Sound technology pioneer Bob Moog’s birthday is May 23, and just about the whole Web will be in on the celebration.

Play Google like a Minimoog: Google’s Doodle, the image you see on their homepage, is one of their best yet: it’s a fully interactive, playable Minimoog synthesizer. You can even record and playback little musical sketches and share with friends. Since the Earth is round, Google Japan gets an early scoop. (Yes, the Moog sun will rise first on the land of Roland, Yamaha, and KORG.)

Bonus (for Web nerds): this all uses the Web Audio API, which promises to bring real sound into the browser. Check out the technical details on html5audio.org, but if you love synths, and you use the Internet, this is good news.

Get swag, save cash, benefit the Moog Foundation: Rags and riches will be on sale for your shopping pleasure, including a benefit for the Moog Foundation on Moog-logo merchandise and clothes, with 50% of proceeds going to the Foundation’s educational and historical mission, which goes far beyond just Bob Moog to synthesis in general. That one-day birthday sale includes the lovely new Moog travel mug (I need one, after mine sadly broke in the mail to Germany), and a huge knob on a t-shirt (nice). See image, below.

Moog Music is also discounting their iOS apps, in case you missed discount pricing on their superb Animoog synth.

I Want My Moog TV. But let’s get back to the man himself, with a series of videos shared by the folks at Moog Music.

From an 80s BBC TV special, here’s Bob Moog demonstrating the synthesizer:

Moog Music are painting their spiritual father and founder’s image on their offices in North Carolina; see a timelapse of this gorgeous mural:

And in the sweetest gesture for the day:

To #celebratebob on what would have been his his 78th birthday local Asheville piano teacher, Kim Roney, brought two of her pupils to the Moog Store to perform a song in celebration of Bob Moog’s life and legacy. Bob Moog is still inspiring creative exploration in children of all ages. Thank you Dr. Moog, Happy Birthday! How has Bob Moog inspired you? #celebratebob

Finally, here’s a five-part series on synthesis fundamentals that uses the Moog Voyager. That seems, perhaps, the best way to celebrate Bob Moog’s legacy: it’s a chance to learn ideas about sound that can allow you to unlock the world of electronic music. With that knowledge, you can use any synthesis, anywhere, with or without a Moog logo on it – or use your imagination to invent the next great music technology, something Bob Moog I’m sure would have loved to see you build.

Moog Music Inc. is proud to present Dr. Joseph Akins’ five part series on the fundamentals of synthesizer programming. Dr. Akins is an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University and strives to teach his students a complete understanding of synthesizers and computers as tools for modern music production. In this five part series Dr. Akins uses a Voyager to teach the process through which a synthesizer’s sound is generated and the techniques needed to program your own sounds and sonic experiments. In part one of this five part series Dr. Akins gives a brief history of synthesizers, goes over basic synthesizer theory, and overviews basic signal flow.

http://www.moogfoundation.org/

Steve Reich had his Music for 18 Musicians.

Here’s a modular made of 18 Moogerfoogers.

And for those of you who complain that modulars can become large, expensive, hard to carry, and unwieldy…

This absolutely, positively … doesn’t help with that at all. (Happily, new desktop modular tools do, but… this is… also possible.)

And to those of you who say this seems impractical or silly, well, maybe you have five friends, and each of you has three Moogerfoogers, and you’ve wondered if you could ever form a band. Yes. Yes, you can.

This is the creation of Shout Out Out Out Out:
http://www.shoutoutoutoutout.com
http://www.auxgang.tumblr.com

After the jump, we’ll see some more practical work they’ve been up to in the studio.

First, here’s part 1 of 2…

Found via Kent Williams, on Google+.

There’s some great musical nerdery as Shout Out Out Out Out show their process tracking in the studio.

Part three of the Shout Out Out Out Out new album video diary. Winter finally drops down like a metric tonne of hammers! Gravy finds “The Button” and Will explains how recording works.

The upcoming record they’re working on here is Spanish Moss And Total Loss, due July 17th in North America from Normals Welcome Records (digital, vinyl, CD). Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, they have … a lot of analog. So much analog. And for that, and their fresh, crisp songwriting and expansive imagination, we love them!

Pure Data is a wonder: a free and open source environment for creating your own musical and multimedia creations with graphical programming, from Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max. You can produce everything from interactive sequencers and drum machines to synths to video performance tools by connecting patch cables visually, and you can run on virtually any platform, from BeagleBoards and Rasberry Pi to Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop. Via libpd, you can target other development languages and environments, embed engines in games, or work with Android and iOS.

It’s so important, in fact, that CDM invites Hans-Christoph Steiner, one of the key developers of Pd-extended, to give us a tour of what’s new. (Note: because Pd-extended includes various additional objects or “externals” that Pd Vanilla lacks, you should be careful when building patches for libpd. What I like to do is use Pd-extended as my editing environment, then double-check patches by opening them in Vanilla to make sure I haven’t accidentally used an object that’s not part of the bare-bones version. I can then substitute an object, copy an abstraction, or if necessary build that external.) -Ed.

The Pd-extended 0.43 release has been brewing an extra long time, about 18 months now, mostly because there are lots of big improvements. We wanted to make sure we got it right, so your patches all work, but the improvements all shine, so its taken a while. It’s now solidly beta, so we’re looking for testers. Download a beta build to try here:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended/releases/0.43.1

First off, the pd-gui side of Pd has been rewritten from scratch. The focus for most of the recent work has been on the editing experience, making your patching experience as productive and flexible as possible. To give some background, Pd has always been made up of two programs: pd is the core engine and pd-gui is the GUI. Since basically all computers now come with multiple CPU cores, this means that pd-gui will usually run on a separate CPU core than pd, so they don’t step on each other’s toes. pd can entirely take over its own core. If you want to make your patch use more CPU cores, then check out the [pd~] object introduced in the last release, but fine-tuned in this one.

There are so many ideas for making a better editing experience in Pd; this release makes big strides to address the editing experience. There are new features like Magic Glass, Autotips, Autopatch and Perf Mode, all available on the Edit menu.

• Magic Glass lets you magically see the messages as they pass through the cords. Just turn it on and hover above a cord, and you’ll see the messages as they go by. You can even look at signal/audio cords.
• Autotips gives you tips about what an object does, what its inlet expects, and what comes out of the outlets.
• Autopatch mode automatically connects objects as you create them.
• Perf Mode, is a mode for performance that makes it harder to accidentally close windows that are part of your performance.

A whole new Pd Window

The Pd Window is also majorly overhauled. First of all, it’s fast. Much much faster than the old one. You can now print thousands of messages per second to the Pd Window and still edit your patch. No more will an accidental dump of info cause the GUI to freeze up (well, okay, maybe if you send 10,000 messages/second, but that is way too many). There are also five levels of printing messages to the Pd Window: fatal, error, normal, debug, all. If you are only interested in fatal errors, switch the Pd Window to 0 – fatal, and you’ll only see the worst problems. You want to see every single message to debug? Switch to 4 – all, and you’ll drink from the firehose.

There is also the new log library, which lets you easily send messages for those different levels. And all messages logged with the objects from the log library are clickable: when you Ctrl-Click or Cmd-click (Mac OS X) on the line in the Pd Window, it’ll pop up the patch where the message came from, and highlight the specific object that printed it. That even works for many messages from other objects, as well.

The Pd Window also includes very basic level meters for monitoring the input and output levels. And for those who want to play with the GUI in realtime, you can type Tcl code in the Tcl entry field, and directly modify and probe the running GUI.

Customize the GUI with Plugins

One thing that you can do now is customize the GUI using GUI plugins. You can change all sorts of colors, some fonts, and many behaviors. Want to create a new object when you triple-click? Try the tripleclick example plugin Want to make the patch cords disappear when you leave Edit Mode? Check out the “only show cords in edit mode” example. Those are the simple ones. There is also Tab Completion, a search engine for the docs, a category browser for the right-click menu, a buttonbar for creating objects, and more.

You can find many GUI plugins in the new section of the downloads page as well as documentation for making your own. (What kind of GUI plugin will you write?)

Write Pd objects in more languages

Traditionally, Pd objects are written in Pd (abstractions), C and some in C++. This new release includes two “loaders”, Lua and Tcl, which allow you to write regular Pd objects in either Lua or Tcl. Pd is not the best for processing strings, so if you need to do that, you can now easily use Lua or Tcl, both very easy scripting languages for working with strings. Lua is often used for OpenGL work, so you can also run Lua objects to work in conjunction with Gem. Also, the Tcl loader lets you write GUI objects in pure Tcl, no C needed.

Multi-processing, Pd-style!

The [pd~] object now works out of box. In case you missed the introduction of the [pd~] object in the last release, we’ll introduce you now. [pd~] is Pd itself incapsulated into an object. You can run any patch inside that instance of Pd, the difference is that the Pd in the [pd~] object runs in a totally separate process. So if your computer has multiple CPU cores, which basically all computers do these days, then the Pd process inside the [pd~] object will run on a separate core. This means you can have a heavy Pd patch spread across multiple cores or CPUs. Or for people who work with video and audio together, you can have one instance for video running at a normal priority, then another instance for audio running at a high priority to make sure there aren’t clicks in the audio caused by heavy video processing.

Autotips, generated from help patches

This release also provides a new “autotips” feature to provide instant information about objects and their inlets and outlets. It is one of the first new developments to showcase all of the meta data that is now included in all of the help patches. (Check out the [pd META] subpatches.) When you hover above an inlet or the object itself in Edit Mode, you’ll see a short text description pop up on the lower left corner. But, of course, using a GUI plugin, you could customize how they are displayed to make it how you want to see it. If you want to add autotips to your object, then just add a [pd META] subpatch to your objects’ help patches, and fill out the description, etc. Voila! They’ll have instant information.

What’s next?

The core pd process still handles a lot of the GUI stuff, but we are working on splitting that out for the 0.44 release. That is a big chunk of work, but it will also bring big gains. In particular, it means that it will be possible for people to write their own GUIs for Pd, covering not just the display of the patch, but also the editing, and everything else. You like OpenFrameworks, Python, iOS, JUCE, Qt, etc.? Write your own pd-gui using the toolkit of your choice. That’s the idea at least. That will take a solid chunk of work, so we are looking for people to join that effort.

Try it yourself:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended/releases/0.43.1
http://puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended

Where to learn Pd:

Resources to start learning

-Hans-Christoph Steiner for CDM

The original vision of the MeeBlip was to make something affordable, something open and hackable, something anyone could get, something that could tell a story, and something we’d use to make some music. And since those are all goals of Create Digital Music, too, it’s a perfect physical compliment to what we do. For me, personally, it means putting my money where my (blogging) mouth is. It’s a chance to learn.

So that makes this a really special week. It hasn’t been easy getting here, but now the MeeBlip begins its second chapter.

This week, we’re announcing availability of the MeeBlip SE. US$139 (intro price) buys you a version you can put together in a few minutes with just a screwdriver, a complete, MIDI-capable digital hardware synth. (We ship most places worldwide – and we’re shipping now.) Through incredible work by the MeeBlip’s principal designer, Canadian James Grahame, the SE revises our original design:

• It’s more playable. With lots of feedback from users (and extended chats with Francis Preve of Keyboard Magazine and Academik Records), we made the control layout more logical and more fun to play.
• It’s got a greater sonic range. Anti-aliasing on/off, and a variable pulse width knob combine with more unusual features like its digital distortion and intentionally-quirky digital filter.
• Everything responds to MIDI. If there’s a knob or switch on the front panel, there’s a MIDI parameter – and vice versa. Whether you use your hand or a MIDI message, everything is accessible.
• It stores patches. 16 patch slots accessible from the front panel mean you can use your favorite sounds live, and you can store them somewhere other than your brain.

And you can get one right now. (MeeBlip SE, and for DIYers, either the SE Build Everything version or the compact micro board.)

But, of course, as we learned how to make the synth better, we learned a lot more about how to make the business of making a synth better. Learning is wonderful: I’ve been floored by seeing what people have done with these instruments, by seeing them pop up in unexpected places and making brilliant, unexpected sounds. Learning is also painful. We made some mistakes, as demand for the MeeBlip went beyond what we expected, and the limitations of the chip we chose made developing our more ambitious ideas take longer than we wanted.

In other words, users have been incredibly inspiring – reality has sometimes been incredibly challenging – and those are the two things that have moved us forward.

So, it’s now a daily task to work on ways of making the MeeBlip more accessible, more available, and better.

While we work on that, you can now find all of our schematics and code – including many, many hours of James’ work, in particular – on GitHub. Axel Werner, a programmer in our community, has already contributed to making that code better, so when you play a MeeBlip, you’re playing some of his work, too. (The lesson of open source: if just one person does something with what you share, it’s already worth it. And Axel’s not alone.)

I’m working mainly on documentation – both for users just wanting to make music (even if this is their first synth), and developers who want to learn about code and sound.

You can learn about the MeeBlip, read those new docs as they’re added, keep up with the latest, and – if you like – buy the new MeeBlip SE as a kit or quick-build synth – at the synth’s site:

http://meeblip.com

Let’s Get Some Music in Here

I can’t talk about the MeeBlip nearly as well as its users can show it.

Case in point: we didn’t know one Jeremy Leaird-Koch until the video above popped in our inbox. It’s a demo video of the MeeBlip SE, and it shows off all the new sonic features of the instrument, and demonstrates the PWM width functionality, and shows how to make music, and does a timelapse of building the kit from scratch. Here’s the funny part: we didn’t ask him to do this. His demo video puts anything we’d make to shame.

Jeremy’s story behind this, and the reason there are two MeeBlips in there, was even more amazing. He wrote us about a month ago:

My boyfriend and I had put off exchanging Christmas gifts because I was waiting for the MeeBlip kit (his present) to arrive. Finally, about a week or so after XMAS, it came, I wrapped it up, and gave it to him. I unwrap his present to me, and it’s in a Canada Post box, too. Turns out we got each other the exact same thing. Two MeeBlip kits. Absolutely hilarious.

Anyways, the next day we built them up and played around with them. We also made this little video documenting one of the builds and our first explorations of what it could do. Damn, what a fun little box.

I nearly cried – well, for two reasons. One was, it was a clear explanation of why you go nuts trying to make a synth. The other was, we really screwed up shipping in 2011, and if anything told me to never let that happen again, this story did. We’ve changed the way we source parts, the way we assemble the MeeBlip, and the way we distribute it, and it’s one of the things I think about every morning when I wake up. But thanks, Jeremy and your boyfriend; you’ve absolutely inspired us.

And most importantly, I want to hear more music, made on whatever thing you choose, because I really enjoyed it. And that’s what this is all about.

Side note: if you like soldering, you want the MeeBlip Build Everything kit for intro US$119, which is what he has here. If you don’t, don’t let this scare you; you can get the Quick Build and just use a screwdriver, and it doesn’t take a whole lot longer than this does in fast-forward timelapse time.

http://meeblip.com/get-one/

We’re here today not just because people like synths, or electronic music, or even music itself, but because the advancement of technology depends on kids learning about science and math.

That was certainly the history of Bob Moog himself. What he got as a student opened up the doors to the knowledge and interests that gave the world Moog synthesizers. Dr. Moog himself long credited his education – as a youngster at Bronx High School of Science in New York City, studying physics at Queens College, Colombia, and Cornell, and even making kit Theremins and discovering electronics – for what would come. Look to any other synth pioneer, or modern inventor or software developer, and you’ll find a similar story.

That’s not to say we need to turn the entire population of the planet into synth builders. But what music technologists do inspires science just as science inspires music. A lot of the young boys and girls who played with Theremins – or, later, Moog synths – went on to advancements in everything from space exploration to medicine. People accomplished amazing things motivated in part by the politics of the Cold War. Imagine what we could do motivated by the desire to do new things – and make new sounds.

All of this makes the mission of the Moog Foundation vitally important. Led by Bob Moog’s daughter Michelle and an elite crack team of synth experts, they’ve already begun reaching kids in schools around Asheville, North Carolina and Jamaica. They’re using synths as a window into science and physics. (Waves underly huge amounts of the universe, and it’s tough to find a better way to understand those waves than playing an electronic musical instrument.)

A funding drive to take this local project national is about to run out of time, and it’s well short of its funding goal. So now’s a great time to look at the project and consider giving even a small amount of support.

You’ve got only a little time left: at the end of Thursday March 1, just before midnight, Eastern time, this fund drive is over.

There are two important things you should know.

First, the Moog Foundation is not associated with Moog Music, the private company started by Bob that makes products like the Voyager and Moogerfooger. The Moog Foundation is entirely independent, and not-for-profit. Science (science!), not selling Moogs, is their mission, and they’re driven by your support – not sales of gear.

Second, since it’s awesome to get swag along with your feelings of good will and acheivement, yes, we’re going public TV/radio fund drive here and telling you that you’re going to get some excellent stuff to commemerate your contribution and fill your studio (or the bumper of your car, if you’ve got one) with synth love.

Marc Doty, who has been involved with developing the curriculum, tells CDM more. (Marc is known recently in these parts when, in a bizarre instance of devil’s advocate, I wound up advocating analog synths and knobs and he iPad apps, all leading to some good discussion and I thought some nice insights.) He explains the mission of the project, and details the curriculum:

Bob Moog pursued his passion for musical instruments through his talent for electronics. As a result, his work changed the landscape of electronic music history, music history, and even history in general. The application of his creativity and innovation has resulted in tools and knowledge that inspired thousands from multiple generations.

It is the belief of the Bob Moog Foundation that the spirit of creativity and innovation evinced by Bob Moog has the power to continue to inspire; not just in regard to music, musical instruments, or electronics, but also in regard to creativity and innovation in general. We live in a time where unique and inspired approaches to problem solving make the difference between mediocrity and brilliance, and where a fresh outlook has the power to revolutionize thinking. Just like Bob’s work inspired a revolution in thinking.

Bob was an educator, so what better way to spread his legacy than through education?

Doctor Bob’s SoundSchool is a curriculum designed to portray the science of sound through the magic of music. It was authored in 2011 by a variety of skilled professionals who had been inspired by the work of Bob Moog, and is the result of their combined knowledge, talents, experiences, and inspiration. It focuses on the physics of sound, and delivers scientific content in an innovative and inspiring way consistent with aspects of Bob’s pursuits, as well as consistent with successful educational practice.

At the core of the curriculum is “The Wiggle.” The Wiggle is a creative way to portray the nature and behavior of sound which can be effectively and accurately demonstrated without simplification or generalization to students of all ages. The focus of the curriculum is the portrayal of the life cycle of the wiggle; how sound is generated, how it interacts with its environment, how it travels, how it is changed, and how it is perceived.

The curriculum is divided into 7 different sections; 5 of which address the nature and life cycle of The Wiggle. Using a variety of tools and media (including tuning forks, oscillators, and even real theremins!), the nature of sound is explored and revealed. The way sound is generated, the way it moves through various media, how it can be converted into electronic form, and how it it can be observed and measured are all covered in detail and in creative and compelling ways which are consistent with the multiple various learning styles of students.

One aspect of the curriculum is the “chain of sound.” This is a fun and creative set of cards which portrays sound in various ways from its origin to its perception that can be arranged in multiple configurations to portray the life cycle of the sound wave. Students can employ creative thinking in their arrangement of the cards, and the rules of arrangement help students understand the physical behavior of sound.

Currently, the curriculum is being implemented in Asheville City Schools at the 2nd grade level, which is the age at which the state standards suggest that the physics of sound should be introduced. This implementation is a test run where we fine tune our efforts through a process of measurement in regard to the effectiveness of the curriculum.

We are currently engaged in an Indiegogo campaign which will hopefully fund our efforts to expand Dr. Bob’s SoundSchool nationwide.

Marc Doty
Archive and Education Specialist

P.S. People still bring up our little interchange about the Animoog. It has been the source of a variety of interesting conversations! Thank you for that opportunity!

Thanks, Marc.

Among the prizes, pictured here: a Moog Voyager Select Series Synthesizer signed by Moog-inspired artists including Brian Eno, Moby, Wayne Coyne, Edgar Froese, Passion Pit, Chromeo, Ghostland Obervatory and many other bands who performed at Moogfest 2011. The Moog Foundation says donors can also win a VIP weekend for two to Moogfest 2012 featuring a stay at the breathtaking Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa in Asheville, NC and a pair of VIP tickets to Moogfest 2012.

But those nice bonuses aside, I think it’s worth noting that the entire impetus for the project came out of an outpouring of letters and support following Bob Moog’s death. It’s something we saw at CDM, and it’s fantastic to see out of what was initially grief, something new blossoming.

More information:
http://www.indiegogo.com/Bob-Moog-Foundation-Dr-Bobs-SoundSchool
www.moogfoundation.org
Photo gallery of Moogfest Voyager: http://bit.ly/wYY9mZ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/MoogFoundation
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BobMoogFoundation

And to see this in action, don’t miss:
Pilot Program of Dr. Bob’s SoundSchool Begins

FRACT is a curious combination of music studio and puzzle game, merging elements of games like Myst with the sorts of synths and pattern editors you’d expect somewhere like Ableton Live. You have to make sounds and melodies to solve puzzles; by the end of the game, say the creators, you’re even producing original music. The work of a small student team out of Montreal, FRACT looks like it has all the makings of an underground indie hit – at least for music nerds.

As the creators describe it:

FRACT is a first person adventure game for Windows & Mac much in the vein of the Myst titles, but with an electro twist. Gameplay boils down to three core activities: Explore, Rebuild, Create. The player is let loose into an abstract world built on sound and structures inspired by electronic music. It’s left to the player to explore the environment to find clues to resurrect and revive the long-forgotten machinery of this musical world, in order to unlock its inner workings. Drawing inspiration from Myst, Rez and Tron, the game is also influenced by graphic design, data visualization, electronic music and analog culture.

The hub of the game is a virtual studio, collecting patterns and timbres. It’s right now in prototype phase, but it already looks visually stunning, an alien, digital world in which more-conventional step-sequencer views seem to emerge from futuristic landscapes. And you can spot Pd in the background (the free and open source patching tool, Pure Data). Update: the developers confirm that they’re working with the embeddable Pd library, libpd. That enables synths with sounds like phase modulation and classic virtual analog sounds, all modulating and generating sounds in-game.

The developers have also published plenty of sound samples so you can experience the musical side of this. Via SoundCloud:

While never released, one place some similar ideas has shown up is a prototype game inspired by Deadmau5. As in this title, two-dimensional editing screens and synth parameters are mapped to a first-person, three-dimensional environment. However, FRACT appears to take this concept much further, expanding upon the world, building more instruments, and actually turning those interactions into gameplay elements. The video of the Deadmau5 project – apparently done in-house for fun and not endorsed by the mouse-headed artist:

That title was the work of a game house called Floaty Hybrid; music blog Synthtopia got the scoop on this in August:
http://www.floathybrid.com
Mau5Bot Sequencer Lets You Make Music In A 3D World [Synthtopia]

We’ll be watching this one develop, certainly; good luck to the team!
http://fractgame.com/

Let’s get straight to it: granular synthesis, and the various processes based on the principle, is one of the coolest things about making music with computers. With the ability to take sounds and stretch, mangle, and reshape them into new textures, it’s one of the fundamental techniques allowing sound software and lots of terrific timbral techniques to work.

Of course, explaining it to lay people is a bit of a trick. So that’s why, even before we get into talking about Steinberg’s upcoming Padshop synth, it’s worth watching the first few minutes. Sound designer Matthias Klag explains that coolness really succinctly (and, I think, accurately).

I’m excited to try Padshop. Now, on its surface, I can’t yet see anything radically new in how it works relative to what you get from some of the better Reaktor patches out there. On the other hand, a lot of people aren’t willing to go buy Reaktor just to use those tools. And it seems Steinberg has built something that brings together a traditional synth’s playability with some of the better tools for dialing in far-out granular textures. We’ll get to see it later this month, and then see if this is as big a breakthrough for granular sounds as Steinberg says. But I think it’s worth an early look, nonetheless – if for no other reason than hearing this nice explanation.

And if I get one great pad for a track out of this, count me in. Time to stock up on some Fritz-Kola, in Hamburg’s honor.

What if a workstation arrangement keyboard were designed for DJs and synth rockers instead of, uh, whoever normally buys workstation arranger keyboards? Casio has taken the wraps off their new keyboards, and they appear to be affordable, all-in-one electronic beasts. Oh, except one of them has an organ. And an arpeggiator and step sequencer. So you can certainly step-sequence your drawbar organ, if you like.

There are also some retro-Casio CZ sounds, numbering in the thousands, loaded into these machines, so it seems Casio hasn’t forgotten why we loved them in the 80s.

And we hear the announcement via some charmingly-awkward headlines. They seem not so much lost in translation as something that makes me wonder what the original intent was:
A Groove Synthesizer with Many of the Cool Sounds and Features a DJ Uses in a Club

A Performance Synthesizer Specially Designed for Creating Sounds and Expressive Playing

That’ll otherwise be known as the XW-G1 and the XW-P1, respectively. I’m not sure which name is worse, so I’ll proceed.

I think all of this calls for celebration. Calvin Harris was echoing through my mind as I thought about CZ PCM waveforms:

Here’s what’s actually in these things.

A Groove Synthesizer with Many of the Cool Features a DJ Uses in a Club basically combines:

• A step sequencer with 100 pattern banks and 16 trigger buttons, and the ability to sequence multiple patterns together into bigger patterns
• A 100-phrase phrase sequencer
• Assignable keys (I think; here I get lost in translation)
• Solo synth (monophonic Virtual Analog) and PCM presets you can dial up
• Arpeggiator
• Sample looper with 19 seconds storage, overdubbing, and the ability to load samples as user PCM waveforms
• 61 full-size keys
• A “designated rubber holding space” – read, a mat that you can use to sit other gear on your keyboard

There’s 128KB of memory, but there’s also an SD slot, though it appears you can only use the SD to play SMF files.

You get a surprising amount of I/O: aside from USB, MIDI in and combined MIDI out/thru, you get a mic in, a line in, and a minijack line in. And the whole thing weighs just 5.4 kg (under 12 lbs).

The solo synth is truly monophonic. The routing appears to start with either a PCM or a Synth (hopefully Virtual Analog) pair of oscillators, or a hybrid (1 VA + 1 PCM), then route through filter and amp as expected.

There’s also a noise block, though, so you could presumably program some percussion sounds. And you can route an external input through the filter and amp envelope, via a pitch shifter, which is a bit more out of the ordinary.

There’s also a reverb, chorus, master EQ, and DSP block, though the DSP and chorus and Solo Synth all appear to use the same DSP.

80s jokes aside, in other words, this is not in any way an 80s synth.

A Performance Synthesizer Specially Designed for Creating Sounds and Expressive Playing is more or less the same synth, but with:

• “Hex Layer” for up to six-part combo “ensemble” sounds
• 50 drawbar organ presets
• 2,158 PCM waves, including presets from the CZ series (though I’m not sure if some of those CZ sounds aren’t also on the DJ model)

In fact, the Phrase Sequencer, Step Sequencer, and Arp are all in the “performance” synth, too, along with all the same I/O; it only lacks that loop recorder.

So, DJ version: 10 user wave slots and a looper.

Performance version: More presets overall, with the same synth presets, but “Hex Layers” for ensemble combos and some drawbar organ sets.

In other words, unless you really want to play a lot of organ or I learn it lacks those CZ PCM waveforms, you’d get the “DJ” version.

We know these are shipping in March and April, and that’s about it. I obviously need to pay the Casio booth a visit and find out if they’ll say anything about price, and get a look at these crazy-looking control layouts.

This NAMM, more than is even typical for NAMM, seems to fold back in time. I’m not sure if it’s 1978, 1988, or 1996. Or, at times, I think I may be at Macworld in the iPhone section.

I just wouldn’t write this keyboard off yet, as it might be some fun. It’s biggest challenge is going up against more-focused offerings from KORG that focus on pattern, looping, and other features. I’ll check it out.

Now, I’m just going to be very, very careful talking to US TSA airport security and Customs, because I don’t want to wind up in a “designated rubber holding space” on my way out of here Saturday.

Official PR announcement

Nod to Synthtopia, whom I’m fairly sure aren’t sleeping

I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

Max 6 in Public Beta; For Home-brewing Music Tools Graphically, Perhaps the Biggest Single Update Yet

Just because a music tool fills your screen with tools and options doesn’t necessarily make it easier to realize your ideas. From the beginning, the appeal of Max – as with other tools that let you roll your own musical tools from a set of pre-built building blocks – has been the blank canvas.

Max 6 would appear to aim to make the gap between your ideas and those tools still narrower, and to make the results more sonically-pleasing. The reveal: it could also change how you work with patches in performance and production. I was surprised when early teasers failed to impress some users, perhaps owing to scant information. Now, Max 6 is available in public beta, and the details are far clearer. Even if Max 5 was the biggest user interface overhaul in many years, Max 6 appears to be the biggest leap in actual functionality.

It’s what I’d describe as a kitchen-sink approach, adding to every aspect of the tool, so there’s almost certain to be some things here you won’t use. What could appeal to new users, though, are I think two major changes.

More visual patching feedback and discoverability. First, building upon what we saw in Max 5, Max’s approach is to provide as much visual information as possible about what you’re doing. It’s probably the polar opposite of what we saw earlier this week in something like the live-coding environment Overtone: Max’s UI is actively involved with you as you patch. There are visual tools for finding the objects you want, then visual feedback to tell you what those objects do, plus an always-visible reference bar and rewritten help. This more-active UI should make Max more accessible to people who like this sort of visual reference as they work. No approach will appeal to everyone – some people will find all that UI a bit more than they like – but Max’s developers appear to be exploiting as much as they can with interactive visual patching.

Multiple patches at once. New objects for filters and data, a 64-bit audio engine, and low-level programming are all well and good. But the change that may more profoundly impact users and workflow is be the way Max 6 handles multiple patches. Max – and by extension Pd – have in the past made each patch operate independently. Sound may stop when you open a patch, and there’s no easy or fully reliable way to use multiple patches at once. (Compare, for example, SuperCollider, which uses a server/client model that lacks this limitation.) That changes with Max 6: you can now operate multiple patches at the same time, mix them together with independent volume, mute, and solo controls, and open and close them without interrupting your audio flow. (At least one reader notes via Twitter that you can open more than one patch at once – I’d just say this makes it better, with more reliable sound and essential mixing capabilities.) Update: since I mentioned Pd, Seppo notes that the pd~ object provides similar functionality in regards to multiple patches and multi-core operation. This has been an ongoing discussion in the libpd group, so I think we’ll revisit that separately!

One upshot of this change: some users have turned to Ableton Live just to host multiple patches. For users whose live performance set involves Ableton, that’s a good thing. But it could be overkill if all you want to do is bring up a few nifty patches and play with them. Now, I think we’ll start to see more people onstage with only Max again. (Check back in a few months to see if I’m right.)

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

• Discoverability: A “wheel” makes the mysterious functions of different objects immediately visible; Object Explorer makes them easier to find, and new help and reference sidebar keep documentation close at hand.

• 64-bit audio engine

• Open multiple patches, solo and mute them, open and close them without stopping audio, mix audio between them with independent volume, and take advantage of multiple processors with multiple patches.

• Low level building blocks: You don’t get new synth objects, but you could build them yourself. New low-level data-crunching goodness work with MSP audio, Jitter Matrix, and OpenGL textures

• More JavaScript: An overhauled JavaScript engine makes JS scripting faster and more flexible, and there’s a proper text editor with syntax highlighting (though, of course, you may still prefer your own).

• New visuals: Vector graphics and “HTML5 Canvas-like” UI scripting (though to me it’s a shame this isn’t just the HTML5 Canvas). There are also massively-expanded Jitter powers, but those are best left to our sister site Create Digital Motion.

• Filters: New filter-visualizing tools for audio filter construction and manipulation.

• Dictionary data type and associated objects let you describe information in a more structured way (all kinds of potential here from control to composition)

• Projects now let you organize data, media, and scripts in the manner more associated with conventional development environments

• What about Ableton? No news on that front, but I expect more soon. Max for Live users will at the very least get the advantages above, since Max for Live is really Max inside Live.

Looking over all that Max does, I have to say, I’m really amazed. I wonder if computer musicians ever pause to consider how fortunate we are. Even if this isn’t the tool for you, its availability – compounded by the availability of a range of other tools – is itself worth reflection.

Max is a program that shouldn’t exist, doing a number of things it shouldn’t do, for a user base that shouldn’t exist, doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

It doesn’t make sense that you could maintain a commercial project for this kind of audience, that you’d wind up with something this mature and powerful that had a continuous lineage stretching back to the 1980s. It doesn’t make sense that musicians would embrace such a tool and produce invention. The only explanation is sheer love.

Then, even as Max reaches new heights, some of the alternatives you have for making your own music tools are simultaneously growing by leaps and bounds. They provide very different approaches to music making (compare Overtone and SuperCollider, or Pd and libpd, or AudioMulch, or new Web audio tools). There really aren’t many fields that have this kind of choice, free and commercial, in their medium. In science and engineering, there’s private and public funding, producing some amazing tools but nothing with this kind of meeting of power and accesibility. There’s just something about music.

The fact that Cycling ‘74 can maintain a business model – just as open source projects maintain volunteer contributions – is a testament to sheer passion and love for music, and a commitment to perpetually re-imagining how that music is made from an atomic level up. There was a wonderful piece on C creator and UNIX co-creator Dennis Ritchie, whom I remembered yesterday, that observed that what he did was to do what others said couldn’t be done. From Max itself to what people make with it, I think that fits nicely.

So, have a look at the public beta, and let us know what you think. The release of Max 6 has caused more people to ask what this means for Pd and other tools, or even whether to patch things from scratch at all, but I’ll leave that question to a bit later. (I do have my own opinion about which tool fits which circumstance and user, but that’s best left to a separate discussion.) For now, you can try Max yourself and see what the fuss is about. If it doesn’t fit your means of music-making, know that you have a wide array of other options – pre-built to low-level code to old-fashioned tape-and-mic approaches, and everything in between. Go out and listen and see what you discover.

http://cycling74.com/downloads/max-6-public-beta/