2Second(fuse) - 05

Honeycomb
5/31/09 15:57 - permalink - email - category: MaxMSPJitter

When I first encountered the Manta at Expo '74, my immediate thought was "It's tónová mrízka as hardware."

I set out to make a Max app that would map tónová mrízka onto the Manta. The tonal relationships seemed complicated on first glance, then I realized the entire chart could be created by a simple pattern of four intervals repeated twice on each row with note staggering at row start points. Once I had this puzzle solved, mapping the Czech akordu diagrams to the Manta turned out to be surprisingly easy. A dollop of royal jelly was applied to allow a wider working range of octaves without repeats, but from overlapped simplicity came very natural seeming complexity.

Honeycomb is the result.

Honeycomb interface. Honeycomb is a tonal mapping app for the Snyderphonics Manta.

The attribute I love most about this mapping is the creation of chord inversions by specific shapes. Example: a minor chord can be played anywhere on the Manta with three notes in an inverted triangle arrangement. The root note of the chord is always in the upper left point.

Below is Honeycomb's About pane, where you can see a chart showing spatial interval relationships along with some of the chord shapes created by these relationships, playable everywhere on the Manta's surface.

Honeycomb About pane. Honeycomb is a tonal mapping app for the Snyderphonics Manta.

Honeycomb is released under the QYBL-NC (Question Your Beliefs License - Non-Commercial). Manta users can download here:

honeycomb_v04.zip (575k, Max patch with supporting image files)

It requires the [manta~] Max object from Snyderphonics.

I'll be at the next Overlap.org Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon with the Manta and Honeycomb. Stop by if you're of the "making noise with blinking lights beneath your fingers" crew.

Manta: Touch And Flow
5/27/09 20:25 - permalink - email - category: Gear

I knew Brian Crabtree's and Kelli Cain's game-changing Monome device was the controller for me the moment I laid eyes on the prototype. There was an instant understanding of and joy in the deep possibilities held by a decoupled grid of buttons and lights. I was hooked years before the larger-in-number but still hand-produced 40h units ever left their secret lab.

Fast forward to 02009 at Expo '74. Darwin Grosse is playing twining, ambient autoharp music on the floor of the Max/MSP/Jitter Science Faire at the UCSF Conference Center here in San Francisco. My ears direct my feet to investigate, and I find in Darwin's hands another controller with an immediately understood, wide-open conceptual space: a Snyderphonics Manta. Uses and techniques for the device immediately begin to spin from the center of my mind.

Snyderphonics Manta in Vernian Device mode.

The Manta, as described on its maker's site, is a "touch-sensitive controller for audio and video with a hexagonal layout and programmable LED feedback." Like the Monome, what you press and what lights up are decoupled. You can display information programatically with the LEDs for sequencing and visual feedback. You can also rest easy in the default startup mode in which pads and lights are connected: what you press is what you see.

There are forty-eight hexagonal pads, two horizontal sliders and four buttons on the Manta's touch-sensitive face. In addition to simple touched/untouched state information, continuous streams of press intensity data are simultaneously provided by each pad. This can be used as velocity or pressure sensitivity. The sliders display only eight divisions in the LEDs running beside them, but you get gloriously smooth values from 0 to 4096 as output.

LEDs under the etched front plate give a warm glow beneath the interface elements, bright but soft at the edges with the shape defined by the metal masking above. The wooden frame creates a perfect sense of anachronism. It's as if Jules Verne tired of knobs and levers and designed a human interface device with no moving parts, infused with the luminescence of the deep. This is not simple poetic inclination from a music technology geek: with a bit of practice the Manta becomes fluid beneath one's fingers, like water.

Snyderphonics Manta - Let your fingers do the lightwalking.

The Manta dovetails nicely with Monome devices. A Monome button has only two states: pressed or not pressed. The play area of a Monome is strictly divided into 64, 128 or 256 of these states. It's about control to a depth of a single bit: on or off, with absolutely clear lines between the points of interaction. The Manta is fuzzier. Because the surface is flat, you can slide from point to point. The metal pads provide just enough tactile feedback to indicate transition between control elements. Glissandos are crazy fun. Take into consideration the continuous values generated by press intensity and the Manta is a flowing counterpart to the 1-bit perfection mechanism of the Monome.

Manta i/o is handled by a custom, audio rate Max/MSP object, [manta~], written by Brad Garton and Jeff Snyder with velocity detection algorithm by Angie Hugeback and centroid detection by R. Luke Dubois. [manta~] outputs data for things like sensor on/off, velocity, continuous value lists, slider position and sensor maximum lists. It also takes messages to directly set LED states and turn on unique and sensitive modes like turbo and hi-res. There is a full feature set of bells and whistles available, even an option to convert the entire surface of the Manta into a single, giant x/y controller. Max users won't have a lock on this arcane device for long: an app is in the works for mapping Manta output and behavior without the need for Max/MSP. I suspect, though, the main embracers of this device will, like the Monome community, always contain a high percentage of Max users.

Snyderphonics Manta in the rapid pattern display zone.

As a Noisebridge member and hackerspace proponent, I'm happy to see Jeff did some of his Manta design and fabrication work at NYC Resistor. The build quality is exceptional. The Manta is in the same league as Monome: hand created, all parts sourced and made in the United States, ROHS compliant, solid like a century tree. 400mA of power is drawn over USB, which provides both juice and i/o. A svelte 0.873cm (11/32") thickness and feather weight means it's easy to take everywhere you will take your laptop. It even comes with a swanky neoprene case.

I'm working on some Max performance patches for the Manta, which I'll release here and in the Snyderphonics forums when complete. More on these soon, once my perfectionism has its last input. If you'd like to take a closer look, I'll also be showing off the Manta and one of these patches, Honeycomb, at the next Overlap.org Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon on 020090603.

The Transmogrification Of Pluggo
5/23/09 22:15 - permalink - email - category: Daevlmakr

Like the transmogrification of Pluggo, this post has been some time in the works. Attendees of Expo '74 had Pluggo's squish confirmed at the event, but the writing was on the wall much earlier. In the wake of Cycling '74's announcement that Pluggo is now Max For Live, I'm inundated with emails from friends and users wondering what will happen to their favorite sonic FSU software: the Daevl.Plugs. Now is the time to let the cat out of the bag.

First, as context, let me drop some history for the Daevl.Plugs. I created the Daevl.Plugs in Max/MSP back in 02006, but they began life long before that year as parts of a toolbox of patches I use to create music solely in Max/MSP. I boarded the Ableton Live maglev train all the way back at version 1, and as my use of it grew I found myself needing to integrate Live and my Max music making machinery more tightly. Pluggo provided this as a VST/AU wrapper for Max patches.

I generally prefer clean, minimal interfaces. The look of the Daevl.Plugs comes entirely from my love of minimal tool design as created within the strict GUI limitations of the Max 4 environment. Somewhere during the first pass at the process I realized through Pluggo I could make the Daevl.Plugs widely available to people with no Max experience, who simply wanted to manipulate audio in interesting, non-repetitive ways. Several more design revisions to generalize the interfaces so users wouldn't have to be me to understand them and the Daevl.Plugs came screaming into the world.

I tried to have no expectations for success or failure at their release. A small concession was made to copy protection in the form of serial number authorization, mainly to provide a widely accepted method of signaling to honest people the commercial nature of the product, though I set the price low at $36.

I was stunned by the response. Since 02006 the Daevl.Plugs have been purchased in huge numbers, by people throughout the audio and video worlds of all levels and interests: bedroom hobbyist to post-production guru, electronic cult act to professional rock star. Add in piracy orders of magnitude higher, and they've made their way throughout the sonic landscape of the latter half of the Twenty Zeros.

The main benefit of Pluggo was instant leveraging of work done in Max/MSP. Rather than create a VST and AU from the ground up, with all the attendant troubles and shenanigans of those two plug-in formats, Pluggo allowed me to take my work in Max and move fast. The troubles and shenanigans were still being dealt with, just not by me. Cycling '74 handled the compatibility nightmare. When compatibility issues began to uncoil with VST3 hosts and an increasing parade of problems with newer ProTools versions began, I began to see an imminent playground design shift. I've kept it in mind since: I built a castle in their sandbox.

Enter Ableton Live in a big way. From the data I've gathered, the Daevl.Plugs user base is comprised of mostly Live users at somewhere above 80%. There are a significant percentage who use Live in conjunction with another environment, such as Logic or Digital Performer, but over 4/5 of those rocking the Daevls use Live at some point in their workflow. Given that Live is the most widely used and generally the most compliant and well behaved of the host environments available, I understand Cycling's decision to focus solely on a host where maximum cooperation is possible. Throw in the unique aspects of Live plus Ableton's willingness to break ground and it seems a perfect match.

Here's the open bag, here's the cat: I'll be converting the entire suite of Daevl.Plugs to Daevl.Plugs MFL. I'll still support the current Pluggo version of the Daevl.Plugs until Max For Live is released later this year, at which point they'll only be available by request and with no promises of support. All purchasers of the Daevl.Plugs will get a free upgrade to Daevl.Plugs MFL.

What's this? Another cat in the bag! In addition, there is a second set of plug-ins, the Daemon.Plugs, which I'll be releasing only as MFL devices. These have been in development for some time, continually bumping up against the edge of what Pluggo was capable of. They're much better served in their functions by Max For Live.

I'm saddened by the death of Pluggo and the closing of old possibilities, but I'm excited by the new possibilities opened by Max For Live. Pluggo, in attempting to live everywhere, ended up a second class citizen in all environments. Max For Live will reach levels of integration Pluggo could barely dream of. It's a quantum leap for Max and Pluggo users, and a vast new world for the exploration of those beaming in from Live.

Change happens. Evolution is built on strengths, not weaknesses.

It's time to do something new.