“Multi-touched” – A workshop on multi-touch interfaces presented by Fashionbuddha Studio, Randy Jones, and Let’s Go Outside
Date // Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Hours // 7:30pm – 8:30pm
Location // Seattle Art Museum – Langdon and Anne Simons Board Room
Admission // Free, open to the public
Multi-touch technology is rapidly evolving into something useful, creative, and affordable. "Multi-touched", presented by Fashionbuddha Studio, Randy Jones, and Let's Go Outside at this year's Decibel Festival, sets out to showcase the latest and greatest of the multi-touch world with an emphasis on the very real possibilities of adding these amazing interfaces to the performing electronic musician's arsenal.
Fashionbuddha's Creative Director, Todd Greco, will show how the studio built their own multi-touch display for under a grand and all the creative things you can use it for once its running. He'll also provide a brief overview of multi-touch technology and point the audience towards the resources they need to start making their own devices.
Orac Records label head Randy Jones will talk a little about his research into control of physical modeling and bring his prototype multi-touch controller, featured on Gizmodo, Make Blog and Create Digital Music, for a hands-on demonstration. He'll also give a preview of some of the upcoming hardware from Madrona Labs.
Stephen Schieberl, better known as Soma Records' artist Let's Go Outside, will be demonstrating his DIY multi-touch MIDI controller. He’ll be explaining the advantages of using a multi-touch screen for music performance and inform participants how to design their own controller with little or no prior programming experience using his Flash-based application, as well as give people the opportunity to try it out themselves.
Todd Greco (Fashionbuddha Studio)
Fashionbuddha Studio creates world-class animations and interactive experiences. Fashionbuddha has a unique studio setup that pairs artists, musicians, animators and programmers to develop award-winning projects for clients and the creative community. Fashionbuddha Studio is featured in Communication Arts Design and Interactive Annuals, How Magazine, and won Best of Show at the 2009 Webvisionary Awards.
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Randy Jones (Madrona Labs / Orac Records)
Randy Jones is a composer and designer whose work explores new systems for audiovisual expression. He has performed and lectured at festivals including Cimatics (Brussels), MUTEK (Montreal), the Festival de Música Electroacústica (Havana), Decibel (Seattle), and New Forms (Vancouver). He was a co-developer of Jitter, the video and 3D graphics processing software published by Cycling ‘74. At his new company, Madrona Labs, Randy and his colleagues are on a mission to design and build electronic instruments that are as expressive as acoustic ones.
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Let's Go Outside (Soma Quality Recordings / Slant Records)
Stephen Schieberl was born in Milan, Italy and is now living in Portland, Oregon. He took the moniker "Let’s Go Outside" as a tribute to his fascination with outdoor activities, most notably parachuting. Let’s Go Outside started DJing and producing electronic music as a teenager in the early nineties in Southern California. He was picked up by Glasgow-based Soma Quality Recordings in 2006, receiving support from luminaries such as Andrew Weatherall, Laurent Garnier, Ivan Smagghe, and more. 2008 saw the release of his debut album, "A Picnic with the Hunters", on Soma Records, pairing that with a successful European tour performing for sold out crowds at venues including Fabric, The Loft, The Arches and Sub Club. He has now started his own imprint, Slant Records, and is set to release his second album on Soma, "Conversations with My Invisible Friends", this October.
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 Portland, Oregon, USA
About me
As far as em411 goes, I'm only posting snippets of weird stuff that will probably never see the light of day. I'm not looking to promote my music on here at all (anymore, because I have in the past). Go to my Virb or MySpace for more info, released tracks, booking info, etc. The URL is "letsgooutside" at the respective sites. Word life, duckets.
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Written September 08 2009 , Tags: decibel festiva, multi touch, sam
Comments
you spamin' this board son?
that's a paddle'n. I thought of a cool multi touch midi application this morning that consists of a large table or sheet of plastic. You could put it out in the rain and the drops hitting the surface would send midi notes to a sequencer...
j_chot said: "you spamin' this board son? that's a paddle'n." Eh, ya gotta spam something. Am I right, folks? EH?! dkarma said: "I thought of a cool multi touch midi application this morning that consists of a large table or sheet of plastic. You could put it out in the rain and the drops hitting the surface would send midi notes to a sequencer..." That *is* a cool idea! I have a new patch in Max/MSP/Jitter for handling all types of webcam data. It turns all kinds of things into TUIO data and send it over TCP. I could combine that with the latter part of the Flash-MIDI bridge or rework the Flash-MIDI bridge into a TUIO-MIDI bridge (use one computer with the camera to track raindrops and another to generate the sound).Additionally, I could use this patch... link ...with a microphone to isolate the sound of raindrops and send that info over the network the same way, so it works in the dark -- which the "camera" portion could determine. Would be cool to trigger visuals as well. Or I guess you could leave a light on behind the "screen" (plastic sheet, tarp, whatevs). Yeah... just do a background remove every 250ms or so to only track new raindrops. If I have time to build this patch, I'll send an executable + source your way to try it out.
Oh, and I'm aiming to launch the distributable version of the MIDI controller at Decibel Festival, including a new control type (X/Y pad with physics (think air hockey where the puck controls two values)). have you heard of "terrain synthesis" or scanning synthesis ( link )? a while ago I saw a paper where they talked aobut using a piece of paper as an interface to control the waveform, so you bend the paper and it is literally scanned in 3 dimensions. seems like this kind of thing lends itself well to multitouch.
the pic is pretty, but using a gigantic multitouch surface to model something that is better accomplished with actual knobs and sliders is kind of a drag. so often the immense possibilities of new technology just go to emulating stuff that already works just fin in analog/hardware formats, eg the huge number of virtual analog synths. if you could make a multitouch surface that was pressure sensitive and could differentiate padded mallets from drum sticks you'd have the best controller evar.
well you'd just have to prog. the differences in teh mallet head size vs drum stick head size...
flies said: "if you could make a multitouch surface that was pressure sensitive and could differentiate padded mallets from drum sticks you'd have the best controller evar." Done! Already in this version. You set a "pressure" flag in the XML and then specify a blob size range (mix/max). I just don't need it for my particular live set. If you wanted to make a drum pad layout, you just edit the XML file to make a grid of buttons and define the pressure sensitivity. Because this doesn't actually use capacitors, it simply measures the blob size, which generally increases with pressure.flies said: "the pic is pretty, but using a gigantic multitouch surface to model something that is better accomplished with actual knobs and sliders is kind of a drag." Donn't knock it 'til you've tried it, yo! Ask anyone who owns a Lemur. I had all the advantages explained to me and didn't quite get them and remained skeptical about using a screen instead of buttons and sliders. When I made the first alpha I immediately realized what I've been missing out on. I've always used hardware controllers and this has major advantages. Since I built this, my CS-32 has been collecting dust. Granted you get tactile feedback and get away with some creative mapping, but check out a few major advantages this has over hardware. - Macro controls. Assign any control to receive input from a macro button. Check out how they're used in this video: link I select the five channels on the left for macro input and use two buttons in the top right to mute/max the volume with a single click. - Automation. Any changes I make in Live show up in the controller -- the equivalent of motorized controls, but works on everything and costs nothing to add. - Completely customizable layout in XML. Note that I only have the controls I need. Any other 18 channel controllers out there? Every control is labeled so I don't have to remember what each knob does what. I don't have unmapped controls like what you end up with on hardware. - Make anything! The controls I have in this first round emulate my hardware so that I can use it for my existing live set. The next step is making controls that do not exist in the real world, like the aforementioned X/Y pad with adjustable physics, and mapping those to effects, etc that I previously wouldn't have been able to use with hardware. - Once Max for Live is out, I'll be able to add scene info to my interface, so I can perform with the laptop clamshelled and out of sight. - Fast and cheap DIY. The time and effort it would take to create these features with hardware would be massive. All this takes is some AS3 knowledge for new controls, or simply editing a XML file for existing ones. As far as the screen goes, there are plenty of ways to easily build or buy your own for cheap. - Flexibility for experimentation. If you check my other videos, you'll see that you can even control this with your eyes, a cigarette, or just about anything else you want to use as input -- doesn't have to be a touch screen. - Stage presence. As mentioned in the last point, you can get really creative with the input and controller layout to turn just about any kind of movement into MIDI -- with zero programming knowledge. With the multi-touch table, it just looks cool. The scale of this thing is very intentional. I could get away with much smaller (think Lemur), but a huge colorful table just has a better effect on stage. Nothing against hardware, of course. Just saying there's a lot more going on here than you can draw from an image attached to a forum post. yeah the more i think about it the more i'm really wanting a multitouch wall in my next studio.
as long as the latency is super low and the interfacing is crisp and bug free (ftmp) the choice between MT and midi hardware is obvious. oh shit speak of the devil....
link dkarma said: "yeah the more i think about it the more i'm really wanting a multitouch wall in my next studio. as long as the latency is super low and the interfacing is crisp and bug free (ftmp) the choice between MT and midi hardware is obvious." Yeah, if you run off a single fast machine (this is setup to run over network to off load CPU), there's zero latency between the tracking software and your DAW (maybe nanoseconds?). Any "latency" actually comes from the frame rate of the camera and tracking software. I'm running stuff off Xbox and PS3 cameras, but if I went ahead and spent a little extra to get something like a Stingray, I'd get a solid 30+ fps and latency would be gone. NICE! I love seeing people do stuff like this. I wish the software was more than the old drag/resize/rotate, but awesome hardware! We wrote our software to work across a network so you can make surfaces as big as you want. We made one of these for Umpqua Bank's Innovation Lab a couple years ago: link But that one uses three single touch films. Just waiting for another project to come along that requires something bigger. :D Thanks for the link. Signup to comment
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