Here is some basketball-themed house music. I did this remix of a song about the illustrious Darvin Ham for The Wizznutzz about a year ago.
If that’s not enough for you, check my other remixes for Wizznutzz: one for Queen James and another for Nils Lofgren’s classic rock anthem Bullets Fever.
Michael Schneider writes about finding the golden ratio in the Amen break. (via rekkerd)
…peaks pop up at Golden Ratio intervals, as do smaller peaks within them, reminsicent of the fractal structures in nature.
For more exact visual analysis I examined the wave image in my computer, in which I have a palatte of geometric forms and proportions for quickly identifying an object’s ratios. Sure enough, Golden Ratio relationships were indicated among the different peaks. Am I seeing things? You decide. But the appearance of the Golden Ratio may help explain its popularity.
Here’s my take. Instead of working with the golden ratio φ, we can work with the “golden fraction” 1/φ instead. (It’s equivalent; it just flips our equations upside down.) Because of the nature of the golden ratio, it happens that 1/φ = φ - 1 ≈ 0.618. Now, 5/8 = 0.625, so that’s a good approximation to 1/φ. In particular, if you’re just eyeballing a WAV file, you won’t be able to tell 5/8 from exactly φ.
Now, what’s special about 5/8? In 4/4 time, there are eight beats in two measures. Listen to the Amen and count the beats:
There are big snare hits on two, four, six .. then nothing on eight. The snare you expect on eight is late, so late it’s almost on the ninth beat. So the distance between the fourth beat and the ninth is five beats, or 5/8 of a two-measure loop.
Is there something special about that particular fraction? Maybe, or maybe playing with the listener’s expectations simply sounds funky. My money is on the latter, but it’s an interesting question.
I just finished listening to Sessions, the new Carl Craig anthology/mix CD. I found it refreshing more than anything else. I don’t mean it was a welcome change of pace from whatever; I mean the synths are crispy, the beats are tight, the arrangements are clean, and it feels like drinking a lager on a warm spring evening. If you like Detroit it’s worth a listen. But if you like Detroit, you probably don’t need me to tell you that.
It’s only nine bucks from Amazon digital downloads, which works out to less than three cents per minute. If you just want to sample one song, I would recommend the Grammy-failing-to-win remix of “Like a Child” or the techier “Oscillator.”
I was on Amazon, looking for the new Autechre album (there’s a review over at Electronic Music World) and I noticed that it was the fourth best-selling album in Music > Dance & DJ > Techno.
For the moment, let’s just accept this broad definition of “techno.” The real question is, what are the topselling techno albums on Amazon?
Number two was “Play” by Moby. Which is an OK record, and I admit to listening to it quite a bit in high school. But it’s almost 10 years old; that dude is getting a lot of mileage out of one duet with Gwen Stefani.
Number one was the soundtrack to Marie Antoinette. Uhm, what? Well, apparently it includes a couple Aphex Twin tracks.
So now you have the secret to becoming a best-selling techno artist: get your music on the same record as rock stars.
Pamelia Kurstin, arguably the world’s best theremin player, at TED. (HT: matrixsynth)
Which seems like as good an excuse as any to bring up this video again:
A couple years ago my friend Darius was making a goofy video game called b1nary her0 and asked me to do a few lo-fi songs for it. I came up with these two chiptunes. I think the project sort of died out before they got around to integrating the new songs, so here they are for your enjoyment.
A couple years ago I made an experimental soft synth called Pondular for the KVR Audio Developer Challenge. The sound engine is a pretty generic VA, but it has a physics-based interface that is fun to watch and occasionally hypnotic. Here’s a short video demonstration:
Tech note: I would like to make more video demos, but I need easier screencasting software. Suggestions?
While looking through our site stats, I found that a ton of people were downloading Sounds I Made, and most of them were coming from this mysterious Chinese page with no apparent connection to Aaron or whatever sounds he might make. (Scroll down to the bottom to see the link.) After spending a lot of time with Google translate and google.cn, our best guess at what’s going on is this:
Korg are developing an MS-10 based groovebox for the Nintendo DS.
Recently, Korg seem to have made a point of releasing small, fun musical gadgets in addition to their usual megabucks workstations. Perhaps they have discovered that this is an excellent way to separate me from my hard-earned cash.
(Thanks to Darius for the pointer.)
Update: video demo and more details here. Two notes from the video:
1. You can apparently use the DS touchscreen as an XY controller, Kaoss pad style. (Or really, Wavestation style.)
2. You can apparently draw patch cables with the stylus, which is just plain badass.
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