Microsoft reacTable?

I just heard on the radio that Microsoft is working on a table-based multi-touch interface. I wonder what this will do to the reacTable DIY crowd? Back w/ more soon....

(a google later) ok, it called "Microsoft Surface" - here's an article:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132352/article.html



Looks an awful lot like an FTIR setup to me.

monome goes for crazy dough on ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180121796848
They stopped production less than a month ago and already the street value has doubled!

another phineus video

phineus + monome 40h + reaktor 5 on youtube

phineus plays Reaktor 5 w/ the monome 40h & a patch written by kid sputnik

monome + reaktor = mp3s

This time using kid sputnik's mlr-like live rig w/ Reaktor 5 and the 40h:
dancethismfkrdown 6:26
slinkysideout 4:46

phineus goes webtronic

I set up a website and a Last.fm page for Phineus
Phineus web
Phineus on Last.fm

monome 100h

monome 100h next to a 40h and some parts

More images from Maker Faire 2007 here

multi-touch + sound + haptics = groupthink?

A couple of things occurred to me during Jeff Han's multi-touch interface demo (see it here).

1) Add sound. The part where he's zooming in and out of a cloud of dots and talking about data modeling, I wanted to hear whooshing sounds and changes in background hum to give me additional information about my realitve location within the 3D space.

2) Use sound to simulate haptic (touch) information. Can you fool the brain with sound? As you drag your fingers around on a virtual surface, if you represent changes in surface texture as changes in sound, do you kind of feel it? Not to mention efficiency. You can type really fast if you can touch-type, not having to look at the screen to see where your hands are. Wht if instead you could "hear/feel" where they are? Keep the eyes free for detail work.

3) What about eye-tracking, too? Hands can do one thing while eyes look somewhere else.

4) Multi-user. Multiple people could look at a screen and create something: images and music based on where they're each looking, highlight certain data, meanwhile you can track what each is doing with their hands. If you had enough processing power (how about multiple automonomous CPUs sending synched OSC info to a server which runs the display) you could track a whole crowd's responses in real-time. Latency would be kind of okay because it would make people focus on one spot until the changes began - might be less chaotic, too.

Phineus - some mp3s

Giant Hand was made with Reaktor 5. The ambient tracks use granular synths, each song is one short waveform chopped and replayed through filters. The rhythmic stuff is done by flipping multiple samples.

Giant Hand
tribelet 3:28
ululatron 4:10
badhaircut 0:54
crackless 1:28
ensnared 1:40
harmonical 1:44
phoenid 2:18
telemone 2:44
tribelet rmx 3:01 (synth o-dub)
jesusizeme 5:03

Mon Ami was made w/ the 40h, Max/MSP & patches from monome.org.

Mon Ami
One 5:04
Two 6:54
Three 5:25

To make lunch and lunchwiser I took brief samples of sounds around my house including fans, appliances, and squeaky floorboards, dumped them into flip, and played them back via the monome:

lunch 1:42
lunchwiser 1:17

tangible musical interfaces

This page is the source of much knowledge:
mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?related
It's got links to videos and explanations and people behind a wide variety of tangible music interfaces e.g. soundwidgets of the highest order.


from http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?related

Tehn plays monome 100h prototype

Here's Tehn (Brian Crabtree), the developer of the 8x8 monome 40h, doing a performance on the prototype 16x16 100h:

Scratch - Programming for the People

http://scratch.mit.edu/

monome logic kit?

I sure hope they make these:



Potential monome logic kit in the works!

Musical Plaza w/ tangibles

image from here

How about a plaza, with each bench, bush, etc a tangible object on a huge reacTable? Add in some humans, dogs, pigeons, and track them as tangibles, too, based on blob shape. An aerial view of a park becomes a sound canvas. Now pipe the sounds in over xmitters in the park, sending to optional headsets. Let people make their own soundtrack - quiet and reflective for reading a paper on a bench as runners zizz by. Picking up more as the commute thickens. Quiet at night, expcept in cases of sudden movement.

DIY monome - big buttons

So Sparkfun sells these button pads like the monome has, but bigger. Plus they have room for 3-color LEDs. Make or buy a monome logic board or two (schematic is on their site - they MIGHT be selling built logic boards and kits soon) and buy some Sparkfun pads, PCBs, 3-color LEDs and make your own tri-cube-omial or something.

SynthEdit - classic samplers modeled - free

SynthEdit is a Modular Synthesiser for Windows XP and Vista. With SynthEdit you can design your own Synth from the ground up. Drag and drop modular components, connect them with virtual "patch cords". - www.synthedit.com

I've been meaning to post about SynthEdit, because it is so cool, and because it's free. I loaded this onto my computer and it worked immediately with my basic soundcard (Echo Mia MIDI). Immediately I was making sounds with a Moog-like synth and then an ARP 2600. I got to see the layout and get an idea of what these might sound like in real life. Definitely cured me of the expensive urge to buy vintage mono-synths for their unique sounds, esp since most of those are out of tune all the time due to neglect. Not that an out of tune synth is necessarily a bad thing. ANYhoo, it's very cool and if you're looking for free synth sounds well there you go. As far as I know SynthEdit doesn't speak OSC, yet.

Björktable

Apparently Björk is going to use the reacTable in her upcoming shows...

Musical Pavillion - Dresden

Here's a video of a dancer inside a 3D interactive space in Dresden. The music is generated using Reaktor with input from a video image tracking tool called EyeCon.



More info: http://pavilion.qaw.se/

Jeff Han FTIR demo

Here's a cool video of Jeff Han demo-ing his multi-touch FTIR interface:

Grampa Max

In the mid-90's I met a guy named Tim Anderson who had built a painting machine and was controlling it with Max running on a Mac. (check out Tim's recent homemade wooden hydrofoil video - and his Robot Art video). He explained that Max was was a new kind of intelligent music software for sending MIDI, but it could control anything, really. Soon my plans for the Sound Square included the idea of sending the gesture output thru Max for processing before playing it audibly.

Around the same time I read a book called Interactive Music Systems, written by a guy named Robert Rowe (then at MIT, now at NYU Steinhardt School). He had built (and includes on CD) a Max patch called Cypher, which consisted of two horizontal rows of objects. The top row were "listener" objects, and the bottom row were "player" objects; you programmed them then patched them together... just like all this "new" stuff where you build synths and stuff inside a GUI. (I recently tried to read the disc but my XP machine spit it out and my Mac Powerbook wasn't quite sure what to with it, either.)

Max/MSP:


So really Max is the Grand-Mac-Daddy of them all. Somewhere along the way the product became commercial and is now sold and updated by Cycling 74 along with some other cool stuff like Jitter (for video). Interesting recent news is that Abelton, makers of Live, and Cycling 74 are getting hitched in some sort of merger. A great feature of Max is the huge community and tons of existing patches, and Live has a rabid following... Could mean great things for both products or the beginning of the War for Middle Earth.

I've been running through the tutorials that come with the 30-day eval copy and they are short and easy to get through, and definitely get you past the "duh" factor and up and running.

I'm only up to chapter 8 so far - there are a total of 53 chapters... yawn.