Well, that happened. It’s a surreal episode that seems not to have any clear winners, as the US government on one side and hackers on the other face off over what is and isn’t freedom online. The mystery is, what will be the long-term outcome for people making content – or, for that matter, do these kinds of dramatics even really have any logic in your work at all?

While the music tech industry was holed away in the palm tree-lined walls of the Anaheim Convention Center, it seems full-blown war broke out over content on the Internet, in a surreal collision of players. Remember that bleak future painted by opponents of new US anti-piracy legislation, one in which your ability to upload your own content might get caught in the crossfire? It turns out it doesn’t necessarily require new laws, and it could look something like this:

MegaUpload file sharing site shut down for piracy by Feds [LA Times]

And then, in spectacular fashion, the hackers strike back…
Anonymous downs government, music industry sites in largest attack ever [RT]

Updated: The raid successfully stopped MegaUpload from operating … erm, except that it’s now right here, via a direct IP address and other sites appear to be phishing scams, so stay away.

It’s hard to imagine a more heated showdown. The US Department of Justice is behind the raid on MegaUpload, and just happened to time their crackdown the day after sites like Wikipedia blocked out content in protest of more restrictive rules in Congressional legislation, rules that claim to target just this kind of site. (MegaUpload was often named specifically, and – in fairness – had run rampant with pirated files. The authorities may have chosen the date as the founder’s birthday party, unrelated to yesterday’s blackout.) But that’s almost not the oddest thing about this story: it places a site endorsed by a number of high-profile musicians opposite labels like Universal Music Group. And don’t forget reports that the CEO is using an alias and is married to Alicia Keys, for added potential drama.

Now, clearly, MegaUpload was a venue for a significant amount of copyright infringement, and it’s inarguable that its owners benefited from that infringement. But artists themselves are already crying foul, partly because a service they used is unavailable. For instance, online radio station SOMA FM protests via Twitter:
“FBI shuts down megaupload .com, claiming no legit users. However lots of indie artists used it to send us (SomaFM) their new music.”

Show of hands. Are you now thinking:
1. I’m relieved! Now that the Federal government is cracking down on these sites, I can at last have the financial security as a musician of which I’ve always dreamed! Clearly, this will help drive more money into sales of music and other creative content, and we’ll all benefit!

2. Great. This will really mean is the next time I try to upload something, there will be all kind of annoying restrictions imposed voluntarily by services to avoid getting shuttered, all because people had to upload Adele albums. I’m just trying to send a darned demo.

3. Who was using MegaUpload, anyway?

Tally to follow.

In the meantime, these fireworks with Anonymous are sure entertaining to watch.

One alternative possibility occurs to me. Because it’s clearly possible to shut down MegaUpload without the benefit of damaging legislation, the MegaUpload closure actually makes an excellent case against the need for restrictive new laws. In other words, you can shut down an obvious infringer like MegaUpload, while leaving loads of other sites that support user content, and you didn’t have to change US law. So, even though Anonymous scored a dramatic protest, the raid itself might actually make a good case against new, tougher laws.

Downpressor, via Twitter, remarks “I’m not sorry to see sites like that go down.” And that’s the crux of this – a large number of parties actually do agree that some sites ought to go away through some sort of enforcement action. After the explosive saga here settles down, the upshot may be that this is left to enforcement mechanisms within the bounds of existing law, and not the kind of radical new laws recently proposed.

MegaUpload itself, though, may prove to be a bit divisive, because it will be seen through the eyes of some users who used it legitimately, even if those activities were a minority.

NodeBeat is the kind of experimental music application that’s thriving in the age of the multi-touch tablet. Its dynamic interface and sound are built on the foundation of free and open source software tools regularly covered here on CDMusic and Motion. OpenFrameworks, the Processing-like C++ library, handles the UI, as libpd, the embeddable version of graphical media environment Pure Data, manages the sound.

What you get is an open-ended plane on which you can graphically array sequences, far away from the standard grid, for generative and sequenced music. It’s good fun, which made it a hit on iOS. Developer Seth Sandler, working with Justin Windle, did a brilliant job. Then, earlier this month, NodeBeat made the jump to Android, with additional porting work by Laurence Muller. Android has been getting tablets that can hold their own — I’ve enjoyed my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, for instance. But the platform has remained severely starved of applications in contrast to iOS, but at least in place of quantity, there’s some quality: this application being one, tools like Mikrosonic’s RD3 or Reactable orControl or Nanoloop qualifying, too. (I’m not delusional; this does not make it at this point any serious competition for iOS, but it does demonstrate potential for developers. And I’ve already had the chance to use Reactable and Control in live performance, personally.)

That is, NodeBeat was temporarily available on Google’s Android Market. Then, without warning, Google suspended developer Seth Sandler’s seller account. This led to an extended discussion with Seth, other developers, and myself as we watched events unfold, ironically on Google’s own Google+. (Yes, that Google product works, despite what you’ve heard.)

It’s back now, so please, go buy and review it if you get the chance. If you’ve got a compatible Android, you’ve got truly no excuse as it’s a delightful app, and it holds up even in the crowded iOS platform:
NodeBeat @ Android Market
http://nodebeat.com/ (iOS and all versions; there’s even a free, desktop version with source code!)

Okay? Bought it? Good. Now it’s time to talk about how bad this is for a developer.

The account suspension on the Market represents a series of obvious flaws. First, of course, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place – Google support eventually acknowledged the suspension was entirely random, “incorrectly suspended” in the words of support, with no other explanation.

Second, support was largely nonexistent. Days passed during which Seth was left without any information. (Amidst discussions of how “evil” or “open” Google is, I’d sometimes be happy just to see them seem something other than desperately rushed. And that seems to be the primary “Apple-fication” of the market – the company’s rivals now are so rushed to try to compete that they screw things up constantly. “Don’t be crappy.”)

Third, and most bizarre, the application stayed available but payment was impossible, leaving customers confused and unable to buy the app.

Now, horror stories like this weren’t unheard of in the early days of the Apple App Store, and I still hear – with, happily, much less frequency – complaints from developers about Apple’s store and approval process. Apple deserves credit for ironing out those flaws, but from the skeptical perspective of a developer, It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that you may want to consider distributing your software via more than one means. Even as Apple fails to allow that on their mobile devices, that means considering going cross-platform. That’s not a philosophical claim; from the perspective of a developer, you don’t want to be dependent on only one company. Feel free to disagree, but my experience has shown otherwise as I’ve watched developers get burned. (And it’s worth noting that while Google couldn’t sell Seth’s app, Apple could.) Technically, via Android, developers are free on the vast majority of devices to sell direct or sell via alternative stores; unsurprisingly, Seth submitted his app to the competing Amazon App Store and is awaiting approval there.

None of this, of course, excuses Google from a big customer failure on Android Market. And whereas Apple’s earlier hiccups occurred as it was the only game in town, Google is making an uphill battle even worse. With Amazon’s Fire on the horizon, there are two questions to watch: one, can Amazon deliver enough tablets to create the tablet market Android has thus far lacked, and two, will their store deliver a better experience? Meanwhile, Google continues to promise a better Market; it’s all I hear about at developer events, largely because it’s the primary complaint from developers. As tech pundits make largely-unsupported claims like “Android users don’t like to buy software,” as if they’re a bunch of degenerate freeloaders, I’d point to the often-inferior Market and frustrating hardware experiences.

But, let’s put it this way: in addition to the obvious range of iOS choice, yes, there are superb applications beginning to appear on Android. For that, I credit developers like Seth and his collaborators. Even as we push for better audio performance, some of those applications are already running exceptionally well on new tablets and higher-end phones. If you have one of these devices, you can fire these up and enjoy making some sounds. And because you can’t always rely on another vendor to get things right, having cross-platform, free and open source tools behind these applications means developers have the flexibility to adapt to a changing market, and to focus on creative design and not constantly reinventing the wheel.

Here are some notes on NodeBeat’s creation on our forums.

And let us know what you think of NodeBeat, or if you do have an Android device you’re using for music (or a Fire on pre-order, for that matter).

Moog Music’s synth Animoog is out today. Synthtopia gets full credit for being first; James concludes with the question “time to buy an iPad?”:

Moog Animoog – The ‘First Professional Synth For The iPad’?

I’m looking forward to playing it and having some time to work with it, and fully expect to make some actual music with it, which is the whole point. I can already see that it has some interesting ideas, and it seems an eminently sensible approach to iPad synthesis. It builds on Moog’s software models of their filters, delays, and whatnot, but exploits the iPad’s touch design by assigning morph-able timbres and polyphonic pitch shift to the X/Y pad of the iPad. The results should be terrific fun to play with, and I don’t think I have to test it to assume it’ll be worth a dollar. In fact, given the pricing of computer soft synths, I expect it’ll be worth $30, too.

Significant points: unique synthesis, MIDI in/out support (even so-called “virtual MIDI” with other iOS apps reportedly works), and polyphonic operation, all at an absurdly low price.

http://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog

Moog video tour

This is already looking like absolutely the sort of synth you’d hope Moog would release. It has some characteristics in common with their hardware, it uses code that we’ve already heard producing great sounds in the Filtatron app, and it also remains different from their hardware, tailored to the iPad. Centering it around an X/Y plot for control is also fitting, as that was the central innovation around with the Minimoog Voyager was built as the modern-day successor to the original Minimoog.

Wired has a review (see video); Moog has posted sound samples, below.

Wired’s Michael Calore concludes:

WIRED A varied instrument capable of both subtle and wild sounds. Excellent sound quality. Plenty of presets to explore. Hours of fun, even if you’re not very musical. This is what the iPad was made for. On sale for $1 — which is a steal, people — for a limited time.

TIRED Advanced features are quite complex, and you’ll need to RTFM. Keys are tiny — you can make them bigger, but that reduces the range of notes. And you thought it was tough to wrestle the iPad away from the kids before.

Moog Debuts an iPad Synth From the Outer Limits

Animoog by moogmusicinc

Here’s where I start to lose the plot. It’s only my opinion, but I imagine I may be giving voice to some other folks who feel similar frustrations. My concerns are partly about Moog, but largely about the growing hype cloud around synths for the iPad.

I think it begins here: something about the video above sets my teeth on edge. It’s not entirely Moog’s fault, but it means it’s time for some reckoning with this whole, uh, iPad thing.

In short: the app is sonically terrific, but it’s past time to properly evaluate the usability of the iPad. And saying this is the first “professional” synth, or that you need a synth from Moog just to make music on an iPad, simply isn’t fair.

The iPad Shares Some PC Strengths – and Failings

The iPad clearly deserves credit for what it does beautifully. I spoke to a major music software pioneer last month in San Francisco who shall remain nameless, and I talked to him about why he was so excited about the iPad. He cut straight to the crux of the matter: by allowing you to touch the interface, you more directly interact with a software instrument. (I’m paraphrasing. I think he said it better.)

Here’s the thing: the iPad is then a better version of a software synth, but not a better version of a hardware instrument. It’s a different beast, but it is on some level an evolution of software. (I would argue this is why my ongoing criticism and praise for the iPad, whether or not you agree with it, has been consistent. I was initially concerned about software lock-down or consumption-focused applications because I was judging the thing as a computer – and likewise found things like MIDI input and output equally useful. That is, I’m certainly biased, but I try to be at least consistently biased.)

And as a result, something about the teaser video above looks horribly, terribly wrong. The modern Moog Music is the brand that, more than any other, more than any boutique modular vendor or blog or synth builder or eBay find, has stood for the beauty of hardware design. This is wrapped up with lots of mysticism among their fans about the sound of analog – some legitimate, some not, some misunderstanding the role of digital circuitry in making analog gear work, and some very real. But more than anything else, it’s about the value of designing hardware that integrates sound-making with physical control.

Having spent the better part of the summer having design discussions about what individual knobs should do, I can tell you first-hand that designing hardware is radically different from designing software. I enjoy each uniquely for this reason: software lets you do anything; hardware forces you to make choices.

If we had simply fetishized beautiful Moog gear with its wooden endcaps and such, then this criticism would be unfair. But I’m assuming it isn’t just nostalgia that makes us appreciate those designs.

Framed by that beautiful gear, artist Marc Doty looks frankly ridiculous tapping away at a screen you can’t see. It looks wrong for two reasons: one, because you know that the experience of the Moog hardware is so very different, and two, because the effect of playing the iPad is somehow incongruous, too.

Now, obviously, our friends at Moog I’m sure aren’t suggesting that we switch from their hardware to iPads. But it’s worth saying why I think the two things are so different, because in the celebration of the cheapness of software, and Moog’s own marketing blitz for their new app, it might otherwise get missed.

Tap, Tap, is This Thing On?

Of course, computers look ridiculous. We all know this. Seeing someone behind a computer is a problem precisely for the reason that watching someone play a video game is ridiculous: the human is involved in an essentially abstract activity in which physical motion only makes sense with visible feedback from a screen. People repeat this criticism to me when I see them the way that people repeat greetings like “Good Morning.”

Illustration:

“Mornin’!”
“Hey, you doing?”
“Pretty good, you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Weather’s nice today.”
“Yeah, winter’s coming.”
“How’s your work going?”
“Busy.”
“You know the problem with computers? They lack the kinetic experience of connecting a physical gesture to a sound, because of the natural abstraction of software. The keyboard/mouse interface paradigm introduced in primarily with the 80s Macintosh and copied from the XEROX PARC GUI research was never intended for musical use. The convenience of the computer is unassailable, but we have this fundamental interaction model problem. Audiences are therefore un-engaged in laptop performances, because all they see is a person behind a glowing laptop screen with the Apple logo. They could be checking they’re email.”
“Yup. Laptop music sure is f***ing boring. Guess you’d better by a f***ing fader box for fifty bucks. So, see you tomorrow?”
“Ciao!”

The problem is, tablets (okay, iPads, since that’s all anyone at the moment is buying), while they look different than computers, can also look just as absurd. Somehow, they’ve escaped this criticism, perhaps because of their newness. Well, dear iPad, it ends now. The laptop has stood up to these complaints, and we know why we use them anyway. We make fun of them, and they’re tougher for it, and we still love them. Now it’s your turn. We may still use you, but you’re going to have to play with the grown-ups now and start to answer how wildly un-musical and un-usable your plain glass screen can be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m fully aware of my own checkered past. I spend large amounts of my time looking silly. (This extends to a great many things in my life, but let’s focus for now on how stupid I look a lot of the time making computer music; lest this post become the size of Wikipedia.) I’ve spent years looking silly and strange using a laptop, since I first played with a computer in 1993. I did it enough that I knew, each time I heard someone reflexively complain about musicians “checking their email,” I was exactly the sort of person they meant. I have seen the enemy, and it is me.

But I have enough expertise in looking stupid to have a sinking suspicion that we must be very, very fast approaching the day where we start to (rightfully) make fun of the iPad, too.

This is not to say you should sell all your computers and trade them in for modular synths – though I do know some people reach that conclusion. I think software is a wonderful thing, in case that wasn’t blatantly and painfully obvious. It allows us greater flexibility of use, and the ability to create sounds you haven’t heard before.

The iPad is a terrific, new marketplace for such synths, because of a voracious consumer base and easy distribution. I doubt the Moog synth would single-handedly motivate an iPad purchase: you either want one or you don’t, and if you don’t, there are so many other ways of making sound I seriously doubt you’ll be genuinely missing out. If you do, you’ve probably already loaded up with other synths, and this one could provide extensive good times. And that is a good thing.

The danger is, in the understandable enthusiasm for embracing this market, we might lose sight of the fact that the iPad shares a lot of the same problems as the computer. To be fair, you can connect MIDI input and output to the Moog app, thus adding more tangible control. And X/Y touch works very well for continuous control, on the iPad as it did, once upon a time, on touch sensors on early Buchla synths.

But Moog, uniquely and more than any other iPad developer anywhere, had better start to think about how they will distinguish between the message about their iPad app and the rest of their hardware, especially since their hardware costs a lot more than 99 cents – and rightfully so.

I really wasn’t joking earlier today when I said I’d trade in my iPad to have a Moogerfooger ClusterFlux instead.

To be clear: the Animoog app benefits greatly from X/Y touch navigation, and you can replace the keyboard with MIDI input to make it far more playable. The issue is simply that what you wind up with is a different – if also powerful – experience from what you get from Moog hardware. And the actual programming outside of the X/Y pad can still be tricky on the iPad’s screen, which has been the ongoing issue with mice on computers.

Good Times Ahead

The big picture is brighter than the iPad alone. Musicians are finding ways of keeping their laptops onstage, but focusing on their performance – of instruments, of controllers, of vocals. Computers themselves can disappear, without losing their flexibility, as we saw with DJ sniff’s display-free Mac mini rig. And the same embedded technology that powers the iPad is finding its way into other tools that are more musician-friendly, even if they lack Apple’s magical, consumer-inspiring tech. Chris Randall’s Beepcat project proposes using the BeagleBoard embedded platform as open hardware for distributing all the power of software synths, without the clunky computer. (More on that soon.)

The iPad, too, can be a useful tool, so long as we appreciate and work around its limitations, as we’ve learned to do with the computer.

This is, of course, the beautiful thing. It’s not about whether you choose analog or digital, iPad app or Ableton Live on Mac or Pd patch running on Linux, hardware or software, knob or switch or touch ribbon or Theremin. We have a wide spectrum of possible choices. There’s great experimentation on the iPad, and the best way to appreciate that experimentation is to realize how many people are tackling it, in many different ways. The iPad synth developer is given a radically imperfect device with all sorts of problems; that’s what makes their solutions so interesting. Because the iPad looks so silly, it’s important to make it sound really, really good, just as the mouse and keyboard and office machine rig that is the modern computer has been transformed by software that can make you love the thing.

First ‘Professional’ Synth?

So, on that note, one final criticism. I’m disappointed that Moog marketing chose the phrase “First Professional Synth Designed for the iPad.”

Yes, this is the sort of thing marketing people do all the time. But it’s no less unfortunate. And I thought it was a bit funny to see in comments on Synthtopia’s excellent preview people saying that they were excited about it because it came from Moog.

Don’t assume that for a second. Assume the opposite: the Moog name means it better be damned good, or you should get your pitchforks. (That’s even truer given that the Moog brand was in the hands of some less-than-stellar owners once upon a time.) We love Moog the way we love the New York Yankees – we love their achievements, and we’ll spend the extra money, in order to celebrate those victories – and be equally savage if they don’t live up to their name. My sense from the people I’ve talked to at Moog is that they’re aware of these expectations, and the expectations, not the assumptions can be what’s motivating.

Independent developers have done some fantastic work in iPad synths, work that obviously influenced the creation of the Animoog. Implying their work was somehow not “professional,” when this synth is built on that work, is insulting.

I’m not holding a grudge here, because the people I know at Moog are uncommonly supportive of the work of other creators. It’s the Moog marketing department’s job to say their thing is the “only” or “first” pro tool. It’s my job to say it’s not, and to pay just as much attention to developers you’ve never heard of as the ones that have. And I know when people feel I’m not doing that job well – whether I think that criticism is fair or not – I hear about it. (Oh, do I.)

We love the Moog name, we put it on t-shirts and drink beer with it on the label and get tattoos and go to festivals named after it because we love the designers who built them, and the feeling of using their designs, and the sounds they make when we plug them in, and the music we produce together with and made for people we love.

Apple? Moog?

Just a brand.

And in the end, if we’re willing to pick up the thing and look really silly tapping away at a piece of glass, we’ll know that the software is very, very good, indeed.

Now, let me update my iTunes credit card information.

Since CDM doesn’t have an editorial board, and this is just me talking, we really do welcome your feedback. Am I pulling too many punches, and you want to go further? Do you disagree, and want to write up an op-ed? Fire away in comments, and if someone would like to write a response / rebuttal, we’ll publish that here or link to your own site. Also, if you think I look silly, you may feel free to call me names; I’ve only ever deleted really rude comments. -PK

You’ve heard the gripes, and heard and seen the somewhat unscientific demos. Now it’s time to examine the over-compression of music with – science! Earl Vickers of STMicroelectronics examines the Loudness Wars in an academic paper, as noted to us by reader photohounds.

The Loudness War: Background,
Speculation and Recommendations [PDF Link, sfxmachine.com]

The paper comes from last November, but it’s as relevant as ever. It’s not just the usual take, either. Its history begins with Phil Spector and vinyl, considering the impact of broadcast TV and not just the music industry. It notes the evolution of compression technologies, particularly multiband technologies.

Most importantly, though – and I’ve spoken regularly to mastering engineers about this – the paper turns to the issue of listening fatigue. Here’s one whithering criticism of the industry on that: some engineers even believe that thoughtless over-compression could be to blame for the decline of the entire industry.

Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig stated, “People talk about downloads hurting record sales. I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”

You’ve seen much of this before, but rarely in such well-annotated, comprehensive form.

Best of all? The conclusion applies lessons from Game Theory to work on making the loudness wars come to a conclusion.

Here’s another thought, too: with artists increasingly self-releasing or releasing through more specialized labels, greater access to music online, direct-to-consumer distribution, and online replacements for conventional terrestrial radio, many of the factors that produced some of the oddest hyper-compression at the top of the charts are fading into the background.

Pax Musica for the loudness wars, anyone?

For a very different aesthetic take on the United States’ Independence Day celebrations, here’s electronic producer Steve Nalepa joining visualist superstar Johnny de Kam for a collaboration. I find it makes for some nice, chilled-out Monday, July 4 inspiration, wherever you are – no marching-band bombast required. Nalepa has been sharing his Ableton skills with the Dubspot school, online and off, and Johnny de Kam, if you don’t know his work, is one of the leading visualists on the planet, a skilled craftsman of motion and live visual performance, as well as a founder of visual software maker Vidvox.

See, what has America accomplished if not send a man to Jupiter and put human civilians on a permanent space station served by daily commercial Pan Am flights? Wait a second here…

For an alternate take, here’s a second video, also by Johnny for the same track — thanks, ChuckEye!

Now that I’ve opened that can of worms, by posting a 4th of July video — or, erm, box of firecrackers — it’s worth saying that symbolic holidays can be a time for reflection on how we relate to our civil societies.

For all the more troubled parts of America’s history, there are reasons to celebrate, too, as an international community of artists, the sequence of events that would eventually enshrine in US law protections for freedom of expression, religious practice, separation of church and state, and a free press – institutions that around the globe are closely interconnected with our freedom to create digital music and motion. (I can say that, doubly, too, because I’m not actually in America at the moment, and the US is cutting those patriotic fireworks shows to make a gesture toward budget cutting – take that to mean what you like.) But as I talk to artists from Moscow to Sao Paolo, I find common themes in fighting to build free communities of artmakers, that transcend history and borders. These may not involve fighting the British Army, to be sure, but there are legal and civil policy decisions, philosophical ideas, that are part of these historical events, too.

There, in case someone were to decide to go on a flame war about US holidays given the video’s theme, I’ve gotten my word in and can leave you to it. Now, I’m off to celebrate my Fourth of July with the awesome people of the Netherlands. (Neth-er-lands! Neth-er-lands!) And yes, to my home nation, I hope as always for a bright future.

Oh, and if you’re mostly celebrating the Nation of Ableton Live, here’s one of those Nalepa videos I mean… as a tasty, watermelon dessert on this post.

On tablets, on displays, multi-touch control these days is calibrated largely as a software interface – more Starship Enterprise panel than violin. As such, it works well for production tools and exploring compositional ideas. But it falls far short of being an instrument: even on the much-hyped iPad, touch timing and sensitivity is too imprecise, and the absence of tactile feedback and real, kinetic resistance makes you feel like an operator rather than a musician.

Several projects in experimental instrument research seek to change that. But of all of them, the one that has generated the most enthusiasm is Randy Jones’ Soundplane, co-developed with hardware designer Brian Willoughby. CDM shares a conversation today with Randy about his brilliant Aalto synth, and I’m working on a review soon. But wonderful as Aalto is, many of us are still eager to hear more of the Soundplane controller. I chose to wax poetic and optimistic back in December of 2008:
Intimate Control: Multi-Touch, New Models, and What 2009 is Really About

I shouldn’t have put a year on my predictions, though – good things take time. (If I could clearly recall what happened in 2009, maybe my general prediction was correct. The past tends to blur together for me into a continuum in the manner of the modern technologist, a vague assemblage of stuff that happened in the 60s with things that are actually still in the future.)

The good news: Randy continues working on the Soundplane, and Aalto will help.

Continuing our interview, here are the thoughts most relevant to Soundplane — and a glimpse of what it’s looking like as he works on it in the lab.

First, Randy explains his ideas about running a small business, continuing what he had to say in our Aalto story. The basic idea: Aalto’s software will bootstrap Soundplane’s hardware.

I think the whole idea of venture capital is sort of a poisonous one. It’s a little like bands wanting to get signed right away. The first thing you want to focus on is giving up your autonomy, really?

Instead, why not scrape together whatever you can from friends or family and just make something that you can sell right away, however small. I didn’t have enough saved to finish the Soundplane project so halfway through I switched to putting out Aalto as a plan B for paying the rent. Now it’s out and it’s a product I’m proud of that I think reflects where we’re coming from, and it’s going to fund Soundplane development, and it’s letting tons of people know we exist. Just get a foot in the door, do something useful.

He also shares his feelings about patents:

Some people won’t like to hear this, but I applied for a patent on the sensor used in the Soundplane. I know, the patent system is totally broken, and often, if not usually, used in stupid ways. But if there’s one thing I think it is actually good for, it’s to protect small companies like ours that innovate against a bigger entity simply stealing their R&D. This is why it was designed, right? I don’t know if our patent will save the day if such a thing ever happens, but if it does I’d much rather have one than not. It’s a pain to write one but it’s not impossible, you just need a lot of patience. “Patent it Yourself“, Nolo Press, is a good reference.

The patent question raises some additional questions for me – in fact, I’d love to see open source hardware that’s also backed by patent protection, in the same way that the GPL license is made tenable largely through the existence of traditional copyright laws.

But I do tend to agree that in the case of a truly novel technology, which this is, patent protection may be necessary. The question for projects like this will be whether to operate as a conventional, patent-protected design, or whether some sort of open source model with a patent covenant and a copyleft license like GPL will make sense — both preventing exploitation and allowing free experimentation. If there are any IP lawyers lurking around out there, let us know (I have some contacts, too); and definitely let us know if that’s a conversation you’d like us to continue.

In the meantime, the important thing is that Soundplane lives, and using Aalto could help it come to fruition. We’ll absolutely keep you posted.

As proof, though, more shots from the lab:

Also, must-read article from shortly after Jones’ NIME presentation:
Why Soundplane?

The whole article is worth reading, but Jones argues that not only is it likely many people will try to do tactile multi-touch, but it may be necessary. For those of you not all that good at hardware design, you could be just as essential as well to there being any future for these curiosities. The designers need other designers. The hardware needs software creators – lots of them. The software creators need to try lots of ideas. And everybody needs players, composers … users.

It’s all-too-tempting to sit back on the Web and marvel at what everyone else is doing, to take their genius and novelty as an engraved invitation to give up on your own work. “It’s been done before.” “Someone else is already doing this.” It’s probably a topic for a dedicated article, but it’s simply the wrong reaction. “It’s been done before — maybe it’s worth doing. Or doing again. Or doing better. Or doing over and over again.” “Other people are doing this — that means I have someone else to do it with.”

Historically, revolutions aren’t solo pieces. They’re ensembles.

Updated: speaking of work being ensembles, while Randy’s name is most associated with the Soundplane project, credit is due to hardware designer Brian Willoughby, who did the hardware design for the instrument. As he wrote in comments on CDM in 2010, when we covered Roger Linn’s Linnstrument: “For my part, I’ve been deep into the process of designing the analog circuits, DSP hardware and firmware necessary for the product, so it’s nice to poke my head up for a moment and see interest on this site, as well as to hear about other engineers trying new things and inspiring ideas.”

Indies, don’t fear the Apple. The world with Apple’s iCloud doesn’t appear to be that radically different than the one we had before. And that’s a good thing: the Web, not any one cloud sync service, is still the most revolutionary technology for connecting music to listeners.

Updated: commenters online read this as complaining, so let me clarify: cloud sync has already had unfair expectations placed on it. It remains a no-brainer for Apple to implement. The question is, from an artist’s standpoint, what expectations should you have about the impact of the technology on what you’re doing. In the short term, some of those prove to be more limited, and now that there are some details, it’s worth analyzing those details.

I expect developers granted an early test version of iCloud and music will be breaking their NDAs shortly so we hear more details, but here’s what we know.

The Service: Useful, Maybe, Just Not Earth-Shaking

I think Apple’s value proposition is stronger than Google’s or Amazon’s. It looks far more complete, far better-designed, and genuinely usable.

On the other hand, like those other services, what it actually does remains relatively conservative:

Automatic sync – if you buy from iTunes. iTunes’ cloud service will work with files manually synced to iCloud, or with purchases from iTunes.

Benefit from being in iTunes’ store catalog, even if your listeners don’t buy there. For US$24.99 a year, Apple will “match” your music from other sources to entries in their iTunes Library – and “upgrade” them to 256 kbps AAC (though for people buying in FLAC format and the like, that’s not really an upgrade).

Sync files locally. Reportedly, Apple will offer streams and downloads alike. That means at least downloads are an option for people wanting higher-quality files. Just how this works is a bit unclear while we wait to test it. It’s not entirely clear why some reports (like TuneCore) suggested Apple had streaming capability; they have confirmed that instead they synchronize files locally prior to playback.

Sync anywhere you want, as long as it’s made by Apple. iTunes for Mac, iTunes for Windows, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Actually, in fairness, that’s relevant even to players other than iTunes – even the recently-released, open source Miro can talk to your iTunes library.

Don’t get me wrong: it looks like Apple is unveiling the first really viable cloud music service. That shows some serious ongoing leadership from the company that popularized the desktop player that’s still #1 today (iTunes), popularized online music buying with an online store that’s still #1 today (iTunes Music Store), popularized the mobile player that’s still #1 today (iPod), and maintains a nice, healthy chunk of the mobile market (especially if you look at all iOS devices together).

As of today, Apple’s still setting the bar for everyone else. It’s just that, in contrast to the revolution unleashed by iTunes and iPod, the results may not be as seismic this time.

Outlook Cloudy

Let’s review: we’ve waited a long time for online sync. And here’s what we’ve got:

Different services for different devices and different stores. Buy your music from Amazon, Google, and Apple? Own an Android smartphone, an iPad, and a Windows PC with Winamp? You can look forward to beautifully-integrated solutions for … each of those. Separately. Great.

No clear benefit for music makers. Digital Music News points to the folks at Beyond Oblivion. They note this service will simply sync people’s pirated music:
But Wait: Isn’t the iCloud Just Reinforcing Bad Habits?

Because even if rights owners are properly licensed, this is merely making billions of stolen music files more accessible. And that’s supposed to be a solution? “We can’t enrich the music industry, we can’t enrich artists, we can’t enrich life, society and culture by continually going to the same 5% who already pay for the music,” Beyond Oblivion CEO Adam Kidron said this morning. “We have to go to a new market.”

I’m not the sort of person who is kept awake at night by thoughts of piracy, but look at this the other way – in contrast to Apple’s initial unveiling of the iTunes Music Store, I don’t see any clear evidence that this will encourage people to buy more music. Not yet, anyway. Your best hope is that somehow this fairly modest sync ability will encourage people to buy more music, likely from iTunes (or Google Music for their Android, or Amazon for their likely-upcoming Amazon tablet). But that’s a stretch, and likely to be a drop in the bucket compared to the ongoing slump of the CD.

Hello? Anyone? I’m the Web? Did you forget me? Although it’s not as mind-bogglingly inexplicable as it was with Google, Apple seems to have forgotten the Web. Apple themselves pointed to the growing popularity of the camera on the iPhone, but ignored in the keynote the reason for that popularity – the ability to spread your photos with Twitter, Facebook, Web apps, Instragram, and the like.

For a service that takes music online, there’s really no ability to use that online information to share what you’re listening to, or get recommendations from other people. Nor is there any kind of API that would allow artists, labels, and creative developers to help build an ecosystem – even though such an ecosystem would potentially benefit music.

In fact, looking to rival Google, YouTube is far more relevant to getting your music out and actually generating new listeners and fans there than this cloud service is.

From a purely business perspective, the cloud so far looks surprisingly barren. It’s a huge gamble that some modest sync features – themselves designed to remove obvious, counter-intuitive annoyances – will make online music listening any more popular, or help musicians earn more from their work.

Winners, Losers, and Vinyl

I’m awaiting a response from Merlin, the folks who represent a huge share of independent labels, and who have protested their treatment in the licensing process.

I’m also hoping to hear more from services like TuneCore, who, for an annual fee, allow unsigned artists to get their work on iTunes. (I’m testing this as an artist and as a journalist myself.)

My bet: the one winner here is TuneCore. Artists may now have to pay the $50-a-year “tax” (erm, make that “service fee”) to TuneCore just to ensure their music will work with iTunes Match – and that people eager to buy cloud-ready music can. Don’t get me wrong: TuneCore provides some valuable services, but irrespective of what they offer, we’ll see whether this winds up being something that brightens independent artists’ day — or is just a pain in the … uh … cloud.

And all of this…

I…

I’m, sorry, I feel a blasphamous, snarky comment coming on. Oh, screw it. Turn to your blogger side. Filters off.

Vinyl records right now are more relevant to independent musicians than cloud sync.

There, I said it. I’m not even sure if I agree with it, but I might, and at least it sounds damned good.

The Good News

Maybe it’s time to stop looking to big companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google to chart the future course of music. Maybe the biggest platform doesn’t come from any one company, or any one, shiny device.

Maybe it’s just the Web. After all, it was the Cloud before anyone thought of calling things the Cloud.

I’ll believe in it, until I go to — borrowing Jobs’ words — that great, big hard drive in the sky.

At first, it seemed like it might be just a blip: amidst generally declining sales of physical music, down sharply from their 1990s boom, vinyl sales were trending up. The reversal started with a slight uptick in 2007 – already noticeable as the CD had begun its collapse. That slight uptick has turned into a small boom. From a tiny 300,000 units in US sales in 1993, the vinyl record is projected to do some 3.6 million units in sales. Source:

Vinyl Projected to Grow More Than 25 Percent In 2011…

Let’s put some of this in perspective. Even with explosive growth, vinyl remains at the margins, representing 1.6% of physical sales in the US. In fact, part of the fetish around vinyl is evidenced by the fact that people would make this headline news – fans of the vinyl record are understandably eager to hear their format of choice is doing well. As a point of comparison, in the last 30 days, just one independent band website, Bandcamp, has done US$640,513 in profit for its members. That’s profit, not revenue, and it’s often going directly to artists.

You can also, via Digital Music News, compare to vinyl’s years as the dominant format, which makes this all look very niche:
The Vinyl Comeback, In Historical Perspective…. (Thanks, JP in comments.) That graph doesn’t show per-unit cost, and anecdotally, artists seem closer to the record release process than they once were.

That said, vinyl’s significance in the new world order is arguably more about its cultural meaning than its numbers. (Getting away from numbers – cough, digital – is the point.) Cutting a vinyl record today is about making a physical artefact of a release. It carries with it prestige. Its scarcity is part of its value, with exclusive 12″ releases again returning to the days when DJs were judged by the obscure gems in their collection, not the disposable digital hits.

And I can see any number of benefits to vinyl’s reemergence:

• Bringing tactile back. Records as objects are a pleasure; I’m the last person to argue there. There’s a ritual to putting on a record that changes how you feel about the music, versus the seemingly-infinite, ephemeral digital jukebox.
• Keeping vinyl DJing alive. At this point, it seems more about preserving the record and mixing rather than scratching, but vinyl remains essential for people DJing with turntables. Notably, unlike faking it with digital control vinyl, using actual records is also more reliable – a slight flaw or vibration won’t bring the whole mix to a standstill. (Analog most definitely fails more gracefully than digital.) That makes the presence of vinyl releases doubly important to getting to hear traditional DJ technique.
• Keeping the cutters, and players, in business. The demand for vinyl records, whatever may motivate it, means everything from turntable repair to disk lathe shops remain healthy.
• The sound is unique. I’m leaving perhaps the most significant point for last. The sound of vinyl does remain unique, precisely because of some of its limitations, and I don’t think any amount of fetishization would please some of its consumers if it didn’t sound good.

When I spoke to Anika earlier this year, she brought up the economic point, too – that vinyl keeps things physical, and supports artists. Now, financially, it may be a tenuous point – look at those Bandcamp numbers – but “support” for artists is more than financials alone. And viewed in a larger effort to express the value of music in tangible form, vinyl makes sense.

Vinyl, incidentally, doesn’t have a monopoly on tangible music. Even digital has made various plays on the concept – one of the most unique being Ghostly International’s effort last year to produce “totems” for Matthew Dear, physical objects that represented the spirit of the intangible music.

Sound, above all, is cited as the primary rationalization for vinyl’s resurgence, but that’s where I feel a bit more conflicted:

• Mastering digital for vinyl isn’t the same as a “direct-to-analog” process. Here’s where things get weird. Remember in the early days of CDs, seeing the letters “DDD” and hearing about fully digital signal flow? Now, we have an oddly inverted situation. People are making music almost entirely inside computers, with software like Ableton Live, doing a digital master, and then printing the whole thing to … vinyl. There’s nothing to say that can’t work, but it seems to me a potential mismatch of source material and recording medium. (More on that in a moment.)
• Psuedo-science, go! Let’s face it: there’s plenty of voodoo around “digital,” and plenty of voodoo around “analog.” In the digital domain, the faux science tends to manifest itself as unsupported claims about the value of absurdly-high bit rates and sample rates, or, if you’re really unlucky, gold-plated digital interconnects. In analog, you’ll routinely hear people claim that analog captures “more” sound, because digital leaves “gaps” between samples, missing that both are constrained first and foremost by the transducers. Analog or digital, these are based on misunderstandings about fundamental characteristics of how sound is reproduced and heard from recording media. I think it’d be unfortunate if the genuine value of vinyl and the unique characteristics of its sound were obscured by claims about recording that simply aren’t true.

Vinyl itself is surely not to blame here; it should just raise some questions. Presumably, not all digitally-produced music really fits vinyl as a medium. And the right way to make that fit work is to really listen and apply some scientific understanding of the process.

Vinyl is that it is a unique medium, one with imperfect recording characteristics. That means whatever the source, you do need to mix differently, which makes a recent piece in Electronic Musician very admirable, indeed. (Disclosure: I have never mixed and mastered for vinyl, so I can only look upon this as an enthusiastic listener and interested observer. I welcome feedback from those out there who are more qualified to investigate the questions I’m asking.)

Learn Mixing | Tips for Mixing for Vinyl [Electronic Musician]

Gino Robair, one of my favorite EM writers over the years, goes through some detail about preparing mixes for vinyl as the delivery medium. Part of what you’ll find is a reminder of why engineers were excited about digital in the first place: there’s a greater ability in digital recordings to capture certain details of the high and low end that would distort in an analog recording. So long as you go into the reality of these limitations with your eyes (or make that ears) open, it can be a good experience as a producer, and for your listeners.

This raises still more scientific and perceptual questions, though. I’m not entirely convinced – I haven’t seen evidence in either direction – that it’s in any way necessary to use a 24-bit, 96kHz master for a vinyl release. (Gino points to the example of Arcade Fire using that as the master.) It certainly can’t hurt, especially in the era of cheap storage. But as in direct-digital delivery, the question is whether you really gain from the higher-resolution file. The only way to know for sure would be to do lab-style experimentation and find out, and as readers have lamented on this site before, there’s not a whole lot of that going on.

Vinyl’s good; vinyl’s unique. (So, too, are cassette tapes and other media with which music producers have been re-discovering of late.) It just means that any claims about vinyl’s resurgence should be scaled against the growth of other distribution outlets, and that we should ask honest questions about sound, not just accept either digital or analog claims of “quality” without evaluation.

So, I purposely raise the points above more as a question than a statement. I’m curious to hear from people who are producing and consuming vinyl records, in terms of what they’ve found satisfying and what they’ve found disappointing. (I mean that, in particular, in regards to certain releases – I’m sure some are better than others.)

And I also wonder whether it’s possible to begin to appreciate digital recording with foresight as much as it is vinyl with hindsight. How can we make the most of the format we have today? How can we understand it, in virtual form, as physical object?

At the end of the day, “analog” is not real. (Hence the name.) A recording is an artificial and imperfect snapshot of an event that occurred in the past, frozen in time in an impossible way. It’s what is beautiful about recording, and what terrified, or at least confused, some of those who first heard it. It is a technology conceived as a precursor to email, as a kind of business memo. It has become to many what music is, rather than the reflection of musical performance. It has had a devastating impact on many forms of live performance, emptying bandstands and causing live players their livelihood before anyone became concerned about whether the record industry that was left would lose its financial well-being.

The “record,” whether it’s a cassette tape or a FLAC download, is strange and unnatural, with the ability to bring to life dead musicians and performances that never existed in one place.

And yes, we do really love it.

There’s a peculiar false controversy going on at the moment over music notation. First, the blog for online (Flash-based) browser notation editor Noteflight introduced a manifesto:
Music Notation Today, Part 1: A Brief Manifesto

The essay by president Joe Berkovitz is a good read, but it oddly makes the comparison between notation and recorded sound, which is a bit like saying a telephone is better than a DVD. One is interactive and intended for human conversation; one is not. So, go ahead and enjoy the copy of Inception that arrived from Netflix — just don’t take it as an excuse not to call your mother. It’s an argument notation will win, to be sure; it’s just not really a very fair fight.

That is, of course, the implication of Berkovitz’s argument, but the failure to state it overtly prompts Synthtopia to run with the comparison:
Does Music Notation Matter For Electronic Music?

Synthtopia’s James Lewin then goes on to make the following argument:

While Berkovitz argues in favor of “looser” communication of music, an over-arching trend in electronic music has been to give you greater and more immediate control over sound.

I’ve heard this before, and it’s worth asking. But I think if you really ask the question, you’ll find that notation isn’t less relevant: it’s profoundly more relevant.

Yes, indeed, electronic music does give composers direct control over sound for solo work. Lewin goes on to say, “For example, it’s fairly routine for composers to create large scale works, such as soundtracks, without the use of traditional notation.” True — so long as they don’t hire any musicians.

Involve more than yourself, and you’re back where you started. Let’s assume, for instance, you want turntablists, samplists, or controllerists. Great! Oh, wait – you might need to tell them what to do. Now, you could try to explain it to them, but the moment you want to provide any kind of structure to the improvisation, odds are you’ll need some sort of picture.

“Some sort of picture” has always been the core element of music notation. The issue of whether this follows traditional 19th century engraving practice is irrelevant – and entirely inappropriate to many forms of music. But if you draw a picture, whether you use a computer to make that picture or not, it’s a score.

Even working alone, these kinds of representations become critical. We might assume that it “marginalizes” notation because computers facilitate solo work. But as we remember the contributions of Max Mathews this week, it’s important to note that from his first pioneering digital synthesis system over half a century ago, there was always the notion of some sort of musical structure. (In Csound to this day, it’s called a “score,” and not by accident.) Whether you notate on a staff, in pictures, or in code, you create a representation of musical structure in time. In a conventional score, that representation is interactive and open to interpretation. Computer programming languages and graphical patching environments give us new ways of doing this. Sharing that code or graphical patch lets us share our ideas with others. And the moment you want someone to perform a physical gesture to make your music, you return to the same set of needs that have driven music notation for millennia.

There are fancy solutions — see this paper, with lots of pretty images of “spectromorphology,” for one — but how fancy it is doesn’t matter. You’ll need something, even if you scrawl on napkins.

In fact, the moment you want to think about the musical structure, you’re likely to use some sort of visual or representational metaphor. Open up any music software program, and these representations are ubiquitous. Waveforms and spectra are also accompanied by piano rolls, graphs, blocks, colors, and symbols. The Ableton Live Session View has LEGO-style colored blocks. Drum machines represent rhythmic subdivision in units derived from centuries of notation; take away even the handy notes and flags Roland added to theirs, and you still see a grid that you could quickly explain to someone who fell through a wormhole from the 16th Century.

If you want to take any one of those patterns and give it to another musician, then you will certainly translate it into a picture. If traditional notation is the most appropriate, you’ll use that. If graphical notation gets the point across more clearly, you’ll do something non-traditional. But that question has everything to do with intention and communication. You might need to adapt the notation to the technology, but that’s always the case. The turntable requires some specialized symbols, but so, too, do fingerings on a woodwind or plucking technique on a harp.

Speaking as a composer, what frustrated many composers in the 20th century with notation was actually the same criticism typically levied against the computer: notation was too precise, too limiting, too entrenched in certain expectations about measuring time and tune. If you really only wish to organize sound in the privacy of your own home, never involving another human being, you might find these attributes of the computer appealing. But if anything, the computer has given us the potential to be freed from these same limitations, by allowing us to quickly create new graphical and textual languages for representing music, and by reassigning time, tune, and timbre to anything we can possibly imagine. In doing so, they present new frontiers for other human beings to improvise and perform live, whether they’re working with another digital machine, their own voice, or a kazoo.

What has electronic music done for music notation? Simple: it’s expanded its necessity, broadened its meaning and applications, facilitated its storage, transmission, and sharing, simplified its production, exploded its possibilities in everything from graphics to interactivity, and freed it from centuries of accumulated restrictions.

My prediction: if you want to look for the growth area in music technology, it’ll be in notation. We’ll see more of what we already have (conventional notation), and a broader category of what qualifies as musical notation – a greater spectrum of notational systems:

• More kinds of visual musical notation. New interactive systems will facilitate explosive exploration of the connection of visual symbols to sound.
• The display becomes a blank page. Tablets of all kinds – the iPad being only the beginning – will adapt computer displays to forms usable in performance. That’ll be a huge boon to conventional notation and new graphical notational systems alike.
• More connected. The ongoing growth of the Web will mean new ways to edit, share, and view notation. Case in point: guitar tab is massively popular as a a search term online.
• More possibilities. Whereas engraving systems restricted notational practice to certain (largely Western) traditions, open-ended computer notation will make it easier than ever to use alternative notations and non-Western systems.
• More people. People will continue to play instruments. And they’ll need to notate gestures for new instruments as they’re invented.
• More improvisation. Written notation and improvisation aren’t necessarily at odds. Any culture with writing will typically make some annotation, no matter how simple, on a score, even if only squiggles on a sheet of lyrics.

The only way recorded sound would make this go away is if recording makes people stop making live music. But recording, for all the times it threatened to do that, hasn’t succeeded yet in making that happen.

In fact, the potential of digital technology for notation is so broad, so diverse, that it almost does it a disservice to put it in one post. So don’t look at this as a manifesto: look at it, instead, as a challenge, to look at new ideas in electronic music in terms of how they use design, visuals, and textual representation to communicate ideas.

Viewing the world of sound through the grand staff is limiting, and for certain sounds, anachronistic. But to cease to view music through any kind of representation whatsoever would mean abandoning musical thought itself.

I love this definition of music notation on Wikipedia: “Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.”

The word “written” doesn’t really fit; if it did, engraving killed musical scores and writers stopped “writing” when they bought typewriters. Music notation, like language itself, is fundamentally symbols.

Oh, and by the way – editing and sharing scores in your browser? Pretty darned cool. And if you think Internet access isn’t capable of making revolutions happen? Well…

More exhibits:

What about the vision impaired? Using notation does not require having sight; computers have been a boon to expanding access to notation. The late Ray Charles was a Sibelius user; sadly, it seems Dancing Dots no longer supports Sibelius, but there are other options. The GPL-licensed open source Freedots continues to work with MusicXML scores for compatibility with many tools. Dancing Dots continues a variety of software and hardware tools for varying degrees of vision impairment from low vision to blindness. These also include interfaces that enable other music software, notably Cakewalk’s SONAR. A 2006 overview from the Texas School for the Blind and Vision Impaired discusses some of the research and tools.

What about rote learning? None of this is to take away the power of rote musical learning. But that’s independent from the computer question; rote musical transmission is perhaps the most direct means of communicating a musical idea between people, and illustrates how significant human communication is to musical process. And even through rote learning, I would think you might come to understand certain patterns of mode or rhythm, which means internalizing those patterns as some kind of mental representation or symbol.

Where these cultures have writing, they tend to have some form of notation. So, for instance, in India – even in a culture in which oral transmission is common – notation has been found as early as 200 BC.

It’s hard to assemble an April Fool’s Joke involving technology these days, because actual inventions keep proving stranger than fiction. When Google created a prank involving gestures for controlling email, it was only a matter of time before someone whipped up a prototype that actually did the job.

The Moog Music company, therefore, may be asking for trouble. Their highly-entertaining polyphonic Theremin is spot-on parody, down to the “Stairway to Heaven” solo. And part of the geekier joke for Theremin players is the knowledge that the technology behind this instrument makes what they’re describing safely impossible.

But what’s impossible with conventional Theremin technology could be very possible with computer vision – even the goofy gestures in Moog’s faked video. Artist, inventor, and musician Tim Thompson has been at the bleeding edge of new music instruments for some time. It wouldn’t be overstatement to say Tim was using multi-touch before multi-touch was cool. When I shared a booth with him at Maker Faire a few years ago, he had with him FingerWorks hardware, a now-discontinued tactile, multi-touch pad, and was using it to play visuals live. In a pattern too often repeated in technology, the independent niche tool was snapped up by a larger player. In this case, that larger player was Apple – and, apparently backed at least in part by FingerWorks’ know-how and patents, Apple made history.

In a new project filmed by the superb Modulate This!, Tim works instead with touch-less control, using the Kinect to track multiple areas of expression. (Tim is using the free environment Cinder, which joins tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks as well-liked options for Kinect hackers. In this case, the Kinect support itself comes from libfreenect, the open-source drivers for Mac, Windows, and Linux.)

What he’s built, in other words, is a true polyphonic Theremin – able to play more than one line and employ more than a monophonic gesture, all without touch. The joke may be on Moog.

Read the full story on Modulate This, Mark Mosher’s all-original repository for great writing on music making.
An Exclusive First Look at Tim Thompson’s Kinect-Based Instrument: MultiMultiTouchTouch
(Thanks to Tim and Roger Linn for sending this my way!)

Part of the value of trying extreme ideas is to demonstrate not only advantages, but disadvantages. And I still find some reason to express healthy skepticism. The similarity to the Theremin isn’t accidental in the Kinect experiments. These projects also inherit the Theremin’s weaknesses. A lack of tactile feedback means it’s difficult to orient pitch or achieve precise control, without the resistance a physical object provides. Reliance on gestural control also opens the opportunity for accidental input and calibration challenges. (The Kinect fares better than the Theremin, but it’s not immune to similar problems, if for different reasons.) Taking a page from the Theremin, Tim’s physical frame makes a big difference – while it doesn’t provide tactile resistance, it at least creates a point of reference in physical space.

The Kinect also adds a new problem the Theremin didn’t face: latency. All of this means if you still like knobs, keys, strings, or even physical multi-touch (which can in certain variations provide excellent tactile feedback via deformable meshes), you needn’t worry. Your revolution may not be Kinect-ified.

But if there were one perfect design for musical instruments, we’d all play just one instrument. Instead, the history of instrument design across the world is an evolutionary explosion of different tradeoffs, different playing styles, and resulting different musical idioms. Any joke can become an instrument, just as any instrument – to someone – can seem like a joke. And that means if you’re looking for something new, you might just celebrate every day as if it’s April Fool’s Day. No kidding.

Updated: Tim offers some comments. He says what other musicians experimenting with Kinect have told me – that while it has certain restrictions as a solo instrumental controller, there’s tremendous potential for multi-user scenarios like installations. And that is itself significant (back to the question of choosing tradeoffs in order to accomplish goals). Tim writes:

Folks whose goal is to replace conventional instruments are sure to be disappointed, as you describe. You could add more detail on other goals:

Goal: using it for art installations at events like Burning Man, creating new and “casual” instruments which are unusual yet inviting and easy to play. Matt Bell ran an experiment related to that goal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQiyKFDvzkU

Goal: creating controllers which have a much larger visual appeal to an audience, who deserve performers more interesting to look at than someone hunched over buttons and sliders. That’s the reason why musicians like Mark Mosher are interested, in the same way he’s interested in the Percussa Audiocubes, for their visual appeal in performances.

Goal: provide an instrument that dancers can use in performances. I’ll be exploring this in the fall, with a choreographer friend.

Good food for thought; feel free to discuss more in comments.