In retrospect, it was so easy.
Last week I got a mysterious e-mail saying,
Our host just had a birthday (perhaps a BIG one, I'm not sure) and was "lamenting" according to [his wife], that there was no celebration. She asked us not to bring gifts, but Chris and I have an idea: when we all sing him the surprise "Happy Birthday" serenade, we will accompany ourselves on strange instruments. (Comb & wax paper? Wooden spoon and pot lid? Grampa's old ukelele? Castanets?) If you play a real instrument, you can bring that, but a toy or joke one is OK, too. Chris has promised a prize to the person with the strangest (musical) instrument.
Looking around my studio, my eyes lit on the Music Pole I'd never gotten around to reviewing—mostly because I'd never gotten around to learning how to play it. The Music Pole is a MIDI controller that supposedly makes it easy to play in any key; each time you rotate it, your fingers align with the notes for the chromatically adjacent scale. No matter what key the rest of the band started out in, I could then match up quickly, I thought.
The Music Pole transmits MIDI notes when you touch its sensors with conductive fabric rings called "Thumbletz."
I then looked around for a battery-powered MIDI sound module and speakers. I seized my Novation BassStation synth for the former and Pacific Rim Technologies Cube Travel Speakers for the latter.
The battery-powered Cube Travel Speakers sound pretty good—especially for $9.99.
Unfortunately, the brand-new batteries I'd bought for the BassStation turned out to be defective, and I was starting to realize that juggling three items would be awkward. So I fell back on using the wacky MadWaves MadPlayer instead. This amazing device is like a cross between a GameBoy and Band-in-a-Box, the algorithmic music composition software. Press a button and the MadPlayer generates endless new songs—no two alike—through its onboard synth.
Designed as a technology demo, the MadPlayer is also a sampler, FM radio, MP3/WMA player, and karaoke player.
For the birthday serenade, however, I decided to use the MadPlayer's voice-transformer feature. Plugging in a headset mic, I set the transformer to shift my voice up an octave, and then plugged the MadPlayer's output into the Pac Rim speakers.
It was no contest. We sung the song, the birthday boy got misty-eyed, and I won the prize...a whoopie cushion.
For more on the MadPlayer, see Paul Lehrman's hysterical column in Mix, in which he proclaims it the musical Antichrist, and my followup, in which I argue why musical toys are a good thing.
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Comments (4)
Read More Entries by David Battino.
@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:
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.)