VJ Heaven

This is the second segment from a 5 week online course, Developing Android Applications with Java. In this segment, instructor Tony Hillerson builds a simple Flashlight app to get you started building apps. To purchase the full online course, visit oreilly.com

Live from the HTC/Vodafone launch event, Noah gets a hands-on demo of the new HTC Magic. The second Google Android phone is slimmer than G1, and has no physical keyboard. It’s a Vodafone exclusive for now, and is running the new “Cupcake” build of the Android OS. MORE MWC 2009 @ www.phonedog.com MORE Android @ www.phonedog.com

Guitarist Joey Mariano is making a unique hybrid sound, blending guitar chops with sonic techniques borrowed from 8-bit chip music. His latest adventure filters the sound of the guitar through pulse width filtering, the likes of which are used to modulate the sound of pulse/rectangle waves in chip music composition.

The invention he’s devised to do this, though, is likely to appeal to anyone wanting to work with CV. Using the Arduino platform, it’s an elegant design for a control voltage sequencer, as seen on classic modulars like the Moog. And since he’s posted full specs and Arduino code, you could easily build one yourself – the design is efficient enough that it wouldn’t make a bad intermediate build.

Joey tells CDM, “It’s just a little CV sequencer, but it adds a lot of depth to the chipmusic guitar sound i’m trying to develop. It’s a really simple device, but some of your readers might find it interesting and $$ saving if they have some compatible analog gear.”

More detailed description of the project, and helpful contributors:

Thanks to Vblank and Batsly Adams for their help. Vblank gave me some programming lessons and Batsly helped me choose the correct components to use.

http://www.waitforvblank.com
http://www.batslyadams.com

Thanks to Bucky from http://youtube.com/explod2A03 for being my camera man on this one.

Thanks to Part Time (my cat) for trying to get into every video i post. …gives me chiptune street cred yo.

This a CV sequencer i built (with an arduino microcontroller). It Sequences the pulse width of my guitar. I got the idea from tracking (composing) in famitracker, LSDJ and Goattracker. When you compose for the NES or the Gameboy, there are tons of effects you can choose from to make square waves more complex and interesting sounding. So, once i saw that the Pulsemonger pedal had a CV input for the pulsewidth i had to buy it. There are a couple reasons i built this with an arduino: I wanted to make it expandable. In the future, I may add some tap tempo functionality or i thought maybe it might be fun to actually hook the sequencer up to my Gameboy (through the linker port) so the sequencing would happen in relation to the tempo of the song i’m playing.

Full details, specs, code:
http://filefreakout.com/animalstyle/?page_id=880
http://animal-style.com

View full post on Create Digital Music

This past week Google’s developer’s conference was one of the first demos of the Android mobile phone operating system.  Announced last year by the Open Handset Alliance, a group of mobile phone manufacturers and software houses who want to have one unilateral platform for all mobile phones to run on Android looks to be one of the most interesting revolutions in the Mobile phones market.

Being developed by Google the phones are highly likely to blend well with other Google-ware like the popular Maps service and Google Mail service.  The stand out feature is that the operating system is being designed to run on a wide range of mobile phones regardless of their feature set.  In a similar way to how PC operating systems are made to work on a wide range of computers with varying specifications Android will take advantage of specific phone features such as built in GPS and touch screen interfaces.

This past week had the operating system running on a touch screen unnamed handset and it was sporting a number of new features since it was last shown off earlier in the year.  One exciting feature was how the handset was unlocked; the user had to draw a specific shape on the touch screen to unlock the keypad.  Another feature took advantage of the GPS function by having an on screen compass which had been tried on other handsets such as the GPS enabled S60 phones offered by Nokia but attendees said the example shown by Google seemed to work much more fluidly than other attempts.

The decision to show off the software at their developers conference was obviously to entice the collective minds into coming up with some ideas for possible applications for their operating system, with it being open-source software, a factor popular with the programming masses, it looks promising that any mobile phones sporting Android’s operating system would have a lot to offer the stale mobile phones market.

Obviously a lot of comparisons were made between the software and Apple’s stand out mobile phone the iPhone, the interface seemed to bear some of the Apple hallmarks such as saving Youtube links as icons on the main screen and a touch based interface.

The Android operating system is currently nearing completion with handset manufacturers Motorola, HTC and Samsung all volunteering to use Android on their forth-coming mobile phones in the next year.