Guthman Musical Instrument Competition

The Thummer is a contestant in Georgia Tech's Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, being held later this week.

Dr. Monty Cole, a high school friend of mine, happens to work just down the road at Mercer University, and has kindly offered to present the Thummer there on my behalf.

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get one of the (rapidly aging) Thummer prototypes working, so the presentation will rely on videos of other people performing on it, rather than a live performance.

Here's the presentation, as a compressed PowerPoint file:  Guthman.zip

It's super-short, relying primarily on three videos.  I'm not sure that the PowerPoint file will be able to locate the videos properly after one downloads, unzips, and moves them to some other file folder. One may need to open the presentation in PowerPoint, go to the slides that contain the videos, double-click on the video graphics, and update the video-link to reference the video files' new location.

Why do the videos have a "Wondershare" logo across their upper-left corner? Because I used a trial version of Wondershare's Video Converter for Mac to convert the video files from WMV to MOV format.

What Killed Thumtronics?

I killed Thumtronics, as its CEO, through my own inexperience.

Two major errors — both mine — killed Thumtronics, thus preventing the Thummer from reaching the market.

These errors were:
1) Starting Thumtronics is the wrong location.
2) Failing to observe the KISS Principle ("Keep It Simple, Stupid").

Location
I started Thumtronics in a tiny hick town (Busselton, Western Australia). Great place to semi-retire, but a lousy place to start a high-tech company. I believed that the world had become flat. However, if you're trying to get a start-up off the ground, geography still matters. Your first step must be to relocate to an appropriate start-up hub.

For Thumtronics, not relocating was fatal. Most of my other mistakes, large and small, could have been avoided simply by starting up in (for example) Austin, and taking advantage of its excellent start-up infrastructure.

KISS
I was initialy attracted to the Thummer, as an investment of my own time and money, because it was "old wine in new bottles," in which the bottle provided all of the added value. All I needed to do was wrap off-the-shelf parts in a new instrument-shape, and voila! — I'd have an inexpensive, expressive new instrument that was easy to learn, fully compatible with all existing (USB-)MIDI-based hardware and software, and patentable. Everything in the Thummer would be off-the-shelf except for its user interface, which was the only remaining source of value in the musical instrument industry's value chain (everything else having been commoditized).

Even better, every performance of the Thummer — whether live or in a video — would implicitly "endorse" the Thummer's unique abilities. Further, because the Thummer would look so unmistakably different from everything else, every performance would also be an "advertisement" for the Thummer. Our marketing expenses could be very low, because our customers would advertise the Thummer for us, simply by using it. (This approach doesn't work for guitar makers because all guitars look alike to non-guitarists. The Thummer, however, looks totally unique, even to non-musicians.)

Indeed, the Thummer was a "purple cow" — a product so different that it would attract attention effortlessly (which was later borne out by the Thummer's ability to attract press from such non-musical publications as the Wall Street Journal).

With this in mind, I should have focused exclusively on "getting version 1.0 to market ASAP, while spending as little on R&D as possible," in order to (a) keep its price low and (b) jump-start the use/endorse/advertise cycle ASAP.

Why did I not maintain this obviously-correct focus?

Because I was also aware that the Internet dramatically increased the effect of word-of-mouth communications (hence "word of mouse"). If Thummer v1 sucked, then its use/endorse/advertise cycle would never start — or, worse, an anti-use/endorse/advertise cycle would begin, "poisoning the well" for version 1 and all future versions, too.

I came to belive that, in order to ensure positive word of mouse, the Thummer v1 had to be "the most expressive instrument on the planet." It had to exceed its customers' expectations by such a wide margin that it would attract evangelically-enthusiastic word of mouse. This led me to elevate expressive potential over KISS, and therefore to invest time and money in two features that required R&D: (a) motion sensing and (b) key velocity/aftertouch.

Motion Sensing
Today, motion sensing (using accelerometers and gyroscopes) is as cheap as dirt, because it's implemented in off-the-shelf chips. Such chips are in every modern console game controller, such as Nintendo's Wii Remote and Sony's SixAxis/DualShock 3 controller.

But back then, in 2003-2005 when we were developing the Thummer, there were no cheap off-the-shelf motion-sensing solutions. Because of this, we should have written off motion-sensing as "a great feature for a later version, once motion-sensing chips became available off-the-shelf." Pretty obvious, right?

The problem was that people LOVED the motion-sensing prototype Thummers. Even skeptics became enthusiasts after seeing them demonstrated. Motion sensing made musician's expressive actions visible to the audience, which was something a tiny thumb-operated joystick could never do. Motion sensing was clearly the Thummer's killer feature.

If we could just implement motion sensing in Thummer v1 (we thought), then we'd have a hit, Hit, HIT!

However, with the crude and expensive motion-sensing chips available back then, there was no way we were going to make a motion-sensing Thummer. It took us months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, to realize just how hard it was going to be to pull together a "complete solution" from those crude chips. Had Thumtronics been in Austin, I would have had access to people who knew that "complete solution" chips were just a couple of years away. Integrating the new chips into a Thummer would have required one-tenth the R&D effort by Thumtronics. Making the decision to wait would have been much, much easier, had I known that such chips were coming soon. (Chip advances are sporadic, so it's not easy to predict what the next year or two will bring, even if you know that "chips are getting better all the time.")

In any case, I should have stuck to my initial vision of "old wine in new bottles," and ignored motion sensing until it became "old wine," in the form of off-the-shelf chips. Deciding to spend R&D resources on motion-sensing was a mistake.

Key velocity/aftertouch
The harder you strike a piano key, the harder its strings are struck. This one extra expressive variable — "key velocity" — was enough to cause the piano to out-compete the harpsichord, pipe organ, and all other previous keyboard instruments.

"Aftertouch" goes a step further, by allowing an instrument to sense the pressure with which you continue to press a key after the initial strike.

Although there was ample off-the-shelf technology available to measure key-velocity in an electronic instrument that used a piano-like keys, there was none available for concertina-like button-field instruments (and there still is none today). The movement of a button is quite different than that of a piano-like key, so we couldn't use piano-based technology.

We figured that, if the Thummer v1 didn't implement key velocity, then it would suck, and ruin our word of mouse. Therefore, we decided to reverse-engineer the pressure-sensitive buttons of the Sony PlayStation video game controllers, which would give us both key-velocity and aftertouch. However, reverse-engineering this button-system turned out to be beyond the capabilities of our back-of-beyond, hick town company. It soaked up much more of our resources than we could afford. By the time we realized that the end of this R&D task was not in sight, the end of our capital was.

Attempting to implement key velocity/aftertouch was a mistake for three reasons. First, it required R&D, and the "old wine in new bottles" game plan was specifically designed to minimize R&D. Second, it simply wasn't necessary. An alternative feature, called "channel pressure," would have been (a) good enough, and (b) brain-dead simple/cheap/fast to implement. We were focused on key velocity/aftertouch because we listened too hard to our piano-playing beta-testers, who said it was a "must have." Third, even if the Thummer needed more expressive power to succeed, the "killer" way to get that expressive power was through motion sensing, not key velocity/aftertouch.

Bad Decisions => Lack of Cash => Death
These bad decisions cost Thumtronics time, and time is money. If I had not made these bad decisions, Thumtronics would have been able to bring v1 of the Thummer to market by Christmas 2005, at which time it still had enough capital to live cheap and market hard while sales ramped up.

Having made these errors, however, I had to attempt to raise more money. This fund-raising effort failed. Presumably, potential investors decided that if I hadn't brough the Thummer to market after a $1.5 million dollar investment — which should have been ample — then perhaps it was simply a bad idea, or I was simply a bad entrepreneur. They were probably right, on the latter point, at least (although I'd say "inexperienced" rather than "bad").

Bad Location => Bad Decsions
Had I started the company in the right location, and thus been able to assemble a board of directors (and suppliers, partners, employees, etc.) with the right experience, then they are very likely to have been able to help me (a) resist the temptation to elevate "excellence" over KISS, and (b) stick to my "old wine in new bottles" game plan, thereby getting Thummer v1 onto the market by Christmas 2005.

Purple cows don't need to be excellent, in their first version. They just need to be very, very purple...and commercially available. The Thummer would have been very bright purple indeed, even without motion sensing or key velocity/aftertouch. All it needed was to get to market, so that it could find its niche. Each subsequent version could have"sucked less," growing the niche, and climbing the Long Tail into the mainstream.

I never should have elevated "expressive potential" over KISS. Darn it.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda...
Let's imagine for a moment that I had not made either of these two major errors. How would the Thummer have worked out? No one can know for sure, however, but here's one possible scenario.

Thummer version 1 would have been available for sale in time for Christmas 2005, without motion sensing or key velocity/aftertouch. Although sales would not have been explosive by any means, v1 would have sold enough over the next 12 months to make Thumtronics cash-flow positive by the end of the year, with a clear growth curve. (This is especially true because we would never have employed the staff that we hired to implement motion-sensing and key velocity/aftertouch, thereby keeping our costs lower.) Sales of the open-source Monome, and of Yamaha's Tenori-On, show that demand existed for alternative instruments such as the Thummer. A history of real, proveable, black-and-white sales growth would have allowed us to attract growth capital. Growth capital is much easier to get than start-up capital, and there was no shortage of growth capital in the USA back then.

With that growth capital, we could have accelerated sales in 2006. Also, motion sensing chips became widely available in 2007, so we could have added motion-sensing to version 2 for Christmas 2007.

Thummer v2 would have been a truly excellent product, not only due to motion sensing but also due to lots of little refinements that users would have suggested after using version 1. As you can see from Ken Rushton and others, the very idea of the Thummer creates "evangelically enthusiastic" supporters. Think how much stronger this enthusiasm would be, and how much more broadly-based, if Thummers actually existed, so that one's enthusiasm could be based on experience (which Ken's now is, more or less, using his excellent DIY jammer) rather than expectation.

With motion-sensing driving the sales of Thummer v2 in 2008, we would have had the cash-flow to add channel pressure to Thummer v3, probably in time for Christmas 2008.

At least as importantly, with Thummers actually being available, the development of open-source software synths that exploited Thummer-only effects (such as dynamic tonality) would have proceeded much faster than they have in today's real time-line. By mid-2009, it is quite possible that dynamic tonality would have started showing up in pop music. (Consider this use of a Monome, or this use of a Reactable. Creative artists LOVE new gadgets.)

The more the Thummer was used by pop musicians, the more rapidly it would have ascended the Long Tail into the mainstream. That's when we would have started seeing Thummer-players being invited to join mainstream bands, or bursting into the commercial music business with Thummer-based bands. That's also when Yamaha, Fender, Roland, etc. would start considering offering their own Thummers, which Thumtronics would probably have encouraged through a patent & trademark license and reference design package.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Sigh.

It was all there, in the palm of my hand, but I screwed it up. By starting Thumtronics in the back of beyond, and by placing "expressive power" above KISS, I wasted my own and my investors' capital, and quite literally the opportunity of a lifetime.

A skeptic might say that Thumtronics' experience proves that "new musical instruments always fail," no matter how much "better" the new instrument might be. This is absolutely the wrong interpretation of the facts, however. The Thummer has never had the chance to succeed or fail in the marketplace. Commercially speaking, it is completely untested.

What's really frustrating is that today, motion sensing could be incorporated into the Thummer for next to nothing. Version 1 of such a Thummer, with motion sensing and channel pressure (but not key velocity/aftertouch) could be a hit product from Day 1. I've still got the key patents. It's still doable. But now I'm broke, angel investors are broke, VCs are broke, and it's just not going to happen. Argh.

Ah, well. Thumtronics is dead. Long live iGetIt Music! :-)

Thummer design docs

Are here: http://www.thummer.com/OpenSource/DesignDocs.zip.

The Epiphany of Helen Keller

Most people are at least somewhat familiar with the story of Helen Keller, whose illness at 19 months of age left her deaf, blind, and without any sense of language. The story of her breakthrough in re-discovering the concept of language five years later is a parable of ignorance, imitation, frustration, and epiphany.

Here’s the parable in Ms. Keller’s own words, from her autobiography of 1903 (to which I have added paragraph headings).

[Ignorance]
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

[Imitation]
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them pin, hat, cup and a few verbs like sit, stand and walk. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.

[Frustration]
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-t-e-r" is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.

[Epiphany]
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903

Back when I was a high-school musician, I felt my musical ignorance in exactly the manner that Ms. Keller described. Eventually, I learned to imitate other musician’s improvisations – scat-singing a solo, or improvising a bass line, or whatever – but I had no idea how the notes all fit together, so I couldn’t create anything new or uniquely personal. It was very frustrating, as a scientifically-minded person (even then), to be told that music was "too mysterious and complex for a mere high-schooler to understand." At least, that was the excuse I was given when I sought to learn more, and the college-level music theory textbook in the high school's library did nothing to convince me otherwise.

More than 20 years later, when I had the time to dig into music again, I was able to peer though a magic X-ray lens -- the isomorphic keyboard -- to see the bones and sinews of music, stripped of the superfical complexities of traditional music theory. It was inexpressibly delightful to have my own series of epiphanies, which gave me the insights needed to contribute to the creation of the Thummer, the ThumMusic System, and Dynamic Tonality.

It is my greatest hope that the musically-curious will find the ThumMusic System to be an “epiphany guide,” leading them to their own string of music-making epiphanies, so that they won’t languish in ignorance, settle for imitation, or give up in frustration, as so many budding musicians do.

Hangul for Music

South Korea could be a leading adopter of the ThumMusic System, for two reasons: South Korea’s relentless obsession with education and its experience with (and reverence for) hangul.

Hangul is a written phonemic script organized into syllabic blocks which represents the sounds of spoken Korean. It was developed as an alternative to the use of Chinese hanja characters, of which there were so many – nearly 50,000 altogether – that attaining functional literacy required a huge investment of time. Korea being a poor country then, the vast majority of Koreans could not afford this huge investment in hanja literacy, so Korea’s literacy rate was very low.

Hangul's ease-of-learning reduced the cost of attaining literacy by so much that a bright Korean-speaking student could learn to read and write in a single day, and by a not-so-bright student in a single week. It has been described as being "the world's best alphabet" and "the most scientific system of writing” (see Writing Right, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning science author Jared Diamond).

Hangul’s democratization of literacy was adamantly opposed by Korea’s intellectual elites, which correctly saw hangul as threatening their monopoly on the benefits of literacy. Hangul was recognized as Korea’s official written script after WWII, and since then, hangul has become nearly universal in Korea, with hanja rapidly disappearing.

Hangul’s impact on Korean culture has been profound. Using hangul, Korea rapidly attained the highest literacy rate in the world – an important factor in its emergence as a top-tier industrial nation. Korea is so proud of hangul that it celebrates Hangul Day every year. Korea’s new capital, Sejong City, was named after King Sejong the Great, whose ‘greatest’ accomplishment is considered to be the development of hangul.

Thus, Korean society is well-disposed towards the idea that the use of a non-traditional symbol system can dramatically improve learning outcomes, as the ThumMusic System is poised to do. Positioning the ThumMusic System in Korea as “hangul for music” could help lead to rapid success there.

The second reason why the ThumMusic System could take off in South Korea is its absolute obsession with education, delivered in large part through private cram schools, on which Korean parents spend US$15 billion per year – the world’s highest per capita investment in private education. As one leading cram school entrepreneur stated, “The most important thing for students is time, so the quality of educational services is critical – they have to learn as much as possible in a short space of time.” In the highly-competitive cram school market, the school which first adopted the ThumMusic System could gain a significant advantage.

Together, these two circumstances could lead South Korea could be a leading adopter of the Thummer and ThumMusic System.

It happens that Korean manufacturing giant Hyundai recently acquired Kurzweil Music Systems and appointed Ray Kurzweil to be its Chief Strategy Officer, to “build Kurzweil Music Systems into one of the largest music instruments brands in the world,” according to Kurzweil.

Interesting,yes? ;-)

Thummer as Purple Cow

I recently had the founder of a music technology company tell me that he wanted to hire me to evangelize his company's music technology products, because I “must be an incredible evangelist to have gotten such amazing national press for the Thummer” (e.g., the Wall Street Journal story and a forthcoming story by CBS News Sunday Morning).

He missed the point completely. The Thummer is getting remarkable press because the Thummer is remarkable – literally “worthy of remark.” The Thummer is, in Seth Godin’s memorable phrase, a Purple Cow.

Here’s the essence of Godin’s Purple Cow Theory, drawn from the above-linked article:
When was the last time you noticed a cow? Saw a cow on the side of the road, pulled over and gawked… Not likely. Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring.

A purple cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to.

Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible. The world is full of boring stuff — brown cows — which is why so few people pay attention. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not just slapping on the marketing function as a last-minute add-on, but also understanding from the outset that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, then it's invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things that the right customers care about can have an enormous payoff.

If being a Purple Cow is such an effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn't everyone do it? Because people are so afraid. "Playing it safe" and "following the rules" seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing; not standing out is the same as being invisible. The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need a Purple Cow. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.

The Thummer is not just remarkable, it’s remarkable in four different ways – (1) its unparalleled expressive power, (2) its unprecedented ease of learning, (3) its revolutionary Dynamic Tonality, and (4) its shockingly low price (compared to other button-field controllers like the Tenori-On and Monome, which don’t even come close to the Thummer on any of the first three points).

These are exactly the benefits needed to disrupt the music products industry.

As Bill Gates once famously said, “to create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures peoples' imagination.”

It takes a Purple Cow – a purple cow like the Thummer.

Dynamic Tonality Demo Video

You can find a video demonstration of Dynamic Tonality here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd4h8vmEsQM

The sound quality is terrible, because I had to record it from my laptop, the microphone jack on which is busted, and using demo-creation software which couldn't tap into the speakers directly -- so the sound you're hearing is coming out of its speakers and into the laptop's built-in mic, which is a recipe for feedback. Noisy fan, too. Please accept my apologies for this.

But, that being said, the demo still makes the point -- clearly, I hope -- that the Thummer keyboard’s note-layout makes microtonal music brain-dead simple, by exposing tonal intervals consistently in every tuning of the syntonic tuning continuum.

Next month, a paper is being published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Mathematics and Music which rigorously proves that the Thummer's Wicki/Hayden note-layout is optimal for controlling Dynamic Tonality. No other note-layout -- not the Janko, nor Fokker, nor Bosanquet, etc. -- packs so many octaves of tonally-relevant intervals into such a small area over such a wide tuning range.

It's easy to dismiss microtonality as an irrelevant fringe interest that has no appeal whatsoever to mass-market consumers. But this ignores both history and current practice, in which tuning matters.

Currently, Western musicians bend their notes constantly – intoning them towards Just Intonation, Pythagorean tuning, expressive exaggerations thereof, or blue notes. Monophonic instruments have dominated Western orchestras in part because they allowed such note-by-note intonation. Tuning matters. The Thummer allows musicians to intone notes polyphonically -- bending many notes at once towards their Pythagorean tuning, for example (with the sharps getting sharper and the flats flatter).

Also, there is a big wide world out there beyond the West, and many non-Western cultures use non-Western tunings. The Thummer's keyboard has the same fingering in 7-edo (related to Thai & Mandinka music) and 5-edo (related to Indonesian music) as it does in Western 12-edo. Even the Turkish 53-edo schismatic temperament fits the Thummer's note-layout, too (albeit with different note-choices than are used in the syntonic temperament, e.g. d4’s in place of M3’s). The Thummer supports all of these different cultures' tunings. To musicians from non-Western cultures, or to Western musicians who wish to learn about or to mix and match the music of non-Western cultures, tuning matters.

Historically, 12-edo is recent, only having been widely adopted between 1850 and 1900, give or take. Before that, Pythagorean tuning, 1/4-comma meantone, and various well temperaments dominated Western tuning for thousands of years. All of these pre-modern Western tunings have the same fingering on the Thummer's keyboard, too. You can see a piece of the soft-synth's controller for Just and irregular tunings in the above-mentioned Dynamic Tuning video, to the left of the tuning slider, towards the top of the screen (look for the phrase "Minor JI"). If you want to play music in its historically-accurate tuning (albeit perhaps on a modern instrument), then tuning matters.

In addition to past and current practice, one should also consider the future. The new musical effects enabled by Dynamic Tonality -- polyphonic tuning bends, new chord progressions (!), temperament modulations, and the like -- enable entirely new styles and forms of music. Consider the expansion of form enabled by the chromaticism of the Romantic period, or the staggering popularity of the non-equally-tempered blues scale over the last hundred years. Tuning matters.

These ideas may seem complicated, because Dynamic Tonality is brand new. However, as you can see/hear from the demo video, Dynamic Tonality is brain-dead simple to USE. You just change the tuning -- by wiggling one of the Thummer’s joysticks, perhaps -- and cool new musical effects happen. You don't have to understand prime numbers, ratios, logarithms, or any of the other arcana of tuning theory. You just wiggle a friggin' joystick. The Thummer knows music theory, so you don't have to.

Hostorically speaking, every change in tuning -- Pythagorean to 1/4-comma, 1/4-comma to well-tempered, well-tempered to 12-ET -- has expanded music's possibilities. Some of these initially seemed complicated and perhaps even diabolical, largely because these tunings moved notes away from their alignment with harmonic partials. But Dynamic Tonality generalizes the relationship between the Harmonic Series and Just Intonation by adjusting a timbre's partials (in real time) to align with the notes of the current tuning, then one gets pure consonance all across the syntonic temperament's tuning range -- as you can hear in the demo (through the noise of the lousy recording -- sorry). So again: you don't need to know music theory to use this stuff; the Thummer knows music theory, so you don't have to.

In short: one of the main reasons to prefer the Wicki/Hayden note-layout over all other isomorphic layouts is that it enables unique support for Dynamic Tonality.

The ThumMusic System was also designed with Dynamic Tonality in mind. It emphasizes those aspects of music -- intervals, and the relationships among intervals -- which are invariant in the music of the past, the present, and the future, across many different cultures, while deprecating those aspects of music – most notably tying each note to a fixed pitch -- which assume a single, static tuning, unique to one time, place, and culture.

Or that’s the idea, anyway. ;-)

Temperament, by Stuart Isacoff

Last week I read, for the first time, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization, originally published in 2001. It was written by Stuart Isacoff, a “pianist, composer and writer, the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today,” and Lecturer at Purchase College, which is part of the State University of New York system. I found it to be fascinating, penetrating, and a very enjoyable read.

I was also pleased to discover that, indirectly, it presents a very strong argument in favor of Thumtronics’ musical innovations.

Superficially, Temperament could be read as a paean to 12-edo (Equal Division of the Octave, called simply “equal temperament” in the book). For example, Isacoff writes that:

• 12-edo is “the final solution” (p. 6).
• “if music depended on harmony for its expressiveness, then [12-edo] was crucial, because it offered any keyboard instrument a unique ability to facilitate harmonic movement” (p. 209).
• “equal temperament [is] a system that casually discards the simplest, purest musical ratios…for the sake of pleasing the ears” (p. 175).
• “no keyboard can execute all these different scales in meantone tuning without falling prey to the ‘wolves’” (p. 215).
• 12-edo’s adoption was “inevitable” (p. 224).
• “the temperament wars, after centuries of struggle, had essentially reached an end…[12-edo] settled in as the philosophical ideal” (p. 227).

However, the book frequent mentions an often-proposed alternative solution: extended keyboards and tunings, i.e., those with more than 12 notes per octave.

• “Instrument makers proposed the creation of keyboards with extra keys, so performers would have more than the usual number of choices for finding a note with the proper proportion. It was a cumbersome solution” (p. 18).
• “As late as 1768, the Foundling Hospital in London [installed an organ] capable of playing more than 12 pitches in an octave. Nevertheless, these complicated musical inventions found little acceptance” (p. 19).
• “one solution to [the problem of wolf intervals in meantone] was to offer extra keys, giving the performer a choice of playing either la-flat or sol-sharp…The idea would gain new adherents over time…but it was cumbersome, and ultimately unsatisfactory” (p. 104).
• “Nicola Vicentino…constructed an entirely new instrument, the archicembalo, with six rows of keys, to allow different versions of each scale member to be played (commas and all)” (p. 127).
• “Fabio Colonna’s sambuca, based on a division of the octave into thirty-one parts” (p. 131).
• “Mersenne, for example, urged the adoption of an instrument with nineteen keys” (p. 181).
• “Constantijn Huygens…used logarithms to calculate the division of the octave into thirty-one equal parts…Models of [his] keyboards, designed to fit over ordinary harpsichords, were, he reported, actually constructed in Paris” (p. 185).
• “Newton’s method boiled down to the cumbersome method of offering performers a greater-than-usual choice of notes to play” (p. 196).

Isacoff consistently uses the same word to explain the failure of extended keyboards: cumbersome, defined by the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary as meaning “unwieldy because of heaviness and bulk." The Thummer is one-thirtieth the size and one tenth the weight of an electronic keyboard, and vastly smaller & lighter than an acoustic piano.

Clearly, Isacoff considers the “cumbersome-ness” of any given keyboard design to be a significant factor in its acceptance or rejection.

Perhaps the Thummer's relative non-cumbersome-ness can be seen as a significant advantage.

Another word that Isacoff uses to describe extended keyboards is complicated, defined as “difficult to analyze, understand, or explain.” An alternative definition of cumbersome provided by Wiktionary, also smacks of complexity: “not easily managed or handled; awkward.” Does Isacoff prefer the simple and easy to the complicated and difficult? Apparently, he does.

• Isacoff quotes d’Alembert as praising Rameau for being “the first to have simplified the practice of [music] and made it easier,” implying that being simpler and easier – i.e., less complicated – are positive qualities (p. 223).
• Isacoff praises the innovations of Guido d’Arezzo – solfege and the staff, specifically – saying “The impulse to explore greater musical horizons demanded advances in technology…Portraying music visually made its structure easier to grasp and to vary; it enabled choirboys to learn in a few days what had taken weeks, and gave singers and composers newfound freedom to experiment. Musicians could more easily pose the question, ‘what if…?’” (p. 50)

The latter quote above is particularly important, as it elucidates a subtle point that is often lost: that by making things simpler, you can also make them more powerful. To quote Wikipedia, "A solution may be considered elegant if it uses a non-obvious method to produce a solution which is highly effective and simple. An elegant solution may solve multiple problems at once, especially problems not thought to be inter-related."

The Thummer’s isomorphic keyboard is said to be much simpler and easier than the piano keyboard, especially when also using the ThumMusic System to display and control musical information. (One might think of its solfege-based ThumLine staff as reuniting Guido d’Arezzo’s sundered innovations.) The Thummer’s ability to facilitate the exploration of “greater musical horizons” is discussed below.

Perhaps the Thummer's being less complicated can be seen as a significant advantage.

Throughout Temperament, Isacoff praises those instruments and tunings which enhance expressiveness and versatility:

• “Temperaments…unfettered the engine of musical progress” (p. 8)
• “Each of Leonardo [da Vinci]’s musical inventions seemed to break new ground in extending an instrument’s expressive possibilities” (p. 89)
• “The stretching of musical boundaries [in the late 1500’s] fueled a demand for more versatility from the keyboard instruments themselves” (p. 162)
• “For many musicians, the invention of the piano was a wish come true. Composer and keyboardist Francois Couperin had pleaded in print for the creation of just such an instrument in 1711. He would be ‘forever grateful,’ wrote Couperin, to anyone who could render the monotonous harpsichord capable of expression” (p. 210)

Independent experts claim (here, and here) that the Thummer, with its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors, has more expressive potential than any other instrument. As to versatility, the Thummer’s keyboard can be used to play the music of many different cultures and eras (which require tunings other than 12-edo), all with the same fingering. As to “unfettering,” the Thummer encourages musical progress through such novel effects as Dynamic Tonality.

Perhaps the Thummer's being more expressive, more versatile, and more enabling of musical progress can be seen as a significant advantage.

Isacoff also hints at the intimate relationship between tuning and timbre that is fundamental to Dynamic Tonality:

• “Unless the strings used to create the harmony are made of the same ‘material, length, thickness, and goodness,’ they simply won’t be in tune with each other…(the gut strings used in lutes, for example, will produce equal-tempered thirds that are more pleasant sounding than the ones produced on strings made of steel)” (p. 143).
• “Indeed, [the piano’s] timbre, like the lute’s, made the modified intervals of equal-tempered tuning easy to take” (p. 214).

During the time covered by the book Temperament, the only possible approach to the problem of consonance (described in the book as concordance) was tempering one’s tuning; it was not possible to temper the timbres of acoustic instruments. However, as Isacoff says (p. 39), “In our sophisticated, scientific age of black holes and anti-matter, dealing with such entities is child’s play.” Using electronic music synthesis, both tuning and timbre can be tempered together, opening the entire dynamic sweep of the syntonic temperament’s tuning continuum to exploration without sacrificing consonance.

This approach to solving the problems raised in Temperament is – as far as my collaborators, myself, and our papers’ peer-reviewers know – entirely novel. This use of “tempered timbres” slices through the Gordian Knot of temperament at an entirely new angle. Its result is not just one arguably-optimal approximation of Just Intonation – 12-edo – but rather a broad, continuous sweep of tunings, each maximally-aligned with its related timbres’ partials. Indeed, our approach embraces not only the syntonic temperament, but every rank-2 temperament, including the schismatic, Magic, Hanson, Porcupine, etc.

This newfound flexibility of tuning and timbre – “Dynamic Tonality” – is simply impossible to replicate on the piano-style keyboard, because a two-dimensional note-layout is required to capture the structure of a two-dimensional (rank-2) temperament, and the piano's keyboard is one-dimensional.

Perhaps the Thummer and Dynamic Tonality will be seen as offereing a more flexible solution to the problem of temperament.

There’s one last thread running through Temperament that’s relevant to Thumtronics’ innovations: Isacoff’s frequent praise for those creative musicians, scientists, and theorists who went against established orthodoxy in proposing new ways of balancing the needs of beauty and utility. However, this praise is offered more in tone than in text, so I can’t provide specific quotes.

It is unclear whether Isacoff's praise is for rational & experiential iconoclasm in general, or only for that which supports an anti-Pythagorean & pro-12-edo agenda. Thumtronics' innovations are certainly anti-Pythagorean (in that they modify the Sacred Harmonic Series itself – gasp, horror, heresy!), but they are hardly pro-12-edo. Nonetheless, they are built atop a firm scientific foundation, with mathematical proofs published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and with a demonstration synth that can be experienced by anyone.

In conclusion: Stuart Isacoff’s excellent book, Temperament, praises those innovations in the history of musical tuning, instrument design, and notation that enhanced simplicity, versatility, freedom, expressiveness, and progress, while being less cumbersome. I submit that the Thummer delivers all of these same benefits, and would welcome Dr. Isacoff's comments on it.

Thummer Plays the Blues

What is the blues scale?.

In Africa and the Blues, Gerhard Kubik describes the blues scale as arising from two overlapping harmonic series, one starting a perfect fourth higher than the other. He shows this using a diagram showing only the 5th through 9th partials (harmonics) of each note's harmonic series, which I have modified as shown below (at right).

In the figure at right, the lower-pitched harmonic series is Do (outer ring, with harmonics as black-filled circles), the upper-pitched one is Fa (inner ring, harmonics as unfilled circles). Partials 5 through 9 are shown for each. There's very good alignment between Do's 8th partial and Fa's 6th partial (and of course the octaves thereof), and also between Do's 6th partial and Fa's 9th partial. These well-aligned pairs are a perfect fifth apart.

An alternative way to visualize two overlapping harmonic series is shown below.
In the figure at left, the harmonics of Do are in black while those of Fa, offset a perfect fourth higher, are in grey. At 700 cents above Do's fundamental, Do's 3rd, 6th, 12th, & 24th harmonics align with the 9th & 18th partials of Fa -- hence aligning the Do6 and Fa9 partials as in the circular figure above. Likewise, Do's 1st, 2nd, 4th, 8th, & 16th partials (far left, at 0 cents) align well with Fa's 3rd, 6th, 12, & 24th partials (far right, just past 1199 cents) -- hence aligning the Do8 and Fa6 partials as in the circular figure above.

At the top of the figure above and left, scale degrees are shown. The 3rd and 6th scale degrees are underlined, with each underline joining two stacks of harmonics. The third degree joins Do9 and Fa7 (and their octaves), while the sixth degree joins Do7 and Fa5 (and their octaves). According to Kubik (if I understand his section of his book correctly), these not-quite-aligned Do9/Fa7 and Do7/Fa5 pairs enable the tunings of these scale degrees to be flexible within a fairly wide range.

Another point raised by Kubik is that the 7-edo scale -- also known as the "equiheptatonic" scale, dividing the octave into 7 intervals of equal width -- is common in some parts of Africa. A "third" in 7-edo tuning is 343 cents wide, which is right in the middle of the range of the 3rd scale degree in the above-left figure, providing yet another source of instability in this range.

Does the Thummer suit the blues?

Played in today's standard Western 12-edo tuning (i.e., an “equal division of the octave” into 12 pieces), the Thummer should be at least as blues-capable as the piano or guitar. Its expressive controls (thumb-operated joysticks & electronic motion sensors) allow the user to play the blue notes "between" the notes of 12-edo as a guitarist can do by bending strings, and which a pianist simulates by "crushing" adjacent keys.

However, the Thummer's real potential as a blues instrument arises from the tuning invariance of its isomorphic keyboard, which gives it the same fingering in any tuning of the syntonic temperament, which includes both 12-edo and 31-edo (i.e., an “equal division of the octave” into 31 pieces, in which the tempered perfect fifth is 696.8 cents wide -- only 3.2 cents narrower than 12-edo's tempered perfect fifth).

The use of septimal (7-limit) ratios for the blue notes is explored by W.A. Mathieu in his excellent book Harmonic Experience (Chapters 17 & 33).

In 12-edo tuning, the augmented second (A2) has the same width as the minor third (m3) -- 300 cents -- so they are often treated as if they were "the same" interval.

However, in any other tuning, including 31-edo tuning, the A2 and m3 have different widths, each signifying a different just interval, as does the M3.

• 31-edo's A2, at 271.0 cents, is only four cents narrower than the just septimal minor third (7/6 = 266.9).
• 31-edo's m3, at 309.7 cents, is only 5.9 cents narrower than the just minor third (6/5 = 315.6).
• 31-edo's M3, at 387.1 cents, is less than one cent wider than the just major third (6/5 = 386.3 cents).

This harmonically-relevant distinction between the A2, m3, and M3 gives musicians a choice of three different notes to play across the range of blue 3rds. They can use the A2 to signifiy the 7/6 ratio, the m3 to signify the 6/5 ratio, or the M3 to signify the 5/4 ratio. All of these notes provide a better match with the harmonic series when using 31-edo than when using 12-edo.

Perhaps even more importantly, 31-edo distinguishes the augmented sixth (A6) from the minor seventh (m7).

• 31-edo's A6, at 967.7 cents, is only 1.1 cents narrower than the septimal minor seventh (7/4 = 968.8), making it well-suited for the harmonic seventh, also known as the "babershop seventh," chord.
• 31-edo's m7, at 1006.5 cents, falls almost exactly between just intonation's Pythagorean minor seventh (16/9 = 996.1) and diatonic minor seventh (9/5 = 1017.6), making it well-suited for use in a dominant seventh chord.

Hence, musicians can use the A6 to signifiy the 7/4 ratio, or the m7 to signify the 16/9 and/or the 9/5 ratio. Either way, musicians get a better match with the harmonic series when using 31-edo than when using 12-edo. (Well, actually, 12-edo's m7, at 1000 cents, is a better match with the Pythagorean m7, but it's a worse match with the diatonic m7 and is completely useless as a septimal m7.)

According to this reference, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords (I7, IV7, and V7) should be played as harmonic seventh chords (i.e., with an A6) except for the V7 at the turnaround, which should be played as a dominant seventh chord.

If I understand this correctly -- which I very well may not -- then in C, using the tuning described above, the I7, IV7, and V7 blues chords would be played in 31-edo as:

• I7: C-E-G-A#
• IV7: F-A-C-D#
• V7: G-B-D-F (turnaround) or G-B-D-E# (otherwise)

31-edo supports free modulation as well as 12-et does, with a caveat or two. For example, you can't play Coltrane's Giant Steps in 31-edo, becuase Giant Steps' chord progression relies on the fact that 12-edo's way-too-wide 400-cent major third tempers out the diesis , so that a chord progression through three M3's will return to the same pitch class. 31-edo's major thirds are almost perfectly just at 387.1 cents, so progressing through three of them will bring you to a point that's 38.7 cents short of the starting pitch class. Oops! In 31-edo, Giant Steps is a giant stumble, because it relies utterly on the unique structure of 12-edo -- whereas most blues relies on a structure that mixes 7-limit intervals with 5-limit intervals, at which 31-edo excels.

So, how does the Thummer compare to other blues instruments?

• On the piano keyboard, making a distinction between the A6 and m7, or the A2 and m3, is impossible. Both intervals share the same key. Pianists can fake it by crushing adjacent keys, but that's clearly a kludge, which does nothing to distinguish among the relevant harmonic ratios.


• On the guitar, it's possible to play perfectly intoned notes -- through string bending -- but difficult. In this YouTube video lesson from Berklee, the instructor states (2:09 in) that "String bends are kinda tricky. They take a little getting used to...like YEARS, actually, to develop a good sound."


• On the Thummer, you can learn to play perfectly-intoned blue notes in minutes. To paraphrase Bach, you just press the right button at the right time, and the instrument plays itself. In C, for example, if you want the A2, you play the D# button; if you want the m3, you play the Eb button; if you want the M3, you play the D button. You can use the portamento controller to slide smoothly from one precisely-tuned note to another, with no guesstimation involved. Or, you can play any of the notes above, and use pitch bending to slide 'em around at will.

31-edo is good for other musical styles, too. It is nearly identical to 1/4-comma meantone, which dominated the early centuries of Europe’s Common Practice Era, of which the use of augmented sixth chords was distinctive part.

31-edo may also be well-suited to klezmer and gypsy music, which use many augmented intervals.

If 31-edo is so cool, why hasn't it been more widely used? Apparently, because it was thought to require the use of an instrument with 31 keys per octave, for which there could be no mass-market in a 12-edo-dominated world.

This barrier may have been eliminated by the recent discovery of tuning invariance, combined with electronic transposition. Despite having only 19 buttons per octave, it appears to be true that all of the tonally-relevant 5-limit and 7-limit intervals of 31-edo fall on the Thummer's keyboard. (The above-mentioned neutral third does not, because it's an 11-limit interval.) Add to this the Thummer's expressive potential (controlled by its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors), and the Thummer could be a very credible blues instrument.

However, it's important to realize that 12-edo and 31-edo are just points along the syntonic temperament's tuning continuum, along which the Thummer can be retuned dynamically in real time. On the one hand, that means that a Thummer player can slide smoothly back and forth between 12-edo and 31-edo (or Pythagorean, or 7-edo, or whatever) in real time, choosing the tuning that best fits the current note or phrase. On the other hand, this real-time flexibility enables entirely new musical effects such as expressive polyphonic tuning bends, tuning progressions, and temperament modulations.

My collaborators and I have barely scratched the surface of the possibilities of tuning invariance -- our initial scientific paper was published just three months ago -- so we're not yet sure how big the creative opportunity really is.

Now, if y'all could please point out the errors I've undoubtedly made in this blog article, I'd appreciate it, and will update the article accordingly.

Thanks! :-)

Instrument Selection

Every three years, NAMM hires Gallop to conduct a telephone survey of American households. I can't find the 2006 survey online, but the 2003 survey concluded that

1. 64% of instrumental music-makers started studying music when they were 5-11 years old; 18% starting 12-14; 7% 15-18; and 6% after 18.


2. 75% chose for themselves the instrument that they learned to play, with 15% making the decision jointly with parents and 10% having the choice of instrument made by the parent alone.


3. 30% took lessons at school, 26% took private lessons, and 22% taught themselves. The “taught themselves” percentage has risen over time (and may be rising much faster now due to the Internet). Boys teach themselves three times as often as girls do.

It is illuminating to make a chart of the ages at which music-makers started studying music (below).


The chart shows the percentage of instrumental music-makers who started learning music at each given age (in red) and the culumative total up to that age (in green).

The ages 5-11 are clearly critical. 69% of people who will ever learn to play an instrument have started learning by the end of their 11th year, and 87% by the end of their 14th year. Clearly, if I want to sell a lot of Thummers, I need to *eventually* meet the needs of very young students (although it may not be efficient to target them first).

NAMM’s surveys don’t ask what instrument is played, or why that particular instrument was chosen. There is little research into the factors which affect musical instrument choice among beginners, and that limited research tends to constrain the available options to band & orchestra instruments. A better understanding the factors affecting instrument-selection could suggest opportunities for improving the Thummer such that it would consistently win this selectrion process.

NAMM's survey data suggest that

• Ensuring that the Thummer meets the needs of beginners aged 5-11 is critical to its long-term success;


• We can emphasize self-teaching (online) initially, but will need to penetrate the private lesson and school-based lesson channels, also, to maximize Thummer sales;


• The ability of a given instrument to help a teenage boy “get chicks” is not sufficient, in itself, to maximize Thummer sales, as (i) it doesn’t help sell instruments to girls, and (ii) more than 80% of music-makers have already selected their instrument before their mid-teens, leaving at most 20% to be affected by this benefit.

People usually mention the "get chicks" factor with regard to the guitar -- but history suggests that jazz instrumentalists did pretty well in that regard, too, so there appears to be more to that benefit than just instrument choice.

JacyDawn82's Criticisms

JacyDawn82 posted some interesting criticisms of the Thummer as comments to Thumtronics’ YouTube videos. A blog like this is a better forum for such discussions, so I've taken the liberty of posting the criticisms below, interspersed with my responses.

Generally, JacyDawn82’s statements seem to fall into three broad categories:

1. No new musical instrument could possibly be superior to all traditional musical instruments in any musically-important way.
2. Making a profit and making a better world are mutually incompatible.
3. The Thummer promotes musical idiocy (in some undefined way), and any claim to the contrary is “ridiculous” and/or “ludicrous.”

These concerns appear to be simple reactionary conservatism – “anything old is better than anything new” – but there may be more to them than that.

The third point is the most interesting to me, as it seems to be hitting a real sore point, which I do not understand.

Here's the thread.

Jacy

[The Thummer] promotes musical idiocy.

Jim
Why? Make your case, Jacy.

In what way does the Thummer and/or ThumMusic System “promote musical idiocy”? What essential concepts of music theory and/or performance does it deprecate, such that those who learn to make music using the ThumMusic System are, as a result, musical idiots?

Jacy
My main problem is the inventor is somehow trying to “improve” upon over 400 years of SUCCESSFUL musical tradition by replacing it with this useless toy.

Jim

I am guilty as charged... just as Henry Ford was guilty of trying to “improve” upon centuries of SUCCESSFUL transportation tradition and Vint Cerf was guilty of trying to “improve” upon centuries of SUCCESSFUL communications tradition. Their useless toys have helped millions.

As to “promoting musical idiocy” – how so? With the Thummer [and ThumMusic System], a higher percentage of people can successfully gain the knowledge and skills necessary to read, perform, and compose music. Is this not a good thing?

Jacy

Are you seriously comparing yourself to Henry Ford and Vint Cerf? Give me a break!

Jim

All inventors – including me – attempt to advance the state of the art. To argue that this is somehow offensive is to argue that we should still be shivering in cold, dark caves.

Jacy
You don't fool me...your BS about wanting to spread the joy of music with your trinket is completely lost and fake to me between interjections of how much you want to make money. The developers of the Theremin or Moog sought to further music as an art form, something you obviously don't intend to do as a musically challenged (however brilliant) businessman.

Jim

Your claims are erroneous. Leon Teremin patented the Teremin all over the world; hardly a sign of unbridled altruism. Robert Moog made theremins for a living, both before and after developing the synthesizer, and always worked (albeit with mixed success) to commercialize his innovations profitably. By offering a simpler, cheaper, and more expessive instrument, I can make the world a better place and a fortune, too. That's the American Dream; as an American, that's good enough for me.

Jacy

How is it that this device is going to make the world a better place? Be very specific, please.

Jim
Let's presume for the sake of this discussion that:

• acquiring the knowledge and skills of music-making has many benefits, both intrinsic and extrinsic; that
• only a given percentage of musical novices -- call it X% -- progress far enough in their music lessons to acquire the above-mentioned benefits; and that
• it costs some average amount -- call it $Y -- to educate a raw novice to the point where they acquire the above-mentioned benefits.

Now, let's imagine that a new approach to music education could be found that

• yeilds precisely the same benefits,
• with a success rate that’s significantly higher than X%,
• at a cost that is significantly lower than $Y.

With this hypothetical new approach, more people could afford to attempt to acquire the benefits of music education, and more would succeed in the attempt. Having more people enjoy these benefits would make the world a better place -- wouldn't it?

No scientific studies have yet attempted to measure the relative advantage of the ThumMusic System, so the extent of its advantage over traditional methods is not yet known. However, the response of many credible music educators (e.g., Leong, Miles, Whitehead, & others) suggests that there is at least a reasonable likelihood that its advantage will prove to be considerable.

The Thummer extends the advantages of the ThumMusic System by providing greater expressive and creative potential than traditional musical instruments (see below), by having the potential to become very affordable (see below), and by offering novel creative potential.

Jacy
How are you contributing to the world as a businessman (because, sir, you are NOT an artist) with your musical innovation? Cut the nonsense; you are very much more interested in tapping into a “$30 billion a year industry.”

Jim
If the Thummer and ThumMusic System do indeed have the potential to deliver the benefits of music education to more people at lower cost, then this would be quite a contribution, worthy of a substantial return on investment.

Jacy
If you would only change your view that the problems of the less musically-inclined is the fault of the music. That just completely boggles my mind.

Jim
The problem is not the fault of music per se, but rather the fault of the level of abstraction at which musical information is displayed and controlled by traditional notation & instruments. The Thummer and ThumMusic System raise the level of abstraction such that the invariant structures of music theory are displayed and controlled in an invariant manner, thereby making music significantly easier to teach, learn, and play.

This is a rather complex and subtle concept, which does not translate well into a TV sound-bite; “it’s music’s fault” is about as close as one can get while being TV-friendly. Those who take exception to the sound-bite will hopefully hit Thumtronics’ website for more information (such as this and this).

Jacy
Face it: what you are indeed promoting is not innovation, but idiocy.

Jim
Why? Make your case, Jacy.

Jacy
You're not talking about cars versus horse and carriage. Music is an art (to some, art in its highest form) and should be experienced by everyone. That much I agree. But to suggest that your way is better and that your device is superior in some way is completely ludicrous.

Jim
Why? Make your case, Jacy.

Jacy
There are countless interested individuals who have toiled for many years learning their instrument – whether piano, violin, guitar, cello, clarinet – both amateur, professional, or somewhere in between who would be more than happy to try or even learn your device (myself included would be interested in at least trying it out).

But I cannot let go of your ridiculous claims about how the Thummer is a “solution” to the problems presented by learning the above instruments, all veiled under the guise of making the world a better place. “By offering a simpler, cheaper, and more expressive instrument, I can make the world a better place and a fortune, too.”

• Simpler? Maybe a little (although it doesn't take too long to learn chords on a guitar or basic progressions on a piano).
• Cheaper? At $450 US, that's not exactly cheaper than a beginner's guitar, and that's just for the Thummer alone, correct?
• More Expressive? The only claim that is just outright wrong. People: compare the Thummer examples here to a fine performance of a Chopin etude or Beethoven sonata on the piano, an Albeniz Tango on the guitar, a Bach partita on the violin, or a simple lullaby sung by a parent to their child.
  

Jim

• Simpler: The ThumMusic System is likely to prove to be considerably more than “a little simpler,” but we can’t know by how much until rigorous scientific studies are conducted. Still, credible experts in music education have stated that its potential is “revolutionary.” Revolutions usually require that the new technology be two or three times as efficient as the status quo; that’s a lot more than “a little.”
• Cheaper: Traditional musical instruments are now about as cheap as they’ll ever get (all else being equal), whereas the eMotion Thummer’s expected initial price can fall rapidly as its sales volumes increase. Because the Thummer is all-electronic, tiny, and has few moving parts, a Pocket Thummer (with battery power and integrated sounds) could eventually retail for under $20 bucks (in constant dollars). There’s no way a non-toy guitar or piano keyboard could ever touch that price; they are too large and mechanically complex. And online computer-keyboard-based ThumMusic lessons are expected to be free, which is a price that’s hard to beat.
• More Expressive: This claim is actually the easiest to prove, as previously discussed on this blog. It also has the most definitive expert support, as from Paine and Goudeseune, who refer to it as being “outstandingly expressive” and “groundbreaking,” respectively.

Why the Thummer Will Succeed

Proposed new musical instruments tend to fail in the marketplace because:

1. they have to be much better – not just slightly better – than traditional instruments in at least two or three different ways that consumers care about, and
2. they are sold through a traditional bricks & mortar distribution channel, which favors "me-too" products over radically different designs.

The Thummer and Thumtronics' sales model solve both problems.

1. The Thummer is WAY Better

• The Thummer allows novices to learn music much faster – at least three time faster, and (with the ThumMusic System) perhaps ten times faster – than traditional instruments.
• The Thummer is has far more expressive power than any other instrument, due to its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors. With these, musicians can control up to ten different independent musical variables simultaneously while playing, instead of the two or three variables available in most traditional musical instruments.
• The Thummer offers artists the opportunity to explore vast new creative frontiers through its novel support for Dynamic Tuning.
• The Thummer is tiny – potentially even pocket-sized.
• The Thummer can be very affordable, due to its being made from standard, off-the-shelf consumer electronics components.

Simple, Powerful, Portable, & Affordable – these are the keys to success in ANY market. That’s why the Thummer can – and will – succeed.

2. The Thummer Has Low Inventory and Distribution Costs

Most musical instruments are large, heavy things, made from special-purpose components. For example, my Roland ep-97 digital piano weighs 32 pounds, which means that it would cost over $105 to ship it across the USA overnight. The Thummer, on the other hand, weighs about a pound, and would cost only a quarter as much to ship. Furthermore, the Thummer occupies only about a tenth of the volume of the ep-97, reducing my inventory and bulk shipping costs accordingly. Keeping inventory and distribution costs low is essential for products that are likely to start out as low-volume niche products before they climb up the Long Tail up into the mainstream. Most proposed new musical instruments are simply too big, too heavy, and too expensive to be profitable in a small niche, so they never get the opportunity to climb out into the mainstream. The Thummer can survive profitably as a niche product while musicians and music educators learn to exploit its revolutionary strengths. World-changing revolutions take time, and the Thummer can be profitable throughout.

That's why the Thummer will succeed: because it addresses both the product issues and the business process issues that have led other new musical instruments to fail.

Go-to-Market Strategies & OS Partnerships

Thumtronics has four different strategies for getting the Thummer to market, depending on the kind of deal it can make with future investors.

1. US Independent: Bring the Thummer to market as in independent US firm, climbing up The Long Tail from low-volume “niche” sales in the first couple of years to high-volume “mainstream” sales thereafter.
2. Chinese Independent: As above, but partnering with a Chinese OEM of electronic musical instruments to complete the Thummer’s engineering and undertake its manufacturing.
3. OS Partner: Partnering with an operating system (OS) vendor – Apple, Microsoft, or Sony – to bring Thumtronics’ innovations to market.
4. Open Project: If all else fails, assign Thumtronics’ IP to a non-profit organization which can lead the open, non-profit development of Thumtronics’ innovations.

The Independent options could lead to an OS Partnership, with an OS vendor buying Thumtronics after its products’ potential had been proven in the marketplace.

Why would an OS vendor care about Thumtronics?

OS vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are currently fighting a pitched battle to control the technology standards for connected entertainment, including music. This competition has been most obvious to consumers in battles over “downstream” music data formats, such as AAC, WMA, and ATRAC. OS vendors are also competing to gain similar proprietary advantages “upstream.” One example is Apple’s Core Audio, which Apple says “let you do things that are simply not possible on other platforms.”

Thumtronics’ innovations are sufficiently disruptive that an OS vendor could use them to add proprietary value to many of today’s music technology standards (aka embrace and extend or de-commoditization), making its platform even more attractive to the creators of musical content, and giving it greater influence over downstream music-related standards, too.

Any one of Apple, Sony, or Microsoft would benefit from a partnership with Thumtronics, albeit each in different ways.

Successful New Musical Interfaces: Why So Rare?

Why is the mainstream commercial success of new musical interfaces so rare?

Here’s my reasoning:

1. The characteristics required for ANY new product to be successful are that it be simpler, cheaper, and/or more powerful;
2. All new musical interfaces are inherently disruptive;
3. A disruptive new product has to be two or three times better than current offerings along at least two of these dimensions (simplicity, affordability, power);
4. The vast majority of proposed new musical interfaces do not deliver benefits sufficient to disrupt the status quo.

If there's any novelty to this analysis, it's in the observation that any new musical interface is inherently disruptive. You can introduce a "new and improved" synthesis algorithm to a keyboard synthesizer, electrify a guitar, or even make drum heads electronic, without requiring significant changes to the instrument's interface. These are sustaining innovations, as far as the musical instrument consumer is concerned. But any change to a musical instrument' interface is inherently disruptive -- and disruptive innovations must deliver a much higher level of benefit to become successful.

There are other minor issues, such as:

• The availability of complementary goods, which in the music products industry include compelling demonstrations of the new interface’s virtuosic potential, interface-specific arrangements of popular music, and interface-specific education materials. However, these days, such materials can be generated free, rapidly, and with high quality by the interface’s early-adopter community, and shared over the Internet.
• The Long Tail favors products which have low inventory & shipping costs, such as tiny instruments which can be manufactured on demand by any consumer electronics-capable factory (without the need for specialized music-related skills or equipment).
• YouTube and other viral marketing mechanisms favor products which provide visually-engaging benefits, such as the use of internal motion sensors to control musical effects.

For any proposed new musical interface, the question then becomes: “is it sufficiently better in ways that matter to the potential market and which facilitate rapid diffusion?” For the vast majority of proposed new interfaces, the answer has been “no.”

Does the Thummer meet this stringent standard? Time will tell – but I think that it does, and I’m not alone in this belief.

Wall Street Journal

Last week, the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition sent John Jurgensen, an entertainment features reporter, to Austin, in order to spend a day observing Thumtronics’ search for the funding needed to bring the Thummer to market.

John had written a WSJ piece on Les Paul, his contributions to inventing the modern electric guitar, and the fact that he was still playing regularly in New York (at 92). I emailed John, suggesting that now that he’d covered the past of musical instruments, he should consider covering their future, too. He liked the idea, his editor approved, and voila! out he came. Cool!

His angle on the story appears to be, “New musical interfaces are proposed frequently but not one has gained mainstream acceptance for over a century [with a few debatable exceptions]. Jim Plamondon thinks his new interface, the Thummer, can beat those odds – but to bring the Thummer to market he needs cash. Let’s observe as he makes his case to potential investors.”

John joined me at the following meetings:

• OpenLabs: Hank Coleman and Victor Wong stated that today’s commercially-successful musicians & producers were (a) computer-based and (b) not classically trained, so that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose by using an easier-to-learn and more-expressive computer-based music-control interface such as the Thummer. They demonstrated the surprising realism of software music synthesis using physical modeling (specifically waveguide synthesis) and emphasized how useful the Thummer would be in unleashing its expressive potential.
• CTAN: Jamie Rhodes discussed the relationship between angel investors & VCs and what both groups looked for in an “ideal” investment. No specific discussion of the Thummer, because Thumtronics had only submitted its proposal a few days earlier and CTAN had not yet had time to review it.
• Fito Kahn and David Peterman: Angel investors who are considering investing in Thumtronics. Asked questions about IP ownership, possible partnership with Chinese OEMs, other issues preparatory to making an offer (probably this week).
• Ian Varley: An archetypical Music Brain, Ian is a serious musical hobbyist – with an extensive home studio and a busy performance schedule – who works as a computer programmer. He demonstrated the Thummer and discussed its merits, including the simplicity of its patterns, its stimulation of creativity, the importance of novelty in capturing the attention of the audience, and the Thummer’s infectiousness. John videotaped much of this discussion, which will hopefully appear on the WSJ’s website.
• Wes Cole: A Venture Capitalist with Austin’s Gefinor Ventures, Wes was kind enough to set up this meeting on short notice. His responses to the presentation were right in line with those of other VCs – and more clearly enunciated than most – which was ideal for this meeting’s purpose.

In between meetings, John and I discussed issues such as why previous new musical interfaces had failed to gain mainstream commercial success, the characteristics needed for any innovation to succeed, and the reasons why some investors shied away from Thumtronics (all of which I will address in subsequent blog postings).

I also introduced John via email to people who could comment credibly on relevant issues, such as Stan Leibowitz on the Lock-In Fallacy, Roger Linn on new musical interfaces, Reuven Brenner on finance, Ajit Kambil on Value Maps, etc. (all without endorsing the Thummer per se).

John said that he could not guarantee that the story would appear, but that he was confident that it would – else his editor would not have approved sending him out to Austin in the first place.

If it does appear, it should be in one of the next few issues of the WSJ Weekend Edition.

This could be very cool. :-)

Project BarBQ

I spent last weekend (October 19-21) at Proejct BarBQ, billed as “The World’s Premiere Interactive Think-Tank.” As in all eleven previous annual incarnations, its sole topic was “Influencing music hardware & software over the next five years.”

Proejct BarBQ was, without a doubt, the coolest conference I have ever attended. Ever notice how the best part of every conference happens outside of the session rooms? It’s the informal exchange of ideas and the networking that makes conferences so productive – the actual sessions are usually pretty boring. Project BarBQ has no sessions, aside from a couple of introductory keynote sessions. Instead, the attendees – limited to 50 per year – decide for themselves what the top four problems facing the audio/music technology industry are, and split up into groups to work out solutions to those problems. Many significant advances in technology & business models have come out of these sessions. Sound boring? Hardly! Not only is it a gas to engage really smart people in heated debate, but it’s even MORE fun to do so when exchanging volleys from rubber-band guns or toasts from seemingly-bottomless margarita pitchers. These ancillary activities loosen people up to approach their shared problems in a fun and creative way.

I had hoped to get the attendees to agree that one of the top four problems to be solved was “increasing the success rate of music education,” but I was unable to attend the first day of the conference, and therefore was not able to make my case. Rats! The closest topic agreed upon was “user interface” – a rather broad topic! – and that topic’s members decided to focus on the needs of the prosumer audio engineer rather than the novice musician, so I was not able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

I got two main benefits from attending Project BarBQ. First, I got a lot of excellent feedback from its attendees on ways that I could make the Thummer even better (the top request: including an old-fashioned “MIDI Out” jack, even if the Thummer’s expressive power is clipped to worthlessness due to the MIDI cable’s anachronistic 31.25 kBaud data rate). Second, I made some excellent connections, some of whom agreed to help me make some connections to move Thumtronics forward. For example,

• George “The Fat Man” Sanger, organizer of Project BarBQ and music technology legend, agreed to introduce me to some top-flight engineers once Thumtronics gets funded, and
• Tom White, head of the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association, agreed to introduce me to some OEM manufacturers who might be interested in partnering with Thumtronics.

All in all, well worth attending.

Semmelweis Reflex

Established hierarchies do not embrace revolutionary ideas. They exist to defend the status quo. They reject revolutionary ideas reflexively, without giving them the slightest thought.

Here’s one historical example. In 1848, Ignaz Semmelweis, a trained physician, collected iron-clad experimental data showing that having a physician wash his hands in a chlorine solution prior to the delivery of a baby reduced the maternal death rate in his clinic from 18% to 1% – yet twelve years later, due to the medical hierarchy’s reflexive rejection of his ideas, the death rate at that same clinic had doubled to 35%. Semmelweis became distraught at the resulting unnecessary deaths, so his “friends” had him committed to an insane asylum, where he fought to be released – as any sane person would – and was beaten to death.

Semmelweis’ experience was not an isolated incident – far from it. To quote Reuven Brenner’s excellent book, Rivalry (with links added):

Murray’s (1925), Tratnner’s (1938), Polanyi’s (1974), Cohen’s (1985), and Ben-Yahuda’s (1985) detailed and systematic studies of scientists reveal the same pattern: In spite of evidence, innovations were frequently greeted with disdain and incredulity by members of the profession where the innovations were to be applied, professions were hierarchies depended on preserving the paradigms. The reaction to Mesmer’s hypnotic cures, Jenner’s An Inquiring into the Cause and Effects of the Varioloe Vaccination (1798), to Simpson’s discovery of chloroform (1847), to Lyell’s publication of Principles of Geology (1830-33), to Helmholtz’s discovery of the conservation of energy (1847), to Joule’s discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat (1843), to Darwin’s, Pasteur’s, Lister’s, or more recently Barbara McClintock’s and Benoit Mandelbrot’s and other discoveries and innovations shows the same patterns that Morison described in the military and the ones described in this book concerning the world of business.

First, the innovations came frequently from outsiders: Pasteur was a chemist; Helmholtz’ training was in medicine; Darwin started with medicine, arts, then wanted to become a clergyman; Huxley turned from physiology to paleontology; Lamarche from botany to zoology; [Julius] Robert Mayer was a physician (he came up with the idea of conservation of energy, and Helmholtz was annoyed that this idea was conceived by an “unknown physician”); as was Thomas Young, a Quaker to boot; Barbara McClintock, a woman working at a small research institute; and so on.

Polanyi (1974, p. 54), who examines these and additional cases, concludes that the hatred against the discoverers of facts that threatened the cherished beliefs of science was as bitter as that of religious persecutors two centuries before and was of the same character.

These observations are made in numerous studies examining patterns of behavior not only across very different fields but also different countries and times.

In honor of Semmelweis’ tragic but exceedingly common experience, the dismissing or rejecting out of hand any information, automatically, without thought, inspection, or experiment is termed “the Semmelweis Reflex.”

Does the existence of the Semmelweis Reflex mean that innovation is impossible? Obviously not, since you're alive to read this, which you almost certainly would not be if the ideas of Semmelweis, Pasteur, Lister, etc. had continued to be rejected. What it means is that thre's no point attacking established hierarchies directly. Instead, an innovator must build its own hierarchy -- what Bhaskar Chakravorti would call a new equilibrium -- without engaging the established hierarchy directly. Harvard's Clayton Christensen endorses this approach, saying that "disruptive products require disruptive channels."

As Everett Rogers points out in Diffusion of Innovations, the adoption of new ideas is a social process. Invention is just the start of the diffusion process, and quite possibly the easiest part, given the resistance of the status quo. Knowing this, investors and innovators can put their efforts into ideas that offer the greatest chance for successful and profitable diffusion.