Year: 2005
Chris Ware to begin publishing Sunday strip in New York Times,
beginning Sept. 18.
A Link to Tristan Perich’s forthcoming ‘One Bit Music‘ project made the rounds of the nerdy music blogs last week. If you mouse over the image below, you can see my assumptions as to the basic breakdown of the circuit — it’s nearly identical to a circuit I used in a music box two years ago, though the IC doesn’t appear to be one of the ISD series of Record / Playback chips I’m familiar with.
It seems this concept could easily be expanded into an even more self-contained object by enclosing some ultra-thin speakers in all that open space.
Perich plans to release the objects with his music encoded onto the IC’s, you can sign up for his mailing list at the link above for more information.
UPDATE
Yep, those are volume potentiometers. More here.
MP3’s of the music accompany this Wired article about the project.
Dave and Darin’s Labor Day song.
A literal reading, featuring a verse sung from the POV of a fetus. Naturally.
How do the blind tell the difference between U.S. paper currency?
Folding techniques and portable bill readers, a la vending machines.
This isn’t a life-changing application or anything, but I was pretty thrilled to discover RetroPlayer – an OS X gramophone emulator. Launch the program and you get a top-down view of a gramophone, sans record. Drag any audio file into the Retroplayer window, and a record appears and begins to play.
Playback is infused with user-configurable quantities of vinyl crackle, skippage, and warping / speed distortion. You can advance the track by dragging the tone arm to the desired relative radial position on the record, and the ‘reject’ (stop) and speed adjustment controls on the graphical gramophone are functional as well. If you’re immune to quickly expiring novelty and make it through a whole track, the tone arm will spin and crackle in a pseudo lockgroove until you either hit the stop lever or quit the application. Two emphatically nerdy, impractical thumbs up.
