Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: Playing catch up on links I’ve accumulated. … Is the Nintendo DS video game Electroplankton out of print? Someone’s selling it for over 70 bucks, used, on amazon.com. (Thanks, Jeff.) … Speaking of which, amazon.com has updated its underacknowledged free-download service, now as part of the blue-light specials at amazon.com/mp3deals. […]
A selection of recent freely viewable videos of note:
Spoken Word: Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee interviewed (vimeo.com, via createdigitalmusic.com). … Minimal techno figure Robert Henke (aka Monolake) presentation (video.google.com, via createdigitalmusic.com). … Laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits lecture on his process (xlr8r.com). … Soundtrack composer Tyler Bates on the film Doomsday (soundtrack.net). … Alex Ross, author […]
Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: The avant-garde rises to the surface in Internet sales of classical music, reports Justin Davidson, guest-blogging for Alex Ross at therestisnoise.com. He’s discussing the charts at emusic.com:
No. 2 is Gavin Bryars‘ The Sinking of the Titanic, a minimalist portrayal of slow-motion calamity that caused one Floridian subscriber’s spouse to ask: […]
It’s not every day that a video-game critic opens a post with an image of an image of a brooding Morton Feldman, especially when the purpose is to “defend” a video game. The game in question is Portal (see half-life2.com). The defense is from Chris Dahlen’s savetherobot.wordpress.com:
And the defense I tried to mount is that […]
Wondering what musical thing the DS will do next after Electroplankton? How about simulating a full-fledged synthesizer? The new KORG DS-10 from AQ Interactive reproduces the late-1970s MS-10 on the popular Nintendo handheld.
The product’s ad site (at aqi.co.jp, from which the above image is borrowed) says it’s for Japan only, but the site is available […]
Complaints that the Nintendo DS cartridge Electroplankton has no “record” feature have been answered. Not by some cheat code that reveals a command to record the sounds produced by users on the ingenious sound toy. No, instead by the increasing number of musicians who treat the Electroplankton as an instrument, plain and simple. No […]
On the influence of electronic toys on today’s musicians:
After all, arguably, electronic toys are the midwives and nursemaids of gamers.
Electronic toys were what we played with before we even knew what video games were. In their stilted, stuttering voices they taught us to count, to spell, to recognize shapes. They sat on our bedside tables […]
Videos Worth Streaming: Robot orchestra made of ping pong balls and glasses (engadget.com). … And a band whose instruments are a Nintendo DS (with Electroplankton) and two handheld Apple products (dhadm.com). … Music made only from sounds from the Windows OS (youtube.com — easily six or seven people sent this link to me separately, and […]
Some of the most widely publicized news from this past week’s Game Developers Conference (gdconf.com), held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center from February 18 - 22, centered on a sixth-sense device, from Emotiv (emotiv.com), that uses brain waves to trigger game play. Still, the original five senses were in full effect, sound key […]
Yesterday’s Disquiet Downstream entry was a 25-year-old discussion about computer-powered interactive art systems (disquiet.com). Today’s is a pair of MP3s recorded thanks to an ingenious piece of software that turns the Nintendo Wii video game console into a musical instrument. After a quarter century, art and science have become entertainment.
The Wii Loop machine needs to […]