{#image457}The MTG group at Pompeu Fabra reports that Björk will use the Reactable in her upcoming tour: With her first tour concert at the Coachella Festival in California, the Icelandic singer Björk introduced the reactable for the first time to a mainstream audience. Our instrument will form a key element of the artist’s current world tour “Volta” which will appear at numerous music festivals during the next 18 months....
There are very few items that make me happy every time I use them, but my Sandisk SD memory card is one of them. I have had it for around a year, and it seems to be some of the most ingenious industrial design during the last years. It makes cables unnecessary, as I simple flip it open and connect it to a USB port. Brilliant! In the beginning I was very afraid that it should break, but I have been using it a lot over the last year without any problems....
Reading this post, and viewing the picture below, I came to think about the dynamics of the Max/MSP community:
I have been thinking a lot about GUIs, namespaces and control parameters over the last couple of days. One of the big challenges we are facing is how to make technology more human-friendly. Often it seems that technology controls us more than we control the technology. Creating a user interface of any kind is very similar how we think about mapping in musical instruments. In essence, any type of control is one, or several, layers of mapping between one set of parameters to another....
Tod Machover’s article Shaping Minds Musically is an interesting read, summarising much of the work on hyperinstruments that have happened at the MIT Media Lab during the last ten years. The main point he is trying to make, is that music should be active rather than passive. This comes from the observation that most people’s involvement with music is from a reception side rather than from production. There is more music than ever in the air, but fewer of us actually play music, sing music, or create our own music....
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. […] Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 ? k)% of the participants; however, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources....
jill/txt is discussing whether the novelty of blogs is wearing off: For the second semester running, I have not succeeded in getting my students enthused about blogging. […] And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out. I think the comment by Linn is right on the target:...
I came across Brad Garton’s blog via Tim. It starts: Last week I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a fairly bad cancer of the bone marrow. The good news is that I am relatively young to be diagnosed with this disease and it seems that it was detected early. The bad news is that, well, it’s a ‘bad’ cancer to have. I think I’m about to embark on yet another life adventure....
A comment on why university teachers should think critically about Word and .doc: Many of us teach cultural analysis and critical thinking in our writing classes. Our first year readers are full of cultural commentary, and we use these texts to teach our students to question the status quo and understand more deeply the implications of the choices they make in this consumer culture. Do writing teachers do the same when they tell students to submit their documents as ....
I wrote this blog entry several months ago, but never posted it because I thought I would have time to go back and evaluate the sounds more. Since I don’t see that happen any time before I finish my dissertation, I just go along and post it now: Microsoft has posted some info and examples of the Vista soundscape. The sounds are designed by Robert Fripp and will be some of the most well known sounds on the planet in not too long....