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David Zicarelli

, a music hardware and software company located near Leuven, Belguim. The company's first product is Audio Cubes, a beautiful and unusual controller system that can be used in powerful ways in conjunction with Max/MSP and other software.

A tool for creating and performing electronic music and sound, which aims to stimulate creativity and lower user interface barriers.

Can you give me an example of the kind performing interface I can make?

If you use the AudioCubes out of the box as a MIDI controller, you can map relationships between the cubes and distances to trigger and continuous controller information.

For example, you can use a pair of cubes and let one cube detect where the other cube is and send a trigger when that changes. If the cube is on the left of the other one, play MIDI note C4, and if it's on the other side you could play note C5. You can sense the distance to your hand also and map that to a continuous controller value. Of course this is not the limit, the cubes are configurable however you want to use them.

 you have an external available which lets you communicate with the cubes over USB. The configuration patches are available when you buy your set of AudioCubes, so you have an example of how to use the external.

You can send the cubes simple commands like change colour, set behaviour, set parameter, etc.

Is there one cube that is connected to the computer using USB while the others talk to it wirelessly? How far apart can they be?

If you want to send signals to your computer then one needs to be connected with a USB cable. you can use multiple "receiving" stations if you want. How far apart they can be depends on the software it is running and how and where you are using it, but most of the time this is around 40 cm (about 16 inches).

If you use the cubes as a MIDI controller, how do you get the MIDI out?

The external in Max/MSP gets you high rate sensor info which you can convert to MIDI rate stuff. There is a patch you get with the cubes that can do the conversion and send out MIDI. So if you have a hardware MIDI interface you can send that information to your external MIDI synths. Eventually there might also be an AudioCube that has a MIDI port. We are also looking into OSC.

Do I receive information from each cube as a separate stream of data, like a MIDI controller, or do I get streams of information about the spatial relationship between the cubes and other properties of all the cubes as a group?

You can get both types of information depending on what the cubes are doing. If one cube sends data about its other cubes nearby you get spatial information. If you just have one cube connected and measure distance to your hand for example, then it's more of a classical MIDI controller.

You can control the colour from Max/MSP. The external supports a colour message similar to the colour picker. Of course any MIDI gear capable of sending continuous controllers can control the colours too (red, green and blue channels available for creating up to 4096 combinations).

Is it possible to make a cube change color in response to sound or some other control information?

Yes, you can create colour pattern "sequences" quite easily using continous controller envelopes, for example.

Can you describe one or two examples of work people have done with the cubes that you particularly like?

We had various public events in which we let people use the cubes to make music / sound. One example was in December of 2004, at the MUHKA in Antwerp (a museum for contemporary art). Peter Swinnen, a composer from Belgium, used an early version of the AudioCubes in an art installation. Over 270 people stopped by that day and it was a big success. The cubes really stimulate people to experiment with sound and music.

Another event held recently was a workshop invited by Vancouver New Music in Canada and conducted by Kim Cascone at Video-in/Video-Out. One group of musicians in the workshop used over 16 cubes together to build a sound generating/processing network which created a drone-like sound which constantly evolved. I was really surprised how they put the tools together to create their installation.

We're also getting increasing interest now in using the cubes as a MIDI Controller for live performance. Artists and performers are welcome to get in touch and talk about their work.

What resources do you have available so people can learn more about the cubes? How do you sell them and how much do they cost?

We are working on more video material and tutorials so people get a more in depth view of how you can use the AudioCubes. You can see demos online at 

You can also send us an email, let us know where you are geographically, and we'll let you know if there is a retailer (or existing customer) where you can go see the system.

We sell through the website for 599 EUR per set of 4 cubes. We're also talking to select retailers to offer them to their customers.

I heard that there is some possibility for the cubes to do some kind of DSP processing. Tell me how that works.

You can let the cubes do lo-fi sound generating / processing also. You can connect them to your computer and assign a "behaviour" (= signal object like in Max/MSP), disconnect them, and point the cubes at each other and have them communicate sound signals or controllers.

The cubes use a mixed digital /analog signal processing system so you can get sounds specific to the cubes.

Tell me a little bit about your background and how you came up with this concept?

I've had a dream of designing technology for electronic music for as long as I can remember. I got my first gear when I was in high school. I went to study computer science at the university in Brussels and then got a Master's at CCRMA, Stanford University.

I came up with the AudioCubes as a reaction to the knobs and displays on existing electronic music tools. I wanted to be able to create sounds and music by manipulating objects instead of staring at a computer. Of course computers will always be necessary to record what you create, and some information is best displayed using a display.

Do you have any plans for other products you can tell us about?

Yes, I have a few things on the drawing board. Keep an 

Bert Schiettecatte is the founder of Percussa, a music hardware and software company located near Leuven, Belguim. The company's first product is Audio Cubes, a beautiful and unusual controller system that can be used in powerful ways in conjunction with Max/MSP and other software. Read more about Audio Cubes in this article.

an-interview-with-bert-schiettecatte-about-audiocubes

An Interview with Bert Schiettecatte about AudioCubes

Marsha Vdovin

Performance and Education
New Ways of Transcoding Media

Interview footage by Sue Costabile and edited by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74.

Cycling74 Perspectives: Luke DuBois

I first became aware of Luke DuBois when I heard his band’s CD Freight Elevator Quartet. Later, we met when he did custom MSP programming for the filmmaker Toni Dove. I was intrigued by the contrast of his knowledge and experience vs. his boyish demeanor. Luke DuBois might look like a college student but that impression changes the minute he opens his mouth. He is a Fellow at the Computer Music Center at Columbia University in New York City and teaches at NYU. Luke is an expert with Max/MSP/Jitter and the intersection of music and image interaction.

I began the interview by asking Luke about his childhood...

I grew up in New Jersey, moving to London, England when I was eleven. I have three siblings who are much older, so it was a bit like having five parents. When I was nine I asked my parents for a bike and they bought me a computer, so I guess my subsequent career makes sense.

What was you first music making experience?

My first music-making experience, I guess, was in elementary school when I tried to build a zither out of rubber-bands. Though that wasn't a particularly successful project, it did give me some insight into how difficult it is to create a musical instrument. After that, there was a pretty big lull until high school when I took up playing bass.

What kind of music did you play and listen to in High School?

I played in a lot of rock bands, as well as one pretty serious rave-n-roll (Happy Mondays, etc.) group. A lot of the music I listened to in high school (new wave, etc.) is disturbingly back in vogue now, so I've been spending a lot of time having deja vu when I go see live music in New York.

It started out horribly, as I was a pretty miserable engineering student and had other priorities (dating, etc.) than learning everything there was to know about electricity. My break came when I discovered the Electronic Music Center (now the Computer Music Center) at Columbia and met Brad Garton. It literally changed my life; I jumped ship and started studying music there, eventually graduating ten years later with my doctorate in composition.

Did you have any significant musical experiences (making or experiencing) in high school or undergrad?

In high school the main thing that was important to me was the collaborative process of music-making, which I always work best within... I've never been completely comfortable with solo performance, and I think that's a result of having my formative musical outings in bands instead of alone.

In college, the CMC at Columbia (as I mentioned earlier) literally changed my life in so many ways. Being around a community of people who were literally designing their own tools (hardware, software, etc.) to make music was incredible, and Brad had created an incredibly generous and meritocratic atmosphere that was incredible to work in, so you never felt awkward about being a nineteen year-old working at a computer next to a graduate student or faculty member. It was all incredibly open and a wonderful place to be. When I got there, the former directorate of the Electronic Music Center (Mario Davidovsky, etc.) were just leaving, so when Brad took over in 1995 we were able to completely transform the place from a tape studio to a computer music facility, while still retaining the charm of the old center and it's amazing history. I started out in electronic music playing Buchla and Serge modular synthesizers (hence my affinity for Max!), and that practice of working with hands-on electronic instruments turned out to be a big factor in a lot of the work I do now.

I first saw Max at a demo given by the theater tech department of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London... their lighting engineer was using it to control a serial-controlled lighting console. That would have been around 1992.

When I got to college, I saw a demo of Max in my sophomore-year MIDI production class. At that point I was using analog equipment, so it didn't seem that useful for me, though that would change soon enough.

When did you start to explore it intensively?

When MSP came out in 1997 I was a first-year graduate assistant and learned the software in order to teach it at the Computer Music Center. In 1999 my old band, the Freight Elevator Quartet, was starting to play pretty extensively and I was having a lot of electromechanical problems with the older synths (Buchlas and Serge Modular units) that I was using, and at a certain point I decided to try to switch to laptop, so I bought a Powerbook G3 and started using MSP.

What was it originally that Max/MSP did for you?

Originally I tried to make a close replica of my analog rig, but I realized pretty quickly that Max/MSP could do more useful things than that, so I created a pretty idiosyncratic synth interface driven by a Wacom tablet that I could use onstage. The thing I like with working this way was that, similar to the analog equipment, it was very difficult to do things precisely the same way twice, so the system had a fluidity that I couldn't really get with a normal digital synthesizer. Max programming is extremely addicting, so before long I was doing all sorts of crazy things...

How have you incorporated Jitter into your work?

These days I use it for pretty much everything, from doing visuals for music to working with generative systems for composition to developing new ways of transcoding media (going from sound to image and vice versa). What appeals to me most about Jitter is its general approach to data... it doesn't treat video as 'video', but simply as a type of information that you can map however you like. This distinction lets me work with media in a way that no other system allows.

You received a lot of press about your Billboard project. Can you go into detail about it?

Sure. Billboard is based on a technique I developed called time-lapse phonography, which is basically a technique for aggregating frequencies into a single sonic image, much like long-exposure photography, only for sound. The idea is that I can then radically compress sounds into shorter time frames while preserving their harmonic content. Billboard takes every #1 song that was on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and shrinks it to one second for every week it was at the top of the chart. So in 37 minutes you get the entire history of the Billboard Hot 100, told through the average spectra of its #1 songs.

Yes. In addition to writing a bunch of the standard Jitter objects as well as a couple of Max ones ([bline], [router]) I co-authored (with Dan Trueman) a set of Max/MSP objects called PeRColate, which is an open source collection of signal processing objects for doing things like physical modeling and wavetable manipulation.

a-video-and-text-interview-with-luke-dubois-educator-and-musician

A Video and Text Interview with Luke DuBois, Educator and Musician

Cycling '74

Lilli Wessling Hart

Growing out of and growing tired of our 379A Clementina Street location, Cycling '74 is moving its headquarters into a great new space a few blocks away at 730 Clementina Street. Apparently, we have an affinity for 

The office is actually a live/work space, so it's set up more like a house than an office. The irony is that our 379A location is an office inside a Victorian house. The main room currently has light peach-colored walls and that officey gray carpet we all know and hate.

Now our job is to make this space nicer by repainting the walls and replacing the carpet. (Don't worry -- there's still a large crew of programmers working hard on the next version of Max.) Deciding on colors has been quite a challenge. Below are some options we have been considering. If you want to know the final outcome, you'll have to stop by the office in a few months.

Pulling up the carpeting exposed a lovely mix of super-sticky glue that won't separate itself from our shoes, floor patching material, and a decade's worth of dirt. Proper attire was required.

And don't forget those masks that seem sort of fun in the beginning (hence the smiles)...

... but then suffocate you more than actually breathing the fumes from the carpet glue and paint primer.

Get the Latest on Max and our Community

An Interview with Bert Schiettecatte about AudioCubes

A Video and Text Interview with Luke DuBois, Educator and Musician

Cycling '74's Office Relocation, Part 1

Workshop in Delft

Jamoma Workshop

Multi-language Max/MSP

A Visit to the Seoul International Computer Music Festival

C74 Tries Marketing to Kids (and Soccer Moms)

Those Invalid Objects are Back

An Interview With Tim Place