Images of the Week: Graphic Interfaces, Now & Then

Two photos this week chart the itinerary of graphic interfaces in sound production over the course of the last half century, from massive hardware to elegant homebrew software.

Up top, and clearly the more recent of the two, is this sample screenshot of Tiction. The software is described by its programmer, Hans Kuder, as follows: “Tiction is a flexible, nodal music sequencer. It’s pretty simple: Each node represents an event, and a connection from one node to the next triggers the next event after a certain number of tics.” (More details, including entrancing video of Tiction in action, at the software’s homepage, tinkthank.net, plus coverage and discussion at processing.org and createdigitalmusic.com.)

And the following equipment, below, has its origins in a music studio put together in the mid-1950s by Radio Italiana. The tools of that studio are the subject of a sizable photo set (at flickr.com), collecting a variety of pieces from the studio’s home at Museo degli Strumenti Musicali in Milan (milanocastello.it). Lots of additional information in two blog posts at the shared website of Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (usoproject.blogspot.com, usoproject.blogspot.com). Also available is a brief but useful document summarizing the history of the studio (PDF), which was originally under the control of composers Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna.