Benga’s latest video was released early last month and made the blog rounds, but it’s worth considering as we continue our ongoing thread on visual music and how sound can go from invisible to tangible. A stunning video whets fans appetite for the upcoming Benga full-length Chapter 2, constructing a wave shape in physical form as a series of vinyl records. Using some 960 hand-cut vinyl records, the track’s waveform materializes in stop motion-filmed animation.

Physical as it may be, the inspiration, say the creative team, was SoundCloud. UK-based creative team Us, consisting of Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor, explain:

When we were asked to pitch on the promo they sent us the track as a ‘Soundcloud’ link, we usually get it sent as an MP3. For the first time we were not just listening to the track we were also watching it. There was something mesmerising about this in its simplicity. This ignited the idea to create a real life three dimensional waveform. We started to think about the fact that a vast amount of our music is consumed online and has lost a sense of physicality this lead us to the idea of using vinyl records. We also loved the way it related to Benga as an artist who’s background comes from using records as a DJ or producer.

The maths worked we would need 960 records to create 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of wave form. Each one had to be individually cut to a specific size, hand labeled, hand numbered and then finally polished. This prep took 7 full working days and then the animation process took around 30 hours.

No 3D printers here: the process of making the individual, differently-sized records sounds painstaking. Us tells Creative Review:

To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours.

As you can see in the behind-the-scenes photos, actually working those records onto the pipe involved removing the far end, making this still more challenging (though adding a great deal to the impact of the effect).

This is all quite similar to another radial, sample-by-sample waveform made of physical circles we saw earlier this year:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Making a waveform view in the digital realm is dead-simple. But something about going to physical media makes that decision more than just afterthought, as though these creators really are touching frozen sound.

Having Benga as your soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either. You can grab this single on iTunes.

Full credits:

Directors – Us
Producer – Liz Kessler
Line Producer – Connor Hollman
DoP – Matt Fox
Gaffer – Ben Fordesman
Editor – Vid Price
Grade – Mark Horrobin
Animation – Alice Dupre
Structural consultant – Jorge Betancor
Runners – Tayo Rapoport, Paul Mckelvie, Chaelyn Allcock
Production Company – A+
Commissioner – Dan Millar
Management – Phil Hutcheon / Andrew Foggin

Behind-the-scenes photos courtesy Us.

See the full project page for lots of additional images and details:

http://www.weareus.co.uk/projects/benga-i-will-never-change

Thanks, Andrew Cavette!

What if your musical instrument were gelatinous? Edible?

“Noisy Jelly” is the latest project to imagine that scenario. Thanks to the capacitive quality of gelatin (known to us Americans by the brand name JELL-O and to some simply as “jelly”), you can mix up a set of colored instruments that jiggle when you touch them. Powered by the open hardware platform Arduino to read sensors and Max/MSP to produce sound, it’s the work of a couple of Paris-based students, Raphaël and Marianne Cauvard.

Check out the terrific video featuring wide-eyed children, and specs below.

What makes this more delightful is the possibility that we’ll see orchestras of squishy, organic, edible instruments. NYC Resistor and our friend Ranjit Bhatnagar built their own instrument out of JELL-O (or fruit salad, depending on the iteration). The Gel-tone made a splash (erm, squish) as a more whimsical entry at the Guthman Musical Instrument competition, and was played and eaten at our own Handmade Lounge at Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last summer. Hilariously, it debuted at (and was invented for) a JELL-O mold competition. See these couple of videos (Guthman top; Solid Sound bottom) below, and find more information on that instrument:

the resistor jeltone :: an edible toy piano [openMaterials]

How to make your own: The Resistor JelTone (I dearly hope this inspires more copy-cats. Let the gelatinous musical instrument revolution continue!)

More on the Noisy Jelly project:

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/MSP, there are absolut no sound editing in the video…
More picture at this Flickr set
And download the project PDF
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L’Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)

If you do make your own project, we’d love to see it. Perhaps a gel-orchestra is next.

Several people showed this to me; notably at DE:BUG (Deutsch)
http://de-bug.de/musiktechnik/archives/5820.html

Speaking of making the ephemeral tangible, as artist Andrew Spitz tells us, “it’s a fun process to map something that is so fleeting as a sound to a physical object.”

That’s what he does in a new collaboration with Andrew Nip of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Denmark. It’s a simple process – and that’s a good thing, as it means anyone with access to a laser cutter can get in on the fun. Using software written in the open source, design-friendly coding language Processing, your voice message becomes a waveform, and then that waveform becomes a series of discs in paper, which, strung together, produce a three-dimensional sculptural object.

The results are quite elegant; I suddenly want to string these around my flat. From the project description:

Paper Note creates a tangible waveform from laser cut disks of paper. The user records a message, a sound or loads up music, and the system analyses the sound to map each moment to a corresponding slice.

This project was made with Andrew Nip at CIID. We programmed it using Processing. Each Paper Note is made up of around 450 stacked disks of paper. The louder the volume at a specific moment, the bigger the disk. Our algorithm samples the right amount of information from the recording to scale the physical waveform to the size of around 14cm.

Paper Note ~ A Tangible Paper Waveform {+ generative}

By the way, Andrew Spitz has over a dozen terrific videos on this sort of physical computing and sound and vision projects on his Vimeo account:
https://vimeo.com/soundplusdesign

Music, ephemeral and fleeting, to many of us wants tangible embodiment, some physical sense of the tug we feel from its unseen vibrations. We’ve regularly featured the image of the circle as a sequence; even as music software prefers left-to-right piano rolls and scores and tracks, it’s a logical shape. Here, Finnish sound artist Martin Bircher looks to a last-century invention to build a mechanical expression of the sequencer.

From an antique music box, comes MIDI, as in the video above. And if that’s too discordant for you, have a look at the original video below. Even in comparison to our analog electronics, there’s something beautiful about seeing the mechanical inner workings of a musical expression.

Official description:

“Digital Enhancement” is an interactive sound installation consisting of an electrified Symphonion Brevet No. 28, a synthesizer, an amplifier and four headphones. The Symphonion musical box dates back to the beginning of the last century and its mechanical workings are combined with digital technology to convert it into a MIDI sequencer. The original music, embossed on steel plates, can be played on the synthesizer, which is programmed to mimic the sounds of the Symphonion. In order to operate the sequencer, a hand-cranked dynamo serves as a remote control.

And the original Symphonion in action:

Martin tells CDM some more about the music box in question and how he converted it to a new, digital life:

The modified musical box Symphonion Brevet No. 28 was produced in the beginning of the last century. The used hand-cranked Style 28 was the simplest and therefore cheapest available model from a broad product range. It plays steel discs with 14.5 cm (5¾”) diameter.

To convert the musical box to a MIDI sequencer, parts of the Symphonion’s base plate were machined to clear space for the stepper motor, replacing the hand crank. A custom etched and with flexible wires extended contact plate replaced the metal comb, whose 40 teeth were originally plucked to generate the sound.

The conversion of the voltage from the contact plate into MIDI messages is done by a microprocessor. A second circuit is controlling the motors speed. The added control panel holds DC input socket, an input for the remote control or footswitch and the MIDI output. Further there are controls for play/pause, tempo, and gate-time. An antique wooden cassette serves as the new housing of the sequencer.

More information:
Project website: mar.li/digital_enhancement.php
Facebook: facebook.com/Bircher.Martin

In the meanwhile, we have the pleasure of getting to gaze at high-resolution images of the setup, courtesy the artist. (Click for the big versions…)

LA-based bang Fol Chen (Asthmatic Kitty records) wanted to go beyond the computer as the playback and manipulation device for their music. So they worked with collaborators to invent a solution. In a new video, sounds, and an interview, we can share some of how this came into being.

Built with the monome creators (Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain) and LA research and experimentation center Machine Project, the Tetrafol is a custom, pyramidal sound device. The object warps Fol Chen’s music using gestural manipulation of playback, but can also use your own samples. And with open-source circuit and firmware, the project could be an opportunity to learn or to build your own creation.

Description:

The Tetrafol is a hand-held tangible electronic sound toy. Circuits enclosed by a wooden tetrahedron detect orientation and motion-gestures to modify the playback of a collection of Fol Chen’s micro-compositions, allowing the user to explore sound through physical manipulation.

The battery-powered device has its own internal speaker but can additionally be hooked up to a headphone or amplifier.

The circuit and firmware are based on open-source hardware and is itself published as open-source, allowing anyone interested to learn about its deepest inner-workings.

Here’s a sample of the project, via the Tetrafol-created Fol Chen track “So Good”:
Fol Chen – So Good by WeGetPress

Built by hand in a limited run of 100, the device sells for US$110 direct from Machine Project. We spoke to monome’s Brian Crabtree about the project – and a new, comically-inclined video shows off the project.

Stems from the track “Back on Kent” come preloaded:
Fol Chen, “Back on Kent” by asthmatickitty

CDM: How did this collaboration come about? How did you work together?

brian: kelli and i have a loving and working relationship with machineproject, a phenomenal organization founded by our good friend mark allen. we’re always amazed at the fantastical variety of projects that are born there. a few inspiring works of recent include a cash machine designed for a children’s museum and a workshop on lockpicking. so when mark approached us on behalf of his good friend adam goldman and adam’s band fol chen regarding a possible collaboration we were all ears. the goal was to design and produce some sort of synthesizer-sampler-effect-instrument-toy-object to accompany the release of their new album. that was about a year ago and we’re happy to see it finalized and soon in playful hands.

in the early stages there was much whittling of ideas (too expensive, too complicated, etc). we arrived at some sort of gestural sample player and a demo video was ready to show the proof of concept (we live on opposite coasts so there was much back and forth through internets and mails) the basic build used a waveshield (by adafruit) and an arduino and some very hacky code i modified.

fol chen provided the sound set. kelli and i proposed a series of enclosures– diamonds, stars, ice cream cones, d20. the tetrahedron ended up being the most beautifully minimal, and incidentally the most cost effective. our friend jason voytilla laser cut a prototype from thin birch ply and we sent the “finished” sample to california where it underwent a series of intense focus groups – thanks to the rigorous machineproject laboratories. after more back and forth, and basic design changes here and there we were in agreement. we used our very reliable production chain that we depend on for monome releases… it was nice really helpful to have that all in place and sped up the process considerably.

the tetrafol accompanies the release of some exciting new fol chen tracks, and there will be a release party of sorts in early december at machineproject. should be very interesting, as the current installation is a 30 foot deep window sill of sorts.

What went into the design? The construction of the thing?

the final circuit board is an arduino, [Lady Ada - Limor Fried] waveshield, and accelerometer smashed together and made very small. i really just put existing technologies together– i can’t take a lot of credit here.

the industrial design was more fun. we didn’t want to use plastic so we experimented with felt and wood. coming up with a size, shape, and feel were the main goals- to create something that was pleasant to hold and sturdy enough to be tossed in the air.

What’s the basic notion of the instrument?

it plays sound loops, or “micro-compositions” written by fol chen. when you pick up and tilt the device it modifies playback: in one axis it changes the playback speed, in the other it triggers a variable-speed stutter (playback position jump). sounds are changed by a shaking motion. given the response is immediate, it comes alive very quickly.

i’d also hesitate to endorse it as an Instrument, though it’s very playable. it’s a bit like a responsive buddha box.

Any other documentation?

i posted the firmware/hardware source on github. there is a no “build your own” guide as you’d be much better off just looking at the waveshield documentation (which is very good.)

this was a fun collaborative side project– and it makes me even more curious to see how musicians continue to create tangible objects to accompany their releases.

More information:
folchen.com

Tetrafol @ GitHub (firmware + hardware, under a GPL v3 license)

Dig into humanity’s past, and alongside the earliest tools, you’ll find some of the earliest instruments. Designing objects for expression seems to be an essential part of civilization.

Martin Kaltenbrunner, a co-designer of the Reactable tangible music interface, is also a professor in Interface Culture at the Linz University of Arts in Austria. There, in the land of Mozart and Haydn, he works with students to explore what interface design is.

So, when I got to spend some time with Martin in New York in September, I was interested in more than just the flashy coolness of the Reactable, the futuristic table-with-blocks interface for music. We got a chance to talk about instrument design generally. The funny thing about the Reactable is that it is closer to the experience of working with a modular synthesizer and oscilloscope than anything else, with the sense of physical connections of sound to object you’d get from classic synths. It is something unique, truly, but that’s its pedigree.

Martin and I got to give a talk together at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, a terrific hub in which Austrian artists frequently are paired with New York-based folks, all in a lean, tall modern landmark building in Midtown. We also performed together, which for me was a real pleasure; Martin claims not to be a musician as such, but was good fun as an improvisation partner.

The next day, we headed to Manhattan music education center Dubspot, where Martin’s creation quickly attracted crowds of interested students and educators. Dubspot filmed our encounter for the video at top. Amusingly, the prominent synth sounds you hear at the beginning are not the Reactable, but our own MeeBlip open source synth, which I brought along to illustrate conventional tangible instrument design with switches and knobs. (If you’ve been impatiently waiting for news on the MeeBlip, believe me, I’m even more impatient – more announcements on that this week and next, following a production quality issue with a contractor that required us to reboot the run of new instruments.)

Reactable Live @ Dubspot! Interactive Sound Design Workshop Video Recap [Dubspot Blog]

YouTube commenters, that subtle and thoughtful bunch, are complaining that the tangible Reactable will set you back thousands of Euros. But at ACF and Dubspot, I was also equipped with the far more economical and portable alternative: Reactable Mobile runs on both Android and iOS. (I was pleasantly surprised to discover the app runs perfectly on a Galaxy Tab 10.1 from Samsung; I’m still a long, long way from being able to recommend buying an Android tablet, but if you’ve got one, I can certainly recommend this app.) Now, don’t get me wrong: the experience was nowhere near as fun as using the table. On the other hand, you can’t fit the table into a seat-back pocket on easyJet, and the savings in cash is proportional to the sacrifice in experience. What impresses me is that the design of the physical Reactable “flattens” so nicely onto the screen; I think it’s a user experience triumph that you can make that translation. And I was able to load up a few loops of my own music and jam along with the MeeBlip and Martin on the (real) Reactable.

Looking beyond the Reactable, Martin addressed these larger issues of tangible interface design at TEDx Vienna – a fitting locale for talking the history and future of music. His whole presentation, and a sweeping concept map of what he discussed, is available.

Martin Kaltenbrunner: Tangible Music

If you just want to get your Reactable on and can’t afford the table, see Reactable Mobile below. (Seen here on an iPad 2, but I’ve run successfully on the original iPad and the Galaxy Tab – the experience is more or less identical, thanks to portable code.)

And if you can afford the table, you rockstar, uh, can we be your friend?

http://www.reactable.com/products/mobile/
[the awesome table version]
Martin Kaltenbrunner website [with plenty of academic links]

A new design launching this week should appeal to keyboardists who want both more expressive touch control and a keyboard – without sacrificing one or the other.

Yes, yes, multi-touch on tablets does indeed give your fingers access to continuous control for added expression and pitch. But there’s a reason keyboards evolved keys: tangible feedback about where pitches are, and the ability to control dynamics with pressure (itself with additional mechanical tangible feedback) just isn’t matched by touchscreens.

We’ll be looking on an ongoing basis at how you can take the flexibility of those touchscreens and match them with more tangible controls. But here’s one example: the German-engineered Evo keyboard really is a conventional keyboard, with all the advantages therein, but combined with capacitive touch on every single key. In other words, it navigates around the very tradeoffs of which I was recently critical in iPad developments, namely, additional expression coming at the expense of tactile feel. (I got some pretty intense criticism for things I said in that article which remain, to me, fairly obvious: a tablet is not a device you can play with your eyes closed, and – in its present form – no matter how hard you hit it, you can’t control dynamics.)

Of course, this does require buying specialized hardware, and it’s a controller only – unlike that tablet, you’ll still need a sound source and (at least for some tasks) a display, both of which are integrated in the tablet. But it is a compelling alternative that introduces a different set of possibilities for playability.

In fact, it’s also not the first time designers have thought in this direction. All the way back to the Martenot, keyboard designers have looked for ways to bend keys or add additional continuous expression – polyphonic aftertouch being the most common (though still relatively rare) solution. But none of those inventions could build on the accessibility of touch on the keys. I’m curious to see what playing this feels like; fans of getting away from the piano keyboard and all its history entirely will likely (and fairly) scoff, but for those of us who want to merge our piano background, something like this merits consideration.

Here’s how the creator describes it; I hope to catch up with this invention soon in person.

Discover the evo. Worlds first keyboard with touch sensitive keys.

With the help of capacitive touch sensors the evo is able to read your fingers movement on top of a keys surface. Next to pitch and velocity there is now a third layer of polyphonic data input.

Think of polyphonic control of pitch and expression. Think of having a pitch or mod wheel integrated into every single key. Think of never ever leaving a key just to turn or push some knobs or buttons.

So, it’s a combination of classic keyboard key and modern touch technology. The best of both worlds combined in a single keyboard. But best of all! The characteristical function of a key remains unchanged. The evo still features traditional pressure-sensitive keys. But in addition there are now all the advantages from a touch-sensitive input device in every single key.

So. At first this might sound like the evo is an all new instrument. But it’s nothing more than a traditional master-keyboard… With capacitive touch inside every key.

http://www.endeavour.de/discover_the_evo/evo.html

Between conventional knobs and hardware controls and “magical” tablets, might we yet see real action in a third category of controller? Keith McMillen Instruments, makers of the SoftStep foot controller and K-Bow controller, are now venturing into fingertip territory. The QuNeo is a “crowd-sourced” project with apparently some open components, available now in preorder form on Kickstarter.

We’ve seen touch controllers that, in terms of basic form factor, followed similar design directions as the QuNeo but that didn’t take off. M-Audio (then Midiman) got only as far as the prototype phase with the Surface One; Stanton’s SCS series went into production but apparently didn’t take to the market.

The KMI design promises more, with velocity response, continuous pressure, and color LED feedback on each sensor. The addition of actual pressure/velocity sensing, and a design that gives you some tactile feedback on where the controls are, would set it apart from a device like the iPad, which has no such usable pressure response and an undifferentiated surface.

The controls themselves:

• 251 multi-color LEDs
• 16 square pads each with X/Y, velocity, and continuous pressure (that should map nicely to rolls, etc., or using them as melodic pads)
• 2 rotary surfaces with position and pressure
• 9 touch sliders, with two-finger touch
• Switches
• iPad-sized form factor
• Class-compliant USB, MIDI, OSC connection

The project is labeled “open hardware” and “open source,” but as near as I can tell, that applies to the development kit for the software to connect with the hardware, not the rest of the hardware itself.

Check out the hardware sensors below.

Kickstarter here serves as a way of “crowd-sourcing” production – just the kind of preorder model for which the service was built. What I find surprising is the promised price: $200 (not including international shipping) includes the controller and some goodies, which seems astounding given the number of parts here. If they really are pulling that off, I’m very impressed.

Right now, we see only the sensor and a mock-up, but certainly the described design shows some significant promise. We’re in touch with KMI, so if you’ve got questions, fire away.

QuNeo, Multi-touch Open Source MIDI & USB Pad Controller [Kickstarter]
http://www.keithmcmillen.com/

In the midst of all this talk of intangible digital intellectual property and arcane licensing and Internet policy, there’s something comforting about thinking of music and art as something you make with your hands and give to someone. It was a discussion of that – even in the context of technology – that first led me to the discussion of “Handmade Music.” (Tip of the hat to my friend, Etsy’s Matt Stinchcomb, with whom this discussion has crossed the Atlantic from Brooklyn to Berlin.)

Via Cool Hunting, here’s an old-fashioned way of making a music object. The music is on vinyl; the book is carved into blocks and hand-printed. Any sense of nostalgia or twee hipness is instantly forgiven once you see the results: the book looks absolutely gorgeous. Kids will have to compete with their parents to get it.

Two stories in a single canvas-covered volume that reads from the outside covers inward, ending at the center. There, a two-song 70 gram 7″ vinyl inside a hand-cranked copper block printed sleeve.

Stories written, illustrated, carved, and printed by Micah Middaugh at Cavern Lantern Wonder Welding (Jordan River Valley, Mich.)

Songs by Breathe Owl Breathe

The story sounds wonderful, too. As CH’s James Thorne tells it:

“The Listeners” is a comic tale of the friendship between an ostrich and a mole who meet by chance one day in a hole. The mole with sightless eyes and the bird with flightless wings join to form a band called “The Listeners,” and perform together in an underground concert for their friends. “These Train Tracks” is a story of metamorphosis, in which a set of train tracks transforms into everything from a caterpillar to the night sky to a set of pajama buttons. Its mood is both whimsical and soothing, a perfect end to a child’s long day.

The Listeners / These Train Tracks: Music and animal hijinks come together in a handmade children’s book by Breathe Owl Breathe [Cool Hunting]

The music is available by Bandcamp, which you’ll see allows you to sell both a digital download and physical copies. Of course, you may want to do a trailer on YouTube to promote it, which means you’ll have to contend with giant lobbying groups and collection agencies trying to destroy the Interne– okay, that doesn’t make a very good bedtime story. Let’s get back to the ostrich and the mole. They’re more likable.

Have a listen to the music:

http://breatheowlbreathe.bandcamp.com/album/the-listeners-these-train-tracks

Streaming live from Dubspot in New York, Martin Kaltenbrunner and I are talking about interface design and music, in the context of his Reactable tangible interface. Join us, ask some questions, and stay tuned for more video after the session is done. For his part, Martin has the enviable title of “Professor for Interface Culture.” Tune in now and he’s making music with blocks. I’ll be talking to him, and talking about performing without a computer, with Reactable Mobile running on Android, MIDI out of an iPad, a MeeBlip, and a Korg KAOSS Quad, hopefully as part of our ongoing discussions about mobile and interface design.