My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer.… Read More “My Father and Me. A Memoir. For Mayer Spivack (1936 – 2011)”
Hey everyone, check out this music: http://www.myspace.com/marinvibes
These are the first public recordings by my brother, Marin, a soon-to-be-famous jazz prodigy.
Not only is Marin writing great new tunes with a distinctive style, but he also plays every instrument on the recordings.… Read More “Check out this Music!”
This post is not to be taken too seriously. I’m not actually advocating for the strategy outlined below. Just pointing out that it is taking place already, at least in iTunes.
One thing I’ve noticed about iTunes on Windows XP is that it is a massive resource hog — especially when starting the application, but even worse, when exiting it.… Read More “Hassleware — A New Strategy To Make Users Not Close Your Software”
… Read More “Playing Proteins as Songs Helps Researchers Hear Patterns”All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of
amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can
consist of dozens to thousands of them.Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of
text letters.
An invetor in Japan has created the world’s first glass CD. Because of glass’s exceptional clarity and durability it not only provides better sound quality than plastic, it lasts "forever." The catch: it costs a hefty amount yen to buy one since they are presently made by hand.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music today. Two other albums that I have that I highly recommend are the Magnolia soundtrack by Aimee Mann, and Colour the Small One by Sia. While we’re on the subject, if you like these, you’ll probably also like Dummy by Portishead, even though it’s quite different from them.
The online music recommendation service Pandora is really cool in all ways but one. Due to what they report as a requirement of their music license the user is only allowed to skip a small number of songs per hour. This can be a problem since the whole point of Pandora is that you give it feedback as it plays songs for you and it learns what you like.… Read More “Pandora is Great But…”
If you haven’t heard of Martin
Sexton yet, or you haven’t heard the album Black Sheep yet – go and get it as
soon as you can. Click here to see it.
Martin Sexton is possibly a genius
singer and songrwiter — you have to hear him to know what I mean.… Read More “Great Singer — Martin Sexton”
An experimental driving interface enables a user to control the performance of a composition by driving through a landscape using a game-controller. This system is similar in some respects to my idea for driving through soundscapes of last year.
This just in: Read this article about an amazing child prodigy who may be one of the greatest musical geniuses in 200 years. Not only can he compose like a master, but he can compose multiple pieces of music at once!… Read More “The Next Mozart?”
From the Truly-Ludicrous-Department, the Senate may attempt to ram through a horribly shortsighted and backwards copyright bill. This bill would, among other things, eliminate centuries of fair-use precedent, make skipping commercials on digital recording devices a crime, and would make many uses of p2p networks, digital music players, digital sampling, and other forms of fair-use, crimes.… Read More “Senate May Ram Ludicrous Copyright Bill”
This is an idea for a new way to navigate interactively through large audio sets, such as collections of thousands of music tracks, and to automatically or interactively learn and evolve interesting trajectories through such spaces.
A Japanese inventor has figured out how to vibrate the leaves and stems of ordinary houseplants so that they can be used as audio speakers. The basic idea is that you can hear music coming directly from the plant itself. Weird.… Read More “Transforming Ordinary Houseplants Into Audio Speakers”
Forget about DRM and legal action to prevent piracy — there is a better way: Superdistribution harnesses basic human drives to save money and make money. It’s more powerful than copy protection, more powerful than ethical arguments, and more powerful even than fear of legal prosecution.… Read More “Superdistribution is the Solution to Digital Piracy and Marketing — and a Venture Opportunity too!”
Erik T. Ray is a creative genius, in the classical sense of the word. I first heard about him when I was studying CS at Oberlin College. Many of my classmates were obsessed with something called The Lambda Expressway — an amazing and bizarre serial novel in the tradition of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Phantom Tollbooth.… Read More “Erik T. Ray — A Genius You Should Know About”
Yamaha has released a new synthesizer that sings. And it sings really really well. You have to hear it to believe it! This is going to revolutionize the music biz.
Well I finally made the leap and got a 40 Gb iPod recently. Thanks to RipDigital the process of digitizing my nearly 1000 CDs took only 1 day and I got it all back on a nice new 250 Gb Maxtor external drive (as well as a stack of DVDs containing a backup of all the new MP3s).… Read More “How to Make the iPod Better”
Hey everyone, my good friend, Richard Adams — who used to work with me at EarthWeb — has just launched his new venture RipDigital — it’s really useful, check it out.
They have put together a special robotic CD ripper system that can convert hundreds of CD’s to ultra-high-quality MP3’s at extremely high speed.… Read More “Check out RipDigital.com — Cool New Service Converts Your Music”