On 2/19/08, Loren Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Did anyone else see Daft Punk rocking out at the Grammys? They played the > coolest instruments I've ever seen - four multitouch screens with various > graphical elements controlling an array of synth and software backend. (
You've touched on one of my obsessions... interaction design for creativity. I'm an electronic musician, and it was through working with machines to create music that I decided on User Experience Design (or as I thought of it at the time UI Design) as a career (over technical writing). But yes, the Lemur is an amazing piece of equipment, and its price is equally mind-boggling. Using four of them is complete insanity and borders on fiscal irresponsibility. : ) Here are some other examples of particularly unique musical IxD: Novation Remote SL: http://tinyurl.com/2kqgj8 One of the biggest issues in electronic music today is this shift from physical instruments (synths, drum machines, mixers, etc.) to software simulations. Now, computers have few affordances for music creation, so the creative flow is always interrupted by having to do something "computery" like using a mouse to select a different track and open its virtual instrument. Once you're there, you'd then need to move the mouse up and down to move a knob on the instrument. MIDI controllers that allow you to assign these controls to physical knobs have been around for awhile, but you have to explicitly program the knob, etc. assignments and then call up the correct assignment when you switch instruments. The Remote SL is unique in that it automatically adapts itself to the selected instrument on the selected track. You never have to assign knobs or program it in any way (although you can). You can even switch tracks using its physical UI, and you can go into a special Mixer Mode in which you're controlling the channels on your DAW rather than a virtual instrument. Using this device, musicians are able to bring the musicality out of the computer. Native Instruments KORE: http://tinyurl.com/ys2ran KORE is... somewhat difficult to describe. It is many things, but there are two things it does that put it on my list of good musical IxD. First, it attempts to solve the problem of finding the right sound. It allows users to classify patches from nearly any software synthesizer using an extensible faceted navigation system. Now, for those musicians who already have tons of soft synths with all their requisite patches, classifying all that is a somewhat daunting task. I look back to when I first created my iTunes library and assigned correct genres and ratings to every song. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it in the end. It's other advancement (and I'm not entirely sure it can do this... the videos, etc. are unclear) is that it allows you to *select* those patches using the hardware interface. I'm not sure you can use the faceted navigation system with the hardware, but regardless that makes using soft synths one step closer to using a real synth. ("Real synth... heh.") Ableton Live: http://www.ableton.com/live Live is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that was originally developed to allow people to compose and perform loop-based music... um... live. Hence its name. This is *revolutionary* when it comes to DAWs. The thought of using others like Cubase, Sonar, or even Logic or Pro Tools live gives me the willies. Since then, it has expanded and now does MIDI as well. Live does a *superb* job of getting out of the musician's way. I will attempt to be brief by talking about its main feature. You can pull loops in while the application is playing, then drop others on top of it, regardless of tempo... it will automatically sync them up. Then you can bring them in and out, and everything stays in sync. In fact, there's nothing the application does that you can't do while it's playing (except application configuration, which you wouldn't do live anyway). Also, it's visually beautiful. Other DAWs are just... fugly. In a less commercial vein, I talked to a guy at interaction08 who develops what I would describe as "artistic physical sequencer interfaces." One of them is based on wood blocks, while another is based on *pools of water*(!!!). http://www.jeffhoefs.com/ Enjoy, Fred (Oh... yes, the iPhone interface is real... I think it's mainly for Pro Tools though... Google for "iphone pro tools" and you'll find it again) ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
