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"Tambour is a musical game about attacking and countering with rhythm." Really nice: definitely musical, interesting balancing mechanics, and I love the range of inputs. Also it looks good, which helps.
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"Imperfect and internal rhymes are two important features in rap music previously ignored in the music information retrieval literature. We developed a method of scoring potential rhymes using a probabilistic model based on phoneme frequencies in rap lyrics. We used this scoring scheme to automatically identify internal and line-final rhymes in song lyrics and demonstrated the performance of this method compared to rules-based models. We then calculated higher-level rhyme features and used them to compare rhyming styles in song lyrics from different genres, and for different rap artists. We found that these detected features corresponded to real- world descriptions of rhyming style and were strongly characteristic of different rappers, resulting in potential applications to style-based comparison, music recommendation, and authorship identification." Awesome, and something I am going to sit down and read properly.
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"A series of informative posters detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key." Gorgeous. (If I had to pick, I'd take Voodoo Ray – which is a lovely piece of drum programming amongst many other things).
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Sunrizer – basically, a tiny JP8000 clone.
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Multi-touch instrument thing.
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"DM1 is an advanced vintage Drum Machine. It turns your iPad into a fun and creative beat making machine."
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Curious scale-based texture performance instrument.
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"This script installs a patched version of ruby 1.9.3-p125 with patches to make ruby-debug work again (#47) and boot-time performance improvements (#66 and #68), and runtime performance improvements (#83 and #84). It also includes the new backported GC from ruby-trunk." Speed boosts for Ruby 1.9.3.
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If you have MacPorts installed, OpenSSL runs into issues when you install rubies through RVM. This helps.
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"The hackable, digital synth": cheap, build-your-own virtual analogue. Interesting.
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"I've been working on a sketch wherein some data is downloaded from an HTTP server and is then processed on the Arduino (printed, as it happens, but I don't think that's important). In my original sketches, I was occasionally seeing transfers fail midway through." James is running into issues that might be relevant to me.
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"The Shruthi-1 is a hybrid digital/analog monosynth. Its hardware design is deceptively simple, but the sonic range is wide: sometimes grungily digital like a PPG-Wave, fat and funky like a SH-101, videogame-y like a Commodore 64, weird and warm like an ESQ-1 ; but more often than not, truly original." Looks nice, not expensive at all.
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Lovely, laugh-out loud post from Holly on games in fiction. Lots of graphs, some of which are funny.
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"rePatcher is an Arduino shield that allows you to “repatch” your Max/MSP or Pure Data patches with a 6 x 6 patchbay matrix. It also has 6 general purpose control knobs for modifying parameters in your patch. Since it does all of this over USB, it can be hacked to work with any other program that can accept a serial stream." Oh, very nice.
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A process of elimination leads to discovering when Ice Cube's "good day" was.
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"I also think there's tremendous value in creating a dedicated music graph (as opposed to a social network that also has music); it's in your best interest to follow (or unfollow!) someone regardless of whether you're strangers or best friends. It's all about the music you're going to get from that person in your playlist of jams." Yep, this – which is the thing I always try to explain about TIMJ. I don't follow the list of people I follow everywhere else; I follow people who make my playlist of music better/worse. It means I discover all manner of new music, but I hope nobody takes it personally. (About the worst thing you can do on TIMJ is just import all your Twitter contacts and not add anyone else ever).
Drivetime Spotify App
04 December 2011
Music Hack Day London this weekend. Tom, Blaine and I ended up making a thing which didn’t demo perfectly, called Drivetime.
It solves a common problem: how do I listen to the same classic pop and rock anthems on a Friday afternoon as people in other studios? The answer is with the Drivetime app.
Drivetime is a Spotify app. You drag a playlist into it to start broadcasting – you set your station name with a simple text field. Then, anyone loading the app can click on your name and hear what you’re playing. Not just the current track – it’ll start the track for others at exactly the point you’re currently at, and it’ll advance through the playlist when a track finishes. At any point, you can stop listening, and choose another song to listen to.
That’s it, really: a simple broadcast/listen system, all built into Spotify as a native application.
The front-end is just HTML/CSS/Javascript, which is how Spotify apps are built; the communication with the client is via socket.io, on top of node.js on the server. Tom and Blaine wrote the back-end; I wrote a bunch of the front-end, which Blaine promptly made much better, and did all the hot pink neon. We all played a lot of Tina Turner in the hacking rooms, and we went home to bed betimes on the Saturday night.
All the code’s in github. The Spotify app only runs (at the moment) if you’re a Spotify developer. We might see if we can get it a bit further and release itspot, so people can listen to one another’s classic rock selections.
It was a fun hack, even if my explanation of it was incoherent, and part of a great weekend – so many superb hacks, large and small, on display.
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"I cannot think of a worse fate: hearing something worse than John Mayer when you have to click on a link that says John Mayer. (Consider clicking on a Google search result for your dentist’s office phone number and getting your ex-girlfriend instead.)" This line is very funny, but the whole post is a shrewd explanation of the importance of resolution, and the fist Facebook makes of it. I hope consumers will discover they care about this more than they thought, too.
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"Elizabeth David was a revelation for me. She was a wonderful prose writer and it was a habit that carried over in to her recipes which are often maddeningly vague. You would be forgiven for wondering whether there are recipes at all. They are really just a handful of paragraphs that serve as a rough guide in the general direction of the dish you're trying to make. The recipe that follows is much longer than anything she'd write." Yeah, but it still looks amazing, Aaron.
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This is brilliant: mp3s of the little mod/tracker music tracks that accompany keygens, cracks, and intros. Hundreds, and it's strange to say "hey, PHOTOSHOPCS4CRK is my favourite!" A weird little bit of culture, perfectly captured.
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IF legend Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin has adapted Jason Shiga's marvellous "Meanwhile" for the iPad. If you wanted someone to adapt your interactive fiction for another format – I can't think of a better person. Really looking forward to seeing how they've done this.