July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time.

Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew and loved Sony by the time 1979 rolled around, having embraced their pocketable radios as early as the 1950s. In fact, if you want to blame a device for degrading audio fidelity, you should again look not to MP3s and iPods but back to — you guessed it — the same transistor radio.

But no matter. The Walkman did popularize carrying your own music collection with you. It was not only about mobility, but mobile music collections free of airwaves, mix tapes and the experience of walking around the city or doing a workout with your own personally-assembled soundtrack. It turned everyone into DJs and made the music something that could easily bounce around inside your head rather than around your living room or a music venue. The Walkman and not the iPod might also have to carry the burden of claims that music was made antisocial – but it also made for a uniquely personal experience.

And do we ever love cassettes, with their ability to accommodate our own mixes and recordings and stack in neat cubes.

True, the link that’s making the rounds on the Web parodies the clueless 13-year-old child of the iPod age:
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman [BBC News]

This comes from a different planet than the one on which we live on CDM. In this world, snarky 13-year-olds have no idea what the metal/normal switch does, and the zinger is “Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?” Okay, you snot-nosed brat, it’s a good thing global warming will revert us all to a primitive Stone Age existence and you won’t have to suffer the fate of technological advancement. PS – your dad says never to call him Alan again. (I kid, kid, really. Just can’t resist.)

Of course, on our planet some 13-year-old is probably assembling his or her own cassette player out of spare parts and turning it into a circuit-bent DJ machine, and knows the entire history of the Sony Walkman by model number, and can tell you which factory assembled your old broken model based on the serial number. In that demented spirit, I invite readers to share your own Walkman memories, and offer up a selection of my favorite cassette-themed posts from CDM (of which, I was surprised to discover, there are quite a lot).

I won’t even try to summarize the history of the Walkman, because I have no idea what it is, and Wikipedia has beaten me to the punch.

The translation of music from something largely invisible to a physical object is oddly beautiful, even when imperfect. That’s part of why we’re working on the Tangible Interface Hackday – less than 48 hours away now.

Here are a couple of additional sources of inspiration as we prepare.

At bottom, Guy John has made a sequencer out of one of the world’s most ancient games, Go. Over two millenia ago, Chinese people were passing the hours playing this game, so it’s an incredible way of connecting our passtimes today with the leisure time of our ancient ancestors – and a sign that gaming is a part of culture that endures. It’s fitting, too, as a lot of computer musical interfaces can be thought of as games. This particular game uses Max/MSP/Jitter and the CV Jitter externals for image analysis, then translates the game into a grid. Guy’s idea is fairly early in development, so I actually think you could go all sorts of different directions with this basic concept. (As seen in Hack a Day at the end of last year.)

At top, the Graphite Sequencer translates optical images made in the electricity-conducting material to sound in a simple turntable. It’s lovely seeing these patterns as sound objects, especially since usually we go the other way (trying to find patterns to affix to sounds). The same basic graphite-conducting process is used in the business card PAiA kit we showed at a past Handmade Music, as well as the Drawdio pencil (based on the same circuit).

Graphite Sequencer (2006), as seen recently via the blog of the fabulous-looking Montreal Elektra Festival

I’d love to see people continue to combine these fairly basic analog-style techniques – or thousands-year-old games – with the newer digital approach. Let us know what you come up with, creative folk.

Sometimes, looking back at pioneers can be nostalgic. “Back in my day,” goes the story, “electronic composers were real electronic composers.” But then you hear from someone like Curtis Roads, and his mind-blowing ideas are coupled with a belief that we’re only now reaching the Golden Age of electronic sounds. Rory Ahearn writes to share the latest episode of the show Motherboard on VBS TV, which talks to composer Curtis Roads. Roads was ground-breaking in his early granular synthesis work in the 1970s as he continues to be today.

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

The song “Daisy Bell” has a special place in computer history. Max Mathews, who had by the late 50s pioneered digital synthesis using IBM 704 mainframe, arranged the tune in 1961 for vocoder-derived vocal synthesis technology on technology developed by John Larry Kelly, Jr.. Kelly himself is better known for applying number theory to investing in the markets — an unfortunate achievement in the wake of a financial collapse brought down by misuse of mathematical theory.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke happened to hear the 704 singing the Mathews/Kelly “Daisy Bell,” and the rest is (fictional) history – the HAL computer in the book and movie sings the song as he is being disconnected, as though the computer had learned this song as a “child.”

Here’s Max himself (namesake for Max, the patching language), overseeing a rendition of his arrangement:

News may filter through Boing Boing, Slashdot, and Reddit – and certainly, this story already has. But oddly, I learned of this item when I happened to meet up with the blog item’s author in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has digital analysis he believes may prove that a track was recorded to a click track.

Paul Lamere is a developer at Echo Nest, a brainy think-tank of music geeks developing new ways of processing musical metadata in the cloud. Whereas services like Last.fm focus mainly on content and community, Echo Nest’s API wants to make the computers in the cloud smarter about how they listen to your music. We’ve had a look at their work twice before:

All Christmas Music, Boiled Down to Sixteen Droning Singles
Musical Brain API: An API for Music on the Web – And it Makes Pretty Pictures

The Remix API crunches data about rhythmic information at a number of levels. Since we first saw it, that API has led to an SDK (read: something you can program more directly), all assembled in Python. The Python-based SDK is now capable of creating the world’s most unlistenable mash-ups, among other things – some oddly compelling. On Friday, I got to listen to tunes with every other eighth note removed and Michael Jackson crossed with tunes – that is, until the programmers in the office started to complain because they were about to lose their mind. (Echo Nest uses a Sonos system to pipe music office-wide. I hope we can give you a preview of those clips soon.)

Remix SDK (currently Python)

But perhaps the most interesting thing this team has done so far is Paul’s work on plotting rhythmic analysis. Plots of tempo deviation, measured in beat durations, yield two interesting revelations:

In search of the click track [Music Machinery]

1. Much of the music you know has a lot of rhythmic variation. (Dizzy Miss Lizzie by the Beatles, anyone? No Ringo Starr jokes, please.)

2. A lot of the other music has disturbingly little rhythmic variation.