Art and Music

Art

• 2010-Nov-21: Amazon wants to start crowd sourcing movies, Amazon Studio wants writers to submit screenplays and then it will pair them up with producers to get a test movie made. [9434] [1]
• 2010-Jul-15: The accountants of Hollywood are starting to get into trouble for their extraordinary accounting practices. And the RIAA's accounting takes a similar approach to avoid paying musicians. [9285]
• 2010-Jun-30: The Mandelbox is another attempt at taking the Mandelbrot set to the third dimension. Very nice stuff. [9265] [1]
• 2009-Nov-27: The Mandelbulb is a 3D version of the Mandelbrot set. An excellent set of pictures from this are here. A Python project to explore it is here. [8760] [1]
• 2009-Feb-15: 100 Beautiful Free Textures, some of these are rather interesting and might inspire you to try photographing your own. [7592]
• 2008-May-29: The Corkboard Mac, a Mac laptop that suffered case damage, so got dissected and reassembled on a cork board. If used as something like a digital photo frame this would classify as a product hack, but if the components and wires were arranged with a bit more thought this could be viewed as art. One wonders how much RF interference something like this causes. [6253] [1]
• 2007-Oct-26: Drawing pictures with only a single line, results in both some rather nice minimalist pieces as well as some amazingly detailed works. Perhaps there is an equivalent in literature: books written in a single sitting, or a single unedited first draft? [3515]
• 2007-Sep-22: Schaedler Precision Rules, make nice rulers for the graphic arts market. [2242]
• 2007-Sep-21: The Klimantiris Gallery, an online showcase, nicely done. [2238]
• 2007-Sep-16: Etch-A-Sketch art gallery [994]
• 2007-Aug-30: Finally, a good use for old business cards (appart from writing little shopping and todo lists on them). Ned Batchelder has a good write up on making cubes out of them, and Paula's Orihouse goes further into the realm of origami. [996]
• 2007-Aug-30: Dr. Suess art [995]
• Updating Escher's work. [5903]

Music

• 2010-Jun-22: The Bliptronic synthesizer from ThinkGeek is the poor-man's Yamaha TENORI-ON. [9221] [1]
• 2010-Jun-11: The MIDIbox Hardware Platform brings a modular set of components to the DIY MIDI music industry, some of these are available as kits and have been used to implement some big projects like this Station MIDI controller. [9189] [1]
• 2010-May-21: Computer composition software is starting to to make real music. [9127]
• 2010-May-14: songbook is a Python tool to create printable songbooks or music score sheets using LaTeX and Lilypond. [8693] [1]
• 2010-Jan-20: A member of the band "OK Go" writes about the current state of the music business. [8929] [1]
• 2010-Jan-15: The Korg Kaossilator Pro - I don't know what it is and I wouldn't know how to use it, but I want one! Knobs, buttons, flashing lights, MIDI, USB, audio jacks, SD cards, wow! [8921] [1]
• 2009-Dec-22: Acoustica makes some computer music recording and composition software, including Mixcraft and Beatcraft. [8859]
• 2009-Dec-22: M-AUDIO makes a lot of musical instruments and equipment including some nice USB-attached keyboards. [8858]
• 2009-Sep-12: The Pro Tools Essential Bundles from Avid Technology combing music composition software with some hardware, one package includes a 49 note velocity-sensitive midi keyboard. [8512] [1]
• 2009-Jun-11: PySynth is a simple music synthesizer written only in Python. The home page is here. This can play music written in abc notation. [7838] [1]
• 2009-May-22: Amazon and TuneCore are going to provide a music CD duplication and distribution service that will allow anyone to create and then sell professional looking CDs. [8017]
• 2009-Feb-10: Auto-tune is a signal processing technique to make a singer pitch-perfect. This is based on autocorrelation. [7550]
• 2008-Dec-19: improviser is an experiment in automatic music generation. The author has some interesting pieces here. [7374] [1]
• 2008-Dec-14: Work on pygame.midi has started, which allows midi in and out from within Pygame. [7346] [1]
• 2008-Nov-25: The start of a discussion on sound equalization. [7264]
• 2008-Sep-28: The Korg nanoSeries are a few small, USB-attached and powered, input and control devices for working with music on a laptop. Really cute and if reasonably priced are bound to be very popular. Would go great with an ASUS Eee... The UK prices for these are in the £49 to £59 range, which probably means US$99 and they are expected in Oct'08. I wonder if you can add multiple keyboards to the same PC so that you can build the organ of your dreams? A preview of these appeared in late Sept'08. [6340] [1]
• 2008-Aug-21: mingus is a Python package for advanced music theory and notation (also here on PyPi). [6720] [1]
• 2008-Jul-17: pyFluidSynth provides Python bindings for FluidSynth which is a software MIDI synthesizer that uses Sound Fonts. [6536] [1]
• 2008-Jun-23: The Midify board adds a MIDI port to the Nintendo DS hand-held game machine. [6409] [1]
• 2008-Jun-20: The Yamaha Tenori-on could be described as Lite Brite meets a music synthesizer. I'm sure kids of all ages will love it. These finally went on sale in the US in June'08 for $1200, guess I'll wait for someone to do this in software on a PSP or dual screen. [5751] [1]
• 2008-Jun-11: sxfr is a sound effect generation tool. Something that could be handy if you need some bleeps and blasts. [6314]
• 2008-May-01: A mobile DJ MP3 mixing station, lots of buttons, knobs and sliders, looks like great fun. And only $99. [6020] [1]
• 2008-Mar-12: The KORG DS-10 synth meets the Nintendo DS - result: cool music device. [5264] [1]
• 2008-Jan-16: Using ball bearings to control a beat sequencer. Pretty cool until someone bumps your table and the balls go flying. [4711] [1]
• 2007-Dec-14: A discussion of the numerical representation of pitch. [4426] [1]
• 2007-Oct-24: The International Music Score Library Project has been hit by a copyright cease and desist. The Project Gutenberg site may be hosting some of this material while the IMSLP sorts out the legal issues. [3479] [1]
• 2007-Oct-22: Soundsnap.com is a site dedicated to sound samples, animals, birds, noises, instruments and even button clicks. [3498] [1]
• 2007-Sep-26: Ah politics, I wonder how much hay the writers of the Royal Canadian Air Farce are going to make with this one: how the MPAA got close enough to the Director General of Copyright Policy to get their ideas put swiftly into law. [2257] [1]
• 2007-Sep-17: The RIAA finally lost, this time they got dismissed for failing to state a claim. [2142] [1]
• 2007-Sep-15: The Canadian Music Industry's levy on blank media (mainly cassettes and CDRs) has finally come full circle and the industry is realizing that they have pulled their own teeth by implementing this. Effectively they have established that it is ok (in Canada) to copy recordings that you own a copy of onto whatever media you want so long as you don't sell or further distribute them, this is fine because they have forced you to pay a fee up front to cover the expected lost revenue do to this. Its now becoming more confused, because as everyone in Canada is forced to pay this it could be argued that, as long as a fee is not charged, it is ok for individuals to exchange copies. I think that's a bit of a stretch but the Copyright Board of Canada appears to be reasoning this way:

  First, the Board has stated, in obiter dicta, on several occasions that the Private Copying regime legalizes copying for the private use of the person making the copy, regardless of whether the source is non-infringing or not. Therefore, according to the Board, downloading an infringing track from the Internet is not infringing, as long as the downloaded copy is made onto an 'audio recording medium'

  the key here would be that to be legit you need to save a copy of the song to an audio recording medium, i.e. you need to burn it onto a CDR on which you will have paid the levy. [1897] [1]
• 2007-Aug-30: WolframTones, computer generated music, discussed here [997]
• In Europe, where copyright is still only 50 years, the music of the 1950's is starting to enter the public domain. This is now starting to be a concern for the US recording industry who has successfully lobbied for the extension of copyrights in the US to 95 years. I guess they'll be advocating a "great firewall of America" to keep this undesirable (i.e. inexpensive) foreign material out. [5925]
• Guess what? That paragon of virtue, the music industry is getting fined for price fixing on CDs [5924]