Moving water
The new episode of Sound Builders looks at Steve Mann, possibly the world’s pre-eminent hydraulophonist.
What’s that? Well, it’s someone who builds instruments that produce sound from moving water. His specialty is water organs and he even has one built into his hot tub.
Watch Steve here:
While at MIT, where he earned a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences, Steve founded the Wearable Computers Group at the Media Lab, and built musical instruments using brainwaves and compressed hydraulic fluids. Lauded by some as the world’s first cyborg, and the initiator of the mobile blogging movement, Steve is now a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.
For this episode, Steve volunteered to be both guest and host, using his human/cyborg first-person perspective to show us his studio, talk about his past inventions, and ask members of the circus to play the latest of his inventions: the hydraulophone, a highly tactile and mellifluous water-based instrument that Steve hopes can offer the blind and deaf a new method of music-creation.
HTML based synths, the next thing?
CDM has an interesting article out right now on browser based synthesizers.
Pioneers like Max Mathews’ Bell Labs team taught the computer to hum, sing, and speak, before even the development of primitive graphical user interfaces. So it’s fitting that the standards that chart the Web’s future would again turn to the basics of electronic sound synthesis.
A group of intrepid hackers and Mozilla developers and community leaders are working to make an audio API a standard part of this generation of Web browsers. (Note: not some unspecified future browsers – they’re making it work right now.)
We’ve already seen some pretty amazing experiments with Flash and Java. This would go further, opening buffer-level access to new, faster, just-in-time compiled JavaScript engines. The upshot: you get to code your own synthesizers and real-time audio processing in a way that works right in any browser, on any platform. Standardize the API by which this works, and adding an FM synth to a page could be as easy as assembling a table or inserting a picture.
There’s no plug-in, and thanks to faster JavaScript engines, JavaScript can be the language. To the end user, you just get a Web page that automatically loads the audio goodness.
I’m in touch with the developers, and hope to have a full-blown Q&A session with them. On the agenda: what this is, what it means, how it works, how people can get involved, and how to get started with these early builds. I’m going to start out with some of my own thoughts, though, because I’ve found myself thinking about this a lot. I’ve been a slow convert to the gospel of the browser and JavaScript, but I’m beginning to “get” it, I think. (If I’m off-base or missing something, we’ll get to cover that, too.)
http://vimeo.com/11345262
Read the full article here, with many more video clips >>
2for1 April offering at Soundcells
Don’t miss out on this
Soundcells are definitely among the top three Reason Refill producers on the market today, at least if you are in on electronic music
Soundcells has been featured in reviews on this blog before and gotten really high scores for their innovativeness, here is one example:
After listening in on hundreds of different refills for Reason it is quite seldom that I find something that feels totally new and fresh, but I am inclined to change my mind on this one. Sure other refills have been published in this space before but rarely with this amount of breadth. There are not just the traditional CMB files and NNXT files that you have become accustomed to but also a several new live performance CMBs that allows you to actually be very creative on stage. I really enjoyed bringing these up during some live jamming in the studio, and to spice things up there are a several really nice Dr.Rex loops also included – and not just endless variations of the same loop in different pitches and sounds but actually quite a nice mixture of experimental, bass and pure chip sounds – I like 
Peter Gabriel's tutorial on sampling from 1982
The video has some awesome footage of Peter Grabriel and company recording found sound and manipulating sound from the Farilight. He also discusses the use of non-lyrical human voice in music.
And here is one with maestro Herbie Hancock in action:
Herbie shows off while Quincy Jones looks on. Taken from VHS recording of 1984 documentary “I love Quincy” http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sif…
Enjoy !
First full length album made on an iPhone
Many single tracks have been produced on the iPhone, but this is more, much more LOL and even a music video made using nothing but the iPhone, but New York outfit Nuclear O’Reilly claim to be the first band to make a whole album using Apple’s touchscreen marvel. The work is titled Phoning It In, and the duo’s App of choice? Intua’s amazing Beatmaker. See/hear all about it in the video below…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzGnZRcyzSs&feature=player_embedded]
Multi mode gating
Found this great video uploaded by thedeepelement, below is what he writes about the test:
“‘m testing out a)Make Noise’s Quad Multi Mode Gate (qmmg) module and b)Flip’s UltraHD camcorder. I wanted to share a video of how extreme the module can get with normal Tip Top Audio and Cwejman waveforms. I first preview all four channels without activating the gates. Then I turn all the channels to VCA, Both, LP and finally HP modes. After that I manually mangle the sound and return back to VCA mode. Everything is coming out of the summing mixer. So in short you get a Mixer, VCA and multimode filtering. Why don’t you have this yet?”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMnsFtM8sv0&feature=player_embedded]
Can you do anything but love Felix's machines
Felix’s Machines are music making sculptures. They were constructed in his bedroom and exist to facilitate music by translating rhythmic audio structures into a three-dimensional visual show.
They function as musical instruments as well as kinetic sculptures. The Machines are a performance device, but can be well suited to act as an art installation, theatre accompaniment, or standalone sculpture.
The Machines invite an audience to share the experience of their creator. He aims to exploit the complexity found behind the workings of most digital music and present it as a more accessible equivalent. These Machines do not intend to match human potential. Instead they exist to test the advantages of mechanical instruments alone.
Check out the video below >>
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/3570989]
Image Line has released FL Studio 8
FL Studio is a fully featured, open-architecture music creation and production environment for PC. No extra software is required to produce any style of music, as a complete kit of instruments and studio tools is included in the cost of the package. With the included plugins, sounds and tools the user can create complete songs, backing tracks, loops or sizzling beats. Completed songs can be saved to WAV, MP3, OGG, MIDI, ZIP or the native project format (.FLP).
Key new features and changes
First, FL Studio 8 carries forward everything that is included in FL Studio 7 plus many more features:
 |
FL Synthmaker is a fully modular environment where you can create & share your own FL instruments, effects & dashboards, all without the need to write basic code in a modular ‘plug-n-go’ workspace.
|
|
One-click-recording using Edison wave editor plugin. Edison ia a fully integrated audio editing and recording tool with spectral analysis, convolution reverb, loop-recording and more.
|
|
Slicex, the powerhouse drumloop slicer & re-arranging tool.
|
|
Soundgoodizer is a ‘maximizer-enhancer’ plugin based on the Maximus sound-process engine. |
|
Fruity Limiter for maximizing & compressing final mixes or individual tracks. Free to all users. |
|
Better integration with controllers. FL Studio can permanently learn and remember links to external controllers with the new ‘multilink’ function + ‘Override generic links’ option. |
|
Wave Candy, a flexible audio analysis and visualization tool with Oscilloscope, Spectrum Analyzer and Peak Meter. |
|
Sinc interpolation now faster (64 point sinc now usable in real-time, depending on CPU) |
|
Rendering with improved latency compensation |
|
Score logger, records all MIDI & note activity for instant recall. Everything you play, whether or not recording is active, is captured and ready to be dumped to the Piano roll. |
|
Directwave Player, broaden your musical palette with downloadable sound banks and multi-sample sets. |
|
Recording filter, to select Audio, Automation or Note data recording sessions, independently or in any combination. |
|
Slip editing and resizing tool has been added to the Playlist for all clip types. |
|
Multi-core safe plugins are threaded for performance gain on multi-core CPUs. |
|
A ‘Selected mixer track’ has been added to the Mixer. The selected mixer track is routed there for better integration with visual effects or a recording Edison. |
|
FL8 supports track-based sequencing in the Playlist. Pattern Clips present sequence data as Audio and/or Automation Clips |
|
An ‘Online Panel’, to keep users updated with content and patches. |
DATAMASKIN
