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Fairly Hot Friday Linkage

July 17th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in music, non music, technology

Typing sounds

Instrumental edition. To keep the eye you aren’t pretending to do work with entertained we have for your internetting pleasure….

  • The BeoTime alarm clock — homing in like a laser-sighted jaguar on that group of  people whose love for woodwinds is only slightly surpassed by the huge piles of money lying around their castle. Yours for a tad under four-hundred smackaroos.
  • A woodier woodwind – Like the arboreal George Mallory, this guy had an inextinguishable urge to get all homnidy with what nature had provided. Unlike Mallory this meant wiring up a tree in his backyard and then bowing the crap out of it.
  • Playing the black keys – If, like the NYPD, you are finding it hard to relinquish the mechanical ball of joy which is your typewriter AND your wax-cylinder gramophone is currently in the shop for repairs then this musical typewriter might be just what the old-timey doctor ordered. Then again, if you enjoy your music to actually be composed and, you know, pleasurable perhaps it’s better to pass.

Have a good weekend! I have not one, not three, but TWO work barbeques to attend over the next two days — although surprise suprise, now that it’s Friday the weather is switching from as sunny to possible to dribbling water. Oh dear.

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Getting Dicey

June 5th, 2009 | 1 Comment | Posted in music, portable audio

Stuck for compositional inspiration? Is the I Ching not quite up your alley? Want to do some serious Bard roleplaying in D&D? Take a gander at these bad boys:

Music Dice

Available for a bit less than twenty bucks at musiciansdice.com. (via Wired)

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Wolfram Alpha

May 18th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in music

The geekier amongst you may have been aware of the latest please-oh-please competitor to Google being released last Friday. It’s called Wolfram Alpha, and it’s actually pretty clever — it’s got a little search niche all to itself. The idea is that it’s an interface to organized data, instead of just an interface to a bunch of other webpages. That means you can do queries like:  “Wisconsin median household income / musician salary” or “calories in 1 bowl of corn flakes + a glass of OJ” or “probability full house“. And tonnes of other stuff.

Some of my favorite tools are the music ones, since (as I’ve harped on about before) I don’t have a music education, but love trying to understand formal structures and intervals and such. It lets you work out:

All of these produce cute little diagrams of piano keys, along with other miscellaneous information.

You can also search for composers and get a little timeline, but that isn’t terribly impressive right now. It seems pretty clueless about pieces as well: Beethoven’s 5th give you info about the (horrible) movie, for example.

Does anyone have any more musical searches which work out nicely?

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Matricks

April 8th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in music

Something to play with, while I am not playing with you.

A exam is next Wednesday. Ahhh!

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Keeping The Receipts

March 5th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in music, youtube

I’m back baby. Back from this. From 10am last Saturday, until 10:30pm today I have been inundated with, dunked in, and squeezed full of Science. It’s been five days of: posters, symposia, brainstorming sessions, platform talks, overpriced (but life-support-ing) coffee, face-sheering-off Bostonian winds, room-sharing, note-taking, schmoozing, on foot GPS navigating and supervisor pleasing, and more.

And now I am home, re-enjoying the luxury of personal space and time. And filling in some gaps: the songs which whirred over the week without an escape hatch. Pieces prompted by relations on the rented minivan’s radio, or pieces of en passant conversations. At the moment it has been mostly:

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And:

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No classical. I almost never feel like listening to classical music after getting back from a trip. I need to come up with a very well thought out 5 second theory to explain that. Too tired to try that tonight though.

Night night!

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