MetaSynth has long been something special, a rare tool beloved by sound designers and fans of unusual software for music. The creation of software designer Eric Wenger, creator of the 3D modeling tool Bryce, expressed his unique vision of how computer design could work for sound with interfaces to make synthesis, filtering, and effects more graphical. At the same time, you’d be forgiven for forgetting MetaSynth, as the independently-developed, Mac-only application has been out of the headlines a long time. Imagine my surprise to see Edward Spiegel’s announcement today of a new version.

Superficially, MetaSynth 5 looks the previous version, and I’m sure some people will balk at its US$599 price. But there’s plenty here that sounds truly promising, so I’m eager to give it a test drive in the coming days and weeks. And for MetaSynth loyalists, finally getting proper Intel processor support is a welcome, if long-overdue, development.

In MetaSynth 5:

• Universal Binary, multi-processor enabled — good news, as fancier effects do get CPU-intensive.
• New synthesis Phase distortion, Pulse Width Modulation among eleven new synthesis modes for the instrument framework. Parameters can now be controlled with envelopes and velocity, as well.
• Improved Image Synth: 14 new drawing tools and real-time swapping of instruments, tunings, and samples as you play back, plus batch rendering, which should make previewing and rendering much less of a chore.
• Convolution in the Effects Room: Hmmm… that sounds racy, at least for those of us with a sound design fetish.
• Spectrum manipulation: The Spectrum Synth now lets you select pitch range and adds – whatever this means, I’m stoked – “Time and Pitch Blur.”
• Big files: Render arbitrarily long files, and handle bigger files in the Sample Room.
• Mixing, file support: Mix 24 stereo tracks in the Montage Room, which works with their VTrack video montage editor. There’s also now “native support of .wav, .caf, .aiff and SoundDesigner audio files at resolutions up to 32-bit floating point and 96 kHz.”

As ever, MetaSynth isn’t going to be for everyone, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s aging. But as one of the cabinet of secret sauce of computer sound tools, you can bet some folks will be taking notice of this new release.

http://uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/ [click the MetaSynth 5 tab for the most relevant new information]

Performance with Cubie from sadmb on Vimeo.

Music sequencing as a Rubik’s Cube-style game, or hypnotic, kinetic rotating wheels – your piano roll won’t know what hit it. New musical art is set to be performed in Argentina, but you can download both tools, free.

Computer interfaces for music date back decades now, but with ingrained notions of hardware sound sequencers, linear media like tape, and hundreds of years of notation in staves and bars, old habits can be hard to kick. Yet it seems that suddenly, a younger generation of audiovisual composers is exploding notions of how musical interface and sequence could work, fully embracing a virtual space in which they themselves have come of age.

Next month’s spectacular-looking 404 Festival could make anyone want to book a flight to Argentina. Two highlighted artists from this festival for me really embody the possibilities of new sequencing metaphors. Both are built in Java.

At top, Cubie by Sadam Fujioka of Japan is free, downloadable software that combines audiovisual performance and game in a rotating cube.

Cubie is a software instrument which provides innovative idea of musical performance, differs from existing musical performance system such as musical notation, DJ systems, DAW systems, etc… It has a novel concept incorporating a new interactive technique based on puzzle games. Music is represented from highly saturated colored letters on a 3D cube. Almost unlimited number of melodies and rhythms can be created from a combination of those letters, and it can be changed on real-time by operations based on puzzle game. Those playful operations push a performer to play repeatedly and get the skill of performing with Cubie. Cubie is free software and you can play just like sadmb do.

More information in both Japanese and English at sadmb site (with lots of other software, as well). Built in Java with the use of JSyn for synthesis.

http://sadmb.com/

If these cubes feel overly rigid to you, though, and you don’t like the mechanical repetition of these lines, enter the crazy, spinning world of Hiroshi Matoba.

Hiroshi Matoba: OVERBUG from antjeverena on Vimeo.

Overbug is a music-performance tool designed to compose Minimal and Dance Music.

Through looping and newly arranging sound patterns, called ‘Bugsounds’, the program creates complex, polyrhythmic sounds. Overbug differs from conventional linear controlled music sequencers, which arrange the sound into a linear timeline from left to right. In Overbug the sound arrangement of the repeating music loops is equal to the visual abstraction of circular actions which built the interface through circles.

I showed a very early sketch I was working on last year of a circle-based sequencer, also built in Processing, though (cough) my chops are nowhere near Hiroshi’s. I was more interested in using the circles to subdivide cycles, as in Indonesian music. Seeing this piece is a major kick in my pants to try to work on my project a bit more and go a different direction.

Here’s a demo video explaining how this works:

More information + free download (just updated this month):
http://www.dominofactory.net/Overbug/

If You’re in Argentina

Don’t miss a terrific-looking exhibition of Japanese works and the rest of the
http://www.404festival.com/
(info in Spanish + English)

These two works clearly belonged together, but I feel bad for not featuring any Latin American (or Argentinian, specifically) work — those of you associated with 404, if you’ve got hot tips, send them in.

Auditorium is a fascinating free Flash game that turns interactive music arrangement into a series of puzzles. The center of the game is what the creators call “flow” – a visual stream of particles that can be directed to audio “containers” to create sound. The user places circles with icons signifying direction in the stream to redirect the particles where desired. As the stream hits the containers, it produces musical patterns. The results aren’t entirely open-ended – that is, there is a fairly fun puzzle game here, in that you can only “clear” a level by directing the flow of particles through all the objects. But the creators do claim that:

Auditorium is about the process of discovery and play. There are no right or wrong answers; there are many ways to solve every puzzle. To get started, fill up the first audio level.

playauditorium.com

The game so far is just a “demo”; the goal is to flesh out the game and deliver a more fully-functioning version. There’s a precedent for that: games like N+ (formerly N), Crayon Physics, World of Goo (formerly Tower of Goo), fl0w, and Da Blob – even the prototype for breakout hit Portal – began their life as free games or research prototypes before becoming officially-published titles, just to name a few. In fact, a significant chunk of what’s happening in game design these days is beginning its life in research and indie projects. That’s likely because hardcore and casual gamers alike are hungry for new concepts, and A-list developers are saddled with epic projects and bone-crunchingly huge ambitions and budgets. I’m not certain Auditorium will be the next big hit, but this kind of model could generate the interactive music games that future-minded music lovers have been anticipating.

My only criticism here, as with many similar games, is that the actual music content is fairly static. It’s a good prototype, but it’d be great if these particles had more influence on music. That creates a new problem for game designers: the music itself is really part of the game mechanics. Part of the fault here is Flash, whose sonic capabilities are fairly limited without a significant investment of effort. I’d love to see a game environment in which it’s easier to prototype musical ideas, with live-generated musical materials and synthesis.

The prototype here is promising, though. Found other interactive music games out there you like? Do let us know!

(Thanks, Brent!)

The Fairlight CMI, the ground-breaking digital synth created by Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, is well known for its contribution to music. Think names like Peter Gabriel, Hans Zimmer, David Bowie, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush, Bono, and … hang on, I’ll stop before this becomes a very long list. With tablet input and sophisticated sampling capabilities, the CMI holds up reasonably well against even modern tech, even if it cost as much as a luxury car. (See Keyboard Magazine’s 2006 write-up.)

But less known is the CMI’s influential visual sibling, the CVI — Computer Video Instrument. Introduced to the market in 1984 at around US$6500, the CVI also used a tablet interface, accessing not a hybrid analog/digital design for visual effects and digital painting in real-time.

You may not know the name, but you’ve seen the effects — the ubiquity of the CVI’s distinctive effects, unfortunately, also made it a cliche in 80s design. But the idea of making an integrating visual instrument is still meaningful today.

It’s not really worth reading about the CVI. It’s better to watch it. We’ve been following videos uploaded by co-creator Vogel onto YouTube, as well as from aficionados of the hardware from the VJ community, on our video sister, Create Digital Motion:

State of the 80s: Fairlight CVI Demo Video, BBC on "Tomorrow’s World"

Video: Fairlight CVI Video Instrument Development, Ca. 1984

Glitch, Synthetic and Real: Free Vintage Fairlight VJ Clips, Glitch in Jitter

Translation: you jam, eye candy runs in the background. On the Mac, you can even easily assemble whole sets of songs using Rax with Quartz Composer visualizations, as seen here previously.

I’ll be teaching a workshop on some of these basic techniques and interactive animation and video/image processing in general. The workshop will be here in Brooklyn later this month, and I’d like to invite Create Digital Music readers in the area. We’ll focus on Quartz Composer because it’s quite easy to learn, but the techniques will be applicable to other software on both Mac and Windows. The fact that QC integrates so nicely with Rax should make this especially interesting to musicians wanting to add live visuals.

The class runs August 24 through September 12 at 3rd Ward, the Brooklyn studio space and gallery recently featured in the Bushwick Art Projects event. (See a video at Cool Hunting.) Unfortunately, space in New York always costs money to rent and 3rd Ward is a for-profit space, but I can offer a discount:

Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion readers will get a special discount off membership or workshops in the space:

Enter code PK0806 to receive a 10% discount on a 3-month trial membership or 1 free workshop at 3rd Ward. 3rd Ward is a 20,000 sq. ft. workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals, located in East Williamsburg.

Digital Media Classes @ 3rd Ward
More on the class and the discount/membership from Create Digital Motion

If we don’t get enough people registered, we’ll have to cancel, so please forward to anyone interested. Thanks!

Create Digital Motion

For those of you who specialize in visuals, we hope CDMotion will become daily reading. For those of you who focus on music but occasionally like to keep tabs on live visuals, just out of curiosity or dabbling, we’ll keep you posted here on CDMusic. And, of course, we expect plenty of crossover, just as we’ve seen already here on CDMusic, whether it’s people making music in live, 3D gaming environments or MIDI controllers that work well with both Ableton Live and VJ applications.

We’ve already given the forums a head start, but for those of you who missed them, you’ll find parallel forums for visual discussion on our new server:

CDM Forums at createdigitalnoise.com

“This is just for VJs, right?” was a comment we got a few times on the forums. But I feel it’s important to take cues from readers, and based on what many of you are doing, a limited focus on “VJing” is too narrow. (Not to mention, many of you don’t even like the term!) Co-editor James Loveday and I both believe, I think, that it’s equally important how you build visual materials for a session, whether that’s going out and shooting time-lapse video or animating in Flash. There’s simply too much crossover to think of VJing as a completely independent discipline, or, likewise, to limit “motion graphics” to pre-rendered work, as much of the market currently does. I believe that interactive and real-time work will become part of digital expression for visuals just as it has for music. Today, the emphasis may be on rendered content — but ten years ago, most people were thinking about music production as being limited to big studios. That doesn’t take away the importance of other techniques any more than laptop music eliminates the need to understand microphones.

Thanks to James Loveday again for all the help moving servers around, importing content, and getting all the technical details right, a job that’s much larger than anyone here probably imagines. And, of course, thanks again to Nathanael Jeanneret for his fantastic graphic design.

Enough talk; head over there and check out our first stories, a feature on building my Shuttle PC (as teased here earlier), news of Flash 9, and of course all the archives of visual stories from Create Digital Music if you feel like digging through some of our old content.

Architecture mixed with electronics mixed with animation — we think nothing of mixing these elements now. In 1958, as Poème Electronique was unleashed on the Brussels World’s Fair, it was still experimental. The animation/installation/composition was the collaborative creation of legendary modernist architect Le Corbusier, his assistant Iannis Xenakis, who would later come to be known as a ground-breaking experimental composer, and composer Edgard Varèse. Varèse is certainly one of us: part of the reason he went into a compositional drought for many years was he was frustrated by the limitations of acoustic sound, and longed for the electronic labs we have today.

The results are, well, totally bizarre, even now. (Or, perhaps, especially now.) There’s a certain freshness, though, to the oddness of the work. I wonder what the ultimate Poème of the 21st Century could look like. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet.

Via Rhizome, via Screenhead — thanks to Marisa Olson, as I’ve been hoping this would crop up online for a long time!

More info on the work, with links, at the Electronic Music Foundation.

Updated: The old YouTube link wasn’t working; here’s a new one. If that doesn’t work, try a YouTube search for Poeme Electronique.

That’s where plasq’s Rax 2.0 comes in. As we saw earlier this week, Rax lets you build set lists for performance, with different software instruments and effects loaded for each song. Here’s the cool bit: Rax also lets you load Quartz Composer visuals. Since you can load different visuals for each song, you can use Rax to easily switch between QC compositions. (In fact, if visuals are what you really care about, Rax could even be thought of as a MIDI and audio-savvy VJ hosting application.)

On top of making it easy to switch between visualizations, Rax is set up to make MIDI assignments much easier. Rax’s custom QC template allows compositions to:

Receive Midi notes (in a ‘friendly’ format) from multiple devices
Receive ‘Learnable’ CCs messages formatted into a Rax Quartz Composition standard
Receive audio levels directly from the Rax output
Receive CPU usage information (allowing your composition to scale its usage accordingly, if required)
Change your Quartz composition with each song in your set.

(Source: Rax/Quartz Composer “SDK”)

And the beauty of all this is, you can make your visuals look like whatever you want.

Here’s all you have to do: go grab the templates, instructions, and tester application from plasq, plus a copy of Rax, and you’re good to go. The template takes care of what would otherwise be some messy MIDI and audio routing; the tester application lets you see the results, try out MIDI and audio, and test CPU load.

If you make any interesting visuals, send them our way!

1. Set Lists and Performance: Rax was always an easy and useful way of hosting AU plug-in effects and instruments, with full control for MIDI and audio routing. But you probably don’t have the same setup in every song. Rax lets you set up a series of songs as a set for a stage performance. This is clearly essential for bands and live performers, but I’ll bet even many electronica-oriented artists and DJs will find it useful. There’s also no reason you can’t configure useful sets for studio use, too.


2. Front Row for Music: Ever seen Apple’s media app, Front Row? With the new Macs, press a button on the wireless Apple Remote, and your Mac enters a full-screen mode for playing your media files (video, tunes, photos, etc.). Now imagine that idea, applied to music, and you’ll be close to Rax 2’s OnStage mode. A full-screen mode shows your set list in large print, stores notes about each song, monitors MIDI and audio levels, and lets you switch from song to song. It’s all big enough that you can see it from a distance, and so that you don’t have to hover around your QWERTY keyboard, Rax features . . .


3. Remote Control: Use any MIDI controller or even the wireless Apple Remote (if you have a newer Mac) to switch between songs.


4. OnStage UI: A high-contrast UI with a bright border is visible even under poor lighting, from a distance, onstage. (Yep, been there.)


5. Recording and Playback: MIDI file playback gives you the ability to load simple backing tracks with your sets. One-click audio recording lets you save your finished performance for posterity.


6. Re-Skinned Apple Plug-ins: Apple has some very high-quality AU plug-ins that come free with Mac OS X; they’ve even been adding new ones in recent OS releases.


7. Built-in Quartz Composer Visualizations: Here’s the surprise feature. You can run real-time visuals driven by audio and MIDI from your Rax setup, using either built-in visualizations or by building your own in Quartz Composer. (Building your own is a little tricky, especially if you’re unfamiliar with QC; watch this space for a tutorial.) Since it’s been challenging to get useful MIDI control over Apple’s free visual development tool, and even harder to switch between patches in performance, Rax could be useful to VJs and visualists as well as musicians. Best of all, thanks to the fact that the visualizations are extremely modest in their usage of CPU (the visuals run primarily on your graphics card GPU), you can run the visualizations alongside your soft synths and effects on the same computer. Naturally, this runs on a second display, so you can run your visualizers on a projector while your “heads-up” display for your set list shows up on your laptop. (Video, incidentally, would be trickier as it is quite CPU-intensive — for that you’d want a second machine.)

In short, you have a host that actually understands what’s needed for performance, from an interface you can see to robust remote control and easy switching between songs and sets.

And the whole product could be yet another reason to buy a MacBook. It’s a Universal binary, of course (though you’ll need Intel-native plug-ins as always), and optimized for dual-core chips. The word I’ve heard from plasq’s internal development that the visualizations work just fine on the integrated graphics chip on the Intel minis and MacBook, so you don’t even need the more advanced graphics card on the MacBook Pro.

Cost: US$49.95
Compatibility: Mac-only, Audio Unit plug-ins, Universal binary
Availability: Now (30-day demo available)

I’ve been playing with the beta for several weeks, and it looks very promising. Congratulations in particular go out to long-time CDM reader and occasional contributor Cris Pearson (aka atariboy) for his thoughtful design work for plasq! This month you can stay tuned for more coverage on this program and how to use it, here and on Create Digital Motion. In the meantime, go grab that demo and let us know what you think:

plasq.com – Rax 2

Spectre is an all-new audio analysis app built for Quartz and OpenGL. What I like about it is that it’s built with multiple instruments in mind: you can hook it up to individual plug-ins thanks to Apple’s AUNetSend and AUNetReceive objects. As a result, they can even be on another machine. Okay, granted, multiple machine setup aside, you could do that with a range of visualization plug-ins, but the integrated, net-connected suite is still a nice idea. With an oscilloscope, VU meters, and spectrographs, this could be a way to apply some science to the synthesizer patch you’re designing. The fact that this app costs only US$88 ought to help with that, too. Even if you’re not interested in the app itself, the UI design is worth a look; I expect we’ll see a lot more visualizers in plug-ins now that visual rendering can be performed by graphics cards with no impact on sound processing. Universal, but still accelerated for Velocity Engine, PowerPC lovers.

Spectre is built for real-time analysis; on the measurement side of things is the newly-upgraded (and
Universal) FuzzMeasure Pro 2. This is either a way to impress your friends with serious-looking graphs of your studio monitors (look at that there frequency response!) or a genuinely useful tool, or both. I don’t do enough measurement to tell for sure. US$250, via my current fave Mac blog, TUAW.