If you’ve been following my internet presence, you know how much I love flowcharts. So naturally, I was amused by this Randall Munroe cartoon: I was reminded of it walking down the street the other day, because someone in our neighborhood in Brooklyn was blasting a dancehall track from their car that sampled the “na, [...]
Filed in Music, Sampling
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Also tagged ableton, bananarama, beatles, flowcharts, katamari, mashups, memes, pop, rock, singing, songwriting, soul, wilson pickett, xkcd
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Friday, February 25, 2011
Last night I caught a lecture by David Kirkpatrick on his book The Facebook Effect. This post is going to be about Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the book, not the book itself, since I just got it last night and haven’t started reading it yet. But his talk certainly conveyed the flavor. Kirkpatrick had one significant [...]
The best and most thought-provoking game of the DOS era was Starflight. Kids today, with their intuitive graphical user interfaces. They have no idea what a pain it was to use computers back in the eighties. DOS especially was an autistic nightmare. Bill Gates is some kind of genius to have convinced so many people [...]
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
One night, Anna was watching me Twitter over my shoulder. After a while, she announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is effectively a real-world immersive internet game. The scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Social Media, Software, Writing
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Also tagged attention, blogging, civilization, recursion, simcity, Social Media, social networks, stats, twitter, wordpress
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Saturday, October 10, 2009
My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except [...]
Filed in Video Games
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Also tagged bungie, christianity, halo, mashups, microsoft, remixes, ringworld, scifi, star trek, star wars, xbox
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
My family does not, as a general rule, dance. Maybe individually. Very rarely together. It takes a wedding or bar mitzvah or other major state occasion to get even some of us on the dance floor. When left to our own devices, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. At least not until last Thanksgiving, when we tried [...]
Why are the Beatles still so cool? By which I mean the late Beatles, Revolver onwards. I like Please Please Me as much as the next guy, but it isn’t why the Beatles are cool now. No, I mean the last few records, especially Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. If any of [...]
Filed in Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling, Video Games
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Also tagged abbey road, analog, audio, audio editing, beatles, common, divorce, hip-hop, john lennon, kanye west, mellotron, memes, mixtapes, multitracking, paul mccartney, prince, remixes, rock, rock band, Sampling, tape, tape editing
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This 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 [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged composing, electronica, hip-hop, Improvisation, interface, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, Sampling, sequencing, synths
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Here’s one of my favorite bits of South Park.
Filed in Dance, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Video Games
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Also tagged america, beatles, dance, electronica, gender, guitar hero, masculinity, Recording, remixes, rock, rock band, simulation, south park, visualization
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There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Music, Physics, Video Games
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Also tagged chiptunes, guitar, Music, Music Theory, overtones, Physics, resonance, singing, synths
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