Here’s a track I’m working on, based around a couple of envelope filtered samples of Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, opus 132, 3rd movement. Filtered Beethoven [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Me vs Guarneri Quartet vs Babsy Singer vs Don Henley vs DJ Trace mp3 download, ipod format download Envelope filter is [...]
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Tagged bjork, effects, electronica, envelope filter, jerry garcia, led zeppelin, mutron, posthuman, reason, stevie wonder, wah pedal
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When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how [...]
Also filed in autobio, hardware, music, science, software, video games
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Tagged autobio, book, chiptunes, computers, eighties, electricity, electronica, microchips, nintendo, remixes, super mario bros, video games
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Expanding on “Learning Music Theory With Autotune” If you’re a science geek and you find yourself in San Francisco, the most fun thing to do there is to go to the Exploratorium.
Also filed in hardware, music, science, video games
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Tagged audio editing, book, coltrane, exploratorium, giant steps, india, keybs, lego, midi, music theory, pitch, pitch shifting, sequencing, tetris, tuning, video games
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on some dude’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of [...]
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Tagged book, computers, drum machines, eighties, electronica, emotion, funk, herbie hancock, interface, jazz, keybs, music, quincy jones, sequencing, sesame street, synths
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People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly it had been used as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated [...]
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Tagged analog, book, electricity, electromagnetism, electronica, feedback, guitar, harmonics, harmony, interface, jimi hendrix, music, music theory, recursion, remixes, resonance, tuning, wah pedal
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Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most popular music [...]
Also filed in music, software
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Tagged book, chameleon, computer evolution, computer science, computers, electronica, fractals, herbie hancock, improvisation, james brown, looping, mandelbrot, math, music, music notation, programming, recursion, visualization
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When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?
Auto-tune makes producing music easier. It can also make understanding music theory easier. The way you dial up different keys and scales doesn’t just guide your ear, it also guides your eye. Your voice can produce a smooth continuum of pitches. To sing, you eliminate most of those possibilities, vibrating your mouth and throat only [...]
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Tagged audio, autotune, binary, book, coltrane, electronica, harmony, hip-hop, informationtheory, kanye west, lil wayne, math, music, music theory, pro tools
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In high school science class, you probably saw a picture of an atom that looked like this: The picture shows a stylized atom, a nucleus with red protons and blue neutrons, surrounded by three grey electrons. It’s an attractive and iconic image, and it would make a great logo. It’s also misleading, and in some [...]
Also filed in music, science
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Tagged book, electromagnetism, guitar, harmonics, harmony, math, molecules, music, music theory, overtones, physics, quantum, resonance, science, spin, strings, vibration, visualization
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Saturday, January 10, 2009
When you delve behind the scenes with the internet, you immediately come face-to-face with a lot of threatening computer gibberish. The most menacing codes are the ones that stand for colors, random-seeming strings of letters and numbers like #99CC66 or #4F102A. Sometimes you see colors described verbally: “black”, “white”, “blue”, etc. That’s fine for simple [...]
