If you want new ideas about design and interaction, ask a musician. Before the Wii remote, the iPhone, Microsoft’s Surface, and Minority Report, musicians were trying oddball ideas for music performance. That hasn’t slowed down, either, from the futuristic and space-y to down-and-dirty acoustic techniques. We’ve got quite a gamut coming up for our madcap, sound and noise-packed hour of competition happening this Saturday at NASA’s Ames Research center during Yuri’s Night, and we’d love to share them with everyone online.

For starters, here’s the rundown of the projects with links to project sites and artists, and all the judges:

Futuristic Music Design Challenge: Meet the Competitors, Judges

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The projects: the Bubblegum Sequencer (previously on CDM), The Box custom hardware with colored lights + Reaktor ensemble, the surface-temperature tangible interface table Weather Report (previously on CDM), the strange polygonal Kromatron wireless instrumental interface, the Thimbletron gloves-as-samplers with lab coated performers project (previously on CDM), the bicycle wheel and analog tape Looping Pedal (previously on CDM), the computer-powered musical saw WaveSaw, the 28-string just-intoned microtonal casmolyra, the turntablist custom software ammoBox and the GrooveStep DS pattern maker (previously on CDM).

I’m also pleased to announce…

The judges:

• Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine (in my opinion, anyway) and creator of the MPC60 for Akai, plus recent creations — and he plays the mandolin
• Liz Enthusiasm, lead singer of Freezepop (check out their albums or just play a Harmonix game) and evidently an expert on Dr. Pepper
• (Matt) Ganucheau, a mastermind of Yuri’s Night’s music and art, a composer and sound designer (and teacher of sound design for games), an electronic musician, and creator of the NSFW "foreplay robot" Moaning Lisa
• … and yours truly as emcee

Speaking of Roger Linn, Tom at Music Thing just posted an auction on the pre-Akai prototype.

Hopefully we’ll get to do some quick interviews with the judges, as well, for Planet CDM. Stay tuned on yuricdm.com.

Quick: you’ve got to sell UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC’s) to a mass market! How to do it? Well, Intel decided to show off pro audio and music production on the Linux-based Transmission, from Trinity Audio, as we saw earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure what got Intel thinking our geeky way, but I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts. And in all seriousness, Linux really an ideal OS choice here, because of its ability to be customized to the application.

The other flipside: low-power is the future. Computers now suck up 15% of the electricity in the US — electricity that produces a lot of our pollution and greenhouse gases. You do the math. A lot of that power gets used up in data centers, but the aggregate of all those homes counts, too. That will impact the future of all end-user operating systems.

Trinity has sent us some photos of the Intel booth at CES. Yes, Linux audio is getting some wider exposure. And even if you’re attached to Mac or Windows as your desktop/laptop platform, a mobile Linux device could be an ideal companion in the near future. We’ll have a chance to look at Trinity’s own device next week at NAMM and see how it stacks up.

Collin Mel brought some wonderful soundmaking projects to Handmade Music last week. Face-to-face community is a beautiful thing (if loud, crowded, and prone to elevator failure — I like to think the Etsy elevator was slashdotted). But it’s also nice to keep up with Web documentation of projects. Collin’s got a great blog with updates on his latest, and some lovely Flickr photos. Included: boxes with lots of knobs that make sounds, and giant, clear, tube-shaped enclosures. And extra points for hacking together an amp and calling it “Ol’ Crappy.”

He also has some nice words about the Thursday party, which I hope will help inspire setting these up, even informally (invite a few friends!), in other parts of the world:

What made this event extra fun for me was the fact that it was the first time I was able to demonstrate some instruments I’ve been working on to a very supportive and interested community. I have to say, the positive feedback I received (regarding the atari tube in particular) warmed my heart. I have spent so much time learning the language of electronics over the past few months - toiling over wire and solder - that I almost forgot how good it feels to see someone else enjoy something that I’ve made. What I see as a noisemaker with a couple of knobs on it becomes an instrument once someone else picks it up and begins to play. That is a very good thing.
A big thanks to everyone who came out to the event - Hope to see you again soon.

A Heart-Warming Night of Noise
Narbotic [Collin's blog]

Tommy responds to our call for screen grabs of software with this fascinating Jitter patch:

He writes:

used lloopp and jitter runtime to make this instrument that uses a firewire camera as a source for effecting sound generators. i like this shot because of the video feedback.

What’s lloopp? Glad you asked. It’s a live improvisation / looping / performance tool built in Max/MSP and totally open source. That makes it ideally-suited to use if you’ve found other live performance tools to be overly restrictive on their own.
lloopp

Speaking of free, unusual interfaces, Tommy also sends along this elegant image from ixi software’s spindrum. They have a whole range of free, Mac/Windows tools for music making, all with organic interfaces and strange, floating objects, a bit reminiscent of the design of instruments like ElectroPlankton.

ixi software

It’s all proof that not all music software has to look the same, and the future is bright for innovation in on-screen interfaces. Software has a major interface on traditional instruments, too, which is that the interface for playing, the sense of a musical score, and visualization/imagery for the sounds themselves can all be united in the virtual domain. There have always been echoes of that in instrument design: buxom, carved women on viola da gambas, the way a piano keyboard reflects a system of tuning and pitch relations, and fantastical landscapes painted on virginals and other instruments. But I suspect we’ve only begun to see how this area could be blown up with digital instruments.

The only danger: we’ll have to keep from getting overly distracted by eye candy!

As the last couple of decades have led to making music in software, some of the materiality of physical instruments is lost. No matter how much you love your hardware synths, odds are you spent at least a little time looking into the void of a computer screen. And to the public, much of that is obscured by the back of a display. Instruments face outward; computers face inward.

Enter online photo sharing. Screen grabs can make software rigs visible. For example, someone’s been busy putting together a monster bass channel strip in Ableton Live:

Contained: the synth source is Vember Audio’s Surge digital synth, fed into Ohmforce’s Ohmicide saturator/distorter, Waves’ C4 (a multiband parametric compressor), L2 (ultramaximizer) and Maxx Bass (bass enhancement), and Ableton Live’s own Auto Filter and Saturator. Kids, don’t try this at home. I’m amused because this is hilarious, goes-to-eleven overkill.

Got some screen grabs you want to share? Add them (and anything else music-related) to the Create Digital Music Flickr pool, and drop us a line if you think we’ll find it especially interesting.

I’ll be interested to see if tools like plasq’s upcoming Mac utility Skitch also catch on for this purpose.

While on the subject of wonderful handmade musical instruments, Max (and Audrey) aka farnea have been posting some fantastic creations to Flickr over the past few months. They recently cropped up on the Create Digital Music Flickr Pool.

The Sound Destruction Unit:

DIY modular synth made putting together a lot of things I’ve built in the last times. There is a Weird Sound Generator, a Crackle Box, a random pattern generator, some filters (cutoff, square to sine), a gate controller, a Vactrol based controller, optical sensors and body contacts, mixing and power stuff.

Orange Commodore 64 Synth: A lovely, custom-painted “Modded C64 with SID2SID expansion and Prophet64 cartridge.”

The C64 also has a helpful discussion of paint. Music DIY extraordinaire Fibra advises:

Always apply at least one layer of plastic primer. Let it dries enough after each layer. Also apply at least 2-3 layers of paint. I also used spray canned paint (for cars) which is probably better than acrylic based.

Hmmm, I’ve got a few keyboards that could use a custom job. (”Pimp my Synth,” anyone?) Please don’t be shy about joining in on our Flickr group, by the way. It seems like it could be a great way not only to document impressive hardware DIY projects, but also custom software patches in Max/MSP and Reaktor, unusual clip configurations in Ableton Live, racks in Reason, musical scores, performances — all kinds of things.

Another nice example: choking sun’s very nice studio.

Now, some videos of the Sound Destruction Unit:

Maker Faire this weekend had plenty to offer fans of DIY musical gear, from Theremin karaoke performances to wild, home-built instruments from independent DIYers and academics. I spent most of the weekend tied to my booth, making music by scanning barcodes, manipulating a simple infrared sensor and touch sensor, and running live interactive visuals in Jitter. (The last turned out to be a huge hit with babies and their parents. Seriously.) But I did get out a bit; my impressions are documented on Flickr:

Maker Faire 2007 Flickr Photoset

If you were there and have some images of your own, or have seen a gallery you especially like, send it our way!

Sometimes an instrument you know can become something else altogether. Bob Collier has been constructing his own thumb pianos, adding amplification, effects, self-sampling features, and novel cases involving recycled camera bodies and faux fur. As Bob says, “Sometimes the crudest and roughest looking kalimbas can sound surprisingly good especially with the right context of fx and
amplification.”

I find kalimbas beautiful and delicate to begin with. Throw in some faux fur and Korg KAOSS Pad effects, and they take on a whole new life:

Other designs add all-new functionality, like the Sampimer, a “self-sampling” thumb piano with integrated 20-second voice recorder, a speaker covered by a lens cap, and a body made out of a jewelry caddy:

I asked Bob a bit more about the designs, and out came still more ingenious re-adaptations of the lowly kalimba. He explains how he got started with this series in the first place:

Pictures of cats and blogging are a cliche — but that cliche happens to be true. And it extends down the long tail (ahem, so to speak) to our little niches. Yes, there really is a blog dedicated to pictures of cats and synths. Not weirded out yet? Via Matrixsynth earlier this month (and evidently not an April Fool’s joke), someone has made a tatoo. Very … uh, meta.

Good grief; the cats have already started making tutorials:

Assembling electronic beats, starring Convoy — a slide show

So, my question is, where are the synth and computer music dogs? Dachshunds on Moogs? Labrodoodles on Ableton Live?

And, yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m stalling today so I can get other work done. But if I had a dog, I’d contribute.

Rowlf the Dog, from the Muppets, has to at least start this out. Occasionally, he traded his acoustic grand or upright for a keyboard like the Arp Odyssey, as seen on Flickr. That’s my kind of dog:

Got some canine friend who helps you get through your productions? Let us know.