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Going to MusikMesse was lot of fun. First of all, I have been able to meet my friends, the CopperLan team, who were showcasing their new developments.

CopperLan is a new protocol for music and pro-audio that makes it easy to connect and control software and devices. It is self-configuring, plug and play, backwards compatible with MIDI.

CopperLan, unlike MIDI, is very easy to use. You just plug things together, and play with them. It lets you access the parameters of compatible software and devices in human readable form, it is fast, reliable, and can be used to control MIDI devices with almost no effort. I really hope this protocol will become popular because it will help solving lots of trouble we have with current protocols: MIDI is not precise enough and requires some knowledge to know what you are doing, and OSC suffers from network configuration, which can be tedious to deal with. Hopefully, CopperLan makes all this a thing of the past.

I also had the chance to meet the Elektron guys. I have to say I am a big fan of their product since a long time. At its beginnings, my band Neïmo, didn’t have a real drummer. Because we just needed to travel light, and wanted something that had a modern sound, we chose the MachineDrum as our drummer. So it was a real pleasure to meet the ones who invented what gave the sound to our first album.

There was also a rather impressive demonstration of the Reactable Live. This is a touch enabled table, with a projector inside that produces sounds that are controlled by a set of “fiducial” symbols you put on the table. To better understand how it works, take a look at this video of Björk performing with the Reactable.

Alexander Schubert has notified me of a new piece he wrote for drum kit, arm sensors, live electronics and live video.

The title of the piece is inspired by the “laplace demon” – a thought experiment describing a model using total determination. This is to evoke the question of how a system of this complexity is totally reproducible – which it is not in this case. The concept of the piece is a very structured progression of about 100 scenes, which are clearly defined – but within these cells there is a great amount of freedom for the performer on a micro level.

Don’t miss the part 2, there is some very very intense stuff …

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.