May 2011
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My boss John Pierce also played the piano and loved music. We were going to a...
– Geeta Dayal interviewed Max Mathews, the ‘father of computer music’, just a few weeks before he passed away last month. The whole piece, at Frieze Magazine, is long and fascinating.
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Whale 'Pop Songs' Spread Across the Ocean →
Absolutely fascinating article about how the songs of humpback whales in the South Pacific evolve and spread. It turns out that specific themes in songs change astonishingly quickly, every 2 to 3 months, and new songs travel westwards from the east coast of Australia to French Polynesia.
But the best part? “Sometimes the “hit song” contained snippets from previous...
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Kicking it old-school: luggable computer, playing an 8-bit version of “Satisfaction” via a program called “Jukebox.”
(thanks for the vid, John!)
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The Music Genome Splicer →
I love this—Greg Sabo has made a delightful little application that tosses up random quintets of Pandora descriptives. He wrote it as sort of an Oblique Strategies for musicians, to foster exploration.
I cordially dislike Pandora, because I think their approach to music recommendation is limited and autistic. (Also, it’s not a “Music Genome Project” if you’re...
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The inverse of what normally gets spotted at z=z: the Illucia is a modular patch console that controls code (‘codebending,’ rather than ‘circuitbending’). Read more about the project at MATRIXSYNTH.