A 20m mixtape, featuring excerpts from my recent collection of weird tales:

1. calma voces v.01
2. fallos v.01
3. la hechicera v.02
4. pequeña maquina v.01
5. dispersion vectores v.03
6. ruidos extraños v.01
7. transmigracion planetaria v.02

Stats of the Union tells health stories in America.

Sound Cells – Universal iOS App Creates Generative Music.

Aphonium – App Creates Generative Audio and Visuals.

SunVox – Multiplatform Modular Music Creation Studio.

Surprise Surveillance Theater: An Experimental Drama with Unwitting Stars.

Japanese artist Eiji Watanabe cuts butterflies out of printed field guides and sets them free, covering the walls and ceilings of installation spaces.

15 Shopping Rules of Thumb.

Every individual needs emotional and intellectual support from her creative tribe to sustain a positive, thriving and aspiring practice.

Hidden is an app that lets you spy on the person who may have stolen you laptop.

Urban Quiver camera bag from Blackstone Bags.

The Silent Stars is my “side-project” for exploring (slightly) different directions in music. El libro principal is a “concept album” featuring granular synthesis, microsound tone colors and freeform arrangements. These pieces are my take on post-ambient space music using modern digital methods; an homage to the early electronic music pioneers, post-prog-rock instrumentalists, early New Wave synthesists and proto-New Age experimentalists of my youth.

Production Notes

Granular synthesis and microsound techniques were used for sound generation. Sources include: flute, harp; strings; toy instruments; vinyl records; elementary sound waveforms and more.

Density GS and Pulsaret instruments were the primary instruments. Arrangement, mixing and mastering was done with Ableton Suite. Processing effects were limited to resonant filters, grain delay, reverb and EQ.

Track listing

El libro principal

1. cadenas v.01 – 06m56s
2. el enlace v.01 – 08m53s
3. grana fina v.02 – 09m21s
4. piscinas v.01 – 09m40s
5. s’arpa v.01 – 07m02s
6. masa brillante v.02 – 20m57s

el libro principal by The Silent Stars

Check out the Asian Film Archive and European Film Archives.

Visual analysis of ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

Interacting with Inner and Outer Sonic Complexity: from Microsound to Soundscape Composition (video).

Meditation Correlated With Structural Changes In The Brain.

Using Bamboo to Fight Climate Change.

Digital Video Fragments, Flowing as if Liquid: A Chat with Robert Seidel.

Soda carbonation solutions for home.

Mapping human development in America.

Immersive videogames make players feel like their best selves. Why not give them real problems to solve?

Study: To Cut Emissions, Cut Parking Spots.

Music Control Meets Web Code Goodness: App for iOS, Soon OSC+MIDI Everywhere?

A Simpler Page: designing for tablets.

Create your own generative art with Silk.

Twitter’s response to WikiLeaks subpoena should be the industry standard.

Social networks create their own regional dialects.

The mysteries of kisses.

Musical chills related to brain dopamine release.

How to pick the perfect brand name.

Composer Howard Goodall takes us on a journey into music’s underbelly, examining the four basic elements that make it work: Melody, rhythm, harmony and bass (video).

A box truck Is just a room on wheels: scenes from San Francisco’s (secret) Lost Horizon Night Market.

Once a rumor, now fact: CIA used modern art as propaganda weapon.

Wikileaks and the Long Haul by Clay Shirky.

Meet the most dangerous man in cyberspace: The American face of Wikileaks.

Ben Fry, the other co-founder of Processing, on  “Computational Information Design” (video)

Emily Pilloton’s TED Talk,  Teaching design for change (video)

“Silent Evolution” builds a beautiful coral reef from statues.

Terms you need to understand for a record contract.

I haven’t posted a Processing sketch in more than a year. So, here’s the recent sketch_2010_09_27_shard02.

Oxo Good Grips Designers Take on Tablet Magazines.

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

Apple to xplatform developers: We’re no longer suicidal.

Create Your Own Virtual Instruments With Maize Sampler v2.0.

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer: eat organic, drink filtered water, avoid plastic containers.

Dear nerd, start a nerd sash with nerd merit badges (nerd).

SKTCH is an interesting generative drawing iPhone app.

This DIY interface (YouTube) is impressive, but it just seems like buttons and sliders replicated on a touchscreen. I’d like to see such devices make use of true multi-touch gestures, such as pinch/expand, twist/rotate, 2/3/4-finger swipes and so on to control sound. Instead of yet another controller app (e.g. a bigger version of TouchOSC or an affordable Lemur-clone), I’ve been wanting to use musicmaking apps optimized for the mobile experience—perhaps a basic version of Live (incl. Impulse, Simpler and Analog instruments with a handful of essential midi and audio effects) or Propellerheads Rebirth for writing tracks. Something that could work as a standalone audio sketch pad, with the ability to transfer projects to the desktop version for further work. I started putting together a mock-up using screen grabs from Live before coming to a realization:

Rather than merely porting existing software to mobile versions, it’s important to examine the mental models that dominate the desktop. Most of the more popular audio suites are based on the recording studio-in-a box model, where the signals (midi info, audio from guitar, voice, synth, drums, whatever) are fed through a virtual mixing desk, using inline and outboard effects and processors, to be recorded in loops or longer segments before being placed in an arrangement to mix-down and master. Apple’s Logic Studio, Propellerhead’s Reason, Steinberg’s Cubase Studio and others are variations on this mental model.

Ableton Suite is my weapon-of-choice because of its flexible, on-the-fly, semi-modular approach that can be adapted to varying needs: looseness vs. precision, improvisation vs. control, performance vs. planning. Plugins and updates bring new instruments and effects, and endless routing and importing options make Live an audio ourobouros. Max for Live builds on this, with new resources for generating, shaping and routing signals, but Live’s clips>tracks>session>arrangement>mixdown>master>render model is still a largely traditional structure (albeit for me the best-of-all-possible-worlds for composing, performing and recording). Max is another side of this spectrum, where building blocks can be created, changed and arranged as needed in a virtual instrument/studio.

Most of the mobile musicmaking apps I’ve used so far (BeatMaker, 8Bitone, technoBox) shrink this virtual studio to the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch. They use virtual buttons and sliders for controls, sometimes spanning multiple screens. Several apps, though, show promise for emerging mental models, including SynthPond and Brian Eno’s Bloom and Trope. SynthPond’s affecters, reactors and orbits lend themselves to non-linear, interactive compositions. I imagine it would be a lot of fun to use on the iPad’s larger screen, esp. with new objects for generating, reacting, processing and moving sounds. Eno’s dynamic, generative pieces work well as apps, because they change and evolve rather than remain fixed to a certain textural arrangement on CD or MP3. These apps are systems for composing and generating music/sounds/spaces/moods and point the way for the possibilities of the iPad and beyond. Artists/composers/developers/companies/organizations that rethink the mental models with which we create and experience music will lead the way on these new and future devices.

I’ve been exploring Max for Live and my new monome grayscale 64 using Stretta’s MFL Monome Suite and thought I would share some of the results. Max For Live/Monome experiments (31:00min, 51 MB MP3) is an aimless mix of four different pieces I’ve been working on:

1. Slim demo, slightly eerie and broken
2. Silver Keys demo, distorted and glitchy
3. Monome jam session, starts overly busy but finds its groove halfway through before finding maximum chill
4. Spectral Drone demo, a cinematic space drone

A new year brings a bounty of hope—for new attitudes, new projects, new directions. In the past year, my intentions were to play more live shows and focus on finishing select tracks to my satisfaction. Mission accomplished.

Rather than make predictions or resolutions, here are some of the things on my plate and/or on the horizon for the year ahead (not all related to this site, FWIW): taking delivery of a blinky, new monome grayscale 64; composing generative pieces using Nodal, Ableton Suite 8 and Max for Live; finishing up a new EP for commercial release; posting more free podcast mixes; turning my generative sketches into fully interactive works; selling original prints and artwork; reading J.G. Ballard‘s complete works and making a dent in my reading list; devoting more time to my Geometry Studio, Sympathy for the Robots and The Silent Stars projects; developing some ideas into a viable, sustainable business; brewing some homemade beer; eating fresh, local cuisine; staying more plugged in and chilled out. Opa!

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party (video).

Why do we often care more about imaginary characters than real people? A new book suggests that fiction is crucial to our survival as a species.

Everything Tracy Jordan Said in Season 3 of 30 Rock.

Danger Mouse to release blank CD after record label EMI reportedly cancelled his new album.

The coming wave of cellphone novels, Twitter fiction, sudden fiction, and flash fiction.

How using gestures can make you smarter.

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell.

Yudo announces 8Bitone Retro 8-bit Synthesizer + Sequencer for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Here’s another recent sketch in Processing. This one has decidedly more visual complexity, with additional shapes and some white hatch lines for erosion. FWIW, I think it looks better at 1280×960 resolution. View sketch_april28_comp_Screen1.

The different kinds of people that there are. Funny.

If the newspapers think they’re such hot shit, they should make their own Hulu and stop whining.

A long, rambly exploration of the state of computing with no real conclusion…, by Steven Frank of Panic software.

U2′s Linear is a short-film to accompany their latest release. Yay, Anton Corbijn.

A court rules your MySpace page isn’t private. So, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want published in your home town newspaper without your consent.

Ten graphic design paradoxes.

Paul Frank’s partnership with Bugaboo = two great tastes that go great together.

Denon’s new DP-200USB turntable rips vinyl straight to MP3; no computer required to record and encode, just to edit.

The secrets of making a vinyl record (video).

The secret, social lives of bacteria; they talk to one-another.

Top 10 Myths About Freelancers.

Free Nodal Generative Sequencer, now multi-platform.

I have been creating some new sketches in Processing. This sketch combines basic lines, bezier curves and triangles in a number of different ways. It’s still procedural code (running in a linear loop, as oppossed to object oriented, which I haven’t had time to explore), so I slowed down the frameRate() to be more viewable. Not every frame is a winner, but some are keepers, at least in my book. You can download the source code and uncomment the saveFrames() function to render the images to your computer. View sketch_march23_comp_Screen. More stills are in my Processing set on Flickr.

Be a Music Geek Ninja with Electronic Music Programming in Pd. We heart Pd, because it’s open source—though perpetually on our To Learn list.

Wacom Intros New DJ Touch-Sensitive Nextbeat Consoles: looks sweet.

Tea Cup Stool: want.

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier gives his vision of the challenges facing society because of technology.

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News, by Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air and Everything Bad is Good for You.

How to Switch from Personal to Business Branding, because you know, you might want to take a day off or sell your company and retire some day.