Let CDM be your guide through beautiful Moog design:
Check these close-up shots. To me, these are really underrated, attractive instruments – an interesting blend between crisp, consumer-friendly 80s contemporary and the Moog tradition.
Monday, September 28, 2020
Take a Stroll Down Moog Memory Lane #MusicMonday
Immense Live Ambient Concert From Legendary Steve Roach #MusicMonday
During the pandemic, legendary ambient artist Steve Roach has been experimenting with live streaming performances. His latest is a 2+ hour journey through the landscapes of an artist who expanded our notion of what music canbe.
Here’s more from Synthopia:
The concert draws on Roach’s deep history of work. It features Roach performing some of his classic pieces, like Structures From Silence; moving fluidly between space music and tribal ambient and soundscape styles; and exploring the sonic possibilities of a vast array of synthesizers and other instruments.
Turn A Cassette Tape Player Into A Musical Instrument #MusicMonday
Zach Scholl has turned a cassette player into a MIDI-controlled synthesizer. With some code and an Adruino, Zack’s cassette synthesizer works by modulating playback speed to pitch a pre-recorded tone. The result is a very analog sound similar to the Mellotron. Here’s more from Zack:
The neat thing about this synthesizer is that it has a very “analog” quality to the changing of notes – the pitch often slides between notes in a neat way (i.e. lots of portamento). It also is versatile because you can record any sound to the tape and use that as your synthesizer.
To make one of these things is actually really easy. I found a great video from Analog Industries showing exactly how to hack a cassette player to add voltage control to the cassette player. I followed that and then wrote a simple MIDI controller in the browser to modulate the voltage to specific notes.
Music Theory for Beginners #MusicMonday
Just what exactly is a diminished 5th? For the title of Bach’s Halloween favorite, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, just what does “in D Minor” mean? The answers can be found in music theory, the delineation and naming of a set of relationships between sounds that make up the toolkit of music. Here’s more from Icon Collective:
Music theory is a practice musicians use to understand and communicate the language of music. Musical theory examines the fundamentals of music. It also provides a system to interpret musical compositions.
For example, basic music theory defines the elements that form harmony, melody, and rhythm. It identifies compositional elements such as song form, tempo, notes, chords, key signatures, intervals, scales, and more. It also recognizes musical qualities such as pitch, tone, timbre, texture, dynamics, and others.
Sunday, September 27, 2020
Explore the Relationship between #Music and Food in Black and Latinx Cultures with MOFAD and The Greene Space 9/30
Looks like we’ll be tuning in to two streams this coming Wednesday at 8. Ask an Engineer of course, and this exploration into food, music and culture, via The Green Space:
We will discuss the parallels in how artists’ communities and food cultures are targeted and exploited by outside forces. As culinary tastes spread, they connect disparate cultures – but exposure comes with risk. We will explore how the relationship between food and music in Black and Latinx culture grounds us, fuels us, and inspires us.
Read more and get general admission stream tickets here
Enceladus and its Fresh Ice
Saturn’s moon Enceladus appears to have a fresh ice and geysers.
via SyFy
The maps shown here use different colors to represent different parts of the infrared spectrum. Due to the differences between fresh and old ice, fresh ice appears red in the images. The south pole is obvious: The geysers erupt from a series of deep cracks in the surface called sulci (Latin for “furrows” or “grooves”; the singular is sulcus). There are a series of them, long parallel grooves nicknamed “tiger stripes,” though to me it looks more like deep gashes left by a tiger’s claws.
The geysers there deposit fresh ice, so that entire area appears red in the images. But there’s a large region centered at 30° north and 90° west that also sports relatively fresh ice. This was hinted at in earlier work, but shows up clearly here.
Lawmakers Demand Scrutiny of Racial Bias in Health Algorithms
As new tools and algorithims for AI get built it is vital that we make sure we are looking at the biases that are being written in. Good article from Wired:
Nwamaka Eneanya, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, welcomes the letter. She has studied the kidney tool, eGFR, and says there’s good reason to think it puts Black patients at a disadvantage, compounding existing health disparities. Black patients are effectively required to get sicker than white patients before they can access specialist care, she says. The tool has been superseded by an alternative that doesn’t use race, and abandoned by some major US hospitals, including Massachusetts General and University of California San Francisco.
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