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Archive for December, 2009

19

Dec

The Known Universe in Six Minutes

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.19.22.27.08 — Archiviato in: Scienza

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.


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17

Dec

Tartaglia?

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.17.04.09.41 — Archiviato in: Società, Storia

Allora, Tartaglia è il nome dello sfortunato aggressore dell’innominabile (perché secondo me SB porta una sfiga atroce).

L’aggressione è avvenuta il 13 dicembre.

Il 13 dicembre 1557 moriva a Venezia il matematico Niccolò Fontana, conosciuto come Tartaglia, rimasto nella storia per l’omonimo triangolo.

Coincidenza?


On December 13, the day of Berlusconi attack by Massimo Tartaglia, the italian mathematician Niccolò Fontana, known as Tartaglia, died in Venice (on the year 1557).

Niccolò Tartaglia is very famous in Italy because of the Tartaglia’s Triangle (a geometric arrangement of the binomial coefficients in a triangle, named Pascal’s triangle in english).


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17

Dec

Su internet nessuno sa che sei un cane

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.17.02.28.27 — Archiviato in: Web

Questo per quelli che, su Facebook, si sono trovati iscritti a un gruppo pro Berlusconi senza saperlo, solo perché il gruppo a cui si erano iscritti, originariamente intitolato a tutt’altra cosa, ha cambiato improvvisamente nome.

Il punto è che, essendo faccialibro una piattaforma che raccoglie milioni di utenti, i gruppi sono utilizzati anche da varie organizzazioni che cercano di aggregare una certa quantità di utenti intorno a un tema per fini tipo:

  • marketing virale
  • invio di comunicazioni pubblicitarie (o spam o keylogger o virus o backdoor)
  • ricerca di individui interessati a certe tematiche per poi contattare i singoli (quest’area va dai giochi di ruolo alle squadre di calcio fino alle organizzazioni terroristiche o religiose di varia ispirazione)
  • varie ed eventuali

e il dato di fatto è che, se non conoscete il fondatore del gruppo, non avete la minima idea di chi vi sta davanti.

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17

Dec

Muxicall

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.17.00.01.04 — Archiviato in: Audio, Net Art

At a first sight Muxicall seems to be another piano on the net like many others. But there is an important and interesting difference: all the people connected play together and everyone can hear all the notes.

All the users connected share the same instrument and a sort of collective improvisation can arouse. Interesting concept, but the reaction time can be a problem: the users can experience a sensible latency due to flash and the network itself.

Muxicall was created by Diana Antunes as part of her work for the New Technologies of Communication degree at the University of Aveiro (Portugal).


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16

Dec

Introducing Max for Live

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.16.00.52.02 — Archiviato in: Audio

Max for Live is an integration of Cycling74’s Max/MSP with Ableton Live. There are two official pages about it from Ableton and Cycling74.

Max for Live puts the power and potential of Max/MSP inside Live. Create all the instruments, effects and extensions you’ve ever wanted. Go beyond the common and predictable, and transcend the limits that conventional tools impose. Build completely unique synths and effects, create algorithmic composition tools, or fuse Live and controller hardware into radical, new music machines.

At first sight, it seems to me a sort a Max for the rest of the people.

Nobody can claim that programming with Max is easy: There is an unavoidable learning curve involved with any kind of programming. So, yes, it can get complex, but it’s worth it. Max’s visual approach is a lot easier to get into than traditional programming, especially because you can immediately see and hear the effects of your changes. Max for Live also includes a number of in-depth tutorials, each with its own reusable example content. The tutorials guide you through Max for Live, from the first basic steps to the advanced, ninja-style stuff. They’ll help you find your level and provide support and examples as your skills develop.

I’m a little skeptic about it. Personally, I begin to move towards SuperCollider…


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15

Dec

inudge

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.15.01.11.58 — Archiviato in: Audio

A better ToneMatrix with a drum, more instruments and melodic lines to play with. Have fun here.


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12

Dec

hist whist

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.12.00.01.57 — Archiviato in: Elettroacustica

An insteresting video (mostly in french) about the making of hist whist for violin and live electronics by Marco Stroppa at IRCAM studio.

Composer and computer scientist, fellow traveler of IRCAM since the beginning of the 1980s, Marco Stroppa is an artist for whom musical invention is inseparable from the exploration of new scientific and technological arenas. His series of works for solo instrument and chamber electronics (including little i, I will not kiss your f.ing flag, and … of silence) offers the opportunity to explore novel methods for projecting sound in the concert hall and renew the computer paradigms that regulate the relationship between the worlds of instrumental and synthesized sounds.

What is the relationship between a poem written by a young ee cummings, the score-following program Antescofo, and a column of loudspeakers placed in the middle of the stage next to the violinist Hae-Sun Kang found in the new work in this series, hist whist (2009).

Click here to start the video.


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11

Dec

Classifica dei capi di Stato e di governo

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.11.23.58.15 — Archiviato in: Società

From Iriospark

I rappresentanti della stampa europea, corrispondenti da Bruxelles hanno valutato, anche quest’anno, i 27 capi di Stato e di governo dell’Unione, secondo i parametri della leadership, dello spirito di squadra, dell’atteggiamento nei confronti del cambiamento del clima, della regolamentazione finanziaria, del rispetto del mercato interno, del trattato di Lisbona per la Costituzione europea, dell’impegno europeista.
Per ogni criterio è stato attribuito un punteggio comparativo, che ha riconosciuto l’attività svolta in quell’area da ogni capo di Stato e di governo rispetto agli altri 26: ha assegnato, cioè, 1 al primo, che ha fatto meglio, 2 al secondo, 3 al terzo e così via.
In testa alla classifica Eurotribune è risultato il primo ministro svedese Fredrik Reinfeldt, un 44 enne che ha meritato tre 1 per la regolamentazione finanziaria e l’uscita dalla crisi, il rispetto del mercato interno, l’attività per l’entrata in vigore del Trattato di Lisbona.
Al secondo posto è stato classificato il primo ministro lussemburghese, Jean Claude Juncker, che ha meritato due 1 per lo spirito di squadra e la regolamentazione finanziaria.
Terza è stata Angela Merkel. La cancelliera tedesca ha avuto un 1 per la leadership.
Quarto è riuscito il primo ministro danese Rasmussen, che ha avuto un 1 per l’organizzazione della conferenza mondiale sul clima.
Nonostante otto sostituzioni, la classifica 2009 ha avuto clamorose modifiche tra i rimanenti rispetto a quella del 2008.
Il presidente francese Sarkozy, che l’anno scorso era primo quest’anno è stato retrocesso al nono posto. Il presidente ceco Fischer è balzato dal venticinquesimo al dodicesimo posto. L’ungherese Bajnai è salito anch’egli dal ventunesimo al quindicesimo posto. Il premier inglese Gordon Brown è precipitato, invece, dalla terza alla ventunesima posizione.
In fondo alla classifica, stabile è il presidente del Consiglio italiano Berlusconi.

Ma ovviamente quelli della stampa internazionale sono notoriamente tutti comunisti… :mrgreen:

Il PDF della classifica Eurotribune

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10

Dec

140 chars of music

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.10.16.06.35 — Archiviato in: Audio, Elettroacustica

A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire’s online readership here.

Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.

SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.

You can listen to all the pieces or download the whole album on this page and also look at the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.

Some excerpts:

The artists notes are here.


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9

Dec

The Fauxharmonic Orchestra

Scritto da:Mauro Graziani @ 2009.12.09.00.01.09 — Archiviato in: Contemporanea

The Fauxharmonic Orchestra produces concerts and recordings of orchestral music at the highest level of aesthetic and technical quality. This “orchestra” consists of the world’s finest sample-based instruments, performed in concert halls and recording studios, directed by conductor Paul Henry Smith.

Using digital instruments The Fauxharmonic Orchestra’s mission is to bring fresh and artistically meaningful experiences of orchestral music to a diverse, world-wide audience.

The conductor, Paul Henry Smith studied conducting with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood and with Sergiu Celibidache at the Curtis Institute of Music and in Munich. He has studied orchestration and composition with Richard Hoffmann, Lukas Foss and Steven Scott Smalley. His career is devoted to promoting and improving the digital performance of orchestral music.

Since 2003 he has been perfecting his digital orchestra, accompanying soloists, performing live concerts and creating recordings for composers and filmmakers. His live performances have been supported by Bang & Olufsen and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra.

Now listen to

  • Edgar Varèse - Ionisation, performed live by The Fauxharmonic Orchestra at Brandeis University on October 4, 2009. Paul Henry Smith conductor.

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