ROB WARMOWSKI: AES 2006. I am here with Darwin Grosse, chief engineer of Cycling '74. I would call them the legendary software outfit responsible for Max/MSP, Pluggo, Jitter, and now the Lemur control surface. Darwin, why don't you tell the folks about the Lemur?

DARWIN GROSSE: Lemur is a multi-touch control surface that basically projects an image on the screen and allows you to manipulate that image with up to 20 points on the screen simultaneously. We have developed a number of applications that use it including some of the applications we'll see in a second. Additionally, some of the new features include control surface emulation, so you could use the Lemur to control your DAW software, and we also provide a lot of performance applications that people can use for live performance using Lemur, which is actually a very visually compelling way to go.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Let's take a closer look.

DARWIN GROSSE: This is an example of one of the video programs we've created. The stuff on the screen is done with Max/MSP and Jitter. It's tied to Lemur which is sending in this case OSC messages to the Max application. What it does is basically it takes a video image and deforms it by all the places that you touch the screen. This is a good example of the difference between a Lemur and a more typical touch surface in that it will support as many fingers and toes to that matter as I can put on the screen at any given time.

This is an instance of an application that we've created to kind of do generative mixes of audio in real time. What it does is basically implement four mixing pads where vertical gives us volume, horizontal gives us panning and with the [SOUNDS LIKE] glaze on, but this also shows the physics capabilities of the Lemur. I can turn down the friction of the knobs and now just send the balls and send the delay lines running, and it does a generative mix of four-track audio in real time and it gives me a real time display of it on the screen.

This is an example of the Lemur running in a standalone mode. You'll notice it's not connected to a computer at all. This is all using internal programming for the Lemur. There's a new clocking system. There's some new options that include knobs which allow you to increase the density of control on the surface. In this case, I've decided to make a very simple LFO designer. It makes three waveforms where I can control the rate and the mix of it. Those three waveforms get changed into a single LFO. This can send out MIDI if it’s connected to a DAW through the Ethernet port. This is another example of very little bit of work on the Lemur, translating it into something that would be very difficult to otherwise do in hardware.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Thanks so much, Darwin.

DARWIN GROSSE: Yeah. It was great to be here.