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Tell me about the development phase of Tablatun, please. What were the most challenging aspects?

The biggest challenge was absolutely personal. It took years, and sometimes programming is something I experience as the hangover from the high of having an idea. "THIS COULD BE A THING! AND THEN WE CAN DO... AND LET'S ADD...! THIS IS A WHOLE NEW WORLD"

But, technically there were two main challenges. The first and more relevant to your line of inquiry was the user interface. TablaTun gives the user control over six pitches. So you could just have six knobs that go from 20Hz to 20kHz. Imagine telling a composer "Okay you can compose with any six sine waves. Choose them." They'd be overwhelmed. Intonation? Scales? Harmonics? That was a very fun design challenge.

The bigger nuisance has been extracting the pitch of the resonances from the sound of the drum. They aren't all always played and, while getting approximations is hard, getting .1Hz resolution is hard! That is an ongoing project and if you know any machine learning gurus that want a challenge, please refer them to me!

How does Tablatun work in practise? Can you talk about the way Tablatun analyses and transforms the input and what parameters users can adjust?

The core principal is that Tabla is a smearing of what westerners consider the percussion and tonal categories of instruments. We wanted to celebrate that by enabling the instrument to stretch farther in both directions. The Dayan can be retuned by the program to any chord. The Bayan can also be retuned. We also include a number of ways for the software to change all of those notes as the player plays with some built in transient detection and things like that.

What the analysis algorithm does is look for peaks in the spectrum that it expects from a Tabla. The way I met Mike was that I needed to record the full spectrum of what Tablas could do for this purpose. You could imagine his surprise when he realized he'd been called to just hit the drum a few times and go home.

Users have plain transposition controls but they we also give control so that you can snap all the overtones of the drum to a scale and even splay them out from each other to get a more full spectrum tonality. This way you can set your open tone real low but get bell-like notes up top. Although it's not pictured in the product promo material, we do Bayan retuning as well. You can set the balance of sustain to transient as well.

In the video of Mike Lukshis performing, you see him pressing down different buttons while playing the Tablas. Is this constant switching of keys practical? What else can musicians change during a performance?

That's a really good question. This is something we, as a team, have done a lot of thinking about. I personally felt, when designing the instrument that the world of real Tabla players was so strict that people were just going to be blown away by the fact that they could raise the pitch of the drum a semitone or two. Or retune the open tone to sit with any scale. I thought about it like this: You get called to work with someone who doesn't know much about the instrument. They say "Okay we're in e" and you have to say "I can tune one of my notes to E but not both. Suddenly you lose half your instrument". Or maybe the composer modulates halfway through the song and you're screwed.

Now it quickly became apparent that we had solved that problem, but it was so tempting to twist the knobs as the player was playing that we started to explore this conundrum, as you said, "How does someone with their hands glued to an instrument use a computer?" The answers are multiplicitous here. We saw the first answer: They don't. I still haven't seen Ojas Adhiya reach over half way through a classical concert and click "E minor!" and freak an audience of old Indian Classical addicts out. ONE DAY!!!!!! Then there are other options. We're experimenting with custom building controllers that fit around the Bayan so that the player doesn't have to reach very far. This is HARD but it is on the back burner. The first time Mike played like that I felt that it was magical because it really felt possible to integrate the software into the playing technique. If you're one of these guys that stands up at their Tabla and plays to all sorts of crazy EDM music, I guess you could use a foot pedal. We've also tried having Mike sing as he played.

As an ensemble we settled on my personal dream which is for me to operate it as he played. I love this idea because we get to connect as we play. We're two musicians from vastly different backgrounds creating a single unified sonic object.

There are also other options that are coming.

Maybe it's a naive question, but does Tablatun automatically tune to 12 step equal temperament or are there different possibilities?

David likes to note that Antares made absolutely sure to include ten thousand scales from all over the world, and yet all over the world the first thing everyone does is tune it to a standard western diatonic scale. And I'm perfectly fine saying we've made the same calculation. So what we have is a virtual knob whose first detent uses the pitches from the input. Additionally, we have detents for major and minor chords, Pentatonics, Diatonics, Harmonic Minor, Indian Diatonic, Whole tone, Symmetrical (I forget what that is), diminished, Chromatic, Just, Harmonics, and Indian Just (which is all 22 of those note-flavors I mentioned). In addition, if you hold down shift and drag the knob, you interpolate between these options so you can get super cool things that have no basis in anything. It's fun to watch peoples eyes as you start with the normal signal slowly move to a major chord.

I'd also hasten to add that you can always set this knob to dry and manually give your own pitches.

Tell us some of the interesting ways you know of that artists have used Tablatun in their music projects?

I get a lot of support calls so I know people are using the software but we're definitely the best music project to use it!

Do you see applicability outside the realm of Tablas? Highjacking the software for other purposes?

The software works with signals that have stable sinusoids. Cowbell, congas, I've considered adapting it to hang drums. Other drums. Chimes. Whistles.  It was really custom built for Tabla but you could definitely find stuff it'll work on.

What's your own take on the relevance of pitch and tuning for music? What avenues do you personally find interesting in this regard?

Wow. There's so much here.

I think one thing I and a lot of other electronic musicians love is the romantic notion that a sound can be deconstructed and reconstructed. That leads me to toy around with simple sine waves a lot. We're taught (it's wrong but... hey) that the fundamental building block of sound is sine waves. You really can't underestimate the role of harmonic makeup in consonance. There's a reason that complex tonality sounds more consonant on piano than, say harpsichord. I find that if you use sinusoidal sounds like flutes or actual sine waves, suddenly musicality and consonance are more about systematizing the scale rather than finding some way to make something sound unrandom to a western ear.
    
One thing I don't see in software is creating a scale from harmonics collapsed into the octave.  So I have a Max object that will take 9 overtones of every note in a equal tempered major chord, collapse them all into one octave, weed out notes that are too close to each other and I have a scale. Not only that, it makes it easy to modulate between scales. This seems to work really well for my purposes. I can work with 40 notes in a scale and have it sound very organized. With a little delay, you get that beautiful ringing as if the notes meld together.

I also do a lot of interpolation between scales. In this work, (https://soundcloud.com/amatomy) I think I have roughly 50 scales I interpolate between.

Also, people yap about vocal tuning software and "what it does." I use melodyne a lot. I love it. I've noticed two interesting phenomena when using it. Even when someone is robotic in how pitch perfect they are, it's amazing to zoom in and see all the impurities in their tuning. I find it truly inspiring to see all the glissando in what sounds like a purely square melody bird call. Or the way you can see people compensating in real time for overshooting an interval. I love that so much and I hope we get to a point where electronic instruments model this sort of thing. Transitions between notes feel like everything sometimes. Also, I've caught Melodyne flat out lying before so a whole line of inquiry flows from "How gestural are intervals rather than being ratio-perfect or cent-perfect?"

Although the software is now available, I'm sure there are still plenty of challenges ahead. Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule?

Well in terms of work on music, at any given time, I have a few (okay many) projects happening. Some days I pick the current one up. Some days I pick another one up. I have to admit I'm not very organized about it. I could use 10 more of me to finish old projects and work more efficiently. I really try to find balance because I find computer use really addictive. There doesn't seem to be any bargaining with a stint of 10 hour days if I'm really 100% inside a project. I try and get rigorous exercise or my mind starts to tank. That's a priority. And during the pandemic I'm cooking and meditating a lot more. Every day is a struggle to really do only do what matters. TablaTun is still at the top of my list.

In the future I would really really love to build a box and possibly a VST version. This requires refining the Tabla analysis algorithm. We'd love to play more with other bands we always feel like we're just beginning to find the possibilities but after a stint of outdoor shows this summer we feel like we're on firm footing as an ensemble. I'd also really love to get TablaTun in the hands of more contexts. I especially want to put the software itself into the hands of Indian classical keyboard players. Watching Mike use TablaTun for the first time literally brought tears to my eyes after two years of work. I want to feel that feeling more. There are also more wacky ideas including visuals and a possible tour. Who knows! I'm also in the process of planning a recording studio.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?
 
I could be very wrong but I personally take very seriously Jacques Attali's pinpointing of sound, noise and music as harbingers of things to come. That's why I feel at least some sense of responsibility to make value-laden decisions when making music. Things have a habit of happening in music first. Grace Lee Boggs had this wonderful phrase: "To Build the Big Robot." What I understand her to mean is, "Don't spend your life trying to replace a human in lieu of being a human." I hate to be gloomy but, even if you're positive about the role of new technology, you have to admit there's less margin for error now. There's no creativity in making a poorer, less creative, less loving version of what you misguidedly conceive yourself to be.

So I think, going forward, musicians can do a better job of connecting to each other and their audience. We should take seriously the challenge of acting sustainably, humanistically and democratically as well. I, personally don't have an appetite for sound baths with crystal bowls and chimes. It actually bothers me as someone who meditates and it sort of goes against the "Bigger and Better Ambiguities" that Leonard Bernstein called for. But where I do resonate with the sound bath people (no pun intended) is I believe that, rather than living in an ecosystem of media and technology, we should work to connect to our anatomy, the ecosystem, philosophy, spirituality, society, psychology etc. We have to be honest: We have structures to destroy, not just "disrupt." We should be the sound of healing with wisdom. That's not linear, not agreeable, not aversive, not about power, not peaceful, not referential, not cliche, and not robotic.

I tried to write TablaTun for the right reasons. I wanted to use it as a way to understand music I respected and connect to people who made music for the right reasons. I don't think it's something people can misuse.


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