And the Prize for Strangest Musical Instrument...

@Marco: What a coincidence! I just received a set of Beamz last week for possible review. They are strange-looking, but much less intimidating than a traditional interface such as a piano keyboard. I set them up at a kids' party last week and everyone lined up to try them.

However, none of the kids stuck with them more than a minute or two. My impression is that the Beamz are like a phrase sampler with six buttons, so you have no direct way to shape the sound — i.e., change volume and timbre — just trigger it.

You'd also need a fog machine running to actually see the laser beams, so the promo photos are misleading.

From your detailed review, you've obviously spent more time with it, though, so perhaps I'll get more inspired as I dig deeper.

I wish to signal my review of "Beamz", a tool with six "laser strings" sounding at hands crossing.
The link for the review is:
http://www.marcodesalvo.it/beamz.html?lang=en

@Matt: The Music Pole is intriguing, and much sturdier than it looks in photos. There are some performance videos on the manufacturer's site. What discouraged me from spending more time with it is that it doesn't offer any way to shape the notes you trigger. It merely sends Note-On events at a constant velocity. To get pitch-bend, volume swells, vibrato, or any timbre change, you'd need to hook up external processors and controllers, perhaps manipulating them with your breath or feet.

And transposing to new keys — the Music Pole's main claim to fame — is trivially easy on modern synthesizers. As an attention-getting device, though, it shines.

That music pole seems very cool.. the only trouble is I'm a microtonalist.. I ether use a 72 note to the octave system... (ala http://www.joemaneri.com/) or.. use a kind of "fuzzy" system that's.. too complicated to speak of here.. so I always want these kinds of devices to be able to go beyond the old 12 note thing.. but it still seems like it could be a great little toy to play around with!

@Paul: To answer your algorithm question, I asked Dr. Mad himself. Here's what he said:

It is not easy to summarize, but the key behind MadPlayer's composition algorithms is their top-down multi-dimensional architecture. The top-down approach has several advantages over other techniques:

• easier to develop into stages;
• each layer can be derived from a deeper-level layer on which layer-to-layer algorithms are applied;
• at each layer level (this is key) you can apply fixed bricks to test and validate with your ears and sensibility what works and what does not, before going one layer down to regenerate those bricks via algorithms and more elementary bricks;
• when adding new features (or debugging problems...) at the right level, it will impact all derivative paths.

The top level layer is the final song. The technology in the MadPlayer is pretty old now (7 to 8 years) and much progress has been made since then. And I only talked here about one dimension. But the top-down approach can still be used to improve the technology, which is what we are trying to do at the moment.

Hope this helps.

DrMad

The Mad technology is now running on cell phones, so it will be interesting to hear where this leads.

What type of algorithms does MadPlayer use for generating music? (I think generative music algorithms are quite interesting and are the wave of the future, to tell you the truth.)