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/

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.

Skeptical about the connection of music-based games and actual music making? Think again – even as music education unravels worldwide, games are actually encouraging real music. That revelation was the impetus of the music box project:

Research commissioned by Youth Music found that up to 2.5 million young people in the UK – or 1 million aged between 12 and 18 – have been inspired to progress into ‘real’ music-making because they have played music-based console games.

You got it – they hit those plastic buttons, got inspired, got bored, then decided to go to the real thing. And otherwise, they might have remained passive musical consumers: the game was a gateway drug. Of course, that means that any such interactive experience has to stand up to polished Guitar Hero and Rock Band-style games. But anyone who believes the music games genre has peaked and is on its way out may be dead wrong on many, many levels. On the contrary, this may only be getting started – and the real growth could come in music beyond the realm of games, as people graduate to the unlimited set of possible music experiences.

Chris sends lots more documentation of this project, if you’d like to learn more:

by silent studios and me for uk charity youth music to get kids turned on to music
http://www.vimeo.com/6210259

watch some bbc coverage here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8160000/newsid_8168800/8168881.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8154449.stm

Ed.: The video at top doesn’t play outside the UK, because we don’t pay BBC license fees. What, all those Doctor Who videos I bought in the 80s and 90s didn’t make up for it?

here is a press release from roland. the box is ‘powered by roland’
http://www.audioprointernational.com/news/1329/Roland-unveils-Music-Box-for-Youth-Music

some launch pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621466657993/

making of pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621404410234/

this goes into some of the ideas and details about the musical kit
http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/blog/24/youthmusicboxlaunchesatlondonssouthbankcentre/

on the website there is a very simplified flash version you can try out on a mini timeline, just click play online :)

its quite funny to read these comments on it
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/07/youth-music-box-democratizes-music-creation.html

And yes, you can try this yourself and play online! The official site:

http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/youth_music_box/

The production company:

http://www.silentstudios.co.uk/

And Chris’ own site:

http://www.chrisoshea.org/

Roland is involved, and donated an E-09 Interactive Music Arranger to give kids some toys to explore.

And yes, I did notice a certain kindred spirit in the form of Moldover’s Octamasher. The underlying technology and its results are different, but to me what’s most interesting isn’t the superficial similarity of these projects, but the fact that they array the instruments in a circle. Computer production often simply orients a single person to a screen – not so ideal for collaboration. And even Rock Band and Guitar Hero, like an onstage band, line up artists for a (now nonexitent) audience. Perhaps the circle is about to make a comeback as music restores its social aspect.

Curious to hear other thoughts on these projects as they evolve.

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]

While Moog is a household name, the UK’s Electronic Music Studio is a kind of "forgotten chapter" of electronic music history, as the documentary above suggests. EMS is significant not just for technological innovation, but musical experimentation — not to mention their cheeky British sense of humor and topless nude women crawling toward synths in their ads. (That and the best synth slogan of all time, "Every Nun Needs a Synthi.") For whatever reason, there’s likewise very little online documentation regarding the late Tristram Cary — even though the likes of Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, and King Crimson made use of the VCS3 synth he co-designed.

Above is a brief trailer for the provocatively-titled documentary "What the Future Sounded Like." (As seen on Music Thing and recommended to us by Christian Haines, lecturer at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adeleide.) Tristram and others are featured in this film; I haven’t seen the 27-minute documentary yet but definitely will be picking up a copy whenever I can (it doesn’t appear to be availale yet).

The documentary has a page on MySpace, which has more background on EMS for us Yankees who know so little about it. If you’re really lucky and at SONAR in Barcelona in June, you can catch a live screening. And EMS itself lives on.

What The Future Sounded Like Documentary

What The Future Sounded Like @ MySpace

Tristram is credited by some as the father of tape music, originating tape music techniques in World War II. He’s notorious to the general public and sci fi fans as the composer of the music for the Daleks in Doctor Who (along with other music) — like an evil counterpart to Delia Derbyshire, who built the studio Cary would later use. But he was also a pivotal composer of music for film, electronics, voice, and instrument alike, a well-known Australian music critic, a leading figure in studios and academies, and, oh, yeah, he did the visual design (product design, really) for the legendary portable VCS3 "Putney" synth from EMS, the synth maker of which he was a founding Director.

It’s safe to say that, out of this web of contributions to electronic sound, Tristram Cary is another of those people who charted the course for what music technology is today. From the technology to his extensive music to his work in popularizing musique concrete in England, his impact is felt even by those who don’t know his name.

Christian Haines writes to let us know of Tristram passing, evidently following a long illness.

If you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover what he’s given us.

Official Tristram Cary Site

Wikipedia article, with lots of references and an extensive composition list

Resources at the Australian Music Centre

EMS, the "Moog Music of England", lives on (apologies to our UK readers, but Americans are just discovering EMS); see also the Synthi blog

And for a little Tristram Cary listening:

Trios LP by Tristram Cary (EMS) is a trio of EMS synth plus turntables; full tracks on the Synthi blog courtesy the composer. Really brilliant sounds:

And, you know, looking at all of this I’m reminded of why things like the Dalek connection are important. For whatever reason, mysterious science fiction worlds have been the entry point for listeners around the world into the sometimes alien and frightening new timbres of electronic music. We’re all lucky enough to have grown up in a time in which we’re challenged to create music that evokes other parts of the universe, real and imaginary.

Christian sends along a complete obituary provided by the Director of the Elder Conservatorium, David Lockett:

Tristram was born in Oxford on 14th May 1925. He served in the Royal Navy from 1943-6, specialising in radar and thereby receiving training in electronics. During his war service he independently developed the idea of what was to become tape music, and began experimenting as soon as he was released from the Navy in late 1946. From 1954 he found himself able to live by score commissions, and from that time produced a large variety of concert works and scores for theatre, radio, film, TV, public exhibitions etc.

He was founder (in 1967) of the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, and designed and built his own electronic music facility, one of the longest established private studios in the world. The equipment from this studio was brought to Australia, and most of it was incorporated into the expanding teaching studio at the University of Adelaide. He was also a founder Director of EMS (London) Ltd, and co-designer of the VCS3 (Putney) Synthesiser and other EMS products. He called upon a wide range of resources for generating film, TV, theatre, radio or concert music, special dialogue treatments, or anything in the area of specialised sound. His wide experience as a composer included all aspects of instrumental and vocal ensemble, any facet of electronic music, or combinations of several types.

Tristram played a pivotal role within the Elder Conservatorium until 1986, when he left the University to resume self-employment. During 1988-90, he was largely occupied with writing a major book on music technology which was published in London as The Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology in May 1992 (Faber & Faber). The American version – substituting Dictionary for Compendium – is distributed by Greenwood Press, Connecticut.

In 1995 and 96 there were performances in London and Adelaide to mark his 70th birthday, and a new suite based on his music for the Ealing film The Ladykillers won The Gramophone Award for best film music CD in 1998.

Apart from composition activity, Tristram was a respected music critic for The Australian newspaper. In recent years he held the position of Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, in which capacity he continued his computer music research. In 2001 the University also conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Music. In 1991 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to Australian music. In 1999 he received the SA Great Music Award for the year, and Symphony Australia commissioned a new work – Scenes from a Life – to mark his 75th birthday in 2000. He received the Adelaide Critics Circle 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award on December 5, 2005.

Meanwhile, oink.cd’s homepage has been replaced with an ominous warning:

This site has been closed as a result of a criminal investigation by IFPI, BPI,
Cleveland Police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police (FIOD ECD) into
suspected illegal music distribution.

A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s
users.

[Emphasis mine]

So, will the UK really come after oink’s users, or is that just an idle threat?

Meanwhile, a number of you have written in with what I think is a good criticism of the oink raid, one worth considering even for those of us who oppose piracy. Why did these agencies go after oink first, a torrent tracker that was hosting at least some torrents uploaded legitimately by indie labels, and one far smaller and less focused on pre-release albums than bigger trackers like mininova? Was it because the site’s popularity among some of the music fan elite made it a more obvious target — or simply that the really dangerous and popular torrents are harder to squash? (Or both?) See Veqtor’s comment for a good summary. Some are also putting forward various conspiracy theories, but I personally suspect laziness on the part of the industry and UK/Europe authorities. Software developer and label owner Chris Randall has a well-argued rant against piracy in the same comment thread. But separate from that argument, the failing of the authorities in this case, and some of the potential oink demonstrates for non-pirate, legitimate sites, are well worth considering. See comments on the previous post.

Several readers have written in to say that Oink, a music torrent server, has been busted. British and Dutch police raided the servers (via several properties in Amsterdam) and the 24-year-old IT worker (and his father) alleged to have operated the site.

The news:
IFPI press release
Huge pirate music site shut down [BBC News, in a story Releasedog, without explanation, claims contains "lies." Anyone know what they're talking about?]

Oink was arguably the largest music-focused BitTorrent-based server, but its special notoriety was in pirating albums prior to release — some 60 albums this year alone, according to worldwide recording industry body IFPI. It also succeeded as being an elite, invite-only club — albeit with a reported 180,000 members. That success led Blender Magazine to name Oink’s anonymous operator “Oinkylicious Alan” one of its 25 “power geeks” of music — though, ahem, “Alen” may not be so anonymous any more.

Updated: As several of you have noted, there were some additional details that made Oink very different. The members were largely music aficionados, with a strict upload ratio meaning that it was closer to a swapping service than some other torrent sites. What that makes me wonder — oink may well have been closer to a community, closer to legit than other torrent sites. But could it also be a model for truly legit music services?

Music software, too: Based on at least one tip from readers, the same torrent servers were also popular for pirating plug-ins and music software for “evaluation” prior to purchasing. Do people really purchase software after pirating it? Our sources say some do, at least among die-hard computer musicians on CDM, though unquestionably many more don’t. The availability of demo versions of a lot of software should raise at least some eyebrows, but in fairness, not all software is available as a demo — particularly plug-ins. (Many other CDM readers, for the record, stay away from pirated music software for “evaluation” or otherwise.) But at least a couple of you have noted software wasn’t a big portion of oink.

Torrent, force for good. Note to software publishers: legit torrents could actually be a great way to distribute real demo versions and updates, at vastly reduced bandwidth costs. Unfortunately, each time torrent servers aggressively promote piracy, BitTorrent as a technology loses ground. And that’s too bad; BitTorrent really is fantastic tech with real legitimate uses.

See also: Yamaha TENORI-ON Launch: Photos, Videos, Interviews, Demos, Details, and a Music Box

THE TENORI-ON : I know this. This means something …

Literally what TENORI-ON means in Japanese is "sound in your palm" but what I came away feeling after hearing Toshio Iwai’s story and later experiencing this innovative musical device for myself at Yamaha’s UK Launch event last Tuesday was more akin to the Richard-Dreyfuss-Close-Encounters quote. Never mind that the light-and-audio-synched performances can bring back visions of that film’s alien jam session.* I may not be articulate enough to explain fully why or how I was so affected by my short time with this snazzy gadget (my logical working-musician-self keeps on telling me that, measured by today’s music hardware standards, this is still just mashed potatoes, albeit in a very cool shape) but I do consider myself self-aware enough to appreciate the very real visceral impact it had on me. I’ve a sense the TENORI-ON is important, but not in a way most of us can fully appreciate today or probably anytime soon.

Let me start off by saying what the TENORI-ON is not:

• It is not a programmable synthesizer or sound module.
• Although it can hold some limited samples, it is not a sampler.
• It is not a compositional tool, not in the traditional sense at least.
• It has a tactile x/y matrix element but is not a Kaoss pad.
• It is definitely not the type of highly flexible "soup-to-nuts" production workstation device most working musicians would use to compose and produce their next musical opus on.

I find it commendable that Yamaha’s marketing manager, Peter Peck, was very upfront in stating the first two points at the outset, especially in a market where so many new music products attempt to be everything to everybody. It also appears to be the reason, although this wasn’t confirmed, why they have decided to market and sell these in record stores rather than music stores here in the UK.

What the TENORI-ON is:

• A well-designed piece of interactive art.
• An innovative and fully-contained musical instrument that allows anyone to easily produce very listenable music.
• A very tactile feedback-loop experience. The interplay of the lights with sound is incredibly mesmerizing and draws you in immediately.
• Incredibly immersive.
• Expensive – approx $1200 USD.

If there is just one particular point I would make in attempting to explain why it is I am so extremely smitten with this slick gizmo, I would have to say this:

THE TENORI-ON HAS PROBABLY THE BEST ELAPSED "ZERO-TO-FLOW" TIME I’VE EVER
EXPERIENCED AS A MUSICIAN.

I’m coining a term here, so allow me to explain: "Flow" is something most all creative people can easily identify with. That’s when your wife – your partner, your better self, whomever – comes to you at your desk or studio at 4:45 in the morning and says "Do you know what time it is?" and you really don’t. Now while many musicians certainly have established their own paths to get to this place, most find there are typically nowadays more than a few frustrating and time-consuming hurdles that must first be overcome.

Granted, I now live and work in a world made up mostly of DAWS, virtual synths, samples and plug-ins, not to mention hardware interfaces, mixers, outboard gear and more cables than I would prefer. As a result, I often feel several layers detached from dealing with my sounds and music, so it may be only natural that the direct, more tactile experience the TENORI-ON provided may have conjured up for me memories of twiddling knobs on my first hardware synth or working a beatbox in real-time.

Regardless, the real story here may not be about the TENORI-ON itself, but more about its artist/inventor Toshio Iwai (seen above). About how one’s lifelong artistic vision can sometimes, in what would seem to be incredible odds in a corporate environment, manage to manifest itself and make it onto the world stage as an actual retail product, and not just another one-off museum installation. Can you imagine what it must have been like persuading a huge corporate behemoth like Yamaha into investing who-knows-how-many millions on the making of what’s essentially a piece of "interactive music art?" I can’t. I have a hard enough time just shilling my little jingles and tunes for loose change to anyone willing to listen.

When you hear Toshio speak about his life-long passions for interactive music and art you realize this isn’t just another creative guy in touch with his inner-child, he IS his inner child! Toshio spends over half of his lectures focusing on his childhood – how his parents encouraged him to create his own toys and the profound impressions he had upon receiving his first microscope, his first tape recorder, his first synthesizer, his first computer. Apparently it was a much-loved crank music box that could read perforated cards that gave him first inspiration for the TENORI-ON and other interactive music projects. I found it most interesting that somebody instilled with the kind of drive and confidence to push an uphill vision in a corporate world, not to mention to speak openly about his inner childhood development, still shied away from calling himself a musician. This after spending a lifetime literally obsessed with music and providing performances like the one below. Alright, so Toshio’s not a musician in the exact same manner that Brian Eno said he wasn’t a musician while in Roxy Music. Get over it, you’re a musician already!

Perhaps that’s the real juncture here. As the lines between musicians, DJs, performance artists, and just "normal" people who happen to enjoy music continue to blur and even evaporate, this may well be where the real TENORI-ON impact could come into play. Case in point: the current Guitar Hero phenom. I consider myself a fairly shreddingly-adequate guitarist, but I was so intimidated by the virtuosity of some of those who played daily during our lunch-breaks in the office at Sony, I didn’t dare join in for fear of being shown up by one of these non-guitar-playing virtual guitar heroes (oh, the humility, the shame!). To hear these guys talk they were experiencing a "real" music-making experience and without a doubt it probably was a very real tactile experience of making music when you think of it.

Other game companies are suddenly jumping on to clones of Guitar Hero with other interactive music/graphics based games. Yamaha has had a long history of promoting music education and this could have definitely had some play as a basic thrust of that initiative. Even Toshio’s own previous work on his Nintendo DS title, Electroplankton, contains many of his TENORI-ON elements.

As for its immediate future, I would love to see this thing become a commercial success, for Toshio’s hard work if for nothing else. I believe Toshio’s intentions are good, that he envisioned setting out to provide to others something he himself had experienced as a youngster. But there are some real issues, the price point being the most glaring. There is no doubt that if this were a $299 product, and not a $1200 one, I and many others would own one right now. Just because I said the TENORI-ON could be important isn’t the same as saying it will sell. What will likely happen – and it could be happening as we speak – is some kid is going to reverse-engineer a virtual software-based version, which is probably not that difficult a thing to do. Perhaps a Monome coupled with a PC running this kid’s software may even come extremely close to that experience I felt the other night, who knows. At any rate, I still think this is just the beginning – I know this … this is important.. <long awkward pause> and "I guess you’ve all noticed that there’s something strange with dad."

Gary Kibler is a game and film composer who most recently worked for Sony Pictures in their Games Studio in Culver City. He recently relocated to the UK just outside London where he is now working on several new projects.

* Speaking of Close Encounters and alien jam sessions: Did that incredibly insipid effect of Spielberg’s having the synthesizer keys move up-and-down player-piano-style totally ruin that otherwise great movie for anyone else? I’ve always wanted to ask that.

Yamaha hosted an event last night in the heart of London’s Soho district to celebrate their official launch in the UK of what’s been described as a "revolutionary hands-on instrument that seamlessly fuses lights, sounds and music". The TENORI-ON is a unique handheld performance controller designed by Toshio Iwai, an established interactive media artist and designer, that has taken a full six years to go from initial concept to final production. Its basic makeup is a 16×16 matrix of LED buttons that not only provide the control interface to its 16 layers, 256 preset tones, and 6 sequence/loop modes, but also displays in lights what is often a stunning visual feedback loop on whatever is being output by the device. The device is planned only to be sold in the UK presently with a list price of £599 (approx. $1200 USD)

The highlight of the stage presentations was this first solo performance by Toshio:

Below is a short video interview with Toshio (he begins with signing my "Electroplankton"
DS game that he had designed earlier for Nintendo).

Here is the link to this and other photos I took at the event.

Peter Peck, the Marketing Manager for Yamaha, got up on stage just before the performance segment to make a few announcements, including some official details on the launch of the product:

• The price point is 599 UK pounds and will likely remain there for the foreseeable future.
• There is currently no set date for an international or US release of the product.
• Yamaha will be displaying these through nearly a dozen retail record outlets throughout the UK. This list is available here.

The evening featured discussions and performances by Toshio himself as well as some guest artists who had been given prior access to the device during its development. One such artist was Robert Lippok, who is well-known in Berlin’s electronic music scene with his noted band "To Rococo Rot". I counted seven or eight demo stations where people could try out the device for themselves, most equipped with headphones but some with powered monitors (Yamaha, of course). Like most people who have only been able to watch demo videos of others playing this device, it doesn’t necessarily appear intuitive, but I personally found that after about 15-20 minutes spent with it in combination with a quick read of the quick-start guide that it all begins to make sense to the point you’re able to produce something fairly quickly and effortlessly. I found myself drawn in and after 45 minutes that appeared more to me like ten, I had to be dragged away kicking and screaming.

Videos

Gary shot loads of video for CDM over the course of the evening; take it away, YouTube!

A personal demo: Peter Peck from Yamaha gives a full demo of the Tenori-On for Gary and CDM.

The inspirational music box that started it all:

Robert Lippok’s soundcheck and a 360 shot of the basement under Phonica Records:

Hands-on Experimentation

Gary’s first-ever TENORI-ON composition, part of his hands-on time with the new instrument:

And a second masterpiece. Gary: “Just because I understand a bit better what I’m doing doesn’t necessarily translate into producing better results. That may be the beauty in this beast.”

Further experimentation, shortly before the “dragged kicking and screaming” moment. “Not only did I have just one hand available to me due to my holding the camera with the other, but I couldn’t hear a thing because I needed to have the headphone resting on the camera mic. Not as satisfying a result as when I was using two hands and could hear, but a tribute to the device that blindly allows you construct something halfway listenable, without even listening!”

Stay tuned…

Thanks again to Peter and CDM for allowing me to cover this event for them. I had a great time. I have some definite impressions after having some direct experience with the device, as well as after speaking with Toshio and the other interested parties attending this event. I’ll write up these comments in the next day or two. I’d like to see some additional discussion started among CDM readers as a result of some of my comments.

For more in-depth info on the TENORI-ON, be sure to visit Yamaha’s Official Tenori-on site.

(Just added in the last 48 hours, areas on the official site where you can actually download the product manual and quick-start guide.)

Gary Kibler is a game and film composer who most recently worked for Sony Pictures in their Games Studio in Culver City. He recently relocated to the UK just outside London where he is now working on several new projects.