Les Arcs 1800

The alps was awesome, indescribably so... I have finally managed to upload a slide show of the mountains and beautiful scenery that was on show. The music accompanying is the only song I listened to while skiing, and (for me) was the soundtrack to my trip :)

Arduino - First Project

Got my Arduino this week, as inspired my the Maker Faire at the Newcastle Science festival. Needed to save penny and have a friday night it, so stayed in and made it work. Got a 16-way rotary switch and a line of 5 LED's and made a kind of Christmas Lights arrangement, selectable patterns. Flexing my electronic and C basic skills.

Tomorrow might be a nice day and warrant a walk up Pendel, if not, have to see if I can't get my stepper motor working :)

Glade 2010

Spotify playlist of the Glade 2010 artists, as informed by their press release dated Wed 17th March 2010!

Foures into electronics

Inspired by this years Maker Faire (and the nature of my job) sees me needing to make a decicive move towards understanding a bit more of electronics. An Arduino has been ordered, and I have been inspired to design and build a musical instrument, using an aluminium bowl, a bag of ball bearings and a few stepper moters I have liberated of an old dot matrix printer from the warehouse at work. The sad thing is, it seems like I am a few decades too late. Getting microelectronic parts that aren't surface mount or £5 delivery charge seems nearly impossible. I went to Maplins for a bag of transistor, and they only had 4!! This is a shame, cause it means people are going to find it hard in the comming years to get into electronics, meaning all hardware development will be taken abroad, just like every other industry we have ever had! Yikes!

Damn Studio

The problem with recording in a studio that have over 100ms latency, is at first, you do not notice it, and you play correctly to the click, or backing tack. Then after a while, your subconscious takes over and begins to allow you to play slightly behind so that the instrument you are playing sounds in time with the rest of the music. The end result is a take that is half in one time and half in another (or in other words, Out of time). As far as I can see, without different recording /studio techniques this is unavoidable... Meaning everything recorded in a studio suffering latency will always be a little bit crap....

Damn Studio!

Matter is Clever

If gravity is exerted by all matter, and gravity is a form of energy, then in accordance with the conservation of energy rule, then where does matter get the energy from to convert into gravity!?

Generative Music

Why is all generative music all so horrid. When you are wandering around in a morning and you hear the dawn chorus, it sounds awesome. Is not all it is a series of musical phrases that are triggered for enviromental reasons (seemingly at random). Why is that case does generative music not sound awesome. I can't decide wether it has to do with the complexity of the over all system, or the interplay of the phrases within each system, or is it just because birds are analouge and not digital.
The dawn chorus contains all birds, supposedly, singing at the tops of their lungs like crazy. In that case they are not listening to each other and responding, so in that respect, there is no intellegence going on. All the little bird does is pump it's little songs out as much as possible... If a generative peice of music was written that did this it would sound awefull and cocofanous.
Maybe then, the dawn chorus actually is cacophanous, and we have just gotten used to it?

NOTE: In trying to find an audiosample of the dawn chorus for this blog, I became slightly distracted and found somthing even better. THIS, is a sample found on a website with the followin description "Lightning whistlers propagating in the magnetosphere. Lightning-generated whistlers came into regular use as remote probes of the radial distribution of electron density in the Earth's geomagnetic equatorial plane."