EDMT App — What We Learned From Kickstarting An Interactive Audio Visual Instrument
by Mandy Mozart
@vjfader @mandymozart @rapohnelizenz @aplusv
#kickstarter #IamOnEDMT #EDMTApp #audiovisual #DAVW #unrender
VJ Fader, once again an artist that we encountered during our countless explorations in the universe of sound back in our Sturm und Drang times at Beijing, moved to Berlin two years ago and consulted us, that is Ashraf Rap aka Ali Chibli from Mummed Records/Rapohnelizenz. The plan was to turn this artistic project into a product.
He was developing a visual prototype that sort of summed up lots of the generative visual algorithms and strategies he had been exploring ever since video was just too slow for his workflow. Generative visuals can be also called video synthesis and require little to nothing memory, but a bit of processing power. It’s very flexible and easily audio reactive.
Fader has made a name for himself over the last year with his VJ Sets, Stage Designs, VJ Software (AVMixer Pro) and more and more audio visual shows. His prototype is a collection of the most basic and effective algorithms to visualize music. A zero sliders & knobs finger and hand gesture based interface allows to intuitively play around with the visuals. Quickly it was clear, this thing is something immersive, something not necessarily new, but very well though through to spent some time on. We formed a tag team consiting of Ashraf (besides Rapohnelizenz also doing performance marketing at Android Pit.de), Gabriel Fioretti, a SEO specialist, Fader, Janik Hotz, a young and talented programmer and newly drummer of our band Cindy Sizer, and myself a random distraction to any sort of streamlined progress — But hey, this is Berlin and this is the team.
Motivation and the imagination of how to use this thing is more important that 1000 million business analysts or senior engineers and strategist.
Quickly we realised sound had to be added. Because that is the bottom line of any audiovisual experience, the audio synced perfectly to the video. Fader was executing this for EDM show such as with Digitalism at EDC Las Vegas, at Coachella, in China, or Los Angeles for such artists as Madlib or Flying Lotus, wherever — that’s the bottom line.
I, that is by the artist name Mandy Mozart, became the sound designer and the experience took off. We had something to show to the public. A working prototype for Android, yet very limited but it was working. Jakob Hoff’s studio once again was raided by us, we took the obligatory Berlin City startup team photograph.
Gabriel especially fertilised his hipster beard for this occasion and I added an intellectual piece of fake glasses to make it very very sophisticated. We ended up with a wonderful boy band picture that was ready to be shared amongst the new media crowd of the continents.
We started analysing failed and successful campaigns for similar products. Most of them were more like albums rather than applications. The once noteable were Brian Eno, Forss — Eclesia (Soundcloud CTO Eric Walforss), Bjoerk — Biophylia, which also did a crowdfunding but failed with a devastating 5% of their goal and was subsequently cancelled and a bunch of others.
Peter Kirn hosted a panel discussion at Platon Kunsthalle with Gerhard Behles (CEO of Ableton) and Matt Black (Ninjatunes founder, Coldcut). I had a peticular interest into the debate about music software and their influence on the creative output of music makers. In a small chat I got to talk to Matt and demo EDMT to him. He is a known VJ himself and got the concept right away. Himself he is developing software like Ninjamm. Matt became on of the first beta tester on Android. His primary critique was that something like looping, is missing to make it more worth while
We did not compare our product too much to games, since that is a totally different field of consumers. Our App vision is an instrument, something without a peticular goal. Something to worth while, create and furthermore able to inspire yourself with the more “skills” you develop. We dropped concepts like ranking, scoring, etc. but focused on making a basic set of scenes. Fader was pushing to go public with the kickstarter by early October. At this point we had 50 people following on some screenshots that we posted on Facebook and about 2–5 beta testers, of which only one was madly active.
We have to thank one of our biggest supporters, Jordan Rudess from the American progressive metal band Dreamtheater. That guy is truly on EDMT and was one of our links to Samsung, but more about that later when we talk about technical decision making. Fader’s argument was that we will not see what’s the ideas is worth without pushing it and seeing what our network is gonna return. On our side the point was like a huge singularity in a black hole. No way this is going to work. The video is shit, there is no narrative and we clearly can not explain the features that we talked about in our phantasy. Even up to now, there is possibly different versions of EDMT in the head of each one of us. But I will come back to this also later after the kickstarter and explain a bit more on the status quo. We post-poned the kickstarter date and I promised to get more actively involved in the campaigning process — convincing James to reshot the primary parts of the video.
What happened? Not much, Fader saw us procrastinating, and he was right.
We were sort of running out of ideas and felt very uncomfortable pushing the next level. Once again, we sat down on a Monday night with a huge and very organic stash of weed. Finest blend. For Fader and me it was easy to debate and kind of make plans or work on stuff for EDMT. We work in the same studio, and also are not bound to regular jobs. We enjoy tinkering. The others however were in 9–5 arrangements and especially on Ali side, there was enormous pressure, since he is dealing sales far out of our capabilities of comprehension. Janik is studying and working at a psychology institute running experiments and data analysis, also nothing to really to free your mind. It was what it was — a motivated but handicapped regular Berlin team.
We decided, yet 4 of us objecting to go live with the kickstarter on Thanksgiving and run it till Christmas Eve. God or Allah, either one of them knows why in the world we picked this date — subconsciously hoping for a miracle, maybe. It was time to speeded up our primary strategies. Contacting people that will write up on EDMT from the Android App scene, we scheduled a few articles on TheCreatorsProject, AndroidPit, Synthopia, and VJ Scene Australia to go live just around the first days of the Kickstarter. By now we had 500 people following us almost organically on our Facebook Page. The website was translated into six different languages, English, Portugese, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean. I remember there was another phantasy language, yet I do not recall it.
We put a massive mail bombbomb, to hit the ether with the combined lists of Neuromixer, Shalom Salon and Rapohnelizenz and added all of our personal contacts and of course all of our business contacts as well. Wtf, we had no idea where this is going to take us, so the metaphor was, shooting from all guns at once! We put some martinies in front of our laptops, injected google analytics into our braincore and partied one more time really hard to start fresh with the power of a great Berlin techno scene Hangover. I remember I played a rave party or something with Janik coming back home the next night and getting caught on the subway for not being able to punch the ticket.
So approx. 6,000 emails send, a Facebook event was also set up to invite everybody possible to the kickstarter page. We linked directly, yet we had to deal with a major Facebook update — Invite all your friends wasn’t possible anymore. I was trying to figure out how to cheat it, my javascripts were also not working, the new ones I found and hacked a bit failed on the server side implemented limits of Facebook. Usually Ali and I can invite up to 4,000 people with just our two accounts, we ended up getting 2,400 with me going into all of the accounts from anybody we had easy access to. Also Facebook was not listing updates to our event anymore after it went live, considering it being past. We overcame that issue with resetting the starting date during the first day and then leaving the end open till December 24th. This was looking bad. From our predictions we needed to make more than 50% in the first three days. With a goal of 18,000 USD and a fortunate 180 bucks after the first day we thought this is exactly what we talked about.
Nevertheless, we had a mad monkey in the directors chair pushing us to keep going anyhow, because who in the world trusts statistics and the experience of other people unless you really gone through it yourself.
I must agree, after all the experiences in love, drugs, art, life and business I had gone through there was no rules, so let’s beat time or space I was telling my self. I guess the team got sort of fuelled by our enthusiasm to fly into that American airplane carrier even if we had no more bombbombs left and blow it up with our very last remaining fuel and body’s heat. Tora Tora Tora!
Finally, we were started to become creative. I guess this is were we actually realised campaigning and product development go hand in hand. I was designated becoming the demo person of the campaign. Putting myself into social conventions of possible supporters, Fader jumped a Pecha Kucha at UdK, I hit the darkest chambers of the Berlin underground at Loophole to give a speech at a session called “No Hope!”. Yes, we were devastated.
Meanwhile the kickstarter had experienced some angle investors. A huge 3,500 USD came in, and another 550 USD just a day or two after. Our hopes were back. Let’s go for individual supporters, because broad support was hard to tackle. That was clarified by Ali, the math won’t work, with 1,500 people only donating 12 USD we had a chance, yet, come on, we had traffic far below. The bombbomb email campaign had a opening rate of less than 8% (a regular newsletter like the one you are reading from Shalom Salon has about 35%). Second round it was below 3%. Let’s not talk about the click through rate nor the actual leads. Devastating!
Haha, and here is our biggest fuck up: Considering we were now based in Germany, even though Fader kept telling us the US is our prime target, we had no way to pay besides credit card or Amazon Payments. Paypal wasn’t working. Something we had totally overseen. From behind your MacBooks you believe the world is globalised, but this is a very wrong perception. Personally I don’t even own a smartphone. In a third world country seeking for a renaissance of medieval values and concepts country like Germany people are more likely to use a stone instead of tennis balls.
A third world country like Germany.
We added a paypal donation button to the homepage and transfered the money to the kickstarter manually—sounds half backen? And yes, it is. This is a bunch of noobs trying to play Feival the Mouse wanderer — yet, the tides were turning and we need to talk about some good aspects of the campaign now. Can’t take this pessimism any longer.
We did a demo video of me, showing how to actually make music with it, that was listenable, something that made sense. We faked the sequencer and we got hits.
I received a Facebook message from an old friend of mine, 김성민 aka Magazine King who now works at Samsung. He was asking, if we would be interested to join their early developer program for an audio SDK he was involved in. His superior officer coincidentally knew about EDMT from Jordan Rudess, who had show it to him in person a few weeks before while visiting the Samsung office in reckon in Seoul. These guys don’t get out of the office much. We had the right people spotting us. Well, it turned out to be a bit of a drag, since Samsung is merely unable to function due to hierarchies and spagetti infra-structures. It took us two month to get a NDA signed and still I am trying to get through the Internet Explorer sign up for a company account process. Their forms are just not compatible. I talking to about five people about this at Samsung now and the CC list of the help desk is definitely growing. They are trying to get me closer to the holy grail, if there is any. Nevertheless some tablets would be nice and of course having a shot off VST like version of EDMT in Soundcamp is a promising trail for any Android application. There is a major draw back as we figure that this SDK will not work on anything but Samsung Galaxy Series devices. It has amazing capabilities like latency free audio and MIDI integration, but absolutely not the right market for our primary product.
Two weeks ago, we were having some amazing talk with developer Eric Lorenzo Benjamin Jr. about techno and how to operate a software company from inside a four day techno club schedule back in the 90s and 2000s. He told us of how clubs such as Berghain, formerly Ostgut, were office and home for him at once. We decided to turn our primary development to iOS. Another major dis-advantage for us was that our target group was not gamers and Appnatics, but musicians and they are native on the iOS devices, due to the earlier mentioned audio latency and compatibility problems. And if it would be according to the Apple evangelion, kids of intelligent and creative partners that use Apple products, are 1000% percent more likely to develop creativity if they get an iDevice at early ages as young as even pre-born. Better even, I heard there is a plan you get sign up, to get your kid a device for each stage of their future development before impregnation— *Money back guarantee, if you are unable to get a second if your first born dies within a year.
Another good thing, from our presentation of EDMT to the “No Hope!” group we got in contact with Florian Speth, a neuroscientist and musician researching on therapeutical methods to integrate audio and visual feedback for stroke patients and specially for rehabilitation of the hand with robotic guidance. Bingo, gesture and feedback and the brain. He we are! This is going somewhere and we found hope in our product(s) again.
Yes, we learned that EDMT has more potential than we originally were able to imagine. The interface concept of Fader, removing any sort of traditional feedback and replacing it purely with the output as a reference was unexploited and a truly new method. Fader is a genius by passion, he naturally thinks about phone environment as a multi-layered gadget box. Giro, proximity, up to five finger gestures, video output— it is a very simple software, yet it makes use of all of these in a very smart and straight forward way.
Gabrial did the mind fuck for us and put it this way: We learned that we have some sort of technology at our hands now, not just what we thought at the beginning to be a single product. The challenge is now how to link finances and put up milestones for development. After all, we are a bunch of broke artists happen to know nothing about financing!
EDMT Health Care Products — rehabilitation product for training your hand at home in collaboration with Florina Speth
EDMT Entertainment—Singing Faces, our first milestone. A face and loop sampler based on the most popular scene form the prototype app.
EDMT Instruments —a simplified Ableton like environment with multiple customisable scenes and presets for sound and graphic interchangeable via an online platform — that’s the ultimate goal for us. This is the tool we want to create for our personal pleasure and application in our performances, etc.
And here is my personal goal as a future development path, not sure if the team will agree on adding it to the roaster, yet.
EDMT Drugs—very similar to the health care products, yet much more trippy and guided. To me EDMT already has a immersive effect, that I believe can be even more powerful than any Occulus rift roller coaster ride can create. Because the abstraction level is so much higher already and so many sense are overly agitated, so that parts of our neural system will be able to output similar substances as other artificial or organic drugs will do. Phones and tablets already are drugs, I reference to Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky who describe our addiction to App based feedback and the phantom in our pocket in his book “The Imaginary App” (Paul D. Miller & Svitlana Matviyenko, MIT Press, 2014). Yet, the goal of EDMT drugs for me would be to create a trip where you have to be active as long as you want to trip. I had done an interview with The Bug aka Kevin Martin about EDMT and immersive experiences. We ended up talking about the recreation of these effects without using them.
Software addiction is different. It makes you conscious about itself idling or checking on your facebook timeline for example. I consider that sort of software behavior harmful. Don’t get me wrong — A messenger service is a good thing, a constantly beeping and socially feebacking with like based mindfuck is something else. Imagine implementing binaural audio generation and psycho-acoustic sequences and patterns with relaxation or stimulating effects. Cheaper and possibly less harmful to the body as any drug pumped into society at this point in time.
The campaign failed?
We closed at around 6,000 USD but we gained a lot more. For us the PR and the feedback is so much more a reward than the money. We know where we can go from here. Our Milestones and Software architecture is lined up and we will surprise you very soon with our first official release. Most likely on iOS first, and instantly afterwards on Android, the Singing Faces App with a bunch of prerecorded voice samples by artists you might even recognise. So stay tuned, because
we are on EDMT!
