randy's Recent Posts
Since making my "Multitouch Prototype 2", I have been waiting for a really good name to come along for these devices. Waiting, because, after naming a few musical projects etc. over the years, I've found that thinking really hard about a name doesn't do much good. What's needed is time...
...because you can't plan those moments when things crystallize and sometimes you just have to get out there and do seemingly unrelated things to have them.
At NIME this year, I had the pleasure of hearing a panel of electronic music luminaries agree that pressure-sensitive multi-touch surfaces are an idea whose time has come. So it's a good time to be coming out with our product. But it also means other people will be coming out with similar things.
I think that there's room for multiple products in this market, especially if they are differentiated by technology, price point and aesthetics. One condition that seems required to sustain all of our projects in the long run, though, is a growing pool of people writing music and musical applications for them. At NIME 2009, David Wessel pointed out the brutal truth that "there are a lot of controllers by the side of the road." Most new musical inventions get used mainly by their creators for a while, after which the creators move on to the next thing. This makes sense, because inventors like to invent. But in order for a new instrument to survive, it needs to get into the hands of a critical mass of players and composers. Composers need players. Players need music to play. Sound designers need a variety of rich mappings to start from. All of this activity is mutually sustaining and obviously, the more instruments out there, the better.
So let's recognize that at least a few of us will be making different kinds of the same thing. The only multi-touch, pressure sensitive controller currently available is Haken Audio's Continuum Fingerboard. Most compositions or sound-making tools written for Fingerboard could be played on our Soundplane A and vice versa. And coming soon will be more and probably cheaper controllers based on projects like the IMPAD designed at NYU. Assuming they're big enough, and have a high enough sampling rate, all these instruments can be used to play the same pieces of music.
At the time of the piano's rise in popularity in the late 1700's, a few manufacturers were competing to improve the action. The resulting improvements led to important pieces, particularly Mozart's Piano Concertos. And of course, these pieces led to more pianos being made.
Touch-sensitive surfaces may well become the piano for the 21st century. Because the computer can map flexibly between gesture and resulting sound, mappings can be designed that work for players at different skill levels from beginner to expert. A huge variety of applications are possible, from Guitar Hero-like games to instruments for the virtuoso to sound design tools for film. No one instrument maker is going to write all of these applications. So there's a potential opportunity here for developers, but to be rewarding, the instruments have to be out there.
So: "soundplane." Generic and descriptive. It's made for making sounds (otherwise we wouldn't need a kilohertz sample rate) and it's flat. I hope that more applications and compositions than we can provide are written for soundplanes, and yes, that other people make soundplanes. Really. Our first one, taking a cue from Steinway, is the Madrona Soundplane (model) A. Following our DIY instructions, you can make your own Soundplane 8x8. And so on.
Probably this modest proposal, my attempt to name this class of instruments, will fail. These things arise organically, and are settled on after a long time. Christofori wouldn't have predicted that his gravicembalo col piano e forte" would become simply the "piano." But I'll be open to changes, and actively supporting the community that will eventually lead to more instruments, more pieces, and more people playing music.
NIME 2009 on the CMU campus had a really high good-to-sucks ratio. Here's my really brief report on the highlights...
Unlike, say, NYU, the environment in Pittsburgh did not have a lot of culinary or cultural distractions nearby. This was both a bad thing and good. Bad, because after finishing making slides at 02:30, being waken up repeatedly by fire alarms at 04:30 and managing to get about thirty minutes more of decent sleep before getting up an hour before my presentation, I found out there was no source of coffee nearby and had to take a 20 minute speed walk to the local coffeeshop. Good, because every single presenter and performer who felt like tying one on after the last night of the conference ended up at the same joint, the fun and sinister Panther Hollow Inn, pictured above.
David Wessel's performance on his Slabs controllers was one of the highlights of the conference. The Slabs are very sensitive multitouch controlers made from multiple touchpads, custom sensing electronics, and a custom-designed FPGA-based brain that provides 96 streams of control data as audio signals. Read the paper. See the video.
Like the Soundplane, The Slabs are a refined multitouch surface—I much admire the obsessive pursuit of control intimacy evident in the work. Their construction as a multiplicity of discrete elements lends itself to really different performance mappings compared to a homogeneous surface. On the Slabs, you are always sure which element you are on, so they seem to lend themselves better to mapping a collection of different voices predictably. Only one finger at a time can be detected on an individual slab, though. So the Soundboard seems better for mapping distinct touches to voices of a synthesizer that can be moved freely across the surface.
On Thursday morning we were treated to a teleconference with three prominent personalities of electronic music: Roger Linn, John Chowning and Max Mathews. Max ate his breakfast wherever he was and interjected just a few words, but really good ones. Linn said that the most crucial area for expressive control lies "in between silence and whispers." This is welcome support for my opinion that signal-based control is going to be a theme of the next generation of interfaces. Everyone seemed to agree that we are seeing the beginning of a renaissance for electronic music, and furthermore that pressure-sensitive multitouch controllers will be important. This gives me comfort that if I'm wrong about this whole thing, at least I'm wrong in the company of some really smart people.
A lot of people came by my demo table and played with the Soundplane 8x8 DIY project. I saw consistent surprise at the sensitivity to touch of what is, electronically speaking, a pretty primitive device. I know, I was surprised too. At least three people seemed quite serious about making their own. I hope they do, and that I can be of help.
The sheets of reinforced, flexible veneer arrived the Monday before the conference, so I managed to get the look-and-feel prototype of the Soundboard together just in time. I'm glad I took the thing out for a show-and-tell at this stage. People really seemed to like the feel of the surface, and on the "what goes on the blank space" question, "nothing" outvoted the next most popular suggestion, "a knob," by 3 to 1.
I seem to be establishing a pattern of going to every other NIME, having hit 2005 and 2007 and 2009. So maybe I'll see you in 2011 in Oslo.