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…)

Make Max Multitouch

Max Multitouch Framework by composer Mathieu Chamagne makes turning your Max patch into a multitouch interface a breeze. When I first reviewed the Lemur, I was frustrated by the hardware-style abstraction between your software and the interface. Why was I having to go through Max patches painstakingly assigning Lemur controls to Max controls – why not just make the Max controls appear on the multitouch screen? Well, that’s exactly what you get with MMF. Using a set of Max abstractions, all you have to do is build your Presentation Mode style UI and add in the MMF ingredients – it automagically becomes touchable on a variety of displays.

It’s not hard to imagine how great this could be for musicians, especially those who have already been building original sonic creations in Max/MSP. Best of all, you don’t need an expensive, non-portable table with a projector inside, either – commodity hardware works just fine right now.

Requirements :

- cycling’74 Max5 (version 5.0.6 required)
- any multitouch interface that sends TUIO messages.

MMF has been tested and works fine with : Stantum SMK-15.4 multitouch screen, HP XT2 tablet pc (windows7 + W2TUIO), Demand Evolution + home made multitouch screen + Reactivision / Tbeta , …

MMF (Max Multitouch Framework) @ Mathieu Chamagne’s Site

Hmmm… apps that send (cough) TUIO, eh? Ah, yes, but that’s why you need companies like Apple to tell you what qualifies as useful in an iPhone app. You see, without Apple’s app review team and their superior wisdom, I might wrongfully assume this sort of app would be something I’d want. Now I know better – thanks! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Back to the on-topic discussion, this does demonstrate a real advantage of Max: it has its UI absolutely nailed, and the open-source alternative Pd is woefully behind. It also demonstrates that the beauty of Presentation Mode is, by abstracting the UI from the underlying guts, you can consider alternative interfaces. We should see that in Max for Live, as well.

Pd is fantastic in other ways, but if there’s anyone out there who fancies writing a lightweight new front-end, it could use it – perhaps in Python. Which brings us to the next item.

pymt demo reel from Thomas Hansen on Vimeo.

PyMT: Juicy Multitouch, Just a Few Lines o’ Code

PyMT is a glimpse of what future development could look like. While Microsoft putzes around with their Windows-only Surface, PyMT makes multitouch platform agnostic, open, and easy. That frees up artists to dream up creative new ways of applying this interface to expressive musical and visual creations (among others). Instead of reinventing the wheel as far as plumbing, you can focus on the reason for using devices in the first place – your art.

PyMT is profoundly portable, using Python and OpenGL to deliver windowing and multimedia features across platforms. Documentation and code are both under heavy development, but there are already some friendly-looking resources. This is almost enough to shake me from my loyalty to Java, though, in fairness, you can do some of the same things with Java and other tools. What’s most important is that there are libraries that are providing standards, like TUIO, and implementations in cross-platform languages that can be easily developed.

There’s good reason to be bullish on the future of this tech. And if you want to see it happen, don’t wait – you can get involved in the project directly.

PyMT at Google Code

PyMT Project Page

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:

1. MIDI-OX: This is usually the first utility I install on any PC — it’s a do-everything MIDI monitor and MIDI-processing utility, for watching messages, troubleshooting, and performing various processing tasks. Donationware.

2. MIDI-Yoke: Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have built-in inter-app communication between apps using MIDI, but MIDI-Yoke performs the task elegantly. (Note, Processing lovers: it also works with Java, so this can allow you to build wild interfaces for music in Processing that control other apps.) Donationware.

3. Bome MIDI Translator: A fantastic tool for creating custom MIDI mappings, translating MIDI to QWERTY keystrokes (and back again), and building rules for performance. Prices range from free to EUR59 for end-user releases, but this is one spending money on.

4. SendSX from Bome sends System Exclusive data. Free.

5. Bome’s Mouse Keyboard gives you an on-screen, clickable interface for controlling synths — essential for when you’re doing some last-minute synth programming and set editing on the go. (Yes, like if you decide to make a last-second tweak in the hotel room before a gig.) Free.

6. Edrum Monitor This tool is useful enough for drums alone, with powerful features for adapting input from electronic drum kits and drum sensors for better accuracy. But they didn’t stop there: with deep data monitoring tools, visual meters for calibration, and support for keyboard, mouse, and joystick inputs, this is just an insane do-everything tool that deserves its own category. Donationware.

7. Jack for Windows An inter-app or even inter-computer audio server, ported from Linux. Linux does Jack better, but if you can’t bear to part with your Windows software, it’s worth testing this – and hopefully someone can help the talented Jack team support and develop it further on the Windows OS. Free.

8. Wormhole2: Think Portal for your host of choice: insert this VST plug-in, and you can route audio to and from different apps, different PCs, or even between Macs and PCs easily. Finally, you can bridge the platform divide and the Mac can lie down with the Windows PC happily. This began as commercial software from Plasq, but it’s now free and open source.

9. MCmu: Emulate Mackie Control with devices that don’t support it. Make devices that do support Mackie Control better. Get the controller power you need with apps like Ableton Live and SONAR. Brilliant stuff. EUR39.

10. OSCGlue: Broadcast OpenSoundControl messages from within a host, ideal for gluing together music software and live visuals. Free, from the vvvv community.

11. WMIDI: Transmit MIDI from Wacom (or other brand) tablet input, complete with tilt and pressure, to turn your graphics tablet into an expressive musical controller. Free.

12. GlovePIE: Somehow I left this out of my original round-up. Take joysticks, gamepads, mice, keyboards, MIDI input devices, Wiimotes, and other devices, output MIDI, keystrokes, and other forms of control (even OSC). It’s my favorite software for control input/output. Requires some scripting, but there are some good sample scripts; hope to post more soon. Free.

Full details and more commentary (plus some additional picks):

Essential Toolkit for Windows – Part 2: (Mostly) Free Musical Utilities for Power Users [Rain Recording Pro]

Previously:
10 Free Non-Musical Windows Software Every Musician Should Use

Of course, this is just a short list of my personal favorites. Any I left out, Windows users?

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

Whereas hardware fetishists brag about heavy, costly gear collections, the software setup has more to do with clever configuration and control. (Hey, I’m not saying I don’t drool over, say, some of the live rigs we’ve diagrammed in Keyboard Magazine, but the fact that you can afford and lift a great PC setup is encouraging.)

Custom performance setups are definitely where it’s at. FL Studio has Dashboards, Reason has the Combinator, Logic Studio 8 has the new OnStage, Live has Racks, Reaktor has — well, completely custom interfaces, Max 5 promises new performance interfaces, and Native Instruments has Kore. (Just to name a few; SONAR, Cubase, and DP all have custom dashboards with branding I’m presently forgetting.) The basic idea: build a virtual front-panel so you can get right to music making. I personally think it’s interesting all these applications have moved in this direction, with different implementations / design principles. I hope they all continue to go further.

The Tablet2MIDI part is especially interesting. Tablets have unusually high resolution and sensitivity, making them very expressive controllers once you’ve practiced using them. Also on Windows: WMIDI. If you’re on the Mac instead of Windows, you have an excellent (and slightly more polished/stable) alternative, µ midi controller from Music Unfolding. And naturally, on any OS, you can custom-program or patch a solution with Max, Pd, and so on. But this, combined with all the X/Y control, makes for a beautiful set of tools for controlling sound. I’d love to see it in action, proem!

I’ve finally gotten a better tablet myself, a shiny, new, 6×8 Intuos from Wacom. That’s a good thing, because the cheap 4×5 Wacom I had previously first made me feel like I had somehow disconnected my hand from my brain (a combination of the smaller area, lower resolution, and challenge of using tablets in general), then promptly stopped working altogether. I’ll be trying out the Wacom on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux, and working on hooking it up to Java and Processing, so stay tuned.

Previously:

Flickr Screen Grabs: Infinite Video Theremin, Odd, Free Musical Interfaces

Soft Flickr Finds: Obscenely Complex Bass Effects on a Single Channel

Use Graphics Tablets for Music: New and Updated Software, Free Tablet Theremin

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!

Conceptual albums. The folks at BornRich.org have a beautiful music tablet PC design up. (Thanks, Gizmodo.) Only problem: it’s basically a Windows tablet PC with a prettier body; the real magic in portable music tablets would come from smarter software. See also their computer in a drum case, which might allow drummers to sneak Ableton Live onstage.

The Long Tail and the Toilet. Lastly, if you’re looking for a new way to distribute your music and gain audiences, and you’re a totally obscure indie band with a name like “Nine Inch Nails” (who?) why not distribute your music taped to USB keys in urinals? In Portugal? (Damn you, Reznor, you stole ANOTHER of my ideas?) Just make sure you tell the RIAA first. Oh, and make sure not to leave your Logic Pro dongle by mistake. I do love the fake site NIN points to. “ZERO TOLERANCE. ZERO FEAR.” happens to be the new slogan of the new CDM forum moderators.

Remember patent 0060026536? It’s the multi-touch, gestural patent Apple filed that was clearly the precursor of the Apple iPhone. Here’s the curious thing: the iPhone, as demonstrated at the Macworld keynote, isn’t all that focused on multi-touch. With the exception of Apple’s clever zooming gesture, most gestures are single-touch. Most are horizontal and vertical strokes similar to what you can already do on laptop touchpads.

A lot of what gets put into patents never shows up in shipping products, but I would be very surprised if Apple’s multi-touch abilities didn’t start to spread to new stuff. Touchscreens and eventually multi-touchscreens are likely to appear on more computers, PC and Mac alike. And other devices have likely lacked touchscreens only because the digitizer hardware — and the processors to deal with tracking multiple touches — hadn’t yet reached the right economy of scale, something that’s likely to happen soon (the iPhone in June being a good indicator). Phones have the advantage of subsidies from the phone carriers — the iPhone would presumably cost hundreds more if it didn’t have Cingular reducing the cost to get you on a 2-year plan. But the touch trend is likely to continue.

And that brings us back to the original patent. Could Apple in fact be working on a music mixer or other touch-enabled music interface? Or was this just a demonstration of an idea they had, and not a working product? Time will tell. I’ll repeat my concerns: touch is great in its flexibility, but losing tactile feedback is not — maybe something Apple themselves have discovered. But that’s unlikely to stop manufacturers from integrating touch into products for musicians in the near future, whether it’s Apple or someone else. And it won’t just be the Lemur.

Okay, no remaining stories this week will have headlines in the form of a question; I promise. “NAMM: New DJ Hardware????”

Apple’s iPhone prototype is a beautiful culmination of user interface design and industrial/product design. But the core of the product really is its multi-touch interface, which should gratify readers of this site. Almost from the moment this site was founded, you’ve advocated the possibilities of touch and multi-touch interfaces. CDM first covered the JazzMutant Lemur (later distributed by Max/MSP powerhouse Cycling ‘74) in November 2004, and readers of CDM were pouring over the interface possibilities of multi-touch as revealed in Apple’s patents back in February, along with experimental, projected multi-touch interfaces and even Windows multi-touch.

Musicians, after all, understand the importance of physical interfaces — it’s the essence of musical performance, and anyone who works with MIDI is intimate with the process of translating gestures into numbers.

So now the iPhone is (almost) here. It’s a brilliant design that, unlike my Windows Mobile-based UT Starcom VX6700, seems to actually understand what a phone is.

With months left until release, a lot could change. But, while I’m very excited about the iPhone’s design, two major questions concern me:

1. Will Apple lock down the iPhone, blocking Flash, Java, custom widgets, and open development from its new platform?

2. Could Apple’s multi-touch patents actually stifle growth of new, interactive displays?

While a lot of CDMers looked at iPhone and thought “that’d make a nifty music controller”, a possibility that now seems more remote, these questions of course have much deeper implications. So, with everyone else to ooh and ahh over Apple’s as-yet-unreleased phone (check out the hilarious faux unboxing), I get the chance to play skeptic.

The Closed iPhone

I ask this as a question, but so far, it looks as though Apple has already decided the iPhone will be an entirely closed box — no development. In fact, the real question perhaps should be, “Will the Mac community and technology press scream bloody murder until Apple opens the iPhone to third-party development?”

Apple Corporate Communications says, simply, there has been no formal announcement on development. But the few journalists with access to higher-level Apple executives and Jobs himself tell a different story. David Pogue’s iPhone FAQ says, simply, no. No third-party development. No widget development. No user-installable apps. No Flash. No Java. If you can write apps with HTML and JavaScript, then you’re set. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

An update to that FAQ says even more, and illustrates why I find this upsetting.

Jobs on Java: “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.” Okay, now there I’ll have a tough time arguing — for Web applets, most Java developers will even agree the runtime loads too slowly. But –

Jobs on Flash — it’s a “maybe”, but read this: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

And this, of course, is the Bad Apple. The whole point of the Web is independent publishing and standard formats. That’s what gives us the freedom to run this site, what gives many of you the freedom to begin distributing music and videos you’ve created independent from large, corporate gatekeepers. Apple is instead using their tight control over devices to make themselves the gatekeeper — we’ll deal with YouTube and make them do what we want, rather than build in a player that would let you see 100% of the Web on our communicator device. (Incidentally, Flash is a player, not a codec per se, so just switching to H.264 is not an improvement in “quality.” And Flash Player gives you additional flexibility that QuickTime and H.264 do not.)

Some Apple fans I talked to at Macworld last week thought this whole issue wasn’t even worth discussing — some because they’re so excited about iPhone, others because of a strange, resigned attitude to something they thought they couldn’t change. Yet iPhone is not iPod: it’s really a portable computer. Apple touted technologies that are developer tools, from OS X app development to Core Animation (the animation API upcoming in Leopard). It’s not just that you can develop for other devices and not the iPhone — it’s that the iPhone is the first portable device a lot of people would actually want to develop for. If Apple really is turning their back on open development, they’re turning their back on what made the Mac great. OS X with iApps and the pro apps pales in comparison to Macs running third-party software. It might just be one utility that makes the difference.

“But it’s just a phone.” Well, I have two arguments to that. The first is, it only takes one user-installable app to make a difference. For the server admins at Macworld Expo, Terminal and ssh topped the discussion list. For a student, it might be German-language flash cards. The point is, who owns your device — you, or Apple? (ssh utilities and flash card apps are both available on Palm and Windows Mobile, I might add.) My Windows phone is a clunky beast. But I now have PuTTY on it, so I can keep an eye on CDM’s servers.

The second argument is, take a look at other phones. Jaymis from the CDM staff just bought a Nokia 6233. (He’s in Australia, so the iPhone may be a long time coming.) The iPhone will work only on Cingular, and — unless you pay $1/minute or more — only in the US until it gets regional launches. Jaymis’ Nokia 6233 works anywhere in the world, on any GSM plan. It supports Adobe’s Flash Lite player. It supports Java. It’ll run the mobile version of the open source art programming tool Processing. You can connect it to a computer and use it as a modem, or directly access its SMS facility. It has an open SDK — actually, typically two SDKs for developers, one from the carrier, and one from the manufacturer. It’ll sync your contacts from Mac — and Windows, too. I could go on, but for a cheap, available-now, “legacy” phone, the 6233 has lots that the iPhone lacks. Not everyone needs all of these features, but anyone might need any one of them, particularly if someone else develops an app they need. And it seems with Mac OS X at its core, the iPhone could have the openness of this device, but allow developers to create Mac-like, elegant applications that people will actually use.

It’s hard to say at this point what Apple will actually do by June; most developers I talked to at Macworld held out hope Apple will unveil open development at WWDC, despite the on-the-record statements by Apple’s CEO to the contrary. But if it’s not a done deal, that seems to me all the more reason to start complaining now.

Music Apps with Flash?

I’ll close this discussion with one positive note: Jobs, when interviewed, didn’t rule out the possibility of Adobe Flash on the iPhone. Aside from giving you 100% of the Web instead of a fraction (a goal Jobs himself set for iPhone), Flash would offer some interesting niche applications. It would allow us a door by which you could write music applications, either self-contained ones that use the headphone-out jack, or tools that turn the multi-touch screen into a controller for music software. That may only appeal to readers here, but it would be cool, and we will be watching — especially after the Nintendo DS and Wii have recently been converted into music tools. And beyond our niche, it suggests just how much opens up when you don’t close the box.

Multi-Touch Patents

It’s, of course, Apple’s prerogative to close their phone if they want to. But the other area of concern is Apple’s patent claims for multi-touch interfaces. Back in the Macworld Speaker’s Lounge, a couple of us were joking that Apple now owned all gestures. (One hand gesture comes to mind if that’s the case.)

A couple of moments in the keynote were a little disturbing. Jobs claimed Apple “invented” multi-touch interfaces (or implied as much; he may have meant the specific technological implementation in iPhone). He also promised to aggressively defend Apple’s patents.

Before we fly off the handle with this, though, I’m not sure, to be honest, what that means. Apple may mean they’ll defend their patents, having just protected iPod from litigation by Creative Labs. Or, it could mean that Apple will go after other companies using these types of gestures and multi-touch interfaces, neither of which Apple invented. (The Lemur multimedia interface, shown here, comes to mind — and it supports much more sophisticated multi-touch and gestural input than the iPhone.)

I hope that Apple doesn’t become the bad guys of gestural intellectual property. I think, though, it’s more likely that they do intend to play defense rather than legal offense. I bring up this issue in part to see if readers here, who time and again prove themselves far better-educated than I am on a host of issues, know something I don’t. (Very likely.)

This much is certain: as multi-touch interfaces spread, there will be some nasty intellectual property fights involving someone. I can hardly wait.

Tablets have always held a special, niche appeal for musicians. For notation, they’re invaluable: you can prop a tablet up on a music stand and use computer notation software in place of manuscript paper. But they’re quite nice for live music, too: tap synth parameters directly, and control performances onstage. Until now, though, there has been no easy way to get a non-Windows / non-Linux tablet. Enter the Axiotron ModBook:

ModBook Product Page [Other World Computing]

I got to try out the ModBook at Other World Computing’s booth and talk a bit to the engineers. The MacBook-turned-tablet is certainly a marvel of engineering. The case is a rugged mod of the factory MacBook with a Wacom tablet digitizer. Maddeningly enough, Apple’s Inkwell technology is truly brilliant: handwriting recognition is spot-on, and everything is beautifully integrated with the OS. You have to wonder if Apple planned to release a tablet computer and then canceled the product.

For those of you who asked, the tablet uses USB drivers, not serial.

The only problem I have with the ModBook is that you’d have to be truly obsessed with Macs to shell out for one. US$2200 and up buys you a model that’s comparable with PC tablets costing a full thousand bucks less. Worse, the mod seals shut the computer: there’s no QWERTY keyboard left. Given that plenty of PC tablets manage to convert between laptop and tablet without adding much weight or width, Windows tablets start looking pretty good — especially when you could afford both a standard MacBook and PC tablet for the price. But for someone, somewhere, I’m sure these will work — even if the rest of us can’t be without good, old-fashioned QWERTY.

Visual Acoustics is an online musical toy built in Flash designed by Alex Lampe (”Ample Interactive”) of the UK. (Via Music Thing.) The motion visuals are beautiful, and the music and interface is very reminiscent of Toshio Iwai’s work (see Nintendo’s ElectroPlankton, for instance). As with Iwai’s designs, just about anything you play will sound good and ambient. Now, there are two schools of thought on that. One suggests that these kind of futuristic interfaces make music accessible to anyone. The other would hold that part of what makes traditional musical instruments lovely is that, while they take a long time to learn, the rewards are much deeper. I’m not sure one is inherently better than the other, but I still wonder if it isn’t possible to build visual interfaces that are harder to master but deeper to play.

If you want some inspiration for moving in either direction, Visual Acoustics certainly shows potential. Now you just need a Wacom tablet-enabled version that, rather than conventional sliders for parameters, adjusts to gesture and pressure.