Noise for Airports 

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Mar 31st

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Mar 28th

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Digging in the Crates is a cool-looking project to explore sampling. Hard to get a good grip on exactly what’s going on from the video, but the projected interface on top of the vinyl record is an awesome idea. (via Yamaha Research)

Mar 23rd

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Some interesting variations on the Goldberg Variations at Michael Century’s Vimeo page. In this version, performers use a Nintendo wireless controller to modulate dynamics, tempo, and incidence of looping. Computer programmed in Max strictly follows the 32 bar harmonic structure composed by Bach, but it’s possible to jump from variation to variation, in “random mode” (this...

Mar 21st

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Mar 21st

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Breaking glass with sound! (A little more scientific than Memorex, courtesy of MIT.) Rubbing the rim of a wine glass with a wet finger will cause it to resonate at its resonant frequency. The glass is placed in front of a speaker playing a sine wave, created by the function generator, of this same frequency. When the amplitude is turned up, we can see by shining a strobe light at the glass that...

Mar 19th

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Another beat-mangled music vid from Paul Lamere, this time a minute of “Bad Romance,” beat-reversed. Love it. (via Music Machinery)

Mar 18th

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Mar 18th

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I wasn’t able to attend the recent Bohlen-Pierce conference in Boston because I was out of town, but this is a fun vid/article from the Boston Globe about the scale. “A different tuning system is almost like a different language,” said Ross W. Duffin, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of the book “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care).”...

Mar 11th

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A video taken by Alex Ross, because I still love this installation so much. (via Unquiet Thoughts) p.s. a friend of mine made this mashup update: Tumblr isn’t playing nice with the embed code (keeps working and then suddenly just displaying the raw html), so you’ll have to click to the link to see it!

Mar 10th

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Mar 10th

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Mar 10th

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Papa Sangre is a forthcoming iPhone game that is audio only. Listen to this “video” above on headphones to get an idea of how awesome this game could be. I’m really looking forward to this one!

Mar 8th

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Mar 7th

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Old Media: Interactivity and Mechanical Music

For my department, I wrote up this short piece about why I study “old media.” I’ve cross-posted it here, for your enjoyment. It’s (hopefully) a nice basic-level intro to the kind of work I’m doing. By Nick Seaver “So what do player pianos have to do with media studies?” I get that question a lot when I tell people about my CMS thesis topic. A lot of...

Mar 4th

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