The graphic designer Rob Ricketts, of Birmingham, England, last year produced four posters that celebrated the lock-step TR-808 Drum Machine beats of long ago electronic music. This is Ricketts describing the process: “Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key.” This is an example of the result:
In addition to Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” the poster series features Cybotron’s “Clear,” A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray,” and Adonis’ “No Way Back.” The beauty of Ricketts’ visual approach is how the rudimentary differences in the data belie the complexity of the individual tracks and the differences between them. By reverse-engineering the patterns, and representing them as static visual patterns, he points out how the drum machine is both instrument and score simultaneously — and, thus, how the drum machines of old prefigured the grid-based (and, generally, software-based) music tools of our time.
Here are two images of another Ricketts project, titled Book of White, in which he collated the names of all the different white papers he could find, to which he added some jokes. No word on whether Pae White, who collaborated with Brian Eno on an edition of Oblique Strategies, made the cut.
More at robricketts.co.uk. (Found via twitter.com/jensjonason via twitter.com/aw_4 via iso50.com.)
The casual nature of sound postings on the Soundcloud.com service has increased intimacy between music-makers and music-listeners in a way no other service can really compare with. On Soundcloud, a musician is more than likely to post within a day of purchasing a new piece of equipment some little test recording, just a snippet of them learning their new tool or toy. In the case of Jared Smyth‘s latest purchase, it is both those things: the TNR-i, aka the iPad rendition of the great Tenori-on device, Yamaha’s next-generation music machine spearheaded by Toshio Iwai, of Elektroplankton fame. If Elektroplankton was a game-like interface for making music, the TNR-i is a music-making interface that feels like a game (see below for images). In Smyth’s hands, the grid-like system gives way to a gentle, lulling piece of music, a sketch of a burbling melody, a gesture toward a proper song.
