Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine.
You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant filter, decay, and some aliasing tricks for extra grit. The big news: the Arduino Piano Squealer is now under a GPL license.
If 16 bits spoil the mood of your All Hallow’s Eve, and you need some chips with your treats, the good peoples of the chip music community are hear to make sure the celebration of the visiting dead are properly accompanied by a free musical soundtrack. The download is free to grab, and fully Creative Commons-licensed for noncommercial, ShareAlike use.
The lineup:
The Guillotine Factory – Assembly Line
NESMETAL – The Throes of Wickedness
Heosphoros – A Traditional Childrens Waltz
Chema64 – Mictlantecuhtli
Norrin_Radd – Reciprocal Dimensions
Mr. Doom – Poison’d Candy
Nestrogen – Infernal Misanthropy
Dr. Zilog – Sanguinary Sect of Worship
arottenbit – Chemiotrails
FTF – Phobos & Deimos
Baphomania – Roaming Spectral Shores
Peter Swimm – illithid
H-Pizzle – Ghosts of a Fallen Empire
What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in it.
Such a movie was rumored, but as with so many projects, leaves behind no evidence. What if it had left a score you could hear? The mysterious “Flynn 1.5″ writes to share a free, downloadable soundtrack that answers that question.
And you can argue with an album that begins out with “For the Love of ENCOM”? Indeed. You can stream the full album and download all but the Journey remix. Read the full “backstory” after the jump.
Tron moniker or no, the results are some lovely music, featuring the likes of Tiger Mendoza, Team9, artist and CDM regular reader Lilith The Kitten, and ringleader World Famous Audio Hacker, among others. (Trivia – Tiger Mendoza has his own, Creative Commons-licensed album, and Team9 earned notoriety for a mash-up collaboration with Green Day.)
What if you could mash, mangle, mush, and morph sounds with your fingers on a screen, watching the waveforms dance in response in three dimensions? That “what if” is expressed beautifully in a project by musician-developer Christian Bannister of Portland, Oregon, who works as Subcycle Labs.
The result is like being able to touch sound directly.
Three-dimensional forms morph and vibrate using visuals programmed in Processing, making architectural-organic shapes and spaces that really begin to “look” like sound. These forms can represent synthesis and effects parameters (Christian has done some work with the Massive synth from Native Instruments), or can allow navigation through loops using touch. Gestures remap offsets and duration for audio, scrub and slice, and apply granular resynthesis.
Autonomous bassline generators? Wireless, modular, infrared sync? Tiny drum machines networking together? Welcome to Texas, and the minds of Eric Archer, Bleep Labs, 4ms Pedals, the Church of the Friendly Ghost, and Andromeda Space Rockers.
One look at a floor full of blinking circuits, and most ladies and gentleman might assume they’ve stumbled upon some alien technology. “Imagine the things we could learn from this civilization – advancements far beyond our own,” as the stock line from sci fi goes. “Man and woman are not meant to learn such things. You’re meddling in things beyond your comprehension.”
In other words, you couldn’t build something like this, right?
Or could you?
In Austin, Texas, Eric, Dann, and Dr. Bleep are launching a new Handmade Music series, kicking it off with kits and classes so that anyone – including beginners – can start building stuff. For the 101 crowd, there’s a free beginner class even if you’ve never touched a soldering iron, so you can build your own analog drum. “I’m no n00b,” you say, “impress me.” Sure – the “upper division” gets to talk more advanced synth design and walks through the full-blown modular, networkable kit.
At the end of it all is an open jam and featured performance.
If you’re anywhere near Austin, Texas – or can find a bargain plane fare – you’ll want to clear your calendar for October 18!
That’s just the first of more events to come, so stay glued to the Handmade Music site for events in Austin, New York, Portugal, Germany, and beyond.
“That’s right / you’re not from Texas / Texas wants you anyway.” For those of us in New York, Lisbon, Rio, Sydney, and Jakarta, there’s still hope. The kits will be online, and I”m looking at ways of putting together a full Handmade Music curriculum of projects online for all of us on the site we’re developing this fall, noisepages – ideas welcome.
I certainly didn’t expect to get deep into these geekier topics in high school while I was busily trying to fail Calculus and screw up science lab results in ways that baffled my teachers. But it’s a glorious age we live in, in which we get to assimilate alien technology as our own. Stay tuned.
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