This isn’t like any Hurdy-Gurdy you’ve seen or heard before.

Derek Holzer’s optoelectronic Tonewheels Hurdy-Gurdy is a combination of mechanical, optical, and electronic elements, part sculpture and part instrument. It recalls vintage mechanical and optical instruments, but with a sound that is decidedly modern and strange.

In the translation, something wonderful happens: this becomes a serious punk instrument, producing surprising, hard-edged sounds. The wheels turn, and the gizmo rocks.

Combining disciplines in this sort of design also means merging different skill sets, so it’s telling that input for the instrument has come from other artists, including friend-of-the-site circuit designer Eric Archer, who has been involved in our Handmade Music series (now MusicMakers). Coming full circle (ahem), I’m thrilled that Mr. Holzer will be organizing MusicMakers at CTM here in Berlin. We have a call out now to participate in the hacklab for that event; I’ll share more details on that event here in the coming days.

I’m a great fan of Derek’s work; there’s plenty to explore below and I hope we cover more soon.

TONEWHEELS HURDY-GURDY(VIELLE A ROUE OPTOÉLECTRONIQUE) from macumbista on Vimeo.

This optoelectronic hurdy-gurdy was commission by the Acces(s) Festival, Pau France in October 2012.
TONEWHEELS is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions, such as the Light-Tone Organ (Edwin Emil Welte, 1936 Germany), the ANS Synthesizer (Evgeny Murzin, 1958 USSR), and the Oramics system (Daphne Oram, 1959 UK). Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry similar to that used in 16 & 35mm motion picture projectors to produce sound.
The TONEWHEELS Hurdy-Gurdy presented at Acces(s) is not an “interactive” artwork in the common sense. While it does not reward the impatient museum visitor with flashing lights and noises at the simple touch of the button, it does invite participation in the process of technological music creation. Although it first appears to be a very traditional instrument known to many folk-music cultures, it functions in a very different way which can only be discovered by playing it.
The artist would like to thank Tobias Traub of Oroborus Customs e.K. and Carlo Crovato for their invaluable assistance in creating this instrument. Circuits designed by Jessica Rylan and Eric Archer are also used within the system.
More information on this project can be found at macumbista.net/?p=3020

This is just one piece out of the Tonewheels project, all working with this medium of physical, optical discs. Here’s a beautiful video from another iteration:

cuT 30[draft]-TONEWHEELS filmed by Eyes_For_Ears from macumbista on Vimeo.

The over-arching project has its own page:
http://umatic.nl/tonewheels.html

The Hurdy-Gurdy is described on Derek’s blog:
http://macumbista.net/?p=3020

And lots of other projects, including his new Solstice Soundboxes, are detailed there, as well:
http://macumbista.net/

Hope some of you get to see Derek and me in person in Berlin next month, and for everyone else, we’ll see you on the Internet.

All photos courtesy the artist.

Those snap-tight blocks have a clear appeal for prototypers. Oh, and they’re fun to play with. Photo (CC-BY) slackpics.

Snap, snap… LEGO bricks are at some point irresistible for making a synth housing. Our friends at DE:BUG point to a LEGO-built, circuit-bending synth. And the imaginary toy world of LEGO find their way into this instrumental housing. Creator freeformdelusion writes:

ClearTone Synth with LFO inside a nice lego project box with a house, dog, flowers, LEDs and a female figure drinking away to the synths excellent sound!

Cheers to that, yes!

But, with LEGO bricks here and there for the holidays (you know, for kids), I wondered: who out there is prototyping synths and the like with LEGO? Found useful applications for it? (Or, for that matter, for Mindstorms?) We’ve covered a few of these projects over the years, but never had a comprehensive discussion about what people are using. LEGO’s patents have expired, and the company has failed to protect the block design via other legal means, but that also means making compatible blocks with specific applications is possible, too. So, let us know how you’re using this toy – or if you prefer something else, and leave this to the kids.

(One serious case in point: Ableton used LEGO when prototyping their upcoming Push controller early on. I hope to get more details on that process soon.)

Bored by buttons and pads? Want something a bit more organice? BeetBox turns root vegetables into interactive percussion instruments, finally answering the question of “how can I work musical controllers into my five a day?”

BeetBox is a simple instrument that allows users to play drum beats by touching actual beets. It is powered by a Raspberry Pi with a capacitive touch sensor and an audio amplifier in a handmade wooden enclosure.

The project is the work of Scott Garner:
Interactive > BeetBox

Okay, maybe it’s not the most practical idea ever, but it is good fun. And that poplar case and all-in-one design are especially nice. BeetBox also illustrates just how cool something like the Raspberry Pi is. By virtue of its low price and small size, the Pi proves the days of attaching a project like this to your MacBook laptop are finally over. It also benefits from a very handy capacitive touch breakout board available for just $10 from Sparkfun.

BeetBox Demo from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

I’m hoping to talk more about the Pi soon; at long last, my order from the summer showed up in Berlin and I’ll be back to it post-holidays. (May have to give that Sparkfun board a try, as well!)

And while the beets may seem silly at first, there is something happening with the exploration of new materials. Hardware interaction need not always happen through petroleum-based plastics. openMaterials co-founder Catarina Mota, whose class inspired the project here, is one of the leading advocates not only of open source hardware but thinking about smart materials. Music and sound are natural media by which to test those materials – as I’m fond of saying, from my heavily-biased point of view, the connection of music to real-time perception, expression, and culture make it essential to understanding how technology will work with people.

This piece served both as a project for Catarina Mota‘s Tech Crafts, for which I was experimenting with edible circuits, and as a final for Peter Menderson’s Materials and Building Strategies, for which I wanted to craft a nice hardwood enclosure. Many thanks to both instructors for excellent classes.

Built with Python and Raspberry Pi. Mmmm… beets, raspberries, Pi, this is all sounding delicious. Keep those creations coming. Previously, our favorite Raspberry Pi creation used the device’s small size to run an entire synth inside a controller:

The Awesome New KORG Not From KORG: Raspberry-Pi Plus MS-20 Controller, Making Dreams Reality

And…

Raspberry Pi, Your Next $25 Computer Synth? First Hacks Appearing

The year we made contact: the first-ever MIDI connection, recorded for posterity. Think about that the next time you plug in a MIDI cable. Photo evidence now proves that the first public MIDI connection was made between a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 and a Roland Jupiter 6. Now, get those instruments and an Instagram filter and recreate this shot, if you like. Courtesy Dave Smith (personal collection).

It’s been almost 30 years since MIDI was first demonstrated at the winter NAMM show, 1983. Marking the anniversary, The Recording Academy is giving a coveted Technical Grammy to the two people most associated with its creation – so-called “father of MIDI” Dave Smith (then founder of Sequential Circuits, now Dave Smith Instruments) and Roland founder and engineer Ikutaro Kakehashi. Actually, it’s a bit interesting to me that Mr. Kakehashi is being left out of some of the news; it was the fact that MIDI could connect between two pieces of gear that demonstrated its value. In other words, it takes two to tango.

We’ll be looking more in depth at the history of MIDI for the anniversary. In the meantime, back to that connection: Dave is at last able to clear up the mystery of what gear make the historic first public link.

Dave deserves credit for shipping the first-ever MIDI-equipped synth, the Prophet 600. In fact, BBC recently marked the anniversary of MIDI with the first shipments of that hardware in December 1982.

Most people, however, including the MIDI Manufacturing Association, mark the connection as the seminal moment. The date is undisputed: it was a public demo at NAMM 1983 that first introduced MIDI to the world. And the Dave Smith side of the equation – then branded Sequential Circuits – was the Prophet 600.

It’s the Roland side that produced some confusion. Called upon to remember back across the decades, various reports described the first link as connecting the Prophet 600 to Roland’s JX-3P. That synth does deserve credit as the first Roland synth to ship at NAMM. But Dave digs up a photo that finally proves it wasn’t a JX-3P at NAMM; it was a Jupiter 6.

It’s a good thing this news is coming out now: there’s still time to rustle up a Prophet 600 and JP-6 and recreate that first demo.

More on the announcement:
IKUTARO KAKEHASHI & DAVE SMITH AND ROYER LABS TO RECEIVE TECHNICAL GRAMMY® AWARD [Grammy.org]
Dave to Receive Technical GRAMMY® Award [Dave Smith Instruments]

Got questions for Dave before CDM talks to him? Or were you at NAMM in 1983? Let us know.

Another NAMM ’83 shot, courtesy Dave Smith Instruments. From left, John Bowen (in the red jacket), Roland’s Jim Mothersbaugh, Dave Smith.

“Look, [darling significant other], it’ll even be totally at home in our modern decor!” Photos courtesy the artist.

The desire to be a little different in a band might drive someone to choose a custom guitar, or maybe, you know, change their hair.

For some, it drives them to build a giant flying saucer they can play like an instrument by waving their hands. No, MIDI controller, don’t destroy Earth. Klaatu barada nikto. That’s the case with Helsinki-born artist Tommi Koskinen, now doing this as part of an MA thesis in the Media Lab of Aalto University.

Another strange gestural controller? Yes. But this flying saucer might just land a bit closer to home. This is just the first prototype; eventually, the developer promises a kit and open source code. And the whole thing can easily work with software and hardware – here, he’s using Ableton Live (though anything that receives MIDI data will work).

So, what is this thing?

• Five ultrasonic sensors – that is, distance sensors based on ultrasonic echo location (a typical range-finding sensor)
• Send MIDI notes, using gestures to send notes with controller data. (This is a bit like the Theremin arrangement – and like any touch-less arrangement lacks tangible feedback – but with more axes of data. And unlike the Theremin, it’s tuned to scaled octaves so you send fixed notes, as on a piano.)
• Send controller data.
• LEDs for feedback on modes.
• MIDI out. USB class compliance (for USB MIDI).
• Built around Arduino Mega 2560

Planned for the future:

Presets that you can store and recall
Sustain pedal support
MIDI IN for arpeggio clock sync
Arpeggiator patterns
LFO CC curves
Quick switching of presets by sending MIDI commands to the device

In the meantime, yes, Tommi does play this in his two bands:
http://kitkaliitto.com/
http://wearephantom.com/

Here’s a live performance from the latter, Phantom:

Basso Live: Phantom 16.11.2012 from Basso Media on Vimeo.

Techcrunch has a nice write-up, beyond our normal solar system of music tech planets:
Control Music Synthesizers With Gestures Through This Arduino-Based Saucer Called ‘The UFO’

And yes, UFO stands for Ultrasonic Frequency cOntroller.

Via Benjamin at DE:BUG (Deutsch).

More info, some cute concept sketches, and sign-up for a mailing list to be notified when the kit is ready:
http://theufocontroller.com/

A wintry afternoon sometimes calls for putting the work on hold and spending some time jamming. So, this week (in approximate celebration of Sinterklaas), I headed around the corner to the offices of Koma Elektronik, the boutique all-analog gear producer. Here’s a few minutes of combining digital with analog, each with its own timbres and applications. In the digital corner: the iOS step sequencer Phaedra (watch for an update on that soon), and our open source MeeBlip SE synth. On the analog side: Koma’s BD101 delay/gate and FT201 filter/sequencer. In the digital world, we get the flexibility of MIDI sequencing and some crunchy sounds; in the analog domain, we have patchable CV routing and my personal favorite, the far-out delay effects on the BD101. (Check out about halfway through.)

Signal flow:
iPad running Phaedra; see our behind-the-scenes story
MeeBlip SE [Fall 2012 Limited Edition] (that’s mostly MeeBlip sound you hear initially)
Koma Elektronik FT-201
Koma Elektronik BD-101

It’s just a quick hands-on jam (thanks to Koma’s Wouter shooting on a borrowed Nokia), but represents some of the sonic range. And it’s nice to have these sorts of relationships with gear makers; talking to Koma (among many other hardware and software creators) is always a learning experience.

More images, just because:

There comes a time in every personal studio where more effort is spent

Sometimes, an idea is so beautifully elegant, it just seems obvious.

That’s the feeling I get from Koma’s newest prototype. The Kontrol Surface is a touch controller device. In its Light version, it’s an X/Y touch controller with CV output. The Pro version adds MIDI so it works with both analog and digital gear, and ups the ante to three-axis X/Y/Z capacitive touch.

Folks with MIDI gear will wait for the Pro version, but the Light edition already appears like it’ll become a must-have for analog/modular owners. Specs:

• 1 x CV output
• 1 x inverted CV output
• Manual gate output (so you can use it as a trigger)
• Hold function, per-channel, including a momentary hold
• …and you can clock the momentary hold. (Oh, yeah – so you can do rhythmic effects with the hold feature. It’s subtle how they’re doing this; see their post for a full explanation of what they’re planning.)

Watch a first video demo:

We’ve seen the occasional X/Y touch controller, but typically MIDI-only – KORG’s KAOSS Pad being the only one I can think of off-hand that got wide distribution. Maybe you don’t care about such a thing in the Age of the iPad, but for hardware lovers, it seems perfect – jack in CV to some analog goodies, play.

You’ll see the final versions, they say, at NAMM 2013 at the end of January in California, with shipping end of Q1 2013.

More:
New development: Kontrol Surface CV Controller! [Koma Elektronik]

Endeavour’s evo keyboard closely resembles a conventional music keyboard controller. But its piano-style keys and high-performance internals are custom engineered from the ground up for additional expression. High-speed connections mean lower latency than is possible with MIDI, and touch- and pressure-sensitive keys allow additional ways of adding to a performance, all in an aluminum case hand-built in Germany.

I was impressed playing the keyboard at Musikmesse earlier this year, but cost put this innovative instrument out of reach of many would-be experimenters. Now, as the product matures, pricing is coming down to Earth. A 24-key version – perhaps just fine, given this novel input approach – starts at a reasonable 499 € (VAT included). That’s not an impulse buy, but it’s less than many mass-manufactured keyboards, and this is something quite different.

introducing the evo from endeavour on Vimeo.

We get to take a look at the beautiful, new half-sized keyboard in the gallery here. It’s otherwise got the same guts as the original 48-key model, which is now at 999 €. Endeavour tells CDM they’re still working on hardware research, so we might expect new things in the future; consider this the beginning.

Half the width now also means half the price of the bigger sibling, opening up the hand-built Endeavour to keyboard experimentation. All images courtesy Endeavour.

In the meantime, they’ve significantly overhauled the software that comes with the evo. If you really want, you can take all that low-latency, high-resolution data and then dump it as MIDI on a conventional soft synth. But to fully exploit all the additional expression data, you need custom software. Endeavour has worked with Max/MSP to make that happen. (See videos of the “dump it to MIDI” and “use a custom synth” approaches, below.)

Plug and play an Ethernet cable, and you can now work directly with the evo on Mac or Windows. (Previously, software was Mac-only; most of the software is out for Windows now and the MIDI support and standalone synth will be available within two months, says Endeavour.) Endeavour’s own evosizer synth works standalone, via ReWire, or in Ableton Live via Max for Live. If you do use Max/MSP standalone or Max for Live, you can also work directly with the externals in your own patches. The software is free and open source. (I’d love to see a Pd port, for embedded and Linux applications. Just need to get a talented Pd coder one of those evo keyboards, I think.)

If you’re interested in learning more about the technology here, there’s now an overhauled website to explore. It’s an interesting read even if you really aren’t in the market: there’s an extraordinary amount of engineering behind this design. (Okay, yes, the phrase “over-engineered” did come to mind – but for an instrument, that can lead to some fascinating places. Over-engineered in a good way.)

http://www.endeavour.de/

evo and Max/MSP:

the evo – Native Max/MSP Support from endeavour on Vimeo.

And more conventional MIDI:

Standard MIDI Synthesizers and The evo from endeavour on Vimeo.

Endeavour’s evo keyboard closely resembles a conventional music keyboard controller. But its piano-style keys and high-performance internals are custom engineered from the ground up for additional expression. High-speed connections mean lower latency than is possible with MIDI, and touch- and pressure-sensitive keys allow additional ways of adding to a performance, all in an aluminum case hand-built in Germany.

I was impressed playing the keyboard at Musikmesse earlier this year, but cost put this innovative instrument out of reach of many would-be experimenters. Now, as the product matures, pricing is coming down to Earth. A 24-key version – perhaps just fine, given this novel input approach – starts at a reasonable 499 € (VAT included). That’s not an impulse buy, but it’s less than many mass-manufactured keyboards, and this is something quite different.

introducing the evo from endeavour on Vimeo.

We get to take a look at the beautiful, new half-sized keyboard in the gallery here. It’s otherwise got the same guts as the original 48-key model, which is now at 999 €. Endeavour tells CDM they’re still working on hardware research, so we might expect new things in the future; consider this the beginning.

Half the width now also means half the price of the bigger sibling, opening up the hand-built Endeavour to keyboard experimentation. All images courtesy Endeavour.

In the meantime, they’ve significantly overhauled the software that comes with the evo. If you really want, you can take all that low-latency, high-resolution data and then dump it as MIDI on a conventional soft synth. But to fully exploit all the additional expression data, you need custom software. Endeavour has worked with Max/MSP to make that happen. (See videos of the “dump it to MIDI” and “use a custom synth” approaches, below.)

Plug and play an Ethernet cable, and you can now work directly with the evo on Mac or Windows. (Previously, software was Mac-only; most of the software is out for Windows now and the MIDI support and standalone synth will be available within two months, says Endeavour.) Endeavour’s own evosizer synth works standalone, via ReWire, or in Ableton Live via Max for Live. If you do use Max/MSP standalone or Max for Live, you can also work directly with the externals in your own patches. The software is free and open source. (I’d love to see a Pd port, for embedded and Linux applications. Just need to get a talented Pd coder one of those evo keyboards, I think.)

If you’re interested in learning more about the technology here, there’s now an overhauled website to explore. It’s an interesting read even if you really aren’t in the market: there’s an extraordinary amount of engineering behind this design. (Okay, yes, the phrase “over-engineered” did come to mind – but for an instrument, that can lead to some fascinating places. Over-engineered in a good way.)

http://www.endeavour.de/

evo and Max/MSP:

the evo – Native Max/MSP Support from endeavour on Vimeo.

And more conventional MIDI:

Standard MIDI Synthesizers and The evo from endeavour on Vimeo.

Finally: a boring controller. No, that’s a good thing.

We’re in an amazing era of controller hardware, witnessing an explosion of kit with fancy features, tight integration with software, and slick oceans of colored LEDs packed with sophisticated sensors.

Only… wait a minute.

Sometimes, you want something fairly generic that maps easily to a variety of software, not just the new Abletive Tracktletron DJ Studio Pro Scratchly Edition. Something with some basic faders and knobs and things, not something you play by wiggling your nose and waving the thing around as you fling your hair.

To put it another way, I know plenty of people who still swear by Evolution’s UC-33e controller, and neither the controller nor the company still exists. We ought to have a UC-33e for 2012, right?

Meet the Alias 8. It’s just a nice, compact controller layout. It looks like every controller, in a good way: it has a generic layout you could map to your favorite soft synth organ or a lighting rig or an Ableton set or a granular patch you just made or … you get the idea. In fact, like the Evolution, it has a master fader (or vertical crossfader) on the right, and pairs knobs with faders.

True to Livid’s personality, you do still get some nice colored pads, but in a 2×8 matrix that’d work perfectly for arming tracks, or as a step sequencer, or… the list goes on.

It’s boring, like a screwdriver is boring. It almost looks like integrated hardware, rather than a controller. You start looking at the pads and faders and knobs, and seeing mappings. That could be $299 well spent – because, like the UC-33e, you could be using it ten years from now.

And since it’s class-compliant, it’ll work with your Mac, Windows, Linux, iPad, Raspberry Pi, or something that hasn’t been invented yet.

I hope to get one to test from Texas soon.

Specs:

8 – 30mm faders
1 – 60mm fader
16 – rotary potentiometers
16 – RGB LED backlit buttons
1- push-button detented encoder
2 analog expansion ports for Livid XPC and DIY controllers (up to 16 additional analog controls)
15 banks of control on separate MIDI channels
Character display
USB powered class-compliant MIDI
Crafted by hand in Austin, TX USA

Dimensions: 7.5” x 11” x 1 ⅝” (including knobs and feet) (19 cm x 28 cm x 4.1 cm)

http://www.lividinstruments.com/hardware_alias8.php