August222009
i think i based our new web site color scheme on this shirt
March312009
Stanford iPhone orchestra
Check this out. Much better than the MGMT cover.
Pretty Amazing
March82009
iPhones as Instruments
This is exactly what we’re looking for…
March62009
performance interface sketches
March42009
Dr. Robert Moog, inventor, on keyboard alternatives
excerpted from music theory for dummies
I think sound generation is a mature technology.
Between analog and digital technology, you can
make just about any sound you can imagine
cheaply and easily. What we don’t have cheap
and easily yet are really good, new player interfaces
— we’re still working with the same old
electronic organ principle. The same keyboards
that were put into electronic organs 60 years
ago, 50 years ago, are being used today, and
there is very little difference. They feel the
same, and, in fact, the organ keyboards that
were developed in 1935 feel better than most
keyboards that are designed today. A keyboard
is just the starting point, especially if you think
of all the ways that people like to move and push
and touch when they’re playing music. I think
the field is wide open for developing really
sophisticated, really human-oriented control
devices.
But the problem for instrument designers is that
people don’t want to give up their keyboards.
Millions of people know how to play the piano.
It’s what there is when you’re learning how to
play music. If somebody were to start off at the
age of 30 or 40 or 50 and learn a new control
device, they’d have to practice as much as they
did when they were learning how to play the
piano when they were kids. You know what it’s
similar to — it’s similar to the Dvorak keyboard,
where you can type 20 or 30 percent faster than
on a regular Qwerty keyboard. Anybody can do
it, but very few people do it because it takes a
certain amount of learning when you’re an
adult. Your mother’s not going to teach you how
to type on a Dvorak keyboard. Most adults
already have plenty to do, and they’re not going
to relearn how to type. So new alternate controllers
are like that, too. Designing them is
going to be half the job — the other half is going
to be musicians developing technique on those
new interfaces. It’s going to take decades.
February272009
This picture shows one idea for a representation of a loop. On the top left, there is a circular ring of segments with a hi-hat image inside of it. The image inside the ring represents the kind of sound you are working with, in this case, the hi-hat. Clicking on the ring expands it into the loop builder, which could use Jon’s idea as the interface (see previous post). Also, you could add loops together (shown in the middle of this picture) to form larger (i.e., longer in time) loops.
8AM
A second go at a multiplayer mechanism. On the top left, you see four iPhones in the group. On each iPhone, there is a “GroupLoops drop zone” into which you can drag the loop you have finished building. When you have done so, it appears on everyone else’s “drop zone,” and it gets added to the song and played back in real time. Each member can freely drop their loops into the zone, and also remove anybody else’s loops - whether they be melody, rhythm, or harmony loops.
8AM
The first go at a multiplayer interface. Each side of the “multiplayer mode” screen has arrows pointing to a group member. After finalizing your contribution to the song in the form of a loop, you can flick it toward the direction of an arrow to send to it to the other team member. The receiving group member would see a loop appear (slide in) to his / her workspace.
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