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.

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? ;-)

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. ;-)

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.

Thummer Plays the Blues

What is the blues scale?.

In Africa and the Blues, Gerhard Kubik describes the blues scale as arising from two overlapping harmonic series, one starting a perfect fourth higher than the other. He shows this using a diagram showing only the 5th through 9th partials (harmonics) of each note's harmonic series, which I have modified as shown below (at right).

In the figure at right, the lower-pitched harmonic series is Do (outer ring, with harmonics as black-filled circles), the upper-pitched one is Fa (inner ring, harmonics as unfilled circles). Partials 5 through 9 are shown for each. There's very good alignment between Do's 8th partial and Fa's 6th partial (and of course the octaves thereof), and also between Do's 6th partial and Fa's 9th partial. These well-aligned pairs are a perfect fifth apart.

An alternative way to visualize two overlapping harmonic series is shown below.
In the figure at left, the harmonics of Do are in black while those of Fa, offset a perfect fourth higher, are in grey. At 700 cents above Do's fundamental, Do's 3rd, 6th, 12th, & 24th harmonics align with the 9th & 18th partials of Fa -- hence aligning the Do6 and Fa9 partials as in the circular figure above. Likewise, Do's 1st, 2nd, 4th, 8th, & 16th partials (far left, at 0 cents) align well with Fa's 3rd, 6th, 12, & 24th partials (far right, just past 1199 cents) -- hence aligning the Do8 and Fa6 partials as in the circular figure above.

At the top of the figure above and left, scale degrees are shown. The 3rd and 6th scale degrees are underlined, with each underline joining two stacks of harmonics. The third degree joins Do9 and Fa7 (and their octaves), while the sixth degree joins Do7 and Fa5 (and their octaves). According to Kubik (if I understand his section of his book correctly), these not-quite-aligned Do9/Fa7 and Do7/Fa5 pairs enable the tunings of these scale degrees to be flexible within a fairly wide range.

Another point raised by Kubik is that the 7-edo scale -- also known as the "equiheptatonic" scale, dividing the octave into 7 intervals of equal width -- is common in some parts of Africa. A "third" in 7-edo tuning is 343 cents wide, which is right in the middle of the range of the 3rd scale degree in the above-left figure, providing yet another source of instability in this range.

Does the Thummer suit the blues?

Played in today's standard Western 12-edo tuning (i.e., an “equal division of the octave” into 12 pieces), the Thummer should be at least as blues-capable as the piano or guitar. Its expressive controls (thumb-operated joysticks & electronic motion sensors) allow the user to play the blue notes "between" the notes of 12-edo as a guitarist can do by bending strings, and which a pianist simulates by "crushing" adjacent keys.

However, the Thummer's real potential as a blues instrument arises from the tuning invariance of its isomorphic keyboard, which gives it the same fingering in any tuning of the syntonic temperament, which includes both 12-edo and 31-edo (i.e., an “equal division of the octave” into 31 pieces, in which the tempered perfect fifth is 696.8 cents wide -- only 3.2 cents narrower than 12-edo's tempered perfect fifth).

The use of septimal (7-limit) ratios for the blue notes is explored by W.A. Mathieu in his excellent book Harmonic Experience (Chapters 17 & 33).

In 12-edo tuning, the augmented second (A2) has the same width as the minor third (m3) -- 300 cents -- so they are often treated as if they were "the same" interval.

However, in any other tuning, including 31-edo tuning, the A2 and m3 have different widths, each signifying a different just interval, as does the M3.

• 31-edo's A2, at 271.0 cents, is only four cents narrower than the just septimal minor third (7/6 = 266.9).
• 31-edo's m3, at 309.7 cents, is only 5.9 cents narrower than the just minor third (6/5 = 315.6).
• 31-edo's M3, at 387.1 cents, is less than one cent wider than the just major third (6/5 = 386.3 cents).

This harmonically-relevant distinction between the A2, m3, and M3 gives musicians a choice of three different notes to play across the range of blue 3rds. They can use the A2 to signifiy the 7/6 ratio, the m3 to signify the 6/5 ratio, or the M3 to signify the 5/4 ratio. All of these notes provide a better match with the harmonic series when using 31-edo than when using 12-edo.

Perhaps even more importantly, 31-edo distinguishes the augmented sixth (A6) from the minor seventh (m7).

• 31-edo's A6, at 967.7 cents, is only 1.1 cents narrower than the septimal minor seventh (7/4 = 968.8), making it well-suited for the harmonic seventh, also known as the "babershop seventh," chord.
• 31-edo's m7, at 1006.5 cents, falls almost exactly between just intonation's Pythagorean minor seventh (16/9 = 996.1) and diatonic minor seventh (9/5 = 1017.6), making it well-suited for use in a dominant seventh chord.

Hence, musicians can use the A6 to signifiy the 7/4 ratio, or the m7 to signify the 16/9 and/or the 9/5 ratio. Either way, musicians get a better match with the harmonic series when using 31-edo than when using 12-edo. (Well, actually, 12-edo's m7, at 1000 cents, is a better match with the Pythagorean m7, but it's a worse match with the diatonic m7 and is completely useless as a septimal m7.)

According to this reference, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords (I7, IV7, and V7) should be played as harmonic seventh chords (i.e., with an A6) except for the V7 at the turnaround, which should be played as a dominant seventh chord.

If I understand this correctly -- which I very well may not -- then in C, using the tuning described above, the I7, IV7, and V7 blues chords would be played in 31-edo as:

• I7: C-E-G-A#
• IV7: F-A-C-D#
• V7: G-B-D-F (turnaround) or G-B-D-E# (otherwise)

31-edo supports free modulation as well as 12-et does, with a caveat or two. For example, you can't play Coltrane's Giant Steps in 31-edo, becuase Giant Steps' chord progression relies on the fact that 12-edo's way-too-wide 400-cent major third tempers out the diesis , so that a chord progression through three M3's will return to the same pitch class. 31-edo's major thirds are almost perfectly just at 387.1 cents, so progressing through three of them will bring you to a point that's 38.7 cents short of the starting pitch class. Oops! In 31-edo, Giant Steps is a giant stumble, because it relies utterly on the unique structure of 12-edo -- whereas most blues relies on a structure that mixes 7-limit intervals with 5-limit intervals, at which 31-edo excels.

So, how does the Thummer compare to other blues instruments?

• On the piano keyboard, making a distinction between the A6 and m7, or the A2 and m3, is impossible. Both intervals share the same key. Pianists can fake it by crushing adjacent keys, but that's clearly a kludge, which does nothing to distinguish among the relevant harmonic ratios.


• On the guitar, it's possible to play perfectly intoned notes -- through string bending -- but difficult. In this YouTube video lesson from Berklee, the instructor states (2:09 in) that "String bends are kinda tricky. They take a little getting used to...like YEARS, actually, to develop a good sound."


• On the Thummer, you can learn to play perfectly-intoned blue notes in minutes. To paraphrase Bach, you just press the right button at the right time, and the instrument plays itself. In C, for example, if you want the A2, you play the D# button; if you want the m3, you play the Eb button; if you want the M3, you play the D button. You can use the portamento controller to slide smoothly from one precisely-tuned note to another, with no guesstimation involved. Or, you can play any of the notes above, and use pitch bending to slide 'em around at will.

31-edo is good for other musical styles, too. It is nearly identical to 1/4-comma meantone, which dominated the early centuries of Europe’s Common Practice Era, of which the use of augmented sixth chords was distinctive part.

31-edo may also be well-suited to klezmer and gypsy music, which use many augmented intervals.

If 31-edo is so cool, why hasn't it been more widely used? Apparently, because it was thought to require the use of an instrument with 31 keys per octave, for which there could be no mass-market in a 12-edo-dominated world.

This barrier may have been eliminated by the recent discovery of tuning invariance, combined with electronic transposition. Despite having only 19 buttons per octave, it appears to be true that all of the tonally-relevant 5-limit and 7-limit intervals of 31-edo fall on the Thummer's keyboard. (The above-mentioned neutral third does not, because it's an 11-limit interval.) Add to this the Thummer's expressive potential (controlled by its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors), and the Thummer could be a very credible blues instrument.

However, it's important to realize that 12-edo and 31-edo are just points along the syntonic temperament's tuning continuum, along which the Thummer can be retuned dynamically in real time. On the one hand, that means that a Thummer player can slide smoothly back and forth between 12-edo and 31-edo (or Pythagorean, or 7-edo, or whatever) in real time, choosing the tuning that best fits the current note or phrase. On the other hand, this real-time flexibility enables entirely new musical effects such as expressive polyphonic tuning bends, tuning progressions, and temperament modulations.

My collaborators and I have barely scratched the surface of the possibilities of tuning invariance -- our initial scientific paper was published just three months ago -- so we're not yet sure how big the creative opportunity really is.

Now, if y'all could please point out the errors I've undoubtedly made in this blog article, I'd appreciate it, and will update the article accordingly.

Thanks! :-)

Instrument Selection

Every three years, NAMM hires Gallop to conduct a telephone survey of American households. I can't find the 2006 survey online, but the 2003 survey concluded that

1. 64% of instrumental music-makers started studying music when they were 5-11 years old; 18% starting 12-14; 7% 15-18; and 6% after 18.


2. 75% chose for themselves the instrument that they learned to play, with 15% making the decision jointly with parents and 10% having the choice of instrument made by the parent alone.


3. 30% took lessons at school, 26% took private lessons, and 22% taught themselves. The “taught themselves” percentage has risen over time (and may be rising much faster now due to the Internet). Boys teach themselves three times as often as girls do.

It is illuminating to make a chart of the ages at which music-makers started studying music (below).


The chart shows the percentage of instrumental music-makers who started learning music at each given age (in red) and the culumative total up to that age (in green).

The ages 5-11 are clearly critical. 69% of people who will ever learn to play an instrument have started learning by the end of their 11th year, and 87% by the end of their 14th year. Clearly, if I want to sell a lot of Thummers, I need to *eventually* meet the needs of very young students (although it may not be efficient to target them first).

NAMM’s surveys don’t ask what instrument is played, or why that particular instrument was chosen. There is little research into the factors which affect musical instrument choice among beginners, and that limited research tends to constrain the available options to band & orchestra instruments. A better understanding the factors affecting instrument-selection could suggest opportunities for improving the Thummer such that it would consistently win this selectrion process.

NAMM's survey data suggest that

• Ensuring that the Thummer meets the needs of beginners aged 5-11 is critical to its long-term success;


• We can emphasize self-teaching (online) initially, but will need to penetrate the private lesson and school-based lesson channels, also, to maximize Thummer sales;


• The ability of a given instrument to help a teenage boy “get chicks” is not sufficient, in itself, to maximize Thummer sales, as (i) it doesn’t help sell instruments to girls, and (ii) more than 80% of music-makers have already selected their instrument before their mid-teens, leaving at most 20% to be affected by this benefit.

People usually mention the "get chicks" factor with regard to the guitar -- but history suggests that jazz instrumentalists did pretty well in that regard, too, so there appears to be more to that benefit than just instrument choice.

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.

Why the Thummer Will Succeed

Proposed new musical instruments tend to fail in the marketplace because:

1. they have to be much better – not just slightly better – than traditional instruments in at least two or three different ways that consumers care about, and
2. they are sold through a traditional bricks & mortar distribution channel, which favors "me-too" products over radically different designs.

The Thummer and Thumtronics' sales model solve both problems.

1. The Thummer is WAY Better

• The Thummer allows novices to learn music much faster – at least three time faster, and (with the ThumMusic System) perhaps ten times faster – than traditional instruments.
• The Thummer is has far more expressive power than any other instrument, due to its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors. With these, musicians can control up to ten different independent musical variables simultaneously while playing, instead of the two or three variables available in most traditional musical instruments.
• The Thummer offers artists the opportunity to explore vast new creative frontiers through its novel support for Dynamic Tuning.
• The Thummer is tiny – potentially even pocket-sized.
• The Thummer can be very affordable, due to its being made from standard, off-the-shelf consumer electronics components.

Simple, Powerful, Portable, & Affordable – these are the keys to success in ANY market. That’s why the Thummer can – and will – succeed.

2. The Thummer Has Low Inventory and Distribution Costs

Most musical instruments are large, heavy things, made from special-purpose components. For example, my Roland ep-97 digital piano weighs 32 pounds, which means that it would cost over $105 to ship it across the USA overnight. The Thummer, on the other hand, weighs about a pound, and would cost only a quarter as much to ship. Furthermore, the Thummer occupies only about a tenth of the volume of the ep-97, reducing my inventory and bulk shipping costs accordingly. Keeping inventory and distribution costs low is essential for products that are likely to start out as low-volume niche products before they climb up the Long Tail up into the mainstream. Most proposed new musical instruments are simply too big, too heavy, and too expensive to be profitable in a small niche, so they never get the opportunity to climb out into the mainstream. The Thummer can survive profitably as a niche product while musicians and music educators learn to exploit its revolutionary strengths. World-changing revolutions take time, and the Thummer can be profitable throughout.

That's why the Thummer will succeed: because it addresses both the product issues and the business process issues that have led other new musical instruments to fail.

Go-to-Market Strategies & OS Partnerships

Thumtronics has four different strategies for getting the Thummer to market, depending on the kind of deal it can make with future investors.

1. US Independent: Bring the Thummer to market as in independent US firm, climbing up The Long Tail from low-volume “niche” sales in the first couple of years to high-volume “mainstream” sales thereafter.
2. Chinese Independent: As above, but partnering with a Chinese OEM of electronic musical instruments to complete the Thummer’s engineering and undertake its manufacturing.
3. OS Partner: Partnering with an operating system (OS) vendor – Apple, Microsoft, or Sony – to bring Thumtronics’ innovations to market.
4. Open Project: If all else fails, assign Thumtronics’ IP to a non-profit organization which can lead the open, non-profit development of Thumtronics’ innovations.

The Independent options could lead to an OS Partnership, with an OS vendor buying Thumtronics after its products’ potential had been proven in the marketplace.

Why would an OS vendor care about Thumtronics?

OS vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are currently fighting a pitched battle to control the technology standards for connected entertainment, including music. This competition has been most obvious to consumers in battles over “downstream” music data formats, such as AAC, WMA, and ATRAC. OS vendors are also competing to gain similar proprietary advantages “upstream.” One example is Apple’s Core Audio, which Apple says “let you do things that are simply not possible on other platforms.”

Thumtronics’ innovations are sufficiently disruptive that an OS vendor could use them to add proprietary value to many of today’s music technology standards (aka embrace and extend or de-commoditization), making its platform even more attractive to the creators of musical content, and giving it greater influence over downstream music-related standards, too.

Any one of Apple, Sony, or Microsoft would benefit from a partnership with Thumtronics, albeit each in different ways.

Successful New Musical Interfaces: Why So Rare?

Why is the mainstream commercial success of new musical interfaces so rare?

Here’s my reasoning:

1. The characteristics required for ANY new product to be successful are that it be simpler, cheaper, and/or more powerful;
2. All new musical interfaces are inherently disruptive;
3. A disruptive new product has to be two or three times better than current offerings along at least two of these dimensions (simplicity, affordability, power);
4. The vast majority of proposed new musical interfaces do not deliver benefits sufficient to disrupt the status quo.

If there's any novelty to this analysis, it's in the observation that any new musical interface is inherently disruptive. You can introduce a "new and improved" synthesis algorithm to a keyboard synthesizer, electrify a guitar, or even make drum heads electronic, without requiring significant changes to the instrument's interface. These are sustaining innovations, as far as the musical instrument consumer is concerned. But any change to a musical instrument' interface is inherently disruptive -- and disruptive innovations must deliver a much higher level of benefit to become successful.

There are other minor issues, such as:

• The availability of complementary goods, which in the music products industry include compelling demonstrations of the new interface’s virtuosic potential, interface-specific arrangements of popular music, and interface-specific education materials. However, these days, such materials can be generated free, rapidly, and with high quality by the interface’s early-adopter community, and shared over the Internet.
• The Long Tail favors products which have low inventory & shipping costs, such as tiny instruments which can be manufactured on demand by any consumer electronics-capable factory (without the need for specialized music-related skills or equipment).
• YouTube and other viral marketing mechanisms favor products which provide visually-engaging benefits, such as the use of internal motion sensors to control musical effects.

For any proposed new musical interface, the question then becomes: “is it sufficiently better in ways that matter to the potential market and which facilitate rapid diffusion?” For the vast majority of proposed new interfaces, the answer has been “no.”

Does the Thummer meet this stringent standard? Time will tell – but I think that it does, and I’m not alone in this belief.

Wall Street Journal

Last week, the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition sent John Jurgensen, an entertainment features reporter, to Austin, in order to spend a day observing Thumtronics’ search for the funding needed to bring the Thummer to market.

John had written a WSJ piece on Les Paul, his contributions to inventing the modern electric guitar, and the fact that he was still playing regularly in New York (at 92). I emailed John, suggesting that now that he’d covered the past of musical instruments, he should consider covering their future, too. He liked the idea, his editor approved, and voila! out he came. Cool!

His angle on the story appears to be, “New musical interfaces are proposed frequently but not one has gained mainstream acceptance for over a century [with a few debatable exceptions]. Jim Plamondon thinks his new interface, the Thummer, can beat those odds – but to bring the Thummer to market he needs cash. Let’s observe as he makes his case to potential investors.”

John joined me at the following meetings:

• OpenLabs: Hank Coleman and Victor Wong stated that today’s commercially-successful musicians & producers were (a) computer-based and (b) not classically trained, so that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose by using an easier-to-learn and more-expressive computer-based music-control interface such as the Thummer. They demonstrated the surprising realism of software music synthesis using physical modeling (specifically waveguide synthesis) and emphasized how useful the Thummer would be in unleashing its expressive potential.
• CTAN: Jamie Rhodes discussed the relationship between angel investors & VCs and what both groups looked for in an “ideal” investment. No specific discussion of the Thummer, because Thumtronics had only submitted its proposal a few days earlier and CTAN had not yet had time to review it.
• Fito Kahn and David Peterman: Angel investors who are considering investing in Thumtronics. Asked questions about IP ownership, possible partnership with Chinese OEMs, other issues preparatory to making an offer (probably this week).
• Ian Varley: An archetypical Music Brain, Ian is a serious musical hobbyist – with an extensive home studio and a busy performance schedule – who works as a computer programmer. He demonstrated the Thummer and discussed its merits, including the simplicity of its patterns, its stimulation of creativity, the importance of novelty in capturing the attention of the audience, and the Thummer’s infectiousness. John videotaped much of this discussion, which will hopefully appear on the WSJ’s website.
• Wes Cole: A Venture Capitalist with Austin’s Gefinor Ventures, Wes was kind enough to set up this meeting on short notice. His responses to the presentation were right in line with those of other VCs – and more clearly enunciated than most – which was ideal for this meeting’s purpose.

In between meetings, John and I discussed issues such as why previous new musical interfaces had failed to gain mainstream commercial success, the characteristics needed for any innovation to succeed, and the reasons why some investors shied away from Thumtronics (all of which I will address in subsequent blog postings).

I also introduced John via email to people who could comment credibly on relevant issues, such as Stan Leibowitz on the Lock-In Fallacy, Roger Linn on new musical interfaces, Reuven Brenner on finance, Ajit Kambil on Value Maps, etc. (all without endorsing the Thummer per se).

John said that he could not guarantee that the story would appear, but that he was confident that it would – else his editor would not have approved sending him out to Austin in the first place.

If it does appear, it should be in one of the next few issues of the WSJ Weekend Edition.

This could be very cool. :-)

Project BarBQ

I spent last weekend (October 19-21) at Proejct BarBQ, billed as “The World’s Premiere Interactive Think-Tank.” As in all eleven previous annual incarnations, its sole topic was “Influencing music hardware & software over the next five years.”

Proejct BarBQ was, without a doubt, the coolest conference I have ever attended. Ever notice how the best part of every conference happens outside of the session rooms? It’s the informal exchange of ideas and the networking that makes conferences so productive – the actual sessions are usually pretty boring. Project BarBQ has no sessions, aside from a couple of introductory keynote sessions. Instead, the attendees – limited to 50 per year – decide for themselves what the top four problems facing the audio/music technology industry are, and split up into groups to work out solutions to those problems. Many significant advances in technology & business models have come out of these sessions. Sound boring? Hardly! Not only is it a gas to engage really smart people in heated debate, but it’s even MORE fun to do so when exchanging volleys from rubber-band guns or toasts from seemingly-bottomless margarita pitchers. These ancillary activities loosen people up to approach their shared problems in a fun and creative way.

I had hoped to get the attendees to agree that one of the top four problems to be solved was “increasing the success rate of music education,” but I was unable to attend the first day of the conference, and therefore was not able to make my case. Rats! The closest topic agreed upon was “user interface” – a rather broad topic! – and that topic’s members decided to focus on the needs of the prosumer audio engineer rather than the novice musician, so I was not able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

I got two main benefits from attending Project BarBQ. First, I got a lot of excellent feedback from its attendees on ways that I could make the Thummer even better (the top request: including an old-fashioned “MIDI Out” jack, even if the Thummer’s expressive power is clipped to worthlessness due to the MIDI cable’s anachronistic 31.25 kBaud data rate). Second, I made some excellent connections, some of whom agreed to help me make some connections to move Thumtronics forward. For example,

• George “The Fat Man” Sanger, organizer of Project BarBQ and music technology legend, agreed to introduce me to some top-flight engineers once Thumtronics gets funded, and
• Tom White, head of the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association, agreed to introduce me to some OEM manufacturers who might be interested in partnering with Thumtronics.

All in all, well worth attending.

Semmelweis Reflex

Established hierarchies do not embrace revolutionary ideas. They exist to defend the status quo. They reject revolutionary ideas reflexively, without giving them the slightest thought.

Here’s one historical example. In 1848, Ignaz Semmelweis, a trained physician, collected iron-clad experimental data showing that having a physician wash his hands in a chlorine solution prior to the delivery of a baby reduced the maternal death rate in his clinic from 18% to 1% – yet twelve years later, due to the medical hierarchy’s reflexive rejection of his ideas, the death rate at that same clinic had doubled to 35%. Semmelweis became distraught at the resulting unnecessary deaths, so his “friends” had him committed to an insane asylum, where he fought to be released – as any sane person would – and was beaten to death.

Semmelweis’ experience was not an isolated incident – far from it. To quote Reuven Brenner’s excellent book, Rivalry (with links added):

Murray’s (1925), Tratnner’s (1938), Polanyi’s (1974), Cohen’s (1985), and Ben-Yahuda’s (1985) detailed and systematic studies of scientists reveal the same pattern: In spite of evidence, innovations were frequently greeted with disdain and incredulity by members of the profession where the innovations were to be applied, professions were hierarchies depended on preserving the paradigms. The reaction to Mesmer’s hypnotic cures, Jenner’s An Inquiring into the Cause and Effects of the Varioloe Vaccination (1798), to Simpson’s discovery of chloroform (1847), to Lyell’s publication of Principles of Geology (1830-33), to Helmholtz’s discovery of the conservation of energy (1847), to Joule’s discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat (1843), to Darwin’s, Pasteur’s, Lister’s, or more recently Barbara McClintock’s and Benoit Mandelbrot’s and other discoveries and innovations shows the same patterns that Morison described in the military and the ones described in this book concerning the world of business.

First, the innovations came frequently from outsiders: Pasteur was a chemist; Helmholtz’ training was in medicine; Darwin started with medicine, arts, then wanted to become a clergyman; Huxley turned from physiology to paleontology; Lamarche from botany to zoology; [Julius] Robert Mayer was a physician (he came up with the idea of conservation of energy, and Helmholtz was annoyed that this idea was conceived by an “unknown physician”); as was Thomas Young, a Quaker to boot; Barbara McClintock, a woman working at a small research institute; and so on.

Polanyi (1974, p. 54), who examines these and additional cases, concludes that the hatred against the discoverers of facts that threatened the cherished beliefs of science was as bitter as that of religious persecutors two centuries before and was of the same character.

These observations are made in numerous studies examining patterns of behavior not only across very different fields but also different countries and times.

In honor of Semmelweis’ tragic but exceedingly common experience, the dismissing or rejecting out of hand any information, automatically, without thought, inspection, or experiment is termed “the Semmelweis Reflex.”

Does the existence of the Semmelweis Reflex mean that innovation is impossible? Obviously not, since you're alive to read this, which you almost certainly would not be if the ideas of Semmelweis, Pasteur, Lister, etc. had continued to be rejected. What it means is that thre's no point attacking established hierarchies directly. Instead, an innovator must build its own hierarchy -- what Bhaskar Chakravorti would call a new equilibrium -- without engaging the established hierarchy directly. Harvard's Clayton Christensen endorses this approach, saying that "disruptive products require disruptive channels."

As Everett Rogers points out in Diffusion of Innovations, the adoption of new ideas is a social process. Invention is just the start of the diffusion process, and quite possibly the easiest part, given the resistance of the status quo. Knowing this, investors and innovators can put their efforts into ideas that offer the greatest chance for successful and profitable diffusion.

Hard Work

While the percentage of music educators that are enthusiastic about the ThumMusic System is high, those who are unconvinced sometimes seem to be opposed to anything that might make music education easier. They want music education to be hard. This view is captured in the Children's Music Workshop's Twelve Benefits of Music Education, in which Benefit #7 is described as follows: "Through music study, students learn the value of sustained effort to achieve excellence and the concrete rewards of hard work."

However, this benefit can be obtained from lots of alternative activities, including team sports, weight-lifting, macramé, and even video-game playing, just to name a few examples. Therefore, emphasizing this common benefit is a distraction from, and devalues, music education’s unique benefits.

Here’s another way to frame the issue. Let’s say that this minority of hard-work-loving music educators had to choose between making music education 10% easier or 10% harder, with all else being equal, and the status quo not being an option. Because these educators consider “an appreciation for the benefits of hard work” to be an important outcome of music education, then of course they would prefer the “10% harder” option. Surely one can’t increase a student’s appreciation for “the benefits of hard work” by making something easier!

Yet this is clearly self-defeating (which is probably why it is a minority viewpoint). Taken to its logical extreme, this viewpoint would make music education so hard that no one would be able to succeed. That's clearly not a desireable outcome, because then no one would attain the unique benefits of music education (whatever those might be).

On the other hand, let's consider the other logical extreme. Imagine that music educators could wave a magic wand and instantly change a non-musician's brain, muscles, cardiovascular system, etc. to precisely match the changes would have resulted from years of musical study and practice through traditional methods of music education (but without the Repetitive Stress Injuries). Let’s further imagine that waving this magic wand was guaranteed to deliver the unique benefits of music education with no unpleasant or unexpected side-effects. Talent and inspiration would not be guaranteed, but then, they never are.

If the unique benefits of music-making are good for individuals and for society, then waving this hypothetical magic wand would be, too, wouldn’t it?

To argue otherwise would be, in effect, to advocate educational flagellation in the belief that the self-mortification of unnecessarily hard work will deliver spiritual benefits.

According to the Twelve Benefits of Music Education, Benefit #3 is that "Students of the arts learn to think creatively and to solve problems by imagining various solutions, rejecting outdated rules and assumptions. Questions about the arts do not have only one right answer" [emphasis added].

A high percentage of music educators have acquired this benefit, and are eager to deliver the unique benefits of music education to as many students as possible, by any means necessary -- magic wands, the ThumMusic System, or whatever. The flagellants, on the other hand, would apparently rather see students fail with traditional methods than succeed with a new one, lest -- God forbid! -- they attain the unique benefits of music education without as much hard work.

Thank goodness that music education's flagellants are in the minority!

"Obviously"...in Retrospect

After a new product has turned its industry upside-down, people always say “well, of course! That product was obviously going to be a success.” But it is rarely so clear ahead of time.

For example, in 1968, HP introduced a desktop scientific calculator which weighed 40 pounds and cost $5,000. It was the smallest, lightest, fastest, most powerful, and cheapest calculator of its day. After it was demonstrated to HP co-founder Bill Hewlett, he suggested that they should make a new calculator that was ten times smaller, faster, and cheaper – the first pocket calculator.

HP’s marketing studies suggested that this would be a mistake. Apparently, the price and size of the HP 9100 conveyed a sense of value and reliability, whereas a pocket-sized calculator at a lower price would inevitably seem more toy-like. It was believed that the total world market for pocket calculators was perhaps 50,000 units. Bill Hewlitt, company co-founder, developed it anyway.

Within the first few months that the HP-35 was available in 1972, HP received orders exceeding their guess as to the total market size. General Electric alone placed an order for 20,000 units.

How could HP have so badly under-estimated the demand for pocket-sized scientific calculators? My guess is that they looked at the market for the HP-9100 and multiplied it, rather than looking at the market for slide rules and multiplying that.

The real target market was not just those who used slide rules, but also those who attempted to use slide rules and failed. Such failure was hardly surprising, since using a slide rule requires (a) understanding logarithms, which most people can’t even spell, yet alone understand, and (b) performing the desired calculation in your head first, to get an idea of where the decimal place should go in the final result. The pocket calculator eliminated this significant learning-and-use barrier to scientific calculation, thereby expanding the market beyond that of the ubiquitous slide rule.

It’s all so obvious in hindsight, isn’t it? Simplicity, affordability, power, portability – the HP-35 had it all. Obviously it was going to be a run-away success. Right?

Now, look at the Thummer.

Enough said?

Shift Happens

Paradigm shifts – the transition from one idea or technology to a new one – are not rare. They happen all the time. Here are some examples from my personal experience.

1. Slide Rules to Pocket Calculators
In 1974, I was in the last freshman mathematics class at my high school to be taught how to use a slide rule. This brilliant device had been the standard tool for mathematical computation for 350 years (since its invention in 1630 or thereabouts). However, by 1974 – just two years after the introduction of the first pocket calculator with slide-rule-like mathematical functions (the HP-35) – pocket calculators could perform more functions, with higher accuracy, less training, and fewer errors (such as mis-placing the decimal point). While the cost of a pocket calculator was still about the same as a good slide rule in 1974, the price of calculators had already fallen by half in two years, and was clearly going to continue falling. Pocket calculators made calculating simpler, cheaper, and more powerful. Shift happened.

2. Punched Cards to Video Terminals
In 1978, I was in the last freshman computer programming class at my university to be taught how to create and use punched cards. The punched card was the de facto standard of the computing industry for almost a century (since 1889) and the basis of IBM’s computing empire. However, by 1978 – just two years after the introduction video display terminals such as DEC’s VT52 and IBM's 3270 – video terminals were clearly out-competing punched cards. Video terminals made computing simpler, cheaper, and more powerful. Shift happened.

3. Geosynclines to Plate Tectonics
Also in 1978, I was in the last freshman geology class at my university to be taught about geosynclines as the fundamental paradigm of geology. By then, plate tectonics had become widely accepted as being a superior theory, but the school’s Intro to Geology textbook wasn’t updated to reflect this change until the following year. Plate tectonics provided a simpler model, in which fewer rules explained a larger number of phenomena more accurately, reducing the frequency of failed geological predictions (such as dry holes). Plate tectonics made geology simpler, cheaper, and more powerful. Shift happened.

4. Command Line & Text Mode to Graphical User Interfaces
When I started taking classes for a Computer Science degree in 1983, the dominant input paradigm was the command line, and the standard output paradigm was text mode. By the time I got my CS degree in 1988, the command line and text mode were being superseded by graphical user interfaces (such as the Mac & Windows user interfaces), which made computing more accessible to non-professionals, reduced training costs, and enabled powerful new applications like desktop publishing, digital photo editing, and Mathematica. Graphical user interfaces made computing simpler, cheaper, and more powerful. Shift happened.

Discussion
When a new paradigm delivers a desired outcome through means that are simpler, cheaper, and more powerful, then shift happens, even if the previous paradigm has been in place for centuries.

Conclusion
Once the Thummer and ThumMusic System are commercially available, they will make learning to play and understand music simpler, cheaper, and more powerful, establishing an important new paradigm for music-making.

Why? Because…Shift Happens.

ThumMusic System

I've placed a PowerPoint presentation on the website describing the ThumMusic System. It's a large file (25MB) because it includes an audio track of me narrating each slide. A version without narration is much smaller, and can be found here; its "note pages" contain the same info as my vocal narration. If you print out the notes pages and read from them as you click through the slies, you'll get the same information, albeit less conveniently.

The ThumMusic System is so visually-oriented that it is much more easily understood by viewing a presentation than by reading a text description (although a text description can be found as HTML here and as PDF here).

If you don't have PowerPoint installed, you can watch the presentation using a PowerPoint Viewer, available for Windows & Mac.

Delayed Binding

As a every computer programmer knows, “early binding” associates a two entities at compile time, whereas “late binding” associates two entities at run time. Late binding usually requires the identification of a new, higher-level abstraction, at which level all possible bindings look “the same,” allowing them to be delayed. Generally speaking, early binding is limiting, whereas late binding is liberating.

Here are two products which liberate consumers through delayed binding: the kapoosh Universal Knife Block and the Gator-Grip Universal Socket.

Knife Blocks
The traditional wooden knife block contains a set of slots that match the width, thickness, and length of the knives that come with it. The number and dimensions if a given knife block’s slots are “statically bound” to the number and dimensions of a given knife set at the time of manufacture.

The kapoosh Universal Knife Block abstracts the notion of “knife slot” by replacing the knife-block’s slotted wooden body with a tightly-packed matrix of flexible plastic rods. Knives of any width or thickness (within wide limits) can be inserted into the rod-matrix, with the rods shifting aside to make room. The kapoosh’s knife-slots are “dynamically bound” to match the dimensions of a given knife at the moment of its insertion into the rod-matrix.

Delaying the binding time from time of manufacture to time of use is what makes the kapoosh “universal” and therefore valuable to the consumer.

The kapoosh scores highly on Rogers’ diffusion-rate factors (power, simplicity, compatibility, observability, & trialability), so awareness of the kapoosh should diffuse rapidly.

The kapoosh is

• Simple: “Learned” instantly, its use is easier than other knife blocks because you don’t have to think about which knife goes in which slot.
• Cheap: At $29.99, it’s cheaper than traditional wooden knife blocks.
• Powerful: It is compatible with all kitchen knives, from all manufacturers, so it is more “powerful” than traditional wooden knife blocks.
• Unique: Its key innovation – its core of long flexible plastic rods – is patented.

Brand-name knife sets bundled with the kapoosh knife block are now starting to appear, which suggests that the kapoosh can disrupt the market for knife & block bundles in addition to the market for stand-alone knife blocks.

Because the kapoosh is highly disruptive and can diffuse rapidly, it is very likely to disrupt the market for wooden knife blocks.

Key Point: The fundamental innovation of the kapoosh is an abstraction of the notion of “knife slot” to a level which allows binding of knife & slot at the time of use rather than at the time of manufacture, liberating the consumer from having to care about matching knives & slots. The consumer value and disruptive potential of the kapoosh is the direct result of delayed binding.

Socket Sets
Most mechanics’ tool kits include a ratcheted socket wrench and a socket set which contains a large number of sockets. The internal cavity in a given socket perfectly encloses a hexagonal nut of a given standard size, making it easy to turn with the socket wrench. Standards vary (inevitably), so one usually needs a set of metric-sized sockets and another set of Imperial/American-sized sockets. Each socket’s internal cavity is “statically bound” to a particular standard nut size at the time of manufacture.

The Gator Grip Universal Socket abstracts the notion of “socket cavity” by replacing all of the sockets with a single socket filled with pins. Placed over a hex nut of any size, the nut pushes many of the pins back, forming a tight-fitting “socket cavity” that grips the nut. The Gator-Grip socket’s cavity is “dynamically bound” to match the dimensions of a given nut at the moment the socket’s pin-matrix is pressed down over the nut.

Delaying the binding time from time of manufacture to time of use is what makes the Gator-Grip socket “universal” and therefore valuable to the consumer.

The Gator-Grip scores highly on Rogers’ diffusion-rate factors (power, simplicity, compatibility, observability, & trialability), so awareness of the Gator-Grip should diffuse rapidly. Its manufacturers have not yet posted a YouTube video demonstrating how it works, which if available would improve its observability and hence its diffusion.

The Gator-Grip is

• Simple: One socket for all nuts, metric or inches – no thought required.
• Cheap: At $9.99, it’s cheaper than traditional socket sets.
• Powerful: One socket to rule them all...
• Unique: Its key innovation – the matrix of metal pins – is patented.

Online reviews suggest that the Gator-Grip is not quite as universal nor as easy to use as is claimed, so its relative advantage (power) is lower than that of the kapoosh, so it is less disruptive – but if these deficiencies can be addressed, it could become highly disruptive.

Key Point: The fundamental innovation of the Gator Grip is an abstraction of the notion of “socket cavity” to a level which allows binding of nut & cavity at the time of use rather than at the time of manufacture, liberating the consumer from having to care about matching nuts & sockets. The consumer value and disruptive potential of the Gator Grip is the direct result of delayed binding.

ThumLine Staff Notation
Like the kapoosh and Gator-Grip, Thumtronics’ new approach to displaying musical information delivers consumer value through the liberating effects of delayed binding.

In traditional staff notation, notes are “statically bound” to absolute pitches (frequencies). This “early binding” of notes to pitches makes on-the-fly transposition so difficult that it is the mark of a trained and seasoned professional.

ThumLine notation abstracts the notion of a “note” to a higher level by denoting “intervals relative to the tonic” rather than pitches. A song notated in ThumLine can be transposed to another key simply by changing the pitch associated with the tonic. ThumLine’s notes are “dynamically bound” to match specific pitches at the moment the tonic pitch is specified – at the time of composition, the time of publication, the time of rehearsal, or even the time of performance.

Delaying the binding time from time of manufacture (publication) to time of use is what makes ThumLine notation “universal” and therefore valuable to the consumer.

Key Point: The fundamental innovation of ThumLine is an abstraction of the notion of “note” to a level which allows binding of note & pitch at the time of use rather than at the time of manufacture (publication), liberating the consumer from having to care about transposition. The consumer value and disruptive potential of ThumLine is the direct result of delayed binding.

Conclusion
Those products which implement abstractions that liberate consumers through delayed binding are likely to be favored by the market.

I have not previously seen any discussion of the relationship between abstraction, delayed binding, and the creation of consumer value and disruptive potential. If you have, I would appreciate your bringing it to my attention.

The Log

Les Paul is often credited as being the inventor of the modern electric guitar (although the first patents for such instruments go back to the 1890's). His story is told in this article from the Washington Post.

Three facts about the invention of the electric guitar strike me as being particularly interesting.

First, at the time Les started tinkering with electrifying the guitar, it was associated with "singing cowboys," who were apparently presumed to be virgins.

• Moral: The guitar is not sexy; rock musicians are sexy, and their instruments are sexy by association.

Second, Les' first technically-successful electric guitar -- pickups & strings on a simple wooden 4x4 -- didn't impress the experienced musical instrument industry professionals at Gibson Guitar, who said that it was "nothing but a broomstick with a pickup on it." Such an instrument did not appear to deliver the tradition, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. that they expected musical instruments to have. So they waited TEN YEARS before manufacturing an electric guitar...and only then because Leo Fender, a musical instrument industry outsider, issued his electrics first.

• Moral: The likelihood of correctly identifying innovations which can disrupt a given industry is inversely proportional to expertise in that industry.

Third, the electric guitar retained the acoustic guitar's poor ergonomics; playing his own invention ruined Les' left hand.

• Moral: whereas acoustic instruments are designed to accommodate the needs of vibrating bodies (strings & columns of air), modern electronic instruments should be designed to accommodate the needs of human bodies.

One last point from the Washington Post article: Les said that in his quest for a fuller sound, before electrifying the guitar he "tried an accordion, and pitched it into the city dump," presumably unsatisfied with its timbre.

I wonder what he’d think of the Thummer? When it goes into production, I’ll be sure to send him one. :-)

Who Cares?

Is there independent verification of claim that consumers care about the benefits develiered by the Thummer & ThumMusic System?

Yes.

In a study of 3,500 consumers conducted during the last global recession (Stimulating Consumer Demand through Meaningful Innovation, Accenture, 2002), Nunes & Johnson found that consumers most often singled out two problems as needing “better” solutions:

• Improving their physical health and sense of well-being, and
• Helping them learn or providing intellectual stimulation.

Clearly, learning to play the Thummer with the ThumMusic System can help consumers "learn and provide intellectual stimulation.” But what about improving consumer’s physical health and well-being? Can the Thummer do that, too?

Yes.

A study (Kigoa & Tims, 2001) of mature students taking music lessons, compared to a control group that did not take such lessons, found that among those taking lessons:

• Blood tests indicated a 90% increase during the test period in levels of Human Growth Hormone (hGH, which increases energy and sexual function, while decreasing the occurrence rate of illnesses), and
• Anxiety, depression and perception of loneliness all decreased.

These improvements in physical health and well-being did not occur in the control group. This is just one of a host os similar studies on music and wellness. Clearly, learning to play a musical instrument is good for you.

Indeed, learning to play the Thummer can address many of consumers’ other stated needs, too.

Here’s the full list of benefits sought by consumers from Nunes & Johnsons’ study:
Learning to play music with the Thummer can help consumers satisfy many of these perceived needs. You want more free time? Learn to play an instrument that’s easy instead of one that’s hard. Want to make the most of your free time? Learn to play the Thummer, which requires less practice to get an equivalent amount of enjoyment. Want help pursuing your interests/hobbies? If your hobby involves making music, then learning to play the Thummer can help you more than learning any other instrument. Want to connect with your friends & family? Get together and make music with the simple, flexible, portable Thummer.

In short, the Thummer offers a simple, cheap, and effective way of acquiring each of the benefits most sought by consumers.

Value Map

One way to compare product strategies visually is to draw a Value Map, invented by Kambil & Ginsberg in 1997 (Kambil is Global Director of Deloitte Research) and improved by Osterwalder in 2004.

The Value Map for Thumtronics looks like this:

Figure 2: Value Map

Caveat: In the Value Map above, Thumtronics’ various competitors are placed to indicate their overall value proposition, not to make fine distinctions as to which is slightly leftward or rightward of the others at each given price level.

The music products industry today has a well-defined Value Frontier – the solid grey line sweeping up from left to right in Figure 2 above. In the middle are most of the companies you’re likely to recognize – Yamaha, Fender, Gibson, Kawai, etc. Their products follow a trajectory of sustaining innovations along dimensions of price and functionality that customers expect. These sustaining innovations keep their products from being completely commoditized, so that they can be sold at market prices or slightly higher.

At the upper right of the Value Frontier are those firms whose products earn a premium price for excellence. Steinway and Baldwin pianos, Paul Reed Smith guitars, and Buffet-Crampon wind instruments are indicative here.

At the lower left end of the Value Frontier are firms who have found new ways to earn a profit from the sale of commoditized products at economy prices. Examples include First Act, which sells commoditized band instruments and guitars through Wal*Mart, Fender’s low-end Squire brand, and Pearl River, the first Chinese manufacturer to sell large quantities of “good enough” pianos under its own brand name in the USA.

The introduction of the eMotion Thummer shifts the industry’s Value Frontier decisively rightward, to the dashed grey line. The eMotion Thummer offers unique and disruptive advances in expressive potential, creative potential, and ease/depth/breadth of learning that no other product can offer – and does so at a Market price.

Thumtronics can then ride its new Value Frontier down and leftward by introducing the Pocket Thummer at an Economy price. Although the Pocket Thummer’s portability and low-cost polyphony are potentially disruptive to Thumtronics’ competitors, it is sustaining with regard to Thumtronics’ newly-established Value Frontier – hence its being categorized as a Sustaining Innovation.

Finally, Thumtronics’ QWERTY Thummer is an implementation of the Thummer’s note-pattern on the standard computer keyboard, offered absolutely free. Because the Thummer’s note-pattern is, by this time, “expected” on Thumtronics’ new Value Frontier, it is neither a sustaining nor a disruptive innovation from Thumtronics’ perspective, and so is categorized as offering “Me-Too” value – albeit at the all-important “Free” price level.

Once Thumtronics’ new value frontier becomes the industry’s new status quo – perhaps a decade hence – the eMotion Thummer and its related products will lose their disruptiveness and migrate leftward on the Value Map. The installed base of Thummer players (which should by then be quite large) should then allow Thumtronics – still protected by its numerous fundamental patents – to introduce a “quality” brand whose excellent products can attract premium prices (the way Toyota created the "Lexus" brand to differentiate its new low-volume, high-margin cars).

As with the Strategy Canvas, the key point of the Value Map is that Thumtronics' strategy delivers a disruptive leap in functionality at a low price through novel channels – exactly what is required to deliver rapid, profitable, sustainable sales growth.

Strategy Canvas

In a previous post, I mentioned Kim & Marbourgne’s 2002 book “Blue Ocean Strategy.” One of the tools introduced in their book is the “Strategy Canvas,” a graphical tool that makes it easier to compare & contrast the strategies of different firms or products.

Here’s the Strategy Canvas for the Thummer, comparing it to the keyboard & guitar:

Fig. 1: Strategy Canvas

Across the horizontal axis are characteristics of comparison & contrast, and the vertical axis provides the scale for comparing & contrasting them.

Tradition: To support the deepest Western traditions of tonality, Thumtronics is breaking the superficial traditions of musical instrument design, music theory, music notation, sound generation, etc. As the French might say, “C'est la vie – plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” – or, “such is life; the more things change, the more they stay the same” (to translate this phrase into today’s lingua franca). Hence Thumtronics will doubtless be perceived as threatening or devaluing tradition (as shown in the graphic above) despite the opposite being the case.

Craftsmanship: Craftsmanship is the manual labor of skilled workers. Such skilled labor is expensive; most people can’t afford it. I want to make the Thummer affordable by everyone –including everyone in the Third World, eventually – so I’d rather have Six Sigma quality standards on the automated manufacture of a cheap electronic instrument than the dubious benefits of craftsmanship.

Dedicated Repertoire: The pieces in a dedicated repertoire are specifically optimized to take advantage of the unique features of the instrument for which they were written. Consider for example the piano’s ability to glissando across the diatonic notes of C Major. That precise effect can’t be captured on any instrument other than the piano-style keyboard. The Thummer has the expressive power to develop innumerable unique musical effects such as the piano’s glissando, but because the Thummer is new, there are not yet any pieces written specifically for (i.e., dedicated to) the Thummer.

Dedicated Channel: This is the worldwide network of brick-and-mortar retail stores which sell music products exclusively or primarily. To sell a new musical instrument through this channel, Thumtronics would need to train salespeople to stand around in these stores demonstrating to passers-by how to play the instrument. This would be phenomenally expensive, which would require that the Thummer be phenomenally expensive, too. No new musical interface has ever survived the attempt to "cram" it through traditional retail this way. In its early low-volume days as a niche product, the Thummer needs a lower-cost distributipon channel: online direct sales, supplemented by customer-created music videos on YouTube, live performances, etc.. Once musicians have created sufficient demand among consumers, the Pocket Thummer can be sold through mass-market retailers, booksellers, and video game stores. Once a sufficiently-large installed based of Thummer-players exists, a high-status Thummer can be sold through the dedicated retail channel, because for such a high-status product, the dedicated channel's high service costs are perfectly warranted. But only then, not now.

Expressive Potential: The piano has one degree of freedom: key velocity (how hard you strike a key, basically), and a few binary foot-pedal switches (una corda, sostenuto, & sustain). The electric guitar has more degrees of freedom: string bending, the whammy bar, tone dials, effects pedals, etc. But the Thummer absolutely blows them away, with thumb-operated joysticks & motion sensors that offer ten degrees of freedom,, with the potential for more.

Creative Potential: When the piano-forte was new in the 1700’s, it enabled creative musicians to do things that had never been done before; so was the electric guitar when it was new in the 1950’s, and the keyboard synthesizer in the 1970’s. Since then, however, generations of musicians have dedicated themselves to exploring every novel possibility offered by those instruments. As a result, today there are no new musical effects unique to those instruments which have not already been beaten to death. Their creative potential is now zero. On the other hand, the Thummer is chock full of creative potential. Its unique expressive power, combined with the novel musical effects made possible by Dynamic Tuning (which only a Thummer can control) expand the framework of tonality, presenting a vast frontier of creative possibilities. Someday, after future generations of creative musicians have mapped out this new frontier, it too will be drained of all creative potential – so beat the rush! :-)

Success Rate: Of a hundred musical novices, how many will reach a level of competence that allows them to play music with and for their friends, to improvise confidently, and to write their own compositions for special occasions? That’s the level of musical competence that most music students seek, and would be satisfied with. But with traditional approaches to music education, the percentage of students who attain this level of success if pathetically low. It is Thumtronics’ primary objective to deliver the highest available success rate in music education. The Thummer note-layout and the ThumMusic System apparently have the potential to accomplish this objective.

Ease of Learning: Students will have a higher success rate when learning is easy than when it is hard. The combination of the Thummer (including the computer-keyboard-based QWERTY Thummer) and the ThumMusic System make music dramatically easier to learn, by exposing music’s underlying structure in a logical and systematic way. The piano and guitar don’t even come close.

Depth of Learning: Music students do not sacrifice depth to gain the Thummer’s ease of learning. The logical elegance of the Thummer and ThumMusic System not only make it easier to learn the basic concepts of music, but also to understand what would otherwise be considered to be “advanced concepts” in music theory. Traditional approaches to music education make these “advanced concepts” so difficult to understand that music students’ primary and secondary educations are focused almost entirely on performance, ignoring theory almost completely until the senior secondary or even tertiary (college) level. Even then, “music theory” is often presented not as a unifying theory of how music works, but rather as a long sequence of individual musical practices to be memorized. The Thummer and ThumMusic System can give students much greater depth of understanding, more easily.

Breadth of Learning: Music education today is focused very narrowly on 12-tone equal temperament, the tuning system that’s been in vogue most recently in the Western world. But other cultures use other tuning systems, and so did the West until quite recently. These tuning systems from other times and places are very difficult to teach, learn, and play using traditional Western instruments, but they are trivially easy to use on the Thummer and with the ThumMusic System. Just wiggle a joystick, and voila! You’re playing in the tunings of Pythagoras, Mersenne, Scarlatti, Handel, Bach, Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. Wiggle it a different way, and you can explore the tunings of Thailand, Indonesia, Arabia, Turkey, or Mandinka Africa. The Thummer and ThumMusic System offer an unparalleled breadth of learning.

Cheap to Acquire: All of this simplicity and power would be valueless if it were unaffordable. To make an impact on the world, Thumtronics’ products must be affordable. Thumtronics’ potential products run the gamut from the free QWERTY Thummer (a free software implementation of the Thummer’s note-pattern on a standard computer keyboard) through the Pocket Thummer (and economically-priced entry-level instrument for consumers) to the feature-packed eMotion Thummer – and even this high-end model is expected to be priced affordably. The key to “blue ocean strategy,” after all, is in offering a product that is (a) highly differentiated in ways that consumers value (b) at a low price, thereby delivering exceptional value to the consumer. Overprice your offering (as Apple did with its Macintosh computers) and you are just creating a market opportunity for your competitors (Microsoft Windows). This Thummer will always be affordable.

Cheap to Learn: The cost of any product includes its acquisition cost, its implementation cost, and its risk of failure. The risk of failure was addressed above in “Success Rate,” and cost of acquisition in “Cheap to Acquire.” Being “Cheap to Learn” embraces not only the success rate, but also the cost of that success. Thumtronics expects to provide free music lessons online to beginners, charging only for the intermediate and advanced lessons. Thumtronics can afford to do this by delivering its lessons primarily online, and by having these lessons be developed primarily by volunteer developers using open source methods. The student’s time is also a cost, but students should progress to a given level of competency much faster due to the ThumMusic System’s ease of learning, so the “time cost” of learning should also be lower. Finally, because the students’ can expect to succeed at a higher rate, fewer will experience the cost of failure, lowering its average cost per student. Every way you slice it, the Thummer will be cheaper to learn than any other musical instrument…without sacrificing depth or breadth.

Discussion
Thumtronics' product innovations and business strategy deliver a highly-differentiated "value innovation" to the mass market of non-musical consumers – exactly what is required to deliver rapid, profitable, sustainable sales growth.

Wii

Nintendo’s new Wii video game console is now out-selling all other consoles combined. Why? Because Nintendo focused every aspect of the Wii’s design on growing the market.

To quote Nintendo’s President, Satoru Iwata, in designing the Wii, “We're not thinking about fighting Sony, but about how many people we can get to play games. The thing we're thinking about most is not portable systems, consoles, and so-forth, but that we want to get new people playing games.” [emphasis added]

To accomplish this objective, Nintendo couldn’t just do the same thing its competitors were doing. It had to do something really different – something that made video games fundamentally easier to learn and play – and offer it at a more-affordable price point. This is a classic example of blue ocean strategy, as others have noted.

Being “really different” is extremely beneficial to establishing new industry standards – as Bill Gates, the all-time world champion standard-setter, made clear long ago. The novelty, elegance, and simple power of Nintendo’s motion-sensing Wii controller have garnered impressive PR, with YouTube flooded by consumer-generated videos of the Wii remote in action.

Nintendo’s success in out-selling its competitors is amazing enough, but what’s even more impressive is that Nintendo makes a direct profit of $50 on each console it sells. Sony and Microsoft each lose money on their consoles, hoping to make it up through per-game license fees from third party game developers. But because Nintendo’s Wii console is outselling all of its competitors, it is also the most attractive platform for third-party game developers – so Nintendo will tend to make more money in licensing fees from these game developers, too.

Any way you slice it, Nintendo’s blue-ocean strategy of growing the market is trouncing its competition.

Meanwhile, the music products & lesson industries are, together, almost as large as the video game industry (2005 data). Thumtronics can do in the music products & lesson industries exactly what Nintendo has done in the video game industry – grow the market with products that are cheap, simple, and fun, and capture that growth with intellectual property.

The success of Nintendo is a ringing endorsement of Thumtronics’ strategy.

Better

Potential investors often smile knowingly at me and say, “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Thummer is better than every other musical instrument available today. So what? Being ‘better’ really doesn’t matter. Entrenched standards are impossible to displace.”

Common sense tells us that this conclusion can’t be true, or we’d all be living in the Stone Age – so why does this urban legend persist?

One reason is that consumers and experts disagree on the definition of “better.” Consumers tend to prefer solutions that are cheap, simple, and powerful, in that order, but experts & specialists tend to prefer “power” alone. As a result, experts’ published reviews tend to rate the most powerful products as being “better” – yet consumers keep buying the cheap & simple stuff. This can create the impression that the “best” products aren’t winning in the marketplace, when really it’s just a disagreement over the metrics of better-ness.

Another reason the urban legend persists is that being “just a little bit better” is not enough. To quote W. Brian Arthur, a leading academic expert on the subject, a new product has to be “200 or 300 percent better than its predecessor before it can take over. Without that shift, the old product stays locked in. The best technology is not necessarily the winning one.”

That is, if your product is 10%, 20%, or even 50% cheaper, simpler, and more powerful than its competition, then it’s going to lose, because it’s not enough better. Your product has to be enough better to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and that requires being at least two or three times better.

But what if your product is, say, three times better than its competition in ways that were important to its potential consumers? Say, three times cheaper, three times simpler, and three times as powerful? If your product were that much better, in those ways then it would be the odds-on favorite to win.

That’s why I’m so excited about Thumtronics’ Thummer and ThumMusic System. They have the potential to make music-making three times simpler, three times cheaper (counting instrument & lesson costs), and three times as powerful (in terms of expressive potential and new tonal effects).

So if you’re trying to decide which innovations have the best chance of market success, don’t get trapped in the Stone Age. Use your common sense to see that being ‘better’ matters. It is one of the most important predictors of an innovation’s rate and extent of market acceptance, giving an innovation the potential to disrupt its industry and topple its market leaders.

[Note: The original version of this posting claimed that the Thummer was ten times better, not just three times better, which attracted comments that this was perhaps gilding a lily -- so I reduced the claim from ten to three. Underpromise & overdeliver, as they say.]

ThummerSetup

The gold-colored Capel prototypes emit MIDI directly, and don't need any special drivers or software.

However, if you are one of the lucky few who have an Eaton model Thummer prototype (the red one), then you also need the Thummer Setup application, which includes the Thummer's drivers.

Using the URL's below, download it to your computer and run it from there.

To download the Windows version, right-click here, save the file to your computer, open the folder to which it was saved, and run it from there.

To download the Mac version, do something similar with the file here.

Industrial Design

I've met with a number of design & engineering firms in the Austin area, looking for one that can (a) make the Thummer more appealing and (b) finish the engineering work needed to get the Thummer on the market.

Personally, I like the way the Thummer looks now. However, (1) I have poor taste, and (2) the one negative comment that I often hear about the Thummer is that it "looks dorky."

It's very hard to shake an "uncool" rep in the music technology business. Look at Casio, for example. Its name is still associated with the toylike CasioTone keyboards it introduced in the 1980's, so the excellent high-end keyboards it offers today don't earn the unit sales, revenues, or margins that they otherwise would. In the music technology business, "cool" matters -- and there are no second chances.

So I need to fix this problem in advance, by spending money on industrial design to improve the Thummer's cool factor.

Hence, my meetings with industrial design & engineering firms. I'll announce Thumtronics' eventual decision here when I can.

How?

How will Thumtronics make its innovations successful?

In the long run, Thumtronics’ innovations in the display and control of musical information – the ThumMusic System – are likely to have the biggest impact on the world, by making it possible for essentially everyone to understand, play, and create music. However, the ThumMusic System is going to be a tough sell, because its benefits are hard to communicate in a 30-second “elevator pitch.”

On the other hand, the benefits of the Thummer are obvious from a 30-second demo video (such as this one, and this one). Musicians playing the Thummer in a band, in live performances, or in YouTube videos will be “advertising” the Thummer for us, making the Thummer extremely viral, which is likely to lead to very rapid exponential growth sales growth.

How rapid? ThumClub members tell us that, if the Thummer lives up to their expectations, they expect to be able to convince an average of five other people to buy one. If they can do that in six months, with those five each “selling” five more, and so on, then Thummer sales will simply explode. Even if each Thummer buyer convinced only 1.4 additional people to buy Thummers, then from first year sales of just 1,500 units, Thummer revenues would exceed $10 million within three years and $100 million within six years (all else being equal). It’s the self-advertising, viral nature of the Thummer that makes it such a compelling commercial opportunity.

The success of the Thummer can pull the ThumMusic System along in its wake, just as the increasing popularity of the guitar made guitar tab popular. Once the ThumMusic System gains a foothold in the market, its growth rate can exceed that of the Thummer, because the ThumMusic System is also applicable to the standard computer keyboard and to the human voice.

At that point, the commercial opportunity of the ThumMusic System should be considerable – online lessons, sheet music downloads, certification exams, etc..

But first we have to make the Thummer successful.

We’ll do this by raising the capital needed to finish the design, engineering, and testing of the Thummer; selling the Thummer directly to consumers over the Internet from Thumtronics’ website; encouraging the independent development of associated websites (like Amazon Associates) through revenue-sharing; leveraging the free PR that we’ve already been offered by FOCUS, I Want That!, and other relevant media; and accelerating the viral marketing process through a variety of means, such as “discount for a friend” coupons, online video contests, and aggressive promotion of those musicians and bands who best show off the Thummer’s unique abilities. The incredible new possibilites presented by Dynamic Tuning – which only works on a Thummer – will tend to accelerate this process, once creative artists show the world how powerful Dynamic Tuning can be.

That’s the plan, anyway – loose and flexible, allowing us to respond to the market as we go along.

Where?

Thumtronics started in Busselton, Western Australia, because that’s where I happened to be living when I thought up my first musical innovations. Busselton is a very pleasant seaside resort town – but it’s a lousy place to start a new high-tech company. It’s three hours’ drive south of Western Australia’s capital city, Perth, which is “the most isolated major city in the world.” It’s as far from the next large Australian city as LA is from New Orleans (about 1700 miles), with absolutely nothing in between but sand, salt flats, and stranded Japanese tourists. Perth is a great place to raise money for a new nickel mine, but a lousy place from which to launch a high-tech disruptive innovation.

Australia’s venture capital community is absolutely clueless. This is not just an opinion; it’s a demonstrable fact. Over the decade from 1995 to 2005, American venture capitalists earned a whopping 41.4% Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on their investments (overall). Over that same decade, Australian venture capitalists earned 0% – that’s right, zero, nada, zilch. Even the top quartile only earned 2.7%, which was less than inflation. Whatever else people might say about American venture capitalists, they know how to pick companies that earn incredible returns – and, demonstrably, Australian venture capitalists don’t. Australian venture capitalists wouldn’t recognize the next Google if it hit them in the face.

So, I couldn’t get funding in Australia, despite the recognized disruptiveness of Thumtronics’ innovations. To get funding, it became clear that I would have to move Thumtronics to the USA.

But… where in the USA should Thumtronics go? Perhaps a high-tech center, like Silicon Valley, Boston, or Raleigh? Or perhaps a center of the music industry, such as New York or Los Angeles? What I really needed was a single city that had successful industry clusters in both electronics and music.

Austin has both. Although its much-touted claim to be the Live Music Capital of the World is somewhat dubious, there is no doubt that Austin takes music – and the music industry – very seriously. Whereas in other cities, having a CEO play live gigs in a local band would be considered somewhat flaky, in Austin it is normal and well-regarded. Austin’s live music scene is mentioned repeatedly in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class as being one of the hallmarks of, and contributors to, its success as a high-tech city.

Likewise, Austin has a deep local electronics industry, with numerous large firms such as AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, Freescale, IBM, Intel, National Instruments, Samsung, Silicon Laboratories, Sun Microsystems, United Devices, and others having headquarters or major facilities there, and thousands of smaller electronics firms. Importantly, Austin also has a deep and broad infrastructure of service providers such as lawyers, accountants, patent attorneys, etc., that understand the needs of innovative high-tech start-ups. Austin’s rapid growth has also spawned a host of high-tech millionaires, who are ready and able to invest in the Next Big Thing.

Austin is Texas’ state capital, giving me access to Texas’ government decision-makers and influencers. This will become important as Thumtronics’ innovations start to move into government-funded educational institutions. With 23 million people, Texas is the USA’s second-most-populous state after California, so influencing Texas can influence the USA, which can influence the world. Furthermore, Austin is still a relatively small city (at 1.5 million, about the same population as Perth), so it’s relatively easy to gain access to Austin’s movers and shakers.

Austin is also a remarkably nice place to live, which has attracted (and will continue to attract) top talent from elsewhere. Finally, its cost of living is low enough to allow Thumtronics to minimize its burn rate.
Fortunately, Austin’s investor community understands disruptive innovation, so I am quite confident that, one way or another, Thumtronics will get the funding it needs to disrupt the $30 billion musical instrument & lesson industries from its new home here in Austin.

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.

When?

I started working on Thumtronics’ innovations in September of 2003. Since then, as my long-suffering family can attest, I have been obsessed by the challenge of developing and commercializing Thumtronics’ innovations.

Shipping an affordable, expressive Thummer is Thumtronics’ one and only mission at present. Only after it reaches a high enough level of sales to make Thumtronics profitable can we consider devoting additional resources to commercializing Thumtronics’ other innovations, such as the ThumMusic System, Dynamic Tuning, or Dynamically Tempered Timbres.

Currently, Thumtronics is raising capital to fund the final design & engineering work needed to get the Thummer to market. It is expected that the Thummer will reach the market within approximately nine months of this capital becoming available.

At the moment, I’m collecting quotes from credible folks in Austin and beyond about the market potential of the Thummer. Although everyone knows that disruptive innovations can make huge profits, investors usually approach a given potentially-disruptive innovation with great skepticism. Because disruptive innovations redefine the market, exploit new channels, and attract new customers, it’s very hard to prove that the disruptive product will actually sell – until it starts selling. The quotes that I’m gathering are intended to reduce this perceived market risk, by establishing that experts in the relevant fields believe that the Thummer will sell.

I expect to start approaching potential investors in a couple of weeks. It’s hard to predict how long the capital-raising process will take. One smart guy with money, and I’m done – but more likely, I’ll need to find a half-dozen, and they’ll all debate the valuation & term sheet, so it’ll take months.

So don’t expect to see any Thummer for sale until mid-2008, at the earliest.

What?

Thumtronics’ musical innovations, taken together, abstract to a higher level both (a) the structure of musical sounds, and (b) the higher-level forms of music arising from that structure. This higher level of abstraction is both simpler and more powerful that that used in the Western musical tradition.

Thumtronics’ first breakthrough is the combination of a concertina-like keyboard with tiny thumb-operated joysticks (like on a video game controller) and motion sensors (like on Nintendo’s Wii game controller), thereby delivering the most expressive polyphonic musical instrument ever: the Thummer. This expressive power is needed to control the many new expressive opportunities enabled by Thumtronics’ other breakthroughs.

Thumtronics’ second breakthrough is the combination of the Wicki note-layout, a chromatic staff, a tonnetz, tonic solfa, and the computer keyboard, thereby producing an easily-deployable system for the display and control of musical information – the ThumMusic PLUS System – which makes music easier to teach, learn, and play.

Thumtronics’ third breakthrough is its recognition that generalized note-layouts (such as the Wicki) have the same fingering not just in every key, but also in every tuning of a given temperament. That enables Dynamic Tuning, in which the performer can change the Thummer’s tuning in a smooth continuum while retaining the same fingering. Dynamic Tuning enables tuning bends, temperament modulations, and new chord progressions, all within the time-honored framework of tonality.

Thumtronics’ fourth breakthrough is Dynamically Tempered Timbres (X_Spectra & X_Timbres), in which the partials of a given timbre are adjusted, in real time, to align with the notes of the current (dynamic) tuning, to which they are related. This can deliver perfect consonance all across a given temperament’s tuning continuum, with additional real-time effects such as dynamic dissonance, primeness, conicality, and richness. These novel musical effects can make dynamic tunings sound pleasing and familiar, while giving composers an entirely new means of creating “tension and release.”

In Thumtronics’ approach, what matters are the relationships among intervals – that is, temperaments – but not pitches. A musical composition can be specified completely, yet leave the choice of key (i.e., tonic pitch) to the needs of the performing group (to reflect its current tessitura). Computer scientists will recognize this as an example of dynamic binding.

Taken together, Thumtronics' innovations hoist the description and control of musical information to a higher level of abstraction which is both simpler and more powerful than the traditional view.

These innovations also generalize music theory beyond the Harmonic Series, to embrace a wider set of timbre-structures. This widening consequently broadens music theory beyond Just Intonation to a wider set of tunings which are related to those timbres (or vice versa -- same thing).

Why?

With the help of many people, I've made what appear to be a significant scientific breakthrough which has implications to musical instrument design, music notation, electronic music synthesis, and music theory. I am attempting to bring these innovations to market through a start-up company -- Thumtronics Inc. of Austin, Texas. People keep asking me "how's it going?" This blog is the answer.