Bored with mouse pushing and knob twiddling? The d-touch tangible sequencer / drum machine makes a cheap interface (with free downloadable software) for assembling sequences. Make some (attractive) blocks, set up a webcam, and plug into your computer. I took a first look at this tool last month, and noted its use in sequencing walnuts. (Yes, the ones that fall from trees.) Since then, the developers have been hard at work on updates. Enrico writes:

We just released the d-touch sequencer, a new, more advanced, audio application. In the sequencer you can record your own samples in real time.

We also have few updates for the drum machine, which should solve the activation problems we were having at the beginning.

Go grab the markers and the software, and you have your own webcam-based drum machine.

Should you decide to go beyond their free instrument, the underlying system is really quite sophisticated. Part of what makes it beautiful is that you can design your own markers rather than settling for predefined patterns, as with most similar marker-tracking systems. There’s even a tool for correcting problems in your design. The freely-downloadable analysis software is written in C/C++, but if you use another environment (like Max or Processing or Reaktor), you can simply pipe data to your tool of choice.

The drum machine and sequencer are available now, so go download them and let you know how you fare! System requirements: a printer, a webcam, and a PC/Mac. Enjoy!

http://www.d-touch.org/

For some hands-on impressions of working with these things, the excellent PC Music Guru has a great description of the experience. Or, if you read the language, there’s a Japanese-language hands-on blog entry.

Gestural Music Sequencer from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Something as simple as remapping a single knob can give you new musical ideas. So expand that to entire gestures and live video input, and you can help push your performance in new directions and out of old habits. That’s why it’s always great to see projects like the Gestural Music Sequencer.

Built entirely in free tools – tools fairly friendly even to non-coders – the GMS lets composer and musician John Keston explore new ideas through gestures captured in a video stream. It’s easier to see than to talk about, so check out the just-completed documentary short by Josh Klos, with the aid of Julie Kistler and Brian Smith. (And yes, documentation makes a huge difference; we’d love to see more of this stuff!)

The ingredients:

• Processing, the free, multiplatform coding environment [site | cdmu tag | cdmo tag]
• controlP5, a lovely, light, quick-and-dirty library for UI controls
• Ableton Live – though you could substitute other software via MIDI, Live makes a nice, familiar interactive music engine

Lots more information on John Keston’s wonderful Audio Cookbook blog, which is fast becoming one of my favorite reads:

http://audiocookbook.org/category/gms/

And here’s a really lovely video that demonstrates what you can do with video. It uses a string of lights in a jar as the source. Yes, in a way, it’s almost like having a very focused random generator, but I think there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s an almost analog approach to seeing the source, and using that to organically create music.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

I have to observe, while this works reasonably well with MIDI, it reveals why standardizing on networked communication, as OSC does, makes more sense. In a world of software, “controller” can really mean anything you like. Control is increasingly about software talking to software – including when devices are involved, since they generally have a software layer of their own. Also, because sometimes it’s easier to code this with Processing than with Max, I can see some powerful uses of the Python-based Live API, which we expect to mature later this year. (Yes, the project called Live API seems to be in a holding pattern, but we may be able to work up a more complete, Live 8-ready alternative.)

By the way, our goal is to make noisepages a platform and collection of tools for people doing this sort of work (or anything creative with music and motion), even if you host your blog elsewhere. Stay tuned for the details on that.

Fritzcrate Project / lusidLearn Early Demo from Michael Schieben on Vimeo.

Knobs and faders can be rigid. Fancy multitouch devices can be expensive. But for the cost of a webcam and some spare materials, you can build computer interfaces with objects around the house, thanks to the power of open source software.

In just one day, a group of artists in the CDM community, from Austria and Germany to New York to Australia, got quite a lot working with tangible interfaces. At top, Michael Schieben and Christophe Stoll experimented with using soda bottles to control software like Future Audio Workshop’s lovely Circle. (Ableton Live works, too – as does any MIDI software.) As Precious Forever, these guys are responsible for some of the best UIs in music software, from FAW to recent Native Instruments designs, so it’s lovely to see them experimenting with this idea.

As you add more people to the mix, you get ideas you might otherwise never have imagined, from a game involving blocks of the Tokyo skyline to an interface built into floor toms.

We also got a lot of real-world data on what works, what needs work, and what causes trouble for beginners, which we’ll be documenting. (Adam and Martin from the Trackmate and reacTIVision projects, respectively, were both tuned in to see progress and provided lots of help – and are also collecting that data to improve their own documentation and libraries.) More commentary on all these side benefits, as well as a discussion with visitors from Argentina on the scene around the world, at Create Digital Motion.

Musical Resources

We also got some really helpful tips for working with the free, powerful, tri-platform synthesis tool SuperCollider:
Charles Martin wrote up an easy SC test script for receiving Trackmate messages (and also had the clever idea of using a floor tom)

And for connecting Trackmate to MIDI and working with Processing, lots of tips are available on Michael Schieben’s noisepages blog:
http://fritzcrate.noisepages.com/

Get Involved

More documentation:
Tangible Interface Hackday: The Projects (So Far)
http://hackday.noisepages.com/

http://trackmate.sourceforge.net/
http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

So, what’s next? You can join discussion and brainstorming for how to proceed, and how to get in on another hackday (formal or ongoing), even if you missed the first. Stop by the Tangible and Multi-Touch Interface group on noisepages:
Tangible + Multi-Touch noisepages Group

Our noisepages community is still in “alpha” state, but it’s usable – we’ve just fixed avatar uploading, which was the biggest problem. We’ll have more features, functionality, and improvements down the line, as well as more extensive documentation for how to get started. But if you’re a bleeding edge sort of person, join up free and give us some advice on what you’d like out of it.

I look forward to more work on these projects. Stay tuned for more, including some additional documentation (I’m developing some stuff around my own project).

Digital technology has made music oddly invisible, virtualized somewhere inside a screen – but it also allows music to be mapped more literally to the physical world than ever before. Some of these experiments may even be silly, but they suggest a lot of possibilities.

From Poland, BeatMachine is a project that sequences beats in a step sequencer using discarded beer bottle caps. Would-be Internet haters, I suggest you count the number of beer bottle caps on the table, and start drinking that number while watching. I guarantee eventually it’ll seem like a brilliant idea.

Make sure you keep watching to the clever-looking software they’ve evidently developed for the task.

http://mw.boo.pl/beatmachine/

If this seems familiar, it was in fact inspired by the Bubblegum Sequencer featured here previously, and its rival I Eat Beats. Through the power of the Internet, iterating and improving ideas isn’t just something you do for yourself alone – it’s something you can share with others. That’s the idea behind our own tangible interface hackday coming up on Saturday:

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Thanks to Artur Nowak for the tip. I know we have a number of readers in Poland, so is there anyone who could help with a quick translation?

(Oh, and Poland, by the way – my book was actually translated into your language!)

Free software, a webcam, and some stickers printed on an inkjet can turn any object into a real-world controller. That’s what Paul Rose of Institut Fatima and his team did with a soccer ball (translation for the civilized world: football). The software is powered by the same framework used for the reacTable, but in this case there’s no table and no projector: just a ball.

Institut FATIMA uses a Fussball as (des-)controller for triggering drumsamples. The camera detects the symbols on the ball, kicks numbers into the sequencer, the sequencer matches goals. The goal is always music. Software used is reactivision and ableton live. Do it at home.

As it happens, reacTIVision just got a significant update, with more improvements planned. You can read up on the full details on Create Digital Motion:

Free Tangible Tracking: reacTIVision 1.4 Here, TUIO2 Coming Soon

Martin Kaltenbrunner, co-creator of the framework (and the reacTable), has some tips for working with tangible interfaces and music, and where to find more inspiration.

In addition to TUIO, reacTIVision also has an alternative MIDI mode, where you can map the appearance of fiducial symbols to note ON and OFF events, as well as their X,Y and rotation angle to a control channel value. Quite a few people have been using this for the creation of cheap web-cam based MIDI controllers.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=reactivision+midi

Using TUIO, you have more alternatives though, you can currently use Max/MSP, Pure Data, Quartz Composer, Processing, Java, C++, C# and so on to receive the object & finger tracking data. Here are a few cool musical projects, that have been built using reacTIVision:

http://modin.yuri.at/tangibles/?list=7

Patrick H. Lauke (patch pictured, from Flickr) has a video on YouTube that shows some of the basic workflow for combining the free patching environment Pd with TUIO and reacTIVision. He cautions:

this may not be pleasant from a musical point of view, but it only serves as a first test for further experimentation.

Hopefully this gives folks some ammunition if you’re getting involved in the tangible interface hackday! [Project site | on CDMu]