Martyn Ware Interview
Uh forgot to mention — we recently got to talk to Martyn Ware for BigShinyThing. Read the interview in full on the site.
From Alliance to Dalliance
One to explore later: during the 90s, there was much excitement and hype about the idea of keeping a business to its core competencies — small and lean — and developing strong alliances with other businesses to flesh out the offering. In the post-stratified, networked world of today, surely businesses should be thinking past such rigidity! From our learnings with social network structures, there is much strength in weak ties — relationships which aren’t constantly reinforced, or core to our activities, but which can be called on dynamically as and when required to achieve some specific goal. Out with Alliance! …
Documents with Tails: Blogjects
Evidently there’s a nice new ‘theory object’ neologism for the class of things of which Documents With Tails are members: blogjects. Thanks for Stephen for reminding me to read that paper.
London Crawling
A while back, there was reported a new law enforcement surveillance system which could automagically switch/integrate multiple data feeds into a single presentation layer — designed to automatically follow individual people or vehicles, as they pass from one camera/feed to the next. Think it might have been a new toy from Qinetiq. Sounds like their kind of thing — 3D maps with patches of realtime footage from CCTV, helicopter cameras, whatever is available, all integrated in realtime for officers in the field or back at C&C. Anyway. Can’t find it on Google, but there were some very CSI-stylee screengrabs (probably …
The Italian Boj
Interval at Addictive TV/Optronica‘s night out at Waterman’s. Some fine fine short things — respect to Tom Wall and Somniscope [above], and of course Addictive themselves for a reprise of The Italian Boj, which was quite a thing last year at the South Bank…
Glanceware Music Navigation #2
For starters, drop the idea of a single rigid taxonomy — there are too many ways through, even assuming that canonical representations are possible. So we’re probably looking at something at least personal, possibly community-based. Folksonomic tagging would be a start, but how to navigate in a neatly glanceable fashion? I’m thinking of building a personalised acoustic surface, where patches of looped sound are snippets representing genres and subgenres, and which morph into one another ‘at the edges’ so you end up with a navigable 2- or 3-space which is a musical patchwork. ‘Drill down’ into any patch and explore …
Glanceware Remotes?
So. Sometime soon, broadbandwidth and QoS sufficient to stream 16/44k1 audio reliably, longhaul. And at some point a bit later, maybe, OMD aggregators which will be able to provide access to most of everything that way. On my mind at the moment is the question: how to navigate the whole of music space, in a glanceable fashion: minus clunky jogwheels and textual taxonomies. I’m thinking, as rules of the game, to allow only a 5.1 surroundfield and a remote useable one-handed, without any interactivity built into the remote itself — effectively a system which could be used in the dark, …
The Seven Stars
Yesterday, we took some time out for a deferred Valentine’s Day Out: Lunch at the Seven Stars — a recent discovery and now one of our favourite London pubs: lovely atmosphere, well-kept Adnams on tap and decent wine, friendly staff, enormous & very serious food, and Tom Paine the pub cat, who yesterday was looking fierce in a ruff collar, and then round the corner for a pilgrimage to the Hunterian Museum, which has to be experienced, if only for the Evelyn Tables: The oldest surviving anatomical preparations in Europe, which were bought in 1646 by the diarist John Evelyn. …
AV32R
Recently won a Tag McLaren AV32R on eBay. Admittedly there’s very little official technical support for these now, and given that mine is the single processor model, there aren’t really a whole lot of upgrade options, even should I find someone to install them for me. And the VFD display, being a VFD display, is a bit tired. But it’s all about the sound, and the sound is excellent. I’ve been most surprised to find that I’m actually using their proprietary DSP when listening to music, as most DSP programs for spatialising stereo just turn the music to mush. The …