Forget all my blathering on about the Sharper Image Beamz thing, because this video says it better than I possibly could. No, it’s not the video you’ve seen already. Think Beamz gone experimental — and keep watching until about :30. (Thanks to Chachi and Matt for this one.)

It’s official: Beamz has become stuff of Web legendz. I can haz alternative interface, or whatever.

To celebrate Yuri’s Night, CDM is organizing a big design challenge. Bring your craziest, most futuristic musical interfaces / hardware projects / custom synths and controllers, and face off with other designers to win a Yamaha Tenori-On and other prizes.

Musical expression and space, after all, go together. The record above carried a special mix of great music made by humans around the world into space, via the Voyager spacecraft. Good thing it launched when it did: I imagine alien life would have been shocked if we sent a CD or cassette or 8-track or SDflash memory card, but LPs are cool again in other parts of the galaxy, too.

If you have any means of getting to the Bay Area on April 12 and you have something cool, we’ll want to see it. (Naturally, I’ll be one of the judges … but we should have some other judges to announce soon.) Even if you don’t win, I’ll be covering the projects on yuricdm.com.

Enter the Futuristic Music Design Challenge

Got any questions? Drop me a line.

Planet-wide futuristic design projects, too: While we won’t be able to judge them for the prize, if you have any futuristic design projects and can’t get to California — particularly if they’re inspired by space, exploration, or Earth and ecology — contact me and we’ll cover them on the yuricdm.com website and CDM as part of the global Yuri’s Night celebration.

Deadline: 11:59pm Eastern Monday, April 7

Performance/Competition: Saturday, April 12; Time TBA @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area

Official Site: yuricdm.com

For an increasing number of artists, data is becoming the raw material for creative work. Most of this has focused on visual media, but in the digital space, you can just as easily use sound. Sometimes the results are aesthetic only; sometimes they tell you something about the numbers being sonified. But either way, sound is a powerful medium.

“Weather Report” is a multi-touch instrument that makes music out of surface temperature data. The results feel a bit like US weather agency NOAA gone IDM. Fire up the multi-touch table, and you can “read” temperature data as sound. Co-creator Jordan Hochenbaum writes us:

I just wanted to turn you guys onto a multi touch interface I have been developing with a friend of mine here at California Institute of the Arts (his name is Owen Vallis). We had out first installation a couple weeks ago at Sea and Space Explorations gallery in Los Angeles and will be bringing it to Yuris Night Bay Area in April. The table is called “Brick,” and our first piece of software for it is called “Weather Report.” Were trying to use the table as a playable and meaningful musical instrument, so Weather Report uses Brick to sonify real-time U.S. surface temperature information into ambient and melodic mini-compositions. You can check out the website (we just put it up so it will constantly be updated shortly) for more information and photos, or check out our first youtube video @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45p_TPtQjR0

Are current plans for the table is making it more stable, and getting multi-touch finger tracking working nicely.

It was custom built and uses custom software written in Max/MSP/Jitter and Reaktor, as well as Reactivision (like the ReacTable).

Hope you like it so far! We are finding out new ways people like to interact with the table in order to refine how it is used, so the more people see and use it, the more usable and interesting we will be able to make it as a musical instrument.

brick: A Multi-Touch Sonification Instrument [Project blog]

CDM will be at Yuri’s Night, the global space party, in a very big way, so expect more!

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one Achilles’ heal is that automatic memory management — the very thing that makes coding easier, via something called a garbage collector — can make sound glitchy at lower latencies. (JavaSound seems worst on Mac OS X, as implementation of the sound API by Apple hasn’t kept pace with improvements in Java audio on other platforms. It is possible to build a real-time-ready Java implementation that performs as well as languages like C++ for audio, but right now there’s not yet a mainstream implementation of this type.)

That doesn’t mean Processing isn’t useful for musical applications. With experimentation, sound libraries like Minim can perform quite well, especially if extreme low-latency is unnecessary. (see Processing’s libraries page for more.) And you can always use Processing as a visual front end, while sound comes from elsewhere (Max, Pd, Reaktor, or even Ableton Live or a plug-in.)

There’s plenty of incentive to work with the environment as an artist. People who never coded before are able to build entire projects in Processing, not just uber-programmer-geeks. Even experienced coders can find it a fast way of experimenting with ideas — sometimes better-suited to tasks that are more difficult with patching environments. Despite all the hype around Flash/AIR/Flex and Silverlight, I find Processing easier to develop in, and you have far more robust development options, free and open source tools and libraries, and genuine OpenGL 3D capabilities.

I put out a call for people working with Processing for music, and we’ve already got a handful of interesting examples. Because of the open community around Processing, code is available for a couple of the ideas here, so you can have a peek and learn from fellow Processing coders.

nodeSeq from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

Once the domain of the few, creating and customizing sophisticated DIY controllers is now more accessible than ever. That means, if you can’t find what you want, and you’re ambitious and knowledgeable enough, you go make your own. Josh Boughey was impressed by the Monome enough to buy one — but the Monome, a grid of on/off buttons, doesn’t provide any kind of variable control. So Josh built his own, combining a series of parallel touch strips with LED indicators. (The lights are the tricky part, requiring an obscene number of connections.)

The creation, dubbed “Stribe” by Josh, could have been a one-off. But instead, he’s working on making it into a tool for others, with completely open source hardware and software. The whole system is built on the popular Arduino platform, making it uncommonly easy to modify. It’s a work in progress, as you can see lacking an enclosure. But ten have made it out into the wild, people are already programming custom software, and more are coming.

I got to hang out with Josh while he was in town this weekend. Luckily, he’s a fan of early music, meaning we met at a concert of a viol consort that was playing my music — an unusual collision of 15th and 21st Century music technology.

Josh gave a demo of the Stribe, for myself plus Phil Torrone of Make and Limor Fried (aka lady ada), creator of the x0xb0x open-source 303 clone. It’s still a project in process– there’s more to be done in firmware and support software and documentation — but it already shows some real promise. I snapped some shots, studied the Max patches, and mostly listened to Limor and Josh talk about the challenges of starting a DIY hardware business. (I hope that DIY builders start to share experiences, even informally, as they work to make the business end work so they can keep building.)

Just what can happen when you let your baby go? Someone else can do stuff with it you didn’t expect. Here’s musician Stretta developing music ideas-in-progress with the Stribe (see blog post, Stribe forum thread):

A Brief Conversation Resulting in One Less Child from stretta on Vimeo.

Some tidbits from the hands-on session:

Squarely in the “not seen at NAMM” category, the Bubblegum Sequencer uses differently-colored bubble gum balls, arranged in a grid of holes, to create rhythmic patterns. It’s not exactly a leap forward for music — you wind up with a pretty simple drum step sequencer — but it does look like fun. Or it would be, except I’d wind up eating the tangible sequencer. Note to self: make interfaces out of something I won’t devour.

What’s rather interesting here is that the whole system uses computer vision analysis — a camera spots the gum balls by color. One thing that means is that you could skip the grid altogether and apply this to something very different.

The hyper-rational voiceover I find really amusing. Now, just add hard-disk recording next year, and the Bumblegum 5000 could  in fact be at NAMM.

Thanks, Johan!

Updated! Holy crap! Analog Industries has started a blog war:

Peter Kirn got all up in our grill with a bubblegum sequencer over on CDM. Well, Peter. I’ll see your bubblegum sequencer, and raise you one done with Skittles.

“I Eat Beats” Skittle Sequencer

I Eat Beats from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

But, come on, Chris. I enjoy my Skittles now and then, but bubble gum is more delicious, and you can’t blow a bubble with a Skittle.

I have heard that Moog Music is introducing a Candy Sequencer OS (Old School), using salt water taffy. And looking at comments, the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression this year may just turn into a massive rumble / turf war of tangible interfaces. Which is why my tangible interface will be Pop Rocks.

Updated, again! Still more. This time, Evan from thisisnotalabel sees our bubblegum sequencer and raises us a ball bearing sequencer. Careful, though, kids. Those are not edible. Choking hazard!

Still more: it’s a dining table as musical interface, in a sonically-augmented culinary artwork:

Eric Singer, creator of musical robots and maestro of LEMUR, the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, has unveiled a new wireless sensor-to-MIDI interface. It’s quite a bit pricier than the non-wireless MIDI models at US$495, but the payoff is a complete kit for wireless performance that promises to be resistant to both latency and interference. The receiver can be connected via either USB or MIDI, and the sensor unit has 20 inputs which you can mix and match as up to 10 analog ins and 20 digital ins. Put the sensor/transmitter unit wherever you like, then transmit data wirelessly to the receiver — so the sensors could be strapped to a dancer while a computer or synth receives the data elsewhere.

I hope to have a hands-on demo soon, but in the meantime, here are the specs — just in case that wireless project can’t wait any longer.

From ribbons to multi-touch, musicians are looking for expressive controllers, ones that allow continuous control for performance.

Oh, yeah, and it’s like totally super-cool on the original Star Trek when people run their hands over the Transporter controls and the blinky lights move. I mean, like still super-cool, even in 2008. (Hint: try to look completely chilled out like Spock when you do it.)

So, one of the things I noticed when the Monome was first introduced was, excellent as that open controller is, you’ve got buttons and no continuous controls. Ever wished another nice square box could sit next to it and give you multiple touch controllers? Good news: Stribe is here.

The Stribe is an 8-channel multi-touch controller for music or video software. 1024 individually-addressable LEDs provide animated visual feedback.

The low-resolution (16 x 64) LED display is controlled in real time by either firmware or host software, or both. MIDI or OSC communication to compatible hardware and software is achieved via patches written in Max/MSP.
Touchstrips down the center of each channel trigger events in the software and the firmware, which drive the display, creating a haptic feedback loop. Each of these eight “channels” has two 64-led-tall columns, e.g. a left and a right.

The Stribe can act as a touch controlled meter bridge, or as an interactive, animated16 x 64 led display. Oriented horizontally, the Stribe can more intuitively interface with step-sequencer type applications, or allow direct manipulation of granular synthesis sampling, or allow the user to perform “scratch” like gestures

or…?

PAiA 2 Transistor “Ribbon” Kit from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

PAiA, the electronics kit creator beloved by music DIYers, has a fantastic, simple kit that’s likely to appeal to beginners and kit lovers alike. The kit is a “2-Transistor Ribbon Kit,” and it’s the basic circuit for ribbon controllers for music, of the sort found in commercial products like Kurzweil keyboards and invented by Paul Tanner as the “Tanner-in” — the same instrument used in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”

Having a kit that gives you a fundamental circuit, adaptable to a variety of projects, is cool already. But PAiA went further: they took the entire circuit, printed it on a business card, and used basic punch holes so you don’t eve have to solder. Just twist together connections, and you can make the “ribbon” itself using a pencil. (4B-8B softness gives you enough graphite for it to work really well; check your local art supply store.)

Best of all, the cost to you is nothing. Write “Free kit for CDM readers” on the back of a self-addressed & stamped envelope, send it to PAiA Corporation, and our friends there will send you a free kit:

PAiA Corporation
2201 North Lamar Boulevard, Suite 200
Austin, Texas 78705 USA

They’ll even send it internationally, minus parts (see complete details). You can include some spare change if you want to help them out.

What I really love about the kit is that it’s super portable and easy to use with people who have no electronics experience whatsoever. Soldering irons can scare people, and that means extra room for assembly and equipment that’s tough to access. With this kit, you can bring a little bag of parts and rock out with just about anyone. So if you’ve read about crazy projects on this site and never tried one yourself, this is a great way to start. And likewise, if you’re one of those people making crazy projects, you can use this kit in schools, clubs, parties, whatever. I took them along to our most recent Handmade Music night in New York, and the results were terrific. (People picked it up with almost no instruction; see the video at top. That’s my partner Jennifer as hand model and assistant instructor.) We hope to repeat that again in NYC, Chicago, and LA; if you do an event of your own, let us know.

Simple Electronic Kit #1: 2-Transistor Ribbon Kit [PAiA Corporation]
Assembly Instructions

All good fun, but what if you want to make a more serious ribbon controller? Good news: