An Instrument Made of Light that has Escaped from TRON #MusicMonday

via CDM

Espills is a “solid light dynamic sculpture,” made of laser beams, laser scanners, and robotic mirrors. And it makes a real-life effect that would make Tron proud.

The work, made public this month but part of ongoing research, is the creation of multidisciplinary Barcelona-based AV team Playmodes. And while large-scale laser projects are becoming more frequent in audiovisual performance and installation, this one is unique both in that it’s especially expressive and a heavily DIY project. So while dedicated vendors make sophisticated, expensive off-the-shelf solutions, the Playmodes crew went a bit more punk and designed and built many of their own components. That includes robotic mirrors, light drawing tools, synths, scenery, and even the laser modules. They hacked into existing DMX light fixtures, swapping mirrors for lamps. They constructed their own microcontroller solutions for controlling the laser diodes via Artnet and DMX.

And, oh yeah, they have their own visual programming framework, OceaNode, a kind of home-brewed solution for imagining banks of modulation as oscillators, a visual motion synth of sorts.

It’s in-progress, so this is not a Touch Designer rival so much as an interesting homebrew project, but you can toy around with the open source software. (Looks like you might need to do some work to get it to build on your OS of choice.)

See and hear more!

How DeepMind Plans to Build Safe AI

From Medium:

At a high level, safety research at DeepMind focuses on designing systems that reliably function as intended while discovering and mitigating possible near-term and long-term risks. Technical AI safety is a relatively nascent but rapidly evolving field, with its contents ranging from high-level and theoretical to empirical and concrete. The goal of this blog is to contribute to the development of the field and encourage substantive engagement with the technical ideas discussed, and in doing so, advance our collective understanding of AI safety.

In this inaugural post, we discuss three areas of technical AI safety: specification, robustness, and assurance. Future posts will broadly fit within the framework outlined here. While our views will inevitably evolve over time, we feel these three areas cover a sufficiently wide spectrum to provide a useful categorisation for ongoing and future research.

Read more

Sound Machine Inspired by a Soviet Deep Drilling Project #MusicMonday

via CDM

Deep in the Arctic Circle, the USSR was drilling deeper into the Earth than anyone before. One artist has combined archaeology and invention to bring its spirit back in sound.

Meet SG-3 (СГ-3) — the Kola Superdeep Borehole. You know when kids would joke about digging a hole to China? Well, the USSR’s borehole got to substantial depths – 12,262 m (over 40,000 ft) at the time of the USSR’s collapse.

The borehole was so epic – and the Soviets so secretive – that it has inspired legends of seismic weapons and even demonic drilling. (A YouTube search gets really interesting – like some people who think the Soviets actually drilled into the gates to Hell.)

Artist Dmitry Morozv – ::vtol:: – evokes some of that quality while returning to the actual evidence of what this thing really did. And what it did is already spectacular – he compares the scale of the project to launching humans into space (well, sort of in the opposite direction).

See and hear more!

Sound Machine Inspired by a Soviet Deep Drilling Project #MusicMonday

via CDM

Deep in the Arctic Circle, the USSR was drilling deeper into the Earth than anyone before. One artist has combined archaeology and invention to bring its spirit back in sound.

Meet SG-3 (СГ-3) — the Kola Superdeep Borehole. You know when kids would joke about digging a hole to China? Well, the USSR’s borehole got to substantial depths – 12,262 m (over 40,000 ft) at the time of the USSR’s collapse.

The borehole was so epic – and the Soviets so secretive – that it has inspired legends of seismic weapons and even demonic drilling. (A YouTube search gets really interesting – like some people who think the Soviets actually drilled into the gates to Hell.)

Artist Dmitry Morozv – ::vtol:: – evokes some of that quality while returning to the actual evidence of what this thing really did. And what it did is already spectacular – he compares the scale of the project to launching humans into space (well, sort of in the opposite direction).

See and hear more!

The History Of Electric Guitar Distortion #MusicMonday

via Bobby Osinski’s Blog

Ah, guitar distortion. It seems like we can’t get enough of it. From the very first time it appeared on records in the 50s, we’ve been hooked. I’ve posed a little about the history of guitar distortion in the past, but the video below takes the history back even further to Bob Willis and his Texas Playboys, Goree Carter, andHowlin’ Wolf.

This video by Polyphonic looks at how distortion is created, how the early distortion pioneers stumbled across it, and how mangling speakers to get it became a real thing even into the 60s. Thankfully it’s a lot easier to obtain these days as just about every guitar amp, pedal and amp sim will get you multiple variations for days.

Learn more!

The History Of Electric Guitar Distortion #MusicMonday

via Bobby Osinski’s Blog

Ah, guitar distortion. It seems like we can’t get enough of it. From the very first time it appeared on records in the 50s, we’ve been hooked. I’ve posed a little about the history of guitar distortion in the past, but the video below takes the history back even further to Bob Willis and his Texas Playboys, Goree Carter, andHowlin’ Wolf.

This video by Polyphonic looks at how distortion is created, how the early distortion pioneers stumbled across it, and how mangling speakers to get it became a real thing even into the 60s. Thankfully it’s a lot easier to obtain these days as just about every guitar amp, pedal and amp sim will get you multiple variations for days.

Learn more!

MagBlaster Hardware Sega Genesis Video Game Music Player #MusicMonday

This is an awesome open source project for revisiting some of your favorite Genesis tunes. Aidan Lawrence‘s blog lays out the build in excellent detail. From the project GitHub:

This project is a hardware Video Game Music (VGM) player that uses a genuine YM2612 synthesizer chip + SN76489AN PSG. This project is driven by an STM32 “Blue Pill” board, chosen for it’s ample speed, I/O, and best of all, price!

Included in this repository is the source code for the project, all of the schematic files, and a completed Ki-CAD printed circuit board /w Gerber files. Feel free to produce your own board!

Information about the main sound chips and VGM

The YM2612 is a 6-channel FM synthesizer IC that was most prominently featured in the Sega Genesis (AKA Megadrive) home video game console. The YM2612 was also featured in the FM-Towns home computer and the Sega C2 Arcade System. The YM2612 also had a CMOS alias that is functionally identical named the YM3438. The SN76489 is a 3-channel + 1 noise channel programmable sound generator (PSG) that was popular with several early video game systems and home computers. Most notably, the SN76489 was featured in the Sega Master system, the predecessor to the Genesis. To allow for backwards compatibility, Sega included a clone of the SN76489 in their new Genesis consoles. Programmers and sound designers could leverage the SN76489 to add three more square wave channels to the YM2612’s 6-channels of FM synth, creating 9 channels + 1 noise channels in total. While this player was designed with the Genesis in mind, it can play back any VGM files designed for the Master System, FM-Towns PC, C2 machine, or any other machine that used the YM2612/YM3438 and/or the SN76489. This project synthesizes music from .VGM files in real time on genuine hardware. There is no emulation here.

Learn more from Github and here.