I’ve been examining the visual patterns produced by the Whitney Music Box (see previous post). If you watch the animation for any length of time, you’ll notice that the dots form spoked or starfish-like patterns periodically. These patterns often cause chords to be played by the music box. I was curious to understand the sequence […]

This weekend I’ve been playing, once again, with the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, using both graphics and audio. While Whitney was interested in turning musical ideas into motion graphics, I’m doing the inverse — turning one of his key animation ideas back into music. Whitney made a number of films based around […]

One of the following five foods is different than the others. A) Grape Nuts B) Egg Salad C) Eggplant D) Egg Cream E) Eggroll Which is it? The answer is given below, in the inviso-text. The answer is “any of the above.” Here’s why: A) The only one which does not contain the word egg. […]

I live near one of the coolest public libraries in Los Angeles, Glendale’s Brand Library and Art Center. Here are a 10 good reasons why you should go. 1. The library sits at the the top of Western Ave in a beautiful park overlooking the valley. Excellent for picnic lunches. 2. The library specializes in […]

I’m still working on making artificial yet authentic 17th century vocal music, so I thought I’d provide some MP3 samples to listen to, and give capsule reviews of a few of the different software packages I am using, in particular, Flinger, and Tracktion. If you haven’t read my previous post about this project, check it […]

Here is a screenshot I took while I was working recently, to document a fascinating project. The project involves resurrecting a bit of technology from the 1600s. In the screen snapshot, I am entering numbers into a text file. I am copying the numbers, as you can see, from a digital facsimile of an old […]

It is harder for a big company to produce decent software than a small company, as illustrated by this ugly little dialog box: Why do big companies have trouble making decent software? 1) They have too many employees. I believe that design and coding should be done by very small teams, and that the same […]

According to a recent post in the Flickr Blog the ‘favorite’ color of the Flickr community is a warm brownish taupe. The blog points to a nifty application, favcol which computes the average color of all the images on Flickr recently tagged ‘favcol’. In actuality, that brownish taupe color is what you tend to get […]

from Machine Project, my favorite art gallery for geeks here in Los Angeles. Hands On’Semble Episode Four of Everybody Loves Difficult Music, a music and discussion series Thursday March 23rd 8:00pm Please join virtuoso hand percussion group Hands On’Semble as they play original compositions that blend the rhythmic concepts and playing techniques of North and […]

I’ve been a little obsessed with cuckoo clocks for the past few weeks, and here are a few cuckoo-related oddments. A friend of mine gave me an unwanted cuckoo clock, and I repaired it and hung it on a wall at home. Every time the cuckoo chime goes off, it makes me giggle. Sadly, most […]