CATSYNTH

cats synthesizers music art opinion

Category: Cats

  • Thoughts on last night's performance

    In this article I review my performance last night at the plug:dos headphone festival in San Francisco.

    First, the venue itself. 5lowershop is in a warehouse near the junction of highways 280 and 101 in San Francisco. It’s at the edge of the Bernal Heights neighborhood.


    The venue and its surroundings have that seedy edge-of-the-city feel that I probably wouldn’t want to live in but nonetheless often find intriguing and romantic. It’s just another part of the quintessentially “modern” world.

    The interior matches the exterior, a jumble of areas within the warehouse, including the main performance area. The space is quite porous with the outside, and I noticed several cats wander though, including the grey fellow and a small black-and-white kitten. They were presumably feral cats attracted by the warmth, activity and possibility of food. Feral cats are an inevitable part of urban environments, but it’s still heartbreaking to see them this way. I was also concerned for them because of the dogs that were present, fortunately the dogs seemed to be pets and quite mellow.

    The atmosphere of people crowded in a warehouse listening to headphones was quite unusual to say the least. Some of the performances were quite interesting, including a serinate for voice and hammer-dulcimer, and of course several acts mixing guitar, analog synthesizers and turntable. The analog synths didn’t strike me as a good fit for headphone performance, and thus avoided them myself (as described in my article on the preparation), but they did a good job of keeping the sound within a reasonable range.

    Despite the best efforts of the organizers, whom I liked and thought did a good job overall, things tended to run rather late, and I ended up going on 9:40PM, two hours after my scheduled performance. But I think it went well musically, pretty much meeting my expectations for mixing ambient and rhythmic/punctuated material while keeping things mellow for the headphones. I did bounce around and repeat elements more than I expected, but such is the nature of improvisation, reacting as things unfold.

    The equipment (Dell Laptop, Emulator X, E-MU 1616m, E-MU Xboard 25) performed flawlessly. I did make a direct recording on the laptop, and will be posting that shortly. I am also planning to make that the first release in my planned podcast series.

    UPDATE: you can now listen to the audio from this performance. Enjoy!

  • Worthless Kitty Semi-Redux: Selfish Cat Video

    A friend emailed this to me months ago, and it's been one of my favorite net videos since (though that muppet-anime mashup is pretty classic, too):

    There's nothing like watching a cute kitten get the better of a canine rival to brighten one's spirits…




  • Weekend Cat Blogging #65: Luna in stained glass then and now

    WCB this week is being hosted by Bonnie Loves Cats, featuring Darlin' Darla, a purebred Himalayan kitty who is available for adoption in Charlottesville, Virginia.

    Last August (2005), I got a great shot of Luna basking in the light from our stained glass window:

    This is one of the images featured on my Art Photography page, which definitely needs to be updated with some recent (and not so recent) selections.

    This August, I managed to get a shot of her in nearly the same spot by the window again:

    It's amazing to see how she's grown up in a year. But she'll always be a kitten to me.




  • Cats after the war

    This photo from the Haifa-based Israeli Cat-Lovers Society is an interesting juxtaposition of cats and the recent war:

    In Lebanon, BETA continues its work in the suburbs of Beirut:

    We stayed with them and we will never leave them. They are those who cannot speak, those who cannot comprehend what is happening around them, those who never had anything to do with this war, and those who were left behind.

    While this forum and others have referenced efforts to rescue and care for pets on both sides of the conflict, the following AP article suggests that there is little or no cooperation between groups on either side:

    More, the Israeli animal rescuer, said her group [Ahava] had contacted BETA to offer assistance in evacuating animals, “but they are not interested in being in touch with us.''…She said Ahava has proposed meeting fleeing Lebanese in boats in international waters to collect their pets. “Believe me, dogs and cats in Lebanon don't see themselves as political animals. They just want to leave.''

    El-Massih said BETA was never contacted by the Israeli animal rights group, although it did receive a sympathy e-mail from a former member of Ahava who now lives in the United States.

    If true, this is another sad development in the erosion of civil society amid the tribalism that dominates the Middle East and elsewhere…







  • catsynth pic: Reed Ghazala Tape Canvas Device

    I was reviewing Get LoFi for yesterday's circuit-bending article, and came across a reference not only to Reed Ghazala, whom I also referenced, but a catsynth pic to boot!

    Who knew the “father of circuit bending” was also a cat person? Then again, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised…

    The tape canvas (illustrated above) itself is interesting as well, allowing expressive control of a device and process that is traditionally linear. It inspires me to revive my interest in musical reading of barcodes using a CueCat, which has the added advantage of continuing the feline theme.


    The CueCat has proved a difficult device to work with, however. I have a modified version that gets beyond some of the proprietary issues and shows up as an HID device that can be read in OSW, but I have yet to make it work properly.

  • Weekend Cat Blogging #64: Luna and laptops

    Luna gets distracted while checking whether the battery on our iBook is subject to Apple's recall.

    Apple has determined that certain lithium-ion batteries containing cells manufactured by Sony Corporation of Japan pose a safety risk that may result in overheating under rare circumstances.

    That is Apple's gentle corporate-speak way of saying “may burst into flames.” Fortunately, it looks like we dodged this one. My Dell Latitude at work was not so lucky, and is now relegated to desk duty while awaiting a replacement battery. Ironically, my home Dell Inspiron whose warm and toasty characteristics I described preparing for my August 6 performance was not on the recall list – indeed, since installing the fan-control software things have improved significantly.

    Thanks for boo_licious and her cats Ms. G and Fluffy over at masak-masak for hosting this Weekend's Cat Blogging.

    It looks to be a pleasantly lazy Saturday for all of us.

  • catsynth pic: Gingerbread

    MIT Media Lab assistant professor Dr. Joseph A. Paradiso includes the above photo of his old Himalayan cat Gingerbread atop a synthesizer cabinet as part of his web page documenting his modular synthesizer. His collection of modules and writings about synthesizers are quite impresesive, and I've spent a bit of time looking through them. That is one of the fun things about looking for these pictures of cats and synths: it often leads to something more interesting.

    Dr. Paradiso's synthesizer has received note in Keyboard magazine, and he had a synth rig featured at the 2004 PrixArs Electronic festival. He has some great photos of synth rigs from the 1970's as well.

  • Luna joins Weekend Cat Blogging…

    at least if I'm not too late already. Weekend Cat Blogging, or WCB, is being hosted this week by Heather along with her adorable cats Pause and Carmel. Hopefully, I get this post in time. If not, it's a good excuse to post a recent action shot of Luna enjoying a new gift from a friend:

    I have also added a separate category for Luna alongside the existing cats category for those who want to see more of her and less of the other stuff…

  • Actual Cat Synth

    jfm3 of Ouroboros Complex posts about as literal a “CatSynth” pic as you can get, featuring his cat Kona and accoutrements as part of his rig. Cat aside, the rig and website include a wealth of personal experiences with analog synthesizer hacking as well as circuit bending (note the mod'ed Speak&Spell). Please give jfm3 and Kona a “catsynth welcome” by visiting their site.

  • Green Kitties

    Green kitties need green love!

    This was an early rendering I created with Poser, combining cats and geometric elements into a surrealist image. It brings together my interests in cats and modernist art of the 20th century.