Elly Jessop and VAMP at the Maker Faire from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Yann Seznec aka The Amazing Rolo brings CDM his coverage of music tech at the Maker Faire in three episodes today.

Continuing the tradition of computer-augmented vocal performance and interactive gloves, Elena “Elly” Jessop shows off her VAMP system at Maker Faire. Elly is a Masters student at the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future research group, headed by Todd Machover. Interestingly, Elly’s background is in conventional theater, including stage and costume design and choreography.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~ejessop/

VAMP stands for “Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis.” What’s really nice in this demo is that the results sound like more than just effects – they begin to become real augmentation, setting up a complex relationship between the vocalist and the sounds that come out.

It’ll be great to see your work evolve over time, Elly, as you fuse that experience. (And I know what a challenge can be, as I’m still working on fusions of my own, having likewise come from various non-digital backgrounds… heck, I made my way through puppetry class at Sarah Lawrence, even. It’s a lifetime-scale commitment.)

For more on data gloves and such: composer, computer scientist, and futurist Jaron Lanier did lots of seminal thinking about these ideas leading back to the 80s. And you can find some extraordinary work from “augmented vocalists” like Laetitia Sonami and Pamela Z. Here’s a terrific 2006 interview by Sua Constabile for Cycling ‘74 with Laetitia:

Barry Threw demos the K-Bow at Maker Faire from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Yann Seznec aka The Amazing Rolo brings CDM his coverage of
music tech at the Maker Faire in three episodes today.

As long as there have been computers, violinists have looked for ways of extending the nuances of their physical performance into the digital realm. (Us keyboardists have it easy – we’re used to pressing an array of levers, and a lot of the gestures we make are, arguably, superfluous.) Many of these concepts return to the idea of the bow.

The K-Bow by Keith McMillen Instruments is a Bluetooth-enabled bow with sensors that read bow angle, length, acceleration, grip pressure, and even hair tension. It’s accompanied by software developed in Max/MSP. The bow itself is one of those “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it situations,” at US$4000-5000 retail, though they claim the bow itself – specially-designed kevlar and carbon graphite, anyone? – can compete with more expensive bows even before you add in the sensors.

NK Berlin is a planetary hub for wild experiments made with music, technology, and electronics. When you can’t be in Berlin soaking it up in person, you can explore the oddities assembled on their MySpace page. A recent workshop by Andrey Smirnov and Guy Van Belle on Theremins led to these unusual videos, playing a potted plant:

…and a bunch of bananas (footage from the Theremin Center, Moscow).

Via the Pd list, though, it seems that the next NK workshop will go somewhere else altogether: music with microorganisms. Really – you’ll need a USB microscope. It’s electronic music in a Petri dish.

I could try to explain, but I’ll leave it to the description by organizers Marc R. Dusseiller & Kaspar Koenig:

Mixed Up – Beat Blender and Mixmaster 1200 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Matti Niinimäki is back DJing with flea market, broken appliances as physical interfaces – and the whole project is getting better and better. We saw an early prototype of the Beat Blender, a re-purposed Osterizer with fake fuzzy fruit that stand in for loops. Now, Matt has added a handheld mixer for scratching.

The Mixmaster 1200 is a wireless scratching device for the turntablist who prefers to deliver his/her scratches like a 5 star chef. As you can see, the Mixmaster does not have any beaters attached to it. This is because it has small laser powered plasma emitter beaters that actually heat up the airwaves around the device itself producing the unique sounding aural explosions.

Motion – Mixed Up (2009) [originalhamsters]

I recently got to see a Numark NS7 in the flesh, the controller that company hopes will be the last word in DJing. It’s got nothing on this.

I’ve got to hook something up to my Breville… maybe temperature sensors.

Matt may have beat you to this idea, but I guarantee, if you’ve been thinking about alternative controllers, you will never see a flea market in the same way again.

Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.

2008 has been an amazing year for music technology. But I can’t bring myself to look back on it on this New Year’s Eve: not when there’s so much to look forward to in 2009. Case in point? An extraordinary, innovative new controller that in a matter of hours was already spreading among connected music technologists around the planet.

At the end of the day, it’s not hard to describe what you might want out of an expressive music controller. Most people would agree on that. The challenge is really an engineering problem. Solve the engineering problem in an artful way, and you can spend the rest of your time just practicing playing your invention. That’s what makes the above video so exciting.

Randall Jones has built a really elegant and wonderful multi-touch hardware controller, as reported by MAKE:blog (and picked up on Hack a Day). With $50 in parts and a lot of clever hardware design and software coding, Jones has built an interface that responds to both touch and pressure and, using some smart sonic mapping, can realistically reproduce instruments like the dumbek and guiro.

Intimate Control for Physical Modeling Synthesis [Project Page / Paper Abstract]

PDF, Randall Jones MSc Research Paper

Who needs a “top 10 technologies of 2008” post for CDM when this particular instrument could pretty easily top the whole list? Let’s just call it done, and uncork the champagne: major congrats, Randy! (This is a master’s thesis!)

Jones’ work does have some precedent, but just to review how much he’s accomplished here: he’s innovated in terms of the sensing, the form factor, the software interpolation, and the way in which the control data is mapped to a synthesis method. (Whew!) That has had a number of specific achievements: