My Midines Review: It Never Arrived
Chris Kann, the owner of wayfar.org, sells a device called the Midines. It's a Nintendo cartridge that plays the Nintendo Entertainment System like a musical instrument, I kid you not. You insert the Midines cartridge into your NES, plug MIDI cables into the Midines, and off you go, into a world of bloops and blips.
I paid $99 for a Midines in the year 2008, and... I have still not received it. I have sent Chris Kann at least a dozen emails, and never received a single reply. In 2008, I did track him down on IRC -- he mentioned that he was going through some hard times, but now it is 3 years later, and he has been completely silent.
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Video Reel 2011
Yes indeed, I created my own showreel!
Watch: regular, or HD version. (Vimeo, 4:00)
The clips have a bias towards art and animation, because: 1). It shows well in a video, 2). This reel was created for an application to an artist's colony. (More on that later.)
A Formant Sequencer in Flash
I started an open source project: fseq-flash is a formant sequence editor. Current features include:
- Import AIFF files
- Audition and edit formant sequences in real time
- Export .syx files for the Yamaha FS1R
Click to launch. Press the space bar to play the sound.
You can push your formant sequence to the Yamaha FS1R, using software such as K_Take's FS1R Editor. Click the "Save .syx" button, and follow the instructions in K_Take's documentation. This is a lot of fun, and breathes new life into the FS1R.
This project became much deeper than anticipated! The code includes FFT analysis (thanks Gerry Beauregard), pitch detection, a formant detection algorithm, and an AIFF parser to read AIFF files. The interface was a challenge to design and implement, and there are still many unfinished features (see the issues list).
My energy is shifting to other work, so I'll enhance fseq-flash when time permits.
Dissecting the Korg Radias
The Korg Radias synthesizer was released in 2006, discontinued after a 4-year run, and seems to have polarized all its users. Some dismiss it as "digital crap", others hail it as a "future classic". Who is right? Are these people snobby analog purists? Is the other group Korg's minions, paid to drum up favor for this little silver beast?