The Tenori-On, the grid-based musical instrument with whimsical sequenced lights created by Toshio Iwai, has been gradually becoming more affordable. The original model, complete with its rounded metal case, has already been cut to US$999 here in North America. Now, Yamaha announces that it is making an “Orange” version which also slices costs. A plastic case stands in for the metal one, the lights are orange instead of white, and lights appear only on one side. Yamaha says this is for “home use” — that is, you don’t need the device lighting up on the other side if no one’s watching you. Unfortunately, by removing this novelty and eliminating the Tenori-On’s fantastic battery power option, I suspect Yamaha may also be slicing out some of the appeal of the device.

In the UK, MusicRadar reports the device will ship at £649. Here in the US, I’ve confirmed with distributor Keyfax that the price will be $699. Now, unlike other recent grid rivals (Launchpad, APC40, Ohm64) and the monome, the Tenori-On is capable of making sound. But I’d be inclined to either spend the extra $400 and make it light up on both sides and use it in bed sans wires or skip the idea altogether. I’m curious to know if others feel the same way.

MusicRadar also gets the scoop from Yamaha in the UK that a firmware upgrade is due for the Tenori-On fixing its somewhat problematic MIDI sync:

We’re told that this will address a number of areas, including syncing of the Tenori-on to DAWs and also the MIDI sync implementation.

Yamaha announces ‘more affordable’ Tenori-on Orange [MusicRadar]
Tenori-On product page [Yamaha worldwide]
Tenori-On USA [Keyfax]

It’s worth poking around the store if you do own a Tenori-On. Those brave early adopters can now make the instrument a pretty practical addition to a live set, with a nice case, stand, and (finally) stand mic stand adapter to feature it in your sets. And in another nod to the design, the Tenori-On recently entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the meantime, I’m still curious to see if someone mashes up a synth engine and monome to make a computer-less monome.

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).”

Ten minutes. Four or five kids (or adults). Make a song. Go.

That’s the idea behind the Youth Music Box, developed by Silent Studios and Chris O’Shea. (Our friend Chris you may recall from various interactive projects and the blog pixelsumo; he sends this project our way.) The software is build in openFrameworks, the C++-based creative coding environment for artists.

With keys, drums, and yes, even a scratching DJ-style interface, the music box brings together kids for quick music making, inspired by the phenomenon of musical games. The experience is guided by genre, with some effort to make sure whatever they do sounds good, but it’s extraordinary how effective it is at conveying the experience of the successful jam. It’s a bit of a confidence builder, in other words, for a group musical experience, perhaps more so than those ear-splitting, cheap plastic recorder consorts I recall from my youth.

And oh yeah, those kids look super cute once they get rocking out. (See video below.)

Youth Music Box Experience from Silent Studios | Resonate on Vimeo.

All of this raises some fascinating questions, and not always with the answers you might expect. In a normal musical ensemble, you begin sounding like crap, amp up difficulty, and eventually sound something like this – at least as far as coherence goes, assuming you’re not aiming for experimental free jazz. But with the addition of technology, whether musical games or the presets on our favorite synths or the quantization and beat-synced loops of our sequencers, it goes something in reverse. You start out sounding like this, pull apart the mechanisms that make you sound a certain way, and eventually find your way to your own personal approach. (And at some point, you get some of the readers on this site, writing code to produce their own sounds and musical structures line by line.) In fact, one could imagine scaling difficulty of even this particular setup, gradually adding greater musical freedom and taking away the “training wheels” of all the rules-based restrictions that make the results sound a particular way.

You know that viral, deeply inspirational Britain’s Got Talent clip in which a lone singer bursts the preconceptions and expectations of the whole world, dazzling audiences and bringing people to tears with her talent?

Yeah, okay, so this is pretty much nothing like that.

This is more in the category of self-deprecating artists who aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves, being exactly what you’d expect them to be – and then some. Let’s call it “dorkpop,” intentionally geeky musicians willing to be just the people they are. Three keyboards, and one man with a keytar. (Note that he basically demonstrates in the video why these should be called shoulder-mounted keyboards or something, since the only thing they have in common with a guitar is a strap.)

Artists able to laugh at themselves: always a good thing.

But the really funny thing about this clip is that Simon Cowell apparently can’t laugh. He seems somehow offended by the fact that they don’t take themselves seriously. Mr. Cowell, unable to handle irony?

Well, if Susan Boyle was so heartwarming you needed a dose of irony, here it is.

Via our friends in the UK who themsleves have quite a lot of British talent, MusicRadar (of Computer Music and Future Music):

Simon Cowell bemused by keytar trio

“This is not serious, right?” Evidently Mr. Cowell has quite a bit in common with certain grumpy readers of this site in comments. (You know who you are. We forgive you.)

Ben Rogerson and the blokes at Future Publishing / musicradar.com in the UK got a nice piece of swag: a Pilsner, to be specific. Thank UK distributor Focusrite for this one (which I assume means the brew has not yet graced Ableton’s office here in NYC.)

They did miss the obvious opportunity to offer an Ableton Live Lite. Or perhaps a liqueur called Ableton Evil (that t-shirt remaining the best Ableton swag ever). “Lively up yourself” I guess appeals to UK audiences. I would have called it Live Lager.

That got me thinking – what other music technology beverages can we make up here? Reaktor already sounds a bit like some kind of energy drink. FL Studio aka Fruity Loops could clearly be a sweet, bubbly soda. Someone could stake out organic tea – maybe MetaSynth. Thoughts?

Ableton Live beer: the ultimate live performance tool [musicradar.com]