My friends at Symbolic Sound have released a major update to the legendary Kyma sound workstation software. Quoting the press release:

Symbolic Sound Corporation has expanded the list of real-time controllers and software that can communicate with its Kyma sound design environment by adding support for Open Sound Control (OSC) to its Paca(rana) sound engine.

By connecting a Paca or Pacarana to the Ethernet, sound designers, musicians, and researchers using Kyma on Windows or Macintosh computers can establish bi-directional communication with OSC-enabled devices and software on the network to control parameters of Kyma sound synthesis and processing algorithms. Open Sound Control (http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc) is an open communications protocol that delivers higher speeds, greater resolution, and more flexibility than is afforded by the standard MIDI protocol.

In addition, we worked in cooperation to bring support for MIDI over OSC to allow OSCulator to send raw MIDI data directly to the Pacarana on its Ethernet port. Carla and Kurt cleverly extended this protocol to allow bi-directional streams. OSCulator can also receive MIDI data coming from the Pacarana and re-transmit it on the MIDI bus of the computer.

For Paca and Pacarana users that means that you can send streams of MIDI events from your software directly to Kyma without need for a MIDI interface on your computer and without having to map each controller individually in OSCulator.

For everybody else, this means that you can send MIDI data over the network with simplicity.

Patrick Flanagan wrote me an email about his robotic percussions project, Jazari, named after the Engineering genius of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. With two Wiimotes and their MotionPlus extensions, he is making music with three robotized instruments: a djembe, a bongo and some hand percussions.

But it’s not just about solenoids and motors. Patrick has brought a whole knowledge of algorithms and music theory that enables him to actually improvise and build a stunningly expressive music.

Here’s a very well made tutorial made by Neo Ruiz on how to use OSCulator and TouchOSC with Logic Studio. You can also watch this video in HD on his website. There are also a few useful notes in addition.

Rafael Hernandez, Director of the Multimedia Graduate Program at CSU East Bay has made a cool tutorial on how to use OSCulator with Pure Data.

He explains in detail how OSC messages can be sent from the DJ Hero Controller to PD, and how you can use the routeOSC object to easily extract the values from the OSC messages. (Note that in order to get the DJ Hero Controller working you will have to wait for the official release of OSCulator 2.9 as the current release candidate doesn’t have the support for this device yet.)

With some minor changes you can learn from this tutorial to route message from the Wiimote or other controllers as well.

Rafael also has a HUGE collection of quality tutorials on PD that is certainly worth having a look at.

Will Marshall, an advanced OSCulator user, has been kind enough to share a template he created with OSCulator 2.9 that (amongst other things), sends the track names to TouchOSC controls. To make this work, he created a custom layout in the TouchOSC editor, a set of OSCulator files, and a virtual control surface script for Live.

If you want to learn about how to use this template, or just get inspiration to create one yourself, watch the video on his blog (better viewed on vimeo, actually).

The files and quick instructions are on github.

Rishabh Rajan, an artist from Malaysia, has used Quartz composer to extract augmented reality controller values and send them via OSCulator to a Buffer Override plugin in Logic:

There is also this captivating Wiimote composition he made using the FM8 synthesizer:

Andy Lunn wrote a great tutorial on how to get started with guitar hero drums and OSCulator.

A new public beta has been released that solves a bunch of annoying bugs and brings some new features.

In the Parameters Window, there is a new option to turn off TUIO protocol interpretation. The TUIO protocol is used with multitouch software and provides information on the tracked objects. OSCemote and MSA Remote are two examples of iPhone applications that implement this protocol.

Here is a video that basically shows the reacTIVision software analysing the video input, sending TUIO data to OSCulator, which in turns controls Ableton Live:

The TUIO protocol itself is not very easy to use out of the box and is not directly compatible with the way OSCulator triggers events. The solution to this problem has been to implement a kind translator that would interpret the protocol and convert it into something more user friendly. The benefits of this is the possibility to use TUIO messages very easily, however some users reported that they would also want to see in OSCulator the raw TUIO data, unmodified.

TUIO uses a single message (for example /tuio/2Dobj), but with varying arguments, of different types like numbers and strings. Until now, OSCulator was only able to receive input from numbers, but since version 2.9, it is able to receive any OSC data type. If the TUIO protocol handling is set to “Raw & Interpreted”, this means OSCulator will display both the original TUIO message /tuio/2Dobj, but also the interpreted ones.

This brings the possibility to process the messages in OSCulator, and also forward the TUIO data to another software or computer, which is very handy since most TUIO clients can not send their data to multiple destinations at once.

The extended OSC data type support made it possible to simplify the OSC Routing editor as well.

A new version

I’m proud to announce the first release candidate of OSCulator 2.9!

So many changes have been done so far, I wanted to give this version a trial before releasing it through the automatic update process.

Social networking plug

I now have a Twitter account I will use for sharing updates and some news. If you download this release candidate, consider following me:

Highlights

Now, the main highlights of this release are :

• Initial Wii Motion Plus support.
• Wacom Tablet users can choose the key combo to use for mouse locking.
• OSC router is now much more transparent as it now handles now not only numbers but also all types of data.

And also other cool new features like a new status bar saving some important real estate, a Notepad to take notes inside the application, and literally tons of bugs fixed. For the complete change log, and a download link, follow this link.

What’s in, what’s out

After talking with some non-native english speakers users, I decided to stop translating OSCulator in other languages. The first reason is how localization (translation), prevented me to make any change to the user interface. The second reason is the dependency on 2 or 3 friends that had to contact every time I was changing text. The last reason is more semantic: I believe that technical software in an identical field of application should be in the same language so all the terms are consistently the same across every programs. The language for multimedia technical parlance has always been English, so I’ll stick to that.

Mac OS X Tiger users should be aware that this major upgrade will be the last for Tiger systems. Back in version 2.7, I announced this was going the last for Tiger, but after many users reaction, I kept the 10.4 support going. For your information, supporting the Tiger platform means spending almost 40% of my working time only on testing and debugging those nasty bugs. Now, the decision is made: OSCulator 2.10 will be compatible with 10.5 Leopard and higher.

All this means that I can spend time on other features like the status bar which not only has a great look, but also reports useful info. I have been able to make lot of subtle changes to the user interface which was stuck since the day I decided to translate oscltr in 4 languages.

Now I’m free and it feels good.

Stay tuned

During the release candidate period I will post some articles about the Motion Plus, I guess this is the part which really needs some explanations. I will also talk about the OSC router, and other tips and tricks.

So, stay tuned. If you have any question, the forum is there to help. Thanks for reading.

Peace, Cam

Ronan sent me this amazing video where he plays retro games using the Wiimote and OSCulator :

While it’s fun to play games from archaeologic times, it’s also fun to have a merry hack party and invent the games of the future. The event will happen in Nuremberg on 6 to 8 november at the “Zentrifuge” Event Hall.

Here’s more information from the the makerjam website:

A weekend marked by fun, innovation and the joy of experimentation. Games developers, designers, artists, programmers, hardware wizards – beginners and professionals – form teams and develop computer games. A competition with the emphasis clearly on fun.

Whether you burn for ideation, concepts, sketching, artwork and design, game logic, hardware design, programming, character development, or audio – the Game Jam has room for every type of talent. The teams are free to choose their controller, programming language, and platform. Work with Flash, a game engine, or a PC game kit. Develop a game for mobile phones, for a PC or for a console – as long as you own the tools and can bring them along. Lash up your old joysticks to a monster control panel, program an iPhone as the central controller, build innovative interfaces with Arduino, or find newer, smarter ways to integrate mouse, keyboard and webcam in your game.