Sometimes, to quote Depeche Mode, words are very unnecessary. Instead, lose yourself for a few minutes in the vibrating mathemagical lands of numbercult, audiovisual immersions in which sound and geometry fuse in a strange, abstract dance.

Their most recent creation, found via Richard Devine’s prolific Facebook wall and posted earlier this summer, explores an actual audiovisual sequencer. See it at top:

Connected is a graphical/musical sequencer system. a three way flow of information, between graphics, sound and external triggers shape the composition. Recorded in real-time.

But actual functioning interfaces aside, I’ll leave you with some other video clips that traverse similar territory, these syncing up separate visual and audio systems.

These folks make music, too – have a listen to their album, at bottom. And that shifts to body candy, as in, for your butt, with danceable grooves.

All three of the above videos combine vvvv – the Windows-only, graphical patching environment for powerful 3D effects – with Ableton Live for sound.

But lest you think it’s all abstraction, have a listen to their excellent dance release on Bandcamp. Downloading:

http://www.numbercult.com/

By the way, ever wondered what visual software people are using? So did we. Don’t miss this look on our sister site, Create Digital Motion, including where vvvv fits on the spectrum:
What Visual Software Readers Use: Some Clear Favorites, Plenty of Diversity, in Census Results

A merry band of complementary filmmakers, photographers, and musicians, a curated ensemble perfectly fitted to the landscape, are heading to remote Iceland to make images and a musical soundtrack inspired by the landscape and its people.

Photographers Tim Navis + Kim Høltermand and film collective Scenic are heading up the visual component, while composer and electronic producer Deru has assembled the musicians. Improvisation is intended to be a guiding force, say the creators. With the assistance of a community organized on Kickstarter, it’ll also be crowd-funded. In addition to the obligatory, pretty photo book and prints and boxed set of music, they also propose to share behind-the-scenes glimpses of the process, which crosses from the LA area to Danish architect-descended photographer Høltermand.

For fans of richly-sonic, thoughtfully-composed and designed electronic music, the music lineup looks fantastic. Aside from Deru, you get:

Shigeto (Ghostly International)
Loscil (Kranky)
Goldmund (Unseen)
Asura (NonProjects / Leaving Records)
Tycho (ISO50 / Ghostly International)
Joby Talbot
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Take (Alpha Pup)
Thomas Knak/Opiate (Co-Producer of Björk’s Vespertine)

Other artists are TBD.

But don’t listen to me; go grab Deru’s fantastic first single. [direct download link]

Working in open source code for any platform, Brazilian artist and developer Jeraman has produced a charming project that imagines musical interfaces in dynamic, whimsically-simple sketches. Like doodled knobs, cartoons of guitar pedals, interactive devices on the touchscreen control musical activity.

And because it’s open, cross-platform code, everything from a computer-powered multitouch table to an Android tablet could get in on the fun. Jeraman explains:

It is a digital musical instrument that allows the control of real-time recorded loops through collaborative performances based on relationships between sketches and sounds, intended to be ludic and playful.

Developed in Processing and OpenFrameworks, it mixes multitouch technologies with the interaction metaphor of guitar pedals, by using a FTIR DIY multitouch table – built with PVC tubes, tapes… – with a modified old keyboard as pedal, following a high-end / low-tech approach.

Here’s an example of performance using an early prototype. By the way, sorry for the poor musical quality… I’m not a professional musician!

The project is also open source and the code, that may allow the instrument to be ported to others plataforms like Android, iPad and cardboard boxes (yes! using this http://sethsandler.com/multitouch/mtmini/), will be released soon.

This is possible due to the independence of the gui module (developed in processing) and the looper module (developed in openframeworks).
for the communication between both, it was used OSC protocol.

Some pictures can be found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeraman/sets/72157626935130739/

For further informations, check this site (sorry, in Portuguese):
http://jeraman.info/illusio/

It’s a fascinating-looking project! Do keep us posted, Jeraman — and readers, if you happen to play with the code, let us know! Oh, and never apologize for Portuguese – it’s a gorgeous language!

See also some nice examples of Jeraman’s previous work:

See, previously:
Robotic Twitter Songwriter Generates Tweet Poetry

Matt Davis [namethemachine] is seen here with Microsoft’s Kinect computer vision / 3D camera controller, plus – stealing the show – lasers. The lasers in question are a rig by Henry Strange, which allows computer control of laser direction using the DMX protocol. (DMX is a protocol similar to MIDI – though actually a bit simpler, if you can believe that – generally associated with lighting and show control.)

I could say more, but I’ll let you watch the video and ponder. The ingredients:
OpenNI, the “natural interface” not-for-profit standards body and organization that allows drivers across multiple hardware (Kinect being the best-known)
Ableton Live (sound)
Max/MSP (I believe here just translating OpenNI control to MIDI and perhaps DMX, as well)

The result: audiovisual control, and The Future. (Now, the only problem is, I’m not sure I’d want to watch an entire lineup of people doing these kinds of gestures while performing, but I could certainly see this alongside other alternative control schemes, from breath to good-old-fashioned tangible controllers.)

Thanks, Laura Escude, for the tip. (Laura has her own interface for futuristic electronic performance – she uses a violin!)

Composer/producer Jon Brooks has a love piece for the Braun AB-30 alarm clock, and its iconic designer Dieter Rams, entitled, appropriately enough, “Music For Dieter Rams.”

“Every sound on this record, from the melodic sounds to the percussion, the atmospheric effects to the bass lines originates from the Braun AB-30 alarm clock.”

In turns whimsical and reflective, the minimal soundtrack is inventively melodic. Pads and beats extend in roomy spaces, giving patterns room to breathe, free of ornament or effect – just as you’d expect music in homage to Dieter Rams to be. Calmly repetitive, the music hums away cheerily and efficiently, all of the zenlike balance of a Braun clock with none of the anxiety of an alarm. Some would be pleasant to wake up to. But it’s not all restraint, either: sounds cover the spectrum, squeezing every imaginable timbre out of the source material, up to the spacey, futurist cut “Elektronische Schaltungen.”

Dieter Rams’ aesthetic I expect has had a deep impact on neo-modernist electronic musicians, whether in the production of their music or as an impact on software and hardware design. (At least, it has between baroque layers of music and faux wood paneling and imaginary tubes reproduced on screen, which have their own, distinct place.) I think a lot of us would like to see more Rams-inspired design in music and visual tech, more of his humanistic notions about design. They don’t all have to be spun as Jon Ives-ian Apple chic, either – indeed, it’s a reminder of the importance of returning to the source of some of those aesthetic choices.

But that makes these musical poems all the more moving. They’re in no way slavish, translating one set of ideas to a novel medium, and dealing with the materiality of the product itself. It gives a design for a humble clock still one more way to last.

Read about this and other projects on Jon’s blog:
http://cafekaput.blogspot.com/

And more of the “good design” thoughts of Dieter Rams:

It’s not a sound design tour-de-force in the same way as the Dieter Rams album, but also well worth listening: Music for Thomas Carnacki.

More in the vein of the Braun project is a Brooks’ wonderfully-clever “Electronic Music in the Classroom,” as produced by a fictitious D.D. Denham and pupils. It’s simultaneously retro parody and freshly-modern; like the Braun piece, it effuses sonic wit.

“din is noise” is a newly-updated “tone board,” making the rectangular plane of its screen into a field of sound you can transform. The video above just begins to show some of what it can do. Pixels can be tones, transformed onscreen. A resonator editor uses Bezier curves to edit sounds across octaves. Each resonator, in turn, can be edited with yet more Bezier curves. Put them together into the drone editor (the bit you see in the video), and you can create vast, sculpted soundscapes from series of rectangles dragged around between octaves.

It’s all free, and it’s all doable for your mouse – a Linux exclusive that might convince you to dual boot, or take a second look at that netbook.

The results here tend toward the ambient, but if you’d like to tap your toe a bit to what you make, there’s already a stereo gate effect, so knock yourself out. And timbrally, you can use any waveform.

This isn’t just a sound toy, either; you can use MIDI, OSC, and …IRC chat?

More tutorial videos after the jump, because I really don’t get tired of watching this thing.

That said, watch for about halfway through the video at top for things to start to get interesting. Initially, it’s just some sine waves. “Yeah, whatever… another…” You skip ahead in the transport. Then big clusters of resonators start moving around, which should make at least a few sound designers say, “Hmmm….,” an evil grin appearing in the corner of their mouth.

For fans of similar concepts (MetaSynth springs to mind), I think you’ll like this approach, especially in a world of fake knobs. This is something that actually makes sense for the mouse, and makes me hope we see more Linux tablets soon.

Download source or 32-bit Ubuntu deb.
Don’t miss the awesome about page. “This is nothing new. / Some old men did it in the 60s! / Punched numbers into cards!”

“Modulation? / Bezier on Carrier and Modulator. / Eat that Chowning.”

Thanks to Ryan Dean for the tip!

(PS, no, I’m not personally calling Linux GNU/Linux. I understand why people do. But average people use short names. And the value of GNU is such an integral part of what Linux is — and other OSes, too, by the way, cough, Mac OS — that I think we can celebrate GNU without saying a clunky name. But if you do, carry on…)

Artists Leisure-B and Usselino collaborated on this Autechre-inspired audiovisual short, filled with pulsing geometric primitives. The work is a kind of A/V composition, the music arranged with abrupt, video-style edits. For fans of Native Instruments’ thick-sounding Massive synth, you also get some free preset downloads in the deal.

With Native Instruments’ software providing the sound palette, Ableton Live became a context for editing the music as you would video:

Leisure: “I tried to approach the composition as “sound design” as possible. Since the video was animated on the BPM (117) and rhythmical accents of “Vose On”, all I really had to do drum wise was find out which accents Usselino had used for his main video events. After creating the drums on those accents, most of the composition was just tweeking knobs and experimenting with note placement.

Since Ableton Live has excellent video support, I could just run the video in the loop region I was working in, and experiment with Native Instrument’s Massive’s great synthesizing capabilities. I usually start of with an init patch, and work my way towards the sound which I feel is fitting for the events in the video. The only exception to this rule however is the second bassline, which originates from Durk Kooistra’s WODAN bass, available for download in his 10 Free Massive Patches”

Watch the video, then check out the presets and more information:
10 Free Massive Patches
Cinema 4D meets Ableton Live: fret_1

More on the visual side, free Cinema4D download, on Create Digital Motion

What could audiovisual art made for tablets look like? Some dismiss the results as “toys.” The creators of Thicket embrace that very role. Thicket, the product of electronic A/V artists Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, is intended as a kind of immersive distraction, filling the screen of an Apple handheld or iPad with clouds of abstract color and ambient sound. Free of controls or widgets, playing with Thicket is a bit like sticking your hand into a mist, more gently responsive than overtly interactive.

It’s also lovely, and – for the moment – free. As an experiment, Josh and Morgan are offering up Thicket free of charge on the store, meaning those of you with appropriate devices can try it out as you read.

http://apps.intervalstudios.com/thicket/

A lot of what you read about iOS development and the new “app” markets in general tends to blur into generalities. You’d also be forgiven for assuming the “app” is a gold rush even for avant-garde digital artists. Instead, the picture from Morgan and Josh is subtler. They concede their work may have niche appeal, and view the iPad and iPhone not just as a hot, new market, but as part of a longer narrative of audiovisual expression.

Along the way, they’ve got some tips for learning to develop software, reflections on how interaction can work and why even a baby can play with their creation, and some insight into how their project worked as musical, visual collaboration and not just software creation.

If you had to classify Thicket, how would you describe it?

Morgan: Thicket is a toy. We can get a little more descriptive and call it an audiovisual toy.

Josh: I’d call it portable moving artwork…

What was the original impetus for the idea behind Thicket? What sparked this particular, somewhat abstract notion of how you might interact with sound and image?

Josh: I had been talking about making something for iOS for over a year, ever since Apple released the first SDK, but had been unable to find the time. The impending release of the iPad and Morgan’s interest provided me with the motivation I needed to actually start something. We decided to choose from favorite moments of our past collaborative efforts and find something we could make pretty quickly. Thicket came from one such moment in the “Unsimulatable” DVD/performance that accompanied Morgan’s first album, Airships Fill the Sky. We had referred to this moment (fondly) as the “ball of string”. That particular moment came from multiple experiments and jam sessions with my superDraw program and Morgan’s Ripple program. That was the seed, and once we had that seed, using the unique features of the iOS devices to alter/enhance/affect what was happening seemed fairly natural.

Morgan: My approach to sound for Thicket comes out of a desire to piggyback on the natural ways people want to touch Josh’s graphics. I didn’t want to have any sort of fiddly controls — knobs, sliders, buttons, menus. I simply wanted to sonically respond to the natural, casual interactions which Josh’s visuals encourage. Typically, music apps for mobile devices have a number of controls — buttons, sliders, knobs. And they use simple XY position as a primary source of musical or synthesis parameters. Neither of those input sources — control widgets, or xy position — is compatible with the natural way one wants to interact with Josh’s visuals, so I had to use some different sources of music input — finger speed and multipe touches. I’m really interested in finding other gestural means of input which play nicely with the control of visuals.

While it began on handhelds, Thicket really seems to benefit from being on the tablet form factor on the iPad. What does that device mean to you as a canvas for work?

Josh: It’s a pretty exciting device to work with. As we’ve improved it over the year, we’ve found that we are more and more focused on the experience on the tablet rather than on the phone.

Morgan: I don’t want to discourage anyone from using Thicket on a phone. We’ve made sure the phone experience is solid since the first version. But I’ll admit that Thicket really shines on the iPad. I was a reluctant iPad buyer. I only bought one because Josh forced me to! But now that I have one, I’ve developed quite a passion for it. It’s a seductively humanizing and ergonomic little machine. It’s very book-like, which is a good sign. There’s a reason books are the size and shape they are. Their form has been under development for hundreds of years. The iPad allows us to reach people when they’re in that curl-up-with-a-book mode: relaxed, comfortable, attentive.

Back when multimedia CD-ROMs were what some artists saw as the future (which wound up being both wrong and right, depending on how you look at it), I remember Morton Subotnik talking about his vision for this stuff. He described these devices as a kind of “chamber” experience – the personal quality of them being a strength. What does it mean to the two of you to be able to distribute work to someone on a mobile computer, and not only in a performance or gallery?

Morgan: The mobile art experience has been around as long as radio, so I’m not sure I consider Thicket revolutionary in that sense. I’ve been making music recordings for years which most people experience in solo settings. However, the community aspect of art-making is very important to me. I love performing, and I love what happens when you get a crowd of people together. If we want to test out the “chamber experience” analogy, we can compare the experience of using Thicket to the experience of listening to live (western classical) chamber music. When you listen to the chamber music, you’re out in some sort of venue, you’re setting next to people, probably strangers, you’re in a public place, physically participating in something collective and cultural. Using an app on your own, no matter how artistic that app is, doesn’t have any of that meatspace cultural thing built in to it. The Smule folks have done a great job of allowing you to interact over the Internet with other people using their apps. But I still place a lot of value on getting people physically together in the same space, experiencing the same sounds, the same sights, the same vibe, and actually being interact with one another in the physical world. I’d love to find ways to create software which encourages more connection between people. But on the other hand, sometimes it’s good to recognize what things software is good for, and when it’s time to be a little more old-fashioned.

Josh: I think the most exciting aspect of these devices for me (besides the general human augmentation that all of them increasingly offer us) is their potential to augment the way we communicate in an artistic way. I’ve been exploring this in my performance based work for a while now (performance that involves the audience in new ways, like the multi-user art show earlier this year), but I’m really excited to approach it even more organically, more like little ad-hoc multi-player games that happen to create something aesthetically compelling.

We’ve also seen Thicket adapted to a gallery installation (at TEDxBrooklyn) and theoretically it could be used in live performance. Is this something you’ve been able to perform with, as well? Do you think it’s possible to build a piece that could be both your performance tool and something an end user can pick up?

Josh: I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with how Thicket can be framed (sometimes literally) as a piece of art on a wall. The iPad itself is just big enough to be framed and hung, and people seem to really enjoy interacting with it this way. Another fun use I’ve discovered for it was projecting it on the ceiling for my 4 year old daughter as a moving night light. Thicket was never really designed to be a performance tool, although it’s arguably started to move in that direction. Building a performance tool that is still fun and accessible for everyone, while giving more focused users the flexibility they need, is one of my goals for the next year. I’m not sure whether that will be Thicket or something new, but will definitely be approaching it as something I will use myself for my own performances.

Morgan: I’m wary of allowing Thicket to become too much of a tool. I’d rather make it a better toy. Performers need tools, not toys. For now, I’ll be sticking with Ripple, my performance/composition software for my own music. And trying to make Thicket an easier, richer, and more delightful world to explore.

Game designers have long thought about challenge, reward, and even failure states. And as a result, some of their creations are truly long-form — it’s not uncommon for someone to complain about a 20- or 30-hour game being too short. One of the criticisms of art on devices like the iPhone has been that thing tend to become quickly-digestible toys – perhaps calibrated to the kind of interaction design artists have done traditionally. How do you respond to that criticism? How did you tackle questions of states of interaction in Thicket?

Josh: Being a fairly avid gamer, and having just read a profile in the New Yorker about Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo’s Mario creator) I’m really excited about the intersection between art and games. I know this topic is a bit tired, but I’m approaching it from the art side rather than the “gamer” side, and that’s interesting to me. While Thicket isn’t a 20-30 hour experience (though it could be argued that its open ended-ness makes the experience ultimately unquantifiable), making Thicket a deeper experience has been one of our major goals this year. (I think we’re definitely on the right track with our 2.0 update that hit in November.) Games that allow players to be creative in how they play, from open world games like Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, to games where traditional goals can be accomplished in a variety of ways (Bioshock, etc.), to games where creativity is part of the game itself (World of Goo, Noby Noby Boy, Captain Forever), have offered players deeper experiences and replayability. I’m really excited to see these two worlds collide, and possibly try to experiment with that collision in my own work.

Morgan: I am decidedly _not_ an avid gamer, though Josh diligently continues to try and convert me. But I’m intrigued by the idea of guiding a user experience, creating some sort of progression a user (or player) travels through. On the other hand, I’m not sure that’s necessary. There’s room in the world for idle playthings with no specified goal. Take those little magnetic Buckyballs, for example. They’re simply fun and satisfying to play with. They’re wildly popular despite the fact that they’re completely open-ended, with no challenge/reward/failure built in to them. A difference between that toy and Thicket is the range of what you’re able to create with them. We’ve been getting regular suggestions from users asking for the ability to add their own sounds and pictures. I have no idea how we would do this. But it may be that what people are really asking for is greater control, a greater range of end results that they’re able to produce. I’d like to come up with ways to do that without losing the casual, playful spirit that Thicket has now — and without adding any sliders!

Working on Thicket meant collaborating not only aesthetically, but technically. How did the two of you work together, especially as you were in different cities?

Josh: There was (and is) a weekly video chat where we discuss our status, what we’re doing… and we’re of course using an SVN [Subversion version control system] on the technical side to share code. Surprisingly, collaborating technically across a long distance has been quite painless.

Morgan: It’s pretty easy for sound and visuals code not to step on each others’ toes. We have a shared set of data we can examine for things like touch position and speed, and mode changes. Other than that, we’re pretty much in our own sandboxes code-wise. We did do a bit of coordination to syncronize mode changes to tempo. As Josh mentioned, a shared code repository — the Subversion software in our case — is absolutely indispensable.

I know a bit about your coding background – Josh having worked in Processing/Java and Flash, Morgan in SuperCollider. What was the process of learning iOS development like? How was the learning curve? Any lessons learned you can share?
Josh: It definitely has been harder than I thought it would be. Coming from [Flash/Flex] ActionScript and Java, I feel like I had to learn three new languages at once: Objective-C, Apple’s Cocoa Touch framework, and OpenGL. Learning about pointers and handling memory was a big challenge. I would highly recommend the (FREE) Stanford iPhone Application Programming course available on iTunes: It was a huge help for getting started and I still am kind of amazed that you can audit a very well put-together class like this for free.

Morgan: I’ve been comparing the move from higher-level languages to the lower-level iOS environment to stepping out of a go-cart and in to a helicopter. Not only was I learning new languages (C, Objective-C, C++), I was dealing with raw audio data for the first time. Honestly, I’m still in the steep part of the learning curve, though things are beginning to feel a little easier. It’s pretty difficult to simply figure out how to send raw audio data to the speaker, which is necessary if you want to do any dsp. This example project helped me quite a bit with that:
http://sites.google.com/site/iphonecoreaudiodevelopment/remoteio-playback

Morgan, you ultimately decided to code sound from scratch. This was your first project to do that, correct? What led you to that solution, and how did you approach it?

Morgan: Without rolling a significant amount of my own code, I would have been limited to very basic techniques — file playback and looping, pretty much. Most of the audio in Thicket is based just on manipulating loop lengths and playback start points. But even though the techniques I use are quite simple, I wasn’t able to find a higher-level sound library which could do exactly what I needed. Also, I didn’t want to get locked in to something which wouldn’t be flexible enough for me in the future. Unless there’s a really powerful tool available which I’m confident I can grow in to for a very long time, I’m more working at low level and building more things from scratch.

Josh has talked with me a bit about how he feels the iTunes App Store and the Apple ecosystem on iOS, for all the criticism it has garnered, has really made Thicket possible. What was it that drew you to iOS? What is it that Apple is able to provide for you, in terms of hardware, software, development experience, or user experience?

Josh: Apple really does have excellent documentation and support for their SDK. That’s one of a number of reasons why we chose to develop for iOS. Another reason is actually the small number of devices that iOS runs on: from a development perspective, it makes things much easier to test… Then there’s the solidity of the Apple’s hardware and multitouch implementation in general.

Morgan: I like the way the Apple devices and OSs look and feel. It’s a dumb emotional judgement, but sometimes you’ve got to follow that. I also like the fact that people using Apple devices are really into their apps. I wanted to be part of that party.

Do you think there’s potential on new platforms – ranging from Web app stores to Android or Windows and Linux tablets – to do the same thing? Or is there something Apple was able to do for you that was unique? Is there anything those platforms can learn from Apple?

Morgan: We chose Apple in large part simply because that platform seemed to be where the action was. I think we probably could have built Thicket for another tablet platform and the product would have been fine. But I also think fewer people would have downloaded, and we wouldn’t have felt encouraged in the way that we were. We might not have made the version 2 update, which has been much more successful than version 1. At this point, for us to transfer time and energy away from iOS development toward another platform, we’d need to see someone else having significant success selling artsy apps. It’s too big an investment to try another platform simply as an experiment. When we see another app store really taking off, on a device which we can feel some love for, we may reconsider.

How has this business of selling an “app” worked out for you? And why try going free?
Josh: I wish I could say Thicket’s paying the rent, but it’s really not. I think the (emerging) art market on the App store is relatively new, and harder to find (as Apple doesn’t give us a real category in the App Store). The fact that they have a Generative Art & Sound category in their 2010 “best of” list [iTunes link] (which Thicket happens to be in!) suggests this may change in the future. We never really expected it to do well financially and are pretty thrilled when people seem to like it. Making it free is an experiment of sorts. It allows a lot of people who wouldn’t ordinarily try Thicket to do so.

Morgan: I had very low expectations for how many people would be interested in Thicket, and they’ve been clearly exceeded. I’m excited that (a modest number of) people are actually spending money on our art! Sales are much better for Thicket than they’ve ever been for any recorded music I’ve released. Originally we thought Thicket would be a sort of experimental, niche product, and we’d price it a bit high. It seems to have a bit wider appeal than we expected though, and a lower price allows us to reach more people, while still making some money. Going free for the holidays is a way of testing just how wide the appeal is.

Have you seen other interactive creations – on iOS or elsewhere – that you’ve found inspiring?
Josh: I’ve mentioned a couple of games that I play; here’s more stuff.

For PC: Windosill (really everything by Patrick Smith, AKA Vectorpark, is just amazingly beautiful.)

Superbrothers have also inspired me quite a bit…

Machinarium is also really good.

Interactive artwork I’ve been inspired by this year on iOS: Uzu, Sonic Wire Sculptor.

Games (also iOS): The Incident, Acrobots, Enviro-Bear (also on Android)

Morgan: I think BubbleHarp is great. I love the butterfly effect aspect of it — tiny differences in the way you set it up result in huge differences in what you see. Bloom is classy and beautiful, and was a great example of how to create a sequencer without forcing a bunch of fiddly controls on a user. Using Uzu makes me feel like a god.

What’s next for your collaboration (or personal projects)?
Josh: Both of us want to continue to make Thicket better. It’s becoming an outlet for artistic experimentation for ourselves, and we are seriously considering how to involve others as well. Additionally I have lots of ideas and I’m hoping to also release a bunch more software next year: some artistic, some performance based, some more game-like.

Morgan: The next thing we want to try with Thicket is in-app purchase of new modes. It will be really satisfying to have this platform we can be continually adding to. I’m a bit anxious to start devoting a bit more energy toward live performance. I don’t want to get so stuck inside the iPad that I forget that I was once a performing, travelling musician.

Thanks to Morgan and Josh for the insight. See also a superb interview, with code, at the always-excellent Disquiet, which focuses on the sonic and compositional aspects of the app…

BEING DECIMAL: THE ANTICIPATORY PLEASURES OF THE THICKET APP [Disquiet / Marc Weidenbaum]

For more interactive iOS goodness, also free, try Josh’s Snowdrift – not that certain people associated with the East Coast of the United States, or London, among other places, really need an app for that at the moment.
Snowdrift @ iTunes

ReacTable Mobile has arrived for iOS mobile devices – even handhelds – bringing the visual, modular sound-making environment to the masses. Apart from building your own interactive musical table, the only way to get ReacTable’s software previously was to spend some EUR9700 – and get on a waiting list. Now, any Apple mobile device will do the trick.

The ReacTable certainly is intuitive and fun, and I imagine this could appeal to people new to music performance, as well as satisfying some long-time ReacTable fans. There’s also sample import, so you can really use this in your own performances and make it your own. Features:

One app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Accelerometer and mic input
Import your own samples and loops
20 virtual objects
Session sharing with others

Full details:
http://www.reactable.com/products/mobile/

I’ve been talking with the ReacTable crew, so hope to cover this in more detail soon. In the meantime, I’m back to playing a mobile game called “shake your jetlag,” and thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Addendum: At least one person on Twitter (Elliott Fienberg) points out the one disadvantage of this is that the original ReacTable is a tangible interface – physical objects you can move with your hands. And that’s worth saying; there’s something rather significant missing in the iOS translation. The iPad et al are undifferentiated glass surfaces, intuitive to use but lacking in physical feedback. I can certainly see a place for both approaches. It’s also possible look at the same question from a different angle. Multitouch, once an exotic technology, is now a commodity, shippings on millions (perhaps, soon, billions) of devices. I wonder what form the tangible future imagined by ReacTable might someday take, and indeed, if it might re-emerge in more economical form.

In the meantime, as you’ll read in comments, ReacTable works surprisingly well as a multi-touch interface, even if it was originally conceived for objects. You’ll likely be happier with the iPad’s larger surface area, and you’ll want a current-generation device for its greater processing power, based on feedback in comments. I hope to offer more a complete review after some tests on devices.

For this book review, we welcome guest writer Andy Farnell, who himself has a terrific book on interactive sound design and free modular patching environment Pure Data, entitled Designing Sound. It began as a review of a book on using free software – but it could be, more than that, a chance to fight procrastination. And while this runs the gamut, including graphics and design and not just sound, that could be even more relevant to those of us who need to delve into those other areas for our creative work. -Ed.

We all have a stack of things to get round to one day. Building a website. Making a video. Writing a book or recording an album. Allow me to share with you ten days that will transform your list of could do, would do, always going to do… into a list of exciting projects you’ve started.

That’s how long it took me to flick through Daniel James’ “Crafting Digital Media”, a light-reading compendium of software wisdom published by APress and weighing in at just under 400 pages.

It takes two of the major excuses for procrastination, “I don’t understand the interface, so I’m waiting for someone to show me.” and “I don’t have the money to buy the latest software”, and stomps them in the face with a giant boot.

There are roughly eight topics, or chunks of knowledge covered.

The first is about photography, with demonstrations in F-Spot, GThumb and GIMP — all the free tools you need to transfer, manipulate, and polish high-quality digital images.

Every software package in the book is a free, open source product that can be legally downloaded and used. These are not shareware or limited trial programs, but full versions of powerful, standards compatible applications — all modern free software with reliable, polished interfaces and powerful features. The book also comes with a CD containing Ubuntu 9.04.

The second chapter concerns illustration and font design. This is a whistle stop tour of modern scalable vector graphics tools and techniques, touching on Inkscape, FontForge, and GIMP again, showing you how to import, export, convert and edit high quality multi-layered scalable graphics.

Next comes 2D animation, where KToon and Synfig are demonstrated, showing the basic concepts of frame sequencing and tweening. And naturally, 3D modelling follows, with a look at Blender, the immensely-powerful 3D object design and rendering package with auxiliary game engine.

Although each section covers a complete production concept, it isn’t tiring or exhaustive. Just enough guidance is given to launch the program, explore the features, introduce the key concepts and leave you to play. If you actually follow along with the software examples, it’s a truly exciting journey, as you go to sleep each night with your head exploding with possibilities.

The art of publishing is the next adventure, with explorations of page layout, document structure, creating PDFs, posters, books and flyers. Subjects like fonts, typography, kerning and color processes are explained through examples with the Scribus application.

As a musician, you might be wondering where the audio tools are. The book doesn’t disappoint. There’s something for even experienced users in this compendium of tools spanning three chapters. Packages such as Mixx, Hydrogen, Jack, Seq24, Alsa Modular, Audacity, Ardour, and JAMin are explored in the context of all the common tasks like podcasting, recording, sequencing, effecting, compressing and mastering, EQ, CD production, and creating your own streaming server.

As an old fart who has just discovered YouTube, I found the next section on video editing to be very helpful since I’ve just started to explore making video tutorials. The now comical proliferation of incompatible video formats and codecs, a depressing indictment of the failure of standards, are cut through in short order. Daniel lays down the basics of formats and their conversion using AVIdemux, cropping and resizing while preserving high quality, and basic editing using Kino and the Open Movie Editor. A quick treatment of audio sync, titles and effects wraps up the section nicely.

Web development is the last chapter on software packages. Arguably there are so many choices for Web2.0 site design that it’s hard to justify any particular one. This book opts for solid and proven Drupal, along with a tour of the industry standard Apache web server, MySQL back-end, and Icecast media server to give a user-driven internet radio station as the chapter example.

Each of these topics is an entire profession in itself, about which shelves of books could be written, so don’t expect to become much of an an expert in any. What “Crafting Digital Media” does is open the door and get you started producing content very quickly. From there the opportunities are up to you.

As well as gently throwing in up-to-date anecdotal knowledge and asides from his encyclopaedic knowledge of modern media software, Daniel ties together the various threads into a whole that leaves you feeling empowered to start any new digital production project.

Let’s face it, the key to most pieces of software is a few simple steps, a few core commands, that seem so easy once you know them that you want to kick yourself for not trying sooner. Getting over that initial barrier is what this book offers.

The book would be a fantastic companion to new users of Ubuntu Studio, Pure:Dyne or 64Studio distributions, though several of the packages are multi-platform, so are available for Mac and Windows too. Ed.: Indeed, a large number of the tools are cross-platform – GIMP, FontForge, and Inkscape run on Mac and Windows, and Ardour on Mac. But then again, if you’ve got a Mac or PC, this is a great time to explore Linux a bit as a second OS, and all this software is available to you. Graphics software should even run acceptably virtualized. -PK

Title: Crafting Digital Media
Author: Daniel James
Publisher: Apress
Year: 2009
ISBN: 9781430218876
Price: $29 (RRP:$40)