The official press release for MODULOR [prevoiusly posted]."Simple but powerful modular sequencing software, tightly integrated with hands-on AudioCubes, helps you listen, focus and develop unique ideas
Erpe-Mere, Belgium, October 28th, 2009 – PERCUSSA announces Modulor for AudioCubes, a simple but powerful software application that lets you host your favourite software instruments (VSTs or AudioUnits) and quickly develop musical ideas.
The MODULOR software and AudioCubes hardware work with your existing MIDI controller and professional sound interface (ASIO or CoreAudio), and becomes the center of the music making and improvisation process, where MIDI information is recorded, looped, routed and processed, driving a rack of your favourite software instruments.
AudioCubes become an intuitive, direct, hands-on interface to record, vary, process and assemble the components of your music: loops can be easily assembled by putting their physical representations together, multiple instrument parameters can be controlled directly by hand gestures, sensed by fast and accurate optical technology, and high-intensity full-colour RGB LED lighting can be used for colour-coding recordings and MIDI effects.
Over a year in development, MODULOR expands on proven loop-based recording and improvisation concepts, by offering access to musical data through a physical interface, AudioCubes, in which units of musical data are represented by beautifuly designed physical objects. Working with units of information becomes as simple, inspiring and satisfying as working with their physical representation.
In MODULOR, bringing a loop into the mix is a matter of placing an AudioCube in the network. Taking a loop out is done by removing a cube. Putting together various loops to build up unique musical ideas is a matter of putting cubes physically together. You can easily explore how the parts you recorded can be combined to create many unique musical ideas, using the AudioCubes hands-on hardware interface. Assign colours to cubes to help you remember which part of the music goes where. Map colours to keys you’ve used while recording the loops, so you know you’ll always be in key when you bring cubes of the same colour together.
Besides being a powerful tool for recording and production, MODULOR offers great potential for advanced composers who wish to process and generate MIDI information: through the AudioCubes interface, MIDI effects, such as an arpeggiator, echo, transposer and chord generator, can be combined to create complex processing chains, simply by combining the physical objects representing the effects. An infinite number of effects can be built this way, generating unique variations of the initial MIDI recordings or live input.
Rather than trying to offer a large amount of features, with a cluttered piece of software as the result, Percussa's philosophy with MODULOR was to develop a piece of software that handles one specific task very well: development of new music. This facilitates the creative process, lets you spend less time with the computer, and lets you listen and focus more on your work.
AudioCubes hardware connects directly with MODULOR, without needing drivers. The high-speed USB connection with custom protocol delivers messages with better speed and accuracy than MIDI, through its 1kHz update rate and 10-bit resolution. The way the hardware and software integrate is identical on Mac and Windows, and plugging and unplugging hardware while the software is running is no problem, requiring no software or system restart. This is especially convenient when using MODULOR in live situations. MODULOR offers all functions on a single screen GUI layout with central workspace, so there are no complicated menus to browse or hard-to-reach functions while you're working.
AudioCubes sensors can be mapped easily to software instrument parameters in MODULOR - up to 4 per cube, which gives you access to a 4-dimensional parameter space, and to great sonic results, which are hard to reach with conventional knob-boxes.
MODULOR uses a high quality mixing section internally for its VST/AudioUnit instrument rack, and supports ASIO and CoreAudio interfaces, giving you the same audio quality as if you would run the instruments in your DAW software. Using MODULOR with your existing DAW is no problem - there is a MIDI export function which lets you export the ideas you developed as multi-track MIDI files, and easily load them into popular DAW software.
PERCUSSA recommends to use MODULOR with 4 or more AudioCubes, and has introduced a convenient 6 and 8 AudioCube set simultaneously with the release of MODULOR. These new AudioCube packages offer a significant discount over buying multiple sets of AudioCubes. When used with MODULOR, AudioCubes make a powerful and unique system for composition, music production, and live performance.
Pricing and availability
MODULOR is available as a free download from the PERCUSSA Website at http://www.percussa.com/downloads/
AudioCubes 6 cube set is available for a suggested retail price of 1049 EUR / 1559 USD at http://shop.percussa.com/
AudioCubes 8 cube set is available for a suggested retail price of 1349 EUR / 1999 USD at http://shop.percussa.com/
More information
Additional information on MODULOR is available from http://www.percussa.com/applications/modulor/ and http://www.percussa.com/uses/composition/
About PERCUSSA
PERCUSSA is the worldwide pioneer in the field of desktop tangible interfaces for music applications. The company’s mission is to stimulate and facilitate the digital creation of sound, music and visuals, through innovation in the hardware and software interfaces by which artists interact with computers.
The companies' products give both professional and amateurs access to new forms of interaction which empowers them to create unique and differentiating creative work.
PERCUSSA brought the fascinating world of tangible interface technology to the desktop of artists in early 2007, and offers a range of products to choose from, all designed and developed by its small and dedicated team located in Belgium."
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