Lured by the siren song of modular synthesis and DIY electronics, but not sure how to navigate the piles of requisite knowledge – or uncertain what the trip down this rabbit hole might have in store?

For years, Tom Whitwell’s Music Thing was a beloved daily read, as that site and this one were among the early blog-format destinations for music tech. Tom moved on – something about a major day-gig at a paper called The Times, perhaps named after the font? – but that makes us all the more delighted to get a dispatch from him. In this guest column for CDM, he introduces one project, a brilliant FM radio sequencer, but also helps us catch up on reading on modular synthesis and electronics dating back to the origins of the technology. And he has a realistic look at what this will do to your life – all inspired by “pure enthusiasm,” as he puts it, “this is fun, you should try it.”

Hey, isn’t that what the drug dealer said in those just-say-no instructional videos we watched in the 80s? Coincidence, I’m sure. -PK

Since buying a Eurorack modular synth a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time building DIY synth modules and reading about synths and the people who build them. (See reading list, below, if you’d like to do the same.)

The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. My first step was building a few guitar pedal kits and learning by reading the Beavis Audio site. Other people start with noisemaker kits like the Atari Punk Console or circuit bending. They all lead in the same direction — down a very deep rabbit hole. 

There’s a lot to buy – a kind of infrastructure you need before doing anything – soldering kit, a multimeter, and a stock of components. None of it costs much, but it’s hard and disconcerting to buy. Online megastores like Farnell or Mouser will stock 50 versions of every component. Get the part number wrong, and you accidentally order capacitors as small as grains of sand, or as large as golfballs. Smaller stores – in the UK, I use http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ - are easier because they only stock common hobby-friendly parts. 

After making a few guitar pedals, I moved onto synth modules. They’re a great DIY platform. The infrastructure is all there, in terms of power supply, case, inputs, and outputs. Parts are cheap, there’s a healthy and helpful community, and a nice learning curve, from basic utility modules to mind-bendingly complex frequency shifters and vocoders. 

In a year, I’ve built:

• a super-simple, chiptuney oscillator
• a tiny spring reverb driver
• a stupidly-complicated and blinkenlights-covered Arduino-powered Euclidean beat sequencer
• a very useful Arduino MIDI clock
• and a simple but handy 8-step sequencer (see video, below)

For this project, I was inspired by this quote from Don Buchla, the legend of west coast synthesis: 

“My studio at that time was ten feet wide. It was so crowded in there we hauled the workbench out on the sidewalk on good days and set up my oscilloscope and worked out there. [John] Cage came by and for voltage control I had hooked up my keyboard to an FM module that I’d built, a little module that was an FM receiver and I could play stations on it because I had one of the first varactor tuned FMs. Cage, as you can imagine, was just enormously interested in the fact that I could tune each key to a station and then proceeded to play the radio” ( Source [PDF] )

Thirty years later, Don released the 272e module (see Matrixsynth on the announcement), a $1250, four-channel polyphonic FM Tuner. There’s also the ADDAC102, a very fancy stereo €270 Eurorack module [see Synthtopia, with a video]. I wanted something quick, cheap and easy that would let me follow in Don and John’s footsteps. After a lot of searching and a few dead ends, I found the wonderful video demo, below, of a battery-powered FM sequencer based on a €15 radio kit from Germany. 

Projects like this follow a predictable curve. There’s a burst of experimental excitement at the start; receiving the crucial part, building the circuit on breadboard and realizing that — YES! — it’s going to work. 

Then comes a period of frustration and tedium. Re-buying a crucial part you blew up. Fiddling with the circuit so it responds just how you want it. Transferring the breadboard layout to a piece of perfboard, or designing a PCB and waiting for it to be made in China. If you’re using an Arduino or other programmable controller, there’s a long period of writing code, battling feature creep, debugging. 

During this period, you have to really, really want the thing you’re making, dreaming of how cool it will be, how much fun you’ll have playing it and telling everyone about it. 

Tom's FM radio-sequencing module project, in all its glory.

Building music gear is more multidisciplinary than you might imagine. The interface and the feel is as important as the functionality. My Euclidean sequencer is a cool-looking thing, with a big LED matrix. It’s really useful – turning trains of pulses into Afro-Latin rhythms. But it’s fiddly and annoying to use. The FM Radio module could be 50% smaller – and size is important in any modular synth – but this time I wanted good big knobs for fine tuning the signals and control voltages. 

So, as the project continues, you’ll spend time designing a front panel, deciding how many knobs you need, removing ones you’ll never use. And along the way, you’re learning. This time round, I wanted to get the control just right – precise, stable tuning so that stations would stay locked. That meant experimentation and [asking for help on the MuffWiggler forum]. I also spent ages reading ham radio sites, trying to work out how to make a voltage-controlled Shortwave radio (I gave up). 
Eventually, the lacquer is dry on the panel, the parts are all in, debugging is complete and the module is working. The result: either elation and fun, or almost immediate maker’s remorse. It’s bad enough spending money on a piece of music gear that you never love. It’s really annoying spending time building one that you can’t then flip on eBay. 

So far, this FM module is pure fun, an injection of random audio in the heart of the system. Every time I turn it on, something else comes out – pirate dubstep stations, Turkish music, news reports and Bryan Adams. You can filter it, sequence it, use it as a noise source, or let it modulate oscillators or open filters. Listen:

Radio sequencer 2 by MusicThing

Photos of the module:

Reading List

Great online resources for learning about modular synths and the first golden age of experimental electronic music include: 

Ubuweb’s electronic music resources section 
Also at Ubuweb, several editions of Electronic Music Review, a beautifully-designed but short-lived journal boasting Robert Moog as Technical Editor. 

The Red Bull Music Academy includes long, detailed interviews with Don Buchla, Tom Oberheim, Peter Zinovieff of EMS, Robert Moog and Morton Subotnik.

Synapse magazine was a mid-70s journal of electronic music, where you’d find DIY projects from people like Serge Tcherepnin

Vasulka is a huge and rather poorly-organised archive of documents, interviews and transcripts, containing some gems.

Source Magazine was, back in California in 1967, a plush avant-garde journal. Many editions came with 10″ vinyl records, pages printed on transparencies or fur. John Cage was a guest editor, and the magazine carried experimental scores from composers like Steve Reich. Original copies sell for $500+, but the articles and scores have been collected in a book: 
Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 [Amazon]

What’s Next?

Tom is already on to the next build since he finished up the radio sequencer. This time, it’s a shift register sequencer. A what?

A 16-step random sequencer, something between the Wiard Noise Ring, the CGS Gated Comparator and Nav’s BITSY.

It takes random noise to fill up 4 x 4 step 4015 shift registers, shifted by a clock input. The shift registers are looped – either after 8 or 16 steps. 8 of the steps are fed into a DAC0800 analog/digital converter, which produces a 0-8 volt output.

See also the prototype:

Electronic music making has had several major epochs. There was the rise of the hardware synth, first with modular patch cords and later streamlined into encapsulated controls, in the form of knobs and switches. There was the digital synth, in code and graphical patches. And there was the two-dimensional user interface.

We may be on the cusp of a new age: the three-dimensional paradigm for music making.

AudioGL, a spectacularly-ambitious project by Toronto-based engineer and musician Jonathan Heppner, is one step closer to reality. Three years in the making, the tool is already surprisingly mature. And a crowd-sourced funding campaign promises to bring beta releases as soon as this summer. In the demo video above, you can see an overview of some of its broad capabilities:

• Synthesis, via modular connections
• Sample loading
• The ability to zoom into more conventional 2D sequences, piano roll views, and envelopes/automation
• Grouping of related nodes
• Patch sharing
• Graphical feedback for envelopes and automation, tracked across z-axis wireframes, like circuitry

All of this is presented in a mind-boggling visual display, resembling nothing more than constellations of stars.

Is it just me, or does this make anyone else want to somehow combine modular synthesis with a space strategy sim like Galactic Civilizations? Then again, that might cause some sort of nerd singularity that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum – or at least ensure we never have any normal human relationships again.

Anyway, the vitals:

• It runs on a lowly Lenovo tablet right now, with integrated graphics.
• The goal is to make it run on your PC by the end of the year. (Mac users hardly need a better reason to dual boot. Why are you booting into Windows? Because I run a single application that makes it the future.)
• MIDI and ReWire are onboard, with OSC and VST coming.
• With crowd funding, you’ll get a Win32/64 release planned by the end of the year, and betas by summer (Windows) or fall/winter (Mac).

I like this quote:

Some things which have influenced the design of AudioGL:
Catia – Dassault Systèmes
AutoCAD – Autodesk
Cubase – Steinberg
Nord Modular – Clavia
The Demoscene

Indeed. And with computer software now reaching a high degree of maturity, such mash-ups could open new worlds.

Learn about the project, and contribute by the 23rd of March via the (excellent) IndieGogo:

http://audiogl.com

As an addendum to yesterday’s teaser of the Evolution multi-touch keyboard, readers send along a couple of other examples. Andrew McPherson has a terrific example of an add-on, multi-touch, capacitive surface that can go on any keyboard (so, basically the same idea).

Description:

This video demonstrates a set of capacitive touch sensing piano key tops which mount on top of any existing piano or MIDI keyboard. The key tops sense up to three touches each by position and contact area, letting the performer continuously and polyphonically shape every note in multiple dimensions. The system connects to a computer by USB and uses OSC for flexible communication with a wide variety of synthesis software.

See also the paper published on the design, and of course, the video. (Thanks, Andrew! Nice work – will we see more?)

From Vol 14, No. 2 Summer 1990 issue of Computer Music Journal, none other than Bob Moog joins Berklee’s Thomas L. Rhea to evaluate keyboard instrument design, and specifically refers to touch overlays on the keys (via resistive, not capacitive sensing).
“Evolution of the Keyboard lnterface: The Bøsendorfer 290 SE Recording Piano and The Moog Multiply-Touch-Sensitive Keyboards.” (A PDF is available, albeit not a … legal one. Thanks for the tip, Dan!)

And as for the Evolution, the release date will be Wednesday, November 23. Simon Kemper explains, “In just 2 days we will answer all your questions. Also there will be some more videos and tutorials. We also offer a software to control and individualize the evo. It is called “COMM” and makes everything between MIDI and OSC possible. So mapping the evos touch sensors to poly-AT, and so on, is also no problem.”

There are definitely some skills to pick up here, but that’s true with any alternative instrument. I’m eager to try one of these out.

What makes rhythm human? Music technology has introduced machine rhythms, perfectly-calibrated to electronically-perfected grids, yet we know that natural playing is more organic. Or, that is, we know we have certain intuitive preferences. How do those preferences and rhythms really work? And what does that mean for music technology?

Fascinating new research investigates more deeply, using – you know, science!

Here’s the summary of the research itself:

Although human musical performances represent one of the most valuable achievements of mankind, the best musicians perform imperfectly. Musical rhythms are not entirely accurate and thus inevitably deviate from the ideal beat pattern. Nevertheless, computer generated perfect beat patterns are frequently devalued by listeners due to a perceived lack of human touch. Professional audio editing software therefore offers a humanizing feature which artificially generates rhythmic fluctuations. However, the built-in humanizing units are essentially random number generators producing only simple uncorrelated fluctuations. Here, for the first time, we establish long-range fluctuations as an inevitable natural companion of both simple and complex human rhythmic performances. Moreover, we demonstrate that listeners strongly prefer long-range correlated fluctuations in musical rhythms. Thus, the favorable fluctuation type for humanizing interbeat intervals coincides with the one generically inherent in human musical performances.

Hennig H, Fleischmann R, Fredebohm A, Hagmayer Y, Nagler J, et al. (2011) The Nature and Perception of Fluctuations in Human Musical Rhythms. [PLoS ONE 6(10): e26457]

Hear that? One of the most valuable achievements of mankind! (Uh, that makes me want to practice a bit more, as I’m not sure I’d necessarily describe my last gig that way!)

James Postlethwaite, who sends this in, accompanies his news tip with an articulate letter considering the value of the research, so I’ll include all of it here:

Whilst reading the latest issue of the journal Nature (No.7372, Vol.479) I was surprised to se a picture of a TR-808 in the Research Highlights section, featuring research of note in other journals.

The research was about the correlations of rhythmic imperfections in human drummers, which correlate over a longer time period than the random singular imperfections that are inserted by some computer programs. At least I think that’s what it was, as I’m not a mathematician.

I do note that the sample size used in the statistical analysis was only 39 subjects, though the results were of a decent significance. The audio files are available in the supporting files section, CDM has a large readership, t-tests are very simple to run… Just an idea.

It does though serve as a nice reminder that a lot of the tools that musicians use nowadays do have roots in academic research, going back to the days of the early synthesizer. It also reminds me of a comment from a friend who used to own a 909; that one of the charms of this machine was the unique imperfection in the rigidity of the sequencer.
I don’t know if this has been corroborated by other people.

Finally, the piece in Nature magazine seemingly wasn’t written by a fan of electronic music, as it starts: ‘If you have endured much 1980′s pop music, you might agree that drum machines steal the soul from the beat. Their cold regularity is sometimes ‘humanized’ in the recording studio…’. Possibility of bias?

“Endured” 80s pop music? Yes, I’d say that counts as a bit of bias (just on the part of Nature). Imagine reading a story on bee populations, which began “Yeah, Bees. F*** bees.”

But the research itself looks solid and intriguing – and James is asking a variety of other interesting questions, so I’m going to open it up to discussion. Hope this is something we can follow up on. (Academics, attack!)

By the way, a quick search of Nature reveals that the journal regularly publishes material of interest to sound and music – worth noting, as there was a time when that wasn’t true. (Max Mathews was one of the first to help computer music break into the scientific mainstream.)
My search results
And, for example: Rhythmic synchronization tapping to an audio–visual metronome in budgerigars [hint: think tap tempo meets birds]

Updated: Nature wrote a quick blurb: Doctoring the beats
…though it seems from the excerpt that they either didn’t understand or tried to oversimplify the role of rhythmic variation in digitally-sequenced music. The study is, to me, more interesting.

Nerds: It’s an OSC sequencer. It’s JavaScript-programmable for making your own generative music. It works with hardware and other software. You can use it in real-time.

Everyone: it makes spectacularly strange sounds out of spectacularly beautiful flows of geometries through space.

IanniX, the latest-generation descendant of work done by pioneering experimental composer Iannis Xenakis, has been evolving at rapid pace into what may be the most sophisticated graphical sequencer ever. Xenakis originally had to content himself to drawing elaborate, architectural graphics on paper, then later being one of the first to use a graphical tablet for interactive scores. IanniX, backed by the French Ministry of Culture, is now barely recognizable even from more primitive versions that carried the same name. But the idea is the same: graphical geometries represent events in pitch and time, now sequencing other software (any software that can handle OSC or MIDI) to produce sound.

Free on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and now with growing documentation, IanniX can be seen producing the kinds of warped sounds Xenakis made in his music. But it is one of the first steps toward a graphical sequencer that could be used in all kinds of cases. And it’s free and open source under the GPL v3.

I’ve included some of the recent videos that show off what it can do. I especially like the recursive demo. But since it runs on your OS — well, unless you’re sticking to your beloved Atari ST or BeBox — you can just go grab it yourself.

http://iannix.org/en/index.php

My sense is that IanniX could have implications even beyond this software. Imagine a greater variety of music software that begins to work in spatial and graphical interfaces, not just the traditional piano rolls and linear tape-style arrangement views. And imagine that such tools, using protocols like OSC and MIDI, begin to establish common means of communicating with one another over a network. (OSC and, in particular, MIDI, are in need of some evolution to fully satisfy that. But these kinds of tools might be an ideal way to prod that very evolution.)

Speaking of prodding, thanks to Mark Birchall on Twitter for reminding me to write this up.

Now, if I can just find some hyperspace portal to additional space and time to play with this properly… there must be a productivity jump gate around here somewhere.

Sydney-based duo Electrocado (Bill Day + Ryan Whare) have been busy making machines to make music – and banging things. In the video above, their inventive robotic percussionist, triggered via MIDI, plays tunes and rhythms. The CP1 (Creative Project 1) uses servos to control drum sticks (chopsticks, in fact) pivoting on rods, which can then strike metal, plastic, and drum skin surfaces. Playing a G# Minor scale on a xylophone along with drums, the robot responds here to MIDI patterns sent to it by Ableton Live.

You can read loads of commentary on the process of making it in a PDF paper:

“Aesthetic and Practical Applications for Robotics in Electronic Music: Further Development of CP1 MIDI Triggered Robot [all for the Bachelor of Audio at SAE Sydney]

These two aren’t just about building flashy hardware, though. They also have a full-length album debut out, with diverse, stuttering, danceable music. I like “psychedelic glitch trance electro” as the label; various other keywords could easily fit. (The opening track even recalls Akufen; keep listening for a gamut of other goodness.) Intricately composed, sometimes tending into tech-house, the record is as finely-tuned as the robotic machine.

I could ramble on, but it’s pay-what-you-like on Bandcamp, so have a listen:

The Hass Effect | http://electrocado.bandcamp.com/

We’re also treated to the delightfully-named track “The Lugubrious Frog,” complete with some froggy drawing timelapse. Artists, too contribute to the project.

Yet more music, in the form of earlier EPs:

Thanks to Bill for sending this along; you’ll find his site worth a look, as well:
http://www.mrbillstunes.com/

Brilliant work, mates. We’ll be watching.

If you have any questions about their work, ask them here and perhaps we can do a follow-up interview.

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?

AudioGL, a project teased in videos first in April and then again last week, is a new concept in designing a user interface for real-time music creation. Visuals and sound alike are generative, with the rotating, 3D-wireframe graphics and symbolic icons representing a kind of score for live synthesized music. The tracks in the video may sound like they’ve been pre-synthesized, polished, and sampled from elsewhere, but according to the creator, they’re all produced in the graphical interface you see – what you see is what you hear.

The newest video, released this week, reveals in detail the project’s notions of how to make a 3D, live music interface work. The UI itself is similar to other graphical patching metaphors, but here, like exploding a circuit diagram in space, routings and parameter envelopes are seen and edited in a freely-rotating view in three dimensions rather than on a flat plane.

There’s a reason interfaces like this have been few. Computer displays and pointing methods tend to be heavily biased to two-dimensional use, modeled as flat planes like pieces of paper. Working in two dimension is simply easier; there’s no reason you can’t take another layer of parameters and represent it on a two-dimensional interface. And rotating around in 3D space can make it difficult to keep your bearings.

Those challenges, though, don’t make this less interesting – they make it juicier and more delicious as design problem and stunning, futuristic musical model. Freed in three dimensions, a complex set of envelopes and parameters has room to spread out visually, making a kind of spatial score. This particular project strikes an interesting balance between traditional, iconic UI – operators are represented with graphic symbols – and more free-flowing geometry representing the sequencing and envelopes. To me, the latter is more compelling, but putting the two together may make the program more flexible and familiar to users of other music software.

What could knock you out of your chair, though, is the sheer depth of the software teased in the video. This is no simple tech demo: it’s an attempt to build an entirely new, live-synthesizing music tool from scratch in 3D. It’s like the International Space Station of music software, assembled in some void. I got a couple of tips on this today, and some are even wondering if it’s real.

It appears to be very real. Whether this particular tool is usable or not to me almost isn’t important: a spectacular failure in this arena would even be useful. Anyone waiting for some sort of “singularity” in music tech, I think it’s coming: it’s just going to be a singularity of human software ingenuity, explosive creativity and invention from independent developers. I can’t wait.

Stay tuned to find out more about this particular project.

See also the earlier video (not able to grab the embed code for some reason).

Thanks, Bodo Peeters, among others, for the tip.

Science and art alike demand inquisitive exploration and experimentation. So, it’s encouraging that a discussion of the future of the digital guitar here on CDM brings impassioned reader debate. There’s some consensus if you dig through our comments: guitarists are compelled by adventures in new technology, and there’s widespread hope that new tech could expand guitar technique and expression, rather than (as the “Auto-Tune” name has unfortunately come to mean) a replacement for musicianship. And yes, there’s excitement about what Antares is doing – just as it’s possible to go beyond the status quo applications of their vocal tech.

But wait — there’s more.

Reflections on conservatism and guitar tech adoption Rich of Way Music sends over an extended, thoughtful rant, inspired by the discussion and directed at his fellow guitarists:
Amongst the guitar players: conservative fetishization and its discontents ;^) [Way Music]

The payoff of guitar research: Adrian Freed of the University of California Berkeley’s CNMAT research center reminds us that the research work with Gibson continues – and fruits of that research appear in products:

Thanks Peter for the mention of our work at CNMAT, UC Berkeley.
Our interactions with Gibson are ongoing and we continue to appreciate their commitment to innovation.
I am regularly confused by the lens used to talk about our research work, i.e., “Where is the product? Where are the adopters?” Good research rarely results in particular products although products are sometimes good demonstration vehicles for new ideas. Our work (as with much of UC Berkeley’s research) is more likely to sneak up on you over decades as an enabling part of the infrastructure, e.g. the first audio plugin, OSC (used in TUIO), pressure-sensing multitouch (next gen. Kindle?), Ethernet EVB, RISC (in ARM), BSD UNIX (part of OS/X), RAID etc. Watch out for how our work at the PARLAB will enable multicore efficiency for audio and music applications. There are lots of acronyms becoming part of mainstream tools already in that project….

I was going to start hyperlinking those acronyms, but I’m afraid you’ll have to Google them.

Why digital guitars matter: The Auto-Tune teaser brought about concerns about automatic intonation. (I do hear from guitarists that they’re really fond of the new automatically-tuning Gibson “robot” guitar!)

But there’s another side to the ability to track guitar pitch, and that’s the ability to combine the guitar with the sonic powers of the computer. Keyboardists have had the lion’s share of the fun over the years with software synths; just as wind, breath, and vocal controllers open up new possibilities, so, too, do MIDI guitars. While possible with any guitar that can send control, Starr Labs have posted some intriguing demos to their blog; see top and below. (I talked about Starr back in January as they introduced new controllers and guitars.)

Starr blog: http://starrlabs.blogspot.com/

And yes, you can play the digital guitar and still win a best beard contest with your more folk-oriented colleagues.

I really enjoy the Ztar guitar playing techniques. I’d love to see this in action in a performance, so readers – whatever make of MIDI guitar you may be using – do send those in.

I’m not as concerned about the conservatism, real or perceived, of any one artist. I’ll say this: regardless of the instrument, there’s vast untapped potential in new instruments and controllers waiting for brave artists to try to tap. And all of this can still draw upon knowledge and skill in traditional instruments. With a few thousand years of instrumental history at our backs, I’d say there’s no rush.

We just need a better term than “alternative controllers” or “controllerism.”

Maybe … music?

Computing technology is an inherently disruptive thing, wonderfully so. It solves problems you didn’t know you had. It creates problems, then creates new problems in even trying to understand those problems. Simply using a computer is a kind of design statement.

You’ve seen questions about what happens with computer performance and audience interaction. But, in AMALGAM, design student Jacob Lysgaard asks those questions, and proposes solutions, in a new way: with a giant talking robot face. (See above.)

Laptop and electronic performance produces a number of symptoms that can be problematic. As the video roboface above puts it, you might find, for instance,

“A lonely man hiding behind a big table onstage.”

Actually, I sometimes do feel lonely and like to hide. Then again, I don’t necessarily have to invite other people for that. So, in that spirit, here’s the latest in a long line of design ideas for re-imagining computer performance. Maybe at this point, this isn’t solving a problem: maybe it’s design, reorganizing the experience of musical activity around a technology that could really be anything.

The solution Lysgaard devises is really rather spectacular, conceptually. Whereas computer performance “solutions” generally involve novel performance interfaces, here, the design delineates the fundamental problem: “real” space (the live performance that’s actually happening) and “virtual” space (the performance that happens only through the machinery of the digital performance, via playback, interactive or otherwise).

In some sense, this is what all responsive visualizations of music do: they create visual evidence of what you’re hearing, producing the artefact of the activity that the virtual sound lacks.

But, then, you’re not always concentrating on what an acoustic musician is doing with their physical instrument, either; you’re often lost in the music. And that is to say, you might just trip out watching all these bobbing cubes and virtual selves. And I think that’s okay.

Here’s just the visualization of how the scheme works, in case you zoned out watching Mr. Roboto in the earlier video:

Various visualizations are presented on the designer’s Behance portfolio. Suffice to say, while the representations here are abstract, other styles are possible – even M.C. Escher variations:
AMALGAM

Read the full explanation of the project, as well as its inspirations, on Lysgaard’s blog:
AMALGAM – my bachelor exam project

The work was a degree project in visual communications for the design department of the Bergen National Academy of the Arts in Norway.

I love the logo for the project:

I’m saving my favorite bit for last: a kind of visualization – or at least visual reduction – of representations of music in Ableton Live.

Terrific work; Jacob. I’ll be interested to see how this evolves in performance.