http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/feed/manufacturer-reviews/manufacturer_id/381 Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:13:37 +0000 Zend_Feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/product/7847-jazz-mutant-lemur.html/?utm_medium=rss%26utm_source%3Dreviews_jazz_mutant%26utm_campaign%3Dmanufacturer%26utm_content%3Dthe_lemur_jazz_mutant_lemur User: Keith Brown
Rating; 9/10
The Lemur belongs to the category of 'controllers', that is devices that control other software synthesisers, hardware synthesisers, or graphical applications rather than do those things themselves. We've seen a number of different ways of repackaging synthesisers resulting from the decoupling of control from synthesis over the last few years. A MIDI keyboard for example can be used with a synthesis engine running on a PC implemented in software, or implemented in analogue electronics running in dedicated hardware. As long as the thing that you wish to control understands MIDI (which in this day and age it invariably does) you have a workable system. More recently the concept of a control surface has emerged which refers more to knobs and sliders than the keyboard whereby you define a setting for a synthesiser or effect within the 'space' of its controllable parameters. This is great for tweaking because providing your parameter of interest is accessible you can change it. Some control surfaces don't even come with keyboards now, they are just a box with sliders, knobs or perhaps a joystick which can be separately assigned and most allow some tweaking at the controller level so you can change sensitivity, MIDI channel and so on. The Lemur extends this idea to that of a fully modular control surface. That is you build a control surface from basic elements such as button, sliders - some very exotic ones which I'll mention later - which are then positioned and customised according to your needs. Physically the Lemur is like a flat screen monitor which you interact with by touching the screen. The Lemur responds by tracking the position of your finger on its surface and reacts depending on the type of element that you are touching. The control surface is built in an application which runs on a PC or MAC. This software is easy to use although it's a little fussy and all the controls are fully configurable even down to colours. You can't define your own elements from which to build your control surface, although even if Jazzmutant did open this up it's likely it would need some hardcore programming skills. The Lemur only has solid state memory and does not retain its state between being switched on and switched off, so the control surface you want to use needs to be resent every time you turn it on. One possible weakness of the product could be deemed that it is not completely independent; it requires a computer running the design application on the same network (LAN) as the Lemur. The control surface can also be defined across multiple 'pages' which you switch between using a physical button at the top. Even better the Lemur allows you to define multiple targets so you can control up to 8 devices from your lemur. The Lemur can be a joyous experience to use. My favourite element is a square containing a ball where the ball gravitates towards any finger present in the square. You can even create keyboard like applications using the pads, although you would have to provide some other means of sending the velocity information. It's an interesting process designing the interfaces, quite intuitive and fun in itself, and if something doesn't work obviously you just change it around. There is a memory limit for the complexity of your interface which for my money is hit a little too early. The library of elements is constantly being added to and given the high end hardware underlying the Lemur the possibilities, which include 3D, are mind boggling. This brings me to the question of configuring the other end, the synthesiser, effects box or VJ unit you want to control. The Lemur has no native MIDI capability, and there is no MIDI port on the back. The Lemur uses a protocol called OSC (Open Sound Control) which is network based, so the port on the back is a standard network one (RJ45). OSC is not very widely supported in the audio world although in my case the applications I mainly use (Supercollider and Reaktor) already support OSC. In general it is the modular environments (Max/MSP, Reaktor, Bidule etc) that benefit most from Lemur and OSC because OSC makes so few assumptions about what it is sending and what it is to be used for. Note and velocity information can be sent as a 2 value array, and it is very straightforward in Reaktor to send these two separate values to pitch and amplitude inputs of a sampler module. Configuration of the Lemur and the various targets you wish to control means getting involved in networking issues (physical routing, IP addresses etc). If you are stuck in MIDI world there are workarounds involving additional software running on the host machine which convert the OSC data to MIDI through a virtual MIDI port, but I've heard the latencies are high, and itEURs not a solution if you are controlling hardware. Overall the Lemur is a very significant new development in music technology. The advantage of being able to build a control surface specific to requirements rather than arbitrarily assigning a number of sliders of a MIDI keyboard to the parameters you wish to control is compelling. The Lemur also offers new ways to interact with digital musical instruments which are not realizable in physical hardware and allow for new creative possibilities. The downside for many will be that the type of software best suited to the Lemur is modular design packages such as Reaktor and Max/MSP, and the Lemur also requires basic network skills to get up and running. MIDI capability is available, but requires additional software (which is provided) and adds to the latency.
Product Price: £1736.00
Product ID: 7847
Product SKU: Lemur ]]> Mon, 26 Jun 2006 12:31:55 +0000