We had organized a workshop named “Bounce to App”, following results from our last years workshop in San Francisco “Rethinking the Digital Audio Workstation”. The general outcome of the lively and also entertaining discussion was that the boundaries between playing computer games and listening to music are vanishing at a rapid speed, although the music industries, especially labels and publishers struggle to follow.

Our panelists are among the few that have paved this path in the recent years, and shared interesting insights and anecdotes into the interactive music business.

(From left to right) Martin MacMillan, CEO of Bounce Mobile, the creator of the mobile music remix application Fireplayer shared his insights into negotiations with labels, artists and publishers when it comes to the question: “Hey, that’s a nice song you have there. We would like to let our customers remix that and share it with their friends through facebook. Is that allright?” (Hint: “Well, no problem, good Sir” was not the first answer he heard). Since more than a year, however, he was asking this very question to probably quite a few people, and quite a lot actually did agree to let the listener remix their songs.

Martin Roth, CTO of RjDj, the creator of “not apps, but sonic experiences” – according to their website – and the popular Inception App shared expert knowledge on the technical backgrounds in terms of audio processing power (and the lack thereof) and sensory capabilities of todays ubiquitous mobile devices.

Jörn Loviscach, our trusted panelists in all things scientific research looked deeply into the “Desiderata for Music App Authoring Software”. Because as already the title of the workshop suggested, there is no direct publishing path from the current music production tools into a (mobile) application. He looked into the authoring tools of the desktop publishing and the game industries, which have already started to implement the “Make an App from this” – button, and emphasized the specifics and requirements of a still to-be-built easy to use authoring software for interactive applications.

Not atypical for London, the panel discussion was prepared and carried on in the typical locations.

Soundtorch lets you browse through your audio collection extremely fast. It is driven by the C.A.S.E. (Computer Aided Sound Exploration) engine, a sophisticated suite of algorithms that analyze and intelligently classify your audio collection.

get it at www.soundtorch.com.

(From right to left) Allan Saego suggested a greater review of the design of future DAWs by applying heuristic evaluation principles, such as put together by Nielsen and Molich. Bernard Mont-Reynaud suggested that DAWs should get more auditory intelligence: If a DAW would be aware of the content that the user is editing, it could rid the user from many elaborate re-occurring tasks such as finding the best take out of several recordings. Joern Loviscach shared his observations on “Impedance Mismatches” in common DAW software: As audio content is essentially non-visual, audio editors are much harder to design than for instance dtp, image or video editing software. Last but not least, Guy McNally, after admitting that it might partially be his fault that today’s DAWs are so overcomplicated suggested a radical change to the resulting output of DAW software. With the rise of the smartphone, he suggested, the days of a linear, non-interactive audio experience should finally be over, and he implied that DAWs from now on should create apps rather than songs.

From here again thanks to all our panelists. Of course we couldn’t have such a exciting discussion without reviewing a bit of DAW history, so here for your viewing pleasure, from the the days when screens were monochrome:

We are also honored that our CEO Michael Hlatky was elected for chairing the AES Technical Committee on Human Factors in Audio Systems. We hereby also want to thank William Martens for his great work as the prior chair.

The secret sauce is unexpected: analog air compressions, otherwise known as “sound.”

ABC’s iPad app for the television show My Generation creates a seamless, two-screen, interactive television experience by bridging a cable/satellite connection and an iPad, two digital devices, by measuring decidedly analog sound waves using the iPad’s microphone. The app looks for certain contours in the audio signal that the Neilsen television ratings firm uses to monitor broadcasts, so that it knows when to display a particular poll or other item linking up with a precise moment in the show.

Wired’s editor Eliot Van Buskirk really seems to dislike the little video ABC put up their site to showcast this ingenious TV companion.

[...] Surface is out there now. It’s in very small, specific, niche segments. The reason for that is the complexity of the technology and the cost of manufacturing. What it needs to work is such that it’s simply not suitable, even if was cheap, for broad audiences. However, it’s out there now while we work on perfecting it.

Right now it has five cameras in it and a projector and a bunch of other stuff. It’s just a lot. What will happen is that Surface will become no thicker than a sheet of glass. That will more or less be true. It’s not going to have any cameras or projectors because the cameras will be embedded in the device itself.

The best way to think about it is like a big LCD where there’s a fourth pixel in every triad. So there’s red, green, and blue pixels giving you light, and a fourth pixel which is a sensor that will capture stuff; go the other direction. [...]

Source: The Globe and Mail

Is this going to be just a really big version of the iPad?

I think that the Media Computing Group’s Madgets are a step in the righ direction. Tactile objects that provide haptic feedback, in combination with multi-touch enabled devices is the way to go, not only for music applications.

We recently discussed whether the kids of tomorrow, growing up with their iPhones and Androids, will still know and appreciate physical faders and knobs. We don’t know for sure, but we’ll sure miss them!

We also gave a seminar about “Novel User Interfaces for Audio Retrieval and Processing” at the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary’s University in London. Thanks to Anssi Klapuri for organizing this event.

Michael presenting the RadioMap Hack (Background) and the feature extraction service running on his laptop.

We intend to do something about streaming radio discovery, but not sure yet where it will finally lead us. I will post more here during and after the Hack Day, so stay tuned.

[EDIT]: First half of the Hack Day event is nearly over, lot’s of people here and in the meantime sleeping round me. We had lot’s of problems today: At the Guardian, nothing but port 80 was open, so we could not access our servers, and stream nothing but 20 or so radio stations. And at the Hub, the network is sooo slow that we can’t really stream anything. Anyways, a radio stream proxy to the rescue. So hopefully tomorrow we can go on in the Guardian offices with a sufficiently fast connection and lots of  high-port online radio stations coming in on 80 relayed through our servers.

[EDIT2]: The Hack Day went really well. A description of our hack, a web radio browser is online at the Hack Day Wiki. Thanks also to Paul Lamere for mentioning us  in his Music Machinery Blog. You can see some pictures of the Hack Day on Thomas Bonte’s Flickr set.

Damn do I look tired. Off to sleep now.

After moving into our new premises in the heart of the city (make sure to update your address-books) we decided to give our website a little facelift.

We now have an RSS feed to keep You informed about ongoing developments.

The list of projects has also been extended and provides an overview of what we have been working on over the past months.