Slashdot Mirror
MIT Students' Audiopad Mixes Electronic Music
nicodemus05 writes "Grad students at MIT's Media Lab have come up with an innovative control device called the Audiopad to run their digital music studio. The Audiopad, '...is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music.' It's practical, but more importantly it looks really, really cool."
But can I play Chopsticks on it?
...um...like...a sig...
Someone gets sued by the RIAA for arranging the objects in their cube the wrong way?
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Better yet, make it work in a 3d space, where full body motion translates into music. There are a few actions that would translate into some interesting 'music' i'm sure.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
I've actually seen this device in action and I was amazed. I think the way it interacts with the user/musician is something a lot of people are looking for. Let's hope some manufacturers of musical devices take note of this project and incorporate some of it's ideas in products that can be made available for a broader range of people.
I've already done this, when we were kids, me an my sis joe, we loosened one screw in mom's bed so we can hear whenever she has a friend over. It worked pretty well, well enough for us to calculate the number of thrusts, the duration, delta T, and so on.
Incredibly, joe now works for NASA.. while I wither away in unemployment (who wants to hire a SCO admin?!)
...but since I can't access the page, I'll just say that if they can make a similar device to convert the death throes of a webserver into digital music, we could have some real fun during slashdottings :)
I haven't had time to see the site in action, probably due to the slashdot effect.
From the description, other than using a tabletop as its active surface, i'm wondering how different it is to Korg's Kaosspad in functionality.
http://www.korg.com/gear/info.asp?A_PROD_NO=KP2
This could probably be made with more affordable hardware, like a TFT touch screen, or even a regular monitor and an XY pad. It would take a slight adjustment of the original constuction, interface-wise. But the main idea would still be applicable.
The really low budget version of this would be a software-only product controlled by mouse. It would probably sell, even though some functionality would probably be lost.
...um...like...a sig...
These days, with the DRM and the DMCA, it's tough getting a music file without DRM crap. What I'd like the MIT folks to do is this:
Get some objects on a table to dance, based on the music! And then we can have another Audiopad to capture the music from this dance - non DRM MP3....breakthrough!
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
some years ago there was a toy-company called Zowie (bought by LEGO as far as I know) they had two products - a "pirate ship" and a "garden" where you could frrely move around some small dolls and their accurate position was transmitted to a connected PC - they did all the positioning stuff some custom chip included in the toy - so producing this stuff cheap in large quanitities is no problem at all
- stefan
Already been done. It's called a Theremin.
http://www.thereminworld.com/learn.asp
KFG
This is just another one of those MIT projects that makes it to slashdot. Just as you seem to have chain effect in 'peer review' processes, it's not because it is spectacular that it gets published, but mainly because it is from place X or Y.
Loads of universities create student projects but they basically give it the attention it deserves: they are student projects; practical definately, revolutionary, not by far. Their main purpose is to give students a direct experience with real life toy projects. Real life, because in those projects, several aspects from real systems are included. Toy because students do not have the time to really do the advanced design and testing a profesional project requires.
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Leon Theremin did that back in the 20's. It was called a Terpsitone and worked off of body capacitance.
If you want to wave your arms around to make music, you still can't beet a Theremin.
This reminds me of this. It is called Mixed Reality Pong.
Mixed Reality Pong is a mixed reality version of the classic "Pong" game. The aim of the game is to score goals by hitting a virtual ball over the other end of the game area protected by the opponent player. The game counts the goals the players have scored, and they can agree to play either for a limited amount of time, or until either of them has scored a certain amount of goals.
The players can play the game with their hands or other real-world objects. The game physics simulate the behaviour of a real ball, except that the virtual ball doesn't slow down at all.
Max/MSP and Pure Data have been doing stuff like this for years. The only thing "unique" here is the fact that they aren't using a mouse, and that's just a bunch of standard Max/MSP and PD externals. Bleh.
sig.
As it seems the MIT site is slowly being slashdotted... here is a different site with a demonstration video.
what's really neat is the interface... being able to move sounds around in a 3d space and manipulate the samples/loops with a completely uncluttered interface. This is the main problem with vst/softsynths, being able to use them in real time w/o a midi controller. The ideas is to get as close as you physically can to the music be made and computers.Audiopad does this thru least one computer to do it's job and radio tagging of the objects being moved around the table. The reason something like this won't go commercial for a long time is b/c there are no real new ideas as far as the actual sound manipulation is concerned. See ableton live for example or jeskola buzz.
Never mind all the fancy stuff, I think the basic problem is students and fairly clear table space.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Oh come on, the interface is everything to an instrument. Instruments vary in only two ways, firstly the sound they produce, and secondly the way they have to be manipulated to produce those sounds.
This instrument may be similar to the device you reference, however its novel and easy to manipulate interface will allow completely new sounds to be woven into compositions. I'd wager that an experienced artist could make music with this device that he couldn't do with any other instrument - but I'd need to read more about it first.
So to argue more directly with your point: The user interface would be the whole point if it actually helped the user achieve something in a more efficient fashion... but it doesn't do anything that doesn't already exist. The interface is the whole point and it does help the user either make music more efficiently, or to make completely new types of composition. I'd say both, but I expect you'd have to ask someone who's made music with it.
Earlier this year at a Boston concert, Tod Machover showcased Beatbugs http://www.media.mit.edu/hyperins/projects/beatbug s.html
Concert staff were telling everyone that Beatbugs would be available for sale this Christmas through a major toy manufacturer.
That's great for getting music into the hands of kids at an early age and also for breaking through the classism that plagues intellectual music, but is the "music" that's being created really something that anyone (other than grandma) wants to listen to?
mah na mah na.