Like a World’s Fair of all the invention in music technology, the big trade shows still gather many of the latest creations from around the globe. And while the NAMM show in California is big, Musikmesse is bigger: spanning some 11 halls (together with a live lighting and event show called Pro Light+Sound), it’s the biggest on Earth. Having covered NAMM for German publication DE:BUG, I’m thrilled to get to do the reverse and highlight the best of Messe for California-based Keyboard Magazine.

Musikmesse 2012 Gear Report [Keyboard Magazine]

Instead of trying to cover absolutely everything, this is the stuff I found especially significant – and I got the luxury of giving into my personal bias toward things with keys on them. Some of the highlights:

• RME getting 36 channels, 24-bit, 192 kHz audio … on a computer and on your iPad. (Also, thanks to RME for the delicious beer.)
• Mode Machines’ wonderful German x0xb0x, SID drum machine, and other treats.
• More accurate modeled pianos, including the epic ALPHA with its full-sized hammer action inside. (No, not what keyboard makers usually call hammer action – like, the whole hammer.)
• Roland’s clever mechanism for using your iPhone to record and jam along with their instruments, wirelessly. (See my hands-on video, below).

And, of course, there’s lots of gear to look at. It wasn’t new to Messe, but if my ethics circuitry were to short-circuit and I decided to hide something under a coat, I sure do love that Buchla modular and touch plate, for all its quirky strangeness. In fact, apologies to the folks at Moog, but I have to recount this story. Evidently a couple of Moog reps went over to the Buchla display to try out the new modular, and came back frustrated about the touchplate and the lack of a conventional keyboard. (Believe me, they’re not wrong: these can keep you from making useful sound if you don’t have a lot of time.) Now, I cut my teeth in analog on two modulars side by side, an original Buchla and Moog setup. I was charmed by the reenactment of the controversy over Buchla – its unconventional input, its creatively-worded labels, and its different approach to patching. I talked to others with the same split reaction, not just Moog. It’s all the more topical after my passing mention of a giant sphere triggered a minor flame war in comments. (And don’t get me wrong: as I said before, I love keyboards, and still favor them over other means of input.)

I always loved both the Buchla and Moog for their differences, and the fact that these philosophical difference survive decades later gives some hope for the longevity of what we do – sometimes even the longevity of our peculiarities.

Let me know what your favorite finds were from Messe, even if you were watching online. (In all honesty, your odds may be better than if you get lost on the giant show floors!)

Music lovers are hacking Apple’s Siri voice recognition technology. By connecting to some of the “intelligence” of the cloud, these tools can make your phone rap or send music files to a player piano for instant musical playback.

First up: Yamaha’s piano taking requests, thanks to music grabbed online. A Yamaha rep explains:

Yamaha consultant Craig Knudsen demonstrates a unique implementation of Apple’s incredible Airplay technology in an exciting new way.
Here’s how it works:
Take a standard MIDI songfile and convert it to an audio file (while maintaining the MIDI data). The songfile is then sent wirelessly via WiFi to an Apple Airport Express (which is mounted underneath a Yamaha Disklavier reproducing piano. The audio output of the Airport Express is then connected to the analog MIDI inputs of the Disklavier, using a standard audio cable.
Then, you simply ask Siri to play your favorite song from your iTunes library, and Siri responds immediately, by making the Disklavier’s keys and pedal move up and down, recreating the performance, including full orchestration.
The result is nothing short of magical.

Of course, the actual “playing” is thanks to the capabilities of the Yamaha Disklavier. I’m actually a bit puzzled as to how the online conversion works, exactly, and I was curious for any Disklavier-owning CDM readers whether this is something publicly available. I’m waiting to hear back from Yamaha.

And now, for something completely different: Siri rapping. (Somewhat … erm … badly, if amusingly. It is a hack.)

My friend Robert “Robb” Böhnke had a lot of fun combining Siri’s voice synthesis and the lyrics of Notorious B.I.G.

My hack for the Music Hack Day 2011 in London, a 24h Hackathon for all things music.

SiriProxy is used to intercept the communication with Apple’s servers. Notorious Siri then sends Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize to the device.

Siri’s speech synthesis is synced to the beat using the timestamps obtained from the Echonest API which were then manually tweaked, to smooth out delays in the text-to-speech engine.

Thanks to Universal Music for awarding me a nice pair of Dr. Dre headphones

The Echonest API, by the way, is an amazing do-everything “API for music,” one that analyzes musical files and connects to a vast storehouse of musical intelligence.

Warning: this video is most definitely Not Safe For Work. (Heck, even the thumbnail isn’t, exactly.) If that concerns you, just go listen to the Yamaha video again, okay?

Siri FAQ [Apple.com]

Previously: Google Translate Beatboxing

…and, of course, that means: Android, your move.

For something with a row of keys, the piano can prove surprisingly hard to model perfectly. But computer software, blessed with lavish storage space for samples and now-ample processing power, has a decided edge. There are lots of good sampled pianos, but two products have really impressed me above the others: Synthogy’s Ivory and Pianoteq’s modeled instruments.

After years of waiting, Ivory II is now here, and my friend and colleague Steve Fortner, at the helm of Keyboard Magazine, reviews the new version. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the digital piano:
Synthogy Ivory II Grands

Sympathetic resonance is a feature that to me really separates the experience of a real piano from a simulated one, and that’s what gets attention here. Steve writes:

Ivory II adds sympathetic resonance to the sustain resonance and soundboard choices of Ivory 1.x. What’s more compelling is how Synthogy does it. Not satisfied with mixing in samples of strings ringing out, they precisely modeled the physics of which vibrations cause which. So, you don’t hear merely the correct notes singing in sympathy, but the correct harmonics of those notes. The result is the most realistic and musical emulation we’ve ever heard of the complex acoustical world beneath the piano lid. Of course, you can adjust it to taste.

It’s no substitute for the physical sensation of being at a piano – its hammer apparatus, the way it responds, the sound emanating from the soundboard – but the sound result is tremendous. Listen to the samples on SoundCloud:

03-2011 Synthogy Ivory II by KeyboardMag

I’ll also put in a quick plug for Pianoteq again. Because I still love the real piano, I absolutely adore the fact that Pianoteq feels different, responds in ways that make the computer seem it’s alive. For sound design aficionados, Pianoteq also earns extra marks for its many unique add-ons – most recently, the Clavinet joined historic add-ons back through the centuries. They even have a Cimbalom. And Pianoteq is very, very easy on systems because of its use of modeling over sampling.

But for sound results, it’s going to be tough to top Ivory II. I would, honestly, choose both if I were serious about playing. And I’d have a hard time saying any hardware could really match these software instruments.

http://www.synthogy.com/products/ivorygrand.html

The player piano has come, oddly, full circle.

Peer into the editing pane of a music sequencer, and what you see is an abstracted virtual player piano. The editing views are even dubbed “Piano Roll” views (sometimes officially so). The MIDI protocol by which most music devices and apps communicate is itself a kind of port of the piano roll’s paradigm to a digital implementation, with fixed pitch and durations spanning time in an endless loop.

So it’s fitting that Dan Deacon is busy in the studio, feeding a player piano with MIDI and computers in order to make it play layers of unplayable music. The technical work is significant, to be sure, but on another level it’s natural that the computer would speak to the player piano in such terms. These are distant technologies bridged by a common understanding of how to simplify and reproduce music. The process speaks to some of the limitations in the way in which computers typically relate to musical instruments. We may be at the end of the road for this century-old way of thinking about mechanized music. But, extended to the near-breaking point, the maximalist texture that results is all the more beautiful.

Thanks to Jason Bergman for the tip.

Pitchfork TV: Dan Deacon in the Studio [Player Piano]

Make:Television has done a really lovely piece on CCRMA, the research center at Stanford University that works on problems ranging from acoustics and sound to musical instrument design. CCRMA is really just one microcosm of the whole music tech making scene around the world – a lot of increasingly beyond the walls of academia. But what a microcosm it is: I don’t think it’s understatement to say this is just the kind of institution a lot of us dream of. Among the highlights from the MAKE video that I could pick up:

• Ge Wang, professor and creator of ChucK programming language and certain popular ocarina-themed iPhone apps, and Stanford Laptop Orchestra director
• Carr Wilkerson: Electronic “Rub Board”(?) with a nice accompanying Pd synth patch
• A very nice Max/MSP app that everyone seems to be using for signal analysis
• Edgar Berdahl: a one-handed drum that “hits back”
• Nicholas Bryan building the legendary hemispheric speaker (incidentally, no one seems to be able to tell me who invented that)
• A giant interactive musical playground, with a Wii-powered teeter-totter (with one somewhat silly patch, and then another very lovely bowed-sounding patch)

Thanks to patospurlock on Twitter for the tip. I know at least some of you CCRMA students read this site, so feel free to chime in and identify your colleagues.

The featured Feedback Piano project is a hybrid with a bit of acoustical design (a piano), electronics/recording (mics), and digital/computer design (the Max patch that completes the circle). The results are really striking, and while it’s a lot less portable than a convolution reverb, it’s certainly very different having an actual piano into which you can play your saxophone.

Make followed up with directions on the Feedback Piano (please use a truly broken piano, thanks!) and we’ve got some video, as well:

HOW TO – build a feedback piano [MAKE Magazine]

feedback piano #1 from Alloy Electric on Vimeo.

Alloy Electric has more Vimeo videos of the feedback piano and other projects. (Nice footage, as well! Actually, I think, a bit artier than what Make:TV shot!)

More on Chris Warren’sblog and project website.

By the way, does anyone know why educational programs about Science always have to have some geeky-sounding guy shouting at you? (See the condensed history of all music tech at the end.)

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro is manning the touchpad on his laptop given all this hardware around, but the cascading patterns on the Monome suggest both LED art and a digital take on a player piano.

More videos on the official NIN YouTube page, which has recently launched a visuals contest for interpreting music from the new album.

But lest you think you need all that pricey hardware to make use of an unusual tool, look no further than MilkyTracker. Platform wars end here: MT runs on Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux (x86, 64-bit x86, PowerPC), Linux game/mobile platforms (GP2X, ARM), UNIX (FreeBSD x86), and Windows CE. Wowsa. And it’s all yours for a donation, if you can spare one. Heck, there are even video tutorials on the site.

But geekdom aside, I love that MilkyTracker ninjas can make so much music out of so little. Without taking on the aesthetic style here, if that’s not your thing, it’s a reminder that economical choices with your tech can produce all kinds of different sounds. So, maybe rather than loading that preset, try to construct a drum kit out of basic waveforms.

Enjoy!

Video by extrabajs; for some reflections on MilkyTracking, see our friend thumbuki — who, speaking of doing more with less, is working with an OLPC. Economical hardware use is back in an age of power efficiency and computing beyond the deep-pocketed “first world” — and everything old is new again:

Milky Tracker @ thumbuki

What? MilkyTracker is fanning the flames of a platform war with the Atari ST? No worries: MaxYmizer is a newly updated (yep, you read that right) tracker tool for the Atari platform. Polyphonic MIDI input and MIDI clock output means it should easily integrate with your existing studio. See the Digital Tools blog for full details.

Imagine every single piece of gear you have on your wish list. Then imagine a baby grand piano, lacquered in white. Then imagine — you know, for the sake of practicality — you want to use the piano as a projection surface. And sound system. And then imagine you just mash all those ideas into one gear-packed baby grand piano, and you’ve got the beautifully freakish BabyGrandMaster:

Baby Grand Master

It’s not just a gimmicky DJ piano. It’s a “video instrument”, blending visuals and audio. The last time we saw something somewhat like this was the keyboard with PC Miko, though since that’s just a Windows PC packed in a keyboard, only the marketing concept in principle made it a “VJ/DJ” product versus, well, a PC in a keyboard. And, of course, the Baby Grand Master starts to make the Miko look oddly affordable and practical.

This isn’t just some random tinkerer, either. It’s the creation of a veteran of the Emergency Broadcast Network group, as seen on Create Digital Motion today, meaning if you want to add missiles, it’s probably possible.

The specs:

Video:

1. Dual Pioneer DVJ-X1 DVD Players
2. Edirol V-4 Video Mixer
3. 3 Marshal LCD Monitors
4. Slot loading assembly
5. Ultra reflective white projection surface

Audio:

1. Allen and Heath Xone 92 Audio Mixer
2. Dual 15″ Subwoofers
3. 18″ Subwoofer
4. 12″ Subwoofer
5. 3 Bullet Tweeters
6. AB 1100 Watt Power Amplifier

Drivetrain:

1. Moog Slip Ring Assembly
2. 8 Foot Rotating Turntable
3. Wall Mount Variable Speed Control

Still not impressed? Options include hydraulic legs and lid, neon underlighting and running lights, fog and laser assembly, and an even more enormous “concert grand” stretch version. If this weren’t April 23, I’d be looking for the April Fools’ disclaimer, it’s so extreme.

All that’s missing: an actual piano. (What, no mapping the hammer action to visual clips?)

Josh Randall of Harmonix/Guitar Hero fame tipped us off. He writes: “From Gardner Post, ex-EBN member. He was the guy behind all of EBNs amazing gear…like the rocket launching golf bags and mobile video attack systems…(huge truck with lots of tvs on it) He’s been telling me about the baby grand project for a while…and he finally posted this site.”

EBN is Emergency Broadcast Network, a terrific multimedia group. Even if this particular creation isn’t your thing, you should check out their work — I think it’ll be right up the alley of the typical CDM reader.

I’ll try to go visit the actual instrument when I’m up Gardner’s way; more soon.

On the visual side: Create Digital Motion, why I think projecting on pianos is fun, and why we should do this the cheap way.

One last minute addition to CDM’s wildly unrealistic and holiday gift guide that’s late enough to qualify as the post-holiday guide (that’s its unofficial name):

Legendary Artist Peter Max Paints Baldwin Piano for Gibson Foundation

Granted, not a digital instrument, but I still love acoustic pianos. Add a Moog PianoBar or a full-featured MIDI retrofit, and this is basically my dream instrument (and I’ve always been partial to Baldwins). And Peter Max remains a terrific visual visionary.

You can help realize someone’s holiday wishes by giving to a charitable organization like the Gibson Foundation. They do some really good work, including helping musicians recover from Hurricane Katrina. What worthier cause than helping give music to the world?

Logic for Quads. Today’s treat from Software Update: Logic Pro 7.2.2 is a must-download if you’re lucky enough to have a new Mac Pro desktop. The update is optimized to take advantage of the Mac Pro’s quad-core architecture. Exactly what does that mean? I can’t say, because I’m perfectly happy blazing away on a dual-2.7GHz G5 (and had equally good experience when I had a MacBook Pro in for testing). But as we’ve observed before on CDM, multi-core optimization is the trend to watch.

10-foot Grands on 13-inch MacBooks. In other Mactel news, there’s a steady flow of Intel-native plug-ins — happily, too many to cover them all here on CDM. Synthogy has released their Universal Binary AU of their fantastic Ivory pianos plug-in; you can find it on their downloads page. Note that there isn’t an Intel-native VST. As with many of the Intel-native updates, this update to 1.5 is recommended for PowerPC users, too. The other good news is that Synthogy is working on an expansion back with a 10′ Italian instrument, recorded just upriver from here at SUNY Purchase (which happens to in fact be a great hall).

The gaping hole in Intel-native Mac plug-in land remains Native Instruments, but the timetable for release should remain this fall, with significant upgrades to boot. That’s when you should start to hear more people say, “wanna buy a G4 laptop?”

I got a chance to work with the inexpensive (US$99) but high-quality library of acoustic drum kits for Reason, Reason Drum Kits, in a brief review for Keyboard Magazine. You can read the full review online. What most impressed me was how cleverly the samples were integrated with Reason:

Via what Propellerhead calls â€Å“hyper-sampling,â€Â? you can assemble endless realistic combinations of sounds. Everything’s here: multiple dynamic levels, mics, playing techniques, and other variations of each sample. Thanks to Reason’s ReFill format and features like the Combinator, the variety is inspiring, not overwhelming. Multi-output drum kits automatically connect to Reason’s mixer so you can adjust the mix of different mics.

As I noted, these kits won’t be for everyone, but if you’re a Reason fan and want acoustic kits, they’re a sure bet. Now, Propellerheads is applying the same technique to acoustic pianos, announced earlier today:

Reason Pianos

I like the lightweight approach: the idea is to give you lushly-recorded sounds without bringing your hard drive and CPU to their knees. The Props are emphasizing rock and pop production, so classical pianists might want to look elsewhere (like Native Instruments’ superb Akoustik Piano, or the upcoming Steinway sample library from Garritan). But whatever they say about pop, these instruments could mix nicely with any music production, thanks to the emphasis on mixing as in the drum sets:

1. The pianos: Steinway D grand piano, a Yamaha C7 grand piano, Steinway K upright piano (it’s especially nice to get the Yamaha and Steinway upright)
2. The mix: Four stereo pairs, two mono ins, all mixed from the Combinator
3. Mics and environment: Think hardwood recording studio rooms with both vintage and modern mics. No concert hall here, though if you’ve got a reverb of choice you can add that when you need it (or use one of Reason’s reverbs).

I’ll reserve judgment until I can test these; stay tuned. But do I want more sampled pianos? Yes! Yes, I do! I’m personally interested because, in their reverb-added and reverb-free versions, they look like they could be perfect resource-light instruments for live performance. I’ll know once I’ve played them.

More Reason ReFill goodness, in case you missed them:

Drums in Glorious Mono: Free Reason ReFill for Reason Drum Kit Owners
Free IK/Sonic Reality Sounds for Reason: TasteFill

Got more ReFills of choice, Reasoners? Let us know.