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French Rock Band Makes Steve Jobs Tribute From His Words

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

People still find heroes – imperfect as they may be, people who provide inspiration. I’ve been talking a lot this year about the impact of Max Mathews; more on that soon. But in the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ death, it’s touching to see some of the reactions. French Rock band Bravery in Battle write CDM to share their music video homage to the Apple leader. They’ve gotten quite a lot of attention in French, as well (French-language links):

«Ayez faim, soyez fous»… les bonnes paroles de Steve jobs mises en musique [Liberation]
Un bel hommage à Steve Jobs en musique (vidéo) [stevejobs.fr]

We are Bravery in Battle, a French rock band. When we heard of Steve Jobs’s death, on October the 5th, we decided at once to write some music to pay him homage.
We have been using the Mac to make music for almost 15 years now and it’s completely part of our creative process. We also have been using
the iPad on stage since the very first days of its launching to trigger samples and play instruments too cumbersome to carry.
Without Apple and its products, we wouldn’t the artists we are today.
But we didn’t want to write a song, we wanted to use Steve’s very words and hear his own voice. That’s why we used his memorable 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. We have chosen the words which seemed the most meaningful for us and for the occasion.
As an additional homage, we played all the music on an iPad, with GarageBand : a Steve Jobs Tribute using only his devices and softwares.
To make a video; we used the same Stanford Address (made on a Mac, too, with Final Cut Pro X).
The original speech was very widely consulted on the Net in the hours following Steve Jobs’s death but our video tells something else. It focuses on a single point and increases its emotion.
For Bravery in Battle
Paul Malinowski

AudioProFeeds-1

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New Music Listening, Free and Pay-What-You-Will: Shigeto to Squarepusher to Ambienteer

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Squarepusher plays Rome in April of last year. Photo (CC-BY-ND) funkoolow.

To take us into the weekend, here are some favorite online music releases this week to download, stream, and enjoy. Be sure to click over to the site if you’re on RSS for the included players if they’re not appearing.

The big buzz this week was the surprise emergence of Squarepusher on a project with Ed Banger Records – a surprise because Squarepusher has long been synonymous with Warp. I’ll leave the music blogs to concern themselves with the label. (Resident Advisor goes understated, whereas exclaim.ca offers, snarkily, “Either Ed Banger Records has moved on from the French touch explosion of 2007 or IDM legend Squarepusher has dropped the wacky time signatures for some four-on-the-floor filter-house.”)

Mostly, Squarepusher fans have been having a good time with a funky, fun track and remix that’s free on Soundcloud (the one “label” we all find ourselves on these days):
Squarepusher – Cryptic Motion Edits by Hypetrak

In the ambient realm, I’ve been enjoying the music of aptly-named artist Ambienteer, whom we visited in June. There’s a new, pay-what-you-will EP up on Bandcamp if you want more:

Ambienteer: Bright Collection of Strange Victories

Ghostly artist Shigeto has an absolutely gorgeous track out this week, mixing the work of vocalist/harpist Ana Caravelle. It’s unmistakably a Shigeto track, but with lots of, well, vocal and harp-y goodness. (If you missed it last month, be sure to check out Shigeto’s free EP from last month.) XLR8R has a nice write-up of the release.
Ana Caravelle – Blackcanyon ( Shigeto’s as i inhale mix ) by SHIGETO

For something more experimental, Makunouchi Bento’s Swimé is a delightful, fanciful soundscape that rattles its way through musical fragments, noises, and cinematic landscapes, sometimes recalling John Cage (particularly when the piano dances over a repeated, asymmetrical motive of some sort). I very much like that it’s free, not so much as a judgment on the commercial potential of the record (which I’ll admit is relatively limited), but because it allows you to encounter the music freely. Like wandering the free day at the art gallery, it may open you up to experience the work. And it’s worth putting on your best cans and listening to a higher-quality format, to explore this musical imaginarium.

If it’s a mix you’re looking for, German artist Martin Juhls aka krill.minima (on Kompakt, among many others) has a rich, extended “ambient dub” mix up on Mixcloud this week.

Krill.Minima – Ambient Dub Mix by Krill.Minima on Mixcloud

By the way, here’s one tool to add to the music releases. If you’re using Google Chrome or the open source variant Chromium, ExtensionFM is a brilliant extension that automatically pulls streaming and download links from pages you’re surfing, then allows you to navigate them as if they were in your local library. I have to admit, I was fairly resistant to the idea at first – until I actually tried it, that is. ExtensionFM is polished, lightweight, and elegant, and far from distracting from focused music listening, I found that the ability to assemble tracks and play them in a complete session has helped me to listen more closely to tracks available online. Anyone who’s ever fiddled with the ill-fated, chronically-unstable, and now discontinued-for-Linux application Songbird will recognize the concept. ExtensionFM is what Songbird should have been, period.

http://www.extension.fm/

It’s been particularly nice when navigating SoundCloud. My new workflow – assemble the stuff I want to hear, spend extended breaks listening to tracks, as well as “browsing” music as you would on the radio by loading tracks in the background while working in the browser, then go out and buy or download the best stuff to add to my permanent library. (These days, that means Banshee for me.)

I was never this impressed with similar offerings on Firefox, but if you have a favorite tool, let us know.

Also, turns out these guys are here in downtown Manhattan, so, ExtensionFM guys, if you’re reading, say hello.

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New Music Listening, Free and Pay-What-You-Will: Shigeto to Squarepusher to Ambienteer

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Special offer: 25% off on PolyKB

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

At ANR we love offering our readers the chance of getting great new gear at a fraction of the original price.
Our friends at XILS-lab are offering a 25% discount on their new PolyKB (inspired to the rare French synth of the early eighties, the PolyKobol).

We reviewed the PolyKB and found it “a fantastically versatile synth, backed up by some old-skool ways of programming and a great sound engine”. Read our in-depth PolyKB review.

How to get the discount?

Go to the XILS shop and add a copy of PolyKB to the cart (you’ll need to choose the authorization method, iLok or eLicenser – ex Synchrosoft)
Register a new account (if you’re not already registered there)
IMPORTANT: during the checkout process paste this code in the “Redeem a Coupon” field:QCZVG32NTJZ
You’ll get a confirmation message, and the total price will change accordingly to 111.75 euro (instead of 149).
Proceed to payment and you’re done!

Please note: it’s a limited time offer, act now!
Feel free to share this article with your friends (also using the tools below).
Enjoy your PolyKB!

P.s: is there a product you’d like to see on offer here? Let us know, we’ll do our best to make you happy!

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Special offer: 25% off on PolyKB

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About Those Waves Vuvuzela Presets, Some Open Code, and Broadcasting Noise…

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Photo (CC-BY) Bruce Turner.

The explosion of interest in filtering out sounds of the vuvuzela has spawned some interesting discussions. Most amusing to me is the notion of some sort of anti-vuvuzela bias. The simple matter of the fact is, recorded (and broadcast) sound are not the same as the sound you hear when you’re physically in a location. If you’re at a sporting event, you hear all kinds of noise. Your expectations are differently calibrated, and you have 360 degrees of (real world) sound spatialization. Watching TV is different. You want background sound, yes, but not to the point that it drowns out commentary. In effect, you want the broadcaster to create an artificially well-balanced soundscape. What’s really striking about the World Cup is that the planet’s largest broadcasting companies all seem to have been caught unprepared for the vuvuzela cacophony.

Which brings us to Waves. So, yes, I took some cheap shots at Waves’ pricing on their plug-ins in yesterday’s massive round-up, and yes, I did actually … hear about it.

First, I want to be clear that in the avalanche of responses to the vuvuzela, there are a number of different techniques – not all notch filtering, though, as my headline hinted, the fact that “notch filtering” is a phrase coming up in mainstream media, blogs, and sports coverage is itself newsworthy.

Waves’ approach involves their noise suppressor. What I said about pricing may have been unclear in regards to the presets: the custom-developed preset chain, made by Waves for broadcasters (and apparently in collaboration with one, specific broadcaster Waves has not named), is entirely free. The cost to which I referred is the noise suppressor itself (US$2900) and the parametric EQ ($300).

And no apologies here for pointing out the gap: compared to most audio software, $2900 is indeed a lot to pay for a plug-in. One of the strange things about audio is that there are sort of parallel dimensions of value/cost equations and markets. In this case, I’m sure the broadcasting market is absolutely willing to pay $2900 for audio software – looking at the cost of, say, a World Cup license, the cost of the equipment used for that broadcast, the human hours that go into plug-in development, and the limited number of potential broadcast customers, Waves’ pricing is actually pocket change. But that further illustrates the disparity: it’s pocket change to the BBC or ESPN, whereas an individual, home audio producer might well use tools that are entirely free as an alternative.

Waves isn’t even, as [someone] pointed out to me, the pricey end of that spectrum – not by a longshot. France’s Canal+ hired an entirely private commission to do what, for Waves customers, at least, was free. [article in French] The result: a non-TDM custom effect solution from a local developer with what was likely a very, very high price tag.

But you can also judge this for yourself: if you’re curious to try out the Waves solution, both WNS and Q10 provide a 7-day demo. It’s definitely the posh steakhouse of plug-ins, to the “street vendor sausage cart” alternatives I mentioned. Pricing is economics, not a quantification of value – such is the nature of the beast. But you can determine how much that market-driven pricing translates to the software. What Waves gives you is certainly a friendly interface, some sophisticated tools tailored to the task, and what’s likely, out of the box, to come closest to producing broadcast-quality sound. Naturally, I also think that delivering that broadcast-quality sound ought to be the job of the broadcasters, not someone at home with a TV set. The question of which tools are relevant for music production, rather than covering the World Cup with an entire network TV crew, can be saved for another day.

While we’re clarifying, I think the most interesting of the long list of solutions I mentioned, apart from Waves’ solution, is the plug-in from the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary, University of London. Dan Stowell notes that, while some of the other techniques mentioned do indeed involve notch filtering, what’s at work here is “a bit cleverer, kind of tuned median-filter.”

The C4DM plug is truly free software, under an MIT-style, open source license. It’s actually a pleasure to browse through the code – bless you, digital signal processing, as mathematically, tasks like this look pretty readable in C and C-style code. No, such things aren’t comparable to, say, a Waves plug-in. At the same time, at their heart, they are fundamentally the same animal. We’ve seen this basic technique (digital signal processing) packaged in wildly different forms. We have academic research centers, which one might argue should engage in open code if they’re publicly funded. We have free code that comes from people who aren’t in academia. We also have businesses that naturally spawn around catering to a very different customer, for whom value is easy to justify given the potential revenue from the product (a sports broadcast), and who likewise have higher expectations of user interface, real-world performance, and support.

But such is the broad spectrum (ahem) of sound software today. Take something as simple as filtering out a drone at a particular frequency, and you see a broad set of potential uses, an audience literally as large as the entire planet’s sports fans, tools on every conceivable platform and operating system, and markets that range from interested academic researchers and programmers to broadcasters with deep pockets.

All over a cheap plastic horn.

It’s a reminder of all kinds of disparities. There’s the economics of sound software, scaling from hobbyist to academia to business, from code that people give away to highly-priced custom services that make Waves plug-ins look like $2 iPhone apps. But more important than that, while specialization in sound software remains the domain of a tiny niche of society, but the ultimate market – human ears – is in the billions. Perhaps while we hide out in our blogs and trade magazines, we forget that.

Oh, vuvuzela. Look at the fuss you’ve caused. The kazoo never caused this much of an issue. Photo (CC-BY) Mark Kobayashi-Hillary.

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About Those Waves Vuvuzela Presets, Some Open Code, and Broadcasting Noise…

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Makers of Pianoteq Talk Piano Modeling, Developing for Linux

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Pianoteq is an effort to model, rather than sample, acoustic pianos and other instruments on the computer. Now in its third major release, its interface and sound generation have each matured. Using mathematical models in place of recorded sounds, an entire grand piano fits in just a few megs of space, rather than requiring several DVDs, and the software maker claims the results can be more natural and playable.

Pianoteq, which runs as do its rivals on Mac and Windows, is also unusual in providing support for the Linux operating system – something some developers have claimed isn’t practical with commercial music software. And a new “Player” addition, announced this month, makes it more affordable. In addition to software development, the team has even launched an extensive piano restoration effort:
http://www.pianoteq.com/kivir

I’ve been impressed with my time playing with Pianoteq’s software. That’s especially meaningful to me, as my background in music has been on acoustic pianos, back to when I was literally old enough to reach the keys for the first time. But I also wanted to know more about how this software developed. Its rigorous approach to modeling has attracted a lot of attention in the virtual instrument world, and the fact that it targets Linux alongside Mac and Windows challenges notions that commercial software can’t make it on the free operating system.

Pianoteq sent along some extensive answers, which I’m pleased to be able to share. Naturally, they’re proud of their software, so there is a bit of expected boasting here. (I’ll discuss more of the experience of using the tool, and the new Player version, shortly). But they also have some fascinating commentary on sound design, modeling, and the development process. In the “geeky as we want to be” spirit of this site, here’s the full scoop.

CDM: Can you talk about the background of the company? How does one make a shift from dealing with the physical instruments and tuning to thinking about mathematical models, let alone translate that into actual software?

Philippe: the Pianoteq history is strongly connected to my first job as a piano tuner. Then at the age of 31, I started a new life with basic studies in mathematics at the University of Toulouse, France. After what I prepared my PhD thesis on the parametrization of vibrating phenomena, without imagining that it would be the basis of my third life with Pianoteq. Thanks to these two skills and to an exceptional scientific environment in Toulouse, I succeeded in identifying important phenomena responsible for the generation of the piano sound and proposed a model which describes the whole interaction of the soundboard, strings, bridge and air.

Julien: I was working as an engineer at Institute of Mathematics of Toulouse, with Philippe (who was also my teacher when I was a student). My focus was on an open-source finite element package ( http://home.gna.org/getfem ) when Philippe told me about his project of piano sound synthesis. I took charge of the development of the real-time engine, and we quickly decided that we wanted to turn this research project into a commercial product. Thanks to the French law on innovation and research (1999), the support of INSA Toulouse, and the Institute of Mathematics, the start-up MODARTT was created in 2006 to sell Pianoteq, which was at that time the first fully modeled piano instrument.

Niclas: I represented many of Pianoteq’s customers of today, being a part time piano composer with a love for the piano instrument. I was updating an extensive article on digital piano technology in 2004 when someone advised me to have a look at Philippe’s research. I immediately understood its potential, which is why I suggested Philippe to assist in marketing and product development. Since then, I have participated in the product development and testing and am also in charge of sales and customer service.

Modeling the Piano with Math

I remember trying previous attempts at piano modeling and finding them interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. I think people who pick up Pianoteq have, immediately, a different experience. What’s different about this modeling approach than those that have come before – and, for that matter, why did it take until now?

Philippe: The idea of modeling musical instruments is very old and has always faced great difficulties: the complexity of physical phenomena, the sensitivity of the human ear to the slightest imperfection, and the difficulty of running a complex model in real-time. The latency needs to be so small that it gives to the musician the impression of playing a real acoustic instrument. Until now, attempts have only confirmed that the task was not easy. The state of the art of digital pianos is based on sampling technology. Each note is a recording of how it sounded at a specific moment, without taking into account the complexity of the instrument. The huge data generated by sampling can reach 40 Gbytes for a single piano. The flow rate of data transmitted from the hard drive to the sound device is too high for the current hardware capacity and it can happen that one hears crackles. [Ed.: I would say fast hard drives, optimized software streaming, and other intelligent configuration can certainly avoid crackles, but the fact that, say, a low-end hard drive might choke means that Philippe's point about data intensity here is nonetheless well taken. -PK]

Moreover, the reproduced sound lacks vividness. Hence, creating a piano model which takes into account the interaction between hammer and strings, the interaction between strings and soundboard via the bridge and the interaction of the soundboard with the air is of great interest. Based on mathematical models, Pianoteq allows parameters to be stretched as long as the model permits, resulting not only in new performance styles but also in new piano sounds. Pianoteq is thus also an innovating tool for music creation and can be useful not only to musicians but also to piano manufacturers and piano tuners for simulation and training purposes. Pianoteq makes excellence in piano available to all. Among Pianoteq users, composers and professionals in music creation are certainly the most excited with our innovation. Pianoteq offers what acoustic and sampled pianos cannot offer: new opportunities for music creation and a pure piano sound that is not altered by its environment (reverberation) or by recording devices.

Can you talk more about the model itself? I can see the components that are modeled, but – realizing we have fairly technical people among our audience – what are the basic modeling techniques?

Philippe: the modeling technique is based on various standard techniques issued from mechanics theory including modal analysis (calculation of vibration frequencies and the corresponding modes) and parametrization techniques that we developed at the university, as well as from a precise knowledge issued from my previous job as piano tuner/restorer of what is going on in a piano and what is important.

How did that approach to modeling evolve? Obviously, there’s this strong mathematical research background. But what’s the process like of translating that theory into something that’s usable? Were there mistakes or adjustments along the way?

Philippe: I don’t think there were mistakes along our model evolution, but more a constant improvement in the details taken into account by the model, looking closer to the physics of the piano and finding suddenly some simplification in the algorithms that allow to take include more details for the same computational cost or being more precise in the simulation.

Developing for Linux

How did you make the decision to support Linux in addition to Windows and Mac?

Julien: The initial prototypes for pianoteq were developed on Linux, using [audio system] JACK, with no GUI. Later, when we added a graphical interface and turned it into a VST plugin, we used VSTGUI for its interface, which is not available on Linux. However we had quite a few requests from Linux users, and we did make sure that pianoteq was running fine in WINE [an open-source implementation of Windows' APIs, allowing Windows programs to run in Linux]. During the development of Pianoteq 3, we switched to the JUCE toolkit, which is a great piece of cross-platform software. Thanks to JUCE, the Linux port was really easy to do, so we decided to give it a try and see what happens.

One complaint I hear from developers about Linux is that it’s “impossible” to do commercial development, because you “can’t” distribute binaries. Obviously, that didn’t stop you. I’ve tried Pianoteq on Fedora and Ubuntu, though, under both the real-time and default kernels, and had immediate success. Now, I imagine there’s a good bit of work that goes into making that happen. What was your experience like as a developer? Do you feel that the result is successful, that it is a usable solution for users?

Julien: This was in fact something that we also feared, that the Linux port would turn into a support nightmare. However a good example of a successful application that is distributed in binary form is Renoise. That showed us that it was possible to do. In fact Renoise also uses JUCE, but I was not aware of that fact at that time. What helps here for binary portability is that we have very few dependencies. JUCE is statically linked, so pianoteq depends on very few dynamic libraries: ALSA, X11, libc (even old versions), and basically that’s all. We had to hack some sort of weak linking for JACK in order to allow pianoteq to run even when libjack.so is not available. Of course, if you want better integration in the desktop, things get much more complicated.

What’s your own Linux testing setup like? (distro? kernel?)

Julien: Pianoteq is built on a Debian Sarge box, otherwise we generally use Ubuntu for the desktop, with the default kernel. [Ed.: The distribution Ubuntu is itself built on packages from Debian; 10.04 LTS uses Debian Testing.]

I’ve likewise been impressed with the vanilla kernel (as opposed to the “real-time” branch), which can save some setup time and configuration work. (My audio interface is a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1). Any thoughts on what setups may be most advisable? (You document some of this in the readme.)

Julien: I’ve never been lucky with the kernels labelled “rt” , and I really hate when the computer randomly hangs so I prefer to stick with default kernels. We don’t have issues with them, as long as your user account has been granted real-time priviledges. I believe that for now, the most overlooked setting for realtime audio is the CPU frequency throttling, which is a real audio performance killer, especially on the less powerful machines such as netbooks. You really need to have your cpu running at full speed 100% of the time, especially with a software like Pianoteq which needs quite a bit of CPU power.

Ed.: Before we give the realtime kernel a bad name, some of those “random hangs” were not necessarily the kernel’s fault – a bug in Ubuntu’s implementation caused the system to crash when combining the RT kernel with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, for instance. But if this sort of thing scares you, the vanilla kernel remains a strong option – it’s the default for a reason. The larger discussion is best saved for another article, but suffic,e to say, if latency-sensitive piano instrument developers are okay with the vanilla kernel, you shouldn’t feel you have to install a realtime kernel just to make music. If you want to test it, projects like Fedora’s Planet CCRMA can make it easier to use.

Are you finding that there is some positive response to the Linux version?

Julien: Yes, very positive response. In fact, a bit more than what we expected at the beginning. Approximately 4% of our customers are using the Linux version.

I could even imagine it working on netbooks. Based on load, it appears perfectly workable, which means a really cheap ultra-portable piano you can take anywhere.

We spent some time to make sure that the latest versions could run on netbooks, altough with very high CPU load (80% or more). However I’d recommend to use a more powerful laptop in order to have more room for the cpu. Ed.: Given the range of Atom netbooks out there now, I may have to test some of the newer models on this.]

There’s not currently a Linux plug-in version, correct? I’ve been just as happy using JACK [a standard for routing audio between applications], but what went into that decision?

Julien: Right, no plug-in version on Linux for now. The problem is that “plug-in” may mean any combination of VST, DSSI, and LV2. VST would be the easiest for us, but very few hosts support it ( basically only proprietary hosts such as renoise and energyxt, and also jost). DSSI is said to be obsolete, while being not to hard to support (except the GUI has to run in a separate process..). LV2 is said to be the future, but
it seems to be quite complicated to fit a “vst-like” plugin into an lv2 plug-in. We have not yet taken a decision. It is already enough of a pain to support the numerous plug-in formats on Mac and Windows. We will probably add support for JACK sessions quite soon.

In Use

Initially, having so much power over sound could be overwhelming – looking at the number of parameters you can adjust in the real-time mathematical model. Aside from the presets (which themselves sound pretty terrific), how would you suggest someone go about beginning to explore the options? Is there a workflow that makes sense for approaching adjusting the sound?

Answer from Pianoteq:
http://www.pianoteq.com/faq?category=pianoteq_working

Ed.: So I should have read the *** manual! Here’s their advice:

If you need to adapt the piano sound you could for example try adjusting the hammer hardness (2) to achieve a different brightness of the hammer strokes. Increasing unison width (3) makes it a bit out of tune (resembling certain acoustic pianos). The new powerful sound recording feature (4) lets you place up to 5 virtual microphones anywhere around the piano to achieve ultimate ambience and tone colour. The dynamics and velocity curve (5) will most likely need to be adjusted to the keyboard used in a MIDI file performance.

Indeed, this commentary makes sense. Hammer hardness is something that could be adjusted in the maintenance of an actual piano. Since you listen to a software piano model as though it is amplified, adjusting mic placement (as on a number of piano software emulations) is a no-brainer. And dynamics and velocity curve are essential not only for MIDI files, but if your keyboard controller lacks these controls onboard.

As my friend Jim Aikin noted in his review of Pianoteq – why would you adjust the speed of sound? (I suppose you could account for different altitudes; I could replicate the Aspen Music Festival!)

Julien: Well, why not ! Being in a virtual world gives you access to some parameters that cannot be easily modified in the real world, if they give interesting variations of the sound, then they are worth being adjusted!

One small note – it seems the metronome is not connected to the playback and recording, which means that MIDI sequences won’t export to SMF correctly? (Or is this a Linux bug?)

Julien: Yes, it’s not a bug, the MIDI recording and playback abilities of the standalone application are very minimalistic. It is best to use a real sequencer for serious work.

Where can people read more about the featured historical instruments?

http://www.pianoteq.com/cimbalom
http://www.pianoteq.com/grimaldi
http://www.pianoteq.com/blanchet
http://www.pianoteq.com/schmidt
http://www.pianoteq.com/graf
http://www.pianoteq.com/cp-80

There are some fascinating add-ons that aren’t pianos. Is it possible at some point that other sound designers might be able to use the sound engine to design their own instruments?

Julien: We believe that Pianoteq PRO is already a first step in that direction, with its ability to edit each parameter note by note.

How are users using this onstage and in the studio? What sorts of users have you found using the product?

Niclas: There are many composers and keyboardists that use Pianoteq, from amateurs to professionals, on stage as well as in the recording studios. We have presented a few reference users here: http://www.pianoteq.com/references

Thanks to the Pianoteq guys for being thorough in the answers. I know not everyone responds in the same way in regards to the perceived quality of the model, but my own feeling is that the effort makes the instrument terrifically playable and responsive. The best way to see for yourself is to give the demo a go, and listen to the results. I’ll follow up more on this instrument, and how it’s become a central part of my Linux music workstation, soon. Let us know if you have questions for the developers I missed.

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Makers of Pianoteq Talk Piano Modeling, Developing for Linux

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EMS Synthi, Recreated in Max, then Controlled with a Webcam

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

The headline says it all. Oh, sure, as if it isn’t enough to recreate the legendary EMS Synthi synth – one of the most creative vintage analog instruments ever devised – this artist takes it one step further, controlling parameters with a piece of colored paper tracked by a webcam. It’s an achievement of sheer patching genius, taken one step wackier.

The patch is entitled Le Synthé V5; the creator is Pierre Couprie. And yes, you can download this for Windows and Mac – even Mac PowerPC. Cost: US$15/EUR10, which is, I must say, insanely cheap.

Video in French with English subtitles.

Pierre Couprie | Le Synthé V5 [Description, download]

Thanks to Lee Ray for sending this in.

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EMS Synthi, Recreated in Max, then Controlled with a Webcam

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Syntheway releases Aeternus Brass

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

6th April 2010: Syntheway Virtual Musical Instruments has announced the release of Aeternus Brass, a new Virtual Brass Instrument, featuring solo Trumpet, Cornet, Trombone, Tuba, French Horn, Flugelhorn as well as Br…

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Syntheway releases Aeternus Brass

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XILS-lab releases PolyKB

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

4th April 2010: XILS-lab has announced the release of polyKB, the recreation of a very rare, very powerful, polyphonic synthesizer released in the ’80s by the French company RSF. Because of the unique sounds, the RSF…

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XILS-lab releases PolyKB

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PolyKB is out

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Lately we’ve covered XILS-lab’s work in a couple of articles: a review of their VCS3 emulation, XILS 3 (by the way, they’re offering a special deal to ANR readers, 25% off the regular price, read more here) and an interview with its founder, Xavier Oudin.

As mentioned in the interview, a new product has just been added to the company’s catalogue. It’s called PolyKB, in their words “a recreation of a very rare, very powerful, polyphonic synthesizer released in the 80′s by the french company RSF. Because of the unique sounds, the RSF Kobol synthesizers were used by J.M Jarre, Hans Zimmer, Depeche Mode, Vince Clark, Vangelis, and many more. In true XILS-Labs fashion, the PolyKB is true to the original sound but with a very modern twist.
The PolyKB is a subtractive synthesizer based on two waveform morphing, aliasing free oscillators and a self oscillating 4 poles low pass filter.
The oscillators create a large part of the sound of this synthesizer. But along with the help of of very complete modulation section and the filter recreating a standard analog

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Off-the-record: XILS-lab

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

XILS-lab is a new French company, focusing on virtual instruments with an analog touch.
A few weeks ago we’ve reviewed their first release, XILS 3, a synth inspired to one of any synth lover’s wet dream, the EMS VCS3.

EDIT: we’ve just partnered with XILS-lab and they’re offering a special deal to ANR reader, 25% off the regular price. Get XILS 3 at 111 euro, click here to read more…

While I’m usually not too keen on the emulation trend, I have to confess XILS 3 is really a brilliant and inspiring musical instrument. It captures the spirit of an age where unpredictability and non-linearities were the norm, adding all the goodies you would expect from a modern software. Mission accomplished!
We’ve asked a few questions to Xavier Oudin, the man behind XILS-lab, read on…

Hi Xavier, would you like to tell us something more about your company?

XILS-lab, based in Grenoble, France, is a music software company I started around the end of 2008.
Having developed some of the best-known virtual instruments and effects on the market for Digigram, Arturia and various companies over the past 20 years, I’m now bringing my passion for music, audio, sound and instruments to my own company.
In order to make top quality software, I decided to work with highly qualified professionals, including Yannick Bonnefoy (graphic design) and many other musicians and sound designers. I think of these collaborations as a sort of expertise network for music software creation. XILS-lab is a node of this network, where I can focus on my main job, the development of new products and concepts
For all the commercial and marketing aspect of its development, XILS-lab works with Michael Logue from MiiM Corp for North American and Ian Morton from Smart Distribution for the European zone.

You mentioned that you worked for Arturia. Why did you leave? Is there something about the synths you helped develop that you’d like to change today, if you had the chance?

After more than 6 years of working for Arturia, I felt that I was always doing the same things and I wanted to achieve something else. So I decided to leave, and began working on this new adventure. After some time spent developing effects with Eiosis, learning a lot about filtering algorithms, I came back to my main passion, synthesis.
My time at Arturia was quite a while ago. They’ve since released new versions and I can’t say anything about their products now.
XILS-lab algorithms are based on important improvements of some well known algorithms, different from those I used when I worked at Arturia.
That’s why the sound is not the same, even if something of the same spirit can be shown.

Making the XILS 3 (inspired by the VCS-3) and now the PolyKB (based on a more obscure eighties synth called PolyKobol), it seems you enjoy challenges.
Why do you think nobody has tried to re-create such beasts of the past and what do they have to offer that can’t be replicated by more modern synths?

Challenges are what keep us awake and vibrant. So yes, I enjoy the challenge, especially when creating musical instruments which have never been remade, or that have been realized without enough features to make them all they could be.
There are already some other soft synthesizers that have been created, based on the VCS3/AKS architecture, and the challenge for me was to keep its very special and acclaimed character, which is so difficult to reproduce in the digital domain.

With the polyKobol, things are different; The RSF synthesizer was the only analog sound machine capable of a creating a modulated morphing waveform, creating wonderful new sounds. The challenge was to recreate this specific oscillator in the digital domain without aliasing, keeping all the modulation and synchronization features as well as its warm and big sound.
By the way, I’m not sure RSF and Kobol was that obscure – J.M. Jarre used 8 connected Kobol expanders for his China concerts, it was only the polyKobol that wasn’t well-known due to the factory problems RSF had.

I have a love-hate relationship with your XILS 3. While I love its organic and lively sounds, I really find the matrix too small. Do you think a future release could offer a different GUI approach?

The size of the matrix seems to be a problem for some users and this will be addressed in one of the next updates. A first obvious method should be to increase the overall size of the XILS 3. For those who work with high resolution, this could be more comfortable. Other GUI approaches could be taken if this doesn’t work.

While reading up on the history of the VCS-3, i noted that the synth was famously inconsistent, especially in the reproduction of sound – it seems that it was almost impossible to re-create the exact same sound. What about adding some sort of ‘inconsistency’ element to the architecture of XILS 3? Like a selection of ‘broken’ patch pins, for example?

Adding some more drift or creating a special keyboard follow to detune it in a sort of random way could be interesting. While I want to keep the sound and the character of analog synthesizer, I don’t think there is interest in keeping some of the more disagreeable things. For example – emulating the time a analog synthesizer has to be powered up before being used correctly and in tune with their other plug-ins wouldn’t be appreciated by users.

Now that most classic synths of the past have been covered, I’d actually love to see skilled developers working on original concepts, possibly more performance oriented (i.e. with a less traditional GUI). What’s your take on the touch-based synths developed for iPhone, for example?

I developed some programs for iPhone and began to adapt a synthesizer for this platform. I think it is a funny controller, but the available CPU power doesn’t allow a very wide range of possibilities and keeps the application on the toy side.
But I agree that the way programs are controlled by the iPhone, especially using a touch screen and an accelerometer, is very interesting. When more powerful computers get these kinds of control parameters (a 19 inch touch screen and an accelerometer wireless mouse for instance, or better some sort of sensitive gloves) things will be different.

About classical synthesizer VS new oriented sound machine, I think both are important and are worth developing. Each classical synthesizer has its own character and is a source of inspiration for the user. There are a lot of machines waiting to have their chance to inspire creative people: we just need to make their best features available again, setting their issues aside.
But I’m thinking of a new plug-in with a totally new approach. I just need the time to improve the concept and develop it, keeping in mind my main purpose: creating an easy, powerful and inspiring musical instrument for musicians.

Which are the artists (just a few names) and musical genres you’re into? And how, if it happens, do your musical passions influence your products?

I love classical music, especially Schubert, Mozart and Brahms, but when I was younger, I enjoyed listening to Pink Floyd, Zappa and Ange. It was also during this time that synthesizer sounds grabbed my attention, with Tangerine Dream and Vangelis.
Much more than my listening interests, I found that playing the clarinet for years led to my understanding that the synthesizer IS a musical instrument, provided its sound keeps freedom, and influences the development of my products.

What are the weirdest/funniest requests you’ve received from users?

I never receive very weird requests from users; it’s usually requests that I can’t achieve, involving CPU power or GUI possibilities.
For instance, one request was for getting the XILS 3 reverb polyphonic, which would mean getting 18 instances of the reverb running all the time (due to the tail, it is not really possible to disable voice after the note off). Another was a request for a total polyphonic sequencer including the clock management (for sequences with various clock speeds and step numbers running at the same time). This would be funny, but creating a GUI to make it easy to use would not be so obvious (although I may keep this idea in mind, to maybe offer a part of this feature for a future version of the polyKB).

Maybe the weirdness comes from myself; a musician once told me I’m insane…

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Off-the-record: XILS-lab

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