Physical Music

There’s at least two ideas I’d love to see implemented:

• Lego-esque modular MIDI controllers
• Physical tile-based Music Clip UI for Acid/Garageband/Logic/Cubase/etc.

Both of these ideas have been percolating around the my local noosphere
for some time. So I don’t forget, or the ideas mutate, I’m going to try to
describe each one.

• Lego-esque modular MIDI controllers
  For better or worse, we’re in an age of software synthesizers, software mixers, software effects, and so on. Plug-in hell. While the malleability of software allows a diverse culture of interfaces, we humans must still interact with them with the anemic interface of a single 2-D pseudo-analog pointer. Interacting with these software doppelgangers via such an input is tiresome and inefficient compared to the rich multivariate interfaces of the devices they are based on.

  One might argue that there exists many external MIDI controllers or ‘control surfaces’ to help one break out of the mouse jail, but these devices suffer from being either too generic (a bank of blank knobs) or too specific (a bank of mixer sliders).

  Instead, imagine a collection of physical UI modules: a slider, a knob, a button, a display, and a controller that has the MIDI interface. To make a mixer, you grab a bunch of sliders, click them together, and click the controller to the end. To make a sequencer trigger, click together a bunch of buttons and displays.

  Ahh, but a problem with this concept: no feedback from the the software app about the state of the button, knob, slider. This can perhaps be solved by embedding simple displays within the ‘input’ devices, like what the Nord Lead has.

• Physical Tile-based Music Clip UI
  The ‘clip’ interface present in Acid/GarageBand/Logic/etc. is pretty powerful: horizontal axis is time, vertical axis is ‘track’. An audio clip can be ‘drawn’ across a time range to indicate when it should play, and it can be truncated on either end to state at what point in the clip it should start and stop (or loop).

  Now think of how this could be implemented physically. I’m thinking: tiles representing audio clips on a surface
  that reads both the tile identity and its position. […tbd…]