It's over

Thumtronics is dead.  :-(

For years now, I've been trying to raise money to finish the Thummer's  design and to manufacture its first production run. In that time, I received many promises, but no checks. Now, the global financial crisis has dried up all funding for early-stage companies. Thumtronics is now in bankruptcy.  It's over.

To Thumtronics' investors, I offer my sincerest apologies. I did my best. I put everything I had into it -- every penny, every hour, every effort.  I'm sorry. I hope that you will forgive me, and more importantly, that you won't hold my failure against the next guy who comes to you with a great idea.

I've tried diligently for years to license Thumtronics' patents to other companies, with no success. Most of Thumtronics' (pending) patents will fall into the public domain due to non-payment of fees.

Once Thumtronics' bankruptcy is final, I'll place the design documents for the Thummer prototypes on the web, as the basis of an open-source hardware project. Completing the Thummer's design would be a great team project for an electronics/mechanical engineering class. Once an open-source reference design was completed, anyone who wanted to make Thummers could do so.

For example, a firm like Hong Kong's Medeli to work with HK UST's students to finish the Thummer's design, then to collect partially pre-paid orders online until receiving enough orders to justify making the initial production run. If nothing else, this would be a great way to identify (and hire) the university's best students.

Hopefully, through an open-source approach, Thummers will someday become available.  I hope so, because I want one!  :-)

In the meantime, I've started a new company, iGetIt! Music. It has no website yet (although I've registered the domain). iGetIt! is just me and an Internet-connected computer in my bedroom -- a classic micro-ISV. iGetIt! is focused on developing online music education courseware using the computer keyboard (and possibly iPhone) as its input device. iGetIt! doesn't have the potential to rake in the big bucks that Thumtronics had, but if I'm lucky I ought to be able to make a living out of it. In these troubled economic times that's a whole lot better than nothing.

My biggest challenge now is getting back into the swing of computer programming. It's been 22 years since I got my Computer Science degree, and 17 years since I last programmed for a living. I was on the cutting edge of object-oriented programming back then, and mostly I'm finding that today's tools make it very easy to do things that required lots of hand-coding back then.  I'll start a new blog shortly to document my progress and share what I've learned.

So...Thumtronics is dead. Long live iGetIt! Music!  :-)

Transposing Tradition

In a letter to the Austin Chronicle dated July 17, 2008 and titled The Question: How Good are the Musicians?, author Tom Bowman asks

Who wants to go down to Red River and get their ears assaulted by band after band of “musicians” who know about 10 chords, write insipid lyrics, and can’t even transpose their own songs from one key to another? If the level of talent were higher, the established clubs wouldn’t have to bring in so many touring acts.

How fascinating that Mr. Bowman equates the ability to “transpose songs from one key to another” with the bands’ “level of talent”! This is by no means an isolated example, however; the ability to transpose is often equated with musical skill and/or talent. A Google search for the keywords +transpose +sight +key +talent turns up almost 3,000 hits.

Yet the difficulty of transposition has no relevance whatsoever to musical knowledge, skill, or talent. It is merely an artifact of the pitch-focused design of traditional musical instruments and notation. At most, it is an artificial barrier placed in the path of aspiring musicians.

Using the ThumMusic System, transposition is a complete non-issue.

I am reminded of upper-class English schoolchildren, who were compelled to learn Latin as recently as the 1980’s. Why? Because Latin was the universal language of scholarly discourse…200 years previously. To be recognized as being One of Us, one had to speak the upper class' secret language, for purely exclusionary reasons. Anyone who could not afford to waste time and money learning an utterly useless secret language was excluded from the upper-class club.

I don’t think that Americas' taxpayers can afford to waste their time and money attempting – with a low success rate – to teach its children the secret language of music’s upper classes. By using the ThumMusic System, students can concentrate on learning about music.

Which is the point, really, isn’t it?

The Epiphany of Helen Keller

Most people are at least somewhat familiar with the story of Helen Keller, whose illness at 19 months of age left her deaf, blind, and without any sense of language. The story of her breakthrough in re-discovering the concept of language five years later is a parable of ignorance, imitation, frustration, and epiphany.

Here’s the parable in Ms. Keller’s own words, from her autobiography of 1903 (to which I have added paragraph headings).

[Ignorance]
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

[Imitation]
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them pin, hat, cup and a few verbs like sit, stand and walk. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.

[Frustration]
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-t-e-r" is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.

[Epiphany]
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, 1903

Back when I was a high-school musician, I felt my musical ignorance in exactly the manner that Ms. Keller described. Eventually, I learned to imitate other musician’s improvisations – scat-singing a solo, or improvising a bass line, or whatever – but I had no idea how the notes all fit together, so I couldn’t create anything new or uniquely personal. It was very frustrating, as a scientifically-minded person (even then), to be told that music was "too mysterious and complex for a mere high-schooler to understand." At least, that was the excuse I was given when I sought to learn more, and the college-level music theory textbook in the high school's library did nothing to convince me otherwise.

More than 20 years later, when I had the time to dig into music again, I was able to peer though a magic X-ray lens -- the isomorphic keyboard -- to see the bones and sinews of music, stripped of the superfical complexities of traditional music theory. It was inexpressibly delightful to have my own series of epiphanies, which gave me the insights needed to contribute to the creation of the Thummer, the ThumMusic System, and Dynamic Tonality.

It is my greatest hope that the musically-curious will find the ThumMusic System to be an “epiphany guide,” leading them to their own string of music-making epiphanies, so that they won’t languish in ignorance, settle for imitation, or give up in frustration, as so many budding musicians do.

Compression, Concreteness, and Concurrency

Here's a different way to describe the sources of the ThumMusic System's benefits.

1. Compression: By notating and controlling intervals (i.e., ratios between frequencies) instead of pitches (i.e., log representation of frequencies), musical information is compressed by a factor of approximately 12, as the music of all 12 keys shares a single representation.
2. Concreteness: Anchoring abstract tonal relationships in the concrete geometry of a specific isomorphic keyboard facilitates makes these concepts tangible, facilitating interactive learning and the formation of mental models.
3. Concurrency: Exposing the consistent patterns of music to the senses of sight and touch, at the same time that they are exposed to hearing, engages more of the student’s brain in the learning process.

I don't know enough about cognitive psychology to cite references as to the importance of these factors (your suggestions would be welcome!), but it seems intuitively obvious that they out to have a synergistic cognitive impact.

The Law of Accelerating Returns, Order, Efficiency, and Music Education

Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns states that “as order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).”

What is “order”?

Kurzweil defines and discusses order as follows:

Order… is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose. In the evolution of life-forms, the purpose is to survive. In an evolutionary algorithm (a computer program that simulates evolution to solve a problem) applied to, say, investing in the stock market, the purpose is to make money. Simply having more information does not necessarily result in a better fit. A superior solution for a purpose may very well involve less data.

I submit that there is only one possible metric for measuring the order of any commercial information system: price/performance, which I’ll call “efficiency.” This same metric can be posed in two ways.

1. Fixed Performance: Contrast the prices at which different systems attain a given level of performance.
2. Fixed Price: Contrast the levels of performance attained by different systems a given price.

A familiar example is the ever-increasing efficiency of the personal computer. Compared to this year’s computer, next year’s computer will have twice the power at the same price, or have the same power at half the price, or some balance thereof.

The efficiency of education hasn’t changed significantly for generations, due to its inability to benefit from the kind of technological innovations that have improved the efficiency of other industries (a situation studied by economist William Baumol and known as Baumol’s Curse).

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the purpose of education is to facilitate a student’s internalization of as much of world’s accumulated skills & knowledge as possible. Then the “order” of different systems of education can be measured by comparing the efficiency – the price/performance – with which they deliver the most skill & knowledge to the most students at the lowest cost.

For music education, the two perspectives on efficiency can be expressed as:

1. Fixed Performance: The total cost of developing a given average level of musicianship in a given population of students.
2. Fixed Price: The average level of musicianship attained within a given population of students at a given total cost.

In education, time often dominates price. For example, in Writing Right's comparison of different writing systems, the time it takes to achieve functional literacy using a given writing system is the price of using that system.

It can be argued that arts education should focus not on the average outcome, but on the exceptional outcome. That argument can be accomodated simply by restricting the “given population of students” to those who are exceptional, and by raising the “given average level of musicianship” accordingly. Either way, the efficiency metric still applies.

I submit that the ThumMusic System has the potential to provide an exponential increase in the “order” of musical information, by reducing – through abstraction and isomorphism – the amount of data needed to describe any given musical structure (whether tonal, atonal, harmonic, or inharmonic).

The Law of Accelerating Returns suggests that such an increase in order should result in a shortening of time between salient events. What kind of salient events?

• In music education, those moments when the student suddenly “gets it,” solidifying past learning and broadening the foundation for future learning.
• In music theory, the emergence of new ideas that abstract, unify, and simplify.
• In music, the emergence, development, maturity, and senescence of new musical styles.

As Kurzweil wrote, “Sometimes, a deeper order – a better fit to a purpose – is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity.”

A better fit to a purpose is exactly what the ThumMusic System offers, through its simple geometric exposure of the music’s deep structure.

The Metrics of Revolution

I'll be leading a panel discussion on the topic "The Metrics of Revolution" at the College Music Society's 2008 National Conference, in Atlanta. The panel is to be held from 8am-9am on Saturday, 27th September, in room Marriott L504-505.

The CMS is said to be quite conservative, so its conference committee is to be commended for being willing to accept a panel proposal from a potentially-revolutionary outsider.

Here's the official blurb for the panel session:

This conference’s Call for Papers described music education as being desperately willing to consider revolutionary ideas; it even dared to state that ideas which served us well in the past might now be holding us back. Let’s presume that in response to this call, a flurry of new approaches to music education will be proposed.

By what criteria and metrics will these new approaches be compared and contrasted with the status quo and with each other? For example, all else being equal, would it be a good thing to increase the rate at which students attained a given level of skill and knowledge (i.e., reduce the amount of time it took)? How about reducing the cost of music education? Increasing the success rate? Broadening and/or deepening the level of knowledge and/or skill attained?

It is unlikely that any – let alone all – of these metrics can be dramatically improved when using traditional instruments & notation. What core knowledge and skills of music-making exist independently of traditional instruments & notation? How can these core abilities be reflected in the criteria and metrics by which novel approaches to music education are measured? Or is it all just too hard, so that we’d all rather fail with traditional approaches than succeed with non-traditional ones?

The conference's version of my bio reads as follows:

Jim Plamondon – an outsider to music education, self-taught in music theory – is the co-author of papers in the peer-reviewed Computer Music Journal and the Journal of Mathematics and Music. Nearly all successful revolutionary ideas come from outsiders, and although insiders to tend to reflexively dismiss revolutionary ideas (the Semmelweis Reflex), it behooves them to consider such ideas objectively. Jim is interested in facilitating the identification of the criteria, metrics, and benchmarks by which alternative approaches to the status quo of music education – such as his proposed ThumMusic System – can be objectively compared and contrasted.

The session's confirmed panelists are:
Thomas Rudolph, President of TI:ME
Monty Cole, Mercer University
Maud Hickey, Northwestern University
Colby Leider, University of Miami
Gil Weinberg, Georgia Institute of Technology
Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, University of South Florida

I expect to hand out a ballot at the start of the session. Each attendee will have 100 votes, which they will distribute across a number of potential metrics to indicate the weight that they would like to see each mettic have in a combined metric for comparing and contrasting the effectiveness of alternative methods of music education.

• Percentage of Test-takers who pass The Test after studying The Method's Student Materials for a given number of hours
• Average number of hours of study invested in studying The Method's Student Materials by those who pass The Test
• Percentage of those who begin to study for The Test using The Method but drop out before passing it (per week)
• Average amount spent acquiring The Method's Student Materials by those who pass The Test
• Average amount spent acquiring instruction by those who pass The Test
• Sum of "Cost of Acquisition," "Cost of Instruction," and any other Method-specific costs (excluding the value of the student's time)
• Same as Cost of Competence, but for those who Drop Out before passing The Test
  Percentage of legally-disabled persons whose disabilities do not preclude passing The Test using The Method
• Percentage of performance gestures required by The Test that are ergonomically risky, weighted by frequency and degree of risk
• Percentage of target population that can afford the Method's Cost of Competence
• Of the music used in The Method's Student Materials, the percentage written by composers who were alive when The Materials were assembled
• Of the music used in The Method's Student Materials, the percentage that is based on compositions that have been in Billboard's Top 40
• Of the music used in The Method's Student Materials, the percentage recognized by first-lesson students (on average)
• Using Normalized metrics: [Pass Rate] / ( [Ergonomic Risk] * [Time to Competence] * [Cost of Competence] )
• Percentage of those who pass The Test using The Method who, without any additional study or practice, also pass equally-standardized Tests on other musical topics

Here are some definitions for terms used in the above proposed metrics:

• The Test: a standardized test of musical competence. There are many possible tests – GCE, AMEB, ABRSM – each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Selection of a particular Test, and debate over the value and consequences of teaching to such a Test, is outside the scope of this discussion. Primary, secondary, and tertiary music education are likely to target different tests. It is presumed for the sake of simplicity that The Test is pass/fail.
• The Method: any given potentially-revolutionary method of music education.
• The Student Materials: the tools a student must acquire in order to use The Method to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to pass The Test. Can include lesson books, DVDs, online materials, instruments, sheet music, metronomes, software, etc.
• The Traditional Method: By default is assumed to use of the piano keyboard and traditional staff notation, aimed at passing The Test.

Hangul for Music

South Korea could be a leading adopter of the ThumMusic System, for two reasons: South Korea’s relentless obsession with education and its experience with (and reverence for) hangul.

Hangul is a written phonemic script organized into syllabic blocks which represents the sounds of spoken Korean. It was developed as an alternative to the use of Chinese hanja characters, of which there were so many – nearly 50,000 altogether – that attaining functional literacy required a huge investment of time. Korea being a poor country then, the vast majority of Koreans could not afford this huge investment in hanja literacy, so Korea’s literacy rate was very low.

Hangul's ease-of-learning reduced the cost of attaining literacy by so much that a bright Korean-speaking student could learn to read and write in a single day, and by a not-so-bright student in a single week. It has been described as being "the world's best alphabet" and "the most scientific system of writing” (see Writing Right, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning science author Jared Diamond).

Hangul’s democratization of literacy was adamantly opposed by Korea’s intellectual elites, which correctly saw hangul as threatening their monopoly on the benefits of literacy. Hangul was recognized as Korea’s official written script after WWII, and since then, hangul has become nearly universal in Korea, with hanja rapidly disappearing.

Hangul’s impact on Korean culture has been profound. Using hangul, Korea rapidly attained the highest literacy rate in the world – an important factor in its emergence as a top-tier industrial nation. Korea is so proud of hangul that it celebrates Hangul Day every year. Korea’s new capital, Sejong City, was named after King Sejong the Great, whose ‘greatest’ accomplishment is considered to be the development of hangul.

Thus, Korean society is well-disposed towards the idea that the use of a non-traditional symbol system can dramatically improve learning outcomes, as the ThumMusic System is poised to do. Positioning the ThumMusic System in Korea as “hangul for music” could help lead to rapid success there.

The second reason why the ThumMusic System could take off in South Korea is its absolute obsession with education, delivered in large part through private cram schools, on which Korean parents spend US$15 billion per year – the world’s highest per capita investment in private education. As one leading cram school entrepreneur stated, “The most important thing for students is time, so the quality of educational services is critical – they have to learn as much as possible in a short space of time.” In the highly-competitive cram school market, the school which first adopted the ThumMusic System could gain a significant advantage.

Together, these two circumstances could lead South Korea could be a leading adopter of the Thummer and ThumMusic System.

It happens that Korean manufacturing giant Hyundai recently acquired Kurzweil Music Systems and appointed Ray Kurzweil to be its Chief Strategy Officer, to “build Kurzweil Music Systems into one of the largest music instruments brands in the world,” according to Kurzweil.

Interesting,yes? ;-)

Temperament, by Stuart Isacoff

Last week I read, for the first time, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization, originally published in 2001. It was written by Stuart Isacoff, a “pianist, composer and writer, the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today,” and Lecturer at Purchase College, which is part of the State University of New York system. I found it to be fascinating, penetrating, and a very enjoyable read.

I was also pleased to discover that, indirectly, it presents a very strong argument in favor of Thumtronics’ musical innovations.

Superficially, Temperament could be read as a paean to 12-edo (Equal Division of the Octave, called simply “equal temperament” in the book). For example, Isacoff writes that:

• 12-edo is “the final solution” (p. 6).
• “if music depended on harmony for its expressiveness, then [12-edo] was crucial, because it offered any keyboard instrument a unique ability to facilitate harmonic movement” (p. 209).
• “equal temperament [is] a system that casually discards the simplest, purest musical ratios…for the sake of pleasing the ears” (p. 175).
• “no keyboard can execute all these different scales in meantone tuning without falling prey to the ‘wolves’” (p. 215).
• 12-edo’s adoption was “inevitable” (p. 224).
• “the temperament wars, after centuries of struggle, had essentially reached an end…[12-edo] settled in as the philosophical ideal” (p. 227).

However, the book frequent mentions an often-proposed alternative solution: extended keyboards and tunings, i.e., those with more than 12 notes per octave.

• “Instrument makers proposed the creation of keyboards with extra keys, so performers would have more than the usual number of choices for finding a note with the proper proportion. It was a cumbersome solution” (p. 18).
• “As late as 1768, the Foundling Hospital in London [installed an organ] capable of playing more than 12 pitches in an octave. Nevertheless, these complicated musical inventions found little acceptance” (p. 19).
• “one solution to [the problem of wolf intervals in meantone] was to offer extra keys, giving the performer a choice of playing either la-flat or sol-sharp…The idea would gain new adherents over time…but it was cumbersome, and ultimately unsatisfactory” (p. 104).
• “Nicola Vicentino…constructed an entirely new instrument, the archicembalo, with six rows of keys, to allow different versions of each scale member to be played (commas and all)” (p. 127).
• “Fabio Colonna’s sambuca, based on a division of the octave into thirty-one parts” (p. 131).
• “Mersenne, for example, urged the adoption of an instrument with nineteen keys” (p. 181).
• “Constantijn Huygens…used logarithms to calculate the division of the octave into thirty-one equal parts…Models of [his] keyboards, designed to fit over ordinary harpsichords, were, he reported, actually constructed in Paris” (p. 185).
• “Newton’s method boiled down to the cumbersome method of offering performers a greater-than-usual choice of notes to play” (p. 196).

Isacoff consistently uses the same word to explain the failure of extended keyboards: cumbersome, defined by the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary as meaning “unwieldy because of heaviness and bulk." The Thummer is one-thirtieth the size and one tenth the weight of an electronic keyboard, and vastly smaller & lighter than an acoustic piano.

Clearly, Isacoff considers the “cumbersome-ness” of any given keyboard design to be a significant factor in its acceptance or rejection.

Perhaps the Thummer's relative non-cumbersome-ness can be seen as a significant advantage.

Another word that Isacoff uses to describe extended keyboards is complicated, defined as “difficult to analyze, understand, or explain.” An alternative definition of cumbersome provided by Wiktionary, also smacks of complexity: “not easily managed or handled; awkward.” Does Isacoff prefer the simple and easy to the complicated and difficult? Apparently, he does.

• Isacoff quotes d’Alembert as praising Rameau for being “the first to have simplified the practice of [music] and made it easier,” implying that being simpler and easier – i.e., less complicated – are positive qualities (p. 223).
• Isacoff praises the innovations of Guido d’Arezzo – solfege and the staff, specifically – saying “The impulse to explore greater musical horizons demanded advances in technology…Portraying music visually made its structure easier to grasp and to vary; it enabled choirboys to learn in a few days what had taken weeks, and gave singers and composers newfound freedom to experiment. Musicians could more easily pose the question, ‘what if…?’” (p. 50)

The latter quote above is particularly important, as it elucidates a subtle point that is often lost: that by making things simpler, you can also make them more powerful. To quote Wikipedia, "A solution may be considered elegant if it uses a non-obvious method to produce a solution which is highly effective and simple. An elegant solution may solve multiple problems at once, especially problems not thought to be inter-related."

The Thummer’s isomorphic keyboard is said to be much simpler and easier than the piano keyboard, especially when also using the ThumMusic System to display and control musical information. (One might think of its solfege-based ThumLine staff as reuniting Guido d’Arezzo’s sundered innovations.) The Thummer’s ability to facilitate the exploration of “greater musical horizons” is discussed below.

Perhaps the Thummer's being less complicated can be seen as a significant advantage.

Throughout Temperament, Isacoff praises those instruments and tunings which enhance expressiveness and versatility:

• “Temperaments…unfettered the engine of musical progress” (p. 8)
• “Each of Leonardo [da Vinci]’s musical inventions seemed to break new ground in extending an instrument’s expressive possibilities” (p. 89)
• “The stretching of musical boundaries [in the late 1500’s] fueled a demand for more versatility from the keyboard instruments themselves” (p. 162)
• “For many musicians, the invention of the piano was a wish come true. Composer and keyboardist Francois Couperin had pleaded in print for the creation of just such an instrument in 1711. He would be ‘forever grateful,’ wrote Couperin, to anyone who could render the monotonous harpsichord capable of expression” (p. 210)

Independent experts claim (here, and here) that the Thummer, with its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors, has more expressive potential than any other instrument. As to versatility, the Thummer’s keyboard can be used to play the music of many different cultures and eras (which require tunings other than 12-edo), all with the same fingering. As to “unfettering,” the Thummer encourages musical progress through such novel effects as Dynamic Tonality.

Perhaps the Thummer's being more expressive, more versatile, and more enabling of musical progress can be seen as a significant advantage.

Isacoff also hints at the intimate relationship between tuning and timbre that is fundamental to Dynamic Tonality:

• “Unless the strings used to create the harmony are made of the same ‘material, length, thickness, and goodness,’ they simply won’t be in tune with each other…(the gut strings used in lutes, for example, will produce equal-tempered thirds that are more pleasant sounding than the ones produced on strings made of steel)” (p. 143).
• “Indeed, [the piano’s] timbre, like the lute’s, made the modified intervals of equal-tempered tuning easy to take” (p. 214).

During the time covered by the book Temperament, the only possible approach to the problem of consonance (described in the book as concordance) was tempering one’s tuning; it was not possible to temper the timbres of acoustic instruments. However, as Isacoff says (p. 39), “In our sophisticated, scientific age of black holes and anti-matter, dealing with such entities is child’s play.” Using electronic music synthesis, both tuning and timbre can be tempered together, opening the entire dynamic sweep of the syntonic temperament’s tuning continuum to exploration without sacrificing consonance.

This approach to solving the problems raised in Temperament is – as far as my collaborators, myself, and our papers’ peer-reviewers know – entirely novel. This use of “tempered timbres” slices through the Gordian Knot of temperament at an entirely new angle. Its result is not just one arguably-optimal approximation of Just Intonation – 12-edo – but rather a broad, continuous sweep of tunings, each maximally-aligned with its related timbres’ partials. Indeed, our approach embraces not only the syntonic temperament, but every rank-2 temperament, including the schismatic, Magic, Hanson, Porcupine, etc.

This newfound flexibility of tuning and timbre – “Dynamic Tonality” – is simply impossible to replicate on the piano-style keyboard, because a two-dimensional note-layout is required to capture the structure of a two-dimensional (rank-2) temperament, and the piano's keyboard is one-dimensional.

Perhaps the Thummer and Dynamic Tonality will be seen as offereing a more flexible solution to the problem of temperament.

There’s one last thread running through Temperament that’s relevant to Thumtronics’ innovations: Isacoff’s frequent praise for those creative musicians, scientists, and theorists who went against established orthodoxy in proposing new ways of balancing the needs of beauty and utility. However, this praise is offered more in tone than in text, so I can’t provide specific quotes.

It is unclear whether Isacoff's praise is for rational & experiential iconoclasm in general, or only for that which supports an anti-Pythagorean & pro-12-edo agenda. Thumtronics' innovations are certainly anti-Pythagorean (in that they modify the Sacred Harmonic Series itself – gasp, horror, heresy!), but they are hardly pro-12-edo. Nonetheless, they are built atop a firm scientific foundation, with mathematical proofs published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and with a demonstration synth that can be experienced by anyone.

In conclusion: Stuart Isacoff’s excellent book, Temperament, praises those innovations in the history of musical tuning, instrument design, and notation that enhanced simplicity, versatility, freedom, expressiveness, and progress, while being less cumbersome. I submit that the Thummer delivers all of these same benefits, and would welcome Dr. Isacoff's comments on it.

JacyDawn82's Criticisms

JacyDawn82 posted some interesting criticisms of the Thummer as comments to Thumtronics’ YouTube videos. A blog like this is a better forum for such discussions, so I've taken the liberty of posting the criticisms below, interspersed with my responses.

Generally, JacyDawn82’s statements seem to fall into three broad categories:

1. No new musical instrument could possibly be superior to all traditional musical instruments in any musically-important way.
2. Making a profit and making a better world are mutually incompatible.
3. The Thummer promotes musical idiocy (in some undefined way), and any claim to the contrary is “ridiculous” and/or “ludicrous.”

These concerns appear to be simple reactionary conservatism – “anything old is better than anything new” – but there may be more to them than that.

The third point is the most interesting to me, as it seems to be hitting a real sore point, which I do not understand.

Here's the thread.

Jacy

[The Thummer] promotes musical idiocy.

Jim
Why? Make your case, Jacy.

In what way does the Thummer and/or ThumMusic System “promote musical idiocy”? What essential concepts of music theory and/or performance does it deprecate, such that those who learn to make music using the ThumMusic System are, as a result, musical idiots?

Jacy
My main problem is the inventor is somehow trying to “improve” upon over 400 years of SUCCESSFUL musical tradition by replacing it with this useless toy.

Jim

I am guilty as charged... just as Henry Ford was guilty of trying to “improve” upon centuries of SUCCESSFUL transportation tradition and Vint Cerf was guilty of trying to “improve” upon centuries of SUCCESSFUL communications tradition. Their useless toys have helped millions.

As to “promoting musical idiocy” – how so? With the Thummer [and ThumMusic System], a higher percentage of people can successfully gain the knowledge and skills necessary to read, perform, and compose music. Is this not a good thing?

Jacy

Are you seriously comparing yourself to Henry Ford and Vint Cerf? Give me a break!

Jim

All inventors – including me – attempt to advance the state of the art. To argue that this is somehow offensive is to argue that we should still be shivering in cold, dark caves.

Jacy
You don't fool me...your BS about wanting to spread the joy of music with your trinket is completely lost and fake to me between interjections of how much you want to make money. The developers of the Theremin or Moog sought to further music as an art form, something you obviously don't intend to do as a musically challenged (however brilliant) businessman.

Jim

Your claims are erroneous. Leon Teremin patented the Teremin all over the world; hardly a sign of unbridled altruism. Robert Moog made theremins for a living, both before and after developing the synthesizer, and always worked (albeit with mixed success) to commercialize his innovations profitably. By offering a simpler, cheaper, and more expessive instrument, I can make the world a better place and a fortune, too. That's the American Dream; as an American, that's good enough for me.

Jacy

How is it that this device is going to make the world a better place? Be very specific, please.

Jim
Let's presume for the sake of this discussion that:

• acquiring the knowledge and skills of music-making has many benefits, both intrinsic and extrinsic; that
• only a given percentage of musical novices -- call it X% -- progress far enough in their music lessons to acquire the above-mentioned benefits; and that
• it costs some average amount -- call it $Y -- to educate a raw novice to the point where they acquire the above-mentioned benefits.

Now, let's imagine that a new approach to music education could be found that

• yeilds precisely the same benefits,
• with a success rate that’s significantly higher than X%,
• at a cost that is significantly lower than $Y.

With this hypothetical new approach, more people could afford to attempt to acquire the benefits of music education, and more would succeed in the attempt. Having more people enjoy these benefits would make the world a better place -- wouldn't it?

No scientific studies have yet attempted to measure the relative advantage of the ThumMusic System, so the extent of its advantage over traditional methods is not yet known. However, the response of many credible music educators (e.g., Leong, Miles, Whitehead, & others) suggests that there is at least a reasonable likelihood that its advantage will prove to be considerable.

The Thummer extends the advantages of the ThumMusic System by providing greater expressive and creative potential than traditional musical instruments (see below), by having the potential to become very affordable (see below), and by offering novel creative potential.

Jacy
How are you contributing to the world as a businessman (because, sir, you are NOT an artist) with your musical innovation? Cut the nonsense; you are very much more interested in tapping into a “$30 billion a year industry.”

Jim
If the Thummer and ThumMusic System do indeed have the potential to deliver the benefits of music education to more people at lower cost, then this would be quite a contribution, worthy of a substantial return on investment.

Jacy
If you would only change your view that the problems of the less musically-inclined is the fault of the music. That just completely boggles my mind.

Jim
The problem is not the fault of music per se, but rather the fault of the level of abstraction at which musical information is displayed and controlled by traditional notation & instruments. The Thummer and ThumMusic System raise the level of abstraction such that the invariant structures of music theory are displayed and controlled in an invariant manner, thereby making music significantly easier to teach, learn, and play.

This is a rather complex and subtle concept, which does not translate well into a TV sound-bite; “it’s music’s fault” is about as close as one can get while being TV-friendly. Those who take exception to the sound-bite will hopefully hit Thumtronics’ website for more information (such as this and this).

Jacy
Face it: what you are indeed promoting is not innovation, but idiocy.

Jim
Why? Make your case, Jacy.

Jacy
You're not talking about cars versus horse and carriage. Music is an art (to some, art in its highest form) and should be experienced by everyone. That much I agree. But to suggest that your way is better and that your device is superior in some way is completely ludicrous.

Jim
Why? Make your case, Jacy.

Jacy
There are countless interested individuals who have toiled for many years learning their instrument – whether piano, violin, guitar, cello, clarinet – both amateur, professional, or somewhere in between who would be more than happy to try or even learn your device (myself included would be interested in at least trying it out).

But I cannot let go of your ridiculous claims about how the Thummer is a “solution” to the problems presented by learning the above instruments, all veiled under the guise of making the world a better place. “By offering a simpler, cheaper, and more expressive instrument, I can make the world a better place and a fortune, too.”

• Simpler? Maybe a little (although it doesn't take too long to learn chords on a guitar or basic progressions on a piano).
• Cheaper? At $450 US, that's not exactly cheaper than a beginner's guitar, and that's just for the Thummer alone, correct?
• More Expressive? The only claim that is just outright wrong. People: compare the Thummer examples here to a fine performance of a Chopin etude or Beethoven sonata on the piano, an Albeniz Tango on the guitar, a Bach partita on the violin, or a simple lullaby sung by a parent to their child.
  

Jim

• Simpler: The ThumMusic System is likely to prove to be considerably more than “a little simpler,” but we can’t know by how much until rigorous scientific studies are conducted. Still, credible experts in music education have stated that its potential is “revolutionary.” Revolutions usually require that the new technology be two or three times as efficient as the status quo; that’s a lot more than “a little.”
• Cheaper: Traditional musical instruments are now about as cheap as they’ll ever get (all else being equal), whereas the eMotion Thummer’s expected initial price can fall rapidly as its sales volumes increase. Because the Thummer is all-electronic, tiny, and has few moving parts, a Pocket Thummer (with battery power and integrated sounds) could eventually retail for under $20 bucks (in constant dollars). There’s no way a non-toy guitar or piano keyboard could ever touch that price; they are too large and mechanically complex. And online computer-keyboard-based ThumMusic lessons are expected to be free, which is a price that’s hard to beat.
• More Expressive: This claim is actually the easiest to prove, as previously discussed on this blog. It also has the most definitive expert support, as from Paine and Goudeseune, who refer to it as being “outstandingly expressive” and “groundbreaking,” respectively.

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Music

I’ve watched with interest the reaction to the publication of Garret Lisi’s paper, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything. He is being revered and reviled simultaneously.

When something happens that people think might be important, but they don’t really understand it, they tend to look around for an expert. If the experts disagree, then those who don’t understand the details are left with an ink-blot test, from which they divine meaning by faith alone. On the one hand, the decision to revere or revile tends to be based largely on internal factors – one’s faith in “progress,” for example. On the other hand, trivial and extraneous details of the ink-blot can become disproportionately influential – such as one’s feelings about surfing.

My collaborators and I are pursuing a similarly-simple Grand Unified Music Theory (which underlies the ThumMusic System). I suppose that we can expect it to receive a similarly split reaction…assuming anyone even notices. We have the advantage that our work’s foundations have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals (Computer Music Journal, Winter 2007, and Journal of Mathematics and Music, Spring 2008), which Lisi’s paper was not.

Oh, well. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Faster = Cheaper = Easier

I think I've been explaining the benefits of the ThumMusic System to music educators in the wrong terms.

• When I emphasize cost reduction, some educators freak out, associating lower cost with lower quality.
• When I emphasize ease of learning, some educators freak out, associating easier with dumbing down.

Instead, I think I need to emphasize "increasing the rate of learning." Music educators don't seem to have a reflexively negative association with the concept of "increasing the rate of learning." By avoiding their negatively-charged reflexive responses, I give music educators the opportunity to form a reflective response.

Cost, ease, and speed are all just different facets of the same gem. If a given level of musical understanding and skill takes a long time to acquire, then it's hard and expensive (in hours invested). If the same level can be gained in less time – that is, more rapidly – then it is easier and less expensive. Increasing speed increases ease and lowers cost.

It's my understanding from research papers that I read on the Web a couple of years ago (I'll look for them again later) that the #1 reason why students quit their music lessons is because they don't feel that they are making sufficient progress to justify the hours invested. Rapid progress is exciting; slow progress is boring. By speeding up the rate at which students acquire a given level of musical knowledge and skill, music education becomes inherently more exciting, so its drop-out rate should decline, and a higher percentage of students should be successful.

This is exactly what I've been saying all along, but I've been saying it in economic terms or ease-of-use terms. These terms resonate very well with investors and technology folks, but have not proven to resonate well with music educators. I'll try casting the ideas in "rate of learning" terms, and see if that works any better.

This is just a choice-of-language issue. I should speak not to music educators in the language of economics any more than I should address a Chinese audience in Japanese. Bad associations, either way.

Growing the Market

The goal of Thumtronics’ musical innovations is to grow the market for music-making products by reducing the amount of time necessary to achieve a self-sustaining level of musical knowledge and skill.

According to NAMM's tri-annual Gallup surveys, nearly everyone in the First World attempts to play a musical instrument, often more than once (as a child, then as an empty-nester, and again as a retiree). Despite this near-universal attempt to learn to make music, US census data shows that only 4-10% of the US population plays a musical instrument regularly (depending on how you define “regularly”). Yamaha’s 2005 annual report cites the optimistic 10% end of this range. If nearly everyone's already trying to make music, but only 4-10% are successful, then lots of aspiring music-makers are failing.

Why?

The #1 reason why students quit their music lessons is because they "get bored" – that is, they feel that, at their current rate of progress, it will take too long to attain a satisfactory level of knowledge and skill to make the investment of time worthwhile. This prevents these students from reaching a self-sustaining level of musical competence.

The 4-10% of people who do reach such a self-sustaining level of musical competence continue buying the musical instrument industry’s products – sheet music, accessories, upgraded instruments, music-related software, etc. Most of these products have higher margins than beginner's instruments do, so increasing the percentage of music-makers in the population should increase the industry's margins in addition to increasing its revenues.

Therefore, the key to growing the annual global sales & margins of the music products industry is to reduce the amount of time necessary to achieve a self-sustaining level of musical knowledge and skill.

To achieve this growth, three goals must be accomplished:
1. A new solution to the problems of music education must be found.
2. Beginners must have free and easy access to the new solution.
3. Beginners must become aware of, and choose, the new solution.

Goal #1: Find a New Solution
Goal #1 has been completed. The new solution is the ThumMusic System, which (a) abstracts the display of musical information to the level of music theory (intervals, rather than pitches), and (b) anchors this abstraction in the concrete geometry of a specific “isomorphic” note-pattern, in which a given interval has the “same shape” wherever it appears. This makes the fundamental concepts of music easier to visualize and grasp (literally), and has the potential to dramatically increase the rate at which students learn to understand and make music, according to many experts. The ThumMusic System acelerates learning not by "dumbing down" music, but by exposing the fundamental simplicity of music's structure in a geometrically consistent manner.

If you’re looking for an analogy, the ThumMusic System’s keyboard is to music what the Periodic Table of the Elements is to chemistry. The Periodic Table is a two-dimensional drawing that presents the complex structure of the atom in a simple and revealing manner; the ThumMusic keyboard is a two-dimensional drawing that presents the complex structure of musical sound in a simple and revealing manner. Just as the invention of the Periodic Table led to the discovery of new elements, predicted by “holes” in the Table, so has the Thummer’s keyboard led to the discovery of new musical properties, such as tuning invariance and Dynamic Tonality (which arguably solves the problem of temperament, which has been plaguing music for 25 centuries). The discovery of these properties is strong evidence of the validity of Thumtronics’ approach.

Goal #2: Free and Easy Access
To accomplish Goal #2, the ThumMusic System must be made freely available and easily accessible. This is accomplished by providing free (for beginners, at least), open-source, ThumMusic-based online music education courseware which uses the standard computer keyboard as a ThumMusic Keyboard. Thumtronics is working with the University of Texas at Austin to develop this courseware, and would welcome the participation of other universities, companies, philanthropies, and individuals.

But, can any new music notation succeed? Literally hundreds have been proposed over the centuries, and all have failed…except for guitar tab. Why did tab succeed? In part because it made a common interface (the guitar fret-board) easier to learn. The ThumMusic System will make music easier to learn, too, using the most common interface of all – the computer keyboard. The music products industry’s widespread support for the new universal music notation file format, Music XML, makes the success of ThumMusic notation much easier. So does the widespread use of music notation software, such as Finale! and Sibelius, since these programs can be retro-actively upgraded to support ThumMusic notation through the installation of a simple ThumMusic software plug-in, distributed free over the Internet. Using such a plug-in, all of the world’s music can be instantly available in ThumMusic notation, without making any deals with music software or publishing companies.

So, Goal #2 above – giving beginners easy, free access to the ThumMusic System – can be easily accomplished.

Goal #3: Awareness and Choice
To accomplish Goal #3, novices must hear about the new solution and be persuaded to learn music using it. NAMM’s Gallup surveys show that 70% of beginners choose their own instruments (usually based on wanting to imitate cool artists, apparently). So to get students to choose to play the Thummer, we need to get creative artists to use them first.

It’s well-known that creative artists choose to use those tools & instruments which allow them to do make new music in interesting ways. So we need a ThumMusic-compatible instrument that gives creative artists the opportunity to make music that is truly new, but which can succeed in the commercial mainstream, thereby inspiring non-musicians to learn to play music using that same instrument. That instrument is the Thummer, a new USB-MIDI music controller which can control the sound of any MIDI-compatible electronic synthesizer, and which uses the two-dimensional note-pattern of the ThumMusic System.

The Thummer provides simultaneous control over more independent variables (degrees of freedom) than any other musical interface, whether acoustic, electric, or electronic. The Thummer is the only polyphonic instrument with the expressive power to exploit music synthesis techniques such as waveguide synthesis, so its players will be able to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments with uncanny realism while playing accompaniment, too. Furthermore, the Thummer makes new musical effects – such as Dynamic Tonality, which is simply impossible with any other musical instrument – trivially easy to control. You just wiggle a joystick, and cool new musical effects happen, with no theoretical understanding required (although the music theory underlying these effects is deep and revolutionary). It is expected that truly creative artists will flock to the Thummer because its expressive power and Dynamic Tuning allows them to make music that is truly new, while still fitting comfortably within the mainstream.

This conclusion is supported by industry experts. "As a VP at BMG’s Windham Hill label," wrote Grace Newman, "I decided which bands to sponsor, promote, and endorse, from unknown bands to Grammy-winning artists. I looked for musicians that had something new, something different, that would stand out in the market... and so did every other label. The first musicians to master the Thummer will rivet the attention of the entire music industry. If you're looking for a way to break out of the pack, this is it."

The music of these creative artists – and the coolness of controlling sound through motion – is expected to inspire musical beginners to want to play the Thummer, too. These beginners will be able to start learning to play the Thummer online, for free, using the ThumMusic System and their computer keyboards, to which so many of today’s youth’s are glued anyway. Their progress should be rapid due to the ThumMusic System’s ease-of-learning. When they exhaust the expressive potential of the computer keyboard (which won’t take long), they can step up to a Thummer, the expressive potential of which is unlimited.

Here’s one small example of how the Thummer was designed to appeal to non-musical consumers in order to help grow the market. The Thummer uses control devices that non-musical consumers are already familiar with, such as a keyboard that is intentionally similar to the ubiquitous computer keyboard and the thumb-operated joysticks and electronic motions sensors that are now common in video game controllers. Millions of non-musical consumers have spent endless hours developing fine motors skills with these control devices. Using a Thummer, they can apply these existing skills to expressive music-making. Leveraging consumers’ existing motor skills presents them with a much lower barrier to entry than would requiring them to learn entirely new motor skills such as (say) manipulating a bow, developing an embouchure, picking a guitar, etc. Their success will tend to keep them in the MI market, stepping up to more advanced instruments, buying more sheet music, buying more accessories, taking more in-person lessons, etc. – potentially growing the MI market to double or triple its current size.

A “Pocket Thummer” could put four octaves of fully-integrated polyphonic musical power in your pocket for less than the price of a good harmonica. It could become “every beginner’s first instrument, and every musician’s second™.”

The Opportunity
Between the computer keyboard, the Thummer, and the ThumMusic System, a higher percentage of beginners could succeed at reading music fluently, composing music knowledgeably, and performing music expressively.

The Thummer has been designed to be enough better, in enough ways that consumers care about, to diffuse rapidly in the mainstream consumer market. The conservatism of traditional retail distribution can be overcome through direct sales over the Internet (see The Long Tail), which can aggregate thin global demand into very respectable volumes, allowing prices to fall and awareness to rise to levels necessary to support traditional retail distribution. Because the Thummer is so tiny, has so few moving parts, and is all-electronic, it is remarkably cheap to manufacture, store, ship, and stock – the ideal instrument for Web-based sales directly from manufacturer to consumer.

Because Thumtronics’ innovations’ many patent applications are sailing through the international patent process, it has the potential to erect high barriers to competition, ensuring that it and it alone captures the value of this future growth. This could make that company the industry’s revenue and profit leader within a decade. Market leaders are regularly toppled in this manner, as a result of paradigm shifts to solutions that are simpler, cheaper, and more powerful – solutions like Thumtronics’.

Growth, growth, growth. Thumtronics’ innovations are all about growing the market.

Conclusion
Shift happens. Industries and ideas that had seemed stable for centuries can shift with surprising speed, once a new approach comes along that is simple, cheap, and powerful. This can happen to the music products industry, too – and all indications are that Thumtronics has the innovations necessary to drive such a shift.