Thummer as Purple Cow

I recently had the founder of a music technology company tell me that he wanted to hire me to evangelize his company's music technology products, because I “must be an incredible evangelist to have gotten such amazing national press for the Thummer” (e.g., the Wall Street Journal story and a forthcoming story by CBS News Sunday Morning).

He missed the point completely. The Thummer is getting remarkable press because the Thummer is remarkable – literally “worthy of remark.” The Thummer is, in Seth Godin’s memorable phrase, a Purple Cow.

Here’s the essence of Godin’s Purple Cow Theory, drawn from the above-linked article:
When was the last time you noticed a cow? Saw a cow on the side of the road, pulled over and gawked… Not likely. Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring.

A purple cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to.

Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible. The world is full of boring stuff — brown cows — which is why so few people pay attention. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not just slapping on the marketing function as a last-minute add-on, but also understanding from the outset that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, then it's invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things that the right customers care about can have an enormous payoff.

If being a Purple Cow is such an effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn't everyone do it? Because people are so afraid. "Playing it safe" and "following the rules" seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing; not standing out is the same as being invisible. The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need a Purple Cow. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.

The Thummer is not just remarkable, it’s remarkable in four different ways – (1) its unparalleled expressive power, (2) its unprecedented ease of learning, (3) its revolutionary Dynamic Tonality, and (4) its shockingly low price (compared to other button-field controllers like the Tenori-On and Monome, which don’t even come close to the Thummer on any of the first three points).

These are exactly the benefits needed to disrupt the music products industry.

As Bill Gates once famously said, “to create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures peoples' imagination.”

It takes a Purple Cow – a purple cow like the Thummer.

Dynamic Tonality Demo Video

You can find a video demonstration of Dynamic Tonality here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd4h8vmEsQM

The sound quality is terrible, because I had to record it from my laptop, the microphone jack on which is busted, and using demo-creation software which couldn't tap into the speakers directly -- so the sound you're hearing is coming out of its speakers and into the laptop's built-in mic, which is a recipe for feedback. Noisy fan, too. Please accept my apologies for this.

But, that being said, the demo still makes the point -- clearly, I hope -- that the Thummer keyboard’s note-layout makes microtonal music brain-dead simple, by exposing tonal intervals consistently in every tuning of the syntonic tuning continuum.

Next month, a paper is being published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Mathematics and Music which rigorously proves that the Thummer's Wicki/Hayden note-layout is optimal for controlling Dynamic Tonality. No other note-layout -- not the Janko, nor Fokker, nor Bosanquet, etc. -- packs so many octaves of tonally-relevant intervals into such a small area over such a wide tuning range.

It's easy to dismiss microtonality as an irrelevant fringe interest that has no appeal whatsoever to mass-market consumers. But this ignores both history and current practice, in which tuning matters.

Currently, Western musicians bend their notes constantly – intoning them towards Just Intonation, Pythagorean tuning, expressive exaggerations thereof, or blue notes. Monophonic instruments have dominated Western orchestras in part because they allowed such note-by-note intonation. Tuning matters. The Thummer allows musicians to intone notes polyphonically -- bending many notes at once towards their Pythagorean tuning, for example (with the sharps getting sharper and the flats flatter).

Also, there is a big wide world out there beyond the West, and many non-Western cultures use non-Western tunings. The Thummer's keyboard has the same fingering in 7-edo (related to Thai & Mandinka music) and 5-edo (related to Indonesian music) as it does in Western 12-edo. Even the Turkish 53-edo schismatic temperament fits the Thummer's note-layout, too (albeit with different note-choices than are used in the syntonic temperament, e.g. d4’s in place of M3’s). The Thummer supports all of these different cultures' tunings. To musicians from non-Western cultures, or to Western musicians who wish to learn about or to mix and match the music of non-Western cultures, tuning matters.

Historically, 12-edo is recent, only having been widely adopted between 1850 and 1900, give or take. Before that, Pythagorean tuning, 1/4-comma meantone, and various well temperaments dominated Western tuning for thousands of years. All of these pre-modern Western tunings have the same fingering on the Thummer's keyboard, too. You can see a piece of the soft-synth's controller for Just and irregular tunings in the above-mentioned Dynamic Tuning video, to the left of the tuning slider, towards the top of the screen (look for the phrase "Minor JI"). If you want to play music in its historically-accurate tuning (albeit perhaps on a modern instrument), then tuning matters.

In addition to past and current practice, one should also consider the future. The new musical effects enabled by Dynamic Tonality -- polyphonic tuning bends, new chord progressions (!), temperament modulations, and the like -- enable entirely new styles and forms of music. Consider the expansion of form enabled by the chromaticism of the Romantic period, or the staggering popularity of the non-equally-tempered blues scale over the last hundred years. Tuning matters.

These ideas may seem complicated, because Dynamic Tonality is brand new. However, as you can see/hear from the demo video, Dynamic Tonality is brain-dead simple to USE. You just change the tuning -- by wiggling one of the Thummer’s joysticks, perhaps -- and cool new musical effects happen. You don't have to understand prime numbers, ratios, logarithms, or any of the other arcana of tuning theory. You just wiggle a friggin' joystick. The Thummer knows music theory, so you don't have to.

Hostorically speaking, every change in tuning -- Pythagorean to 1/4-comma, 1/4-comma to well-tempered, well-tempered to 12-ET -- has expanded music's possibilities. Some of these initially seemed complicated and perhaps even diabolical, largely because these tunings moved notes away from their alignment with harmonic partials. But Dynamic Tonality generalizes the relationship between the Harmonic Series and Just Intonation by adjusting a timbre's partials (in real time) to align with the notes of the current tuning, then one gets pure consonance all across the syntonic temperament's tuning range -- as you can hear in the demo (through the noise of the lousy recording -- sorry). So again: you don't need to know music theory to use this stuff; the Thummer knows music theory, so you don't have to.

In short: one of the main reasons to prefer the Wicki/Hayden note-layout over all other isomorphic layouts is that it enables unique support for Dynamic Tonality.

The ThumMusic System was also designed with Dynamic Tonality in mind. It emphasizes those aspects of music -- intervals, and the relationships among intervals -- which are invariant in the music of the past, the present, and the future, across many different cultures, while deprecating those aspects of music – most notably tying each note to a fixed pitch -- which assume a single, static tuning, unique to one time, place, and culture.

Or that’s the idea, anyway. ;-)