Here’s a live rendition of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide And Seek.” It’s introduced by Zach Braff, but don’t let that dissuade you from watching.
Posts Tagged ‘interface’
Imogen Heap and artificial harmony
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
The web browser as a musical instrument
Saturday, September 12th, 2009Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on how people could use the web for production, not just sharing completed tracks. Then I got home and discovered the iNudge in my Delicious network feed:
Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.
Auto-tune on the iPhone
Saturday, September 5th, 2009It was only a matter of time before the Autotune The News people got T-Pain on board.
The newest version of this software lets you sing with Auto-tune over anything in your iTunes library. Pretty amazing hip-hop and electronica scratchpad, except that it crashes two minutes into each recording. Still. Auto-tune the Pro Tools plug-in is five hundred bucks. The iPhone version is three bucks. So not complaining.
Björk thought she could organize freedom, how Scandinavian of her
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009Björk knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrument textures. Her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by her. I’m glad I hung in there, because she’s been one of my best teachers in the art of making music with computers.
Game controllers as musical instruments
Friday, August 21st, 2009This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller.
Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.
The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.
A synthesizer is like an axe
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009I 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 Herbie and Quincy Jones demonstrating Herbie’s Fairlight CMI in 1983. (more…)
Jimi Hendrix, electronic musician
Monday, July 6th, 2009People 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 control surface.
The desktop metaphor is, like, so five minutes ago
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness.
User interfaces are the first line of computer instruction, and for many people are the last line too. Not every interface designer does their job equally well. The problems mostly emerge from designers’ presuming implicit knowledge from the user that might not really be there. There’s plenty of computer science that seems like obvious common knowledge to programmers and engineers that remains opaque or esoteric to the population at large. For example, the general public uses the terms memory and storage interchangeably, even though they refer to different computer components that function in very different ways.
Twitter, jazz and moving music forward into the stone age
Friday, February 13th, 2009So the other night my friend Jesse played at the Shorty Awards with his Tin Pan Blues Band. Because it was an awards ceremony dedicated to the best of Twitter, they were projecting people’s tweets about the event itself onto a screen in real time. Some of those tweets were comments about the band. The musicians, in turn, were reading and responding during the performance. (more…)
Fun facts from the usage logs
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Ethanhein.com has had 465,689 hits so far, mostly distributed among my blogs and mp3 pages. A single blog post about Family Guy generates a disproportionately large percentage of that traffic. October 2008 represents a typical month, with 40,611 hits total. That’s around 1,310 a day, 54 an hour. A large percentage of those are from robots, but still, neato. These numbers don’t include hits on my Flickr photos. My various sets have had 228,155 views so far, with anywhere between 500 and 1,500 hits a day.
Flickr in particular breaks your data down with exceptional granularity, making it easy to assemble the images of mine that the internet cares most about. (more…)