ThumMusings

Bringing the user interface of music-making into the 21st Century, and changing the world... one note at a time.

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Name: ThumMeister
Location: Austin, Texas, United States

In the late 1980’s, I tried to write insanely great code for the Mac and help others do so, too. When Windows swept through the Valley in 1991-2, I realized my great code would become worthless if the Mac platform sank. I became very interested in knowing how to spot winning platforms. Since Microsoft clearly knew how to make its platforms succeed, I joined its Systems Strategy Group. While designing and executing practical "technology evangelism" campaigns, I studied the theory behind the practice, eventually teaching mandatory "how-to" seminars to Microsoft's new evangelists. I left Microsoft in 2000, looking for a new industry to disrupt. When my wife quit her piano lessons after six months of diligent practice, saying that “music is just too hard,” I knew I’d found it. Hammering the Web relentlessly, I found a novel combination of old ideas which could make music dramatically easier to teach, learn, & play, more emotionally expressive, and expand the frontiers of tonality. This blog tells the story of my bringing those innovations to market.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Who?

Thumtronics’ innovations have been a team effort with contributions from a lot of people.

The Thummer Prototypes
Bussleton, Capel, Bunbury, & Eaton Designs
These early prototypes were developed in Busselton, Western Australia. The prototypes were named after a string of towns running north from Busselton along the Indian Ocean.

Bruce Wahler contributed to the Busselton’s electronics, but the lead electrical engineer on all of these prototypes was Matthew Darke. A man of diverse talents, Matthew also implemented the Bunbury’s motion sensors, and performed most of the demos on the gold-colored Capel and Bunbury prototypes. The Eaton’s ThumSetup software was developed by Leigh Smith. All of these prototypes were designed by Mike Dixon, who also did the heavy lifting on the size, shape, and spacing of the Thummer keyboard’s buttons. Andrew Lavorgna was invaluable in organizing beta testers for these prototypes, and Gavin Healy was great at demonstrating the red-colored Eaton prototypes.

ThumLine Staff Notation
ThumLine notation was the result of collaboration with many contributors, including Thomas Reed, Founder of the Music Notation Modernization Association; Ron Gorow, author of “Hearing and Writing Music;” and Recordare’s Michael Good, inventor of MusicXML.

The X_System
Dynamic Tuning & Dynamically-Tempered Timbres
Andrew Milne of The Tonal Centre was the lead contributor to the X_System. His deep knowledge of music theory and mathematics was essential to identifying the novel elements of the X_System and proving their correctness. Bill Sethares’ recognition of the relationships among tuning, timbre, spectrum, and scale were, along with the Wicki note-layout, the seeds from which Thumtronics’ innovations have sprung. Bill also made major contributions to the mathematics, music theory, and computational aspects of the X_System, also helping whip our scientific papers into proper academic form.

Thumtronics Pty Ltd & Thumtronics Inc
Any entrepreneur will tell you that coming up with an idea is easy, compared to successfully commercializing it. Lots of people have helped Thumtronics move its ideas closer to reality. Bob Gaskins, the creator of Microsoft PowerPoint, has been a veritable fountain of useful advice. George Spix was an early investor, as were many of the friends and family of Scott Horsburgh, Thumtronics Pty Ltd’s excellent CFO. Watermark went well out of its way to be helpful with Thumtronics’ many patents.

Nonetheless, Thumtronics had to move to the USA to further its commercialization efforts, landing in Austin, Texas. There, many noted Austinites have been very supportive.

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