Bag of Beans

Listen to the beat of a binary counter!

This is an experiment, where I count one byte up - from 00000000 to 11111111. Decimal spoken, this is from 0 to 255. I have assigned a sound to each bit and when it switches from 0 to 1, the sound is played.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Jonathan Coulton, the writer of “Still Alive”, the memorable end song for Portal, gives us the story behind the song. You may already be familiar with Jonathan’s previous songs, like Code Monkey. Portal is one of the most brilliant games ever made, and also one of the funniest. This final song makes a perfect ending to the game, and has received a huge amount of attention.

The character is this hilarious passive aggressive personality, which is obviously a perfect subject for me. I write about that sort of thing all the time. I got an advance copy of the game when it was nearly finished, played through it, talked with the writers, and tried to get inside this character’s head as best I could. I bought my first ukulele specifically to record this song, it just seemed right for it. (Or maybe I wrote the song that way so I could buy a ukulele, hard to say.)

• Link
• Portal - “Still Alive” Credits Song on YouTube

Related:

• Code Monkey

This is a great song by Jonathan Coulton.

Check out the video by spiffworld on YouTube:

• Thing a Week 29 - Code Monkey (via net@nite podcast)
• YouTube video

Take this online test to see how well you can distinguish musical pitches and tones.

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

…

The test you are about to take was used as a screening test to roughly characterize patient’s pitch discrimination and musical memory abilities. Even though musical memory is strongly tested here, we have found that people who are tonedeaf tend to have normal musical memories.

• Link (via Digg)

This is one of the coolest 3D animations I’ve seen.

From the first Animusic DVD. Pipe Dream has been voted one of the 50 greatest animation projects ever (by 3D World magazine).

A group of percussion instruments perform music by way of metal balls that fly out from pipes.

• Link (via reddit)

This is an impressive video of a guitar solo with an interesting playing style.

• Link (via Digg)

This is an innovative idea for a music video. It was apparently created with 2,500 Polaroids.

• Link (via Digg)

This article explains why current CDs are not taking full advantage of their digital medium, and in fact are sounding worse and worse.

Then, one day we awoke to a new technology. It was called “digital recording.” Wow, now with a dynamic range of over 90 dB, our recordings could almost rival a live performance. Well, in theory. However, the music industry had other ideas.

Rather than use this new technology to take advantage of it’s wide dynamic range, the music industry went in the opposite direction. They decided that louder is better. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a race to see whose CD was the loudest. The only way to make CDs louder was to keep compressing the signal more and more. That’s where we are today. Everyone’s trying to make their CD sound louder than everyone else’s. The term that is used for this process is called, hot. Yes, most of today’s music is recorded hot. The net result, noise with a beat.

• Link (via Digg)

This is quite an entertaining music video of one man playing all 37 parts of a song using only his cello.

I thought it would be a fun project to write and record a pop tune using nothing but cellos, then make a video of the performance. The original goal was to keep everything entirely acoustic, with no recording studio effects or other processing. I quickly abandoned that idea to get more variety of sounds, but everything you hear was played entirely on my cello. There are 37 separate cello parts recorded on 23 tracks using 37 plug-in effects.

I don’t know if I should be embarrassed to admit I spent hundreds of hours on this project, or proud to have paid so much attention to detail. You be the judge. So pick a media version your computer supports, crank the volume up to 11, and let ‘er rip.

• Link (via Digg)

This is a brilliant idea. Someone figured out that the Creative Zen Micro fits perfectly inside an Altoids mint tin. Just drill a hole for the headphone jack and you’re set! If you like, you can also cut holes for the power switch and usb connectors. Check out my pictures on flickr.

• Thread on Head-fi.org where the idea originated
  

Nathan True has hacked together a wireless music player using a Netgear WGT634U wireless router. It might be hard to locate the Netgear router since it has been discontinued, but still a nice hack.

The Mission

When I began this project, I knew I could not settle for anything less than:

• A small, low-power networked music player, which
• Runs Linux, and
• Can connect either wirelessly or wiredly, that
• Supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC at a minimum, and
• Accepts commands remotely from a PC or PDA, in addition to
• Displaying song info such as Artist/Title on a display local to the device.

This incredible album is a collection of mp3 remixes based on the soundtrack for the original DooM game (not the movie!). Hangarmageddon, Industrial Strength and Mystery Meat are some of my favorites. But Darkness Dawning just blows me away. Wicked stuff.