Granulator patch that I made in Max MSP

"Here is a better example of the granulator patch that I built in Max MSP. It works by grabbing grains of sound (windowed snippets of a preloaded sample of varying lengths anywhere betweeen about 15 and 3000 ms) and layering lots and lots of these little grains together, all playing at different speed and volume. The grains are selected randomly but within certain paramenters, so you can vary the range of the audio file from which the grains are grabbed. Works really nicely for creating ambient textures and pads. You can load and sample into it and usually garuntee interesting results!! Here is a quick demo of what it can do. This will make up a part of my latest uni assignment. "

No not me, this guy mikefoyle. Pretty cool patch, looks simple enough to use and seems to generate some very impressive results. One of these days I going get my hands dirty with Max again.... but not today ;)

BBC's Radiophonic Workshop

Over on BBC News there's a full page article on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A fair few vids with explanations of how some of the more recognizable sound effects were made.... There's a very short clip of a guy making a Dalek Voice on the EMS VCS3.

What with this, the multiple vids on youtube, the Alchemists of Sound docu and the many articles in SoundOnSound and other magazines I think the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is well covered for now. I wish we could get a few more vids on WDR or RTF or more information on the R.A.I. Phonology Studio... I'll have a hunt about see if I can find anything.

Wabot 2 & Yamaha FX-1

Wabot 2 playing the Yamaha FX-1... there used to be another vid up but it's gone now and this one just came up today.... so. It's always fun seeing robots playing music.

If you like that kind of thing Wired.com has a decent article about Asimo the Honda Robot and his upcoming gig as conductor for the Detroit Symphony...

Free Online Acid Studio - Killer :)

This is a killer little internet app from hobnox.com. Yes it's Rolands galore... A 909 and 2*303's with a heap of Boss/Roland guitar pedals and a mixer.... all for free. Everything is connected with virtual cables that can be dragged around freely, the 909 has multiple outs and the mixer has pan... so in essence it's technically better than the venerable Rebirth. You can even plug all the effects pedals in series to get some wilder fx going. If this isn't the ultimate time waster for work I don't what is. Go there and cook up some acid... beautiful :)

wonder if it'd run on iphone... anybody fancy giving it a go?

Smokeless Fuels - Breakers Blog

Just a shout out to Colz over on Smokeless Fuels Blog. The blog is dedicated to all things DJ and Breaks.... loads of mixes (inlcuding plenty of his own), lots of Irish breaker talent, plenty of youtubes and a healty doses of venting at the blatant stupidity of the music industry. Well worth a read...

I've added Smokeless Fuels to my feed reader so you can see the latest headlines over at the top right of AudioLemon.

Swedish study: drummers more intelligent

So despite the drummer being the most frequent butt of lame band jokes it turns out they might be the brightest of the bunch... oh ya! At the Karolinska Institute they've found out that intelligence and rhythmic accuracy go hand in hand. They also demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of white matter in the parts of the brain's frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.

Ok one drummer joke... How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb? None, they have a machine to do that now :)

Doepfer A-100 MS20 Bass - Live Sampler patch

" New free patch for ableton Sampler module !

Created on a Doepfer A-100 analog modular synthesizer. Sampling done with AutoSampler software and a Metric Halo MIO 2882 audio interface.

Modules analogiques utilisés Eurorack analog modules used
A-111 High End VC Oscillator
A-138 Mixer
A-140 ADSR
A-106-1 Xtreme Filter (MS20 Filter Clone)
A-131 Exp. VC Amplifier

A100 MS20 Bass [4.6 Mo] (53)

This sample pack is licensed under using Creative Commons copyleft licence."

Thanks to Hielo Patagonia who has another few modular sample pack all cut, chopped, edited and ready to GO for Abletons Sampler. Feel to Love :)

Buchla Easel on Music Thing

CHARLES COHEN AT THE BUCHLA MUSIC EASEL from ALEX on Vimeo.
The beautiful Buchla Music Easel being played by Charles Cohen. This is most definately the coolest post of the year so far. You can read more details over on Music Thing.

TB-303 Acid Reflux #008

Another in RRKS69's Acid Reflux series of acid house trax...

"Acid Reflux #008, I pulled out the old MC-505 for the drums. Please leave some comments. Cheers goes out to Suicide Server banging it in Germany. New Tracks are coming soon so stay tuned.
PEACE & CHEERS from Chicago,
RRKS

Written, Produced and Recorded at ITM Studios, Chicago, IL by RRKS.
COPYRIGHT 2008"

If you haven't seen any of the other trax in the series they're worth checking out.

Sent my way thanks to RRKS69

Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller than MP3

Researchers at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file.

The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

We're still using MIDI 30 years after it was developed so any advances in digitally representing music for playback has to be welcomed!

Dem Boyz - 5 mins then End

Hello... I've been away for a week or so. My old laptop finally gave way to kipplization and it had to be replaced. Anyways I wanted to put this up for few days so now I'm back online I thought I'd post it up.

Myself and the 3 boys in the pic are trying to get some kind of live modular thing going. We're trying to do it without computers or keyboards. Just analogue sequencers... it can get a bit messy... very messy :) - This is the first one that sounds something like music. A bit too structured maybe but we'll work on warping it up. It's a live 5 minute improv using 3 Euroracks and the Jomox 09. It kind of ends abruptly but Dem Boyz told me to post it unedited so here it is...

Free-Kammerl Plugins

Kammerl Audio have released a set of 5 plugins for Win/OsX for free! Pitcher, Warm Distortion, Scratcher, Looper,Slicer. Functional and elegant with _lovely_ artwork to boot!

The Phonautograph: 1860

On the musical devices involving paper tip this article recently appeared in the NY TImes recounting the successful playback of soundwaves that had been transcribed onto paper by a precursor of Edisons phonograph, created by the little known Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an early pioneer of sound recording. There's a little .mp3 snippet of the recording here.
Straight outta 1860 y'all!