As you may know, the creators of games like Grand Theft Auto have collaborated with Timbaland to bring a mobile music studio to Sony’s PSP (and later, the iPhone), based on an ambitious free Flash experiment on their Website. Now, it’s my impassioned belief that you shouldn’t need lots of canned loops or celebrity endorsements to make music fun, so normally I might actually run the opposite direction of any story starting with that line. But here’s the surprise: underneath, the app is more powerful than I expected.

I’ve gotten an early preview of the title in person at Rockstar’s offices here in New York, and was also able to grill their developers on geeky details of how the sound engine is put together. A test copy isn’t yet available so I can’t properly review the app, but I am at least able to talk about some of what lies beneath the PSP screens and marketing.

For some time, a select few have known that the Sony PSP’s secret is that it’s a powerful handheld computer, ideal for mobile music. Brilliant-but-underground apps like PSPSEQ and PSP Rhythm capitalized on this potential, but required you hack your PSP in order to run them, because Sony restricts launching non-authorized applications from memory.

Beaterator is the first full-featured app that can be run directly on the PSP. Some people may not look past the fact that it comes from a game company, past its (admittedly) thick layer of marketing glitz and celebrity endorsement. But based on a first look, I believe Beaterator is the most powerful music app ever released through game channels, surpassing in functionality even the recent cult hit Korg DS-10 for the Nintendo DS.

July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time.

Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew and loved Sony by the time 1979 rolled around, having embraced their pocketable radios as early as the 1950s. In fact, if you want to blame a device for degrading audio fidelity, you should again look not to MP3s and iPods but back to — you guessed it — the same transistor radio.

But no matter. The Walkman did popularize carrying your own music collection with you. It was not only about mobility, but mobile music collections free of airwaves, mix tapes and the experience of walking around the city or doing a workout with your own personally-assembled soundtrack. It turned everyone into DJs and made the music something that could easily bounce around inside your head rather than around your living room or a music venue. The Walkman and not the iPod might also have to carry the burden of claims that music was made antisocial – but it also made for a uniquely personal experience.

And do we ever love cassettes, with their ability to accommodate our own mixes and recordings and stack in neat cubes.

True, the link that’s making the rounds on the Web parodies the clueless 13-year-old child of the iPod age:
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman [BBC News]

This comes from a different planet than the one on which we live on CDM. In this world, snarky 13-year-olds have no idea what the metal/normal switch does, and the zinger is “Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?” Okay, you snot-nosed brat, it’s a good thing global warming will revert us all to a primitive Stone Age existence and you won’t have to suffer the fate of technological advancement. PS – your dad says never to call him Alan again. (I kid, kid, really. Just can’t resist.)

Of course, on our planet some 13-year-old is probably assembling his or her own cassette player out of spare parts and turning it into a circuit-bent DJ machine, and knows the entire history of the Sony Walkman by model number, and can tell you which factory assembled your old broken model based on the serial number. In that demented spirit, I invite readers to share your own Walkman memories, and offer up a selection of my favorite cassette-themed posts from CDM (of which, I was surprised to discover, there are quite a lot).

I won’t even try to summarize the history of the Walkman, because I have no idea what it is, and Wikipedia has beaten me to the punch.

Wired has a great mini-documentary on the score for the videogame Infamous. It’s chock full of sound design ear candy, not only served by the chops of composer Amon Tobin but the team at Sony Music and Sony’s entertainment division, as well. Curiously, Jonathan Mayer, Music Manager at SCEA, says explicitly that he doesn’t want composers writing interactive music. He’d prefer to have them write a conventional score and then adapt it to the interactive engine. Now, of course, around these parts we like the idea of composers finding ways to write genuinely generative and interactive scores. But in this case, Mayer is acting as a kind of remix artist for the game realm, sampling Tobin’s compositions and reconceiving them in the game world. That kind of collaboration could be powerful.

Chuck Doug, SCEA music director, overstates things a bit by claiming this game has a unique aesthetic. The visuals are a burnt-out, post apocalyptic city – yeah, been there quite a few times. The music involves lots of ethnic percussion-y instruments and bowed metal and deep booming sounds. (Let me get this straight: we’ll hear a plucky stringy thing, then a bowedy metally thing, then there will be a big boom!) So, generally, not some radical new departure from game and motion soundtracks. But regardless of its novelty, I’d be an utter killjoy to complain: it sounds utterly gorgeous.

Previously:

I got to listen in on a lot of gems regarding sound design from composer Troels Folmann. He doesn’t just bow metal instruments – he boils them.

GDC: Boiling Waterphones and Other Sonic Inspirations from Composer Troels Folmann

And on the subject of getting composers to write interactively, Matt Ganucheau has been teaching that way:

Teaching Adaptive Music with Games: Unity + Max/MSP, Meet Space Invaders!

The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud — not exactly indie cred. We saw Microsoft enlisting indie musicians and animators to sell Zune, of course.

But here’s where things get surprisingly amazing: Sony is using weird and wonderful Japanese experimental music to promote Walkman.

Now we’re talking.

And whether or not Walkman is cool again, this is for sure: Japanese experimental musicians? Mind-blowingly cool. And, apparently, in love with using light as a controller for sound.

Atsuhiro Ito uses contact mics on a fluorescent bulb he dubs the Optron. Instead of just being stage eye candy, the bulbs are really making the sounds here; coupled with guitar effects, he can solo on the bulbs. It’s what the Knitting Factory will be like after the nuclear winter. I can’t wait.

Taeji Sawai uses a light pen to draw melodic lines and rhythmic onto a screen. The basic effect – track light from a single source – is old. Yet he’s clearly got a brilliant aesthetic mind that makes it all work; the elements are strikingly simple but never fail to be engaging. And there’s a strong connection to work by his fellow sonic inventor Toshio Iwai.

Thanks to our friend Donald Bell of cnet, aka very talented and (cool) musician Chachi Jones, who has a great write-up:

Sony Walkman promos are awesome, confusing

Confusing? No, I’d say Sony is confusing; the real question is why their Walkman can’t be more like these ads. Plus, since neither Don nor I can read Japanese, how do we know those characters don’t say something like “Hey, guys, sorry for that bit with the lousy boring electronics – we’re coming back from the dark side to make awesome things again”? Okay, maybe not. (Do let me know if the next one says “Fine, you damned snarky blogger, I’d like to see you run a giant multinational corporation.”)

Admittedly, the problem here is this makes me want to toss my iPod touch out the window and build my own open source MP3 player with Popsicle sticks and wire, or, at best, mod an original Walkman so I can play circuit-bent OGG files using power from a bicycle. At the very least, I’m ready to add to my Atsuhiro Ito and Taeji Sawai collection. And I don’t think their full body of work is on iTunes. That’s just as well.

So, Sony, thanks. Now, will you let us run homebrew music apps on your PSP? Please?