of it goes like “a biophysical framework for musical performance and responsive milieux.” In other words, it is a technology that extends some intrinsic sonic capabilities of the human body through a computer system that senses the physical energy released by muscle tissues.

I started developing it in September 2011 at the SLE, the Sound Lab at the Edinburgh University, and got it ready to go in March 2011. It has evolved a lot in many ways ever since.

The Xth Sense wearable biosensors by Chris Scott.

The XS is composed of custom biophysical sensors and a custom software.

At the onset of a muscle contraction, energy is released in the form of acoustic sound. This is to say, similarly to the chord of a violin, each muscle tissue vibrates at specific frequencies and produces a sound (called Mechanomyographic signal, or MMG). It is not audible to human ear, but it is indeed a soundwave that resonates from the body.

The MMG data is quite different from locative data you can gather with accelerometers and the like; whereas the latter reports the consequence of a movement, the former directly represents the energy impulse that causes that movement. If you add to this a high sampling rate (up to 192.000Hz if your sound card supports it) and very low latency (measured at 2.3ms) you can see why the responsiveness of the XS can be highly expressive.

The XS sensors capture the low-frequency acoustic vibrations produced by a performer’s body and send them to the computer as an audio input. The XS software analyzes the MMG in order to extract the characteristics of the movements, such as dynamics of a single gesture, maximum amplitude of a series of gestures in time, etc.

These are fed to some algorithms that produce the control data (12 discrete and continuous variables for each sensor) to drive the sound processing of the original MMG.

Eventually, the system plays back both the raw muscle sounds (slightly transposed to become better audible, say about 50/60Hz) and the processed muscle sounds.

I like to term this model of performance biophysical music, in contrast with biomusic, which is based on the electrical impulses of muscles and brainwaves.

By differently contracting muscles (which has a different meaning than simply “moving”) one can create and sculpt musical material in real-time. One can design a specific gesture that produces a specific sonic result, what I call a sound-gesture. These can be composed in a score, or improvised, or also improvised on a more or less fixed score.

The XS software has also a sensing sequencing time-line: with a little machine learning (just implemented few days ago) the system understands when you’re still or moving, when you’re being fast or slow, and can use this data to change global parameters, functions or to play with the timing of events. For example, the computer can track your behaviour in time and wait for you to stop whatever you’re doing before switching to a different set of funcions.

The XS sensors are wearable devices, so the computer can be forgotten in a corner of the stage; the performer has complete freedom on stage, and the audience is not exposed to the technology, but rather to the expressivity of the performance. What I like most about the XS is that is a flexible and multi-modal instrument. One can use it to:

• capture and playback acoustic sounds of the body,
• control audio and video software on the computer, or
• capture body sounds and control them through the computer simultaneously.

This opens up an interesting perspective on the applications of the XS to musical performance, dance, theatre and interaction design. The XS can also be used only as a gestural controller, although I never use it exclusively this way. We have thousands of controllers out there.

Besides, I wanted the XS to be accessible, usable, hackable and redistributable. Unfortunately, the commercialized product dealing with biosignals are mostly not cheap and — most importantly — closed to the community. See the Emotiv products (US$299 Neuro Headset, not for developers), or the BioFlex (US$392.73). One could argue that the technology is complex, and that’s why those devices are expensive and closed. This could make sense, but who says we can’t produce new technologies that openly offer similar or new capabilities at a much lower cost?

The formal recognition of the XS as an innovative musical instrument and the growing effort of the community in producing DIY EEG, ECG and Biohacking devices are a clear statement in this sense. I find this movement encouraging and possibly indispensable nowadays, as the information technology industry is increasingly deploying biometric data for adverts and security systems. For the geeky ones there are some examples in a recent paper of mine for the 2012 CHI workshop on Liveness.

For those reasons, the XS hardware design has been implemented in the simplest form I could think of; the parts needed to build an XS sensor cost about £5 altogether and the schematics looks purposely dumb. The sensors can be worn on any parts of the body. I worked with dancers who wore them on the neck and legs, a colleague stuck one to his throat to capture the resonances of his voice, I use them on the arms or to capture the pumping of the blood flow and the heart rate.

The XS software is free, based in Pd, aka Pure Data, and comes with a proper, user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) and its own library, which includes over one hundred objects with help files. It is developed on Linux, and it’s Mac OS X compatible; I’m not developing for Windows, but some people got it working there too. A big thumb up goes to our wonderful Pd Community; if I had not been reading and learning through the Pd mailing list for the past 5 years I would have never been able to code this stuff.

The Xth Sense software Graphical User Interface. Built in Pd.

The public release of the project will be in April. The source code, schematics, tutorials, will be freely available online, and there will be DIY kits for the lazier ones. I’m already collecting orders for the first batch of DIY kits, so if anybody is interested please, get in touch:
http://marcodonnarumma.com/contact

I do hope to see the system hacked and extended, especially because the sensors were initially built with the support of the folks at the Dorkbot ALBA/Edinburgh Hacklab. I’m also grateful to the community around me, friends, musicians, artists devs and researchers for contributing to the success of the project by giving feedback, inspiring and sharing (you know who you are!).

Thanks, Marco! We’ll be watching!

More on the Work

http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/xth-sense/
http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/music-for-flesh-ii/
http://res.marcodonnarumma.com/blog/

And the Edinburgh hack lab:
http://edinburghhacklab.com/

Biological Interfaces for Music

There isn’t space here to recount the various efforts to do this; Marco’s design to me is notable mainly in its simplicity and – hopefully, as we’ll see next month – accessibility to other users. I’ve seen a number of brain interfaces just in the past year, but perhaps someone with more experience on the topic would like to share; that could be a topic for another post.

Entirely unrelated to music, but here’s the oddest demo video I’ve seen of human-computer interfacing, which I happened to see today. (Well, unrelated to music until you come up with something this crazy. Go! I want to see your band playing with interactive animal ears.)

Scientific American’s blog tackles the question this week (bonus 80s sci-fi movie reference):
Brain-Machine Interfaces in Fact and Fiction

I’ve used up my Lawnmower Man reference quota for the month, so tune in in April.

Apple yesterday described their iPad as “this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.” So – how about making mobile devices into what you want it to be?

With the help of author Peter Brinkmann and publisher O’Reilly, we’d like to give you a taste of Peter’s new book, Making Musical Apps: Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS. Imagining that a lot of you are especially curious about iOS, we’ll include the chapter on how to get started with development. It really gives you a sense of how easy this can be; the challenge is, as it should be, coming up with musical ideas. And Apple did say that they thought that technology was at its best when it was “invisible,” not when it was “inaudible.” So let’s make it make some noise.

(Android developers, libpd actually got its start on Android and runs quite well even on very primitive Android handsets, so consider this a sample; the full book – and the libpd site – include loads of examples on the Android side, too. In fact, because libpd works basically identically on the two platforms, it’s a great choice for making cross-platform development easier.)

In this excerpt, Peter covers:

• How to set up your development environment
• Starting a project with Xcode, and including Pd
• How to make a Pd patch run in your app
• Making the Pd patch and your UI connect with each other (here, from the app’s UI to Pd; the book covers both directions)

In fact, in just a few pages, you’ll have a working guitar tuner for iOS. Have a look:

Read it on CDM’s Scribd page:

Making Musical Apps (Excerpt: How to Build a Music App for iOS)

Direct PDF download link, hosted by CDM (please don’t link to this file directly):
Making Musical Apps (Excerpt) [PDF]

I’ve read an advance copy of the whole book, and my review is simple: if you’re curious about this stuff, get this book. Peter’s style is friendly and precise; no technical detail is left out, and yet those details aren’t overwhelming. The book can be accessible to those new to development, which is essential for a title that’s likely to be read by people who are used to Pd, but dipping their toes into Java and Objective-C for the first time in order to get their patches running on a device.

Ready for the full book?

Get a printed copy on Amazon:

Or read the Kindle edition:

For multi-platform epub, mobi, and PDF formats, head straight to the O’Reilly page:
Making Musical Apps [shop.oreilly.com]

http://libpd.cc/read-the-book/