Yet Another Post About the Kindle

Last night I mused on twitter that in a world of iPhones, the Kindle feels like a Mac IIsi in comparison. Not only does it feel like one, it sort of looks like one as well.



From this, I surmised that the Kindle fails utterly as a gadget. It can not compete with the sexiness of netbooks and smart phones with its current level of clunkitude. If you like gadgets, and buy gadgets for gadget's sake, you're going to be disappointed. From this perspective, it is easy to pick apart the Kindle's shortcomings.

At this point, you're probably thinking I hate the Kindle. While I believe the Kindle is the only the starting point for a certain application and class of device, I must say I'm addicted to reading on the Kindle. If you love reading (note, I said, if you love reading. If you love books, you probally wouldn't consider the Kindle) I strongly recommend the device. The Kindle, and e-readers in general, represent the first genuine technological improvement to the act of reading in ages. I mean that. As slow and unpolished the Kindle is compared to an iPhone, it is a huge leap forward compared to reading a book, in my opinion.

I speculated about the Kindle, and gave my first impressions, but here are a couple more observations.

The in-line dictionary feature is really handy. In the past, when I encounter a word with a fuzzy meaning, I'll attempt to ascertain the definition from the context. With the Kindle, you simply move the cursor in front of the word you're curious about.

The Kindle is small and light enough to hold and turn pages with one hand. This frees your other hand for greasy popcorn or other messy foods.

And I still have yet to charge it since I initially filled it up.

So, if you're a gadget-lover, avoid the Kindle.
If you love reading, go buy one.

Ode to Nagra

If you're anything like me, chances are you enjoy some good gear porn. Usually this takes the form of beautiful and sometimes rare synthesizers, but I believe nothing compares to the precise, clockwork engineering of Nagra field recorders.

Musicians exist in a parallel world to audio production for film and television. Nagras, rugged, expensive and battery powered, are designed for the chaotic, brutal world of location audio, so one does not normally encounter one in the studio. As such, most musicians rarely get an opportunity to encounter one of these beautiful beasts.

Edison's New Setup

Remember, folks, you saw it here first. New Edison video with his new sidecar pushbutton thinger.

Pareidolia Video: Felix the Cat

Cut this public-domain Felix the Cat video to Pareidolia in a lame effort at leveraging the attention of a surprising number of youtube subscribers. A bit more interesting than a static album cover, but a lot less work versus generating something in After Effects.

ro videos

Somewhat related to the recent seemebeemin release, here are some ro videos.

Error Correction

Error Correction is a 22 minute EP comprised of four modular synth tracks. I've been waiting to finish Pareidolia, then I mastered all four tracks so they sound more or less like they belong together. No other synthesizers or samplers were used, excepting some of the drum sounds on tracks 2-4. Everything you hear is crafted on the modular.

Pareidolia clocks in at 3:33. In a lot of ways, it is the opposite of the recent piano releases which were recorded and issued quickly. Pareidolia took me four weeks to create, for better or worse, which is twice as long as Element 112, and the piece is half the length.

Element 112 is probably my first, true, post-Volta track, although 050209 predates it. 050209 was created fairly quickly for the AHNE09 video. The difference is I felt I was truly beginning to leverage what Volta is capable of with Element 112, and just sort of getting my feet wet with 050209.

Coalescence and Luxation was released a while back, and is a pre-Volta piece. In fact, Coalescence and Luxation was maybe the final straw as I remember being extremely frustrated with my MIDI to CV box. Although the idea of a dedicated CV product had been on my mind for some time, after this piece, I swore I was never going to work that way again.

Much of the point of working with a modular synth is to have total control over the audio, so I feel the free MP3 encoding (especially the bandcamp encoding, which I don't really have any control over) sounds pretty terrible. I strongly encourage you to grab the lossless versions (use the download link).

The album art is based on a graphical representation of pi that recently appeared in a crop circle.

Kindles & Bits

I'm still opposed to some aspects of the Kindle, notably, the DRM and the pricing structure of titles, but I'm going to be in a situation where I don't want to carry 50 pounds of books around, so I finally succumbed.

Amazon reduced the price of the Kindle $60 to $299. A few hours later, it arrived in the mail. Thankfully, Kindles ordered within 30 days of the price drop get price protection, so I got a refund. Of note is Amazons creepy and efficient call you back feature. You simply type in your phone number in the amazon web site and moments later your phone rings and connects you to a customer service representative.

The Kindle is smaller than I expected. About the thickness of a pencil or iPhone. The screen is a little smaller than a standard paper back. The entire unit is slightly larger than three iPhones. It feels like a slate, only electronic. It is small and light enough that I don't mind keeping it in my bag which stays with me at all times which means I'll be reading more, including at work during lunch.



I've never used an e-ink display, but yes, it is readable in any light, very much like ink on a page. When you 'turn' pages, the screen inverts to clear in a brief flash before it renders the new page. This is expected due to how e-ink works, but feels a bit wonky in this day and age. The display obviously has a sustained power active mode that gets invoked when using the menu options, otherwise the screen would flash every time you move the cursor. It occurred to me that it is theoretically possible software problem for the kindle to know when it is plugged in and go into an active, non flashing on page refresh mode under these circumstances.

On power down the Kindle locks the physical UI controls, save the soft power switch and fixes the screen to a randomly-selected image or illustration of a historical author. Call me strange, but I'd like to customize this. e-ink is cool in that it requires no power to display an image, but I don't need to be reminded of this. I find the images grating and unnecessary. I would prefer the option of a blank screen or the ability to upload a jpeg of my choosing.

Do you read trash? I do at times, and I don't care to advertise what I'm reading to others, so I like this aspect of the Kindle. Now, my inner 12 year old girl can read Twilight in public without the disapproving stares.

The Kindle comes pre-registered from Amazon so you don't have to set up anything. Titles can be purchased from the Amazon web site, or from the Kindle itself. Titles can be loaded onto the Kindle via USB, or beamed wirelessly from Amazon directly to the Kindle via 'whispernet' - basically a cell phone network. Obviously it costs amazon money to deliver data this way, but this charge is 'built-in' to the price of the book and you don't get a discount for avoiding whispernet. In general, if you read a lot, and buy books online, you'll save money on titles and shipping - but you'd have to be a fairly heavy reader for the savings to subsidize the cost of the Kindle itself, particularly if you're someone who has to have the latest, best model.

As the Kindle is rendering text out of data on the fly, you can tailor the rendering of the text, most notably the size, bigger or smaller. It would be nice to have a choice of typefaces.

The Kindle lacks some of the user experience finish of an Apple product, so I think the non-technically inclined might struggle a bit with some of the product management. I think the Kindle 2 remains a product outside of mass acceptance, like the first generation iPod. However, if you're comfortable purchasing a book from Amazon, you're probably comfortable managing a library of electronic media at the Amazon web site.

There are a number of extras, including a mostly-useless web browser, mp3 player (also mostly-useless due to the limited memory of the kindle) and text-to-speech so the kindle can 'read' to you. This mIght be interesting if you want to continue reading while you're preparing dinner. There are built-in speakers, or you can use headphones.

Most titles range from $6.68 to $9.99. There are a number of public domain works available for $0, which are stocked with classics like Pride & Prejudice, works of Shakespeare, etc... These can be found anywhere on the net, but who wants to read a book on an iPhone or computer?

seemeebeemin

In case you don't subscribe to my twitter feed, you should definitely check out the new release from ro, seemeebeemin. Download the full album here.

Porcupine Tree in the Studio

Porcupine Tree are gearing up for a new release September 21st, 2009 and world tour kicking off in the US mid-September. Here is a short video of the band in the studio including some shots of Richard Barbieri with some analog synths (prophet 5?) including a modular of some sort. It isn't a Moog or a Macbeth M5N looks vaguely like a Roland System 700 cabinet, but that doesn't feel right either.

Audi Bosendorfer

The Audi Design Studio Team and designer Philip Schlesinger helped create this new Bosendorfer for Audi's centenary.

The end of trade shows

The music business is in transition. The old way of doing business meant announcing a product at a major trade show like NAMM, AES or Musikmesse, advertising in one of the major music trade magazines, and selling through a large national retailer.

You've probably read that Native Instruments announcement is opting-out of all future trade shows. Trade shows have been in decline for some time. The first indication of this was Apple pulling out of Boston Macworld, then all trade shows, instead focusing on orchestrating their own media events and conferences like WWDC. This enabled Apple to announce products on a timetable that made sense to the company, instead of constrained to an arbitrary timetable. Trade shows are partially responsible for vaporware and premature product announcements. As a company, you have to have something to say at a trade show, regardless of if the product you're pushing is shipping soon or not.

Then, there is the cost. Trade shows are expensive. Obscenely, horribly expensive. A reasonably competitive booth in the music software industry will buy you a very nice house. This booth needs to be stored somewhere, trucked into the trade show location, and set up by union labor. There are electricians, video specialists and all sorts of subcontractors involved. Oh, does everything respect the local fire code and regulations? Then there is the expense of the booth location on the floor. Personnel, flights, hotels, food. It all adds up to a tremendous amount and guess who gets to pay for it? You do.

Trade shows have evolved into a bloated billion dollar business that ceased serving the needs of the industry and became a profitable end unto itself.

Trade shows aren't even necessary anymore. What changed? Well, the internet. I used to anxiously await the post-show edition of magazines for the large chunk of product announcements. Then, slowly, the online trade show coverage became more comprehensive than the magazine coverage. Companies began issuing press releases directly to web sites and people online found out about products before the dailies hit the hotel rooms. Most music shows are not open to the public, but suddenly the public was more informed than industry insiders.

For companies, trade shows are not about announcing products to the public, but for extracting purchase orders from retailers, but even that process is changing, and ultimately, unnecessary.

It isn't any secret that print media is dying. The magazines are a shadow of their former self due to, wait for it, the internet. Reviews, advertising, editorial and product announcements have migrated to a variety of online sources. Readership, relevance and advertising revenue are all going downhill.

The current economic climate isn't the cause of these changes, but the recession may kill off companies that can't or won't adapt to the new way of doing business. Trade shows and print advertising are an unnecessary expense today as a nimble company can communicate directly to their customers. This is a good thing for consumers as companies can be more competitive by re-directing these outdated, huge expenditures into making better products and improving dialog with their customers.

Origami and Solar Sails

Robert Lang explores the link between art and practical applications at the intersection of origami and mathematics. "The secret to productivity is letting dead people do your work for you."

Post-Volta Modular Setup

Sitting between the top and bottom cases are two 828mk3s, bound together with a MOTU half-rack adapter, facing backwards, with the jack fields facing me. I made 32 3.5mm to 1/4" cables by splitting two 8-channel Hosa snakes in half and discarding the outer jacket. One 828 is dedicated to control of the oscillators and stereo audio in/out. The other 828 is for miscellaneous Volta outputs.

I have the three TipTop Audio Z2040s mounted directly below the Z3000 oscillators. You can also see the Lego Miniwave perched on top.

After I brought my modular home, I optimized the layout to be more Volta-friendly. Before, I tried to have some sort of concept of a 'voice' grouped together and used the bus access module. That's gone. Now all the oscillators are grouped. VCAs and mixers are together. The envelopes are together and there is an entire row of filters. Much easier.




I like the scale of this system. Enclosure choices were very limited and I'm happy to see this opening up. I must say, those new monorocket cases look very nice. Here is a sexy custom curved west coast design via the muffwiggler forums.



What a wonderful time to be into modulars.

Pareidolia excerpt 070109

I haven't produced anything of note for a couple weeks because all my spare time has been soaked up working on this project. I won't lie to you, it hasn't been a very good stretch for me professionally or personally. The piece itself has been refusing to come together for some time, only last night did the pieces start to fall into place. Due to some extreme stupidity on my part, I've had some minor setbacks on the piece itself where I accidentally wrote the new file over with an older version. I've managed to lose some small chunks of data along the way.

Every single sound you hear was designed from scratch on my modular, controlled by Volta, albeit processed and edited with autistic intensity. This is similar in style to Element 112 and, when finished, I'll wrap up with a couple other modular tracks as an EP. There are two more sections of the composition in total.

There are two new filters in my system debuting in this project, the Cwejman RES-4 and the TipTop Audio Z2040. In fact, these are the only two filters I used. The RES-4 easily produces crystal clear bell-like, almost digital-sounding tones. I posted a submix of some of my early experiments with the RES-4 that were derived from this composition on the muffwiggler forums.

I'm planning to make a video of the Z2040, but first, I wanted to get a handle on what it can do musically, how it 'behaves', etc. The Z2040 is responsible for the bass parts you hear as well as the polyphonic parts that sound, to me, like a Prophet-5 (just three pairs of Z2040 and Z3000 - thazzit - envelopes provided by Volta). I currently have a couple extra 2040s on loan for these polyphonic experiments. The Z3000 is the only oscillator used, except for a part that called for the wide open voice of the Livewire AFG.

I think I'm going to take a break from this piece tonight.

A Brief History of Computer Voltage Control

The idea of controlling an analog synthesizer with control voltages generated by a computer is not a new one. The first systems designed to do this sprouted shortly after modular synthesizers themselves.

The GROOVE system was an adaptable general system developed by Max Matthews at Bell Labs. It was based around the DDP-224 computer and interfaced to a modular synthesizer primarily via 14 digital-to-analog converters and a bunch of relays.

In a lot of ways, the GROOVE system was like the MaxMSP of today because arbitrary modules could be interconnected. However, by today's standards, it wasn't exactly user-friendly. You got the system to do what you wanted by programming FORTRAN IV and DAP 24 bit assembly language.

I primarily associate use of the GROOVE system with electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel . This is Laurie's Appalachian Grove I (1974) available on Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music. The still used in this video is not the GROOVE system, but Laurie's home studio.





The Fairlight CMI had an option called the CMI-07 analog interface card. This card provided 16 inputs/outputs to control analog synthesizers from the Fairlight sequencer. I'd be interested to hear from anyone familiar with this option as I can find little information on this.



In 2005, Cycling 74 released Pluggo. Several of the included audio plug-ins were designed to output control voltages to analog synthesizers using a DC coupled audio interface.

In 2009, MOTU released Volta, the first virtual instrument designed to generate control voltages to control analog synthesizers. Volta introduced the concept of oscillator calibration which finally provided accurate pitch tracking from an audio interface.