MATRIXSYNTH

"We're building this to make a list of quality freeware and opensource programs for Apple Macintosh OSX computers. We'd like to mainly focus on Max/MSP standalones/patches and other hard to find experimental audio applications but we also have some selected VSTi, AU plugins and other cool and useful music making software. Make your own noise!"

Title link takes you there.

Fleshtones

Click here an interesting video psouper. The video consists of pixelated porn driving a piano. Acording to Philip Sanderson, "the app was put together using max/msp/jitter. Its provisionally called Instant Kitten." Background on the piece via Philip:

"At last a use for all those unwanted adult movies now using the wonders of max/msp/jitter you can turn them into pixelated lyrical piano music. At least that is what psouper has done with an updated "light organ" image to accompaniment synthesizer.

The concept of a correlation between sound and vision goes back to antiquity. One starry night on the island of Samos Pythagoras stood contemplating the skies, to him he very rhythm and motion of heavenly bodies in their orbits appeared to him as if governed by a cosmic harmony, a carefully choreographed sequence, the music of the spheres.

Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci produced sophisticated spectacles for court festivals that fused music and colour. In 1760 Father Castel constructed an Ocular Harpsichord or as he described it a " harpsichord for the eyes". Castel's machine was a normal harpsichord above which were 60 small windows, each with different coloured-glass and a small curtain. Each time the player depressed a particular key, the relevant curtain would rise to show a burst of colour.

In the next two hundred years many new instruments for combining light and sound were built. The British painter A. Wallace Rimington developed a Colour Organ which provided a moving light accompaniment to the 1916 New York premiere of Scriabin's symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire. Scriabin had scored not only the music but also the precise colours he wanted to accompany particular passages.

Such colour music forms the conceptual starting point for Fleshtones, a piece for extreme pixelated porn and auto generated accompaniment. Footage from webcams and other online sites is broken down into a simple tableau of colour bands, at times rather like the paint charts one might find in a DIY store. Given the subject matter this palette is either predominately pink or coffee coloured thus producing a sequence of flickering fleshtones. Using the wonders of max/msp/jitter these Fleshtones are turned into lyrical piano music that rises in falls in response and exact correspondence to the onscreen movement. The motion of earthly bodies thus is transformed into something of beauty, harmony and contemplation."

Casio SK Site

Title link takes you to group site dedicated to the Casio SK line of keyboards including pics, mods and more.

Notes on the SK-5 and SK-8 from Ryan (Plutoniq9)

- 4 sample slots opposed to the (1) on the SK-1
- Samples saved when powering off, SK-1 loses memory due to DRAM.
-When adding midi (i.e Highly Liquid's midi retrofit), the SK-5 & SK-8 can trigger all four samples via midi, so you can use it as a crude lo-fi drum sampler.
- Reverse mode.....always cool for xperimental sounds.

The SK-5 & SK-8 are very very close to one another, I still haven't tested
it yet, but i think a ROM swap could be made between the two. Although they
are the focus of the group, discussion on all SK keyboards is welcome. The
files section has detailed modifiations for the sk-5 & SK-8, real
modifications...not circuit bending.