– The Fluid Piano is the best thing you’ll see all week, month, and maybe year.
– I finished a small set of experiments using Amen today – there’s some fun stuff in there – playing back the row from the Lyric Suite, randomizing harmonic content over normal percussive content, making a semi-endless dub, and a small glitch explosion.
For, as ever, certain values of weeks.
– In the middle of The End of The West, I went to Iceland! I can recommend it.
– Some fine Canadians are working on an instrument called the MUNE. It looks…OK. These things are very hard, and almost never do what you think they will, but this has some nice touches. (Rotation! Buttons and sliders! )
– Bad Music Tech Idea # 345345: You can’t listen to an album unless you’re with a friend.
On May 31st, 2016 the track/upload endpoint will be removed from the public API of Spotify / The Echo Nest, ending an era.
I don’t want to dwell on the importance of track/upload, and its partner in crime, Remix, that much – though I will probably do so later. For now, I want to say that the show must go on – because myself, along with the brilliant Brian McFee, Ben Lacker, and Peter Sobot, have built something like a replacement.
It is called amen, and you can get it here.
It’s a Python library that uses Brian McFee’s librosa library for analysis, and then allows Remix-like editing and remixing based on that analysis. The analysis takes place entirely locally, so you’ll need to do some slightly heavyweight installation to get it working, but you won’t need to send a track to the internet any more.
This is a 0.0.0 release: things work for us, but things might get weird for you. If so, get at us on github, and we’ll try to fix things as best we can.
Remix has had a pretty good run on the Internet. We hope amen will do as well.
– Another month, another amazing Monthly Music Hackathon.
– Web Audio gets rewritten and looks ‘way better.
– If you go to midwife school or nursing school, you will practice on a robot called the VICTORIA S2200, complete with a flexible birth canal, synthetic blood, and “An incredibly smooth and supple innovative new skin [that covers her anatomically correct body from head to toe.” Well.
– Went to the always great Theorizing The Web, got to hear two of my internet heroes (Laurie Penny and Ingrid Burrington) speak.
– Jawdropping article by Malik Jalal about being on the drone kill list.
– Hello Alfred hits a new low / high in dehumanizing service workers. (Though they are W-2, but, well, you be the judge.)
– Unsurprisingly, Kyle McDonald makes an amazingly meta VR bungie-jumping thing.
– Google / Nest might just turn your house off, one day.
– Verilog for cells is a thing. I was talking to a neuroscientist friend of mine recently about how bio/tech is going to become very very serious very very fast, and I think it has and I have not noticed.
– What do the Big Five want from you? Data, among other things.
I’ve been trying to draft a “Things I Learned From Working At Drip” post that is useful, interesting and not fodder for Our Incredible Journey – which is tricky. I did learn many things, despite the company failing, and I am grateful for Sam & Miguel for trusting me to run their system … even though those are both peak tech company cliches.
Let’s say that you should add or remove as much start-up verbiage to or from the below statements as you need to be happy, and leave it at that.
– Systems thinking as LARP. No, really.
– At the last MMHD, Halley Young spoke about sonification of algorithms, and played a great example of running mergesort on a collection of randomized pitches. Are there references of this sort of thing for, say, Quicksort, or Dijkstra’s? (I sure hope so)
– Some cats I know are involved in PubPub, which is like science publishing, only better.