Drum machines with tubes: from Wurlitzer’s classic SideMan to a new prototype, drum machines can make tubes rock even harder.
What happens when adept sonic inventor Eric Barbour of Metasonix makes a drum machine out of clever circuits and vacuum tubes? Well, in the creator’s words:
“It makes noise … a lot of noise.”
Design in music in a digital world can be about the object as the sound – musical ideas translate from one medium to many others. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with a new visual metaphor, a new creation for manipulating music.
OTTO is a functioning prototype combining interactive hardware and computer software, the invention of Luca De Rosso. He produced the design as a thesis project for his masters’ degree in Visual and Multimedia Communications at IUAV University of Venice. It uses the Arduino open source hardware platform and Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP software, and Luca accordingly is quick to credit the assistance of those two communities. In that sense, two, I think it points to lots of new design in the field of integrated hardware and software – not just standalone hardware or standalone software or generic controllers for anything, but hardware that itself behaves like software.
All photos here courtesy Luca and used by permission; see his Flickr account.
OTTO ~ demo.01 from Luca De Rosso on Vimeo.
Luca sends along some more details of the behind-the-scenes workings just for us. (Thanks, mate!)
By now you’ve all probably seen that excellent video of Kid Beyond illustrating his usage of Ableton Live. Pretty cool, right? If one had such a system, you could loop yourself playing guitar, beatboxing, etc., all perfectly in sync with programmed drum/MIDI tracks and other performers.
Here’s how to set up your own system in a similar hands-free operation style, for about US$10, without having to solder anything. It’ll take you about an hour once you gather the parts required, or less. No joke.
You will need:
That’s it. Here’s how to make it go:
For mobile work, your choices have traditionally come down to one of two choices: either lug your laptop and audio interface, or get dedicated recording hardware with far fewer capabilities. We’ve been following the evolution of the Linux-powered Trinity mobile recorder for over a year now because we’re interested in what could happen between those two extremes.
Prototype Trinity recorders initially failed to impress on the software side: the bundled software focused on Audacity 2.0, a fairly basic waveform editor. That already allows far more than what’s possible with dedicated hardware recorders, but maybe not quite enough to warrant leaving your laptop at home. Since we last saw it, though, the Trinity has gotten two major improvements. First, it’s not naked any more; it’s got a lovely, brushed aluminum case. More importantly, though, it’s got an application worth writing home about: a new, mobile/embedded edition of the powerful, free DAW Ardour called Ardourino.
There’s a simple problem: sound is invisible, and sound synthesis concepts don’t have any physical reality. Knobs, faders, patch cords, keyboards, infrared sensors, touchpads, and the like all work quite nicely for synthesizing sounds. But take a closer look at Bjork’s use of the reacTable, an interactive multimedia interface that uses a camera to track the movements of blocks on a surface. They really are using it to make sounds, those sounds really are visualized in a nice new way (watch the waveforms connecting the blocks), and while the result is some swoopy synthy sounds, the interface does make making them a lot of fun.
It helps that Bjork pulls out some of her synthiest, electronicilicious-est tracks, like Pluto:
and Hyperballad:
And, of course, part of what happens is that the computer screen here has become the interface. When it works — when the visuals match the sounds, and suggest some new ways of constructing music — it really does show potential for this kind of instrument. (Even if you don’t buy into the blocks, the way the visualization itself works has a lot of promise.)
That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Surface, too … but sometimes the gimmick can be a solution in search of a problem. Well, actually, maybe your computer of the future really will be “a big-ass table.” (Thanks, SarcasticGamer.com, for making me laugh so heartily.)
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