The earliest major analog electronic instrument meets laptop, as artist Dorit Chrysler demonstrates the power of her voice and musicianship in the Moog Sound Lab.

How it works:

To function as a one woman band, Dorit triggers a prerecorded backtrack on her laptop, adding vocals and theremin in real time. At her feet are a Moogerfooger MF-104Z Analog Delay and an Akai Head Rush looper that add layers of complexity to the sonic depth to her sound.

It’s an eminently practical rig, with the sort of gear you can really cherish rather than just dispose – and just the sort of live performance we’d love to see more often. Having just come off watching a night of intense live electronic performance at Philadelphia’s Saturn Never Sleeps (more documentation of that soon), seeing this makes me want to head into my own lab and do some serious practicing. There’s no technology quite like the human technology.

Moog Sound Lab: Dorit Chrysler

It’s hard to assemble an April Fool’s Joke involving technology these days, because actual inventions keep proving stranger than fiction. When Google created a prank involving gestures for controlling email, it was only a matter of time before someone whipped up a prototype that actually did the job.

The Moog Music company, therefore, may be asking for trouble. Their highly-entertaining polyphonic Theremin is spot-on parody, down to the “Stairway to Heaven” solo. And part of the geekier joke for Theremin players is the knowledge that the technology behind this instrument makes what they’re describing safely impossible.

But what’s impossible with conventional Theremin technology could be very possible with computer vision – even the goofy gestures in Moog’s faked video. Artist, inventor, and musician Tim Thompson has been at the bleeding edge of new music instruments for some time. It wouldn’t be overstatement to say Tim was using multi-touch before multi-touch was cool. When I shared a booth with him at Maker Faire a few years ago, he had with him FingerWorks hardware, a now-discontinued tactile, multi-touch pad, and was using it to play visuals live. In a pattern too often repeated in technology, the independent niche tool was snapped up by a larger player. In this case, that larger player was Apple – and, apparently backed at least in part by FingerWorks’ know-how and patents, Apple made history.

In a new project filmed by the superb Modulate This!, Tim works instead with touch-less control, using the Kinect to track multiple areas of expression. (Tim is using the free environment Cinder, which joins tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks as well-liked options for Kinect hackers. In this case, the Kinect support itself comes from libfreenect, the open-source drivers for Mac, Windows, and Linux.)

What he’s built, in other words, is a true polyphonic Theremin – able to play more than one line and employ more than a monophonic gesture, all without touch. The joke may be on Moog.

Read the full story on Modulate This, Mark Mosher’s all-original repository for great writing on music making.
An Exclusive First Look at Tim Thompson’s Kinect-Based Instrument: MultiMultiTouchTouch
(Thanks to Tim and Roger Linn for sending this my way!)

Part of the value of trying extreme ideas is to demonstrate not only advantages, but disadvantages. And I still find some reason to express healthy skepticism. The similarity to the Theremin isn’t accidental in the Kinect experiments. These projects also inherit the Theremin’s weaknesses. A lack of tactile feedback means it’s difficult to orient pitch or achieve precise control, without the resistance a physical object provides. Reliance on gestural control also opens the opportunity for accidental input and calibration challenges. (The Kinect fares better than the Theremin, but it’s not immune to similar problems, if for different reasons.) Taking a page from the Theremin, Tim’s physical frame makes a big difference – while it doesn’t provide tactile resistance, it at least creates a point of reference in physical space.

The Kinect also adds a new problem the Theremin didn’t face: latency. All of this means if you still like knobs, keys, strings, or even physical multi-touch (which can in certain variations provide excellent tactile feedback via deformable meshes), you needn’t worry. Your revolution may not be Kinect-ified.

But if there were one perfect design for musical instruments, we’d all play just one instrument. Instead, the history of instrument design across the world is an evolutionary explosion of different tradeoffs, different playing styles, and resulting different musical idioms. Any joke can become an instrument, just as any instrument – to someone – can seem like a joke. And that means if you’re looking for something new, you might just celebrate every day as if it’s April Fool’s Day. No kidding.

Updated: Tim offers some comments. He says what other musicians experimenting with Kinect have told me – that while it has certain restrictions as a solo instrumental controller, there’s tremendous potential for multi-user scenarios like installations. And that is itself significant (back to the question of choosing tradeoffs in order to accomplish goals). Tim writes:

Folks whose goal is to replace conventional instruments are sure to be disappointed, as you describe. You could add more detail on other goals:

Goal: using it for art installations at events like Burning Man, creating new and “casual” instruments which are unusual yet inviting and easy to play. Matt Bell ran an experiment related to that goal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQiyKFDvzkU

Goal: creating controllers which have a much larger visual appeal to an audience, who deserve performers more interesting to look at than someone hunched over buttons and sliders. That’s the reason why musicians like Mark Mosher are interested, in the same way he’s interested in the Percussa Audiocubes, for their visual appeal in performances.

Goal: provide an instrument that dancers can use in performances. I’ll be exploring this in the fall, with a choreographer friend.

Good food for thought; feel free to discuss more in comments.

What happens when you try to make bleeping and beeping a business? Meet the Beep-It, a simple but addictive optical theremin, and a fun noisemaking impulse buy for sonic enthusiasts. Then, if you’ve ever fancied developing a new idea into a product, learn a little bit about the path of its creator. We hear a lot about technology and entrepreneurship in broad strokes, but rarely do people tell you what it means actually putting ideas to work. So, where better to start than with a simple idea and a labor of love? Michael Una, musician, sound artist, and inventor, explains.

Greetings all, this is Michael Una. I’m an occasional contributor to CDMu and I want to share a bit about a big project I’ve been working on.

This is Beep-it:

More info at thebeepit.com.

It’s an analog optical theremin. This is not a new idea, but I was driven to make my own with a focus on playability and low cost. Beep-it started as an idea a few years ago, and I’ve been working to make it bigger and better since.

A little while back we heard from Roger Linn on “How to get poor with prototyping.” Mr. Linn made many good points and offered a  realistic, if somewhat harsh picture of what it actually takes to take an idea to market. I’d like to expand on this discussion by offering my own experience with this exact process, from prototyping to overseas manufacturing.

Back in 2009, my nephew’s birthday was coming up and I needed a gift. So I looked around my studio and found that I had enough parts to make something that looked like this. It made a lot of funny beeps, so I called it “Beep-it,” after the Cornelius song of the same name. The case is a big plastic petri dish and the circuit is a 555 oscillator with photocell control.

It turned out to be the hit of the party and all the little kids wouldn’t stop beeping.  I had a stack of the clear petri dishes left, so I made another 25 and put them up for sale on Etsy in late fall of 2009. These sold for $25. I also showed them at a small art gallery here in Chicago. I sold a few, but nothing too crazy until the Christmas shopping season hit and my Etsy inventory sold out in a matter of days. I scrambled to build more and fulfilled about 40 orders before the season was finished. Small numbers, but it showed that there was a bigger demand than I was aware of.

As I built all these Beep-its, two things happened. I became much better and more efficient at building them, and as I got better I became dissatisfied with the quality. I also ran out of petri dishes, so I undertook a redesign and came up with this:

This version upped the price to $35, because I figured out that I was barely making money at $25. Now that I had a better product, I set out to try and market them and drive up sales. I did workshops, made some videos, and did my best to get noticed by prominent blogs and influential musicans. It mostly worked. One blog post on Boing Boing kept me busy for a month. There were other months where I only sold a handful. But over the next few years I sold about 250 of this version and shipped them all over the world. I bought myself some nicer tools and moved my workshop from a 2nd bedroom to a rented studio space. Things were looking up.

Now there’s an interesting problem here- the more I sold, the more time I had to spend actually building them. Which meant that I had less time to do other things, like tinkering on new designs, actually playing music, etc.  I hired some friends and family to help with soldering circuit boards and drilling the cases, but it still took up a lot of my time. So I started looking for other solutions.

I applied for and won a small business grant from Scale Well, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of larger-scale manufacturing. I got some great advice from local hero Joe Born and electronics guru Mitch Altman, and started conversations with an overseas manufacturer. After much back-and-forth and dropping some serious coin, last month my first shipment of “fancy” manufactured Beep-its arrived:

I’ve now partnered with master motion and print designer Joe Moccia, whose fine work can be seen on the product itself and in our web and video design.

So despite having actually designed a product and brought it from idea to prototype to manufactured object, I still feel like I’m just getting started. My next steps are now to talk to bigger retailers and get them to carry my product, and to start working on the next product. And hiring a lawyer to handle some business administration stuff. And setting up a more robust accounting system. And putting together a new live performance to showcase my new devices. And like 10 other things that I can’t think of right now. But let me offer a few parting tips for anyone thinking of turning their idea to reality:

• Pick something you can accomplish. Build one, and sell it. Keep track of how long it takes you and how much you spent on parts, and how much you got for it. Then have a good think about whether it’s worth pursuing.
• While you can hire someone to do all the work for you, don’t. It will cost you way too much, and you won’t learn any of the valuable lessons that will go into running your business later. You actually need to do everything once before you can hire someone to do it for you, otherwise how will you know if they’re doing a good or efficient job?
• Don’t spend money you don’t have. Personally, I think taking on debt is a terrible idea. People will argue that it’s the fastest way to accomplish your goals, but you won’t spend it as wisely if it’s imaginary money. Spend it out of your own pocket and try to grow that, especially at first.
• You don’t have to be an expert, but you do have to be an information sponge. In order to be successful, you have to be learning all the time. Which includes un-learning misconceptions and bad behaviors.
• Ask for help. People love to share information and successful people won’t mind helping someone with a good idea and good energy. People who don’t share information usually aren’t very successful anyway.
• Stop thinking about it and do it. Until you actually do something, it’s all theory. Get your hands dirty and make mistakes, and keep notes. The time has never been better for a good idea to take off.

Readers, many of you have great ideas. How far have you taken them? And what roadblocks have you hit along the way?

More (and purchase info):
http://thebeepit.com/

Previously:
Beep-It: Portable, Open, DIY Optical Theremin

Beep-It assembly of an earlier model at Handmade Music, Brooklyn (workshop + performances with Michael Una)

Therenect – Kinect Theremin from Martin Kaltenbrunner on Vimeo.

Who says technology has to move fast and die young? Leon Theremin may have been a full century ahead of his time, before computers, before transistors, before jet engines or atomic power or rockets.

ReacTable creator Martin Kaltenbrunner has a virtual Theremin prototype built with Microsoft’s depth-sensing, 3D Kinect camera. And what he really needs is some players of the real Theremin to help develop it. Martin writes CDM:

I just finished my first musical instrument based on the Kinect controller. The Therenect is a virtual Theremin, which defines two virtual antenna points that allow controlling the pitch and volume of a simple oscillator. The distance to these points can be controlled by freely moving the hand in three dimensions or by reshaping the hand, which allows gestures that are quite similar to playing an actual Theremin.

At the moment I am getting in contact with some trained Theremin players in order to tune the application to fully simulate the behavior of an actual Theremin. We will then publish some additional videos with a more musical experience … The software has been developed using the Open Frameworks and OpenKinect libraries and will be released under an open source license when it is more mature.

On our sister site Create Digital Motion, we’ve also noted that Martin’s new library allows OSC communication anywhere, so if a virtual Theremin isn’t inspiring your Kinect dreams, you can make something else.

Kinect with Anything: TUIO Gestures from Kinect

Kinect may be popular at the moment, but lest you feel rushed, just remember – a hundred years later, people still play the Theremin. So maybe if your idea is worthwhile, you’ve got some time. (Erm, not to enable any more procrastination.)

From Wendy Carlos to the Swingle Singers, artists have proven over and over again that great music is great music, regardless of instrumentation. (Music historians would be just as quick to point out that most Classical performances don’t really match the original instrumentation, anyway.) So, since it’s Monday and we’re due for a distraction, we have from reader Jack Stratton a delightful rendition of Bach on TalkBox. (BachBox?)

Something’s in the air, as our friend Synthtopia also shares novel instrumentations. Here, it’s Ravel:

Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis by Maurice Ravel – performed by thereminist, Randy George and the Gaudete Brass Quintet. download video in High Definition at: http://bit.ly/GBQRGM

Finally, I can’t embed the videos, but the wonderful Glockabelle – recently seen tearing through Classical favorites on her Casio VL-5 at Handmade Music NYC, confirmed on glock for our next event – has a terrific lineup of videos on her blog, recorded in her kitchen. Glocks, more Casios, and a keyboard with meow sounds. There’s music by the greatest composers of all time, and there’s a bit of punk, too. Public service: if it any moment in this week you find yourself grumpy, come back to these videos.

http://glockabelle.blogspot.com/

And, yes – it’s easy to dismiss novel instrumentation, but not if you talk to people who actually play the instruments. I do always slightly dread the association of Theremin and Halloween, one which I think doesn’t befit how lovely the instrument sounds. But music is all about novel instrumentation, and actually enjoying what you play. Great music works on different instruments.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Handmade Music returns August 29 to New York City – now in Manhattan at the new Culturefix space on the Lower East Side. Beginners, this is your chance to learn about electronics and sound making, with a newcomer-friendly workshop on making a photo-theremin – and yes, you’ll even learn to solder. (Like knitting, you’ll find it gets easy fast and can even be relaxing.) Entry fee includes all parts cost, and you leave with a fun creation.

If you have work you want to show or a performance to propose, be sure to see the call for works at the end of the post.

HANDMADE MUSIC
Culturefix, 9 Clinton St., New York, NY 10002
Sunday, August 29
Workshop 4-6p
Event 7-9:30p
Hosted by createdigitalmusic.com with Etsy.com, Make Magazine, and XLR8R Magazine

Equal parts science fair and music party, Handmade Music is a gathering at which musicians and the musi-curious explore new sound worlds. Assembled from the growing, global grassroots DIY scene, makers and hackers present new inventions and technology. Instead of just consuming, these are the people making the code, instruments, and noise-making contraptions that make the music. They’re building a musical future that’s open, creative, and hackable. Inventors bring their new creations for an open show-and-tell, join performances and jams, and make much noise.

4pm – 6pm
WORKSHOP: Make your own Photo-Theremin (Beginner-friendly!)
$10 (includes parts)
Never soldered before? Dozed off in Physics class when they were explaining electricity? Here’s your second chance. Create a noise-making two-transistor synthesizer of your very own, controlled by modulating light. Based on an original circuit by electronics legend Forrest M. Mims III, the man who de-mystified electronics in books for Radio Shack and others, and adapted by designer Eric Archer for Handmade Music Austin, this simple circuit is the perfect introduction to making sound with electricity. It’s quick to assemble, but lots of fun. Learn basic soldering, then make your own kit. And be sure to come back in the evening with your creation to join the world’s first known Photo-Theremin Chorus.

You must pre-register for this event.
Registrations close August 20! (Parts are being fabricated in advance!)
http://phototheremin.eventbrite.com/

7pm – 9:30 pm
HANDMADE MUSIC – Open Party
FREE

Meet and mingle with inventors, musicians, and artists. Discover chip and mobile music played live wirelessly at the bar by New York’s Pulsewave community. Hear music and sound made with free software on Android mobile phones. Check out open sound inventions in the gallery and surprise performances hosted by createdigitalmusic.com, DIY musical crafts from Etsy.com, the latest inventions and kits from Make Magazine, and a world-exclusive debut performance of a new, hackable synthesizer called the MeeBlip.

Special guest: Drone Lab creator and renowned synth designer, artist, circuit bender, and musician Pete Edwards of Casperelectronics

Full lineup will be announced, but unplanned guests tend to appear.

View Larger Map

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

Call for Works

We’ve already got some work coming in for this installment, but we’d love people to share more. Handmade Music is a chance to share what you’re doing with like-minded artists and creators, and to exchange knowledge and skills. Projects are welcome at all levels of completion.

If you can’t make this event but want to be considered for future events, fill out the form

Please note: this is a free, shared, community event; we’re not offering compensation at this time.

Call for Works Form [Google Docs link]

Also embedded below…

Watching the bleeding edge of new musical instruments often means having to see new designs in tech demos, in proof-of-concept experiments as artists first try their hands on a new object. If you can use some imagination and see potential, that’s fine, but it’s a bit unfair to the instrument – you don’t get to see it really exploited musically.

Here’s a case that’s different: Jo Hamilton, an acclaimed up-and-coming artist from the UK, is really integrating the new AirPiano into her performance. Nor is she waiting for production: she’s got the only prototype outside of Berlin.

We saw the AirPiano in 2008; it’s the creation of Omer Yosha, an FH Potsdam interface design student. Drawing on the optical Theremin and the key layout of the Tannerin, the AirPiano creates a matrix of infrared sensors so that the keys are played in a volume of air above the instrument. (That’s a two-dimensional pitch layout, projected into the space above the instrument, as opposed to the one-dimensional projection of the Theremin.)

Here, Jo demonstrates how the instrument works (top), and also shows off her musical use in a video (which evidently suggests the AirPiano is a good choice if you’re playing in the forest). It’s quite lovely, and it’s nice to see a design in a musical context. She’s playing this instrument not only in this video, but in live gigs.

Who’s Jo Hamilton? From her press release:

Stemming from a nomadic family with roots in both Kenya and Jamaica, Jo Hamilton was brought up in a house two miles from the nearest neighbour in the wilds of northern Scotland. Her parents moved constantly in her youth, which saw her spending periods in Turkey, UAE, Kuwait, Sri Lanka and Cambodia.
Jo’s debut album Gown was produced by Jon Cotton (producer of Scott Matthew’s Ivor Novello Award-winning debut album) in her current hometown of Birmingham, and has received a sweeping range of
accolades including 3 awards at London’s recent Recharged Radio awards and a tip from US tastemaker/DJ Nic Harcourt as one of his picks for 2010.

If you’d like to know more about her music or you have questions about playing the instrument, I’ll follow up.

http://airpiano.de/
Jo pioneers new instrument – video out now! [johamilton.com]

We know you’re out there: somehow, you haven’t heard the gospel of the Theremin, the first great electronic instrument of the 20th Century. Our friend Yaniv Fituci, associate producer for G4 TV, takes on the topic and some condenses it into the space of about three minutes, through the magic of lots of jump cuts. (It’s called MTV-style-editing, and I hear these kids love this MTV thing. It’ll be huge!)

It’s actually a pretty darned good explanation, and features the innards of a Moog Theremin kit getting replaced with an Altoids tin. The choice of the Moog kit, while pricey, is spot on: I’ve seen some disastrous and frustrating results with some of the other kits out there, not to mention the Moog model looks and feels utterly gorgeous when it’s done. Bonus points for celebrity cameos by our boys Bre Pettis and (Handmade Music co-organizer) Collin Cunningham.

If you’ve been looking for a three-minute video you can use to help explain to the uninitiated what a Theremin is and how it works, it’s worth a try. Comments welcome.

It’s #&*%ing Science! The Science Behind Theremins

It may be 2009, but you can still play electronic music as though you’re an invading alien visitor from the future. Just ask The Sonic Manipulator, an electronic musical performer and inventor, alias Claude Woodward. His musical creations range from warped radios to instruments derived from turntable scratches and Theremins. And then there are some instruments that seem to be sonic weapons. (Apologies to recent protesters in Pittsburgh.)

CDM reader Andrew Cordani caught Claude at the UK’s British Invention Show. Claude is apparently a Perth, Australia transplant, by way of Cambridge, though Andrew writes that he “has been known to travel about a bit (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Indi, Teegarden’s star and further).”

Andrew describes Claude’s other creations:

Met at the British Invention Show (http://www.britishinventionshow.com/show/index.html), at Alexandra Palace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace)
(Organized by [MP3 player inventor] Kane Kramer – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_Kramer)

http://www.youtube.com/user/sonicmanipulator

http://www.sonicmanipulator.com/

http://www.sonicmanipulator.com/Inventions.htm

The Claude-a-tron – a sort of pre-wireless (i.e. wired) Theremin – and is “Way cool”

The Radiolian a lot of fun – Essentially triggerable (pre-recorded) radio samples – Used to switch-between radio programs (reminds me of http://www.neave.com/television/ )

The Greet-o-metre + The Transatron should be given out to all travellers, interstellar or not!

(My fave was the Rap Rod – which does for scratching what CDs did for vinyl. The Bash-a-tron was a close second, though)

Definitely check the Sonic Manipulator site for many, many more bizarre creations if the one at top doesn’t impress you. See a couple of my faves at bottom.

Fans of DIY, the whole event sounds fantastic! Thanks, Andrew, who can be found here (with his own futuristic creations):
http://midisticks.ltd.uk/

Making music into an object – the central genius of recording – could be a wonderful thing. But the CD was always somewhat utilitarian as a distribution mechanism, with its easily-splintered plastic jewel case and inserted artwork that paled next to the grand visions of the LP.

Moldover is the latest artist to experiment with ways of re-imagining the musical object. Already a fan of custom sonic circuitry, he made his CD into a circuit board. Some of it is just aesthetic, like the printed lettering. But there is also integrated noise-making circuitry for a very simple optical Theremin (well, at least, a light sensor-driven oscillator), plus a headphone jack. There’s actually quite a lot of function you can get out of that when plugging into a computer.

The album itself is comprised jazzy bleepy jams (in varying proportions). You do pay for this deluxe, handmade circuit goodness. The US$25 “Pocket Edition” seems to be the sweet spot, with a pocketable version of the circuit board. It still has a built-in speaker, turning the jewel case into self-sufficient sonic hardware instead of a throwaway. The $50 version comes with the full custom-printed circuit board for the track listing, but you can’t pocket it, which means you have exactly $25 and one custom Theremin less in your pocket.

Check out the music and purchases at Moldover’s site:
http://moldover.com/quicklinks/buy.html

The joy of being on YouTube is you get strange comments like this:

Who let you out? of your mom’s basement? Go back to building lego trainsets to transport your cocoa from the kitchen to your computer desk.

Hey – that’s a great idea, come to think of it.

Justifying the musical object can sometimes get ridiculous, but so long as there are genuinely creative ideas that fit the music, I think music may have a more interesting future in the post-industry world than it did before.

Updated – previous applications of this idea: I’m typing quickly before I head to lunch, and I commit the major sin of not mentioning our friend Tristan Perich’s infamous 2005 release 1-bit Music. Whereas Moldover is turning the packaging into an instrument and inserting a traditional CD, Tristan made the entire jewel box the playback mechanism – the album is embedded in the circuitry, and you listen to it directly.

An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music—the lowest possible digital representation of audio.

1-bit Music (Tristan also did a great workshop at Handmade Music. So if you want to play with these ideas, and you’re in the NYC area, there’s only one place you should be tomorrow night.)

We talk a lot about novelty, but my hope is people rip off both Moldover’s and Tristan’s idea here – and invent their own twist on this concept. I’d love to have a shelf full of circuit CDs, instead of dead, silent plastic!