Andrew Pask

I just received an email from our friend Lippold Haken. Here's a video of his amazingly expressive musical controller, with software written entirely in Max.

You can find out more about this incredible musical instrument 

This video is a demonstration of the VlnVlaCelBass sound on the Continuum Fingerboard, performed by Edmund Eagan. This EaganMatrix string sound has been programmed to take advantage of the Continuum's  fast and accurate pressure sensing. Playing this sound with low velocity finger movement will create a smooth gentle start to each note. After the note starts volume and timbre changes can be applied by changing the pressure on the surface.

When played with a harder finger velocity, the sound gets more aggressive in it's attack. This is due to the inclusion of timbre data that represents a real string attack.

The name of the sound includes the four names of the orchestral string family, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, reflecting the combined pitch range of these instruments. The sound is equally convincing and expressive at all pitches, even at the extremes.
Pressing the first foot pedal activates a mono mode which makes it easier to play fast monophonic intervals, such as whole tone or minor third trills.

The overall tonal character of the instrument can be changed by moving the Size barrel. Lower values of Size will create a larger sounding instrument, higher values a smaller one.

The VlnVlaCelBass uses the GrainSilo in the EaganMatrix, with a timbre element called Vla Sustained. The original source for this timbre element came from the first 100 milliseconds of a single note preformed by Rudolf Haken on a Pellegrina 5 string viola. This 100 milliseconds contains essential attack and sustain spectra. Through the power of the EaganMatrix formula structures, control of the timbre elements reference point, fundamental, spectral rolloff, spectral shift, and amplitude is mapped to the playing surface. The three dimensional performance of each finger can translate into exquisite control of this finite piece of data.

VlnVlaCelBass

You can find out more about this incredible musical instrument on Lippold's website.

expressive-musical-controller

This is encouragingly sophisticated, bringing us continually back to the focus on 

 data as the key source of expressive intent and communication. Unfortunately it also foregrounds the dichotomy of idiomatic musical/instrumental gestures: the huge range of the Continuum causes extremes of the pitch/timbre spectrum to sound [to my string-player's ears] contextually unnatural. If I was a pianist, however, I would be positively tumescent with anticipation of buying one!

This is encouragingly sophisticated, bringing us continually back to the focus on control gesture data as the key source of expressive intent and communication. Unfortunately it also foregrounds the dichotomy of idiomatic musical/instrumental gestures: the huge range of the Continuum causes extremes of the pitch/timbre spectrum to sound [to my string-player's ears] contextually unnatural. If I was a pianist, however, I would be positively tumescent with anticipation of buying one!

Expressive Musical Controller