If you’re planning to build a creative new instrument or interface for music, and you don’t already have the open source Arduino project on your watch list, you should put it there. Chris O’Shea at Pixelsumo brings some great new goodies for Arduino lovers via the Italian project site / tutorial site / shop Tinke
Monday, 29 October 2007
DIY Sensor Lovers: New Bluetooth, Ethernet, DMX Arduinos
OSC- MIDI - Wii - Kyma on Mac
Open Sound Control (OSC), an open protocol that can be used in place of MIDI, isn’t the right tool for everything. Hooking up a 4-octave keyboard with some knobs, for instance, makes a whole lot more sense in MIDI, and MIDI is widely supported. But I like OSC’s open-ended message structure for devices like the Nintendo Wii
On Windows, the dominant Wii tool GlovePIE already supports OSC via scripts. On Mac, several of you pointed us to OSCulator, a tool that lets you turn input from the Wii into OSC messages (Max/MSP, Flash, Processing, Reaktor, Traktor, and others support OSC), and route MIDI to programs that don’t support OSC (everything else).
Just what might you use this for? Matrixsynth beats me to a video demonstrating the Wii as controller for the advanced synthesis tool Kyma (software) / Capybara (DSP hardware):
Hackable, Playable LED/Pad Music Interface
The Monome is a new music interface with LED-backlit pads, a USB interface that transmits OSC and MIDI data to a computer, and — here’s the unusual part — open source, hackable firmware and software interface. Touch the pads, and you can use this as a step-sequencer and remix tool (as in the example), but the real philosophy here is being able to do whatever you want, so think of the example video as just a start.
New Instrument Design
"....People have been coming up with new ways to improve musical instruments for just about forever, but what interests me personally are the new ideas that break entirely with mechanical interfaces in favor of high-tech sensor interfaces, and particularly ones that can produce–or at least attempt to attain–finely nuanced musical subtlety...."
Yamaha to Ship Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-On
Related: alternative controllers, alternative interfaces, futuristic, hardware, interactive, LEDs, monome, networked, open source, physical computing, previews, Sampling, Yamaha & more
In June 2005, we first saw the Tenori-On, a futuristic music-making device covered in a grid of interactive, lit buttons, designed by the talented interactive artist Toshio Iwai as a prototype for Yamaha. Last week, Yamaha revealed some details about plans to make Iwai’s experimental device into a shipping product. (I missed this in preparations to fly off to Oahu.)
Basic specs: 16×16 grid of buttons, MIDI out, sequencing, and perhaps most surprising, built-in sampling and Motif sound capabilities with internal speakers (plus line-out, naturally). (Notably missing: any mention of network capabilities, which was arguably the most compelling part of the prototype. MIDI out would be notably limited in this respect. Perhaps these features will resurface.)
Anticipated price: £500.
Availability: Unknown, but soon — UK launch first, evidently.
Tenori-On specs [Future Music blog]
Hands-on Tenori-On video [Sonic State]
Tenori-On official site, Toshio Iwai Tenori-On blog, neither of which have been updated as I write this
Much like a car maker releasing a concept car as a factory model, it’s exciting to see this happen. Now there’s only one problem: a lot has happened since June 2005, and light-up buttons you can turn on and off aren’t exactly inaccessible technology. Here’s a quick review of what’s been developing in the world beyond Yamaha since 2005:
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
music table
author(s):
:Rodney Berry, Masami Suzuki, Naoto Hikawa, Mao Makino:
affiliation:
: Advanced Telecomminication Research Institute, Media Information Science
publication:
The Augmented Composer Project: The Music Table [PDF]
website: http://www.mis.atr.co.jp/~mao/ac/about_e.html
description:
The Music Table is an experimental composing system that provides a tactile and visual representation of music that can be easily manipulated to make new musical patterns. It lets people experience their own music as patterns in musical space. Patterns of cards are arranged on a tabletop to become musical phrases. Completed phrases are stored on other cards and combined as multi-layered patterns. Animated characters provide fun visual feedback as you edit and arrange phrases, making abstract musical structures visible and tangible.
Electronic music instrument
The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.
This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spa
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