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Science Commons
Daphne Oram
Before Delia Derbyshire (of renowned Dr Who theme) there was Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She spent much of her time on Oramics, which was a device using 35mm film, drawn on, to produce analogue synth, similar to the Variophone. Daphne passed away in 2003, and finally received some recognition for helping to pioneer electronic music. Gallery.The main body of the machine is a steel-framed table, across which a centre strip of graph paper is placed at right angles. Waveforms are drawn freehand onto this paper (these are still in place) and then traced, or marked out with masking tape, onto transparent, sprocketed loops of 35mm film. There are ten looped strips of film in total, arranged in five banks and each passes clockwise from right to left operated simultaneously by a common motor. The near group is individually and directly looped around the clutch mechanism and drive wheel, and the far group is looped around a wheel that is slaved to the main motor. Clutch and gears control speed of rotation, which normals at 10cm per second, although a handwheel enables the user to turn all strips simultaneously more slowly if desired. The near group of four control waveform shape, duration and vibrato, the raw ingredients of the desired sound, and the far group control the finer nuances of timbre and intensity, amplitude, frequency. The drawn waveforms pass over photocells, illuminated from above by a steady stream of light, to the right of the flat surface, The dark patches on the transparent film strip modulate the rays of light, and these are picked up as voltage measurements by the capacitors in the photocells. The electronic signal triggers oscillators and filters and envelope shape can be manipulated in fine detail. The signal is also passed to a separate sealed light box which houses four cathode-ray tubes. A flat plate of glass slides into a slot in the light box. The glass plate is partially covered by an opaque mask, selected from a number of pre-set shapes which correspond to the desired effect. This partially covers the tube output which is picked up by a photomultiplier inside the light box and conveyed to the output of the various oscillators. more...
Blip Festival 08
Highlighting the chipmusic phenomenon and its related disciplines, the festival aims to showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals - sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology's untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character. In NYC this weekend, be there, or be square.
puss - 3step
nullsleep - says it's not the end
bit shifter - particle changeEverything That Happens Will Happen Today
This new album is the first colab between Byrne and Eno in several decades, Byrne says this is not My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts 2 -- which might initially seem disappointing since that was a truly brilliant work. But this is it's own excellent beast: I don't think I loved it on the first listen, and that's been the case with Byrne's solo work too. But, a couple listens in, however, and those albums, and this one, it hooks you -- especially the last two songs "Poor Boy" and "The Lighthouse". Eno had, in 2005, put out an album Another Day On Earth which I like to describe as exactly like his work ten or twenty years earlier (and that's good IMHO). Byrne has recently done a fantastic installation piece here in NYC called Playing The BuildingThe Entirety Of My Political Support
Fanboy
I'm not an Apple fanboy. I do own a macbook, and I'm very pleased with it -- both the hardware and the OS are really very good. The OS, at least, is several magnitudes better than Microsoft's, and a step above most Linux distros in ease of use (but not in flexibility or 'freedom'*). I have an iPod, I bought several years ago, it is currently in a dock on top my stereo, I almost never unhook it. Apple is a great company, they generally make great products, and they certainly have a great sense of style (and an even better spin for marketing). But I'm not a fanboy, if they went away tomorrow I'd just load up another OS, without blinking or regret.
I remember the bad old days. I remember Apple taking away the command line, I remember really bad clones and an even worse OS. OK, I'm like an old depression-era grandfather, who remembers having to work with a trash-80, and remembers fondly the failings of the Amiga, and isn't ready to let any one OS become a reliance. Things change, in tech, more so and more often. Acknowledging that Jobs took care of the ugly 90's things, I still am skeptical that they can ever properly do a web app. Do they want to try and be Google? Oh, I see, they want to get on the cloud bandwagon where all your device and app data is available from anywhere.
And that is a good bandwagon to be on, who doesn't want that? I want my email, bookmarks, addressbook, passwords, netflix recommendations, etc., reachable at all times. But apparently Apple borked it, borked their MobileMe. John Markoff writes up the problems over at NYTimes (always take his word as a grain of salt). My slight pleasure in Apple's misfortunes stems from my belief that the majority is always wrong (and the other half of that Ibsen quote, "the minority is rarely right"). But I am an appropriate reactionary: if it's not cool to dis Apple, then by God, it's time to dis Apple a little just to kept their ego from getting galaxy-sized.
* Please, don't let this digress into that discussion.The Last Hope
2600'sHOPE conference was called 'The Last Hope' because it's the last HOPE conference held at the Hotel Pennsylvania (PE6-5000). The hotel is scheduled to either be torn down or retro-fitted. I'm sure whatever will take its place will be too uppity for the likes of this crowd (hotel W style? I'd say p\xc3\xa2t\xc3\xa9, martinis and little stupid dogs, but then I really don't know). Sadly, the trend of New York becoming a city too fancy to have any fun in continues. But, the encouraging thing is that a whole new generation of folk are getting involved in phreaking/hacking/making, and in a more MAKE magazine way rather than a 'l33t' way. This is good. Seeing an entire table of young people soldering, learning how locks work (and don't work), while actually being social is pretty darn encouraging. I'd like to think the nasty period of 'l33t' from the late nineties to the mid-00s is over -- the period summed up by, say, an 18 year old male wearing an NIN shirt and totally into p0wning your network and snarkily bragging about it online, just some mayhem or destruction directed mostly against innocent people. Back to making things, taking things apart, learning how things work, polymaths, generalists, and promoting the individual over sheer biomass or botnets. It's more about "here's what I discovered, isn't that cool?" instead of the Mitnick-era style "look at me for what I discovered, aren't I cool?". Still technological, yes, but once again no longer computer-centric. The talk on the history of phone phreaking (by Phil Lapsley, was fantastic), the state of technology in education, talks about environment and social engineering reinforce this. Steven Levy in a keynote reminded us that the term "hack" came from the model railroading club in Building 20 at MIT. Reminded as well, were of phone heroes like Joe Engressia (aka Joybubbles) and Captain Crunch who epitomized a creative and driven way of exploring technological systems for perhaps simply the joy of knowing. Adam Savage finally capped off this same theme with an excellent, hilarious talk about his quest for perfect movie memorabilia, and also about the process of Myth Busters. There may not be any more HOPE conferences at this location (although in another I would expect so) but ending on a high note promoting community, critical thinking skills, making things that please you, and taking apart things you think can be better, is ending on a high note for sure.Hoarding Light Bulbs
BBC reports some folks are hoarding old fashioned light bulbs in the inevitability of newer energy saving bulbs replacing them. "They don't look right," he explains. "They're not bright enough and they take an age to come on. That's not what you want from a light bulb. You want it to light up the whole room, just like that." He clicks his fingers. Who knows if this is really widespread, the thought of someone being actually perturbed by the second difference between illumination sort of boggles my mind. Perhaps the mercury content is a legitimate gripe -- I'm hoping these bulbs are only intermediate to practical LEDs. The argument is, if you were worried about the mercury, consider how often you have to replace CFLs versus old bulbs and that the mercury in the bulb replaces mercury that would've been airborne via a power planet. But consider if CFLs become the single largest source of light, and proper recycling about as good as most other recycling schemes, how much mercury then? Me, I'm hoarding gas mantles since that is absolutely the only light I can feel comfortable reading by.Dangerous World, Part N
In the consistently great Make Magazine this month George Dyson writes "Physicists love explosions. We owe our nulcear predicament to a quirk of human nature." And he contines about Theodore Taylor, one of the atomic bomb makers of the 50's, and proponent of nuclear driven spacecraft. "Taylor held up a small parabolic mirror and lit a cigarette with an atomic bomb. The fireball was 12 miles away." If there is modern hysteria about liquid explosives on planes, you have to wonder if the hysteria isn't misplaced. In the 50's Taylor "...tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce... it was never built in those years, it certainly has been since then. It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about 6 inches in diameter." Carry that onto a plane? No, you'd probably put something like that in a shipping container. I'm going to start a company selling Red Herring.The Fog Of War
I can't believe I hadn't seen this, that everyone hasn't seen this. Few things could be so close to the interior of modern American warfare than Errol Morris's interview shot in 2000 of Robert McNamara, "the best and the brightest", former Defense Secretary, talking about the cornerstone moments of the cold war and the foundation of the mire of Vietnam. Most importantly, this is an old man looking back at his part in the fire bombing of Tokyo, working with Curtis LeMey, Kennedy, Johnson -- an interior view of big business war, of MBA war, of algebraic morality (is, in fact, all morality just an assessment of what is a lesser evil). Apparently, very few things have changed.
