I have a foot in both sides of the music industry. As a musician I’ve released records for listeners, and as a technologist I’ve made commercially-available music tech tools for creators. So this time of year should always be exciting — it’s the NAMM trade show. For the uninitiated, NAMM is the CES of music tech. It’s where lovers of music-making descend to ogle at banks of flashing buttons, keys and knobs, dream about a bright future or fetishize a rose-tinted past.
But year after year I’ve consistently found the new product news coming out of NAMM almost entirely uninteresting. Why? I love music in a particular way that the industry hasn’t catered for. Until now.
I got into this double-edged game of creating both music and the tools used to create it because I wanted my musical experience to be about just that — an experience right now, not the pursuit of finishing a track some point in the future. I want to get lost in that intangible sonic heaven between this moment and the next in an embodied, active, spontaneous way. In that moment I don’t want to be an engineer or a producer. Forget the tracks, the songs, the records, they’ll follow naturally in their own time.
But the music tech industry doesn’t really think like that. To date it’s had its head stuck up the recording industry’s proverbial. The vast majority of products are geared towards making perfect tracks or realizing the perfect performance of that perfect track. Those things interest me but not as much as my primary musical interests — spontaneity and embodiment — and until now they haven’t been catered for.
So I took matters into my own hands and made my own instruments my own way, starting in 2004 with the Keymasher, a complete studio in a box with all the ‘engineering bits’ taken out. I’m now in the process of building my third generation all-in-one instrument, The Flow Machine. Along the way I’ve turned some of the innovations I’ve poured into that project into commercially available instruments and FX — The Finger, The Mouth and most recently Flesh — all in collaboration with Native Instruments, all of which encapsulate elements of an experience-based approach to music-making.
And now thankfully we’re beginning to see this kind of hands-on approach being widely adopted by the music tech industry. It feels like it started in earnest in 2012 when long-time innovators Ableton released Push, a physical controller which turned their behemoth DAW (digital audio workstation) software into a physically playable instrument, opening up a portal of spontaneity away from the laptop. 2015 saw Novation release Circuit, an all-in-one track-making box with a live hands-on workflow away from the computer. Both of these instruments steer music-making from being a means to attaining track perfection towards being an end in itself — something which we can enjoy freely without feeling we need to measure up our efforts against this month’s latest releases.
Parallel to this there have been key developments in the other crucial dimension of in-the-now music-making: embodiment. Relating the natural mechanical movement of our bodies to music-making is the superhighway to deep immersion in realtime music creation. First of all we need a fluid workflow such as what Push and Circuit offer so we can get our hands on all the ingredients for music-ing at the snap of a finger. Then to increase the depth of our immersion we need great controllers that allow us to engage our whole bodies in music creation.
I wanted to bring this embodiment to the Flow Machine to get away from its sprawling desktop of knobs, buttons and faders. Back then there was very little in the way of wireless gestural controllers. In fact the only one I could find was a Logitech joystick, so I set about creating a special mapping that would allow me to control the key functions of the Flow Machine from amongst the audience with just a joystick in my hand. The sensation of being wireless and physically active right in the middle of the audience is a next level of musical experience.
Fast forward a few years and we’ve seen a whole host of innovative controllers appear. The Mi.Mu gloves are wireless glove controllers kickstarted by ceaseless futurist Imogen Heap and her talented team of developers. They’ve put the flag in the ground for how wireless gestural controllers might break electronic music-making away from its focus on boxes to a focus on the body.
At the same time newcomers Roli were in the lab coming up with the Seaboard, a groundbreaking multi-dimensional controller for a new era of realtime expression. They released an affordable version in 2015. The Seaboard isn’t designed to be picked up and paraded around as a portable instrument but it does offer a completely new mode of musical expression. It uses multi-dimensional data-points to control sound generators, allowing you to get so much more resolution and musical expressivity out of your physical gestures. It’s most certainly a big leap towards deep immersion in realtime music-making.
But this year’s NAMM has seen the launch of a tipping point product from a very unexpected contender, Zoom, known mainly for their affordable portable audio recorders. Introducing the ARQ, a live performance instrument with a removable bluetooth ‘loop’ allowing wireless gestural performance from the comfort of anywhere within a 10m range. It’s the first attempt I’ve seen to bring workflow and embodiment together in a single instrument. And that is the key innovation. The jury’s still out as to how this actually feels to play but that’s beside the point. This is so groundbreaking that doubtlessly Zoom have got lots of things right and lots of things wrong.
The point is that all-in-one embodied workflow instruments are here. The music tech industry has shown a new side of itself that cares about immersive creative experiences that don’t kowtow to the needs of the recording industry.
The recording industry is about seeing (and hearing) people making music. The music tech industry is about being people making music. The reason so many of us are happy to see and not be musical is that the technology’s been failing us. It’s been failing us because the music tech industry hasn’t yet found the confidence to cut the apron strings of the recording industry and stand alone in its own right. But now it has, and musical is something we can all be.
So remember what you were doing in 2016. It’s the year music woke up.
I’m currently working on the new Flow Machine, a spontaneous, embodied live music creation instrument. Once it’s finished I’ll write an album’s worth of performances on it and make a record. New music, live dates and instrument products will follow. Sign up to my mailing list at timexile.com to find out more.
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