Some albums that held my attention this year (in no particular order):
From the Pitchfork top singles intro:
"[T]he effects of file-sharing on personal taste became unmistakably clear: the indie community's palettes-- and everyone else's-- have broadly diversified. Freed from the careful decision-making that comes with $12 purchases, we can now easily branch out beyond the genres we've always loved and discover the inherent worth in all of them. [...] The great thing about music right now is that listeners don't have to be "staunch" anymore. In an age when all music is free, dedicating yourself to just one specific genre or type only denies you the hedonistic musical bliss that is rightfully yours. Sure, we all still buy albums for their increased sound quality, tangibility, artwork and artist support, but let's be straight about one thing: singles are for downloading."
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I mentioned Steven Johnson book Emergence in
my post on complexity, emergence and collective Intelligence. I've now discovered that
Steven has a blog and is coming out with a new book called
Mind Wide Open.
Mr. Johnson has also written some interesting articles:
AI music modeled like swarming bees - A look at the
Tim Blackwell's Artificial Improviser
Sociobiology and You - A review of The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
The Anti-Video Game - Games and biofeedback
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Free music production tools:
Buzz Machines - "Buzz is not a Soft-Synth. Buzz is not a Tracker. Buzz is not a Sequencer. Buzz is all of these things and more."
Skale Tracker - A cross platform tracker based the old DOS tracker model.
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Ladies and gentlemen. A portion of the future we were promised is here: Dancing Robots (wmv movie file).
The robot in question is the Sony Dream Robot, Qrio. Qrio is the world's first running humanoid robot. Check out these photos of QRIO in action.
In order to achieve stable motion control for conventional humanoid robots, either one or both feet needed to be touching the floor and, from the opposing force produced by the contact with either of the feet, motion such as walking was controlled. This is the control theory based on the so called ZMP (Zero Moment Point) stable range and forms the foundation of robot motion control.
The new 'walking, jumping, running movement control' technology which Sony has developed this time accomplishes motion involving both feet losing contact with the floor at the same time, which means it is a motion control technology enabling stable running and jumping. The seamless addition of motion control based on this new technology enabling running and jumping, has lead to the development of a robot having outstanding motion capabilities.
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While searching for Qrio links, I stumbled across this blog: B3 Annex - Blogging from Tokyo
Maisonneuve - Eclectic Curiosity
These maps of the internet look eerily like giant neural networks.
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I've added XML syndication to Stungeye. The RSS news-feed can be found here. (The perma-link can be found in 'necessary evils' section on your right.) Please let me know if your news aggregator has problems with the feed.
Confused? Here's an archived post on RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
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The Chef and I gave ourselves 1 hours on Saturday night to create a musical sketch composed solely of loops from my personal sample library. One hour later, the composition work was done. After another hour of tweaking, we were satisfied with the results: 4 - A Collaborative Musical Sketch.
Although the Chef had no prior experience with music composition or production, his time-real feedback and added creativity were invaluable; at times it was like a musical debate!
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The snake is back. Another flash photo enhancement: New Snake.
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Some links gathered from the wired portion of the Noosphere:
Wired Opinion - Politics, Philosophy, Issues, Commentary. Currently up for debate: The capture of Saddam and the selective humanitarianism of the United States.
The Mixologists are turning the tables - A *must see* for all DJs. A 30 minute tutorial on mixing and turntablism. 2 DJs. 4 Turntables. (This video is but one of many DJ session available from
The Red Bull Music Academy. Mmmmmm
red bull.)
A slide-show of images from Hubble - Ignite your sense of wonder with these images of our universe.
Apple recently open a retail store in Japan. On opening day there was
a really long line. Mind blowing.
If you were a computer geek in the early 90s (and before) you will remember the
demo scene. Well, the scene is still thriving. Proof of this can be found in
Farbrausch. Check out their
65K demos. Amazing textured mapped 3D rendered scenes (with music) generated by under 65 Kilobytes of data! (Via
Dublog)
The universe as a hologram - A fascinating read.
Czech composer, Vaclav Halek, bases his music on
the songs of mushrooms.
Free ebooks on Buddhist meditation.
OneLook Reverse Dictionary: describe a concept and get back a list of related words and phrases. This is like a dream come true. (via
Cup of Chica)
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I had a text-collage text-file on my PC desktop at work. Snippets of half-finished poems and half-captured messenger conversations.
I emailed the file home on my last day of work.
Today's collection of words were born in the past. Half-finished partial truths.
Angel
I'm in jail with an angel
yet I still can't see our jail cell...
I stole his halo years ago
he's counting backwards... (7 fears to go!)
I guard this shiny ring I took
it hangs around my neck
I sleep with one eye open
in case he tries to steal it back
So I wake early every morning
and he greets me with a glare
I tried to put this all behind us
(he's really being quite unfair!)
There was once another in this coop
but he is long since gone
he used to whisper in the angel's ear
so I played him as my pawn
On that fateful night
with my chess piece fast asleep
I took the angel aside
I spun a tale about a black sheep
"oh dear angel let me tell you
about our sleeping friend
he has committed unspeakable horrors
the poor children had no chance to defend"
By the time that I was through with him
the angel was enraged
he did not want this evil man
to share room in our cage
Next a strange thing happened
when the angels hands were red
I watched as his large halo
slowly fell from off his head
So it was mine for the taking
but it wasn't worth the price
For I have no use for halos
locked up here in this device
God
What if there was a god
but he wasn't all that great
it didn't take him seven days... no, it took him eight
He started this experiment so many years ago
he left it on his work bench
a half forgotten project left to grow
Just like Alex Fleming and his molding piece of bread
we were a happy accident
one that god soon learned to dread
For he was just a mad man
he never asked for all this praise
he never spoke these words of wisdom that so many paraphrase
Vibing
My eyes are closed and I feel a smile take over. The kind of smile that if I rocked it all night I would have a sore face the next day. I could be anywhere right now. I open my eyes to a sea of smiles... not the dopey chemical kind but the kind that mirror my state of mind. It's almost like we are all sharing some kind of unspoken universal inside joke. Temporary knowing eye contact from a stranger. Positive reinforcement without having to resort to words. Words that sound silly if I say them over and over. Words that we invented in an attempt to describe the world around us, but could never properly describe the world within us.
Ritual
the hour is half empty
your stomach should be half full
your skin could be quite itchy after that scrubbing with steel wool
but the wool was never stolen
and time's only in your head
counting down the seconds until you're finally dead
the first meeting's at the church
the second, at the hidden hill
you bring the sacrifice and I'll bring the suicide pill
wear only the essentials
leave your ID back at home
the Armageddon suit is made entirely of foam
memorize the words of ritual
cross your heart and hope to fly
near the end of our ceremony you should see something in the sky
they are coming here to save us
bringing peace, happiness and joy
we can only take one child and it better be a boy
in their world there is no money
so before the ship you mount
remember to transfer your savings into this numbered account
on earth you live in terror
a world of fear made by your mind
you once asked me why I cared for you, (I was only being kind)
I knew you needed something
I'm your saviour and your knight
the final act might be painful but don't put up a fight
once the act is over
they will bring you into their lives
remember in their world you get to have 3 wives
so now I bid you farewell
I have many more to save
now you'll finally taste the greener grass that I know you crave
Monkeys in waiting
takes the brakes off in your mind
let your thoughts flow in realtime
with the music in the background
there is treason on the pitchers mound
playing mind games with backcatchers
tapping into the wax scratchers
now I'm calling for a rewind
so I hope y'all won't mind
I've got a second mind about the issues
I don't cry so no need for tissues
Unless I'm cleaning faces
painted with lies to help round the bases
scored way too many homeruns
I'm working to increase my funds
in the end the money's useless
got a mind full of half regrets
thoughts lost between the pages
haven't seen my mind in ages
life can be left on auto pilot
I've never seen a group of monkeys riot
they still have social structures
but they'll never practice acupuncture
they don't kill for sport
Use reason as a last resort
I'll pick the insects of your back tonight
If tomorrow we schedule in a fight
happiness can sometimes bore me
and the herbs will help restore me
to my once and future image
then I'll settle for a scrimmage
life flips the coins as we sit begging
for change to fill my pocket and my thoughts
as time slips through my fingers
When dreams dream
I lie silently
Waiting and watching the world that I do not understand
and I do not care to
The emerald cushion of grass stretches out from beneath me
I can feel it through my clothes
on my skin
it holds me softly as I lie here
looking up at a sea of light blues and soft whites
always changing
In the not so distant distance I hear the sound of water kissing sand
and innocent laughter
The warmth of the sun and the cooling breeze wrestle for my skins attention
the sun is winning
I breathe in deeply through my nose
wishing that my lungs would never reach capacity
Thoughts glide through my head
much quicker than the clouds drifting above me
Ideas branch out
like the trees I know are so close by
but out of view
I close my eyes to allow daydreams to flow
but I cannot think of any place or time better than this
so I dream of now
of here
Look
If I lied about everything, would that make it less real?
Do you really have to live it in order to feel?
I feel sorry for the suffering I see on TV.
But inside I'm glad that it's them and not me.
Most often I will analyse to the Nth degree
and yet I fall in love with dreams so easily. (Or is it more like tripping?)
I search the want ads for the perfect newspaper clipping.
If I daydream at school does that mean that I'm skipping?
I skip out on responsibility and I side step through doors.
Would I be more of a man if I had fought in a war?
United we stand.
Divided we fall.
But would I need others if I grew really tall?
Sometimes I wonder if I got the short end of the stick.
You'll buy me ice cream but I'll refuse to lick.
I bite down. (Is that the bitter taste of success?)
Double the C and double the S.
And you would never guess
that I could wrap electricians tape around itself
and make something that resembles a bullet.
I built it.
But they did not come.
I don't take candy from strangers
as a rule of thumb.
So many guidelines to follow as we wander through life.
Don't steal.
Don't murder.
Don't cheat on your wife.
In a world that values form over function,
you can always stop the trial with an injunction.
At least that what I learned watching Ally McBeal.
(An anorexic lawyer in a court of appeal.)
If I lied about everything, would that make it less real?
Do you really have to live it in order to feel?
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Mike and I just wrapped up a sonic experiment. Pong, the electronic music equivalent of Photoshop tennis.
Starting with this bass loop, "played, recorded, and 'verbed out by" Mike, we volleyed back and forth. Adding here. Tweaking there.
After six iterations we were left with this: Blip Blop - A Collaborative Audio Collage.
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Wood S Lot introduced me to the wonderful Artchive with a link to this write-up on Wassily Kandinsky.
"[Wassily Kandinsky's] 'inner necessity' to express his emotional perceptions led to the development of an abstract style of painting that was based on the non-representational properties of color and form. Kandinsky's compositions were the culmination of his efforts to create a "pure painting" that would provide the same emotional power as a musical composition."
Kandinsky's artistic exploration of musical tools, such as melody and rhythm, to create abstract visual "compositions" can be seen in the following thumbnail of his Composition VII. Study the thumbnail before you click to reveal a larger image. Notice the melodic visual structures coupled with the unstructured narrative and the rhythmic nature of the entire piece.
"The creation of [Composition VII] involved over thirty preparatory drawings, watercolors and oil studies. Amazingly, once he had completed the preparatory work, Kandinsky executed the actual painting of Composition VII in less than four days."
The rest of the Composition series can be seen here. Interestingly, the Artchive write-up states that Kandinsky saw Cezanne's Large Bathers as "an example of this clearly laid out, melodic composition with open rhythms."
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Over at Squublog - I on Outsider Art.
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Although sketchy in detail, the visual sentences over at The Elephant's Memory are interesting. "The Elephant's Memory is a pictorial language consisting of more than a hundred and a fifty combinable graphic elements (pictograms and ideograms)"
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"Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn't handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else." - Artists and Narcotics.
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I watched as her lip-glossed mouth shouted, lips glistening: "Things are only boring when you're not interested in listening!"
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Song of the weak: Jack Johnson - Holes To Heaven [offline]
Some news from the blogsphere: Both Dublog and Iconomy are back. Two great sources for artistic inspiration. Explore.
Some Links (Found here and there):
From Darkness - "The people that I portray in this series have been sitting alone by themselves in total darkness and haven't been aware of when the picture will be taken and the flash would lighten up their face."
Mastering A Record
Michael Jackson at the age of 45 (minus the plastic surgery.)
Unsolved homicides from my home town.
The Meatrix.
The weekend has arrived. Where's your head at? 48 hours off from the world, plus tonight. The weekend mission: Think of your favorite word. Ban this word from your vocabulary for the next 3 days.
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A few days ago, I sent my theories on the evolution of consciousness to John McCrone. Mr. McCrone has written some interesting books and articles on the development and understanding of consciousness. I recommend exploring his website. I was curious if my theories held any weight in context with the current neuro-scientific models. (I retooled and reposted some of my thoughts while working on my email to Mr. McCrone.) The following was his reply:
"Generally everything you say is a good commonsense approach to the evolution of consciousness. You talk about a developing hierarchy of response, which is a standard theme (at least among neuroscientists). The bit about external value patterns at the end is what people talk about in social constructionist psychology (see for example my paper [on freewill].)
So I think you certainly start with the right orientation to the subject.
Cheers
John McCrone"
My inner arm-chair philosopher/theorist grins from this positive feedback. With no formal training in neuroscience or biology, I initially found it quite difficult to express the ideas I had been pondering. It's almost as if science is a private club with it's own secret handshakes and obscure dialect. Actually, that's exactly what science is. Here's where the true power of the internet lies. With a couple of days of web-based research, I was able to build up a framework of knowledge that allowed me to express my theories. The web gave me access to this secret club known as science.
Sadly, the signal to noise ratio for educational information on the web has been eroding over time. Unless you are searching for very specific information, google will undoubtedly lead you to commercial/ebuisness sites rather than educational/informational ones. Maybe this is why they are developing froogle. "Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online." Hopefully, once froogle matures they could filter out all commercial sites from regular google searches. (As a side note, now that google owns blogger they should consider filtering out blogs from their regular search engine and create a blog specific search tool.)
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I have three Glutton university experiments to post today:
Another photo flash enhancement. This experiment had a three hour time limit and was an exercise in masking, path tweening, and the creation of movie clip objects.
This animation was the result of a 10 minute time limit and a canvas restricted to 48 frames.
Last but not least, I remixed a track made by my buddy mcd:
3 in 1 - the Wally Glutton Jitter Dub Mix. This track is an exploration of abstract rhythmic patterns. I was very happy with this remix as it retained the sense of space and atmosphere that I loved about the original track while completely tearing apart the rhythmic structure. The method used to deconstruct the track was an accidental discovery made by mcd and I, which exploits a glitch in the Cubase software.
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A new flash experiment care of my new drawing tablet: The Tunnel
The appreciation photography is quite a subjective experience. I've always liked how some photographs (and some art in general) act as a catalyst for imagination rather than as an expression of statement or esthetical feel.
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I discovered a very interesting corner of the web today. I've been up to my neck in consciousness and complexity theory. Here's some of what I dug up:
John McCrone's introduction to consciousness and complexity. Why a theory of consciousness matters, popular myths about the mind and other insights.
A definition of complexity - This comes from
Don Mikulecky site. A interesting look at how our universe is built on complexity and the failure of science to re-evaluate scientific dogma. Hopefully this will shed some light on
Chef Quix' quest.
An interesting experiment on perception - Try to discover the changes made over time to the displayed images. You can right-click on the image and select new scenes, (these new scenes are found at the bottom of the drop-down list.) The majority of viewers are unable to spot the changes in the images. This is an example of Change Blindness, a phenomenon in visual perception in which very large changes occurring in full view in a visual scene are not noticed. (In order to easily see the change you can right-click on the image and select "No Gap". Only do this after you have tried all the scenes. Think of the flashes as forced blinks of your eyelids.)
Cognitive Questions - "The Only Cognitive Science Website Without a Picture of a Brain on it!" A collection of papers dealing with cognitive science by Teed Rockwell, complete with commentary by fellow philosophers and scientists.
Stephen Grossberg has managed to boil the ideas from my last post down to this one statement: "The brain as we know it can be successfully understood as an organ that is designed to achieve successful autonomous adaptation to a changing world."
Online papers on consciousness compiled by David Chalmers.
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