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A pretty, pretty piano sample library. Filed away for if/when I get a grown-up version of Kontakt.
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A magical, brilliant teaching tool. Ableton's education/explanation team have always been top-notch, but this is great, and I am envious of it and them. I love how it starts with sound, and abstract explorations, before breaking those apart into components – amplitude, pitch, timbre – and only later mapping those to synthesizer components – all of which will work with a keyboard plugged in, thanks to webmidi. Grand stuff, and so great to see them investing in this sort of thing.
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"…"there is no parallel here. Richter was a genius. He worked tirelessly for many years to perfect his piano playing. The lobster was some aberration. But what if it was not? What if the lobster was *essential*? What if every pianist needs a lobster? What if everyone needs a lobster for something?"
So much in this huge essay by Errol Morris – on anxiety, on performance, on the piano, on consciousness, and how we offload our consciousness to small advisors – what a programmer knows as rubberducking. There is so much in here to love, and I probably need to reread it at least once.
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Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.
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Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.
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Impressive, fun, immediate.
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A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.
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Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.
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Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.
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Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.
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Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.
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Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.
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Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.
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"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.
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Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.
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Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.
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This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.
He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.
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Wonderful prepared piano album.
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A really nice exploration of what live piano + electronics could be like. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the actual filming: there's a lot of modular on display, which is very analogue and visible, with all its sequencers… but there's also at least one midi controller visible and if it's talking to a computer… is it disingenuous to hide a laptop? Hmn.
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Well this looks very good.
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I've been thinking a lot about pianos and electronics, and this is a nice exploration of the lines I've been thinking along. I think the piano manipulation could be more interesting, but it's certainly in the ballpark of what I'm interested in attempting.
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75 minutes of Donald Fagen talks to Warren Bernhardt about composition, voicing, and runs through some Steely Dan and solo stuff. The explanation of the voicing on Peg is worth your time alone. So much in here – and nice filming of _hands_ for once.
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"I hit upon a card game mechanic that I thought would work. I explored it a bit and it wasn’t long before I realized that in order for the design to really sing, it needed to be a collectible card game with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cards. This sprawling design would create the sense that a large part of the story is happening outside the realm of the game currently being played, much like the feeling you have while reading the novel." Corvus' own entry for his roundtable is bloody marvellous.
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Blimey – 1.68gb multisampled Yamaha C7, for most popular soft samplers, for no money.
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"No consoles are launching in 2009, right? Not so. Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy, most notable outside of South America for its long partnership with Sega and official distribution of its consoles in Brazil, will be releasing an entirely original product called Zeebo. Centered around downloadable games distributed only over a 3G wireless network, the console is designed for emerging markets…" and, even if it's not exactly powerful and the business model still seems sketchy, this could be really, really interesting.