January 2007
5 posts
1 tag
Prediction [archive]
… Christiana was in town, having sublet her place near mine and electing instead to stay at the 104th Y down and across from me as a youth counselor in a tiny room she populated with a subset of her extensive Limoges collection and an AM transistor radio. … The only station she listened to on her transistor carried Top 40 from 5 years ago, exactly synchronized to the day. But after nine it...
1 tag
The Rainer Buchty Ratio [archive]
The original “Web2.0 AJAX Popup” was the amazing Rainer Buchty’s Create your own customized SQ80 OS V1.8 version (CYOCSOV), online since at least 1998. Those were heady times, when a reluctant genius could release a Web Application that provided a real value-add for Ensoniq SQ80, ESQ-1, or ESQ-M (NOT SQ1) owners. CYOCSOV (too many letters– has to be “four letters, many vowels” — let’s say SqaT –)...
1 tag
Pushpin is Real [archive]
Seven years ago Noah Vawter and I finished up “Pushpin,” a Gameboy Color MIDI adapter. Pushpin allowed you to compose music on a computer or sequencer and use the GBC as an instrument. You didn’t touch the GBC while it was playing other than to admire the fancy boot screen. It turned your $80 toy into a pretty good 4-bit waveform synth. Unfortunately, you probably don’t have one, let alone...
2 tags
Armed Forces in Alphabetical Order [archive]
An enormous global pet peeve since Digital Music collapsed from long unsegmented strings of PCM into inodes on a filesystem is Armed Forces in Alphabetical Order. The first ID3 spec, meant to associate the audio-only information in the MPEG stream with some “real world” characteristics, was pitiful: audio gets 1MB per minute but the concordant ground truth was allowed only 128 bytes. We...
Brian Whitman @ variogr.am
Thank you for visiting my personal website. You probably want to read the most recent stuff.
Bio
Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest) teaches computers how to make, listen to, and read about music. He received his doctorate from the Machine Listening group at MIT’s Media Lab in 2005 and his masters in Computer Science from Columbia University’s Natural Language Processing group in 2000. His research...