Introducing the Fluid Piano

Posted on December 10, 2009 by John CS Keston

My mate Joshua Herbst recently shared this video with me of the first ever “fluid” piano invented by Geoff Smith.

The completely acoustic piano allows the musician to tune every string by a whole tone either during the performance or before hand in order to set up particular microtonal scales.

The fluid piano sounds beautiful, reminiscent of sitar, but with a deeper tone quality. I can’t wait to hear more from this ingenious instrument.

Here’s the original article from the Guardian:
Introducing the ‘fluid piano’

GMS Now Available for Windows

Posted on December 5, 2009 by John CS Keston

GMS v0.10 beta binary distribution for Windows is now available, thanks to Grant Muller, who compiled the latest source code for the GMS under Windows. Please visit the GMS page to download the Windows version. If you’re interested in the source code for the GMS you can find it at http://code.google.com/p/gestural-music-sequencer/.

Audio Technology Research Funding

Posted on November 17, 2009 by John CS Keston

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After nearly two years free of advertising, I have decided to include sponsorships on AudioCookbook. This was not a decision that came easily, but I concluded that advertising was not bothering me on other sites, similar to ACB that I visit regularly, so perhaps it won’t bother me here. In any case, all the funds that are collected from sponsors and donations will go into an account that will be used exclusively for research projects that will be featured on ACB. The cost of the equipment and software that I purchase for these projects will surely exceed any income by these means, but perhaps it will help offset the expense.

What helped lead me down this path was an offer from TuneCore to participate in their affiliate program. I am one of the partners of Unearthed Music and we have used TuneCore for digital distribution since September, 2006. We have used other distribution and licensing agencies before, and still do (until we can get out of our contracts), but what makes TuneCore unique is that they do not take a percentage of your royalties. Instead they charge a one-time delivery fee, followed by affordable yearly storage fees. Our label has had much better returns with TuneCore than other services, so I feel comfortable endorsing them.

I hope the advertising on ACB does not turn anyone away. I plan to keep the ads discreet and the content of the same nature as it has been for the last year and ten months. No reviews, just continued experimentation and research into whatever weird and wonderful sound discoveries we make or find along the way. If you have thought on this, please share them. Reader feedback, comments and opinions are one of the main reasons why I continue to create content for ACB.

Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration

Posted on November 6, 2009 by John CS Keston

With help from Josh Clos I have shot a short video documenting what my latest MaxMSP project does.

It’s a sort of swiss army knife of wavetable glitch machine and sample scrubbing tools. Hopefully the video will shed some light on what this project is about. I’ve been trying to describe it in a few other posts without much success, but seeing it in action seems to make a bit more sense.

The next step invovles integrating this tool into the Five Output Atemporal Looper i describe in my last entry.

For more information check out some of the related posts including Physically Modeling Multitouch Controls, Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis, and TouchOSC Controlled Glitch Looper in MaxMSP.

Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Physically Modeling Multitouch Controls

Posted on October 19, 2009 by John CS Keston

For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in MaxMSP controlled with TouchOSC on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is coming along quite well. I have the granular traversal piece working how I want, as I described in Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis.

Now I’m working on another feature of the application designed to allow the user to play samples with a rotary dial; not unlike manually spinning a record on a turntable. The basics of getting this going were pretty simple, but I also wanted to be able to spin the dial and have it continue to rotate based on the acceleration applied. Secondly, I wanted to have a slider that would adjust the amount of friction, from frictionless to instant braking.

This essentially involved physically modeling the control to behave like a turntable or other spinning device. After trying four or five techniques using standard Max objects I managed to get it working, but it wasn’t pretty. Instead I decided to try using a few lines of Javascript to do the calculations and adjust the position of the dial. This worked much better and only required about 35 lines of code. The best way to illustrate this application will be with video. I’ll shoot a few minutes to get the point across and share it here soon. For now here’s a recording made with the modeled controller I described and just a small amount of friction.

Percussion Loop Spinning