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The Monome Four By Sixteen: cnc cut pennsylvania black walnut, for an installation later this November in Los Angeles.

BugBrand has intreoduced the AudioWeevil08 - both a synth-sound generator and an audio processor - with a load of chaos possibilities chucked in too.

Features:

• Audio Input through a CMOS Overdrive/Distortion - a powerful input (1/4″ mono jack) suitable for guitar or line levels. There are two levels of drive offering clean or distorted sounds. The distortion crunches really nicely!
• Variable Response Wasp-style Filter - the filtering on the AudioWeevil is now full of character! Based on the famous old-school Wasp synth and offering variable Resonance / Q, Cutoff + LFO Modulation and Low/Band/Highpass outputs. There’s a mixer going into it for balancing the Thru (Audio Input) and Ring (Weevil Sonics). There’s also an output level control before 1/4″ mono output jack.
• Twin Oscillator Weevil Heart - this is the screechy ringmod centre of synthesis with many features. There are two lofi squarewave oscillators (one with LFO modulation) with Hi / Lo rate ranges which feed into a quasi-ringmod. The 2nd osc can be switched over to accept the squared audio input for wierd-assed ringmod processing. Added onto this are controls for: Power Starvation (with Stable or Instable modes), Ringmod Feedback (with three way routing switch) and an output Comparator to give stable levels even when starved.
• Modulation LFO - Osc1 and the Filter can be modulated by the wide-range tri/saw LFO. The two rate ranges offer modulation from superslow to audiorate and the waveform is switchable from Saw to Triangle to Ramp. There are independent modulation depth controls for the Osc and Filter
• Screen printed Frontpanel with Contact Points - the professional frontpanel labels all functions clearly (13 dials, 10 switches) and presents a total of 16 body contact points allowing touchy chaos control of the machine - lick your fingers!

The AudioWeevil08 is cased in a sprayed slope-fronted enclosure (c.22×14x9cm). It is battery power only (due to the touch controls) running off 6 AA batteries in the panel compartment mounted underside. Battery life should be at least forty hours with decent batteries including rechargeables.

Audio demo below.

Note: this is not in production yet.

 

 Sonics just from the internal synth [5:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Chris Randall continues with his video overviews of Audio Damage sofware with this introduction to Dr. Damage.

Dr. Damage Features:

• Multi-mode filter (4PLP, 3PLP, 2PLP, 4PHP, 2PHP, and 4PBP modes). The 4PLP self-oscillates at high resonance without audio input, allowing Dr. Device to be used as a theremin-type instrument.
• “Tube” style soft saturation and bit reduction.
• Stereo bucket-brigade-style delay, with two filtering modes and tempo-synced time.
• 2-node XYZ control pad, hardwired for control from popular hardware XYZ pads.
• Sophisticated motion recording and kinetics control over the XYZ pad

OpenTape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. If you tried MuxTape - it looks like this is basically a free software clone of the site.

Links: demo, download it.

Fleshmap - a site that makes visual “studies of desire”, has introduced a new feature, a visual guide to what parts of the body we sing about, categorized by music type.

It’s NSFW, so you’ll have to read more to see if wangdoodles make the list: Read more…

Controllerism 101: Moldover teaches you how to turn a simple and inexpensive MIDI keyboard into a custom audio controller.

Remember German samplemeister Johannes Kreidler and his piece Product Placements - the song that supposedly smashes 70,200 samples into a 34 second work?

He’s released it and you can preview it above. Special prize to the first person to name all 70,200 samples…..

It’s a lot more interesting as an idea than a piece of music. Kreidler’s using the music to challenge the idea of copyrights and how they relate to art.

Kreidler’s is a provocateur - his film Smoking Fetish, below, pairs found footage with industrial noise music:

This is techno video filmed “in” Second Life - the online virtual world.

I can’t go near Second Life - it’s the sort of thing that could suck up as many hours as you have in the day - but this is an interesting demo of both the virtual world and it’s capabilities as a platform for machinima-style videos.

This demo features “a lot of awesome things in the cyberspace of Second Life”, including:

• Dynamic realtime shadows & per-pixel lighting (3xp3r1m3nt@l in Aug-08)
• Havok 4 physics
• WindLight atmospheric rendering
• Sculpted prims

This is a video demo by pask present of an electrochemical synthesizer. The video features audio recorded direct out (rather than microphone and speaker/amp).

The sounds are produced by an electrochemical reaction between aluminum, copper and salt water (NaCl), fed through a pre-amp after basic filtering via a capacitor and resistor.

The originally inspiration for the electrochemical synthesizer was the webpage “Peculiar Sounds of Aluminium” by Nyle Steiner. home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/alsounds.htm

This if the final version of Glenn Marshall’s video Music Is Math.

It’s a generative video, and Marshall says “I just let the program run till the end of the music, I felt reluctant to interfere too much by trying to sculpt an ending, and just let the code run its own natural course.”

Nevertheless - it’s interesting how your brain creates connections between the visuals and the music, isn’t it?