What you are observing above is basically this (as described by Jon-Kyle Mohr):
Sound frequencies are displayed as they are heard. Lower frequencies are mapped low (bottom) to high (top). Brightness is determined by amplitude.
Sweeping tones and rhythmic patterns create intricate structures. The circular form is in memorial of dead formats; the CD, MiniDisc and others. R.I.P.
Andrew Ohlman, who also happens to be a member of the Cargo Collective team, compiled a Quartz sketch which does similar things called Circular Spectrogram.
You can download the Circular Spectrogram application here to create your own visuals (currently only available for Mac users).
uber_filgrane – One of the best instagrams i’ve seen to date, it can’t be all iPhone can it? Its almost Wes Anderson like, you definitely won’t find a better use of pastel colors anywhere else within this feed.
houseoffriedman – making a name for using his hands on instagram, I really enjoy the simplicity of his theme and the subtle texturing for the effect.
4ksh – Beautiful washes, it perfectly mutes the angles of most of his photos.
This Shigeto remix of Sufjan Stevens just got leaked out about a week ago, a beautiful take on how to remix a different genre, Shigeto keeps the feel of the original and gives us this thread that unravels this tune into pile of silk cloth to lay on and rest.
Probably the most inviting to new listeners of the Four Tet / Burial collabs comes Nova. This could be an Enya / Ricardo Villalobos collab which really sounds appealing right now and i’m only saying that because I wish this hit a broader audience so people could understand what the world is missing out on here.
Its time for early 2000’s Tech House to come back, the melody is important again! pull out your old Traum, Kompakt, and Border Community records because they’ll blow these young kids minds, Blondes definitely know what there doing.
NASA has a great collection of historical photographs detailing their exploits over the years. Break out your Epsons and clean up your source imagery folder, these are all high-res and downloadable. Your tax dollars at work.
You may recall the post I did a while back on Daily Book Graphics. Well apparently I misidentified several of those images as vintage covers when in fact they were modern works by designer Julian Montague who is part of the Buffalo based design duo Frazer / Montague.
When I first saw the Icon 4×4 CJ series a while back I was temped to post but never got around to it. Seeing their new 1964 Bronco reproduction tipped the balance though and I had to get these up here. Icon create idealized versions of a few of the great 4×4 of yore (Bronco, CJ, and FJ) with a modern slant and an eye for detail. Don’t ask how much they cost unless you’re reading this on the front deck of a yacht or all your emails end with “Sent from a horse”. Nike was somehow involved. Also, you get a free shoe with one of them apparently.
More pics and some insight into the process of designing the Bronco can be found here
With everyone heading to or already at SXSW this week and next, I thought this would be a good time to post about the location aware music apps that Bluebrain has been doing. They’ve already done one for The National Mall and Central Park ( Listen To The Light ), the new one The Violet Crown is based around Austin and SXSW. Basically it’s, as Bluebrain describes it, “a musical composition, available exclusively as a free iPhone app, that uses the phone’s built-in GPS to alter the music as the listener traverses the area – each street and intersection is tagged with various pockets of sound, turning the festival grounds into a musical ‘choose-your-own-adventure’.”
You can download the free app here through iTunes.
It’s a really cool concept and as of yet, I haven’t been able to try out the other versions from The National Mall or Central Park ( Listen To The Light ), The Violet Crown will be the first.
For those that can’t make it out to SXSW this year, I dug a little further to get some more of the background on The Violent Crown app and some process. Ryan Holladay of Bluebrain went over the technical info and he sent me a few screen grabs and a map from the programming end of things. He also did a breakdown of how it works, which I think is really interesting.
“What you are looking at in these shots is the app simulator running running on our desktop — this is a way that we can remotely test the music without having to be in Austin and simulate the experience of, say, walking from one block to another and hearing how the music changes. As you can see, there are many in a single area, often with so many overlapping that it’s difficult to tell visually where each of them are located. The crosshairs in the middle represent the location of the listener, the various circles indicate the size of the audio track and the colors the state the audio is in: Blue, as you probably guessed, is playing, while yellow is cued and red is disengaged.
Because, by design, the app basically has to be ready for whichever direction you move, what we have is a system that prepares the audio to be dropped in at any given point and at the correct interval by preloading audio in every direction within a certain proximity. So, for instance, if you were to begin walking from Frontage Rd towards Congress Ave, halfway up 4th Street it will have prepared the tracks waiting for you when you arrive at Red River Street. But, when you reach an intersection, the audio to your left and right is also waiting for in case you chose that direction. Once it’s realized you’ve moved on, it drops those tracks to save processing power until you turn around and re-approach.”
To see what it’s all about check out the Making Of video below, which gives you a detailed explanation of what it does and how they actually built the one for Central Park ( Listen To The Light ).
So I came across this great collection of vinatge ski posters a while back, but unfortunately they were all watermarked. I really hate watermarks and try to avoid posting images containing them at all costs; but these were just too good to pass up so you’ll have to try and see past the giant “ORIGINAL SKI POSTERS” and enjoy the underlying greatness. Growing up in Sacramento I always had a thing for 70s ski culture — Tahoe was a short drive up the mountain and a lot of the style and imagery tricked down into the valley. A lot of these perfectly capture the spirit of those times for me.
So, as you may have guessed, these are all from the Original Ski Posters site, where you can purchase many of them. Sadly, these watermarked Jpegs are as close as most of us will ever get to these as they start at around £500 and go upwards of £3000. there is an open image directory here where you can grab all the images with a utility like Downthemall. A couple seem ripe for watermark removal and some of the resolutions are high enough to get a good print out of.
