VJ Heaven

Lyrics video of Snow Patrol’s Hands Open, 2006.

A look a 7-channel video installation by Dave Greber with contributions from Katie Gelfand, Jacob Edwards, Roel Miranda and Matthew Holdren. At the Front, in New Orleans, Louisiana, March 12-April 4th, 2011. camera by Phil Rached Edit by Dave Greber

Our favourite New Zealand band, The Opensouls, demonstrate the recording features of Scratch LIVE and show how to integrate them into a live performance. Also, how to beat match, change tracks without touching your computer, set cue points and more. Ace video!

Open Souls, a live hip-hop act show off the wicked awesome capabilities Of Rane/Serato Scratch Live. A vinyl manipulated mp3 tracking program that eliminates crates and crates of records. That’s what’s up.

On February 9, the highly anticipated Pip Android is going live.

If you’ve been waiting for the “real deal” then mark your calendar and make sure you are first in line for this one…

Here’s why I’m so excited about Pip Android –

It’s been built by some of the most successful Forex traders in the business.  Pip Android has been trained to exactly mimic these guy’s trading strategies.
It’s a Ninja at finding successful trades in every market condition – Currency Pairs don’t matter….volatility doesn’t matter….it profits no matter what!
It’s tailor made for beginners that don’t want to fuss with complicated algorithms and installation hassles
It’s easily configured for “large scale” trading – making Pip Android a must have forprofessional traders

Here’s the deal though…

This is going to be a big-time launch.  Hundreds of the most influential Forex experts will tell their people about Pip Android.  So thousands will be checking it out on February 9.

It will be debuting at great introductory price, but I bet that price will get increased pretty quickly.  So I strongly recommend that you plan on camping out on this site on February 9, and hitting the refresh button until it goes live.

==> Visit Official Pip Android Website

Pip Android has a pretty impressive live trading record.  You’ll be able to examine the proof for yourself on launch day.  The rumor is that it’s doubling account balances every single month.

==> Read Full Pip Android Review

An introduction to Android Open Source Project. Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications. Learn more at source.android.com.

velosynth release#001 from velosynth on Vimeo.

Bicycle transport is cheap, environmentally sound, and quiet – a little too quiet. Since bikes don’t make noise, it can be difficult to hear them coming. And since a bicyclist should be focused on the road, any visual feedback to the bicyclist is potentially distracting. What’s the solution? How about a box that easily straps to a bike and makes sounds? Sounds can provide feedback to pedestrians, fellow cyclists, and other people sharing the road. They can also make distraction-free sonification of data the cyclist might want, as opposed to requiring that a rider take their eyes off the road to read a display. Using network features, you can even communicate amongst a crowd of cyclists.

The Velosynth is an open-source (Creative Commons-licensed), hackable sound gadget that attaches to a bike. To measure speed and acceleration (essential for making vroom-vroom-style sounds when the bike is in motion), the device uses a magnet and sensor combination on the wheel. There’s also a three-axis accelerometer, built-in amp, and Arduino-compatible brain. You can buy the device as a US$100 kit or get a pre-assembled device.

EFFALO, despite the silly and tongue-in-cheek video, are a serious “hyperlocal” maker of new designs to explore interaction, environments, and DIY hardware and fabrication. The group is based in Portland, Oregon, and includes monome community regular Michael Felix, aka “%.”

The EFFALO crew aren’t just looking for publicity, though; they hope that they can get help, including bright ideas for how to make this project useful, from hackers, designers, and musicians. The Kickstarter project they’ve started isn’t just a beg for money, either – it’s effectively a preorder page for kits for hackers or pre-built devices for non-hackers. A few kits are left, though I expect they won’t last very long after this post.

The potential of a bike-mounted synth also shows how transformative mobile sound synthesis can be. Sure, today’s digital synths aren’t far removed from those available twenty or thirty years ago. But whereas early synths required big budgets and big rooms, making them useful to sound studios or academic research facilities but not much else, sound today can be a commodity. Just as with the display, mobile sound synthesis may have uses far beyond just making unusual music. (That’s why yesterday’s mention of batteries wasn’t just a random post.)

Case in point: Velosynth isn’t alone. Electric cars face a similar challenge; their silent operation means that producing synthesized sound becomes a safety feature. That issue appeared just last week on the superb design blog core77:
An update on “vroom tones” for electric cars

Of course, unlike conventional motors, it’s possible to actually design the sounds transport methods make. That can mean producing sounds that are less disturbing to neighbors and that are simultaneously more effective for localizing where the vehicle is relative to the listener. Another project to watch: the makers of the upcoming OP-1 synth by Teenage Engineering have also engineered an electric bicycle, meaning some sort of interaction between the bike and the synth is possible.

All the details on Velosynth:
http://velosynth.com/

For more tunes by %, check out virb.com/owneroperator

Previous posts on the relationship between bikes and electronic music:
Music Sequencing as Bicycle Wheels, Rubik’s Cubes at Fest in Argentina

Maker Faire: Giant Bicycle-Part DJ Looping Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck

Music for Bicycles: Ensembles, Symphonies, and Bikelophones

Nutcracker Suite Played Exclusively on Bicycle Parts

More Musical Mayhem, Instant Art with Bicycles

View full post on Create Digital Music

The explosion of interest in filtering out sounds of the vuvuzela has spawned some interesting discussions. Most amusing to me is the notion of some sort of anti-vuvuzela bias. The simple matter of the fact is, recorded (and broadcast) sound are not the same as the sound you hear when you’re physically in a location. If you’re at a sporting event, you hear all kinds of noise. Your expectations are differently calibrated, and you have 360 degrees of (real world) sound spatialization. Watching TV is different. You want background sound, yes, but not to the point that it drowns out commentary. In effect, you want the broadcaster to create an artificially well-balanced soundscape. What’s really striking about the World Cup is that the planet’s largest broadcasting companies all seem to have been caught unprepared for the vuvuzela cacophony.

Which brings us to Waves. So, yes, I took some cheap shots at Waves’ pricing on their plug-ins in yesterday’s massive round-up, and yes, I did actually … hear about it.

First, I want to be clear that in the avalanche of responses to the vuvuzela, there are a number of different techniques – not all notch filtering, though, as my headline hinted, the fact that “notch filtering” is a phrase coming up in mainstream media, blogs, and sports coverage is itself newsworthy.

Waves’ approach involves their noise suppressor. What I said about pricing may have been unclear in regards to the presets: the custom-developed preset chain, made by Waves for broadcasters (and apparently in collaboration with one, specific broadcaster Waves has not named), is entirely free. The cost to which I referred is the noise suppressor itself (US$2900) and the parametric EQ ($300).

And no apologies here for pointing out the gap: compared to most audio software, $2900 is indeed a lot to pay for a plug-in. One of the strange things about audio is that there are sort of parallel dimensions of value/cost equations and markets. In this case, I’m sure the broadcasting market is absolutely willing to pay $2900 for audio software – looking at the cost of, say, a World Cup license, the cost of the equipment used for that broadcast, the human hours that go into plug-in development, and the limited number of potential broadcast customers, Waves’ pricing is actually pocket change. But that further illustrates the disparity: it’s pocket change to the BBC or ESPN, whereas an individual, home audio producer might well use tools that are entirely free as an alternative.

Waves isn’t even, as [someone] pointed out to me, the pricey end of that spectrum – not by a longshot. France’s Canal+ hired an entirely private commission to do what, for Waves customers, at least, was free. [article in French] The result: a non-TDM custom effect solution from a local developer with what was likely a very, very high price tag.

But you can also judge this for yourself: if you’re curious to try out the Waves solution, both WNS and Q10 provide a 7-day demo. It’s definitely the posh steakhouse of plug-ins, to the “street vendor sausage cart” alternatives I mentioned. Pricing is economics, not a quantification of value – such is the nature of the beast. But you can determine how much that market-driven pricing translates to the software. What Waves gives you is certainly a friendly interface, some sophisticated tools tailored to the task, and what’s likely, out of the box, to come closest to producing broadcast-quality sound. Naturally, I also think that delivering that broadcast-quality sound ought to be the job of the broadcasters, not someone at home with a TV set. The question of which tools are relevant for music production, rather than covering the World Cup with an entire network TV crew, can be saved for another day.

While we’re clarifying, I think the most interesting of the long list of solutions I mentioned, apart from Waves’ solution, is the plug-in from the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary, University of London. Dan Stowell notes that, while some of the other techniques mentioned do indeed involve notch filtering, what’s at work here is “a bit cleverer, kind of tuned median-filter.”

The C4DM plug is truly free software, under an MIT-style, open source license. It’s actually a pleasure to browse through the code – bless you, digital signal processing, as mathematically, tasks like this look pretty readable in C and C-style code. No, such things aren’t comparable to, say, a Waves plug-in. At the same time, at their heart, they are fundamentally the same animal. We’ve seen this basic technique (digital signal processing) packaged in wildly different forms. We have academic research centers, which one might argue should engage in open code if they’re publicly funded. We have free code that comes from people who aren’t in academia. We also have businesses that naturally spawn around catering to a very different customer, for whom value is easy to justify given the potential revenue from the product (a sports broadcast), and who likewise have higher expectations of user interface, real-world performance, and support.

But such is the broad spectrum (ahem) of sound software today. Take something as simple as filtering out a drone at a particular frequency, and you see a broad set of potential uses, an audience literally as large as the entire planet’s sports fans, tools on every conceivable platform and operating system, and markets that range from interested academic researchers and programmers to broadcasters with deep pockets.

All over a cheap plastic horn.

It’s a reminder of all kinds of disparities. There’s the economics of sound software, scaling from hobbyist to academia to business, from code that people give away to highly-priced custom services that make Waves plug-ins look like $2 iPhone apps. But more important than that, while specialization in sound software remains the domain of a tiny niche of society, but the ultimate market – human ears – is in the billions. Perhaps while we hide out in our blogs and trade magazines, we forget that.

View full post on Create Digital Music

Wikipedia notes that the Google Android is a mobile operating system that makes use of a modified version of the Linux kernel.  It was originally developed by Android Inc., a firm and later purchased by Google and the Open Handset Alliance.  The Google Android will allow developers to create managed code in Java language in order to manage the device via Google-developed Java libraries.

Initially, the Google Android was  developed by Andorid Inc.  Android Inc., was then purchased by the Open Handset Alliance and Google.  Google-developed Java libraries allows developers to write managed code in Java language.
In November of 2007 the Google Android was first released by the Open Handset Alliance.  The “Alliance” is basically made up of 47 hardware, software and telecom companies dedicated to the Android platform..  This alliance is committed to advancing the open standards for mobile devices..  Most of the Android code has been said to be debude under the Apache license.  As stated earlier, the Google Android is equally open source and free.  A very unique and strategic move on Google’s part.  

Mobile phones incorporating the Google platform can look forward to a comprehensive set of software which comes with an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications that can be tweaked to suit the end user.

The Googles Androids was constructed from the ground floor.  This process makes it possible for designers to produce those mobile functions that  take full advantage of everything a mobile device can offer.  Creating the Google Droid from the bottom up is said to be pure open source. Any  device incorporating this application can make use of any of the phone’s principal functionalities.  These functions incorporate yet aren’t restricted to making calls, sending text messages or utilizing a camera.  In short, the open source makes it possible for developers to design a richer and more cohesive experiences for end users.   

Now if that is not sufficient, the Google Android utilizes a custom virtual mechanism that  was designed to optimize both memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment.  As the Google Android is open source; it will possibly be generously extended to integrate new innovative technologies as they emerge. This Android platform will continue to get better as the developer community innovates fresh ways of utilizing mobile devices.

THE GOOGLE ANDROID:  All devices are alleged to be created alike in  terms of the Google Android.

The Google Android platform  creates no distinction involving the phone’s fundamental features and third-party applications.  In fact, they could all be designed to share evenly in the phone’s capabilities.  This characteristic permits users to make use of a broad spectrum of services and devices. Getting phones developed upon the Android platform, consumers possess the capability to tailor their phone to fulfill their special requirements. Altering the phone’s home screen as an illustration from Google to Opera or Yahoo.  The shape of the dialer can also be changed to any of the devices. End users can even target their phones to utilize their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photographs.

A great number of cellular phone fans argue that the Google Androids is tearing down conventional application boundaries.  Breaking down these boundaries contributes to novel and modern phones.   A developer, for example, can blend information from the web on to an individual’s mobile phone with precise information.  This data can be shaped in terms of a user’s contacts, weather, stocks, calender and even their geographic location.  In the long run, the ability to tailor and end user’s skill make using this device more significant to each individual.  Visualize being able to create an application that will let you know when your child arrives in school, when they head for home and their eta.  Picture in addition if you would like to keep in touch regarding a client who is traveling to your city or workplace.  You’ll in fact watch their movement with your Google Android based device phone.

In terms of the development of applications for the Google Android, the platform is designed to be fully accessible.    For example, Google’s Android provides immediate access to a host of libraries and tools that can be exploited in terms of building rich applications. Only time will tell how many, how varied and how innovative these applications will be.