Imagine this: you have a real-time interface that must be responsive and satisfying, simple enough to be approachable, but sophisticated enough that you’ll want to finely hone your skills over time. You’ll juggle a variety of elements to control with split-second accuracy, but even with elaborate mechanics under the hood, the whole thing, above all, has to be fun.

Sound familiar? It’s a description that’s equally apt for traditional music instruments and modern music software, as much as it is for games. The fact that, once they’re done, a game is often very not like familiar music software and instruments suggests the range of possible solutions to these design challenges. And suddenly, after years in which the games industry clung conservatively to tied and tested models, indie game designers with oddball game designs are grabbing the headlines. Some continue to tackle the meeting point of game and music making. Others offer inspiration for what futuristic 3D musical interfaces might look like.

I unfortunately didn’t make it to the game developer pow-wow that is GDC, but our friend Josh Randall at Harmonix tipped us off with these top picks. Given the blog buzz they’re earning, you may have seen some already, proving great independent game design may not be constrained to obscurity any longer.

Some games are playable on Windows now; Mac users may want to hit up Boot Camp, or watch for release on a console near you. (The pattern seems to be, prototype on PC but ship on consoles where better money can be made.)

It’s the music of the spheres. Or at least, the music of the various, floating geometric shapes, bouncing around a virtual galaxy with gravity simulation. Kepler’s Orrery is a (newly) open-sourced generative music maker, based on a gravity simulation algorithm. As bodies collide, they make sound; it’s a bit like what would happen if you crossed a music box with a snow globe. Different worlds represent different songs. You can reach in and grab some of the objects, so it’s possible to “perform” with the project.

The application runs directly in a web browser (assuming your Java is up to date), and since it’s open source, digging around in the code could inspire your own Java-based musical environment.

Kepler’s Orrery Project Page, with notes, source code, and a live applet
Creator Simran Gleason Talks About the Project on java.net in a podcast (MP3)

And yes, there are some similarities here to the generative music of Brian Eno (soon to be heard in the upcoming Will Wright game Spore) and sound artist/composer Toshio Iwai’s ElectroPlankton game. Perhaps we have a whole genre of musical creation in the works here.

Related:

• Flash-Powered, Animated Musical Painting: Visual Acoustics
• NuSofting’s Collide and Play plug-in uses a similar, physics-inspired interface
• Videos and more featuring Nintendo ElectroPlankton and Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai
• Why ElectroPlankton is wonderful — but falls short of being the music tool it could have been
• Brian Eno, with Will Wright on Spore and Generative Systems, Sound, and Paintings

As we continue physical modeling month, here’s a free piece of software that lets you create music and sound (and visuals) using real-world physics:

pmpd, free external for Pd

Johan Strandell writes:

It’s not physical modeling in the usual sense; pmpd simulates things like friction, acceleration/deacceleration etc.; i.e., more useful for control of parameters rather than synthesis in itself. Some of the examples are really intriguing, but I’ve only scratched the surface on it. An article about it would be great, to see what other people are doing with it.

Consider your challenge accepted. May take me a while, but I’m doing some other work modeling physics, so this could segue nicely. As you can see in the visual below, you can use this to model fluids, matter, particles, and other substances. That could be easily applied to sound synthesis (and they include a number examples) as a way of making control less mechanical and more dynamic and organic. Since environments like GEM run 3D visuals on your graphics card, there’s nothing stopping you from dedicating your graphics card GPU to visual feedback while the CPU plugs away on the sound.

November 29 is the 205th birthday anniversary of Christian Doppler, the Austrian mathematician and physicist who hypothesized what’s now called the Doppler Effect. (You know, that effect when an ambulance or other fast-moving vehicle flies by and the perceived pitch changes.) That calls for Doppler trivia, astrophysics, audio software, and a drink.

In celebration, go check out the excellent Wikipedia page on the Doppler Effect, including one of my favorite Physics equations (while I wasn’t failing.) And if the idea isn’t sinking in, there are plenty of online demonstrations of why this effect occurs. (Science aside, I also recommend celebrating by imitating the sound of an English police car driving by in a movie. It works best if you simultaneously run by your significant other at high speeds.)

Because light can be a wave as well as a particle, the Doppler effect applies to light as well as sound. An increase in the observed wavelength of light emanating from a star is called a redshift. The principle is the same: as the source gets further from you, the wavelength (what it sound we perceive as pitch) shifts; in the case of a star, that translates to observed color.

Here’s the mind-bending caveat: there’s a misconception that Doppler-like redshifts are what allow astrophysicists to measure the expansion of the universe. Wrong! Why? Because it’s not the stars moving away from you (a la the Doppler ambulance); it’s the intervening space stretching, as per the understanding of General Relativity. There you go; if that hasn’t convinced you to go have a drink in honor of Christian Doppler, nothing will. (Heck, it’d probably convince him to have a few drinks, were he alive.)

Back to digital audio: If you want to reproduce the Doppler effect accurately, GRM Tools Classic has one of the best Doppler plug-ins I know of, available for both Pro Tools (RTAS/TDM) and VST. See the detailed review from Electronic Musician of a few years ago. GRM Tools is a great collection of plug-ins, but if you’re on Windows you can also opt for the much-cheaper GBP 15 a la carte option, Spacestation (VST). (Thanks, Afro!)

Or just go have that Dopplertini. (Anyone got a good recipe? I think it involves throwing the drink at high velocity . . .)

[Updated: Had the wrong record label -- it's not Muti, it's Pretension. Though Pretension is also cool.]

I asked readers to brag about their work, and, wow, does Cynthia Bruyns have amazing things to brag about:

She’s a DJ — check out her mixes

She’s working part-time with Apple’s Interactive Media group

She’s involved with a really cool electronic record label

She’s been busy modeling instruments in 3D

The Vibration Lab is a sophisticated 3D modeling app for the Mac that accurately models percussive sounds. (Digitally-modeled cowbell? Not so far-fetched, after all!) See the project page for audio samples. She presented the work as part of a three-member team at SIGGRAPH and recently completed her Master’s thesis on new instruments. And yes, she’s looking at commercializing the technology.

Still more information:

Lab Notes: Modeling the Sound of Music [Research from Berkeley Engineering]

Vibration Lab Models Music [Daily Californian; though see her site for corrections]

Thanks, Cynthia. Now . . . uh . . . I’ll have whatever coffee you’re having.

Rope and Sound is an installation that uses rope tension to control sound. Pull on a cord, and the change in tension triggers electronic thuds and mellow chimes. The trick is conductive fibers braided into the rope; as the tension changes, the conduction of the rope changes, as well.

I got a chance to try out the installation at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The show is up through October 30 and well worth a visit if you’re passing through town. The installation is beautiful and the concept brilliant, but the sound aspect was somewhat disappointing. The sounds themselves were compelling, but the ropes act like simple buttons: sounds are triggered as you cross a set threshold. If the whole point is the ability to monitor stress, why doesn’t that translate into sound? A velocity-sensitive keyboard is more expressive. That said, I think the underlying concept is terrific, so expect to see more use of conductive fibers in new sound interfaces.

If you’re near Emoryville, California, you can meet up with the Squid Labs folks who built this and other projects. (via O’Reilly Radar) And you can even one-up them by showing your own project. If you go, let me know what goes down!

[UPDATE:] I went to the source and asked Ben Recht (MIT Media Lab) about why the strings weren’t sensitive. In fact, they were! The reason they modulated timbre and not velocity was that he felt velocity was too hard to calibrate for different visitors. (And, obviously calibration is an issue, since I didn’t notice the timbre modulation.) This certainly demonstrates the challenges in designing new interfaces. And it also suggests that even with new designs, you need musicians to become adept at using the interface expressively.