#Reddit mixman studio pro full
"Sound Toy" was one of the winners of the original New Voices, New Visions contests sponsored by Interval, Voyager and Wired, and last year Voyager published a full CD-ROM collection of Robbins' creations called "Sound Toys." Besides providing audio feedback to screen input, Robbins' "Sound Toys" don't do much. I still haven't explored the interactive screen for "In Your Eyes" - and at this rate, I may never.Ĭompare this approach to the more generous stance of Todd Robbins, creator of "Sound Toy." This elegant, self-deprecatingly-named noise machine is an onscreen grid that, under mouse stimulation, produces exquisitely playful blues tones, walking bass lines and harmonica squeals. You may spend many hours with "Eve," as I have, and still, despite all the hints the disk provides, hit a roadblock you can't get past. Interactive music appeals to people who never subjected themselves to the discipline of mastering musical notation or learning an instrument "Eve" removes those hurdles - and then immediately replaces them with new ones from the genre of puzzle-games like "Myst" and "The Seventh Guest" (the piece also owes different kinds of debts to important previous CD-ROMs like "Scrutiny in the Great Round," "Meet MediaBand" and Laurie Anderson's "Puppet Motel"). Viewed from a different angle, though, the requirement of mastering one screen before you can move on to the next is also a little puritanical. You can't have your fun until you, like, grow. According to Gabriel's therapeutic ethos, I suppose this can be described as requiring users to "take a journey" before they can mess around. So you can't just wade in and play you have to earn the right. You can't have any uncertainty about the sexual nature of this design - or its casting of the player as the lost male in search of the eternal feminine Other in its very first demand on you, "Eve" turns the cursor into a sperm and requires that you penetrate an ovum to proceed. Once you've listened enough, clicked enough or simply hung out long enough, "Eve's" folds recede a notch and let you in deeper. Occasionally some psychologist or artist will pop up to offer sound-bite insights. Using the 360-degree wraparound panoramas of Quicktime VR to expand on the visual vocabulary of "Myst," "Eve" buries its musical improvs in an interactive puzzle-world that mutates around you as it remixes images from the Book of Genesis and genetics to make a murky commentary on sexual relations. Gabriel and his collaborators (at his own Real World company and at Starwave) plainly took great care in building these mix-your-own environments out of chunks of Gabriel's sound and the imagery of "Eve's" four visual artists the screens are beautiful, the sounds lush, the transitions seamless.īut "Eve" isn't all jam-along toys to get to play around you have to wander through the CD-ROM's landscapes, collecting musical samples embedded in symbolic tableaux of mud and gravel, hidden in fields of greenery and hanging in galleries.
#Reddit mixman studio pro series
Love it or not, there's no mistaking it for a promotional brochure.Īt the heart of "Eve" lie a series of "Interactive Musical Xperiences," or musical toys - screens that strip down popular Gabriel tunes like "In Your Eyes," "Come Talk To Me" and "Shaking the Tree" to layers of tracks, riffs and dubs and let you goof around with reassembling them, recording your own mixes and translating them into animated videos. "Eve," by comparison, arrives as a confident, state-of-the-art contribution to the multimedia genre. Just compare Peter Gabriel's new CD-ROM, "Eve," with its 3-year-old predecessor, "Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World." "Xplora" was smart and tasteful and groundbreaking in its time, but it couldn't hide its own hodgepodge confusion over whether it was personal statement, fan scrapbook or multimedia experiment. Still, technology marches on, and the range of possibilities for desktop-dabbler musicians today keeps getting broader and deeper. Interactivity suddenly hits walls that ocean of sound feels like a piddling puddle.
Like all promises of technological enlightenment, this one rarely delivers. Transform your computer from a mundane workday tool into a musical instrument! Make your keyboard sing! Jam till your wrists ache! Surf an ocean of sound! Interactive music always sounds like a cosmically wonderful idea.