Photoshopped Sound?

A friend of mine turned me onto the http://audiocookbook.org, to look at what this guy has done in his sound processing experiments.

Using a product called Photosounder, he turns normal recorded sounds into bitmap images, and then tweaks them in Photoshop. He then re-loads the image in Photosounder, and saves them back as a digital sound file. The results are very interesting, to say the least! The picture shown here is a piano riff run through Photoshop's "Liquefy" filter. The photo is cool, and the sound is ... um ... liquidy?

Check out these links:

Original blog entry

Other examples of photoshopped sounds

The blog itself is a wealth of cool articles, especially for those of you that have ever played with a real synthesizer (oh, and for those of you that actually own your own music studios - you know who you are!) Most articles are equipped with an mp3 link that plays the sound being discussed, so its a very sensory experience I think you will enjoy.

Windows 7 Beta

Holy Crap, Windows 7 is coming out? I'm still using WinXP, does that mean I'll never have to use Vista? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Honestly, as much as I've heard about Vista, I'd rather not ever use it, so it's definitely fine by me, assuming Windows 7 is an improvement. Still, I'll probably hold out with Windows XP as long as I possibly can. The day the games I play "require" a new operating system, is the day I'll switch, and not a day before.

The thing is, I love Windows XP. It was the first time I switched to a new operating system, and found everything working, and happy. I can find stuff where it's *supposed* to be, and it's even pretty quick doing stuff. The only time it's ever crashed on me is when I've done something crazy, and probably deserved some pain. Heck, it's even treated me better than Mac-OSX did when it first came out. Anyone who will tell you that Mac's don't crash, is full of it.

Okay, so I guess I'd better see what Windows 7 (what, no clever catch-phrase?) is all about. Click the link above if you want to join me, and I'll meet you there.

Yews the Fours, Lewk!

Wow, if this really works, that could satisfy one of my "Bucket List" items. Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I spent as a kid trying to move objects with my mind. I always felt like it should be possible, and yet was never successful. I also spent a lot of time with those ESP cards trying to read circles and wavy lines from the mind of my next door neighbor.

This toy apparently uses EEG signals from your brain to modify the airflow beneath a ping pong ball in a tube. If you get it just right, the ball moves up. If you get it wrong, a high voltage surge of electricity punishes you, and you go unconscious. At least I think that happens.

Anyway, the boy in the picture seems to think that his brainwaves shoot out his hand, which is pretty funny. That said, I probably would also use hand gestures to give the appearance of "The Force", because that's just too cool! Look out Obi-Wan and Yoda, here I come!