I'm equal parts excited and jealous (that I didn't think of it) about the iPhone app RjDj, which creates beats on the fly out of the sounds coming in from the microphone. I've been trying for a while now to think of ways to incorporate live sampling into performance in a way that doesn't sound too chaotic and yet doesn't require superhuman precision, and I think this is the answer I've been searching for: let software take care of the rhythm and quantization and you can focus on the sounds you want.

Making it an iPhone app was certainly clever and seems to make for a solipsistic sort of fun, like a soundtrack to one's life, but I think this has much bigger potential for the performance of experimental music. The iPhone has a nice set of user controls between the multitouch and the accelerometer, but the microphone and headphones set up seems a bit limiting, unless maybe you could wirelessly transmit the audio output. The creators seem to have found some way to do this for their demo videos.

Their developer site seems to contain some open source goodness and possibly the seeds of being able to run this as a standalone desktop app or a plugin. I might have to try adapting it myself, or making my own version from scratch.

via Kottke

An Engineer Imagines is the autobiography of Peter Rice, one of the preeminent structural engineers of the 20th century. He worked on the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre, I.M. Pei's pyramids at the Louvre, and the Lloyd's of London building, to name a few. According to the reviews, it's a fairly inspiring look at the creative design process. I've been particularly interested over the past year in the intersection of structural engineering and architecture, and how innovative forms become physical realities.

Unfortunately, whatever knowledge is in this book is a casualty of modern intellectual property, and, for all but the most determined scholar, lost to the world.

It was last reprinted in 1998, but only three copies are available on the web: one at Amazon for $1,752.80, and two at AbeBooks for $900 and $2,818.60. Mind you, the book is not bound in solid gold with diamond dots on the i's; it's a simple paperback.

Google Books has only the dreaded snippet view and points me to WorldCat, which shows that there are copies at several libraries in the region. Sadly, the Mid-Manhattan's copy, the only one at a public library, has status "Lost." So I'm left trying to gain access to Columbia's library, which requires me to first go to the public library and convince them of the situation so they can give me a special permission card.

So to sum up, because someone might at some point decide to try selling this book again, no one can read it without unreasonable effort or expenditure until that does happen or several decades pass and the copyright expires.

Yet there is hope. Google's recent settlement of the lawsuit filed against them by publishers includes measures designed to solve precisely this problem by enabling the electronic purchase of out-of-print but in-copyright books. It will be a happy day if this pans out.

Every time I read BibliOdyssey, I think, this is what I want on my walls. The author, known as peacay, finds beautiful and strange images from antique books and documents, collects them by theme, and tells the story of their significance. He finds many of his images in online library sites and archives, and does a lot of fighting with web interfaces gone bad--stitching together screenshots and removing watermarks--to bring us pristine high res versions which he posts on Flickr.

Some favorite recent posts: Panorama Handbills (they should definitely bring back the panorama as an attraction), Clippings (featuring an awesome 1751 map of Sri Lanka with plans of forts around the edge), and River Deep Mountain High, with maps that compare the tallest mountains with the longest rivers. To quote someone on Flickr, is it possible to Fave every picture in a set at once?

I recently found a similar blog called Old Book Art, which offers posters and every other conceivable type of merchandise on Zazzle. One can of course do the same for the BibliOdyssey images by uploading them. The challenge, a common one these days, is whittling down the overwhelming selection.

Last year I competed in a cookie bake-off at work, making chocolate raspberry french macaroons inspired by fading memories of tasting Pierre Hermé's creations in Paris in 2005.

Earlier this year I returned to Paris and partook of many more Hermé macarons that incorporated unusual flavors such as olive oil, white truffle, and grapefruit. I left newly inspired not only to make more of my own, but to strive for excellence and innovation in all my endeavors.

Only with the onset of cool weather and another impending bake-off have I gotten around to macarons again, but this time I intend to make a thorough study of these cookies and find out how far I can take them: I'm thinking of it as a meditation (rather than, say, an obsession, or a compulsion).

Although last year's results were tasty and good for a first try, there are several specific areas that had room for improvement:

• Shell Texture: my shells had the requisite "feet" and avoided some apparently common trouble spots such as cracking, but they were flatter than they should be. I also need to practice piping out a consistent size and shape.


• Shell Appearance: most cooks try to make their food look good by natural means, but when it comes to macaroons, the color and decoration are a big part of the experience. Hermé achieves intense colors and glittery effects on some flavors. Last year I put in some red coloring, but it pretty much disappeared when the shells were done baking.


• Filling: I made a dark chocolate ganache with strained raspberry juice, let it set in the refrigerator, and then spread it on with a knife. Hermé pipes it on, achieving a perfect fat cylinder shape. He also uses a lot; I don't think I had enough and the crumbling shell may have actually prevented enough of the filling from reaching the taste buds.

Last year I used a combination of elements from a recipe in The Sweet Life, a dessert cookbook, and this recipe from Epicurious. The first thing I've done this year is to research any other recipes out there for any differences in technique.

You can't accuse Pierre Hermé of being too secretive. He has several cookbooks, but the recipe for his most famous Ispahan macaroons is right there on the web from a restaurant industry magazine.

A few other resources: Foodbeam is written by a French woman who did a one week internship at Hermé. She doesn't give away many details, but does talk about the process of filling and closing, and has lots of photos and descriptions of different flavors.

Mad Baker is written by a woman in Singapore who makes all sorts of pastries, including macaroons, and sells them from her website. It's clear that she's done a lot of experimentation, both with techniques and flavors, and that she achieves brilliant results. She doesn't give much away either, but has made some helpful comments.

(To be continued)

A nice analogy by Geoff Nunberg on Language Log:

...dirty words are magic spells that conjure up their references. We first learn about dirty words at an age when we still believe literally in magic, and I don't think anything we learn afterwards palliates their irrational power. That's why we behave as if we could render them inefficacious by the simple expedient of using asterisks in place of some of their letters — magical spells have no power unless you say them just so . And it's why they bleed through quotation marks and the other devices we use to hold content at arm's length: if the New York Times can't allow itself to print "Adam Clymer is an asshole" then it can't print "Bush called Adam Clymer an asshole," either (strong racial epithets have these properties, as well).

Smule develops iPhone apps. These include Ocarina, a virtual instrument that takes advantage of many of the device's input methods: the touch screen to cover virtual holes, the microphone as a breath controller, and the accelerometer to control timbre by tilting the phone. You can also hear what other people around the world are playing and rate it! And then, of course, there is "Zeldarian mode."

Not having an iPhone, I haven't had a chance to try this, and even the developers seem to acknowledge that it can be finicky, but then again, so can real instruments. Even so, it's pretty compelling that virtual instruments might be made so expressive. It's always been a peeve of mine that it's so laborious to put the same level of nuance into an electronically produced sound that would be natural if not effortless on a guitar or any physical instrument. One common but perhaps unfortunate solution to this is randomization, a.k.a humanization, a route taken by a few Audio Damage products.

I have to say though, I'm not sure what I will think the first time I go to a concert and see someone pull out their phone and start 'playing' it.

Smule is run by the creators of ChucK, a neat audio programming language that I have played with from time to time.