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.

CDM on Cassettes

The best story of all time: Eric Beug on how to make a Mellotron sampler entirely out of Walkmans, as seen at an early Handmade Music with CDM, Make Magazine, and Etsy. See MAKE:blog for the full post.

The best-ever cassette quote: from experimental DJ Artjom (DIY machines and Max patches below):

Yes, you can contact with me. But, if you would want that I played on your party on cassettes, then I refuse. I do not play on cassettes any more. In general, I don’t want play in the club, because people come there to drink and to search partner for copulate. This is bad.

The best day for cassettes: when we read RIAA numbers that showed that DVD Audio and SACD combined were still matched by cassette sales. Some new formats catch on. Some do not.

Cassette tapes (and other tape media) as a way of making lo-fi samples:

Free Tape-Recorded Samples of Roland TR-606, 808

Cassettes for uses silly and uses practical alike:

Cassette Change Purse; Choosing Cassette Decks with Pitch Control

In other words, cassettes can be entirely useless and about nostalgia only — or they can remain a useful and inspiring musical tool even for digital users, helping you get out of your rut and approach sound in a new way.

Cassette Jockeys at the 2007 Maker Faire

The work of DJ Artyom, who assembled DIY DJ gear using cassette tapes for a unique sound and mixing techniques:

Homemade Cassette Tape DJ Mixers + Max/MSP PC

An international collective shares mix tapes – the physical tapes, yes, even in the Internet age

Above: Andy Warhol shills for TDK. Video cassette tape, to be sure – but sublime nonetheless. If I had to remember my Japanese lines, I might have to close my eyes, too.

Tape collections:
The brilliant Project C-90
The Obsessive “Tape Jam”

Walkman Sequencer: Tape + Homebrew Sequencer + Nintendo Game Boy

Gijs Gieskes is a master circuit bender, and cassette is a favorite medium. Check out his Tape Seq 02, which varies cassette playback using controllable pots and synchronizes to a Game Boy. It’s an analog result that’s only possible in this way with tape as the playback technology.

Put a cassette deck inside a Windows PC (sadly, this product appears to be discontinued?)

You Tell Us

Nostalgia is one thing. But what to you have the cassette and the Sony Walkman meant for music? And is there anything these youngsters (well, anyone younger than … 20, I guess?) could learn about this technology? Is there a lesson from the Walkman?

Above: You know a technology makes an impact when it has its own graffiti. The cult of the cassette, as captured (CC) hugovk.

Pronunciation of some common music tech terms has been a source of debate. Generally, though, there’s only one right answer. I had hoped to kick off a pronunciation guide yesterday or today, but now I really can’t resist – not with none other than Tegan & Sara getting together to debate the right way to say Moog.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cows, and the sound “moo.” I suggest if you have something you want to name Moo, you should, like your own MooVerb max patch or something. However, here goes, a few of my favorites:

Moog: Rhymes with “brogue” or “rogue,” not the sound a cow makes. Don’t say “Moooooog” unless you want to get funny looks from synth nerds, or if you’re teaching synthesis to livestock in a dairy.

Monome: The community-based, (partly, at least) open-source controller rhymes with “MA gnome,” not the Spanish-sounding “Ma gnome ME.” You should not be able to use it in a couplet with paper mache. Get it? Two syllables. Sure, this pronunciation varies, but the two-syllable version is what the device’s co-creators call it.

OSC: Pronounce the letters of the open communications protocol, as in “O.S.C. / oh ess see”, not “osk” – though that would have been kind of cool. Think, “Rah, rah, rah, Give me an O! Give me an S! Give me a C! What’s that spell? Better than MIDI! Time-based messages, higher resolution, transport-independent high-speed networked communication with auto-discovery, gooooooooooOOOOO O.S.C.!” (People sometimes say this site is geeky. I have no idea what gives them that impression.)

And for now, O.S.C. stands for Open Sound Control, even though in one spot on the JazzMutant website it’s called “Open-Source Control.” Just get ready for this to change – because OSC really isn’t specific to sound, it may need a new name, like Open System Control. (A recent paper suggests dropping the “sound” in the name.)

MIDI: Rhymes with G. Gordon Liddy, or P. Diddy, or Tweetiebird saying “Piddy.” And, actually, it occurs to me I’ve never heard anyone mispronounce this. Fascinating – an acronym that’s actually intuitive. Oh, but “C.C.” stands for “Control Change,” NOT “continuous controllers” — look at the CC specs; most aren’t continuous. There. I got to be anal about something anyway. Updated: consensus is actually that “mee-dee” is a mispronunciation for native-English speakers, but likely makes more since than “mi-dee” in other languages — particularly if you speak French. So, in other words, it’s an acronym, and makes the most sense to pronounce in the natural way you would in your native tongue. (For English speakers, who knows what vowel sound is appropriate given how screwy our language is, but the creators of MIDI all say middy.)

Maschine: Native Instruments’ drum machine software and controller is German-engineered, so say “muh SHEEN uh,” three syllables, as if you grew up in Berlin. Now, granted, Maschine’s own promotional videos — outsourced to the US — anglicize this to “machine” / “muh SHEEN”, but the engineers and product folks who built the thing use the German pronunciation and think you should, too. And, anyway, it sounds cooler, just as I have to admit a currywurst is tastier than a Nathan’s dog.

I’m sure this is only a small selection of potential mispronunciations. Other candidates? We’ll have to release a full pronunciation guide soon.

I really have no words for this one, other than there’s a hilarious APC40 meme happening on the Ableton forums. Is it love? Disdain? The APC as the new “All Your Base” for the Live warping set? Does it really matter?

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=116396

It’s good to know that, even as Ableton Live use has spread, us computer music folk are really not normal.

Via Tara Busch on Twitter of AnalogSuicide.

Wearing wooden masks and cow bells strapped around their waists, Germans defied the freezing temperatures to participate in the traditional cow bell-ringing procession in Mittenwald, in southern Germany. The century-old custom is celebrated around carnival.

New York Times Pictures of the Day, 2/19

Just remember, folks: musical instruments are a wonderful thing.

If this economy is getting you down, our friends at MeatWater, the “high-efficiency survival beverage,” have a prescription. A prescription for techno:

MeatWater MP3 Techno Remix

Now, perhaps this is just a crass ploy for MeatWater to sell more of their MeatWater-protein drinks, which come in flavors like Gyros, Beef Stroganof, Hungarian BBQ, and Dirty Hot Dog. But if there’s one thing I believe in more than the health-giving power of proteins, it’s in the stimulating power of techno. I’m steps away from the stock market, so I may take this on a boom box and hold it out front of the exchange, Say Anything-style. Well, until I get stopped.

I mean, who can feel anything but bullish as four beats pound confidently on the … floor?

By the way, if you’re wondering, just … don’t. There’s not really a rational explanation.

You can talk to the bottles on Twitter. They like German. (send them some German techno, okay?)

I can’t say anything this song doesn’t say brilliantly. Comedian Adam Buxton takes on the Radiohead remix contest with his own entry, which cuts through the hype brings a bit of wit to TV incidental music and remixing alike. And, really, how often do you get to say "Radiohead" and "rap" in the same sentence? Take my mechanical rights, please!

See, there, I said something. It wasn’t very good. Just so listen to the song and thank me later, okay?

See also Adam Buxton’s sketch for BBC3’s Rush Hour which cleans up NWA to "Help Da Police." Thanks, Jaymis!

Here’s the one and only Facebook app you’ll ever hear me get enthusiastic about. You know the Facebook apps, of course – this overhyped “platform” generally involves time-wasting, spam-like “Someone you barely know just sent you a cupcake” emails. But I like this one:

Analog Synths

Thanks to CDM’s Liz for being so generous:

And personally, all email should work this way:

I’m waiting for Star Trek’s replicator technology to become reality so we can send around real synths. Anyone? Want to win a Nobel Prize?

In fairness, this isn’t really off-topic. The connection of ladies to music is clear here. There are, too, the fantastic Ladies of CDM — few in number, yes, but mind-bogglingly awesome in quality. (Ladies, feel free to roar here.) And, of course, for those of you who are not ladies yourselves but an aficionado of ladies, it’s clear that, like roller skates, synths and music are part of the essential lady-attracting formula.

The bad news I have to break for Flight of the Conchords fans:you’ll be waiting until well into 2009 for a new season.

Side note: CDM loves New Zealand.

And yes, Carnegie Mellon is advertising how cool they are in these videos. In these days of geek chic — and with involvement on various projects just beginning with the Keepon — I can’t really argue. (I wasn’t paid to say that, really. They didn’t give me an honorary doctorate, or, uh, a week of free tuition or something.)

There’s a side narrative with recent grad Dr. Daniel Wilson on the battle of man vs. machine, which is reasonably amusing. Here’s the Keepon bit:

And this video is totally unrelated to Create Digital Music, except that Liz and I just had to negotiate with American Airlines’ and Orbitz’s automated systems so we could talk to a human being.

You know I’m often (well, sometimes, anyway) a reasonable, rational, measured person. And you can probably guess that, as a fan of design and elegance, I really appreciate the iPhone’s elegant design, the fact that it pays attention to user experience. I think it’s a major innovation, one that will have far-reaching effects. Yet, something about walking out the door of my apartment building and seeing a hundred people waiting in line just because there’s an AT&T Wireless store on the block — one of many here in Manhattan — is setting me off.

I miss computers. Remember computers? Remember the Apple II, which came pre-installed with BASIC so you could start programming it out of the box (in stark contrast to the closed nature of iPhone)? Remember the Newton, which you could turn into a drum machine if you wanted? Remember how Steve Jobs’ first product, with Steve Wozniak, was a device that actually ripped off AT&T? That sounds like fun. It’s just sort of hard to see the iPhone being the landmark 50 years from now, even if Steve Jobs told Apple employees they’ll tell their grandchildren about the iPhone launch. (I have a feeling their grandchildren will respond, you used THAT?)

I like devices that can make music, not just listen to it. Mac? Check. iPod? Nope. iPhone? Not so much. That’s the reason so many readers here still get creative with old Nintendo game systems and Commodore 64s and 1960s modular synths — music doesn’t age, and neither does music technology. Sure, I might even get an iPhone at some point … but for now, the best gadget I’ve ever met is still the Mac. And June 29 for me is a Pixar release date more than an iPhone release date, a reminder that, despite the name of this site, art made on computers can be more than “digital” — it can ultimately be just music and art. Eventually, the technology doesn’t matter. And creativity is still the best killer app of the digital age.

It’s not that I don’t understand the appeal. Tycho on Penny Arcade puts it best: “I just think I’m ready to use a device where each application was designed by people who seem to talk to one another on occasion.” Wow, the wonders of modern technology. That would explain why people are lining up for this thing like it’s a Depression-era soup line: most phones really are that bad.

But here’s my suggestion: Let’s talk about anything. Anything. Worth $500 or less. (Heck, two years of service … say $1500.) Anything that’s not an iPhone. (Newton totally counts.) I mean, either you’re going to go get an iPhone and you probably need someone to take your mind off of it for a few minutes while you wait in line, or you’re like the rest of us, surrounded by a swamp of hype. Meditation time … Moooooooooooooog. Moooooooooooooog. (Hint: if you just sounded like a cow, you’re saying it wrong. Think Ohm. Or Ohms.) What technology do you get excited about that’s not an iPhone?