The Toriton Plus is a very interesting music controller. it transforms movements of water into sounds. The motion of the water is detected by lasers. The sounds in the video give a nice Oval-like drift, making this a very smooth music instrument.
This is original and some different way to "do" homebrew instruments. It is an orchestra that manufactures and plays instruments, they made 100% of vegetables. It's interesting how many different things they build out of this garden fruits. Not only things to knock upon, but also flutes, trumpets and many other interesting things. After the show you don't need to stay hungry: you simply can eat up the stuff you played.
Robert Hodgin aka Flight404 does creative code for really a long time now. I don't know how long ago, I guess it was about two years, he dropped most of his experiments and only concentrated on visualizing music mostly with processing. Well, what's so special about it? I'll tell you: the works of Robert Hodgin reached a very high level of originality. With no problem you can tell this artistry.
Robert documents his progress on his weblog. This is a good example of the artistic practice to constantly repeat a challenge that you set yourself, in order to grow and grow and reach a level very high. Or would you disagree, that you haven't seen something like the "Weird Fishes" ever before?
PikaPika is a refreshing project from Japan, that use "long time exposure" pictures of the city at night. With colorful lights they draw characters and animations, some a little bit like games, into the night. Finally they make videos and little stories out of it. Cute colors, drawn into the night. I also enjoyed this videoclip with this uplifting music.
"Mona Lisa" from Gabriel McGovern for 1k-compo at Boing Boing Gadget.
BoingBoing is having a 1 kilobyte competition, deadline will be the 1st of May 2008. You can do whatever work you want, it only should fit into 1024 bytes of digital goodness. You can win a hard-disk as competition winner, but the file-size limit should be challenging enough to go for this compo! The submitted works should be licensed in a way, that the boingers can use it freely at Boing Boing Gadgets, so GPL or Creative Commons would be fine. Some first results are shown here.
UPDATE: The final results are published!
People, who read Digital Tools will be interested in this news: Cycling 74 released today the new version of Max, that famous graphical music programming software, used by many musicians, artists, researchers, composers and sound designers. What is so special about this update? Since digital software music technology evolved in the last few years, a major update of the "old" Max system and architecture had to be done. Max was really at the time within more of the last twenty years. With this update the future of Max should be save.
"Max for the next 20 years"
A new era of Max programming is about to start. Max 5 include major enhancements and a overall new architecture below the surface: a completely redesigned multi-processing kernel and a streamlined development environment built on a platform-independent foundation. This sound like good news. The demo is free to use for 30 days. Upgrade will cost about 200 dollar.
Everyones chipmusic-darling Goto80 hits the scene with another work of glitchart he did together with Rosa Menkman. Best to see the resulting video of them both on the Goto80-blog. Here I show you the progress of Goto80, how he did processed, searching for glitchy holes in the tracker-app. He says on his blog: "I hugged bugs to compose". I wonder how exactly he made the glitches on the tracker.
Who does not like the Tenori-On? Pingmag published today an interview with Yu Nishibori, that throws light into the story behind the Tenori-On plus technical background. Hot reading tip of the day! Yu Nishibori also releases music on the Notype-label.
Don't forget to check this flickr-pool on the making, development and prototyping of Tenori-On.
Circle is a new synthesizer. To me it seems a little bit like the counterpart of the golden age of software-instruments innovation, done by Native Instruments and Ableton, for instance with Traktor, Reaktor and Live. The emphasis in Circle is on building software-synthesis instruments and quickly trying out things. Necessary parameters are not hidden behind windows, but are plain visible and also directly editable. Most impressive are the drag and drop features. The clear screen design without annoying graphic-elements follows the interface design tradition of Ableton Live and the Native Instrument range.
Circle is not out yet. They are planning to get it out by May, the pricing will be at 149.00 Euro or 199.00 Dollar. A video from the Musikmesse Frankfurt demonstrating features and interaction design can be found at the Future Audio Workshop blog.
Maybe some words about Future Audio Workshop itself, that is also interesting:
Future Audio Workshop is a pan european collective of engineers, programmers and designers, with the main office based near the Connemara region of Ireland. Formed in 2007, FAW's main aim is to create and develop exciting new audio software for the international community of musicians, sound designers and live performance artists.
I added a third little tutorial on how to make first steps into the wonderful world of Actionscript with Flex. This tutorial shows how to build a custom class, that extends the sprite class. The objects in this class are transformed, in this case by a rotation, and move autonomously when the objects are created on the screen. All this stuff is foremost one: simple. Look at the code.
Feels like BASIC
You can download it as well.
It's the mid of the month again. As always I put interesting findings into this blog, that are somehow cool or something to think about it, like todays issue. Let's do it like theorists!
Bruce Sterling needs no introduction. He is a Science Fiction author, but do not write Sci-Fi books anymore, instead design-theory and travels around the world. Sometimes I have the feeling, that he travels to all this talks, just in order to have cool videos online, like the one shown here.
Crap games. An aspect of game design, that is far too underappreciated. Enjoy this video, but beware of explicit talk. Nevertheless, you have games - 52 games! - on one cartridge. Some you really can't play or win, because the level design or the gameplay suck. Are unplayable games computing games in nature? Or are they something else? Maybe more like audio-visual artifacts, assuming you to play, but not to win. Related: the B-Games competition.
What happens if you concentrate on creating new gaming ideas, instead of realizing the games? Three Hundred is such a case. It is an ongoing sketchbook of conceptional studies and ideas of realizing new forms of games. He did not manage all 300 sketches, but there are about 80 online. We hope to have more things to come.
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Uhh, I love acid. And thanks to the solid taste of the mighty Independent Gaming Source I discovered this two games today, that make extensive use of acid as the music score. Game, Toy, Sound-Sequencer. The games are a little bot of everything, like "Space Invaders meets Jump'n'Run, R-Type and Doijin-Shooter". Not much gaming elements, but all mixed up a little bit.Download them here.
You control the the player sprite and the music sequencer with the cursor keys, while jumping and shooting is done with X and C. Press X two times for double-jump. Music is getting loud and tricky from time to time. The sprites have a nice and reduced pixelstyle. It somehow reminds me on the game Dive from the Gamma256-collection.
This is basically a shooter. Press space to start the game. In the game you press X to shot and C to drip a bomb in order erase all bullets from the screen. The bullets are synchronized to the sequencer sound. Unfortunately I did not found any instance to change or modulate the sequencer data. That would be a cool feature, even if you had to modify a simple text-file. You can change the sequencer-data by shooting the white squares that appear on the enemies ship.
I didn't test it, but you should also be able to replace the sound-data. They are stored as wave-files in the sound-folder of the game-directory. What I also like about these games: the usage of the keys C and X instead of Z and X, that most games from Japan and US use. Using C and X makes it seamless playable on qwerty and qwertz-keyboards - without changing the language scheme.
PS: I noticed, that the independent gaming source freshly opened up a database of indiegames. Good work! Clean and usable design.
Don't click it is a research-study in interactive design from 2005 that follows a systematic approach of making complete interaction with the mouse, but without using the buttons. The websites informs about the history of mouse-interaction and delivers interesting statistics about button usage of the users. It also transforms: at first it's really hard to resist clicking the button. But after a while you begin to wonder, why we still use the click? It's like a miniature world. It made me see the click as a transitional frame of time in the history of computing, where CPU performance did matter and navigational elements were not be able to be as fluent as today. Nevertheless I think it's unrealistic that we will abandon the click on some day. It is somehow similar to the QWERTY-Keyboard. At least we can doubt, that click-less designs really speed up work, like Benoit Espinola notices on his blog.
Björk's videos are always impressive and surprising at the same time. The new video "Wanderlust" reached a new milestone in the aesthetic process of Björk's video works. They used a wide variety of different techniques, from 3D-rendering to scenes made of clay and people in costumes. To top this the official video will be released in 3D-stereo: you will have to wear old-school 3D-glasses to enjoy it. However, the version released on the internet is in plain 2D. Enjoy the epic quality of it! Never seen something like this before.
There is also a remarkable making-of Wanderlust. If you like, you can watch a high quality version of Wanderlust.
[ via CreateDigitalMotion, Motionographer ]
Blissful!
What can you say about the band TRS-80? At least lo-fidelity aesthetics, use of retro-technologies, very unique style and hypnotizing music. The new video "Tinted" is made of 2 or 3 simple layers and could be, in other words, made with Resolume or others of this "I layer three videos" VJ-Tools. The mix of vintage look and live recordings give them a very special feel. At least I love the music. Somewhere between early Mouse on Mars and Nonex. The glasses give me urban-moods like DaftPunk did before.
This is the highest wisdom of manufacturing synthesizers in a homebrew way! It is loud and awesome, does not sound that good, but looks amazingly beautiful. But maybe you have to practice in order to get nice sounds. Nevertheless I would like to play with it a little bit.
The creator Stanley Povoda lives on Prague and simply looks like he made it very far on the way of being a real slack-master. You can check out his working-place - or should I say home or laboratory? - here, a nice 360 degree picture.
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If this thing is really working as good as it says, than finally a good solution in making computer-suitable drawings outside is offered. The "Paperium" is basically a pen. With it you can draw and write as with any normal pen. The funky detail is that all your movements are stored in the pen and with the click of a button you can send the path you just drawn to your computer via Bluetooth. It combines the freedom of expression with computer-based memory and the ability to enhance the data after you have generated it. Sounds to me like an interesting alternative to most of this ugly table-boards. The people who made Paperium this is small company located in Vienna.
The pen is computing your drawings.
Maybe there will be good times coming at us for computing outside. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) also offers a monitor that is clearly visible in direct sunlight exposure, at least in black and white mode.
Korg is always very certain when it comes to find cool names for their instruments. They launched a sythesizer-project on the Nintendo DS that is simply called DS-10. It is a full scale synthesizer, that should be available for under 50 Euro. A tool that really would add value to your gaming console. The features of this synth are: two patchable virtual synthesizers with two oscillators on each channel, a drum machine, a sequencer, and a full range of effects. Here is the official website. Notice that interesting use of the stylo with the appregiator I somehow seen before anywhere in the homebrew scene...
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Good news for everyone who are interested in both, computing game history and game design as well. There is a Monkey Island wiki, complete dedicated to Lucasarts Monkey Island games. As you can imagine they feature everything from the complete cast of all characters over the setting towards the people behind the games. We get to know mind-blowing, unforgettable quotes from the characters, like Elaine Marley, who said one time: "I... I can't. I'm washing my hair tonight."
Like on Wikipedia, you can edit and more interesting discuss each article. Same people ran the site "The World of Monkey Island", but discontinued it at the end of 2007. The wiki will be the replacement, although the World of Monkey Island site is still up. If you want to need to know anything about this games, just ask those people.
It's the mid of the month again, time for interesting content that did not found its way into this blog yet.
Very hot, just today I discovered a new netlabel via the great music-numblog. It's the netlabel Budabeats, self-acclaimed leading netlabel from Budapest. And if they will stay at the quality-level like the first two releases, there is no doubt that they will defend this title. Be prepared for some of the best lounge, jazz, trip-hop releases I've ever heard for free. Ninja-Tune? Better be prepared. My clear listening highlights are Jazz.zene from Kovacs and A Day in the Life from Crookram. If Tokyo-Dawn would still exist, they maybe would sign this.
Sarah Turbot on the Beam Wiki
I already announced on Eggshell Robotics two wonderful B.E.A.M. robotic-projects. The first one: B.E.A.M.-Wiki, a great resource collecting wisdom of manufacturing B.E.A.M.-robots. In that context I suggest the second site, a B.E.A.M.-bot website. Just look at this tiny creatures.
Via Phlow I came upon Berlin hiphop-artist Bruno Fortuno. Unfortunately with no really usable website, he spreads himself all over the web... MySpace, Strassen von Berlin and YouTube.
Seems that Berlin got humorous again. Also in my inbox was this also very obvious Berlin style funny cartoon. Right after the click.
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This is Direct Note Access from the Melodyne-Tool. I am not sure, if I didn't saw this tool already somewhere, I guess it was at a TV documentary showing the inside of any producers studio. This, let's say, promotional clip with that good music shows how to pretty easily bend and shift vocals. But now imagine really hard abuse to get interesting results, that sound somehow... new and fresh!
The maxYmizer overview.
Atari ST tracker maxYmizer got new features, that will be cool for people jamming or playing live with the Atari. It has support for polyphonic MIDI-input that enables recording of chords and complex, polyphonic melody-lines. It also spits out a clock-signal, that you can connect to other hardware devices. The Atari becomes a MIDI-control center, clocking other gear where you can tweak live-stuff and modulate things. This is good for live-sets.
Back in 2006 the maxYmizer-staff organized a chip-compo to get people going with their instrument. The compo is still available on the microdisco netlabel from Berlin.
Write code that nobody is able to understand, but still does compute - that could be one of the ways to understand "Esoteric Programming Languages". It is a term for languages that are not designed to be good at something or at least to be convenient. No, the reason for doing writing cryptical code like that is the very own sake of style of just being a little exquisite, extreme or to theoretically think about programming. Many are also meant as jokes. If you visit the wiki of esolangs.org you will find hundreds of total strange languages. Every madcap will find its own ways of enlightenment there. Probably the most famous of the esoteric programming languages is Brainfuck. I just compiled some languages that are extraordinary interesting or beauty in my eyes.
Continue reading "A Selection of Esoteric Programing Languages" »
One click to happiness. The 8bit-boy is a versatile, flash-based music-player, that let you play all the good module files (.mod) from the Amiga days again. You can embed the binary online at any site and feed the player with mod-files via XML - which is somehow a standard process to flashbased players at the moment. The 8-bit boy is written in ActionScript 3.0 and at Popforge you will also peek inside the souce-code if wanted. This cute little one will surely have a great career if people will use it to play such funky tunes like on the 8-bit boy website.
This is just a screener, go here.
[via]
The Blipfestival is in every mouth at the moment, so it seems to me. It feels a little bit like the chiptune-revolution has already begun. There are movies like "Reformat the Planet" that tell the story. But chipmusic is also nothing new. It exists for years now, but there were cultural shifts. The milestone of chipmusic of course is the C64 / NES range, that we all love to remember. But people and projects like the 8-bit peoples and the micromusic-community set new standards in performing, style and perception. This are the points where the chipmusic started to grow. Most recent, remarkable promising projects are the chip netlabels Pause and File Freakout that breathe exactly the same air.
Micromusic
Chipmusic was also always international. And invisible: it was music for freaks. I am curious if this will change. At least the Blipfestival made its point, set a new standard in live-performing and stage-visuals. Unfortunately I've never been there, or in the small clubs all over the world where the new revolution began. But bands like the Japaneese YMCK totally blast my way.
YMCK - Tetrominon
This are hot news, at least for me. Until now I did not know, that Apple had another design for their logo. It was made by Ron Wayne and unfortunately (or in luck) did not meet viable criteria for good logo design: to tricky to communicate clear and to be easily reproduced and recognized and was - referring to the English Wikipedia site - almost immediately replaced. Most interesting is the reference to Isaac Newtons groundbreaking recovery of the gravity force, where the apple played a central role in it. At least I am glad that they made a new logo, because for me the apple logo is one of the most remarkably and beautiful logos that was ever made and used.
(Logo taken from Wikipedia).
It's the mid of the month again, time for a sum-up of the interesting things I found last month that somehow did not found its way into this blog yet.
This time it will be an issue with music, but first...Take a look at this highly recommended reading on 20 Underused Game-Mechanics. This one is for people seeking out some inspiration on how to control games. I think this will fall under the topic "Game Theory and Practice".
Soothing, relaxing videos. Trance spirit and quite minimal video aesthetics. If I see it right than this made with any cool Apple visualizer plug in and therefore preset funk. Anyway, it does unfold their magic. Take the deep dive at NM's YouTube site.
Magical, magical circuitry and music ahead at this one: Paris/Voltage Controlled with minimal visual glitches on portable gaming devices and a looping addictive soundtrack. This is my personal pick of the month.
Lofi aesthetics from Italy. Just happy with a game of life implementation and other goodness on the C64. Music is also with vocoder and well, this all gets very strange.
Scene from original Dark Castle on the Apple Computer
I had a really good bliss at this article about Dark Castle and the remake of it at fine weblog The Artful Gamer, and I still consider getting deeper into this topic by dedicating an own article to it.
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X-Dump is a sideproject from the hard rocking chipmusician Psilodump. It's a collective of electronic musicians from Sweden, that are in a way dedicated to pushing beats and chipmusic-style. Paza Rahm from the X-Dump collective has released an album "And his Gummiband", of which we are going to watch the videoclip "Jhonny the Owl's Big Break". It has this somehow special poetry.
Ronski Polski is the moniker of Ronnie Deelen who originally comes from the Netherlands, but for somehow reason studied in Poland at the Art Academy in Katowice. His style is playful, combining tactile interfaces, graphic design and illustration with 8- and 16-bit sound from devices like Game Boy and Casio VL1, Mattel Synsonic Drummachine and an Electric Kazoo. This video here (see below) shows a live-performance in the new art building in Katowice: the "Rondo Sztuki" (Art Roundabout). Please notice the music and the colorful visuals he makes with two other guys under the moniker RGBoy. This clear style (the 8-bit guys nowadays know how to get into mastering...!), clean melody lines and driving, unrushed beats - I simply like it.
Notice Ronski Polski's diploma work, where he merged dolls, illustration, performance, computer-based visuals and hardware music into a colorful something. He's got a myspace, too.
The demogroup Kewlers made a remarkable demo, that is called "Aesterozoa". This is best andromeda-style and I like the dense atmosphere, as well as the continuous transitions. You can watch Aesterozoa video here.
Mfx did in cooperation with the Kewlers another interesting production, that is Vorticity. You can watch Vorticity video here.
[via]
KZero, a company specialized in consulting and research on virtual worlds, released a first version of a map showing the number of users and the age of specific user groups of the virtual worlds. As you can see, Second Life is suited for people over thirteen years, as well as the Habbo Hotel, that one for kids, got far the most users (source: January 2008). KZero also have a metaverse growth forecast besides other interesting things.
A small, but fun work. Used colored html-table tags to generate pixel-artwork. I think the source-code - result ratio is not very efficient, but at least you can do it. This reminds me of an older work, I've seen from Danielle Aubert. This also dealt with tables, but in Microsofts Excel. Also tables, also colorful work.
Partly [via]
