God bless you, 4/4. Yes, there’s still something about that four-beat, sixteen step bar that gets toes tapping and booties shaking and floors fouring on the… floor. So, when musician and maker Steve Cooley decided he wanted more physical control, he didn’t want some perfectly generic controls, and he didn’t want rows and columns. He wanted sixteen steps and faders alongside. The result is Beatseqr, an -powered hardware controller recently outside San Francisco.
Because it’s just a controller, they’ve built , a Mac software step app that sends OSC, and , a Max/MSP patch, though other options would be viable. The idea is to to make a productive “toolchain.” (I’m still surprised people don’t make more use of tools like Python for these sorts of tasks, not only for cross-platform compatibility, but even for ease. But the principle is the same.)
I like the idea and layout, and if you want one, you can even . (We’re talking extremely limited runs. Right now, there appears to be … one of them.) It’s a cool creation, though it makes me imagine this as a prototype for something else – something with onboard MIDI or possibly even basic onboard sound generation. I think we could be on the verge of a real explosion in new, hand-built devices of that sort. And that could mean layouts like the one found on Roland’s 808 are about to make a very big comeback, re-imagined for a new generation.
And the bottom line: it’s fun for its creator. It’s not only a solution to a problem from an engineering perspective; it represents bridging the gap from wanting something, and realizing exactly that thing you want by making it yourself. As Steve puts it:
The goal wasn’t to create a box that can do all things for all people. It’s a specific tool for a specific purpose. It is a very fun tool for improvising and performing.
If that isn’t the spirit of DIY, I don’t know what is.
Reuters - Seeking information on possible price fixing in the digital music marketplace, the U.S. Department of Justice contacted the legal departments of the major record labels as part of an initial inquiry into Apple, sources tell Billboard.
Octoloopy: a new Dr. Rex allows loading multiple loops, at last. But drum synthesis, sampling in Reason may steal the show.
As I mentioned earlier today, the in the Reason and Record announcements is that you don’t need Record to record; Reason now does sampling. Here’s the full look at what’s new from Propellerhead’s software music workstations.
Highlights:
A new drum designer. Drum synthesis, sampling, REX loops, physical modeling, and effects modules drive a 16-pad drum instrument, so you’re no longer limited to faux 808s or samples – you can make your own drum sounds. This alone could help Reason find its way back into some workflows, I’d guess.
Everywhere there’s a sample, there’s sampling. Propellerhead have told me in the past that they really focus on consistency in engineering; in this case, I think they deliver. Anywhere you now see a sample waveform, in Reason 5 you can click to sample from an input. It’s simple, it’s in a way somewhat obvious – but that’s also why it matters.
Multi-core optimization. Reason and Record are already pretty light on system resources for what they can do; multi-core optimization is good news for newer CPUs.
Neptune pitch adjustment / voice synth: I’m still waiting on how this can be used in ways other than the generic-sounding, AutoTune-style correction and harmonization. Formant shift and other features look like they could be abused for more creative sound deign. Imogen Heap covers, also likely.
Dr. Rex Plus Eight. The “Octo” version of Dr. Rex makes it easier to load multiple REX audio loops, the Props’ format for beat-sliced audio. I’m assuming you’ll be able to use this in conjunction with sampling, but will confirm that. You actually can’t sample into Dr. Rex, unfortunately; it seems to me that the Rex workflow is an area that could use revisiting in Reason, generally. Let me know what you think, particularly if you use this aspect of the tool.
Block pattern sequencing. The sequencer continues to mature with arrangement features.
Other, more subtle features are improved, too, in each. It looks like some focused updates, at least, for current users.
The Record update is free for current users; Reasons upgraders will spend US$129 regardless of version. All other information:
In case you haven’t seen already, Propellerhead is slowly doling out new feature information on its . So far, they’ve announced pitch correction and vocal synthesis in Record (because we really don’t have enough AutoTune-style vocals in the world, apparently), multiple loop support in REX, and new block-style arrangement (a bit reminiscent of Cubase’s implementation to me).
It’s all good stuff, and I look forward to seeing what the final announcement is later today. I’m still hoping that Record gets ReWire host mode, because I can think of some users who would love to drop tools like Ableton Live into Record for final mixing and mastering. (Flying Lotus, Steve, I bet you agree with me!)
But the big news so far is that sampling has come to Reason. What a lot of Reason users I talked to said following the Record release was that they had no desire for a big, SSL-style console, but thought a lightweight sample input was what Reason had lacked all this time. Sure enough, that’s exactly what you get in this release, as seen at top. It makes perfect sense for the Reason workflow, and the implementation appears to be fairly easy to use, complete with a sample editor. Yes, I know – what many of you would like to know is likely why it took four releases to get here. But for Reason die-hards, it could be well worth the wait.
With sampling and the Blocks feature both in Reason, you also aren’t forced to by Record just to get audio input or arrangement.
Our own Matt Ganucheau is currently in Sweden at Props headquarters; I’ve scheduled the announcement for 9am NYC time / 3pm Berlin and Stockholm time / 1pm Greenwich Mean Time… you know. Some time today.
The launch video doesn’t tell you much, unless you’ve been so caught in Reason world that you didn’t realize mics can be used to record things. It does, however, give us a picture of what the world’s strangest, audio geek mod of Unreal Tournament would look like. (Duke Fieldrecordem 3D, anyone? We could totally have a CDM clan.)
And yes, it is absolutely fair for Propellerhead to point out that too many “samples” don’t allow live input. It’s a crime. It’s not a sampler if it only plays things back and doesn’t record. This sort of thing is the cure. Input is a good thing.
Wish you could make any track swing? , grad of the MIT Hyperinstruments Group and c0-founder of , made that happen at San Francisco’s Music Hack Day. The Python code uses the Echo Nest’s sound-processing magic, available to the world via open Web APIs, in order to analyze tracks and re-synthesize them in swing form. The results are — well, somewhat terrifying, though in a cool way.
Paul Lamere of Music Machinery points this our way and on his terrific, sound geek-friendly blog. (The post must have captured people’s imagination, as it’s spread virally online, but I know this is the only site you read — right?)
The swing is definitely of the consistent/mechanical variety, but … well, it does serve to prove that not everything should swing, but anything can.
In-demand indie band The National helped build buzz for the release of their fifth album, High Violet, by taking a page from the pop-up retail playbook (WSJ.com 5.8.10).
For five nights starting the day of their new album’s release, the Brooklyn band and various artsy pals took over a previously vacant storefront on East Fourth Street, redubbing it the High Violet Annex. The 150-person capacity space was transformed into a free-flowing event featuring rotating live music performances, art exhibits and movie screenings.
Details of just what was going down in the space on any given night were purposely kept scarce to maximize the need-to-be-there factor and build up word-of-mouth buzz.
WHAT THIS MEANS TO BUSINESS
In an increasingly digital music world, sometimes it pays to play up the physical. By creating an informal communal happening the National earned maximum street cred with their Millennial fan base and managed to dominate music blogosphere chatter as consumers scrambled to spread word on all the annex’s activities in real time.
Forgive some seemingly train-of-thought connections between topics, but today is what I’d call a Nexus of Goodness while I’m traveling through Berlin.
1. Meetup tonight, starting at 7p. Tonight, if you’re in the Berlin area, we’re doing a little, informal meetup to get to know each other and talk Web tools for music and musical goodness in general. Come, say hi to me and other CDM readers and the SoundCloud developer and user communities, and hear some great music. (See #3) Rooftop plans are off given the chance of rain, but in the safety of a good bar, we’re set.
Short notice, but an utterly informal event for our friends. Meet at –
systM / gallery bar | torstrasse 68 | 10119 Berlin []
– at 7 pm. ; the series sounds great to me, with some ideas we need to import to New York.
2. Web APIs. Whether you’re in Berlin or not, you might want to check out some slides from Henrik Lenberg. Presenting (as I was) to the Barcamp portion of Berlin’s Droidcon, Henrik illustrated why music apps are so important, what the SoundCloud API can provide to those interested in building new music sharing powers into their sites and software, and what this means for the Android platform (and others, as well). Slides are below; there’s something oddly zen-like and enjoyable to me about looking through slides minus the actual presentation, but I think they’ll make sense to you, too.
View more from .
For more on these tools:
Let me know if you have an idea for how they could be used on CDM. And for still more Web musical API goodness, great things happening at:
; more on that soon.
3. Wonderful music. “japanese musician, composer, sound artist and producer Midori Hirano” is playing the event tonight. The space sounds lovely, and I’m excited to hear the music live – sample of this below. Well worth checking her out, whichever part of the world you call home. I’ll report back. Event details:
from on .
We’re lucky to live in a world with lots of digital musical goodness in it; it’s always nice to get out from behind my desk to explore it.
“The hills are alive /
with the sound of browsers”
Ever thought you’d make sounds in a browser, or have new ways of visualizing music playback? It’s happening, with builds of Firefox anyone can download.
Work to make browsers rich with sound synthesis and visualization continues. “Compatibility” isn’t really an advantage yet, because Firefox is the only browser with support, and only in the next version, though that could change in the future. And yes, Flash is capable of some of this, too (though not real 3D), with 90-95% saturation, conservatively, of computers. But if not compatibility, what these experiments do represent is what happens when someone working on a tool (Firefox, in this case) really commits to making sound a priority, and supporting free standards and developer tools (an emerging standard API, WebGL, Processing.js, etc.).
In fact, it’d be great if this occurred everywhere: if you’re making a platform, make sound a priority, and people will do mind-blowing stuff with your platform.
Among the latest fruits:
1. 3D eye candy. Charles Cliffe has a psychedelic visualization of sound playback. The JavaScript nuts are also proceeding to do more things with their language than most would deem possible, even moving DSP calculations to JavaScript code. I remain a bit skeptical there: the question to me isn’t whether JavaScript is “fast enough,” but whether native code is faster or simply the better tool for some jobs. Details below.
2. Patching in a browser – with a Pd clone. Chris McCormick is porting a subset of basic Pd objects to the browser. Now, one side of me wonders whether Pd is the best choice; it’s a somewhat idiosyncratic, if powerful, language for describing sound patching. But on the other hand, I could see this being fantastic in teaching and sharing: put basic patches up in a browser, let people play with them live, then build more advanced tools (with greater hardware access and external support than is possible in a browse) in the traditional Pd tool. As I keep saying, I think there’s far too much partisanship in the discussion (“Browsers for everything!” / “Browsers are useless!”), far too little thinking about how the browser and the desktop tool are more powerful together.
from on .
Check out:
Also — heck, I may try this out in workshops as soon as next week. The browser could build a basic language for music and visuals in Processing and Pd, then robust performance tools could be built in the native tools, with quite a lot of compatibility between the two.
3. Actual standards. The W3C, the standards body behind HTML, has added this discussion to an . (It’s been incubating for some time, but maybe this will help something actually hatch.) Now I’d just like to see these things in Chrome/Chromium, too – I wonder if anyone’s up to a test build, as the standards adoption discussion continues. A number of readers have pointed out that MPEG4 had a specification that included, wholesale evidently, Csound. But this process seems more organic to me – you need actual tools and real-world experiments to evaluate the validity of something, not just standards on paper.
Putting the Awesomeness in Context: An Appeal
A side rant, though: why do Web geeks only care about what happens in the browser? It’s funny to me it seems that outlets like Slashdot jump on stories like browser-based tools, but ignore exactly the same ideas if they’re in a separate app. That’s not a criticism of the Mozilla crew or these brilliant hackers – this is what development is all about, pushing your tools to the limits. But if there isn’t a broader recognition of the value of what you’re doing or why you’re doing it in the first place, there’s a danger that unsustainable tool fetish will miss the point. That is, synthesis in the browser is excellent, but if people don’t understand the value of the synthesis itself, we have a lot more work to do.
Even the tools themselves need a context. It also JavaScript is amazing, but so are tools in Python, Java, Scala, and so on… and some of the enduring power of C still shows here. Browser powers are cool, but the OS is just as important – performance of Firefox would be heavily dependent on support for OS-native, low-latency audio outputs, like JACK on Linux. (Yes, it’s open source, so you can go do it yourself. No, I have no idea how to build Firefox for JACK – maybe a reader does?)
I’ve still yet to see a compelling explanation of what the browser really is, and what’s possible with its interface paradigm. That should be a fascinating discussion, actually, especially with the radical transformation of the browser, particularly as players like Google make it the central aspect of TV-watching or tablet experiences. But the discussion is only really interesting if you don’t start out with the value as a given. For instance, if browsers become a bigger part of what we do, is its simplistic tab metaphor really sufficient? If browsers simply bundle a set of native tools, are there ways “standalone” apps might adopt similar, standards-based approaches?
David Humphrey argues that part of the value here is the , but the Web has had the same empowering influence on sharing, collaboration, and reuse with platforms other than just JavaScript. The browser itself is a largely misunderstood piece of technology, partly because users (understandably) focus on their experience, and doesn’t pay attention to which aspects are delivered by the browser, the OS, or some other piece of code.
Oh, side note: this isn’t about “the cloud.” The cool stuff here is happening on your local hardware, period. That’s what makes it fast, and that’s what makes it work for audio, and your local machine is getting cheaper, cooler, and less power-hungry all the time. New DSP and floating-point capabilities in devices like tablets could make sound more powerful and flexible than ever before – provided people work out how to maximize, not squander, those capabilities.
So, here’s what I’d like to ask: what form will the standards discussion take? And how can these larger discussions – many of which transcend the discussion of any one tool or standard – find a forum?
Behind the Scenes, More Info
While you ponder that (and I’m open to suggestions), here’s more reading for you:
[Dave Humphrey's increasingly-awesome blog]
Previously:
More details on the first example, and how it was built (Minefield is Firefox 3.7):
All runs in real-time with Javascript, WebGL and HTML5 only (uses Minefield Audio build) — no browser plugins are used.
This demo combines the CubicVR 3D engine on WebGL () with the Mozilla HTML5 Audio API (hacks.mozilla.org), Processing.js () and BeatDetektor.js ()
Mozilla Audio API is used to sample the HTML5 audio tag on the page, this information is processed by BeatDetektor.js which produces timing information for the Processing.js real-time canvas textures and the CubicVR.js procedurally generated WebGL scene using them.
The camera is set to free roam a simple chase pattern with a probability to follow a nearby cube (fully automated).
Available online at:
or if you have a Float32Array enabled Minefield build:
you can find more info about audio api-enabled Minefield builds at:
You can also feel free to chat with us about the Audio API via the #audio channel on irc.mozilla.org
Enjoy! And yes, I’ll have to work out a more beginner-friendly, here’s how to do this post.
Reuters - The U.S. Justice Department is making preliminary inquiries into whether Apple Inc unfairly dominates the digital music market, according to three people whose companies have been contacted by regulators.
The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that the U.S. Justice Department is –a business in which Apple’s iTunes has 69 percent of the market and second-place Amazon.com has only eight percent.
The article doesn’t specify much in the way of alleged Apple misdeeds except for threatening to withdraw marketing support for songs if their publishers signed temporary exclusive deals with Amazon. Last time I checked, I wasn’t an antitrust lawyer–is that illegal?
In case you haven’t seen already, Propellerhead is slowly doling out new feature information on its . So far, they’ve announced pitch correction and vocal synthesis in Record (because we really don’t have enough AutoTune-style vocals in the world, apparently), multiple loop support in REX, and new block-style arrangement (a bit reminiscent of Cubase’s implementation to me). 
by Robert van Alstyne
