Category: Technology
This exciting new instrument has just been unveiled by design led technology start-up ROLI a radically new kind of musical instrument and digital controller that reimagines the most iconic of musical instruments – the piano.
An evolution of the piano keyboard, the Seaboard has a soft three dimensional surface that enables unprecedented realtime, intuitive control of the fundamental characteristics of sound: pitch, volume, and timbre. Piano and keyboard players can instantly transfer their skills to the Seaboard and begin exploring its new capacities.
The Seaboard is the first electronic instrument to enable control of a wide variety of parameters through traditional techniques for expressiveness and virtuosity. As a controller, the Seaboard allows players to manipulate sound like never before. It authentically simulates a plethora of other instruments – guitar note bends, subtle string and horn swells, and much more are expressively created in seconds instead of hours. Both as an instrument and as a controller the Seaboard creates a world of entirely new sonic possibilities, and provides a new bridge between acoustic and electronic approaches to music.
We’re very excited by this new instrument and hope to get our hands on one soon
A limited edition of 88 Seaboard GRANDs will be available for preorder worldwide starting in April 2013. Each Seaboard GRAND will be hand assembled to order in the ROLI studio in the heart of Dalston, East London, and, in recognition of its provenance, each will be named after a particular note on the piano keyboard, from A0 to C8.
We’ll bring you more info about this innovative new piece of kit when we have it! More info can be found by following the link below:
(Via MusicTech.)
Roland today released this video celebrating the 30th Anniversary of MIDI, which has become a massively important industry standard, due to the vision of Sequential Circuit’s Dave Smith, Roland’s Ikutaro Kakehashi and others.
For a 30 year-old standard, MIDI is going strong. In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen the standard show up in MIDI Tesla Coils, an iPad MIDI sequencer, new MIDI instruments and your Web browser.
In addition to noting the wide range of vendor support for MIDI, it highlights some of the standard’s more unusual applications, like musical fountains. And then there’s the MIDI-controlled skull.
Pretty amazing for something that started with connecting a couple of synths together, back in 1983……
On the ground, sometimes its easy to lose track of the fact that hundreds of airplanes are flying overhead at any given moment. A new company, FlightRadar24, is developing nice aggregation tools to observe the traffic jams in the sky. Before, live views of aircraft like this were the domain of aviation professionals. Sure, it may not be the most useful new app–unless you’re an aviation fanatic–but the real time tracking of aircraft is undeniably cool.
FlightRadar24 uses public Federal Aviation Administration data in the United States and pulls data from automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) responders elsewhere. Since only about 60% of passenger-carrying airplanes are equipped with ADS-B, there are some flights missing. Regardless, you’ll most likely be able to track where your friend’s flight is if he or she is flying a major American airline. Like most new internet services, coverage is best in the United States and Europe (the other continents don’t have as many ADS-B responders on the ground.) A glance at the continental United States through FlightRadar24′s website reveal a phalanx of crisscrossing flights.
Like most new internet services, coverage is best in the United States and Europe. Also, there’s a pretty cool iPhone app associated with the service. It provides the same data in a mobile package, but the coolest feature is an augmented reality trick that allows you to point your phone at a plane and learn all the associated details with that flight, such as flight number, destination, and expected landing time. Wolfram Alpha’s apps have allowed you to see flights overhead using the same data, but the augmented reality layer is a nice touch. Head over to FlightRadar24 to try it out.
A prolific trojan called DNSChanger could soon prevent hundreds of thousands of Mac and Windows PCs from connecting to the internet.
On Monday, the FBI plans to shut down defenses that have been in place for months, cutting the estimated 275,000 still-infected computers off from the internet.
To check if your PC is infected with DNSChanger, head to the DNS Changer Working Group’s (DCWG) check tool. If the box is green, you’re good to go.
If the box is red, your internet will go dead on Monday, July 9, but The DWCG has a whole arsenal of tools ready to use.
Another solution lies with McAfee’s DNS checker, which will reportedly aid you in removing the harmful trojan should your computer be infected.
The DNSChanger malware began circulating in 2007, redirecting infected computers to pirate DNS servers that stole users’ personal information.
The criminal endeavor was thwarted last November, when the FBI arrested its six Estonian masterminds.
But rather than shut down the servers, thus switching the internet off for any infected computers, the FBI chose to temporarily legitimize them in anticipation of a more permanent solution.
Thus was born the FBIs ‘Operation Ghost Click,’ which is being shut down on July 9.
Google began warning users of the impending internet implosion in May.
Google search users with DNSChanger-infected computers began seeing messages at the tops of their search results prompting them to ‘take action’ against the trojan.
The search giant used its ubiquity to warn as many potential victims as possible, though there are still as many as 275,000 infected computers.
So try as they might to get the word out, internet service providers are still likely going to get a lot of irate calls on Monday.
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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
A tribute to Bob Moog, sonic doodler: “In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Moog unleashed a new universe of sounds into musicdom with his invention of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The timbre and tones of these keyboard instruments (true works of art in and of themselves) would come to define a generation of music, featuring heavily in songs by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and many others.
When people hear the word ‘synthesizer’ they often think ‘synthetic’—fake, manufactured, unnatural. In contrast, Bob Moog’s synthesizers produce beautiful, organic and rich sounds that are, nearly 50 years later, regarded by many professional musicians as the epitome of an electronic instrument. ‘Synthesizer,’ it turns out, refers to the synthesis embedded in Moog’s instruments: a network of electronic components working together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
With his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts and a hero to many of us here. So for the next 24 hours on our homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the instruments with which Moog brought musical performance into the electronic age. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds. Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we’ve patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+.
Much like the musical machines Bob Moog created, this doodle was synthesized from a number of smaller components to form a unique instrument. When experienced with Google Chrome, sound is generated natively using the Web Audio API—a doodle first (for other browsers the Flash plugin is used). This doodle also takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.
Special thanks to engineers Reinaldo Aguiar and Rui Lopes and doodle team lead Ryan Germick for their work, as well as the Bob Moog Foundation and Moog Music for their blessing. Now give those knobs a spin and compose a tune that would make Dr. Moog smile!
(Via The Official Google Blog.)
Blog from your phone, call for free or use your computer to make free phone calls. Google Voice isn’t the easiest Google service to explain to non-techies, partially because it can be used for so many different things. Find a short list of those things below.
Using only a phone to manage voicemail is old fashioned: Google Voice does a much better job. Manage your voicemail on your computer or phone, and enjoy unlimited free texting within the US and Canada. It’s a service no human should be without, but which is sadly (still) limited to humans who reside in the United States of America. Google, remedy this!
Find below just a few advanced Google Voice tricks. Know some more? Leave them in the comments below the article and share them with the world.
Imagine being able to blog by phone, from anywhere. It’s not farfetched: our very own Ryan devised a method of voice blogging. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great way to get in a quick blog post from the road.
Cell phone has no concept of long distance, provided I’m calling or texting a US number. It’s another matter when you call or text Canada: that costs extra. Good thing I have Google Voice: it allows you to call or text Canada for free.
You can do this one of two ways. The first is to call Google Voice number from my cell phone, then call Canada from that. It’s easy, but requires some extra dialing.
The second way requires some setup, but works very well: have your Canadian friend send a text message to your Google Voice number. Assuming you’ve set up Google Voice to forward texts to your phone, you will now have an American number you can use to reach your Canadian friend. Save this new number and you can call your friend as though it were a domestic call, anytime.
This isn’t exactly a secret, but many people don’t seem to realize it: you can make free phone calls from within Gmail, provided you’re calling a number inside the US or Canada.
Even cooler: if your Google Voice number is your primary phone number, you can pick up your phone calls in Gmail. You just need to turn on chat and install the Google video chat browser extension.
Another related but also lesser-known trick: you can add any phone number to a Google Plus Hangout, allowing you to include people without Internet access in your conversations.
Skype is a very affordable way to make long distance phone calls, but there is one problem with it: unless you set up a call display number you appear as ‘unknown caller’ on the phone of the person you’re trying to reach. Many people will, assuming you’re a scam artist, and refuse to pick up.
You can buy a phone number from Skype to avoid this. Or, if you don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you can set up your Skype account to display your Google Voice number for call display. That way people you call will see a real phone number.
You might consider doing this even if you’ve paid Skype for an incoming number: people will call you back at your Google Voice number instead of your Skype number, meaning you’ll get the call on all of your phones instead of just Skype.
Want to hear from the people who read your blog? Add a voicemail button to it. This allows people to leave you a voicemail without telling the world your phone number. People who visit your site can enter their phone number and, in one click, connect their phone to your voicemail inbox.
Read the full instructions for setting up a voicemail feature on your blog here.
Of course, there are many more cool things you can do with Google Voice. Ryan outlined several of them in 2010, and his tricks still work very well. They are:
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
I wasted half an hour yesterday morning looking for my cellphone, only to find it and spend another twenty minutes looking for my car keys, which I had in my hands while looking for the aforementioned cellphone. Needless to say, I was late, my boss gave me an earful, and I had a pretty crappy day.
If you can relate, then you’d also probably be interested in the U Grok It.
It has a weird name but a pretty neat purpose. Here’s how it works: you stick a tiny RFID tag on objects that you lose on a regular basis, add them to your list of items, and locate them using the U Grok It receiver when you need to find them.
The U Grok It has a range of about six to ten feet and signals just how close you are to finding whatever it is you’re looking for with beeping signals. The closer you are, the louder and faster the beeps will be.
U Grok It plans to conduct an initial test run with 1,000 units, with full-scale production scheduled for 2013. No prices have been announced yet, but the devices is said to be around $100(USD) while each RFID tag will be sold for $1.
(Via Technabob.)
If you’re looking for the cheapest prices in the U.S. or Canada, this free app can help you out. The app rewards users who report gas prices with a weekly giveaway of a $250 gift card.
Also available for iOS.
Price: FREE
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