The Future of Music V: iPad Music Making

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7QPbXM9W3g

NYC’s TekServe recently held a seminar looking at the future of music that featured four electronic music gurus: Peter Kirn, Oliver Chesler, Steve Horelick, and Joshue Ott.

The February 3d event focused on iPad music making.

This video captures some of the highlights of the event  – and demonstrates that the state of tablet music-making already covers a lot of ground. 

via tekserve:

Check out the best moments from Tekserve’s “The Future of Music V: The Craft of iPad Music-making” event, held on February 3rd, 2011.

At this special evening event, attendees heard and saw the musical and visual results as leading electronic artists performed live. Harry Allen returned to moderate discussion between four cutting-edge artists: Peter Kirn, Oliver Chesler, Steve Horelick, and Joshue Ott.

36 thoughts on “The Future of Music V: iPad Music Making”

  1. Why is it that this has to be the future of music creation and not the future of music controlling.. i mean i see better uses as a controller than a station to create music.

  3. I like Apple computers a lot, OS X is a great UNIX desktop and Logic is second to none…but I find iPads pretty irritating really. Apple spent so much time building themselves as the "Pro brand" for multimedia but now all these gadgets and gizmos is making them look like the "Toy brand". I'm sure they'll make a ton of money short term but I feel like they're losing focus going for quick mass market bucks.

  4. It's not even there as a controller.
    The touchscreens of today are too featureless, all flat and smooth.
    That's bad ergonomy.
    You can't look up from the screen and know what your fingers are doing.

    If we're talking future I'd like a surface material with configurable grain too.
    Simple example: If you define sliders, there would be tracks with shallower ribs so you can feel how far you're pushing it.
    A magnetic surface to which you attach small movable rotatable blocks like a generic mini-reactable could probably have many uses too (esp game pieces).

  5. meh. 4 people who clearly don't use nor understand the power of the iPad in music making.

    As interesting as the seminiar may or may not have been, huge FAIL for utterly and totally ignoring the potential of integrating the iPad into DAW usage. I'm using it on a daily basis with Ableton Live, yet so far not one story anywhere has been written on the subject beyond the odd promo story about a new controller app.

    We've got 10,457 stories about how wonderful it is to hook up an Akai LPK25 to a friggin iPad, but so far nothing about using it in a much broader scope aka DAW studio and live work.

    lol.

  8. Since Tekserve is an Apple reseller, I guess the whole thing can't be seen as completely objective, can it?
    I partly agree with loopstationzebra, the real potential of touch screens has not been fully understood yet… or better, the tecnology is not fully there yet.

  10. Interesting overview.

    Not sure I understand previous commenters’ negativity, though. Seems like knee-jerk anti- Apple trolling. Every one of these guys is accomplished and they’re doing stuff that wasn’t possible on any mainstream platform six months ago.

    1. being "accomplished" does not make you a guru. doing stuff that wasn't possible on a mainstream platform 6 months ago is called making technology dependent electronic music like most of us do. i have been doing it for about 20 years and we don't need to award people with titles like guru because they have the funds, time and audience to obsess over tech. Peter Kirn and Oliver Chesler can barely make coherent, enjoyable music, but who cares, one has a blog and the other makes the absolutely horrible, poorly produced, ironic dance music and they both love technology so let's put them on pedestals! yea!

      But of course I am a Negative Nancy and should only post if I have something nice to say and where is my music ? Where is their music ? Where is your music, sissy cheese face?

  11. How are you using your iPad with Live?

    I'd love to see deeper integration with Live and Logic, but it will take a while for the developers to catch up with the hardware.

  12. The question is – do you wait things out until touch screen computers catch up with laptops?

    Seems like that's going to be a few years, and tablets are useful tools right now.

  13. Not questioning that, but the show was about the *future* of music, not the present. tablets and smartphones (or whatever we want to call them) are useful right now, but offer just a glimpse of what will be. If we're talking about the future, then there is a lot more about these devices than just what we have seen in the show. So I guess the show should have been titled "what you can do musically, with iDevices, as of now 🙂
    Jokes apart, I think Peter Kirn made a much better point about this on createdigitalmusic, than he did on the show. His latest post about it is really worth a read imho.
    If you think about this whole thing taking away brands, technologies and hype, what is left is probably a small, but interesting change in the world of electronic music, and a time (the one we are living right now) where we have a chance to dream, and imagine.
    So while tablets are useful right now (though sometimes it can be argued in which manner exactly) the great thing is that we can imagine what will come sooner or later, the actual future of music.

  14. Arguing that the iPad, or any similar device, is not a real and functional musical instrument right now is like the argument back in the early 90s that computers can't be used in the creation of good music. Or a couple decades earlier when people said, "Nobody will ever want music from synthesizers". Or even several more decades back when people argued that the saxophone was far to brash and clumsy of an instrument to ever fit into jazz music. And so on. We've heard it all before… get comfortable with the new stuff, because it's not going away, and ultimately ends up making things even richer.

  15. It's not an argument whether it is or not | but… honestly | really?

    Question? would you say you love typing on an iPad as opposed to a computer keyboard.

  16. You're right – I don't love typing on the iPad. But I never use my compact BlueTooth keyboard. Why not? I think it's because the software keyboard weighs nothing, takes up no real space, and vanishes when you aren't using it. I also don't type a lot in music apps.

    I do, however, frequently use both the touchscreen and an external MIDI controller for playing music. I'm not sure the iPad needs a built-in hardware QWERTY or MIDI keyboard.

  24. Oliver, great tracks. How do u connect your iPad to ableton? Do you use the ipads headphone jack output into an interface? Thanks
    andy

  26. I apologize if I came off a bit too brash. I still don't like your music but you are apparently doing something right for a lot of people who do like it and you're probably
    a reasonably nice guy.

    I should probably focus my criticism toward people who right such articles and not the people they are about. I just think "guru" is a bit much.

  27. Yeah I wouldn't call myself a guru… I just love the toy (iPad). Music is totally subjective… I rarely like much myself. Thanks for the response. 🙂

  28. What a very unusual thing for you to obsess over, ex-winphat.

    We will continue to err on the side of holding people in esteem.

    As for Oliver, he's an expert at what he does and he shares his knowledge freely, which makes him a guru in my book, any day.

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