As the Monome, the sustainably-produced open controller hardware, spreads, it’s going from one-person gimmick (i.e., “look what I’ve got!”) to club and community (”let’s get together and monomate!”). Laptop circles like Share in New York have already introduced the digital drum circle, but Monome owners may soon be converging, as well. Last weekend, Monome users met up in Princeton, New Jersey. Kempton writes::

A quick recap, there was a little show and tell, a few instructional sessions showing what people do, and several jam sessions during which people walked around and were able to watch each other in action. MLR was the most used app, though many others were used, including some homemade apps. Everyone seemed to be coming from different genres, which created a wild mix. I think everyone walked away saying that we need to do it again, so hopefully you can make the next get together!

Monome users in other places, how about you? Perhaps a Monomefest in the device’s hometown of Philadelphia?

Here’s a time-lapse video of the NJ meetup. Granted, not any big win for, um, diversity (not visibly, anyway), but that, too, may change with time — and any time we get out of our bedroom studios and together with other folks is a welcome change:

East Coast Monome Jam (4/19/2008) from makingthenoise on Vimeo.
More Monome Meetup Videos From Around the US

Also on Vimeo:
See the Portland Monome meetup
and the Los Angeles Monome meetup — with none other than Monome celebrity Daedelus. (Daedelus, I like to think of you as Monome’s Keith Emerson.)

West Coast vs. East Coast Monome — fight!

To celebrate Yuri’s Night, CDM is organizing a big design challenge. Bring your craziest, most futuristic musical interfaces / hardware projects / custom synths and controllers, and face off with other designers to win a Yamaha Tenori-On and other prizes.

Musical expression and space, after all, go together. The record above carried a special mix of great music made by humans around the world into space, via the Voyager spacecraft. Good thing it launched when it did: I imagine alien life would have been shocked if we sent a CD or cassette or 8-track or SDflash memory card, but LPs are cool again in other parts of the galaxy, too.

If you have any means of getting to the Bay Area on April 12 and you have something cool, we’ll want to see it. (Naturally, I’ll be one of the judges … but we should have some other judges to announce soon.) Even if you don’t win, I’ll be covering the projects on yuricdm.com.

Enter the Futuristic Music Design Challenge

Got any questions? Drop me a line.

Planet-wide futuristic design projects, too: While we won’t be able to judge them for the prize, if you have any futuristic design projects and can’t get to California — particularly if they’re inspired by space, exploration, or Earth and ecology — contact me and we’ll cover them on the yuricdm.com website and CDM as part of the global Yuri’s Night celebration.

Deadline: 11:59pm Eastern Monday, April 7

Performance/Competition: Saturday, April 12; Time TBA @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area

Official Site: yuricdm.com

For an increasing number of artists, data is becoming the raw material for creative work. Most of this has focused on visual media, but in the digital space, you can just as easily use sound. Sometimes the results are aesthetic only; sometimes they tell you something about the numbers being sonified. But either way, sound is a powerful medium.

“Weather Report” is a multi-touch instrument that makes music out of surface temperature data. The results feel a bit like US weather agency NOAA gone IDM. Fire up the multi-touch table, and you can “read” temperature data as sound. Co-creator Jordan Hochenbaum writes us:

I just wanted to turn you guys onto a multi touch interface I have been developing with a friend of mine here at California Institute of the Arts (his name is Owen Vallis). We had out first installation a couple weeks ago at Sea and Space Explorations gallery in Los Angeles and will be bringing it to Yuris Night Bay Area in April. The table is called “Brick,” and our first piece of software for it is called “Weather Report.” Were trying to use the table as a playable and meaningful musical instrument, so Weather Report uses Brick to sonify real-time U.S. surface temperature information into ambient and melodic mini-compositions. You can check out the website (we just put it up so it will constantly be updated shortly) for more information and photos, or check out our first youtube video @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45p_TPtQjR0

Are current plans for the table is making it more stable, and getting multi-touch finger tracking working nicely.

It was custom built and uses custom software written in Max/MSP/Jitter and Reaktor, as well as Reactivision (like the ReacTable).

Hope you like it so far! We are finding out new ways people like to interact with the table in order to refine how it is used, so the more people see and use it, the more usable and interesting we will be able to make it as a musical instrument.

brick: A Multi-Touch Sonification Instrument [Project blog]

CDM will be at Yuri’s Night, the global space party, in a very big way, so expect more!

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one Achilles’ heal is that automatic memory management — the very thing that makes coding easier, via something called a garbage collector — can make sound glitchy at lower latencies. (JavaSound seems worst on Mac OS X, as implementation of the sound API by Apple hasn’t kept pace with improvements in Java audio on other platforms. It is possible to build a real-time-ready Java implementation that performs as well as languages like C++ for audio, but right now there’s not yet a mainstream implementation of this type.)

That doesn’t mean Processing isn’t useful for musical applications. With experimentation, sound libraries like Minim can perform quite well, especially if extreme low-latency is unnecessary. (see Processing’s libraries page for more.) And you can always use Processing as a visual front end, while sound comes from elsewhere (Max, Pd, Reaktor, or even Ableton Live or a plug-in.)

There’s plenty of incentive to work with the environment as an artist. People who never coded before are able to build entire projects in Processing, not just uber-programmer-geeks. Even experienced coders can find it a fast way of experimenting with ideas — sometimes better-suited to tasks that are more difficult with patching environments. Despite all the hype around Flash/AIR/Flex and Silverlight, I find Processing easier to develop in, and you have far more robust development options, free and open source tools and libraries, and genuine OpenGL 3D capabilities.

I put out a call for people working with Processing for music, and we’ve already got a handful of interesting examples. Because of the open community around Processing, code is available for a couple of the ideas here, so you can have a peek and learn from fellow Processing coders.

nodeSeq from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

Squarely in the “not seen at NAMM” category, the Bubblegum Sequencer uses differently-colored bubble gum balls, arranged in a grid of holes, to create rhythmic patterns. It’s not exactly a leap forward for music — you wind up with a pretty simple drum step sequencer — but it does look like fun. Or it would be, except I’d wind up eating the tangible sequencer. Note to self: make interfaces out of something I won’t devour.

What’s rather interesting here is that the whole system uses computer vision analysis — a camera spots the gum balls by color. One thing that means is that you could skip the grid altogether and apply this to something very different.

The hyper-rational voiceover I find really amusing. Now, just add hard-disk recording next year, and the Bumblegum 5000 could  in fact be at NAMM.

Thanks, Johan!

Updated! Holy crap! Analog Industries has started a blog war:

Peter Kirn got all up in our grill with a bubblegum sequencer over on CDM. Well, Peter. I’ll see your bubblegum sequencer, and raise you one done with Skittles.

“I Eat Beats” Skittle Sequencer

I Eat Beats from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

But, come on, Chris. I enjoy my Skittles now and then, but bubble gum is more delicious, and you can’t blow a bubble with a Skittle.

I have heard that Moog Music is introducing a Candy Sequencer OS (Old School), using salt water taffy. And looking at comments, the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression this year may just turn into a massive rumble / turf war of tangible interfaces. Which is why my tangible interface will be Pop Rocks.

Updated, again! Still more. This time, Evan from thisisnotalabel sees our bubblegum sequencer and raises us a ball bearing sequencer. Careful, though, kids. Those are not edible. Choking hazard!

Still more: it’s a dining table as musical interface, in a sonically-augmented culinary artwork:

Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work.

Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, featuring a light box on which musical elements can be manipulated by moving around blocks. It uses the same underlying library that was developed for the ReacTable synth, currently made famous by its use on Bjork’s tour.

But what’s nice about the Etiquette is — surprise — the music. Rather than predictable electronic sounds, Etiquette echoes and vibrates with laptop-sampled acoustic timbres, such as stand-up bass, banjo, brass, flute, and even glockenspiel. It’s still digital music: fragments of music are reconceived in the digital world, overlapping into an ambient landscape. But the common criticism of installation art — that you wouldn’t want to sit and listen to the music produced — is answered here. Etiquette is available as a downloadable Creative Commons-licensed four-track album. I just sat and listened to it, and was quite happy! It’s real music played by real musicians that seems perfectly suited to its interactive counterpart; the free-flowing form of the music is ideal for rearranging in an installation. (In somewhat less interactive form, I expect I may have it on repeat here in my studio on and off for the next few days!)

Everything was produced on-location: many of the materials themselves were found on site, and recordings were made around the workshop.

The project is a collaboration between musicians and technologists: the band FOUND worked with computer scientist (and CDM reader) Simon Kirby.

Simon writes in with additional details of the setup, which features Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and the ReacTIVision library:

There’s a simple problem: sound is invisible, and sound synthesis concepts don’t have any physical reality. Knobs, faders, patch cords, keyboards, infrared sensors, touchpads, and the like all work quite nicely for synthesizing sounds. But take a closer look at Bjork’s use of the reacTable, an interactive multimedia interface that uses a camera to track the movements of blocks on a surface. They really are using it to make sounds, those sounds really are visualized in a nice new way (watch the waveforms connecting the blocks), and while the result is some swoopy synthy sounds, the interface does make making them a lot of fun.

It helps that Bjork pulls out some of her synthiest, electronicilicious-est tracks, like Pluto:

and Hyperballad:

And, of course, part of what happens is that the computer screen here has become the interface. When it works — when the visuals match the sounds, and suggest some new ways of constructing music — it really does show potential for this kind of instrument. (Even if you don’t buy into the blocks, the way the visualization itself works has a lot of promise.)

That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Surface, too … but sometimes the gimmick can be a solution in search of a problem. Well, actually, maybe your computer of the future really will be “a big-ass table.” (Thanks, SarcasticGamer.com, for making me laugh so heartily.)

Via Music thing (be sure to read the comments, in which they sort out what it actually is), here’s another multi-touch music table built on freely-available tools:

MultiTouch Console

Quite a lot of tools have been connected to make this happen, but they’re all out there so you could do something similar. Let’s see if I can get this right: the software is a collaboration of two projects that resulted in the multi-touch loopArena MTC, for making music interactively. loopArena itself was built in the free, Java-based Processing, originally with MIDI support via the ProMIDI library but now evidently using OpenSoundControl. The graphics library libAVG (”picking up where Director left off”) does the tracking, though there’s also a link to the free multi-touch library Touchlib.

And, long story short, here’s what you get:

YouTube readers sum it up best: “air hockey is cool again” … “this is the real future voodoo.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

More fun than organizing your digital photos in a hotel lobby, huh?

It’s interesting to me, though, that after all this work, you don’t necessarily get a different kind of music — just a different way of making it. And there seem to be two major directions in interface. On one end of the spectrum, there are glitzy, complex interfaces with sophisticated hardware. On the other end, we have increasing interest in minimalism, like the grid of buttons on the Monome, retro-styled software interfaces in trackers on computers and game systems, and, at some point, just a desire to take that KAOSS Pad and MacBook and MIDI keyboard and just practice making music rather than worrying about interface. I actually thing these seemingly divergent threads may all lead back to the same places in the end, and don’t know that they’re even incompatible — but, “ooh, aah” factor aside, it’s fun to watch them spinning themselves out.

If this makes one thing abundantly clear, though, it’s that even though Microsoft has an easier time getting on the Today Show, they by no means have a monopoly on experimenting with these kinds of interfaces.

Got more resources for building your own tools? Diagrams, software libraries, code, blogs about how yours didn’t quite work, blog about how awesome yours is? Let us know!

The good news: Microsoft is taking multi-touch, camera tracking, and gestural technologies seriously, and they have what looks like a very nice implementation that will be one of the first commercial implementations. The bad news: it’ll cost US$10,000 out of the gate. That high price will mean you’ll see at places like T-Mobile stores and Sheraton hotel lobbies first. But what you need to know: you can build your own version, thanks to available open source tools, with is likely to be more useful for music.

Good sources of commentary:
New Media Initiatives Blog at Walker Arts Center, which notes this could be museum-friendly tech.

Chris O’Shea @ Pixelsumo, who has built a device something like this himself.

The video does show what’s cool about Surface — and it’s easy to imagine these same techniques being applied to live visual and music performance. (People have already tried experiments in that, and I think there’s a lot more to be done — once you’re talking music rather than just digital snapshots, you get into deeper questions about how to model the interface.)

But let’s get a few things out of the way:
1. Enough about Minority Report, already!