Marek Michalowski is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His latest project is Beatbots - cute little robots with microphone noses and video camera eyes which can dance to music. In the video on his site, the 'drum' clip is OK, but the clip of the robot dancing to Spoon's 'I turn my camera on' is fantastic. It's all done with Max/MSP, obviously. (Thanks, J-Chot)
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Labels: Instruments Survey, tips
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Noooooooooo! eBay item 380050845372 is a B&K Type 1850 Anorectal ultrasound transducer. Yes, you put it there, connect it to an ultrasound machine, and it produces awesome 3D images. The auction contains the unforgettable lines: "Comes in nice wood box. Came from working environment." Noooooooooo!32 I'm assuming that one of you dear readers has $2,499 to drop on this, and plans to connect it to Max/MSP and create the most terrifying musical instrument in history... (Thanks, Paul)
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Doug writes: "I liked the Kaoss Pad Guitar very much. I like complete control over my digital music and I have built two guitars that do just that. One controls midi parameters, the other uses a usb interface into max/msp." Doug's page is here, with some noise-tastic sound samples here. The Steinberger style guitar on the right is "equipped with two cds cells (light sensors), two pressure sensors, internal feedback loop and four sliders rescued from a salvage yard. It uses MIDI to control parameters to virtually any electronic device.", while the one on the left "Has all electronics built inside of it. It has one infrared sensor, one internal kill switch, 8 external switches and 12 potentiometers to control external electronics via USB interface". Amazing work, Doug!
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Matt Gilbert (who blog-watchers will remember as the creator of the scrollbar scarf) has been thinking about speech synths: "Speech synthesis is usually about converting text to speech, but what if you approached it differently?" He designed a great-looking instrument out of curved wood, string, rubber bands and faders. As you press on the strings, it triggers a Max/MSP patch which emulates a voice. It's can't speak, but gets pretty close to singing. As ever, this makes no sense until you see this slightly freaky demo video [QT](thanks, Roberto)
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Apologies for yet more YouTube stuff, but I'm watching this now, because pretty soon it will have all evaporated.
It's hard not to lust after the fantastically cool and clever Jazzmutant Lemur synth controller. But if you don't have €2190 and an enthusiasm for Max/MSP, Danish developers Livelab's Tablet 2 Midi software could be the next best thing. It's currently beta, but shouldn't cost more than €50. You can pick up a basic tablet PC for £200-£250 on eBay (the Fujitsu Stylistic range is the absolute bottom of the range), and a cheap usb/midi cable. Of course, it will only be mono-touch (the Lemur can take simultaneous movements from ten (or more) fingers. And the Lemur software is the best looking music software I've ever seen. This isn't. And you'll look pretty dorky with a cruddo HP tablet PC. But it's cheap, and until Behringer announce the £150 LM-2000 Multitouch Instrument at NAMM 2006, it's all we've got. (via Matrix Synth)
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Bradon from Paraportable built an installation using a table covered in copper contacts, two copper-bottomed glasses, a Doepfer Drehbank MIDI controller and the inevitable computer running Max/MSP. It uses the CV inputs on the Drehbank - as the cups make circuits in the table, different voltages flow into it, creating different sounds. No video yet, unfortunately, but it should be on the way. Project Page. (Thanks, Shawn)
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Kaden writes: "Serious synthesists use a $30,000 custom spec'd Wiard/Blacet hybrid modular driven by an open source Max/MSP fractalizer algorhythm with a neurofeedback front end to get this EXACT SOUND.
DJ
VIDEO WEEK: Thanks to 'Susan' in
Wiley (from the wonderful Video Thing) writes with news of a Squeezable Interface for music making, created by four guys at the University of British Columbia. "Imagine massaging someone with your hands and fingers. Now imagine massaging a tabletop in the same way. Not quite the same, right?" They're tryining to invent something which is more like a shoulder, less like a touchpad. The system works with a bit of rubber glove material, painted with spots, and stretched in front of a webcam. The webcam captures the dots, and translates them into something which Max/Msp can understand. As always with these graduate projects, the heroically geeky video [21mb divx] explains it better than I can - but there isn't anything in it about specific music uses.
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André writes: "I'm a French reader of your blog and I found him every time so interesting and so astonish." Which is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about MT. He brings news of 'Le Cybersongosse', a fantastically psychedelic music machine for teaching recording and synthesis to schoolchildren. I think it looks like a cross between between Sly Stone's organ, a Buchla 200e and Jörgen Bergfors' incredible DIY modular. This PDF leaflet explains everything. It's a hardware interface to MAX/MSP software running on a G5. If this is what passes for education in French schools, it's no wonder Daft Punk sound like they do.
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I'm always slightly paranoid about being hoaxed on Music Thing. I was very, very dubious about the reality of Godfried Willem Raes, and I'm still not convinced that Belinda Bedekovic is kosher. So I'm pretty sure that Eric Singer's website is a trail for some wacky BBC2 comedy series (perhaps a spin off from Look Around You) The pitch is that Eric is "a Brooklyn-based musician, artist, engineer and programmer with 20 years of arts and multimedia programming" who has created a Max/MSP controller called the Sonic Banana, which he plays in these video clips, while staring deep into your soul. I think the site designers jump the shark when they claim that Eric reached the semi-finals of Junkyard Wars as part of a team called "The Brooklyn Benders". That's just silly. (Thanks Ray!)
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