Still evaluating Live 8 – or want to learn more about how to use it? You can now read my review of Ableton Live 8 free on Keyboard Magazine’s site:

Ableton Live 8 Review [Keyboard Magazine]
See also (via comments) Nick Rothwell’s review for Sound on Sound June [subscription or US$1.49 fee required]

Keyboard doesn’t yet have comments, so feel free to discuss – or disagree – here.

I wanted to back up a little bit and consider Live as if for the first time. Now, I had also personally heard at least Robert Henke complain at one point that reviews of Live were uncritical. That to me would be a flaw as a reviewer, because all software designs involve compromises, so no software can ever be perfect. Here, I still feel there’s legitimate room for improvement in terms of the way Live handles interactive clip triggering and how it assigns control. Of course, we’re not just passively complaining about it – there’s also a community of Live users working to hack in functionality they need using the Live API, both via Python and forthcoming Max for Live.

Also for the review, I shot some quick video demos of features that were easier to show than describe, namely the new instrument Collision and the Vocoder effect. These are basically mini-tutorials on these creations. See Collision at top, Vocoder after the break at bottom. Fixed! Now the top video is actually the Collision video. (Oops.)

I’m a huge fan of physical modeling and Applied Acoustics, and Collision is one of the best percussion models I’ve seen. It starts to approach some of what’s possible in Apple’s Sculpture in Logic, but in a much more focused context, and with some unparalleled resonators (which you can also use on their own in the form of Corpus). See the top video for a walkthrough of the interface.

As an addendum to the last story, Ivica Ico Bukvic sends along an example of the [myu] Max/MSP + Unity game engine combination in action. Here’s the surprise: Unity isn’t generating visuals. Instead, Unity simulates ripples created by movement in the space, and builds physical models that are sonified and spatialized by Max/MSP.

Speaking of work involving art museums and the combination of Max and Unity, VJ Anomolee notes in comments his own work with the pairing. Lightbent Synth is an in-progress piece with alternative controllers and sensors that produces sound with a novel visual representation (sound’s very quiet in this preview — more hopefully once it progresses):

Lightbent Synth from VJ Anomolee on Vimeo.

Ivica explains the top work:

It’s a tough time for the music tech industry like so many industries. But there are beautiful products coming from independent developers – indie, boutique shops crafting musical instruments in code. The folks at Devine Machine, makers of the likes of Guru and Lucifer, unloaded three big announcements overnight – enough to make you think there’s some obscure trade show going on at the end of March no one told you about.

Here’s the capsule view of why they matter:

The NAMM show brought a cluster of new soft synths from some beloved synth makers. The interfaces are noticeably conventional, but there are some tasty sonic features in store. Most of these are promised as “coming soon,” not available now, but here’s a quick look at what to expect.

By the way, if you’re one the people complaining that you’re sick of everyone talking about Ableton and want something else to be excited about, I have one word for you:

D.CAM.

Let me sum it up in one line first:

minimoog V 2.0: Rewired circuitry, automation recording vocal filtering, and weird 3D preset browsing mean if you like minimoog, you’ll like it more.

Brass 2.0: physically-modeled brass stuff you can play more easily with controllers, now with a sax model and fully spatialized and harmonized.

Trilian: Even more of the synth that gives you more bass than you need – and now your Intel Mac can run it in place of Trilogy, for free.

Largo: It’s a Waldorf synthesizer, but it’s software. You can’t afford a Blofeld, but you can afford this, and then use it in a coffee shop.

D.CAM: Synth wishes granted: thick parallel-waveform performance synth plus vintage-style string synth plus big, modern FM plus and environment to put them all together.

(added!) impOSCar 2: Features aren’t confirmed yet, but an early look at the OSCar emulation suggest a very big sequel indeed.

Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.

2008 has been an amazing year for music technology. But I can’t bring myself to look back on it on this New Year’s Eve: not when there’s so much to look forward to in 2009. Case in point? An extraordinary, innovative new controller that in a matter of hours was already spreading among connected music technologists around the planet.

At the end of the day, it’s not hard to describe what you might want out of an expressive music controller. Most people would agree on that. The challenge is really an engineering problem. Solve the engineering problem in an artful way, and you can spend the rest of your time just practicing playing your invention. That’s what makes the above video so exciting.

Randall Jones has built a really elegant and wonderful multi-touch hardware controller, as reported by MAKE:blog (and picked up on Hack a Day). With $50 in parts and a lot of clever hardware design and software coding, Jones has built an interface that responds to both touch and pressure and, using some smart sonic mapping, can realistically reproduce instruments like the dumbek and guiro.

Intimate Control for Physical Modeling Synthesis [Project Page / Paper Abstract]

PDF, Randall Jones MSc Research Paper

Who needs a “top 10 technologies of 2008” post for CDM when this particular instrument could pretty easily top the whole list? Let’s just call it done, and uncork the champagne: major congrats, Randy! (This is a master’s thesis!)

Jones’ work does have some precedent, but just to review how much he’s accomplished here: he’s innovated in terms of the sensing, the form factor, the software interpolation, and the way in which the control data is mapped to a synthesis method. (Whew!) That has had a number of specific achievements: