Trumpet Hero
Trumpet Hero exists, courtesy of MAKE magazine:
I will marry with great glee whoever hacks together bassoon hero.
Novelties
I hate the word “novel”. Scientists are obsessed with it. Not in the bookish sense, in the “like wow, that’s totally crazy” sense (which is how scientists talk). To give you an idea of how often it’s used, there are over 380,000 papers containing that word on PubMed (an index of US life-sciences papers) ALONE. That doesn’t include papers from physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. Novel this, novel that. Everything is freakin’ novel. It’s not an “unusual” enzyme, or a “creative” technique, they are “novel”. Eugh. I can’t stand it.
This rant (I think, I’ve completely sidetracked myself now) came from that being the first word which got all up in my grill when trying to discuss the following two… atypical… ways of interacting with sounds.
This is Visible Sound from the design group (whatever that is) with the appropriately pretentious name SOUNDS.BUTTER. It sews sounds. Well, their waveform anyway.
And then we have….
Which uses a handheld scanner to play notes which seem to (loosely) correspond to squiggles scribbled on a piece of illuminated paper.
Any more of this kinda thing out there? If I find about seven of them I can do one of those link-whoring list posts.
Bevel My Edges Baby
Audiophiles, do you find the musical fidelity of your CDs lacking? Does your soul yearn for the pure analog joy of the wax cylinder? Perhaps the problem is that your CDs are not circular enough. But take courage! For a shade under a G you can amend this horrible affliction, and start enjoying life again.
Yep. Eine Deutsche company called Audio Desk is selling these sweet babies for the not-a-rip-off-at-all sum of $899. The device uses a sharpened tungsten carbide blade — no wait, burin; blades are for cheapskates — to bevel nothing less than a perfect 36 degree angle onto the edge of your discs. This minimizes light scatter which of course results in “pronounced improvements in focus, transient attack, detail and transparency”.
Personally, my focus is pretty tight, but I always suspected my transient attack was awry. Well, not any more, at a price like that I can afford one for every one of my mansions.
“I built this machine…”
I love machine/music hybrids. It satisfies my mechanical, geeky, physics-PhD side while also socking it to the right-cortex. Physical parts are hot. Cogs, exposed mechanisms, gears… oh my. This guy — a street performer in Bath, the beautiful town next-door to Bristol, the city of my undergrad days — combines both with a semi-automatic guitar accompaniment to his fiddling:
I built this machine
because of unreliable guitarists
It don’t smoke!
It don’t drink!
And it’s never late.
The Lancaster Musical Road is No More
Have you ever heard of the musical road in Lancaster, CA?
Well that roadspeed-dependent rendition of William Tell is sadly no more. It was disturbing the local residents with it’s repetitive and unbearably out-of-tune musical emissions, according to an article in the local paper. According to our youtube comments on the above video from locals sources:
So the city council meeting was this evening, and demolition of the road started this morning at around 7am. I spoke at the meeting about the road, expressing my concern about how quickly they were to get rid of it, and was told that reason they moved so quickly was because of safety concerns regarding all of the u-turns. When I asked how many car accidents had actually occured on the road as a result of u-turns, i was told by Mayor Paris, “Well, none”
Oh well. There goes another neat — but perhaps poorly executed — piece of creativity. At least we can still drop by the one in Japan…