Music Samples Through Time #MusicMonday

Currys Tech Talk has a fantastic little research project that produced an interactive tool called Music Samples Through Time. You know what sampling is, but unless you’re really into this stuff, you may not know how entangled all this stuff can get.

via Currys Tech Talk

Things get particularly interesting when you explore music in the new millennium. Who doesn’t know “Toxic” by Britney Spears? The smash hit track is one of Spears’ best-remembered songs. Yet if you know what to listen out for, a cookie-cutter dance number is transformed into something much more layered, much more impressive.

The distinctive hook is lifted from a Bollywood track, “Good Sign, Bad Sign”. Go back to “Toxic” with this in mind and suddenly the Indian influences are hard to miss. It’s then that you discover that the writer of “Good Sign, Bad Sign” also helped compose the original 1962 James Bond theme song. By sampling a relatively unknown Bollywood track, “Toxic” unintentionally channels the spirit of Bond.

When you dig beneath the surface, there’s a story everywhere you look. With its disarmingly simple beat and catchy chorus, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” is hard to get out of your head. But did you know that the original hook upon which the song rests was originally in a folk tune, “Seville?”

Dozens of stories abound and Music Samples Through Time, an initiative between Currys PC World and the Bose SoundLink Micro Bluetooth speaker, explores these stories in greater depth. Tracing sampling’s roots, its rise and its highlights, the campaign serves to illustrate just how widespread the practice is.

From the Music Samples Through Time tool

Sampling music – the art of taking a song, cutting it up, and weaving its threads through a new track – is common practice in modern music. But it’s by no means new. In fact, the artform goes back more than one hundred years.

Get a better feel for this history by examining the graph on the home page. The graph illustrates the number of tracks that have used samples – and been sampled – since 1910.

Music Samples Through Time

 

 

 

CircuitPython Libraries on Linux and the 96Boards DragonBoard 410c @96Boards @LinaroOrg @ArrowGlobal @Snapdragon @circuitpython #circuitpython

CircuitPython Libraries on Linux and the 96Boards DragonBoard 410c

We’ve got tons of projects, libraries and example code for CircuitPython on microcontrollers, and thanks to the flexibility and power of Python its pretty easy to get it working with microcomputers like the DragonBoard or other ‘Linux with GPIO pins available’ single board computers.

We’re adding new boards to Blinka all the time. If there’s a board you would like to have added to Blinka, please file it as an issue on the Blinka Repository on Github or even better, submit a Pull Request.

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The CircuitPython Subreddit hits 500+ members! #CircuitPython #Python @Reddit @CircuitPython @Adafruit

Adafruit is dedicated to providing you the news on Python and CircuitPython in your chosen way. Whether via Blog, Newsletter, Video, Instagram, or on platforms like Reddit, we have your back!

The CircuitPython subreddit on Reddit.com crossed the 500 members mark today! Thank you to our Reddit readers for choosing to get your Python happenings fix on Reddit.

Check out the CircuitPython subreddit now > > >

Beyond Bitcoin: 6 Ways Blockchain Is Revolutionizing Our Daily Lives

via AfroTech

Blockchain technology exploded on the scene with the introduction of cryptocurrency, and that’s where it remains within the public conversation. There is not much understanding, especially within the Black community, of the underlying technology and its usage outside of finance.

Blockchain technology is a list of records linked through cryptography. It is managed by multiple machines on a peer-to-peer network. Although it cannot be edited, it is verifiable because, in order to change the blockchain, it has to be confirmed by the majority of the network.

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How Old Spy Satellites Helped Scientists Peek In on Shrinking Himalayan Glaciers

You know how the old sayin goes – reduce, reuse, recycle old spy satellites. Fun story from Atlas Obscura.

On multiple missions between 1971 and 1986, KH-9 HEXAGON satellites—also known as “Big Birds”—soared above China and Soviet terrain, imaging 877 million square miles of ground, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. The satellites were heftier than a school bus, Space.com reported; some weighed upwards of 30,000 pounds. Cameras were mounted so they could rotate as the satellite flew, and film was stored in four canisters that drifted back toward Earth via parachute and were intercepted by planes.

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Making a Jacquard Loom Controlled from an iPhone

via Retro Tech Journal

Weaving on a loom is fun. I gave my son a simple loom for Christmas, and he wove an entire scarf on Christmas Day. This got me thinking about building a computer controlled loom, maybe one that could weave any pattern imaginable. I liked the idea of taking software back to its very origins with Jacquard and the original Jacquard Loom. I also new there’d be lots of interesting design challenges.

At the heart of the loom is a long row of cams sitting on a square shaft. In order to not have this giant row of cams jamming up horribly, the cams would have to have almost no load. The square shaft locks most of the cams in position but has one section that can rotate to spin a single cam. The main idea was to have the cams not do the lifting and lowering of threads directly, but to have them shift some hooks back and forth. If the hook was over a bar, then the bar could do the work of raising and lowering the threads.

See more!

Alternative Ocean Cleanup Successful In Removing 40 Tons of Plastic in a Month

Just when it feels like all the news is bad news, here’s a little good new from dezeen.

a california-based cargo ship called ‘kwai’ from ocean voyages institute set for sea on may 23, searching for ghost nets and consumer plastics using GPS to track the trash. OV institute had spent the year prior distributing these trackers to mariners and asking them to leave the devices with the ghost nets they encounter.

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