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

Guess who’s gotten really bad at keeping a lid on upcoming product announcements? The manufacturers.

We’re suddenly utterly awash with teasers. Yes, it seems from intentional leaks to advance campaigns, we’re now destined to see every significant new piece of music gear before we see it, cast in shadows and partial photos and more. Apparently, the folks doing publicity think that this will cause people on the Internet to talk about them. They’re … right, in fact. And with the biggest American trade show for music gear landing next week, we’re in a flood of stuff.

I would willfully ignore such things, but I think it’s worth a quick round-up just to remind ourselves which booths we should visit next week in Anaheim at NAMM. And amidst more predictable teasers, the other good news is, the synths just keep on coming and coming. Who would have thought it? 2012 could be the year of the synth – again. (Even with MIDI DIN, no less!)

CDM is proud to bring you all this news, last. (I made the coffee and everything, but then seemed not to actually post this stuff when it arrived.)

Let’s take a sneak peak.

The best teasers:

NI tipped me off to their new @Traktor feed. There, we see, curiously, something resembling the colored buttons on color-mod monomes. And that’s all I can see, but I’m told we’ll see more from NI soon. (Note that NI doesn’t have a NAMM booth, so I don’t necessarily expect a NAMM announcement.)

Oddly, after I made a reference to the StealthMountain account, I see that tweet reads “Sneak Peak.” I’m going to assume that either that was a cheeky attempt to attract the ire of snarky grammar-correcting Twitter bots after I made mention of them, or that I should shut up as a lot of 2012 will be about me utterly butchering the beautiful German language.

Ken MacBeth takes the wraps off his MicroMac on The Facebook. “Micro” for Ken means basically “normal size” for the rest of us – the guy designs Paul Bunyan-style modulars. The Micro looks nice, indeed, three oscillators, loads of CV, and a VCF, plus Ken hopes for portamento and glide. This is still a prototype, but we hope to catch it in person. Compare the earlier proto design, second from top (which I actually quite like – anyone else?):

French synth maker Eowave is definitely on my must-visit list, with not one but two compelling new synths. The Domino (top) is a little more in the meat-and-potatoes category, a lovely, minimal analog monosynth. Koma (second top) is a bit more modern-looking and different, combining an analog bassline synth with a push-button step sequencer.

Koma @ Eowave
Domino @ Eowave [rattle your floors with the sound that autoplays]

More has leaked out about the upcoming Casio XW-P1. And yeah, basically, it sounds like what we’re getting is a general-purpose workstation, more along the lines of what Roland and Yamaha offer than the personality of the beloved CZ series. (SonicState does the math, too – it’s been since 1988.) The bad news: it’s a big workstation keyboard rather than something a bit more unique. The good news: coming from Casio, I’ll bet we see some serious value pricing … and you can still get your CZ on via eBay.

SonicState quotes Keyboard:
“A Mono solo section with up to six oscillators: two virtual analog, two PCM, noise, and external audio. Poly section with wide variety of gig- ready sounds. Drawbar organ mode. Six-way HexTone multis. Nine-track step sequencer with dedicated drum track.”

We’ve also got more details on Akai’s second controller-plus-software combo offering, the MPC Studio. (Curiously, if it’s small enough to carry with you, it’s called “Studio.” If it’s so big, you have to leave it in your studio, it’s called “Renaissance.” Got it?) As with the MPC Renaissance, the big story here is that you get a “dumb” hardware controller that doesn’t produce sound, and the operation itself all happens on your computer via software, a la Native Instruments’ Maschine. Unlike NI, though, Akai doesn’t really have a track record to speak of in software, so the big variable is how well their software works.

The MPC Studio, meanwhile, looks far more luggable and is presumably more affordable than its nonetheless cool-looking, monster truck-style bigger sibling.

It does look very, very slim. Unfortunately, with all those buttons crammed on the right side, it looks like a remote control for a home theater. I’ll be interested to try it in person and see if that’s usable in real life.

http://www.akaiprompc.com/mpcstudio.php [yup - URL still looks like "Prom PC" to me]

I’m probably most intrigued by Livid’s latest controller, the CNTRL-R, made in collaboration with M-nus Records and Richie Hawtin. That collaboration is interesting just because of the amount of live parameter control Rich and company are doing live. And Livid and their booth-mates should have loads of good toys. Livid’s Peter Nyboer writes in comments:

We (Livid) are showing with Mode Machines at E1009. We’ll be previewing some eurorack MIDI+analog things that we’ve been working on, the CNTRL:R that ships next month, and all our other controllers and DIY parts. I will also stand in the acoustic center of all the electric guitars and attempt an air guitar performance mimicking all the simultaneous shredding.

http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_cntrlr.php

Nord has a new organ and a new drum module coming. Sweet. I’m holding out for a Nord Virginal.

“The drums of the future come from the past” is the tagline.

Or to put it another way, “The key to saving the future, can be found only in the past.” [1]

Or to put it another way, “The future is history.” [2]

Or to put it another way, “He will erase your past to protect your future.” [3]

Or to put it another way, “Fight the future.” [4]

Or to put it another way, “In the future, one man is the law.” [5]

Or to put it another way, “The people aboard Flight 35 are about to land 1,000 years from where they planned to.” [6, and I hope that doesn't happen during my Delta connection in Atlanta on the way to LA ... again]

If you want to hire me to do your next PR campaign – yes, conflict of interest, blah, blah – give me a call. Several commenters have said I’m a great shill. I think that’s a compliment.

Answers below.

[1] Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

[2] Twelve Monkeys.

[3] Eraser.

[4] X-Files: Fight the Future.

[5] Judge Dredd.

[6] Millenium.

Show of hands – how many of you got them all?

Also on our teaser tracker:
bodo notes:

Loads of new Eurorack by the likes of Pittsburgh Modular, WDM, Syntech, LZX, but the most eagerly awaited modules will probably be the Make Noise Oscillator (yay!) and Echophon (basically +pitchdelay http://soundhack.henfast.com/freeware/ in a Eurorack module)

We know Teenage Engineering is bringing something, and they win the award for most obscure teaser video. (TV dinner, suggests one reader.)

I look at 10 things I’m excited about at NAMM, though I think I may have to remove the one about “surprises.”

See you from Anaheim.

Compare the complex model of what a computer can use to control sound and musical pattern in real-time to the visualization. You see knobs, you see faders that resemble mixers, you see grids, you see – bizarrely – representations of old piano rolls. The accumulated ephemera of old hardware, while useful, can be quickly overwhelmed by a complex musical creation, or visually can fail to show the musical ideas that form a larger piece. You can employ notation, derived originally from instructions for plainsong chant and scrawled for individual musicians – and quickly discover how inadequate it is for the language of sound shaping in the computer.

Or, you can enter a wild, three-dimensional world of exploded geometries, navigated with hand gestures.

Welcome to the sci fi-made-real universe of Portland-based Christian Bannister’s subcycle. Combining sophisticated, beautiful visualizations, elegant mode shifts that move from timbre to musical pattern, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional interactions, it’s a complete visualization and interface for live re-composition. A hand gesture can step from one musical section to another, or copy a pattern. Some familiar idioms are here: the grid of notes, a la piano roll, and the light-up array of buttons of the monome. But other ideas are exploded into spatial geometry, so that you can fly through a sound or make a sweeping rectangle or circle represent a filter.

Ingredients, coupling free and open source software with familiar, musician-friendly tools:

• Two projectors
• A monome
• Processing, the elegant and artist-savvy free software for visual code
• Ableton Live and Cycling ’74′s Max for Live, acting as the interactive glue with the sound world
• Drumaxx, Image-Line’s tasty physical-modeled drum synth
• Native Instruments Battery, the sampled drum engine
• Eclipse, the free IDE, for Java coding in this case
• Community Core Vision and reacTIVision (based on our previous info, at least), free and open source community-based projects for making the interfaces you see in movies happen in real life.

Another terrific video, which gets into generating a pattern:

Now, I could say more, but perhaps it’s best to watch the videos. Normally, when you see a demo video with 10 or 11 minutes on the timeline, you might tune out. Here, I predict you’ll be too busy trying to get your jaw off the floor to skip ahead in the timeline.

At the same time, to me this kind of visualization of music opens a very, very wide door to new audiovisual exploration. Christian’s eye-popping work is the result of countless decisions – which visualization to use, which sound to use, which interaction to devise, which combination of interfaces, of instruments – and, most importantly, what kind of music. Any one of those decisions represents a branch that could lead elsewhere. If I’m right – and I dearly hope I am – we’re seeing the first future echoes of a vast, expanding audiovisual universe yet unseen.

Previously:
Subcycle: Multitouch Sound Crunching with Gestures, 3D Waveforms

And lots more info on the blog for the project:
http://www.subcycle.org/

You may have already seen FaceOSC, free software that eases the use of facial tracking from a computer camera for use as a controller, here with music software (top). Synthtopia picked up the story in July, featuring artist and engineer Kyle McDonald. But one FreeKa Tet has done his own implementation (second from top), and while the video is a bit grainy, he sounds wonderfully terrifying, as if his face is trying to slip out of The Matrix.

Sometimes, I’m rendered entirely silent (no, really, it happens), and it’s best to let videos speak for themselves. So here, after the jump, are some whimsical and wild prosthetic sound light-up … hell, I don’t have any idea what’s going on, but I’m enjoying it.

I dare you to start some conversation about musicality. Just don’t be surprised, comment trolls, if you find yourself abducted by a glowing and oddly glitchy-sounding creature with long, monstrous fingers. I’d watch what I say, frankly. Remember the old saying “on the Internet, no one knows if you’re a dog?” I expect that extends to space aliens, too.

Plenty more where those came from.

Oh, look, I could have done my research and seen there’s a bio for Mr. FreeKa Tet, aka Bacon ClapCLAP.
:

Extreme violent bursts, silence, speech, hard rock samples, strange atmospheres, Burgers , American Idol Icon, crackles, retardation, puking static, rocking a gabber party, cutting a worm in half and watching both parts moving, get a watch tatoo on his wrist, confusing videogames with music, drawing little puke characters on friends faces …

Right. Okay. That cleared everything up.

Enjoy your weekend, folks, and stay high and dry, those of you here on the Eastern seaboard of the US.

If your music and sound collections seem like outwardly-expanding universes, two new tools promise to bring order by representing media as virtual planets and stars. One works on albums and tracks on the iPad; the other uses computer-aided analysis of loops and samples (not just music) on Windows. One will make your eyeballs pop; one might help you manage gigs of samples for a game design project.

Built in the open-source framework Cinder by an all-star team of media artist-designers (Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, Jesper Sparre Andersen and Robert Hodgin), Planetary should satisfy space nuts and eye candy lovers. The metaphor is pretty direct: artists are stars, albums are planets around the artists, tracks are moons around the planets, and you can filter “constellations” by letter. That means the actual structure is heavily hierarchical, actually, in the tradition of iTunes (and, before it, its predecessor SoundJam). I’m not sure what happens with, say, compilations. But let’s face it: the real draw is that it’s incredibly beautiful to look at. I’d be just as entertained looking at a visualization of my system folder if it looked this pretty.

For now, Planetary is some fascinating eye candy with at least basic playback capabilities, iPad-only. That brings some good news – Airplay wireless works, and since it makes use of standard media code, even features like Last.fm scrobbles function. It also brings some bad — while Apple added support for libraries to third-party apps, Home Sharing isn’t included, so you’re limited to what’s on your iPad. Playlists aren’t supported, either. But hook this up to a projector or large screen TV with some of your favorite music, and I don’t think you’ll be complaining. And as a free tool, it’s incredible.

Planetary is available now; free for the iPad. As seen on creativeapplications.
http://planetary.bloom.io/
iTunes link

Less pretty, but with greater facilities on the utility side, is the Windows-only Soundtorch. (Thanks to Kristian Gohlke for the tip!) Visually, it offers a similar metaphor: media assets live on a continuous plane. Functionally, though, it’s more algorithmic than hierarchic, using something called the Computer Aided Sound Exploration engine (C.A.S.E.). The set of algorithms, which the creators say were based on evaluation of human listening, performs a sophisticated set of extractions of some 600 features from each sound file.

Rather than limit itself to albums and tracks, C.A.S.E. is tuned for audio files and loops. It’s fast enough that it can plow quickly through gigs of material. So, if you’re on Windows and have amassed an enormous collection of loops, samples, field recordings, sound effects, and the like, Soundtorch will use C.A.S.E. to first map all those relationship, then visualize them. You can use the mouse to produce new collections of assets, map relationships visually, export those relationship to XML, copy sounds to the clipboard, export to WAV, or open them in Windows Explorer. That is, all that eye candy is a genuine interface, not a barrier between you and what you might do (as so often happens with these sorts of experimental interfaces).

In fact, you might argue that, despite outward appearances, Soundtorch is entirely different from Planetary, but they share one common conceptual assumption. Related media “orbit” or attract to common materials. The difference is that Soundtorch is relational. In Soundtorch, if you “magnetize” a file, it – and any similar files – become attracted to attractors called “magnets.”

As is appropriate searching for media, the “torchlight” metaphor shines a light through files. Everything under the light plays back simultaneously, so you don’t have to audition sounds one at a time. (That sounds slightly terrifying to me, but I have to spend more time with it in an actual library.)

The creators describe the magic thusly:

Have you ever listened to a sound and felt that there was a similar one somewhere on your hard disk? And the sound you can’t find would just work so much better right now? Well, Soundtorch also remembers all sounds that you ever listened to. Just select any sound on Soundtorch, and let the system suggest the most similar ones from your whole collection.

In other words, SoundTorch is as much about what you can’t see as what you can – the intelligence to determine similarity behind the scenes. Check out the tech talk in the video above for more information on how “aurally and visually-enhanced audio search” could also apply this technology. More research at:
http://www.accessive-tools.com/

Soundtorch 2.0 entered a free public beta last week. It was developed in Microsoft’s C#-based XNA framework.

Grab the download:
http://soundtorch.com

Finally, if you want to hear the “Optimist” track by Zoe Keating without that voiceover and just enjoy Planetary’s gorgeous visuals, here you go:

From innovation in the visual interface to the intelligence underneath that changes how the computer interprets relationships between files, finally, there’s hope. Music and sound might not forever be trapped in views borrowed from spreadsheets, tables modeled on the needs of accountants 30 years ago.

Onyx Ashanti is insane – in the special, essential way that makes certain brilliant musicians. An experienced busker, having crossed from the US to Berlin, he’s a rare virtuoso of wind instruments and electronic improvisation, the kind of musically-free soul who can just let loose live. But his latest project really crosses into some new territory.

He’s making himself into Tron.

No, really – just having some handheld touch control wasn’t enough, so he’s preparing an open source, wearable rig. He’s hardly the first to attempt this sort of thing, but he has two major advantages: first, he’s already developed the musical idioms and chops he needs, rather than leaving that for some indeterminate time after the thing is built. Second, he has on his team not only himself, but people with experience in prosthetics, plus the co-founder of Ableton. And the work isn’t just a crowdsourced pipe dream: it’s already well on its way.

I could try to describe it all, but this is a project only its mad-scientist, mad-musician creator can really do justice. So I’ll let Onyx take it away.

My Name is Onyx Ashanti. I am a Busker, Author, Beatjazz Artist.

Beatjazz is a term and style of music i came up with back in the late 90s, which described my playing of my wind MIDI controller with beats I had pre-programmed into Fruity Loops [now FL Studio]. That was cool for a while, but as time went on and I got older, It became boring. I wasn’t writing new beats as often as i should have. I had an Ableton phase which gave me a different means of using beats as a sort of hybrid, chopped-up DJ/live set kinda thing, but i got bored of that, as well. It wasn’t until a family tragedy that I realized that it was time to walk that tight-rope, in a sense, to do the weird and the crazy stuff that you convince yourself not to, for the various reasons you give yourself. So beatjazz evolved into a beat-centric form of live music based on live looping, software synth-based sound design, and jazz improvisation. That was three and a half years ago.

It wasn’t easy. It took a year just to get proficient enough to play beats live without a metronome using the wind controller. But after that, Beatjazz evolved in ways i couldn’t have imagined — styles of music that I may have heard once in my life, springing out of one of these extended improvised sessions, which sounds oddly like DJ sets in their continuity.

Over time, I have outstripped the capabilities of my [Yamaha] WX5 wind MIDI controller. It was not designed to do multi-elemental improvisation. There are many things to do and keep track of during a live beatjazz performance, so I have, over the last few years used a wide variety of different secondary controllers, such as the M-Audio Trigger Finger and the Korg microKONTROL, but found them all to be to distracting in performance. A wind midi controller is constructed like a horn. It looks like a clarinet, and as such, it’s hard to play and simultaneously tweak a knob on a secondary controller, because your hands need to be on the horn. And I never liked foot pedals, especially in clubs, because they limit my movements to a very small area — and get drinks spilled on them CONSTANTLY.

Last winter, I started experimenting with using TouchOSC, interfacing with [open source multimedia development environment] Pure Data on my computer, as a gestural controller. In that way, I could simply wave or shake my hand and control many parameters at once, which opened up many new stylistic trajectories that are still very exciting — so much so that I can’t do what I consider to be “my music” without an iPhone running TouchOSC strapped to the back of my hand. This is great and very cool, but isn’t optimal because there are so many gestures I have created and only one accelerometer/GUI, so I set out to design a system that was designed specifically for the presentation of beatjazz. The result is the TRON Beatjazz controller system.

I called it TRON because the system is made up of three main components; a helmet (above) and 2 hand units (top). Each unit is wirelessly connected to the computer. The hand units together are “fingered” the same way one would finger a saxophone or a clarinet, known as the “Boehm” fingering method [see video / below], but the hands do not have to be in a stationary “horn” position the way they are with those instruments. Each hand will have switches for keys, a joystick, an accelerometer, and a color synthesis system based on RGB LEDs to tell the audience what element i am playing (for instance, blue for bass and green for drums,etc). Part of the performance of these units is hand motions very similar to that of a raver using glowsticks (image below), which results in light trails reminiscent of the light effects from the movie TRON.

The purpose of this system is to provide a complete live performance system that incorporates lights, sound, and dance in one cohesive new form. The helmet, which looks like an afro, is made of carbon fiber and will house lip and breath sensors, a wireless microphone system, in-ear monitoring with ambient mics (so I can hear things around me without taking the helmet off), a digital compass for directional processing, an accelerometer, and two very powerful PC fans so I don’t have a heat stroke while wearing it. Why have a carbon fiber helmet? Primarily because a friend who is a professional creator of artificial limbs offered to help me make use of the material, and also because it’s durable and very lightweight. Oh, and I almost forgot — BECAUSE ITS f&%(ING CARBON FIBER! It’s the coolest-looking material on Earth! Ahem.

The brains of the system will reside on the host computer by way of Pure Data [above]. This is for two main reasons. First, as I stated above, I get bored easily. This system will be permanently malleable. Since the controller is just a wireless array of sensors, I can change and adapt them to do many thing I can’t imagine at this time, which leads to the other reason:

This is an open source project. This system would not be possible without open source software and hardware in the form of Pure Data and the many Arduinos that will make up the core components of this system. I am releasing all notes associated with this project once it is completed, as well as detailed notes on the concept and methodology of Beatjazz. By keeping the brains on the computer, by design, the concept should evolve exponentially in multiple directions. People can use these notes and patches as a jump off point for their projects, and it is also a not-so-subtle way of spreading the gospel of open source, of which I am a zealot.

Beatjazz is part of an atomization of sound culture. It is pure, computer-enabled improvisation. I never know what I am going to play onstage, even while I am playing. I combine the vibe in the room with what I am feeling at the moment, limited only by my skills and my sound set, and construct/deconstruct a narrative that provides a singular soundtrack for that moment. It may come out as house or be-bop or latin jazz — that’s the point, I have no idea, and it is very exciting.

I am doing this project now because, for lack of a better way of putting it, it’s just time! I’ve “practiced” for 20 years. This is the stuff i grew up dreaming about. When you reach a point in your life where you have the skills and the determination and the “people resources” to make something actually happen, you have to act! I have direct access to some of the most amazing people with the skills that make this a much more viable project.

Uli Maier is the Prosthetist (video above) that is helping me cast the molds we will use for the helmet and hand units. Chris “Loganic” Logan draws the ideas out in a form that conveys exactly what i see in my head, Tomas Henriques is wind synthesis legend, having already created the Meta-EWI [customization of the Akai wind controller] and the award-winning Double-Slide controller and Native Instruments co-founder Stephan Schmitt is offering to help me design the custom looping system that will form the backbone of the system. (The controller is open source, not the synths and looping system — yet.) I’d be mad not to go for it with all of these stars aligned at one time! These are just a few of the people that make the project real.

This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever been part o, as an artist, but its also, by far, the most expensive, so i am “crowdfunding” it through indiegogo.com, which is another amazing aspect of the modern Internet — the ability to bring people directly into this project that may be really interested in it. I have a created a wide array of “perks”, i.e. cool items in exchange for contributions to this campaign. From an exclusive EP of the twisted beatjazz that I will create with the new system ($5-available in late May), at onyxashanti.bandcamp.com, to a hand-bound copy of my book entitled “The 21st Century Musicians Guide to Busking” ($50, completion by late March). Options go all the way up to various versions of the controller system itself, in wired and wireless varieties, including the $5000 “Ultimate Package” in which you get the same carbon fiber controller i am making for myself (with a different helmet). I will it deliver to you personally, spend two days teaching you how it all works, and then you and I will give a concert for your friends and family! See: www.indiegogo.com/tronbeatjazz.

I have been told that saying that I want to create “the most amazing live music performance system ever” is a bit “bombastic”. But I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t the intended goal and if it didn’t think it were possible.

www.beatjazz.blogspot.com
www.indiegogo.com/tronbeatjazz

Novel instruments come and go; futuristic ideas appear in demos, wow crowds, and then vanish just as quickly. In order to really become part of musical practice, they require practice. And with something as unusual as the Eigenharp – a digital music controller that looks like the love child of a bassoon and a fretboard and connects to a computer – they even necessitate new techniques and strategies.

Enter musician Geert Bevin. As the creator of the fan site Eigenzone, he’s been a tireless champion of the instrument. He’s been compiling videos revealing player techniques and ideas for putting together a practical performance setup. And even Geert concedes that making music takes time.

“Six to nine months seems to be the time required to become confident enough to play the Eigenharp Alpha in front of an audience,” says Geert with a smile.

Here, Geert explains in great detail how he played the instrument in a recent video – one that should make Galactica fans happy. (You may have seen the video making the rounds, but we have some additional technical specifics.) And he shows us some of what other players are doing. They’d better be practicing, because the instrument shown, the flagship Alpha variation of the Eigenharp, costs £3995 and up. (Fortunately, if that’s out of your price range in this tough economy, there’s a cute, more portable version with many of the same features at £449. The Pico actually winds up being a pretty good deal for this kind of unusual product.)

Inventing the technology is only half the equation: it’ll take players, and time, for that creation to come into its own. Guitars and drums and flutes have had millennia. Here’s what a few months have done for the Eigenharp.

Detailed breakdown of a performance setup

Geert shares the technical details for one video and musical performance. Some of what makes the instrument special may not be immediately apparent. He’s making use of the broad pitch area, the access afforded to a range of pitches by the key layout, and features like per-key pitch bending, per-key vibrato, and expressive details in playing the notes. Those are then connected to a range of soft synths intelligent enough to respond to those messages, and sonically detailed enough to make some useful sounds in reply.

Here’s Geert with all the gory details.

As a follow-up on the Eigenharp Alpha post on CDM a few months ago, I thought I’d let you know that I finally recorded a video that I feel comfortable about pushing into the wild.

It’s a rearrangement of Battestar Galactica ‘Kara remembers’ theme song for the Eigenharp Alpha. The main melody of this theme is heard by the Final Five Cylons when they’re ‘switched on’. Kara Thrace (Starbuck) tries to remember this song in the series while sitting at an old piano in a bar. When she recalls how’s being played, it explodes into a full-blown arrangement.

My personal rendition of the song also starts off hesitant, inspired by Kara trying to remember the chords, the melody and the tempo. I’m using Tonehammer’s Emotional Piano for the piano in the first Eigenharp Audio Unit slot. [All the instruments] are tuned to A major; this allows me to play standard chord patterns and have them sound correct within the song’s scale. By doing that, none of the keys on the keyboard are playing any key outside of the selected scale. [In the Eigenharp's software, you can configure that setting] on a per-instrument basis as opposed to globally, you can create your own scales, and you can also play fully chromatically.

The beginning of the song is played on the third Alpha keyboard split, which provides a small rectangular area at the bottom and a single area of playing keys on the majority of the keyboard. I set up the bottom area to control the Eigenharp drum loops section, so that I can quickly change them later while playing the piano at the same time.

Eigenharp, up close. Image courtesy Eigenlabs.

Once I ‘remembered’ the chords and the melody, I start the Eigenharp’s metronome, which also starts the two drum loops I’ve activated by default. This gives me a sense for the rhythm of the song and I can start playing the piano part in tempo. After a few bars, it’s clear that also the rhythmical part of the song has ‘come back to me’ and I can dive into the meat of it.

I do this by activating four new drum loops on the control area while playing the piano chords an octave lower with my left hand. After two measures, I press the record trigger for the active instrument on the keyboard split and play the piano chords together with the main melody for two measures. The looping automatically starts immediately after the recording.

Having the accompaniment section built up, I can now switch to a first solo instrument, which is the native model of a cello. I used an Audio Unit effect [insert] on it to reduce the dynamics and to make it louder. The Softube CL-1B compressor is great for that as it also adds a touch of warmth. The cello on the Eigenharp can be bowed in a variety of ways. My preference is to use the left strip controller since it’s the closest to the real physical action of bowing on the actual instrument. While playing the cello, each course of keys acts as a string, playing only the highest note. You can thus play with a polyphony of five tones when pressing down keys on all courses. This also allows you to play smooth legato on the same course since you can leave existing fingers pressed down while adding next ones. Just as with regular strings, you can individually add vibrato to each note. At the end of the cello solo section, I use the second strip controller together with the first one to modulate the global pitch while bowing at the same time.

The next section is a more atmospheric intermezzo that builds up tension before exploding into the final part. I play this on the fourth keyboard split that evenly divides the playing surface into two sections. The upper one uses the same Emotional Piano as before, together with a sweeping synth sound that comes from FabFilter Twin2 in the second Audio Unit slot of the Eigenharp [software]. The lower section only plays the piano. This allows me the play chords with sweeps using my left hand and have just a piano sound for the melody with my right hand. Note that this demonstrates that splits on the Eigenharp are merely different ways of accessing the same instruments and functionalities. All the capabilities of the Eigenharp are always active; they’re just accessed differently at different times, depending on what’s most comfortable for you while you’re playing. At the beginning of this section, I switch off the metronome and turn it on again at the end; this also switches the drums loops and recorded accompaniment off and on.

When I move on to the next section, the first two measures of the drum loops don’t play the recording since I actually started playing slightly ahead of the first beat when creating it. The Eigenharp therefore only starts playing the notes at the end of the first round. This is a matter of practice and since I’m not always at the correct time while recording, I take a precaution and continue playing the chords on the keyboard while waiting for the recording to start up again. When that happens, I switch to the fifth keyboard split, which gives you access to four independent areas.

The final section of the song uses Orange Tree Samples Evolution Electric Guitar Strawberry (EEG) as an instrument in the third Audio Unit slot. I play this with my right hand in the third area of the split. This is then fed into the insert Studio Devil AMP Audio Unit to provide the amplifier and effects simulation. Playing EEG with the Eigenharp feels very responsive and natural due to the precision and expression of the keys — hammer-ons and pull-offs feel just right. I’m also using per-key pitch bending, which is understood by EEG and allows you to naturally bend one note while keeping others steady (as I like doing on my regular electric guitar).

I join the electrical guitar part with the cello again, played with my left hand in the second area of the keyboard split. Since my right hand is playing already, I can’t use the strip controller to bow, so I use the breath controller instead. This allows you to move the virtual bow back and forth by exhaling and inhaling. Using tonguing technique makes it possible to do create rapid bow movements, which is exactly what I’m doing when I’m playing chords on both the guitar and the cello.

The end of the song plays the lead melody in unison on the guitar and the cello, I set the first split area up to have both instruments active so that I have my right hand free to turn the metronome off at the right moment. The outro simply has me using the breathpipe to wrap up the song with some soft cello notes.

More Demos, More Players

Geert points to more examples that explain the instrument. First up, a look at the whole product range:

Since it’s not easy for people to imagine how an Eigenharp is actually used in practice, Eigenlabs posted a new video that demos the three models: Pico, Tau and Alpha in very different styles of music. Afterward they briefly highlight how the instruments are used:

And other players demonstrate live performance.

Geert in particular notes this video by David Jameson, who talks more about his setup:

In this video, I am running Apple MainStage inside of which several instances of Omnisphere are running to produce string and choir sounds. Kontakt 4 is responsible for the Uillean Pipes solo. The background chords are being triggered one at a time by Max (a real-time programming language) in response to key presses by my right hand on the Eigenharp. The chord data produced by Max is sent to Apple MainStage. My left hand is playing the solo, going directly to MainStage.

The music notation is being displayed on the Apple iPad using Scorecerer, the product we developed for managing and publishing sheet music to tablet devices. (see www.deskew.com)

Lament (Caoineadh Cu Chulainn) is a beautifully haunting instrumental from Riverdance, written by Bill Whelan.

I imagine not everyone here is quite ready to jump down this particular rabbit hole, but then, that’s not entirely the point. To me, it’s always fascinating to see the different ways in which people develop performance practice and set up their rig, and the extraordinary range that covers. Even if I don’t immediately resonate with what people are doing, I find there’s something to learn or take as inspiration. Let us know what you think.

Classically trained as a pianist, musician and producer Jon Hopkins has one of the richest resumes in electronic music. He’s a frequent collaborator with Brian Eno, wand has worked with artists like Coldplay (who featured his music on their last album), Tunng, David Holmes, and Imogen Heap. He worked with director Peter Jackson, and has a sci-fi score on the way. He also has a rich set of solo releases. And we’ve seen him here recently with remix swaps with Four Tet and contributions to Eno’s upcoming Warp record.

Coming to the Electric Zoo Festival, the blowout Randall’s Island Labor Day weekend electronic party here in New York, he’s set to perform a straight-up, genuinely live set, complete with a small squadron of KAOSS Pads. You can catch him Sunday at 1pm if you’re at the event.

I got a chance to speak to Mr. Hopkins by phone from the UK, before he departed for New York and Electric Zoo. He shares here how he works live onstage and in the studio, talks about how Brian Eno got him hooked on the Kaoss Pad, and reveals his addiction to the tools he first used as a keyboard and resistance to software and hardware upgrades. I’m especially able to resonate with what he has to say about working with sound, and transitioning from a piano background to working as a producer – and I’m listening to his work from a fresh perspective after the combination.

(Don’t miss the spectacularly lo-fi film of “Insides” from Live at the ICA, London, below.)

CDM: Not having seen your live show, knowing only your studio work, I’m looking forward to seeing you at Electric Zoo. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do for live sets?

Hopkins: It’s an Ableton [Live] system at the core of it. I ran off all the separate sounds from my own studio, and kind of loaded everything up into Ableton, so I’ve got total flexibility over all the songs. Then I have separate outputs through the interface, so I can have four or five [Korg] Kaoss Pads running in sync with Ableton, where I can do sampling and looping and all kinds of crazy sounds. And then I go into a mixing desk, and I’ve got a lot of control over what’s going on. I’ve got a little MIDI keyboard up there to play stuff on and to keep things triggering. That’s kind of it, really. It’s not enormously complex, because I have to be able to travel around with it on my own.

How do you use the multiple Kaoss effects in tandem?

The card I use has 16 outputs, so I can separate sounds into different ones and have different effects running on each pad. And sometimes I put one at the end to control the master. It depends. It’s a very flexible setup that way.

In order to assemble your clips, are you simply loading stems from the tracks into Live?

Loops, stem loops, and a little bit of everything. One-shot things, longer things. It’s kind of really just about having a variety, so you can take it any way you feel. I found out recently I’m playing for an hour and half rather than an hour [at Electric Zoo], and I normally do an hour, so there may be some slightly longer pieces. I’ve got some time to prepare, so I’ll go and revisit some other songs and try to bring some new things over, as well. So it should be interesting.

Otherwise, it sounds like the live set is mostly dry; you’re doing most of the processing on the KAOSS Pads.

Yeah. Those things – the Kaoss Pad [KP3], specifically — I was working with Brian Eno over the years and he showed me the original one when it first came out, and I’ve kind of followed them as they go. And seeing from him, some of the crazy things he can do with them — I’ve just gotten really addicted to them. You can kind of make them do things they’re not supposed to do. If you record things into the delay settings, particularly the loop settings, and then speed up the tempo, the craziest effects come out. If you got that going into another one, you end up with a sound onstage that you’d never get out of a computer. It’s cool.

Let’s talk about the new single, and the work with Kieran [Hebden / Four Tet]. How did that come about?

Well, we met about three years ago, I think. We had quite a lot of mutual friends. I had been a bit of remixing for an artist on Domino called James Yorkston, who he’d worked with, as well. A year or two later, I signed to Domino.

We did a show together at the Natural History Museum in New York, and it was our first show together – a year and a half ago or something. And the mix of styles went quite well, I think. And we did a few more, and we did a remix swap recently. I did one for his last single, “Angel Echoes,” with the Caribou remix on the other side. And he did one for my new single, which is “Vessel.” And now we have this tour together in October, which I look forward to very much.

Angel Echoes (Jon Hopkins remix) by Four Tet

How do you approach working with his sound, or approach the remix as opposed to your solo work?

It was great, actually, because I love the original. I loved his last album [There Is Love in You] — it was fantastic. The first time I heard it, a guy from Domino played me some of the tracks in the car, way before it was out. And I heard that song, and I just had this idea for it, which was to take that vocal out of the chords he had it in, and write a completely new chord sequence on the piano — have a very natural piano sound, and then have those vocals and those beats flow back in on top of that, and really just try to rewrite the whole chord structure. And he had a live drum loop in there, and I found that if I really squashed it with a limiter … you heard every tiny detail of it. I added an extra few snares here and there, and turned it into a real 3/4 kind of thing, a dance track. And then the main sound — the track was called “Angel Echoes.” I’ve got an old Eventide DSP 4000, which has got a setting called Angel Echoes — which is a complete coincidence; he had never heard of it. I tried putting all the vocals through this Angel Echoes patch and then sent the pitches up an octave and down an octave, as you can with the Eventide in a quite interesting way. There’s this sort of enormous, floating delay. And I had that filtering up in the background while the dry vocals play over top. So you can hear a lot of that effect in the song, particularly in the end. So that was that track.

It seems like the combination really works naturally, that there’s some common aesthetic between the two of you.

There’s some common ground in there, yes. Also… my early albums are completely different than his. I think we’ve grown closer over the years. I think it’s a nice combination, because we have some areas in which we’re similar, and some in which we’re completely different.

What’s your studio setup look like, aside from obviously the aforementioned Eventide?

I’ve got quite a strange combination of things. The core of it is now a Logic system. But I’ve only had it for about a couple of months. Everything I’ve actually released so far was done on Cubase VST from about — I don’t know, 2001 edition; I can’t remember what number it was. And all the sounds I’ve made over the years have been on SoundForge, which is a program I’ve just always loved. I’ve been using it since I was 19; I just got so used to it. I guess it’s whatever program you know best is the best one there is, really. I don’t think there’s huge amounts of difference between one sound editor and another. I’m sure they all can do similar things. But I’ve loved the way SoundForge just has the one massive waveform on the screen, and you can just have infinite levels of undo on every spearate sound. And I have that going into Cubase, so you can have these sounds kind of open live, and be changing them all the way through the process of the song. Just recently, I worked on a film soundtrack, and I found that system finally couldn’t quite handle having any video, so it started crashing a lot. So I’ve got this new Logic system, but I just can’t make any of the more complex sounds on that, because it takes so long. So what I’ve done is hook them up together with an Ethernet cable so now I can drop certain sounds in a folder and have them open in SoundForge and then drop them back in Logic. So I’m using them both, really.

And that’s great. I didn’t want to just completely lose all that, because I think that is what has defined the sounds I’ve been making over the years. I don’t want to change everything in one go. It just seemed like a step backwards in some way.

There’s something psychological about it too, right, when you’ve done a lot of work to have it look familiar? It seems you feel differently about that tool.

You do, I think so, yeah. And particularly when I started on Logic and hooked the two up, I just felt quite bewildered as to how I would ever reach the complexity of editing levels that I was used to. I just operate directly on the waveform. And I love that what you see there on the screen is what you’re hearing, rather than it going through a bunch of live plug-ins. It’s just what I’m used to, really.

So, what don’t you do on the level of the waveform? At what point do you decide, okay, I’m done with that level of granularity with the waveforms and now I’m ready to work with effects and mixing?

I think initially, you go by instinct. In SoundForge, I’d have three or four variations of a loop, and then they would be open in Cubase, or now Logic. And you’d be able to operate on little micro-edits. And then at some point, you feel the drum track is ready, and it doesn’t need any more tweaks — it would be overworked. And I don’t like over-programmed electronic music; I think it had its time, really. Now I really think a solid groove is the way.

And it’s great, at that point you can stick it in Logic. I invested in some crazy plugins, so I’ve got quite a lot of fun things going on in there. Hopefully it will evolve to be the best of both worlds.

And you work a lot with the keyboard, coming at this as a pianist, as well?

Yeah. I didn’t mention that the only keyboard I’ve ever used is a Korg Trinity. I’m sure there aren’t many around these days, but again, like with SoundForge I don’t think it’s about what you use, it’s about how well you know it and how long you’ve been using it. And I know that machine ridiculously well. I’ve had it again since my first setup, when I was 18. And I’ve got a few hundred sounds that I’ve made over the years. Every synth sound on all three of my albums comes from that, with the exception of a couple of bass sounds from a Nord Lead that I’ve got as well.

But it just gets enormously processed. I don’t use them as they are; I stick them into SoundForge and just mess them up, and go through a lot of processes.On the new album, a lot more of the sounds that sound like synths are actually real instruments that have been mangled. A lot of the things that sound like synth pads are actually where I was playing piano through a series of pitch things into quite a deep reverb, and I was using that with a kind of gate to make a lot of the pads and the rhythmic sounds.

You do have a piano in your studio, as well, I would imagine.

It’s, like, behind me when I’m sitting at the computer, so I can swivel around on the chair I can play it. It’s hooked up to a couple of mics, [which] goes into a nice old TL Audio valve pre-amp thing, which then goes into either SoundForge or into Logic, depending on what I’m working on.

It’s the same piano I’ve had since I was a kid, so it’s nice for me, it’s in good condition.

Do you find that piano practice or piano technique are still sort of part of your musical life?

No, unfortunately not; it’s gone. (laughs) I can only play what I need for myself. I used to be a clasically-trained pianist when I was a teenager. I guess it stopped when I was 17; I realize I wasn’t interested in pursuing that, because as a career, I wanted to make my own things.

I used to play a lot of technical stuff which is unfortunately gone. But I couldn’t really justify sitting there and practicing for two hours a day, which is what I used to do. Once you work on musica all the time, music in your spare time isn’t really something you want to do.

Having faced this very issue myself, it doesn’t sound like you feel in any way limited by that. From what I hear in your music, you have far more than enough facility to allow the keyboard to be part of what you do, even if it isn’t central. (And I enjoy that playing.)

Oh yeah. It’s very much limited to the exact thing that I need, but I can still do exactly what I want to hear on what I’m recording. The thing that hasn’t gone is the dynamic range, so I can still play very quietly if I need to, or generally stay in time. It’s just anything fast — but I would never have anything like that anyway, because it’s not really what I’m into playing-wise or writing-wise.

Do you find you draw on the Classical background that you have?

Yes it is, although in a very subliminal way. I haven’t played a Classical piece on the piano since 1998, so whatever’s left — I think I’m more influenced by film scores and what appeals in them, which in turn I guess are influenced classically. But there’s certainly no conscious reference between what I used to listen to and what I used to perform and what I write now.

So what are you listening to these days?

(pauses) My mind always goes blank when that question comes up.

Me, too — or I could say, in the last 72 hours?

(laughs) Actually I think I’ve got my iPod right here. I’ve been listening to a friend of mine, Nathan Fake of Border Communities, who did the other remix of my single. Been listening to his stuff, his album Hard Islands. I do tend to listen to stuff that people I work with or who are friends of mine. I listen to a lot of Brian Eno, very specifically the ambient series. I love all of that stuff. You kind of never get bored of that, really.

But I’m also into a lot of songs and more traditional singer stuff like Arthur Russell or Jim Martin, people like that. Proper lyrics I love, as well, almost listen to more of that than electronic stuff.

Take a listen to Nathan Fake’s remix yourself…

jon hopkins – wire (nathan fake remix) by nathan fake •official•

And then you had the experience of Monsters, the sci-fi film.

That was an amazing experience. I don’t know when it comes out in the US, but it comes out in the UK 12th of November. It was the first film I’ve worked on just on my own. Ed.: Hopkins is no stranger to film scoring by way of collaboration, having scored Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones with Brian Eno. And we’re in luck here in the US – the movie arrives October 29, on demand even sooner on September 24.

And there should be a soundtrack album that comes with that. It’s very much more cinematic style, no beats, much more pure melody and atmosphere and tension. So it doesn’t sound like any of my albums, really. It’s interesting to be pushed in different directions by whatever you’re working on.

Had you had the experience of thinking about visual ideas when you worked on music before? I know it’s very different when you have someone else’s image there in front of you.

No, that was a whole new thing, because I actually don’t tend to think particularly visually. I always wanted videos to get made – but you don’t really get those kind of budgets any more. So I don’t tend to think of anything in particular when I’m writing. I just follow the instinct of the melody and where it goes. So it’s almost like having a film in there takes an enormous part of the pressure and responsibility off, because you’re not the main focus.

How slavish were you in terms of how you lined things up?

Pretty specific. I mean, it was my first time on my own, as I said, doing it. So I pretty much was feeling my way; even simple things like how to arrange the sessions on the computer for each queue — it would have been useful to know that you should have a different session for every queue, because I was trying to do it in one and thinking, wow… (laughs) Just simple organization was quite difficult.

I guess the learning curve is administrative as well as creative!

And it went really well in the end. I was working very strange working hours of 2pm to 4am every single day, and sleeping very strange hours, and not doing anything else. It was the middle of winter, and I barely saw daylight. Life is very simple when that’s all you’re doing. You just feel like for that period of time, you’re not thinking of anything else. I manage to take care of everything else that comes up and come in every day and fight through to the end, really. It was an amazing experience.

It’s starting to pick up some great momentum, so we’re really excited about it coming out.

More Information

http://www.madeevent.com/ElectricZoo/

Official site: Jon Hopkins

Monsters Film

And one more Jon Hopkins remix…

Wild Beasts – Two Dancers (Jon Hopkins Remix) by Jon Hopkins

For a long time, technologists have described a world of in which computing experiences naturally incorporate touch and gesture. The question is, how do we bridge the intuitive desire for those interactions and the actual technologies that get us there?

Few activities test the expressive potential of interaction quite like music. It’s in our cultural DNA; musical activity may even predate written language. So it’s fitting that the story of touch in computing and digital music would be intertwined, as they are with touch pioneer JazzMutant. Years before well-known Apple products, the Lemur, prototyped in 2003 and shown as a musical multi-touch screen, suggested the importance of fusing display and touch, and of tracking more than a finger or two at a time.

The history, and products like Apple’s iPad and iPhone, you may know well, though. The question on everyone’s mind now is, what’s next? (And for some impatient futurists, the question may even be, what’s taking so long?)

To begin to answer that question, I turned to Guillaume Largillier, original co-founder and CEO of JazzMutant, now Stantum Technologies. There aren’t many people on the planet closer to where touch has been and where it might be going. Even as the Lemur gets new features like integration with popular music production and performance tool Ableton Live, Stantum is working to bring the same enabling technologies to other device makers. And even though this is “Create Digital Music,” it’s telling that that technology is showing potential in everything from phones to aviation, not just DJing. Musicians have had a role in technological history before, from Leon Theremin’s work to Max Mathews and computer synthesis. It may be musicians who invent the future, again. This time, the trick is who delivers that future to the hardware makers who can popularize it.

http://jazzmutant.com/
http://jazzmutant.com/behindthelemur.php
http://www.stantum.com/en/
http://www.stantum.com/en/offer/technology-ip

To accompany the story, we also have an exclusive look inside Stantum’s labs, all the way back to the original 2003 prototype of the Lemur.

On Designing for Touch, and the Music Tech Industry

Peter: I remember when I first talked to Darwin Grosse about Lemur, when it was being distributed by Cycling ’74. Darwin just kept saying, “You know, I just think Star Trek: The Next Generation.” (That’s my recollection, Darwin; I hope I’m not misquoting you.) I tended to agree. It’s a cliche, perhaps, but this was clearly hardware that brought into our century part of an imagined vision of a much further-off future (the 24th Century). Was that a conscious influence? In an industry that has sometimes been aggressively traditional, is there a way to channel ideas from something as far out as science fiction?

Guillaume: Before answering your question, allow me to challenge your statement about the computer music industry. I think “ill nostalgic” would describe this industry much better than “aggresively traditional.” Most music software companies have kept being innovative over the last decade, but their creativity has been a slave to this nostalgic obsession. Emulating an analog channel strip, a tube amplifier, or a vintage synth is far from a trivial job. It actually requires as much engineering time and resources as developing a disruptive product such as Ableton Live or Max/MSP/Jitter! On the hardware side, the innovation killer is the price pressure. Despite a common misconception, the computer music industry is not and will never be a mass market. Companies such as M-Audio [Avid], Behringer, or Native Instruments may look like giants compared to JazzMutant, but they are nano-particles compared to large consumer electronic brands such as HP or Nokia. The volume and the gross margins are too small to amortize ambitious research and development plans. When we launched the Lemur in 2005, a lot of people predicted, and somewhat hoped, that Behringer would release a similar device at $200 within the next eighteen months. Five years later, the first serious competitor of the Lemur is about to land – Apple’s iPad – and its entry level price is $500.

Back to the USS Enterprise, whether we want it or not, this parentship is likely to follow the Lemur forever. This is kind of ironic insofar as I’ve never been acquainted with science-fiction culture. I don’t even remember having ever watched a full episode of Star Trek. That being said, I acknowledge that this association has settled spontaneously and durably in people’s mind. Does this association come from the product concept itself? I don’t think so. In my opinion, it comes first and foremost from the fluorescent graphic design of the UI objects, not from the tactile technology.

So, the real question would rather be: “Why did we design the graphic interface this way?” First, we wanted to stand clear of those boring pseudo-vintage brushed-aluminium graphic skins – the cutaneous symptom of the nostalgic flu! Moreover, we anticipated that converting users to virtual controllers would be a difficult task and that trying to mimic the appearance of real-life objects would generate frustration; hence, impeding the adoption of the product.

Having said that, the main purpose of this flashy design was pragmatic and ergonomic. The Lemur is ontologically a live controller, though it might be used in other contexts. This requires that the interface must be visible wherever and whenever a user might be performing, from night clubs to outdoor venues. This is particularly tricky with a touch screen laid horizontally, because the display backlight cannot compete with the specular reflection of sunlight. Human-factor sciences taught us that contrast perception prevails over brightness perception. Hence, highly contrasted graphics- ie, flashy objects on dark background – is the most efficient way to ensure a consistent readability. This is something the aerospace industry has understood for decades. So, if there was one conscious influence behind the Lemur, it would be the Boeing 747 dashboard, not the USS Enterprise.

“If there was one conscious influence behind the Lemur, it would be the Boeing 747 dashboard, not the USS Enterprise.”

I know for me, the appeal of the science fiction aspect was more conceptual than superficial, the idea of the ubiquitous touch interface. But I agree, having experimented with this, that the high contrast, light foreground, dark background formula is really an essential solution. I’m seeing some interfaces on a white background that look aeshtetically lovely, but that I can’t imagine using onstage. I’d at least want a switch for dark environments, when you’re not at your desk.

That reminds me a funny episode of JazzMutant’s story. As early as February 2004, we started showing early prototypes of the Lemur to our friends at [Paris sound research center] IRCAM. At this time, the graphic skin was based on a palette of blue shades, with a few touches of warm yellow for emphasizing elements that needed to stand out, such as text, levels, etc. One day in July of 2004, about one year before the commercial launch of the product, we brought them a new prototype, featuring a brand new touch panel along with the final graphic design. Their only reaction was, “wow, this display is much brighter!” They did not even comment on the tremendeous improvement to the touch panel! That being said, there are other approaches to improve the psychological perception of readibility. I sometimes regret that other developpers are reluctant to dig into them, and mimic the “Lemur style” instead.

Talking about drawing on screen, did you know that Iannis Xenakis’ Upic project has been my main source of inspiration – and also my main motivation to step from music making to technology creation ?

I didn’t know that, but it makes a lot of sense. [UPIC is a tablet-based, visual composition system developed by ground-breaking experimental composer Xenakis. It is now decades old but continues to evolve in new incarnations.]

Below: DJ Mike Relm demonstrates the Lemur for G4 Tech TV. Yes, this is the video to show all your friends who aren’t regular CDM readers and have no idea what the heck this is all about.

Lessons of Lemur

Let’s talk about the place of Lemur’s technology in the current landscape. How does it hold up in 2010? I know a lot of people do get hung up on the price, but can you talk about how it differs from other options out there, or what the source of the cost is?

Once again, the music market being a small niche, it’s hardly possible to be both innovative and affordable at once. In addition, the Lemur is still manufactured in France with components imported from various locations around the globe – not to mention that the US dollar’s agony doesn’t help [when exporting] the manufactured product! Lastly, a large part of the product assembly is still handcrafted. For all the reasons above, the product is far from cost-optimized. I cannot disclose further our plans now, but we are working hard to address most – if not all – of these issues.

Have there been uses of the Lemur in performance and creation that surprised you, or went beyond what you imagined?

Oddely enough, and despite of what I said before, the most surprising uses of the Lemur are sometimes the most conservative ones! As an example, for Björk Volta tour, Damian Taylor and LFO made the most archaic interface layouts one could imagine — a fistful of colored labelled pads and eventually a pair of faders –- nothing more. Their brilliant idea was to create one unique interface for each song. This way, at each moment of the gig, they just had at their disposal the few commands they did actually need. The other big surprise came from video performers. Whereas most musicians are reluctant to use the advanced features of the lemur during their live performances – such as the objects’ physics – video artists do not hesitate to play the Lemur as an instrument, rather than a remote control. For instance, I warmly recommand you to visit Ali Momeni’s website. Of course, it would be unfair to forget all the advanced users who have developed inspiring and unique instruments, but this is less surprising, since the Lemur was designed specifically for that purpose.

OSC is a technology that many of us have advocated, but there’s also, admittedly, a big gap between where we believe it could be and where it is, especially in regards to the lack of mainstream music tech adoption. That said, what would an ideal implementation of OSC look like? What could the protocol do to be better? And what might you imagine could be a tipping point in adoption?

Indeed, it’s fair to say that OSC failed to become the industry standard we hoped it will be! I can see a few reasons for that. First, there is an obvious chicken-and-egg issue, as with any protocol. At JazzMutant, we’ve done our best to evangelize OSC in the industry for about 5 years now, without success. Why should a software company implement OSC if there is no hardware to support it, apart from a $2k product? Why should a hardware manufacturer develop an OSC-compatible controller if there are no mainstream applications to support it? Finally, there are also some intrinsic technical reasons that prevent OSC from becoming a standard anytime soon. In order to overcome them, we started developing a new protocol a few years ago called “Minuit” (“Midnight” in French), as a successor to OSC and MIDI (“Noon” in French). We were discouraged from pursuing this project after assessing the amount of human resources its evangelization would require.

The Big Picture, Stantum, and the Future

We’re looking at an explosion of interest in multi-touch display surfaces in the consumer space. Are any of these, in your view, promising for music? Are there ways in which some of these technologies are deficient for musical performance applications?

The responsiveness of a touch system is the most under-estimated parameter, even though it tremendously influences the perceived usability, transparency and trustworthiness of an input device. This is why a vast majority of Multi-touch systems available fails to meet music makers’ expectations.

Absolutely — you mean responsiveness in terms of latency, accuracy, precision in tracking multiple points, or (I presume) all of the above?

I was pointing out the latency more specifically – even though the perceived responsiveness is a complexe imbrication of all these parameters.

Can you talk about Stantum’s role in the evolution of multi-touch? What can we expect to see in the future?

We envisioned the real potential of the technology we invented long before the iPhone announcement, though we could not imagine that Steve Jobs’ crew would accelerate the market demand [to the extent they did]. We started investigating how we could bring our technology to OEMs in parallel to our computer music activity as early as 2005. We finally made this step in 2007. The role of Stantum in this ecosystem is quite singular. However pretentious it may sound to you, Stantum is still the only company beside Apple to have developped a real multi-touch product, top-down, including all the software and hardware technology bricks. So, despite the small size of our company, we are better placed than any other player in this field to understand the complexe imbrication of software and hardware. You might ask, “Aren’t all these Windows 7 convertible notebooks real multi-touch products?” In my opinion, they are not, insofar as the only multi-touch services these devices offer so far are rotating videos or ten-finger painting. I do not want to offend anyone, but watching videos is much more pleasant fullscreen and if Neanderthal people gave up painting with ten fingers 45,000 years ago, there might be a good reason. At JazzMutant/Stantum, we’ve always considered the multi-touch technology as a milestone, not the final destination. With what we’ve been incubating in our labs for a few months, we expect to reach the next big milestone quite soon.

Do you mean that these PC vendors are missing the actual application of the multi-touch technology in the software they ship with these devices? Certainly, no argument there — the demos, the marketing, the demo apps outside of Apple have just looked horrendous and awful to me. But surely there are developers out there who want to do better? Hasn’t what’s held them back simply the lack of available hardware?

I do agree with you. Unfortunately, that leads to a chicken-and-egg situation; insofar as developing a meaningful, multi-touch-capable application requires a preliminary awareness of the objective capabilities and limitations of a given hardware solution. On the other side, a vast majority of multi-touch panel providers doesn’t look willing to raise the bar until the market identifies a “killer app” requiring full multi-touch capabilities with zero performance tradeoff. Hopefully, the iPad will contribute to reschuffle the cards. Unfortunately, Apple decided to stand clear of handwriting capability – which, I believe, is a huge limitation for creative and productive applications.

“I do not want to offend anyone, but … if Neanderthal people gave up painting with ten fingers 45,000 years ago, there might be a good reason.”

Let’s assume Stantum is successful in popularizing the technology. At some point, will the Lemur be obsolete – and could that perhaps even be a good goal?

The Lemur as it is today is likely to become obsolete at some point – the pet is more than 5 years old in an industry that usually sends hardware products to retirement manu militari at 18 month old! Having said that, there is much more to develop on the hardware side than what we have done in the past. If we succeed in what we are working on today, I believe the Lemur will keep playing in its own category for quite a long while.

Now, that said, how do Stantum’s efforts to engage the larger electronics industry impact these issues of scale and cost?

We understood as early as 2005 that there was only one path to spread this technology – and the underlying vision of how computerized equipments should work – out of the small niche of professional musicians and Max/MSP users. Then we did what we had to do : we licensed the technology to tier-one semi-conductor companies such as ST Microelectronics to embed our multi-touch know-how into dedicated chips. We also teamed up with some of the largest and most trusted touch panel makers to bring our solution onto the consumer market place. The whole supply chain is now in place and you’re likely to see a few Stantum-based multi-touch tablets shipping in the coming months. Will these products match musicians’ expectation ? That’s too early to risk an answer at this stage, since we have no control over what OEMs will make out of our technology. And as you know, a good user experience does not only depend on the quality of the touch system – it’s also a matter of CPU and OS choice, hardware optimization, not to mention the software application running on top of it. That’s why we believe there’s still some room for a dedicated hardware that takes in consideration the very specific needs of electronic musicians and visual artists. In a not-too-far future, we expect the hard work we have done with our partners will have a positive impact on the cost structure of our music products.

Stantum’s Latest Technology, and What it Means

Guillaume is a bit limited in what he can say about his future plans, but that leaves me free to do a bit of (informed) speculation. This is largely my own analysis, so it’s my message, not necessarily Stantum’s.

First, unless it isn’t already clear, JazzMutant is Stantum. Stantum is JazzMutant. Stantum is now the official name of the company, and JazzMutant is just the brand by which their technology caters to musicians. It says something about the company’s lineage – all the founders have a background in electronic music – that they have in the past, continue now, and plan in the future to keep a strong connection to musicians. That’s meant that the rigorous demands of live music have informed their touch technology and made it a better product.

The idea that Apple’s iPad would drive JazzMutant out of business, therefore, is the opposite of correct. JazzMutant is Stantum. Stantum is in the business of licensing its specialization to OEMs. The Lemur shows just how potent that specialization is, in a way that literally gets rooms full of people dancing and gaping at projections. Apple’s technology is available only to Apple. With Microsoft, Google, phone vendors, and PC vendors all getting into the touch business, that means Stantum just became very big news – even if that’s something musicians and VJs figured out years earlier.

Part of the challenge of multi-touch development is that you have to get a lot of pieces working together. You need the physical surface of the controller, the sensors built into that surface, and the firmware that interprets the sensors all to work in tandem. Apple does it, and does the OS and applications, too. 3M is working on a product for OEMs, also working with multiple touch points. But the other big source right now is Stantum.

It’s also significant that Stantum’s technologies are heavily patented (a fact that they advertise on their site). While I’m no big fan of patents, unlike Apple, Stantum is licensing their technology into the marketplace. Given the need to have a patent portfolio just to protect your work, Stantum’s patents give it effectively the right to play ball. By licensing their technology to the manufacturers big enough to make this stuff on a grand scale, Stantum’s OEM program could provide ready access to touch for software developers beyond just the iPad platform. Even if you’re a huge iPad fan, that means greater accessibility in the market, and more than one vendor to provide that access. I’m a great advocate for DIY, but making displays isn’t yet a garage operation. (Yes, I know people building their own multi-touch tables, but they don’t make their own cameras or projectors.)

Stantum’s technology itself is also unique. Their sensing approach supports pen input and even handwriting recognition, features Apple leaves out. For many of the world’s languages, handwriting recognition is a “killer app,” which could further drive touch adoption. For the rest of us, until we evolve smaller fingers, the ability to use a pen can mean amplified accuracy for painting and writing, and yes, even pen-driven music applications. (Somewhere in the great beyond, Xenakis smiles.)

This is not an advertisement for Stantum, either – the list of companies anywhere close to being able to provide this functionality is short enough to count on your (ahem) fingertips.

So, okay, you buy into the concept – when can you get it? (After all, even the Lemur doesn’t quite count. It isn’t set up for pen input, even if its sensing method could work. And the Lemur is a controller, not a computer.)

Right now, Stantum’s technology is available in a series of multi-touch demonstration kits, including one with the guts of a Dell netbook inside:

http://www.stantum.com/en/offer/evaluate

In other words, we’re waiting for someone to ship a product that incorporates their technology. Windows 7 already includes multi-touch APIs out of the box in all but its Starter edition, so the Windows platform is a major candidate. Windows, while proprietary, has none of the developer, language, software, or hardware restrictions that the iPad platform does, so if your application doesn’t fit the iPad model or needs pen input, Windows’ stock just rose. Free software is possible too. Linux already supports the Stantum Slate PC and a number of other digitizers, support that will be baked into the kernels shipping in this year’s major Linux distros. We’re not just talking drivers, either: the whole Linux community is working on everything from libraries for environments like Java to support in the windowing system to touch-centric distros. (More on the Linux situation later this week.) Google’s Android has a multitouch API, too. I’ve used it, and got frustrated quickly not because of the OS, but because the hardware on current phone handsets just doesn’t work well with more than one finger. That could change if Stantum’s tech starts to appear in licensee products; Android as a touch OS could take off.

For specifics on the Windows 7 aspect (old news, from way back in November – but of course, everyone is taking a second look because of the iPad phenomenon):
2009-11-03 Windows 7 Certification

Right now, the one thing Stantum doesn’t have a lot of – aside from OEMs shipping their tech – is competition. Most of the other touch competitors either can’t accurately track fingers in close proximity, or limit tracking to two fingers, or lose tracking fidelity around the edges of the screen, or can’t handle pens, or some combination.

You need musicians, creative artists, and gamers to tell you this, because the mainstream computer market thinks multi-touch has something to do with pinch-zooming their photos. If that were all you could do with multi-touch, this would indeed be an over-hyped technology. But the responsiveness of the Lemur and the demonstration technology from Stantum is something that can be powerful and expressive.

Apple has already brilliantly demonstrated what happens when scale, creativity, and technical competence meet. Now the question is, who else will be able to put this formula together, thus making other options available to developers? Stantum has the competence, and the connection to creative artists and music specifically. If OEMs start to sign on with Stantum’s tech and build useful hardware, we could see both off-the-shelf machines – and cheaper JazzMutant-branded products – for musicians. Indeed, with this larger Stantum perspective, whatever happens with OEMs could in turn be good for JazzMutant-specific, music-specific customers, too. Even with competition from the likes of 3M, the technology is so specific to certain hardware devices, and the emerging markets so large, it’s hard to imagine Stantum not having a big role.

What might surprise people in the larger tech world is how important music has been – and will continue to be – to the big picture.

When it all comes together, the days of computer musicians, DJs, and visualists standing behind screens, able only to stare blankly into them but unable to manipulate what they see directly, could become a relic of the past.

What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in it.

Such a movie was rumored, but as with so many projects, leaves behind no evidence. What if it had left a score you could hear? The mysterious “Flynn 1.5″ writes to share a free, downloadable soundtrack that answers that question.

And you can argue with an album that begins out with “For the Love of ENCOM”? Indeed. You can stream the full album and download all but the Journey remix. Read the full “backstory” after the jump.

Tron moniker or no, the results are some lovely music, featuring the likes of Tiger Mendoza, Team9, artist and CDM regular reader Lilith The Kitten, and ringleader World Famous Audio Hacker, among others. (Trivia – Tiger Mendoza has his own, Creative Commons-licensed album, and Team9 earned notoriety for a mash-up collaboration with Green Day.)

In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.

“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.

My task was to compile great underground artists to create a new soundtrack for this darker world of Tron. After the completion of the initial tracklist and first production draft of the soundtrack, it seemed as if negotiations between Pixar and Disney had broken down. Funding for the project was eventually pulled.

I have been most excited to see the announcement of the third film, the new “TR2N” (Tron: Legacy), especially with the involvement of those who will be creating the new soundtrack. It is obvious to me that “Tron: Legacy” takes place after “The Rise Of The Virals” without abandoning its first concept. Perhaps that is why we’ve seen sites like Flynn Lives creep up in anticipation of the new film.

I’ve decided to release the preliminary version of the soundtrack which includes a special remix of Journey’s “Any Way You Want It” produced specifically for “Rise Of The Virals”. Journey provided two songs to the original “Tron”, and their song “Separate Ways” will reportedly be on the “Legacy” soundtrack as well. In any case, since the story of “Rise Of The Virals” takes place between the first “Tron” film and the upcoming “Tron 2: Legacy”, I can’t think of a better title for this material other than “Tron 1.5″. I hope you enjoy the music these artists have put such great work into.

– Flynn 1.5

Tron 1.5: “Rise Of The Virals”
(Digitally Remastered)

1. “For The Love Of ENCOM” (4:16) (Team9)
2. “Askew” (5:08) (Solcofn)
3. “Build A Better Lightcycle” (3:24) (Tiger Mendoza)
4. “Rise Of The Virals” (3:37) (World Famous Audio Hacker)
5. “Any Way You Want It” (4:30) (Rhythm Scholar Syntax Error Remix)
6. “Electro City” (5:24) (Lilith The Kitten)
7. “March To Silicon Palace” (3:34) (Future Sound Of Tron)
8. “Lora’s Theme” (4:34) (Team9)
9. “Technojazz” (5:56) (Solcofn)
10. “Love Theme” (4:11) (Tiger Mendoza)
11. “Paranoid Space” (2:45) (Tiger Mendoza)
12. “T128.Flynn.FK@yf” (6:30) (EBNC)
13. “Core Dump” (6:01) (Lilith The Kitten)
14. “Means To An End” (8:00) (Solcofn)
15. “Theme From Tron 105″ (1:26) (Carl Walters)

The full album is available for free download at http://tron.fm/