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Generative music apps

David Pescovitz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:34:11 +0000

At our sponsor Intel's LifeScoop site, I posted about "Music That Writes Itself":

In ambient music pioneer Brian Eno’s 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices, the composer wrote, “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” Eno was talking about generative music, a process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed parameters set by the artist. In its simplest form, you twist a few knobs (virtual or otherwise) and the computer takes it from there, creating music that can be credited to the system itself. The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. Decades later, a number of generative music apps are bringing Eno’s vision to our smartphones.

"Music That Writes Itself"

The Exploratorium's Sound Uncovered: A science museum in your hand (for free)

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:15:33 +0000

This review also appears on Download the Universe, a group blog reviewing the best (and worst, and just "meh") in science-related ebooks and apps.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi.

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music.

It's part of a series that also includes Color Uncovered. The app is basically a portable Exploratorium. It would be very simple to convert everything in here (from games to text) into a meatspace exhibit. And that's a good thing. There are some big benefits to having access to your own, private museum.
A) You get to press the buttons as many times as you want.
B) You actually have the time and the headspace necessary to explore the text and learn the things the button-pressing is supposed to teach you.

For instance, one module features a psuedo vintage tape deck that allows you to record yourself speaking, and then play the recording both normally, and in reverse. You're particularly encouraged to try recording palindromes—words and phrases that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. You might think that palindromes would also sound the same backwards and forwards, but you'd be wrong. The phrase "too bad I hid a boot", for instance, sounds more like garbled Japanese when it's played backwards.

Having this all to yourself on an iPad means that you can spend a lot of time being silly (examples of recordings made by this reviewer include palindromes in different accents, "Hail Satan", and multiple swear words) while easily jumping back and forth between the interactive diversion and the explanations of how it works and how it fits into modern society. I can even imagine kids playing with the toy part of this for a while before finally stumbling upon the embedded text and having their games suddenly illuminated with meaning. That's pretty cool. In a museum setting, I've watched plenty of kids muck around with the button pressing and then run off before they ever have a chance to learn that phonemes are distinct units of sound or that backward speech doesn't just reverse the order of the phonemes, but reverses the phonemes themselves. Sound doesn't have palindromes.

The other benefit here is that Sound Uncovered eliminates the need for the role of Boring Adult — the person charged with the futile task of reading the explanatory text out loud to a gaggle of button-pressing children who really do not care about that right now. In doing so, it frees adults to actually have fun and learn something, too. If you don't have to be the education enforcer, and can trust that your kids will discover the explanations as they play with the app over time, then you're able to actually engage in play yourself —both with your kids and without them. The portable museum is a place for kids, and it's a place for adults, too.

That said, I think an adult on their own would probably burn through this pretty quickly. I got most of what I'm going to get out of it on a three-hour plane flight. But it's also free, so it's not like you're out a lot of money for a small amount of information. In general, I'd say Sound Uncovered is a good example of how the digital format can be used to improve science communication in ways that aren't easily possible in the real world.

Sound Uncovered and Color Uncovered

Rob Walker on the cult of Evernote

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:31:15 +0000

Count me among the members of the cult of Evernote, a web service (with 50,000,000 users) that stores digital documents and makes them easy to find. I use it with my Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner (here's my review) and would have a very hard time without them. The current issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek has our friend Rob Walker's excellent story about ardently devoted Evernote users.

“What you put in Facebook isn’t who you are,” says [Evernote CEO] Phil Libin. “It’s what you want some people to see. And what you put in LinkedIn is certainly not who you are; it’s what you want the professional world to see.” Libin suggests that the addiction to a particular strain of “viral” growth has led to a drastic overemphasis on digital design for extroversion. As a guy who describes himself as too introverted to win over his high school chess team, Libin says that’s an oversight. “What you put in Evernote is who you are,” he continues. “We used to say in the beginning that Evernote is not social. In fact, it’s antisocial; we don’t care about your friends.”

As Evernote's Cult Grows, the Business Market Beckons

Twitter launches video sharing app

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:40:37 +0000

Twitter's just released Vine, a video sharing app designed to make it easy to create and embed short snippets of high-quality, low-bandwidth video on the web. The shortcomings of animated GIFs, and the bloatedness of most web video, leave a poorly-served middle-ground that it intends to fill—but only, for the time being, if you have an iPhone or iPod touch.

Hundreds is a stylish iOS puzzler

Josh Centers — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:31:18 +0000

Hundreds is a minimalist puzzle game from Semi Secret Software, the makers of Canabalt. Each of its 100 levels is filled with one or more floating circles. When you press down on a circle, its numerical value and size increases. Your goal is to enlarge the circles until their combined values add up to 100. But as a circle grows, it turns red, and if anything touches a red circle, it’s game over.

The game is deliberately cryptic, challenging you to figure things out for yourself. There are no instructions. Instead, the game’s levels gradually introduce gameplay elements. The first level is almost insultingly easy, with only a single circle, but the challenges soon grow to include more circles, linked circles, burstable bubbles, and hazards like value-destroying buzz saws.

A riddle minigame adds to the mystery, with a new riddle unlocked every few levels. The riddles can be accessed by tapping the center of the main menu. Solving conundrums such as “A MOUSE HAS ONE SNOUT BUT A HAND HAS FIVE,” earn players Game Center achievements. The riddles are a nice distraction, and it’s impressive that the developers were able to fit a minigame into such a simple game.

Solving every level and riddle requires zen-like patience. In fact, later levels often feel as though they rely on patience and luck more than wits or skill. Fortunately, the game’s neutral grays and relaxing soundtrack (by Loscil) help prevent you from throwing your iPhone across the room.

Despite being conceived as a Flash game, Hundreds feels like it was made for iOS, with its simple, elegant design and inherent touch-friendliness. On larger iPad screens, the game can even be played co-operatively with a friend.

Hundreds is a well crafted time killer, and like its predecessor Canabalt, impressively crafted, if often frustrating. For those seeking a stylish, challenging puzzle game, it’s worth every penny of $4.99 in the App Store.

Hundreds [itunes.apple.com]

KaomojiApp makes crazy text emoticons easy ＼(☆o◎)／

Dean Putney — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:00:10 +0000

KaomojiApp adds a menu item to your Mac with a huge collection of Unicode emoticons that you can easily select and insert in any text area. The free version has a few basic samples in each emotion category, and you can unlock hundreds more for just $3.

Yay! ☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆

KaomojiApp.com

Tyra Banks has an app that teaches people how to "smize"

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:08:53 +0000

John Koetsier of VentureBeat: "Tyra Banks has released a new iPhone app to help other women -- and men -- learn the secret that she teaches America’s Next Top Models: how to take sizzling hot self-portraits by “smizing.” Smizing, as I learned today, is the art of smiling with your eyes."

Smizing with Tyra Banks

Small world, tracker music edition

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 16:38:31 +0000

I love to hang out with online pal Cabel Sasser, founder of Portland software company Panic, whenever our paths cross in real life. But I only just realized that he was an early 90s tracker musician whose work I listened to in England as a kid, on my Commodore Amiga, decades before we met.

One of my favorite things to do on my Amiga was write music in trackers, a unique, note-by-note way to write tunes that was half-music, half-programming. ... Then, Cut to Yesterday. Rob Beschizza, out of Boing Boing, read my post about The Incident music. To summarize: not only did [a U.K.] magazine actually publish my dumb song, but a 13-year-old Beschizza remixed it, and as internet pals we had no idea until yesterday that we shared this connection.
You’re pretty cool, universe.

Cabel says his work's aged badly; bear in mind that these were free digital sampling apps hacked to run on home computers a fraction of the cost of a Fairlight. But what made his tune cool and useful to 12-year-old me is the fact that it was a simple, melody-based track with just two or three cleanly-looped instruments sampled at the same pitch.

Back in the glory days of tracker music, songmakers would hurl in every possible feature to push the low-tech hardware to its limits. Notes would be programmed to warble at as high a hertz as possible to emulate chords on a single audio channel. There'd be elaborate collections of samples in multiple keys, intricate envelopes coded into the notation, and general nerdliness throughout. The underlying code was often impenetrable--and effectively uneditable.

Cabel's track, however, sounded great, made perfect human-readable sense under the hood, and was fun to experiment with. It's no surprise at all that he's now the co-founder of an app-maker renowned for its perfectly-designed, no-nonsense creative apps.

Plasma Orb marble maze game for iOS

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:07:09 +0000

Plasma Orb looks like a fun marble maze game for iOS. But beware -- it has "Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling." (Via App Spy)

New features in Glympse, a location-sharing mobile app I like

Mark Frauenfelder — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:54:00 +0000

For the last year or two I have been using a free location–sharing app on my iPhone called Glympse. It's purpose is simple: when you are driving somewhere to meet someone, the app generates a URL so they can see where you are on a map and track your progress as you are driving.

Today, Glympse introduced a new version of the application, and it has interesting improvements.

Glympse Groups allows users to share and interact via common activities, such as sporting or industry events, meetings or social gatherings. Glympse reveals group members’ real-time locations on a map for a set amount of time, encouraging local interaction and social discovery.

Glympse allows users to automatically schedule location updates to everyone associated with a specific calendar event, virtually replacing the need for “Running Late” or “On my way” emails, texts or phone calls.

When Glympse first debuted, it made it fast and easy for users to “Share Your Where” with others, for a specified period of time without creating yet another network. Now, the new Glympse turns the tables and makes it just as easy to ask your friends, family, and colleagues, “Where are you?” With the new “Request a Glympse” feature, users simply send a request via text or email and recipients can instantly accept and start broadcasting their location for the given time period.

Get Glympse in the App Store and Google Play

AwayFind gives you the peace of mind to ignore your inbox without fear of missing an important email

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:44:21 +0000

I've found that having big stretches of time where I don't frequently check my email boosts my ability to accomplish things. A service called AwayFind gives me the peace of mind to ignore my inbox.

In a nutshell, AwayFind lets you add selected email addresses to a Priority Inbox. When someone on your list sends you an email, a notification appears on your phone. That way, you don't need to check your email inbox every few minutes. I've added my family members, my book editor, my coworkers at MAKE and Boing Boing, and a few other people to my Priority Inbox list.

Does this sound like Apple's new VIP feature? Yes, AwayFind and Apple's VIP share some of the same functionality. However, AwayFind goes beyond Apple's VIP feature, making it much more useful. Jared Goralnick, the founder of AwayFind, wrote a blog post that describes the features in AwayFind that VIP doesn't have. For instance, AwayFind determines the 25 people that you reply to the fastest and makes it easy to add them to your Priority Inbox (this list is regenerated every month). It also notifies you when someone you've scheduled a meeting with sends you an email before your meeting, even if they aren't in your Priority Inbox. These examples just scratch the surface. Check out a list of the other differences between VIP and AwayFind here.

You can try AwayFind for free for 30 days. After that you can subscribe to a personal plan for $4.99 a month, which includes 100 alerts a month, or a pro account for $14.99 a month, which gives you 1000 alerts per month.

AwayFind

As car service app Uber grows, D.C. council pushes to regulate

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:23:09 +0000

I absolutely love the smartphone app Uber, which allows you to order car service on demand, instead of trying to hail or call a cab or order a black car. It became an essential tool during my radiation treatment for cancer in LA, when treatment made me too weak to drive, public transportation didn't serve the route I needed to get to the hospital, and I was just too flaked out to arrange rides in other ways. When my friends Tara Brown and Sean Bonner "gifted" me some Uber credits, I tried it once and was hooked. Uber wasn't a luxury for me, but a truly practical service.

It is also the very definition of a disruptive technology: as Napster was to the recording industry, Uber is to taxi unions. And, not coincidentally, the guy behind it is Travis Kalanick, who was once sued for $250 billion by the MPAA, RIAA, and NMPA over his now-defunct P2P search engine Scour.

In his latest round of pissing off legacy industries by building great internet-based services, Kalanick has managed to upset the forces that represent Washington, DC area cab drivers. And the DC city council is now considering regulation that would mandate much more government oversight over Uber's operations, and severely cramp its style. Snip from WaPo:

The regulations, among other things, would require drivers and companies to obtain licenses to be renewed annually; require companies to operate at least 20 vehicles, with at least 10 percent of them wheelchair-accessible; and require the vehicles to be painted black and meet age and model standards.
Also in the proposed rules is a ban on “demand pricing” — a direct shot at a key part of the Uber business model, which hikes prices during periods of high demand to guarantee a supply of cars.

“I would ask the D.C. Council to figure out what problem it is trying to solve,” Kalanick quipped this week. “Sedans didn’t all of a sudden grow horns and get a pitchfork.”

Read more: D.C. Council weighs limo regulations (Washington Post, thanks, Miles O'Brien).

Spacecraft 3D: Nifty robotic space travel augmented-reality app from NASA JPL

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:45:21 +0000

I recently had a chance to visit NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Miles O'Brien. At the NASA center in Pasadena, engineers are readying for the long-anticipated landing of the Mars Curiosity rover on Aug. 5. During our visit, we met with the team behind a cool new iOS app from JPL: NASA's Spacecraft 3D, an augmented reality application that allows users to "learn about and interact with a variety of spacecraft that are used to explore our solar system, study Earth, and observe the universe."

Using a printed AR Target and the camera on your mobile device, you can get up close with these robotic explorers, see how they move, and learn about the the engineering feats used to expand our knowledge and understanding of space. Spacecraft 3D will be updated over time to include more of the amazing spacecraft that act as our robotic eyes on the earth, the solar system and beyond!

The app is really a ton of fun. You can download it here for free, iPad and iPhone and iPod Touch. Here's the JPL press release announcing its release.

iPhone app makes a game of monitoring pain for young cancer patients

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:50:38 +0000

[Video Link] Canada's Hospital for Sick Children (aka SickKids) and the Cundari creative agency are developing a iPhone app called "Pain Squad" to help monitor and report physical pain and emotional wellness in young cancer patients. Snip from a post on Springwise:

Using the narrative of a police force hunting down pain, users are inducted as a rookie officer working on the case. Patients fill out a daily survey – which asks questions relating to whether they felt pain that day, how intense it was and its location – and can progress through the ranks of the force when they keep their records updated. The concept was created by Toronto-based media agency Cundari, who got stars from Rookie Blue and Flashpoint – two primetime cop shows in Canada – to appear in videos that are unlocked when patients do well and progress the narrative. By gamifying the process, the app gives patients an incentive to keep a daily journal of their pain. The app is still in the testing phase but SickKids hopes to release it later this year.

When I was in the hospital for breast cancer surgery, nurses popped in constantly to ask how my pain levels were; when they knew I was sufficiently doped up but saw me cry, they figured I was going through emotional pain.

But my relatively brief hospital stay is nothing compared to the longer-term in-patient stays many cancer patients must endure. And with many forms of cancer, monitoring pain levels over time is critical because that information can reveal the progression or retreat of disease.

I can see how a handheld app might encourage better data gathering, and more accurate tracking, especially in younger people with cancer who have different levels of comfort in communicating their condition with (older, adult) hospital staff. I haven't played with the app, and the proof is in how the young people with cancer feel about it—but it sounds like a great idea.

(thanks, Maria Popova!)

It's shopped, this new app will be able to tell by the pixels

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:32:29 +0000

At Poynter, Craig Silverman writes about FourAndSix, a new photo forensics tool now in beta. The idea is to create tools that "sniff out digitally altered images." Two of the people behind it: Kevin Connor, former VP of product management for Adobe Photoshop, and digital image forensics expert Dr. Hany Farid. (via Erin Siegal)

Saving the whales? Now there's an app for that, too.

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:33:33 +0000

An interesting new iOS app launched today called Whale Alert. Though it's available for anyone, the iPhone/iPad app is intended primarily for use by workers in the shipping and maritime industry. It "combines science and technology to help save critically endangered North Atlantic right whales by reducing threats of collisions with large ships along the East Coast of North America."

From the launch announcement by IFAW (the International Fund for Animal Welfare):

The app links the bridge of a ship to the latest data about right whale detections and informs users when their vessels enter right whale management areas. The app uses Global Positioning System (GPS), Automatic Identification System (AIS), the web and digital nautical chart technologies to alert mariners to NOAA’s right whale conservation measures that are active in their immediate vicinity. A key feature of Whale Alert is a display linking a system of near real-time acoustic buoys that listen for right whale calls to an iPad on a ship’s bridge showing the whale’s presence to captains transiting the shipping lanes. In a matter of seconds the ships position is updated on the iPad in relation to any endangered right whales in the shipping lanes allowing the ship to safely slow down and navigate around the whale.
North Atlantic right whales, which live along North America's east coast from Newfoundland to Florida, are one of the world’s rarest large animals and a species on the brink of extinction. So few exist -- about 450 -- that scientists have identified and named almost all of them. Collision with ships is a leading cause of right whale death.

Link to Whale Alert at the Apple App Store. More about the project at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) website.

More app screenshots below, along with a shot of the beautiful and endangered cetacean they're trying to save.

Creepy woman-stalking app exploited geolocation

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:35:01 +0000

At Cult of Mac, John Brownlee writes about Girls Around Me, a creepy app that exploited geolocation APIs to make it easy to stalk women.

These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.

See also Charlie Sorrel's guide to kill the Facebook and FourSquare features that enable apps like this.

How to improve iPhone photos by spending money on stuff

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:41:03 +0000

For MyLifeScoop, I made a quickly-absorbed and extremely trustworthy video guide to apps and gadgets that'll help you take better photos with an iPhone. Better apps and add-on lenses (like PhotoJojo's, right) make a lot of difference, even if you've got a steady hand and good light.

Download the Universe: Reviews of science e-books and apps

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:12:56 +0000

I'm really happy to be a part of Download the Universe, a new group blog dedicated to reviewing science e-books and apps. No dead trees allowed. It fills a long-ignored niche, helping readers find high-quality science writing in the digital realm, and my partners in this little side project are all top-notch. Download the Universe will feature reviews written by best-selling authors like Sean Carroll and Deborah Blum, new media gods like i09's Annalee Newitz and Not Exactly Rocket Science's Ed Yong, and some of the best science journalists at work today.

The whole thing was organized by Carl Zimmer, who also wrote the most recent review on the site—all about Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking On the World's Most Daunting Disease, by Paul Ewald.

Ewald's basic thesis: What if cancer is really a virus? We know that viruses do cause some cancers. For instance, most cervical cancer is pretty definitively caused by the human papillomavirus. But Ewald theorizes that this virus-cancer connection could be a lot further reaching than we now think—and it could have profound impacts on how we treat and prevent cancer in the future. The document is published by TED Books, and Zimmer says it bears the pretty obvious imprint of the TED brand—really provocative ideas that may or may not be correct, but are definitely fascinating.

[Ewald] has long been an advocate for putting medicine on a solid foundation of evolutionary biology. In the 1990s, for example, he came to fame for his ideas about domesticating infectious diseases. The deadliness of a parasite can evolve, and in some situations, it may pay for parasites to be milder instead of meaner. He went on to argue that many supposed chronic diseases--from heart disease to schizophrenia--are triggered by pathogens. Ewald's work has been mostly theoretical--extrapolating from what we know about evolution in general to diseases in particular. His ideas are tough to test, if only because our bodies are so complex. But they have certainly been influential, as scientists have developed better tools for detecting microbes in our bodies and probe their effects on us.

Controlling Cancer is a quick read, without any photographs, videos, or other ornaments found on other ebooks. It does include footnotes, where Ewald back up most of his points. The citations are a good thing, but sometimes it's hard to tell when Ewald citing well-established cases of pathogens causing cancer and when he's only pointing to suggestive hints. The scientific literature is loaded with papers in which researchers describe tumors brimming with viruses. These associations could be evidence of viruses triggering cancer, or they could be evidence that tumors are good places for viruses to breed.

Read Carl Zimmer's full review of Controlling Cancer

Check out Download the Universe for more science e-book reviews