Thummer Diffusion

Sales Growth: How Many and How Fast?
How fast and high can sales of the Thummer grow? No theory can provide exact numbers, but the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) can provide a qualitative guide. Here’s a brief, paraphrased summary of UTAUT.

In the UTAUT model, only two characteristics affect a given innovation’s rate and level of adoption:

• Performance Expectancy: “Adopting it will help me attain gains in job performance.”
• Ease Expectancy: “Adopting it will be easy.”

In addition to the characteristics of the innovation itself, two environmental factors also matter:

• Social Influence: “Influential people say I should adopt it.”
• Satisfactory Infrastructure: “My adoption of it is supported by a satisfactory infrastructure.”

The first three factors above determine an individual’s intention to adopt the innovation. That intention, plus the fourth factor above (satisfactory infrastructure) determine whether the innovation is adopted or not.

Personal factors including experience, gender, and age all tend to moderate a given individual’s (or population’s) willingness to adopt a given innovation. For example, generally speaking,

1. everyone values performance – especially men and young people of both genders;
2. women value ease more than men do;
3. older people value ease more than young people do;
4. inexperienced people value ease more than experienced people do; and
5. experienced people value performance and infrastructure more than inexperienced people do.

Application to the Music Products Industry
The UTAUT model explains why the music products industry sells relatively little product to girls and older folks. The industry has focused relentlessly on delivering better products to its most-demanding customers – experienced, professional instrumentalists – who are overwhelmingly male. These experienced guys want performance, and will sacrifice everything else to get it. The resulting twiddly-fiddly instruments are attractive to young males, but turn off everyone else, producing exactly the demographic holes that the UTAUT model predicts.

On the other hand, the Thummer delivers ease to girls and older folks (especially when combined with the ThumMusic System), while also delivering unprecedented expressive performance to young males. This means that the appeal of Thumtronics’ innovations is potentially universal – so there may be no upper bound on its potential rate of adoption or saturation sales level, especially once (a) the Thummer-specific infrastructure has grown organically over time, and (b) the fully-integrated Pocket Thummer puts ease in your pocket.

Diffusion of Innovations
The Thummer’s high scores in the UTAUT model are repeated in other models. For example, the older Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) model, popularized by Everett Rogers’ book of the same name, lists five characteristics that affect the rate and level of a given innovation’s adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, simplicity, observability, and trialability.

The Thummer scores high on all five of these criteria.

• Relative Advantage: “Is it better?” Experts say so. See for yourself.
• Compatibility: “Does it work with what I already have?” Yes! It’s MIDI and USB-MIDI compatible; it is compatible with your computer and video-game controlling skills; and it is compatible with traditional notation and music theory.
• Simplicity: “Will it be easy to learn and use?” Experts say so – and if you’re a novice musician, it will be even easier if you use the ThumMusic System, too.
• Observability: “Can I observe others using it?” Absolutely! Check out these demos – and soon, live performances, music videos, and more YouTube videos, from the creative musicians who buy the first Thummers. This is one of the Thummer’s most important characteristics: that its relative advantage will be demonstrated in an emotionally-charged manner by high-status individuals in public. That’s marketing nirvana.
• Trialability: “Can I give it a test drive, free?” Yes, right here – and these test-driving apps will get better and better over time.

Any way you slice it, the Thummer has all of the characteristics necessary to spread like wild fire.

Order of Product Introduction
These criteria also explain why Thumtronics is releasing the Freedom and eMotion Thummers first, rather than the Pocket Thummer. Although the Pocket Thummer is likely to have much wider consumer appeal, the performance of the Freedom Thummer and especially of the eMotion Thummer will be much higher. This raw performance power is attractive to the experienced Music Brains who can drive the Thummer into live performances, music videos, and user-created YouTube demos. The Music Brain’s output, not Thumtronics’ advertising (which it can’t afford), will create consumer demand for Pocket Thummers.

Same with the ThumMusic System. If the ThumMusic System were released first, then its performance expectancy, ease expectancy, and satisfactory infrastructure ratings would all be pathetically low. It just doesn’t make sense to learn the ThumMusic System unless you want to learn to play the Thummer (except for vocal music instruction using tonic solfa, perhaps). But once the Thummer takes off and consumer demand for Thummer-lessons grows, the performance expectancy, ease expectancy, and satisfactory infrastructure ratings of the ThumMusic System all skyrocket.

Conclusions
The order in which Thumtronics plans to introduce its products is based on an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses using the latest proven scientific techniques. These techniques also suggest that the Thummer’s sales could grow rapidly, and to a very high level.

It Works!!!!

Two new things on Thumtronics’ website:
1. Online Thummer: an online implementation of the Thummer’s note-layout, driven by your computer’s keyboard (Windows only).
2. Dynamic Tuning, Mark I: A Max/MSP implementation of Dynamic Tuning & Timbres (DT&T), also driven by your computer keyboard.

[Added 23rd June: The latest version of the main Max/MSF file, which is undergoing rapid evolution, can be found here. Use it instead of the .MSF file that's in the above .zip file.]

A simple test of Dynamic Tuning is as follows:
- Set the width of the tempered perfect fifth to 700 cents (12-tet).
- Press the M & W keys at the same time. These two notes are the major third and diminished fourth of QWERTY’s B key, respectively (the actual pitches don’t matter). In 12-tet, they are the same pitch.
- While the notes are sounding, slide the tuning slider up to 702 cents.

In 12-tet, the pitches sounded by pressing the QWERTY keyboard’s M & W are the same – but in any other tuning, they aren’t. When the tuning is at 701.7 cents (call it 702), the two notes are discernibly different. In the schismatic temperament, you’d play “major” triads with the diminished fourth instead of the major third, because with a harmonic timbre, at that tuning the diminished fourth’s fundamental lines up perfectly with the root’s fifth partial (ignoring an octave or two), maximizing consonance.

But this app’s timbres aren’t harmonic. The timbre’s third partial lines up exactly with the tempered perfect fifth, whatever width you set the perfect fifth to be (a couple of octaves aside) – thereby eliminating the Pythagorean comma from both the tuning and the timbre. Likewise, the fifth partial has been adjusted to align with the major third all across the tuning continuum – so the syntonic comma has been eliminated, too, from both tuning and timbre.

What’s going on here? The background is discussed here, which is a draft of an article recently accepted for publication by MIT’s Computer Music Journal, and here.

Another interesting test is to play the chord progression from Pachelbel's Canon while changing the tuning dynamically (rather like Herman Miller’s Warped Canon, but dynamic, and timbre-adjusted). I found that it’s easiest to work out the note-pattern on the Online Thummer, then, having understood/memorized it, play it on the Dynamic Tuning test-app.

The additive synthesis algorithm used in this bare-bones synth is just a toy. We expect, in future, to be able to adjust the partials of any synth's output in real time, so that electronic musicians will have complete freedom of timbre within Dynamic Tuning.

This is all pretty bare-bones, of course, but it shows that Dynamic Tuning actually WORKS.

Whee! :-)

Online Thummer

A team of students at Curtin University recently completed a project in which they implemented an "Online Thummer"(tm). You go to their web page, use your computer keyboard as if it were a Thummer keyboard, and voila! You can test-drive the Thummer's note-layout online.

That's not just cool -- that's bitchin'.

Any Online Thummer's polyphony is inevitably limited by your computer keyboard's implementation. Some keyboards support only allow certain combinations of button-presses at a time, some keyboards allow other combinations. My laptop's computer keyboard allows all of the major & minor triads in root position, but any 7's or extended chords.

I've asked the student team (a) to add an "about box" describing themselves and their project, and (b) to add the resulting Online Thummer to Thumtronics' web page. I'll make another post when and if this gets done.

Well done, y'all!