Leather UI Skeuomorphic Design

I know it's not on trend to like skeuomorphic designs, but I just loved this set of leather UI elements from GraphicsFuel.

LiveCoding and Swift Audio

So, with everything else going on over the summer I finally got a chance to take a look at Swift Playgrounds and have a look at what kind of LiveCoding opportunities it presented. I was spurred on by Jamie Bullock's Live coding audio with Swift playgrounds  posting which has been well linked. Unfortunately I ran straight into the same problem that Kevin Irlen posted and did a bit of digging to find the problem which was easily identified by googling the functions and checking on the Apple Dev site - looking at the AVAudioMixerNode it clearly indicates that AVFoundation is for iOS8 or here for Mac OSX 10.10 (Yosemite). I've added this comment onto the post for others.

As my home machine is used for lots of other things I'm a bit reluctant to put a dev build of Yosemite on so will have to wait a little longer before playing with this audio example playground. Shame.


Update - the temptation was finally too much and I decided to give this a go on Yosemite....

Aphex Twin Syro track "minipops 67"

Lots of anticipation for the new Aphex Twin album Syro that has been further fueled this morning by listening to one of the tracks "minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]" that can be heard in full accompanying an interview in Rolling Stone magazine following an earlier article. It's particularly interesting given the use of vocals in the track.

Even more exciting that Richard D James has more material ready...

Sony SmartBand fitness tracker with e-Ink

I've long been a fan of the Pebble watch particularly due to it's e-Ink display and have followed it from the start on Kickstarter. e-Ink technologies have been a personal interest for over 15 years now from lab demos to finally seeing this in a range of products, and hopefully this is only the start as flexible/thin material products start to emerge.














Sony just this week announced the SmartBand Talk (see the white version here) at IFA which combined a fitness tracker with a watch using an e-Ink display and can link with Android devices. Cool! This is certainly a step on from the earlier LCD versions which also have an improved version with theSmartWatch 3 SWR50.

Holiday Reading (Pt 2) - Music Signal Processing / Dan Ellis

Along with Andy Farnell's book, I took along Dan Ellis' also excellent course notes from ELEN E4896 - Music Signal Processing (Spring 2014) which make a great read (I'm going to checkout the accompanying videos as soon as I get a chance) across a range of music and signal processing applications.

Dan has a great site with a stack of links and materials. I've just put the links to the slides for my own reference here, there are supporting videos and additional material on his site. Oh to have had this when I was a student!

ELEN E4896: Music Signal Processing:

• 1: Course Intro + Short-Time Fourier Transform
• 2: Acoustics
• 3: Perception & Psychophysics
• 4: Analog Synthesizers 
• 5: Sinusoidal Modelling
• 6: Linear Prediction (LPC)
• 7: Filters & Reverb
• 8: Pitch Tracking
• 9: Time and Pitch Scaling
• 10: Beat Tracking
• 11: Chroma and Chords
• 12: Alignment and Matching
• 13: Audio Fingerprinting
• 14: Source Separation
• 15: Research at LabROSA

There are also a bunch of other excellent courses that Dan teaches at Columbia which I had a quick look at after getting back from hols and want to take a deeper look at, obviously E4810 Digital Signal Processing was of interest and the lecture on Analog filters and IIR filter design has some fantastic material.

Holiday Reading (Pt 1) - Designing Sound / Andy Farnell

I had a great holiday sea/road-trip and found a bit of time to squeeze some technical reading in between everything. I've been meaning to learn a bit more about Pure Data (Pd) and wanted something that walked through it's capabilities and also combinedsome of the other corners of digital synthesis. Andy Farnell's excellent book Designing Sound bit both of these needs right on the head and brought back fond memories of my first year physics and the various different applications of wave equations and damped oscillators.

The code examples from the book can be found here and he has his own site at Obiwannabe.

There's an interview link with Andy here and a bunch of lectures on YouTube:

Designing Sound Procedural/Computational Audio Lectures by Andy Farnell:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Interesting Electronic/Midi Instruments - Hurdy Gurdy

On our epic roadtrip through Spain/France this summer we passed through the Basque region and stopped off in Pau where these two music festival posters for the Hestiv d'Oc caught my eye.


I'd forgotten about this instrument, although it features in a number of well known English folk bands with Blowzabella probably being the most well known to feature it. What struck me, is both the shape and human interaction probably make this ripe for an electronic hacking intervention and was curious to see what there was.

The relative obscurity of the instrument would probably keep the number down, but as this is basically a key and wheel interface device it is probably ripe for a few people to give it a go and get the melody and drone sounds with some electronic effects thrown in. I was pleased to see some really interesting results.

First of all Bryan Tolley has some interesting examples along with some YouTube examples here and here. In this case Bryan has followed the 'electric guitar' route with a mixed electronic instrument along with effects.

I'm not sure how electronic the instrument is, but this is certainly using some electronic effects to interesting result below:

Then I took a look for fully electronic implementations and came across the very interesting MIDI-gurdy:

This is a hurdy-gurdy MIDI controller with the sound synthesis made via an accompanying iPad application. You can see it being played below. Neat, this looks very interesting. I like the styling and the wooden buttons.

Which returns us to where we began on finding this opto-electronic version or Vielle a Roue Optoelectronic which was commissioned for the very same festival in Pau that I saw the poster for...