It’s been an unseasonably warm and dry winter here so far, but the current weather forecast says we’re likely to receive several inches of snow tonight. A white Christmas would be just fine with me.

My friend Dan has an excellent tradition of recording traditional Christmas songs as reworked versions of hits from the 1980s. He posted his latest yesterday: Holly Jolly Monday. Yes, it’s an unlikely but successful collision of Holly Jolly Christmas and Blue Monday. Click here to go to Dan’s site to hear it.

It’s worth mentioning that Dan records all of these songs from scratch–he doesn’t use any samples from the original recordings.

There’s a rather good interview here with Laurie Spiegel, one of my sources of inspiration. She’s a composer, musician, and programmer who started way back before computers were fast enough to generate audio signals in real time. In the interview, she touches on a number of interesting topics, including what it was like to be at Bell Labs in its heyday, how computer programming has become considerably more difficult over the last several decades, and how making music with software usually involves a layer of detachment not present when making music with instruments. It’s a good read if you have any interest at all in the history of the use of computers in music, as told by someone who had a not insubstantial influence on how this history came about. read more

Once upon a time, like around 60 years ago, electronic music was made not with synthesizers (which hadn’t been invented yet) or computers (which had been invented, but took up most of a room and didn’t really do much), but with tape recorders, test-tone generators, radios, and other sundry bits of electronics usually used for something else. It happened like this:

Mr Müller (former assistant of Stockhausen) performing on generator, radio and 3 tape machines from standuino on Vimeo.

Now, on one hand it’s easy to watch what’s going on and think, “wow, it’s so much easier now that we can run multi-channel recording software on laptop computers and use all sorts of cool plug-ins from companies like Audio Damage.” To a large extent, that thought is completely true. However, working with tape and mixers and things in real time has a degree of immediacy and an organic quality (for lack of a better way of putting it) that’s absent with computer-based electronic-music studios. Software’s lack of direct, hands-on manipulation is what motivates things like the iPad, Windows 8, the new controller from Ableton and Chris’s onging experiments with multi-touch monitors. There is huge power and flexibility inside the computer, but our interaction with it is limited by an inability to reach in and touch it. read more

I’ve started an official Twitter presence for Paper Jade. I’ll probably use it to announce the arrivals of new papers, post the occasional photo of something I’ve folded, etc. If you’re of the tweeting sort, here’s the button:

Follow @PaperJadeLLC
read more

Recently it came to my attention that DealExtreme is selling some 8×32 LED arrays for cheap here. Since I have a serious weakness for LED arrays I ordered four of them. My ultimate goal is to mount them together to make a 32×32 array, all driven by a single microcontroller. For starters, though, I programmed the onboard ATmega8 MCU on one of them to make some interesting patterns:

The idea came from the multiple-pendulum demonstration that has popped up in a few YouTube videos such as this one. It’s a nice example of complex patterns arising from a relatively simple system, and hence relatively simple software. read more

There’s a remarkable collection of photos here of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

There are some amazing videos here shot from HD video cameras mounted on birds. Yes, birds.

Here are some photos of odd or amusing things which caught my eye in Japan:
UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that the photo-gallery thing doesn’t work right. Sorry. I’ll fix it when I have the time.