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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.
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"Driven by my devotion for vinyls and analog processes (perhaps a bit of Dj wannabe too), and emulating the audio tape cut&paste technique, I tried to make the vinyl sampling a bit more analog – literally cut and paste pieces of vinyl to create samples." Cut & Paste with physical vinyl; bonus points for excellent Delia Derbyshire video.
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"I’m not saying that a book that makes you cry is a great book. It would be a wonderful criterion if only it worked, but alas it admits effective sentimentality, the knee-jerk/heart-string stimulus. For instance, a lot of us cry when reading of the death of an animal in a story — which in itself is interesting and significant, as if we give ourselves permission to weep the lesser tears — but that is something else and less. A book that makes me cry the way music can or tragedy can – deep tears, the tears that come of accepting as my own the grief there is in the world — must have something of greatness about it."
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"The Fretless Fader concept involves a cross fader which can move vertically as well as horizontally, allowing an extra parameter to be controlled simultaneously with the traditional fader movement – most notably, pitch. It’s probably best demonstrated in video…" Nice chat about productising this, but seriously, the first video is marvellous – it's "Drunk Trumpet" all over again…
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"Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, took off at dawn and flew across the capital. Each balloon plays a different element of a musical score, together creating an expansive audio landscape." Marvellous.
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"It was supposed to be a £12,000 art project in which a helium-filled sculpture of a desert island floated eerily above the heads of spaced-out festival-goers. It has become instead a £12,000 art project in which a helium-filled sculpture of a desert island floats somewhere through the troposphere without anybody actually seeing it, or even knowing where it is." Awesome but sad all at once; and yet, expensive or not, it feels like a genuinely valid affordance of the art. Oh well.
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"the footage gopro cameras produce is fantastic and i’ve seen some crazy stuff filmed with a gopro, but i think i found it’s achilles heel – my skateboard." The camera may be dead, but the footage is ace.
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"Children will turn anything into a toy, any toy into a game and any game into a story. Adults do just the same thing, they just don’t do the noises. At least not when anyone’s looking." Yes. (Also: Sorrell is blogging. This is good.)
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"Artist Rodrigo Derteano's autonomous robot plows the desert ground to uncover its underlying, lighter color, using a technique similar to the one of the Nazca lines, the gigantic and enigmatic geoglyphs traced between 400 and 650 AD in the desert in southern Peru. Guided by its sensors, the robot quietly traced the founding lines of a new city that looks like a collage of existing cities from Latin America." Oh gosh this is awesome.