What to do with all those extra MIDI outputs

amanda steggell: The Emotion Organ (2007) is a synaesthetic simulacrum machine where players can explore the sensational interplay of feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling and motion. It is also a time machine – a re-engineered pump organ from 1895 that combines both old and emerging technology and builds upon a trajectory of several centuries-worth of ideas…

Dangerously cool (interactive) synths

I was thinking about simple visual metaphors to communicate organ works, but digressed. Cue Nick’s World of Synthezisers. Favourite quote, from the slinkyfied Springatron: “I used the golden ratio to work out the lengths of the springs, this was to prevent resonances occurring at the same frequencies and at harmonically related frequencies.”

Philip K. Dick We Can Build You

“Time has passed us by,” Maury said at once to me. “Our electronic organ is obsolete.” “You’re wrong,” I said. “The trend is actually toward the electronic organ because that’s the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won’t sell one spinet a day; the spinet will be a…

Unnacompanied into the woods?

The other day someone gave me the (impeccable) English translation of Gabriel Tortella’s classic El desarrollo de la España contemporánea. Historia económica de los siglos XIX y XX. I don’t really understand why he uses 1900 to divide the period in two – on the basis of most of the indicators he cites, a tripartite…

Chino de los mandados = errand boy

Chinese because of his servility and/or size, or a genuine Indiana Jonesian Short Round? From Bogota, and perhaps relatively recent, but here (it reappeared) is Walter Silva from distant Casanare singing a sentimental but memorable ditty about how his mum etc looked after him when the store wouldn’t put the groceries on the tab. Can…

The Alhambra as the opening titles from Mission Impossible

1966, and here’s series 1, episode 1 of the Strine Bond: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Lh6i9096Q Let’s rewrite that: Good morning, Mr. Irving, Your mission, Washington, should you decide to accept it, is to compile a series of cultural and historical sketches laying the foundations for tourism policy in Granada and to a considerable extent in Spain in general.…