Centripetal Notion: category

In much the same way that a conventional speaker uses a magnetic field to push a driver, plasma speakers (sometimes called flame speakers) use electricity to move the surrounding air, projecting sound directly from their discharge.

Reactable has come a ways since I last saw it a couple years ago — from something that seemed a little pale in comparison to other analogous systems like Audiopad, to something now seriously dripping in delicious synaesthetic badassery.

The Freesound Project — fairly well-known in the Creative Commons community — is a collaborative database of sounds contributed by users under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Freesound deals only in sounds — for instance the most popular downloads at the moment include recordings of a heart beat and a thunder storm. They’re paired [...]

Some animations visualizing John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”. One by Michal Levy that takes an artistic approach, and another by Iain Houston that breaks down the song’s signature ditone and quadratone chord progressions.

The Superb Lyrebird found near Australia’s south-eastern coast is extraordinarily gifted at mimicry — copying not only the calls of other birds but the sounds of humans in the forest as well, including camera shutters and chainsaws.

Two t-shirts with functioning graphic equalizers that react to sound in their environment.

“Composers often speak of fitting chords and melodies together, as though sounds were physical objects with geometric shape — and now a Princeton University musician has shown that advanced geometry actually does offer a tool for understanding musical structure.”

Plug in some headphones and listen to the following recording. You’ll hear a match being lit, then a matchbox shaken and moved around you — behind and in front, then above and below. I’ve heard clever effects like this before, but nothing so realistic, and nothing that captured vertical space with just left and right channels. You can almost see the sound moving about — but only with headphones — speakers will simulate planar movement but not the full 360 degrees.