brainwagon

Courtesy of Make magazine blog, here is a whacky DIY site on building your own Cigar Box Guitars. It seems like the kind of thing that my friend Tom would approve of, and he turned me on to Make in the first place.

Those clever BoingBoing-ers found another cool item for you “music” loves: a Hormel can ukelele. It doubles as a lunchbox. It’s a pity that they don’t include a link to how it sounds. This is just the kind of impromptu folk instrument that I’m beginning to find fascinating.

Slashdot links to a story about the music industry using AI to choose hit songs. I can’t help but shake my head in shame. I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Dead Poets Society (excerpted here): KEATING Gentlemen, open your text to page twenty-one of the introduction. Mr. Perry, will you read the opening […]

Need a ballad dedicated to Willebrord van Roijen Snell? Look no further than the Snell’s Law Song. Found via the MASSIVE search engine.

In case you weren’t impressed by the 8-bit Christmas music, how ’bout these Christmas Carols generated on a PDP-1. Ah, square waves.

Holiday-themed chiptunes from 8bitpeoples, link courtesy of BoingBoing. Kind of makes you want to dust off your Gameboy (not the DS, or the Advance, or even the Color) and play some Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Imagine Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass playing Christmas Carols. They might sound like this. Try especially

For some of my do-it-yourself musicians, Boing Boing ran a link to this $22 kit to build a ukulele. I’m developing an intellectual if not aesthetic appreciation for inexpensive musical instruments. Can anyone recommend outstanding examples of music for the ukulele? Addendum: I found something brilliant.

Every once in a while, I want to generate some pure sine waves for audio purposes, and I have to go digging around to find this simple technique, so I thought I would write it down here. Suppose that you are trying to generate a 440Hz (middle A, if memory serves) sine wave sampled at […]

Anyone who can mix eigenvalues and eggnog gets a thumbs up from me. Bonus brainwagon tip: wget -r -A.mp3 -l1 -H -np -nd http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/christmas_2004.html

Brilliant! Link courtesy of Dan Lyke at Flutterby!.

The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo has been released under a Creative Commons license. Awesome! If you like, you can still by the traditional dead tree variant, but the author has seen fit to release an electronic version under an Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDeriv license.

Apprently Microsoft can occasionally dimly see the light ahead: witness Yahoo! News – Microsoft Sings a New Tune With Windows Media Player 10. After years of dragging their feet about including MP3 ripping in their Media Player product, they have finally caved and made an encoder freely available. Of course it doesn’t rip variable bitrate […]

Alex Maclean thinks of Perl programming as a type of performance art. He improvises new programs that generate music while standing on stage. He explains the framework he created and how he uses it to control sound generating application.