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Ever feel like you’ve found the seam dividing past and future?

The past: restrictive UI frameworks requiring pages and pages of code to produce dated-look 2D displays. Proprietary software with rigid interfaces. Input bottlenecked through the x and y coordinates of a single mouse pointer.

The future: UIs whipped together graphically or with a few lines of code. 3D mixed with 2D. Open-source, friendly frameworks. Creating your own interface or drawing upon a community of creative software makers. Input that uses multitouch for gestures, collaborative input, manipulation of 2D and 3D space, and … well, just a lot more fun.

There’s no need to wait around for the future. Creative software inventors are building it for themselves. Here are two of the most promising multitouch interface projects I’ve seen in my inbox.

In no time at all, you’ll be painting a cow! (Okay, more on that in a moment…)

Despite its quirks, Windows can be a wildly underrated OS for music. Of course, that has little to do with the way it works out of the box. It’s a matter of tweaking your setup so you reshape it into a finely-tuned musical tool. And I believe in sharing that info, because ultimately you should be able to make music on whichever OS you choose.

Rain Recording, a custom PC vendor that specializes in building systems for music and creative work, asked me to write up some of my favorite tools for just that job. For the first part, I looked at the unpleasant stuff — tools for troubleshooting your system and keeping it operating at maximum efficiency.

Part 2 is more fun — the goodies that actually help your musical workflow. I kept this entirely to utilities for MIDI and control, but thanks to the effort of some passionate musician-programmers, that winds up being an impressive toolkit. Quite a few items are Windows-only. (I do actually intend to cover Mac OS and Linux, too, but Windows stacked up pretty well.)

My picks, all free, donationware (and do donate and support these tools!), or relatively cheap:

Proprietary systems like FreeHand’s awkwardly-named MusicPad Pro Plus (Pro Plus, eh?) have offered digital manuscript paper for some time. But the idea there is you buy dedicated hardware; the MusicPad Pro Plus is US$899. With tablet PCs starting at about the same price, and the convenience of having your mobile computer also be your music notation, it seems like the convergence of the manuscript page and the computer isn’t far off.

Enter MusicReader for Windows XP and Vista. It runs just US$69-99; bring your own laptop. Better yet, bring your own tablet PC and you have a form factor that fits naturally on a music stand and can be marked up with digital ink. Turn pages with a tap or foot pedal.

Sheet Music 2.0 [Wired.com, via the tablet lovers at GottaBeMobile.com]

With the ultra-thin machine on its way (witness new ultra-thin laptops from Apple and Lenovo, and upcoming low-power, tiny chips from Intel), the future looks even better. Here’s a video of the system in action, lest you think this would never appear in the real world (suggestion: you may want to mute the sound, as the background score is a bit …unnecessary):

Mac users, looks like you’re booting into Boot Camp for now. Too bad Apple still doesn’t think we want a tablet.

Reading notation is good fun, but what if you could write it, too? A little-noticed, open-source tool from researchers at Brown University does just that on Windows Tablet PCs, and even made a brief, official appearance as a Microsoft PowerToy. The recognition is surprisingly satisfying once you learn the shortcuts, which resemble Palm Graffiti strokes. Finally, in 2005 the developers added MIDI export, making this a potentially useful tool. If there’s someone out there with a newish Vista tablet, I’d be curious to know if this still works on modern machines.

To me, the ability to write as well as read makes things far more interesting. But for about a hundred bucks — well, plus whatever your tablet PC cost — you’ve got digital music paper right now.

Music Notepad for Tablet PC

Does any of this actually matter to you? Blogger Tom Whitwell asked that of his readers, and found the answer is, well, sorta:

Can Music Thing readers read music? [Music Thing]

Hardware is wonderful, but make no mistake about it: many musicians have put the same care and musical love into their software setup as once was limited to tangled guitar pedal rigs. We’ve been watching as intricate computer music studios appear in the CDM Flickr pool.

proem, the gifted electronic musician from Austin, Texas (see Wikipedia, proem’s own site) who regular shares haiku-like reflections in CDM comments, is the latest to post his setup:

• Dual Dell e207 LCD displays
• Windows PC
• FL Studio (aka Fruity Loops), with a custom dashboard for controlling all the hardware and a modded install
• Native Instruments Komplete
• Evolution MK249-c keyboard (Evolution was a UK-based keyboard maker later absorbed by M-Audio)
• M-Audio Trigger Finger
• Wacom Intuos3 6×8 (just picked up the same tablet myself and adore it — mouse, begone!)
• The now-discontinued (sadly) Fingerworks iGesture multi-touch controller. Apple iGuesture any time soon, perhaps? (I’ve heard rumors from a couple of sources that they bought the patents.)
• The not-discontinued Shuttle XPress
• Tablet2MIDI, which translates Wacom graphics tablets to MIDI data for use in performance

What looks like some huge news gets casually mentioned in descriptions for the upcoming SIGGRAPH graphics conference and on the website of JazzMutant, the developers of multi-touch hardware controllers Lemur and Dexter:

Jazzmutant is proud to have been selected by the Siggraph Emerging Technologies Committee in San Diego to demo a new prototype device for digital imaging involving multi-touch control. This solution will go beyond mere finger-drawing and clearly illustrate a new way to interact and improve productivity with drawing and video editing software. Furthermore, the solution presented will be the very first multi-touch enabled Tablet PC shown to the public.

JazzMutant news

One of my complaints when I looked at the first Lemur touchscreen was that it felt like it had in a way separated display, computer, and interface. A computer with multi-touch? Now we’re talking. Lots of questions here, though: how would a typical PC support the multi-touch interface? How much would it cost? What’s this new prototype device — is it, as the Dexter was, basically just another Lemur with the addition of new control templates?

Time will tell. We’ll be watching. But this is some of the best multi-touch news in a long time.

Thanks to Andreas Wetterberg for the tip!