Creating systems to generate music is not new. Brian Eno created several such systems and coined the term “generative music” to describe their output. He was inspired by composers like Steve Reich, who had also experimented with generative music systems. You can find an unbelievably fantastic overview of generative music by Tero Parviainen at teropa.info/loop. You can also read my [Alex Bainter’s] own “Introduction to Generative Music.”

It’s truly incredible that we can create unique, complex musical output from simple systems which run on your smartphone’s internet browser. With the accessibility of technologies like the Web Audio API and deep learning libraries, I look forward to a future full of amazing musical systems unbound by the limitations of traditionally written and recorded music.

Listen

https://generative.fm/music/alex-bainter-aisatsana

Read

https://medium.com/@metalex9/generating-more-of-my-favorite-aphex-twin-track-cde9b7ecda3a

Like any great memory, I can still recall my first personal encounter (albeit somewhat detached) with the machine. I knew by name, by sound, by look and legend, but the first time I saw – physically *saw – the Roland TR909 I was a freshman at college, nearly 20 years old. The rhythm composer was sitting alongside a 707 and 808 in a glass display case at a music store near campus in St. Paul, MN.

I remember being unimpressed, or, through the sheets of glass and the eyes of retrospective transparency, naively unimpressed for my impression of the price-to-feature ratio. This was a dated drum machine, nearly twenty years old already. It was expensive for what it appeared to do (trigger and sequence a handful of sounds). Its legend and prestige didn’t carry much weight. And, as would be true for many college freshman I’m sure, the $1500 sticker price positioned it well beyond my means. I resolved internally that should I ever became desperate for the TR-style programming experience, a 707 (or 727) would only set me back a few hundred dollars, and I could trigger 909 samples from a ROMpler or sampler by MIDI.  This would be close enough – no need for 909.

As they do, days and weeks passed and I acquired other (as much as I could on a loan-based college budget) equipment. I earned my degree, started a family, a career, and continued to exercise my bedroom/basement studio hobby.  My music consumption trends over this decade or so made the 909 a familiar sound and (naturally, along with the 808) became to me one of the purest elements of electronic percussion. Its sounds were instantly recognizable – by now they’d saturated enough genres to be considered timeless – and they were the pulse of the soundtrack of my most formative years. Whether I’d have said it unprompted, self-aware, or otherwise, the bass, snare, hats and claps of the 909 had organically rooted themselves in my mind and memory.

Prices for the 909 continued to rise even *further beyond my budget, it solidly ingrained itself in the ear of popular culture, and I doubted I’d see another (and if I should, certainly none within the realm of affordability). The samples and emulations I’d collected over the years were good, Propellerhead ReBirth was the price of a cup of coffee, and the idea of ever owning a *real TR-909 understandably became the stuff of thrift store and garage sale dreams.

Then, fifteen years after seeing that first 909 in a glass case I’d quite unexpectedly stumbled upon a second.

And this time I’d bring it home.

I invented the Bow Blower, a combination of the bow drill and forge blower to make a device that can force air into a fire while being easy to construct from commonly occurring natural materials using only primitive technology. I began by fanning a fire with a piece of bark to increase its temperature. It is this basic principle I improved on throughout the project.

This is the story of how an unlikely threesome—a girl, a heavy metal band and their fans — pioneered the web at its infancy, bucked the status quo and proved that the Internet wasn’t a fad.

It’s 1994. I’m working at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California.

via What The Hell Was Megadeth, Arizona? — Cuepoint — Medium.

Melton: Oh, Christ! Yeah, exactly, I couldn’t do that. I had to do something right away. I said in the article that I wrote for The Loop magazine, when Steve asked you a question you didn’t ramble and whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. And if you didn’t know, you said that you didn’t know. And more importantly, you told him when you would have an answer.

So sometimes, when you would get these emails, you’d had to be blunt and say: “I don’t know. Here’s what I’m doing to get you that answer and when I expect it”, you said as your kids were begging you to go out and see this nice sight in France or wherever the hell you were at. I mean, that’s just what you did.

And I have sometimes have young people come up to me today and ask me about being successful in this business. And part of it is just dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time. Thank God I listened to my wife when I took that job at Apple.

But the other thing is, you have to realize to really be successful to a sin, it’s kind of a Faustian bargain you make. If you’re not willing to pay that price, it’s not gonna come to you. I hate to say that. And so you have to ask yourself, is that really the way you wanna live your life? ’Cause it’s not like I recommend it, either. You have to think long and hard about that.

And I know I’ve read a lot of studies how this is a stupid way for the tech industry to function. And that’s certainly true. But this happens all over, and it’s not just the tech industry, it’s just I think in the tech industry it’s on steroids […]. But damn, there is no way you can cruise through a job at Apple, Inc. That just does not happen for anybody I’ve ever seen.

via Work Habits at Apple – Ole Begemann.

At any given time Google, through its various services and devices, knows, well, a lot:

What you’re searching for

What you are talking about when you email friends (and, through Google+, who those friends are)

Where you live, and work, how long you stay at either location each day

What you’re watching on your phone, tablet,or television

Where you are in the world, and, with Glass, what you’re looking at

And that’s just what I could come up with off the top of my head.

If you connect the dots here, it should be clear what Google doesn’t know, and where Nest fits in. Google has no idea what your energy consumption habits are, a data void that makes it impossible for it to make other, more significant insights.

via Nest: Just another big data source for the all-seeing, all-knowing future Google | VentureBeat | Business | by Ricardo Bilton.

Cassette Film.

SAN FRANCISCO — What does not kill me, makes me stronger. So said Nietzsche, Conan the Barbarian, and Kelly Clarkson.

Now Netflix cloud director Ariel Tseitlin is taking that philosophy to its natural limit in the world of the cloud. Every day, he unleashes an army of virtual monkeys on his company’s computing infrastructure, trying to kill it. Every day, it survives — and it gets stronger, more resilient, and more resistant to real outages. By now, it is almost unkillable.

As a result, Netflix has managed to stay online even while other users of Amazon’s cloud system have gone offline.

“Their sole purpose is to make sure that we’re failing in a consistent and frequent enough way to make sure that we don’t drift into overall failure,” Tseitlin said today at CloudBeat 2013, VentureBeat’s conference on the enterprise cloud.

from VentureBeat.