Results for Percussa

Some interesting things I found recently:

# Audio Cubes: Tangible Interface for Audiovisual Creation, a Percussa workshop

AudioCubes designer Bert Schiettecatte will be hosting a series of one day workshops at his private workspace, for a select number of artists, starting November 10^th 2009.

Workshop description: Starting with some theory, you will discover the history of AudioCubes, tangible interfaces, and their applications. The practical part of the workshop will let you master the technical aspects of using AudioCubes in sound, music and visual creation, and let you work on your own project using AudioCubes.

Topics covered:

• history of audiocubes
• overview of tangible interfaces
• why were audiocubes created / fundamental ideas
• how audiocubes work
• the audiocubes hardware
• audiocubes software for live performance, sound design and music production
• how to use audiocubes to control MIDI software and hardware
• how to MIDI map audiocubes
• how to use AudioCubes with Max/MSP

# Plogue Chipsounds review – retrogaming nostalgia

Torley takes a look at Plogue Chipsounds.

Tom Shear @ Waveformless shares his thoughts in his Chipsounds review

What excites me most about Chipsounds is the possibilities for the future. I’d love to see a couple options that weren’t present in the original machine introduced here. A filter section would definitely expand the possibilities (a handful of chips have filters available as their chip-specific settings), a more useful and flexible Portamento function would be great, and, as mentioned before, a wider array of effects would be a nice addition. That said, imposing the limitations of the original chips is not a bad thing in my opinion. It encourages the same kind of creative thinking and workarounds the original programmers used to use back in the day to get sounds you wouldn’t expect to be possible with such limited means. Plogue has approached this softsynth with a palpable sense of reverence and their affection for these outdated sound makers shines through in abundance. An exceptionally fun and unique instrument! [8/10]

# Veqtor’s corner: DIY Flux Capacitor Expander

Göran Sandström writes:

This demonstration uses my crude DIY flux capacitor for the Livewire AFG, basically 5 switches and 10 jacks corresponding to the flux cap pins. Two pin pairs are attenuated by two VCA's controlled by the makenoise/wiard wogglebug, crosspatched with the malekko/wiard noisering, which drives the melodic noodling, via a A-189-1 used as a bitcrusher, to perform cheap quantizing.

The sine output is sent to an input of a makenoise QMMG, driven by the A-143-1 envelope. About halfways through, a feedback path from the animated pulses, animated by A-143-1 LFOs, into the A-106-6 xpander filter (wogglebug controlled) goes into one of the pins on the flux cap expander, resulting in strange noises and unpredictable overtones.

# Seeed Studio DSO Nano, Pocket Digital Storage Oscilloscope – Review

Blair Thompson reviews the Seeed Studio DSO Nano:

For those starting out in electronics as a hobby there are some tools that are required for the job. To begin with, a soldering iron, some screw drivers, perhaps tweezers and of course a multi-meter are probably what you would consider essential.

After a while though, you are going to be looking for more. Amongst the other goodies out there to help you on your way are oscilloscopes. In the past, advice on forums has always tended more towards purchasing a second hand scope. These tend to be had for around £100 on places like E-bay and most certainly will be a few years old if available at this sort of price. Well that is changing and I was excited yesterday to get my hands on a “Scope” that may just re-write the forum advice. Meet the Nano DSO from Seed Studio…

# PetSynth

Chiron Bramberger turns his synth for the Commodore PET open source.

Petsynth features a two-octave keyboard layout, selectable note length, many selectable octaves, selectable pulse-width, vibrato, distortion, and noise or “drum mode” depending on how you use it.

All this without adding or hacking the Commodore PET in any way. Plus, it’s compiling from C, so it’s FAST – with very low latency.

The drum sounds are also crazy weird. You can also set the vibrato so high it sounds more like a laser gun or alien telephone.

# Kseniya Simonova – Sand Animation – Ukraine’s Got Talent 2009 Winner

Kseniya Simonova is an Ukrainian artist who won Ukraine's Got Talent 2009. She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII.

More on Kseniya Simonova

Some interesting things I found recently:

# AudioCubes DeckaBridge

Percussa’s AudioCubes meets Deckadance in DeckaBridge, a software designed with the digital DJ in mind.

Deckabridge is a software application developed specifically for the Percussa AudioCubes hardware. It lets you use the AudioCubes with Deckadance, well known professional DJ software from Image-Line, the company that created FL Studio.

DeckaBridge allow you to:

• Control the transport (CUE, seek fwd / backw)
• Control EQ and effect sections (bit crusher, lowpass filter, …)
• Control loop length and enable/disable
• Control various parts of the relooper beat slicer (a unique feature in DJ software!)

Download DeckaBridge here.

# Arduino playground – Un looper pour guitare électrique (French)

Arduino based Guitar Looper:

Here's how to make a little pedal for electric guitar. The idea is to connect the Arduino pedals, and using software to control sound processing, we made ourselves with Pure Data. Here I show you an example of a looper, but it can also be a rack of effects without problem.

# Wild Musical Inventions from Berlin Hackday

Peter Kirn writes:

The Berlin Hack Day, which wound up earlier today, offers still more projects focused on the creation side of music hacking. Having Ableton and Native Instruments as sponsors likely helped the mood. And as you’d expect from one of the world capitals of creative hacking, Berliners don’t disappoint.

Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even worked out a way to turn NI’s Maschine into a rhythm game, complete with Street Fighter sounds.

Percussa has released LoopShaper, a software application developed specifically for Percussa AudioCubes.

LoopShaper is a standalone application, hosts your VST instruments, and lets you interact with them in a hands on fashion through AudioCubes. With LoopShaper, AudioCubes and a VST instrument (some are freely available), you have everything you need to create interesting sound material and loops.

The software will loop and record, and will let you record your interactions and play over them continuously. There are various controls available for the loop memory and to freeze the loop once you are satisfied with it and only want to control the notes or the parameter changes, for example. There is also a loop memory deck available to store and recall loops, which facilitates using LoopShaper with live performance or with lengthy recording sessions.

The resulting sound can be recorded to WAV files on your computer’s harddisk. If necessary you can import the files into your favourite DAW for further editing and mixing.
LoopShaper works with ASIO for low-latency sound output. If your audio interface doesn’t support ASIO you can always use the built-in sound card of your computer using a freely available ASIO driver such as ASIO4ALL.

To help with timing, there is a built-in metronome in loopshaper.

LoopShaper is available as freeware for Windows PC and Mac (requires two Percussa AudioCubes).

More information: Percussa / LoopShaper

The Percussa blog has some interesting new AudioCubes things Percussa is bringing to NAMM 2009.

We will be at the upcoming Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, CA, USA. Come visit us in Hall A, Booth 7007 to see our latest developments!

Percussa at NAMM 2009

• AudioCubes VST Wrapper 1.0 — Existing VST plugins or instruments in your DAW can be instantly used with AudioCubes through included VST wrappers from Percussa. The wrapper is compatible with popular DAW software such as IL FL Studio, Ableton Live, …
• AudioCubes Loop Shaper 1.0 — Producing sounds or music directly with the cubes is possible through the included sound design software from Percussa (load VST plugins directly in this application without running a DAW or other software).
• DeckaBridge 1.0 — Deckadance, a popular professional digital DJ application by Image-Line, can easily be used with AudioCubes through included Deckabridge software from Percussa.

Check the Percussa blog for details.

Some interesting things I found recently:

# iPhone / iPod Touch Applications: Sid Player – Sid Player brings you the sound of the Commodore C64 to your iPhone and the iPod Touch. Enjoy game classics such as 'Commando', 'Arkanoid', 'The last V8' or listen to the music of 'Rob Hubbard', 'Martin Galway', and many others.

# Libcube: Use the AudioCubes with your own programs

Libcube is a library written in C (available for Mac OS X and Windows) which aims to be a library that is robust, easy to learn, and that covers most the functionalities the cubes are offering.

We think that this component makes a good foundation that will help AudioCubes enthusiasts to develop innovative and creative new applications. We even have some new stuff in stores, but I’ll let Bert show you that when it’s time …

# PrePal – The worlds largest online listing of used musical instrument prices, updated every day.

# Say it with Pictures – Eight programs that convert images to music.

# MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections

Anita Lillie writes:

This is a blog for my Masters thesis at the MIT Media Lab, on a music browser called MusicBox. In this blog, you can find screenshots and videos of the project, which show the interactive maps that MusicBox creates.

That lovely visualization in the bottom right looks familiar!

Some interesting things I found recently:

# An interview with Richard Devine

Percussa's Bert Schiettecatte writes:

A while ago we went to Winter NAMM (in January 2008), to show the AudioCubes. We were lucky to hang out with our good friends Kyle and Ryan from Subtractive, they have a studio in Santa Monica and do a lot of great sound design and composition work, while at the same time producing film and working on their album (see the Test Short Starfish remix contest from a while ago, which was featured on Percussa’s main website).

Ryan and Kyle have been AudioCube users since the very beginning, I think they have serial number 10 on their cubes. They introduced us to Richard Devine, and naturally a discussion about his work and music technology emerged.

# true – The new sound, light and dance performance, true is a stage performance piece that explores the relationship between the brain and the reality we face, and is, performed by two performers.

# ISM: The Quantum Hall Effects — impulse responses from nanospace for convolution reverb. Tony Dubshot writes:

After many years of fundamental research in cooperation with the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory (Leiden Institute of Physics) the ISM studio proudly presents 'the sound of nanospace'. It's all about levels of magnification and breaking down the wall between analog and digital sound. Quantum hall fx are nothing less than a paradigm shift in the perception of time and space.

You can download a 27.1 MB archive of 24bit impulse responses released under a Creative Commons license from the ISM blog.

# SOUNDS.BUTTER Visible Sound – The "Visible Sound" project attempts to create a physical version of the sound around it by sewing sound waves in realtime. Although this was just a concept, we like ways of making invisible objects like sound waves into tangible forms.