keyboard

Midnight Monday Studio Cat

Luna wanders into the (somewhat messy) studio, where I spent much of this weekend working on several projects, including music you will probably never hear and the Sunday podcast. It's a rare shot of both the PC and Mac laptops along with the keyboards and other gear.

Actually, I think the ketzela is more interested in those cushions and bedding than in any musical or technological mischief.








Bad Kitty Chaos Festival #4: The Round up

&cWell, it's Sunday afternoon and time for the round-up of the Bad Kitty Chaos Festival #4. The theme is Music and Cats, and Luna starts us off with a “CatSynth pose” next to a soon-to-be-bent Casio SK-10:

Meanwhile, Willow from sammawow has her own keyboard shot, where she channels the Ramones. Gotta love those 70s haircuts. We will probably feature some more photos of Willow as part of our regular “CatSynth pic” series.

Luna doesn't really play much, she mostly just likes to hang in the studio, as we've seen many times in the past:

For Gree, music is about purrrs. Purrs can indeed be a wonderful musical sound, there are several electronic treatments of purrs in the album I am currently working on entitled 2 1/2.

Next we take a little detour from art towards science. Living the Scientific Life asks the question “Can Animals Predict Impending Death?”, and features the much discussed case of Oscar who seemed to predict when residents at a nursing home were near death.

Oscar is also the subject of this week's contribution by TherapyDoc.

More music (or “mewsic”) can be found at the home of Kashim and Othello, where the boys try their own version of a faux reggae classic.

Meanwhile Victor Tabbycat presents Fursday along with Bonnie Underfoot.

Those Bengals are back, with all the Bengal cuteness, over at Pet's Garden Blog.

Mouse takes on the competition in this slideshow at This, That and The Other Thing (who hosted Carnival of the Cats last weekend). Don't worry Mouse, the toys are no match for you.

“When you?ve gotten bored of attacking your toys, there?s always your own foot to play with…”, as we are reminded at Dophin's Dock. Sage advice.

Have you ever considered a cat's whistkers? Well, you should. And this contribution from the Magick Cat Cauldron will help introduce you this amazing piece of feline machinery.

Samantha says thank you to everyone who helped with her surprise party. Sounds like it was a smashing success.

At Self Help for Cats, Herman Panther likes to sleep cuddled with his humans, “like a lover.” Reminds me of a bit of “kitty live” with our own little panther here, who loves to snuggle up in bed on my left side and fall asleep purring.

Aloysius joins our cats-and-music theme with his epic poem. Sing, Great Cat, the tale of Aloysius, mighty hunter of the line of Pangur Ban!.

Gemini sets off a bit of an argument at Chey's Place. Maybe time for her own blog? After all, there is no such thing as too many cat blogs.

Over at the Cat Realm, Karl dares us all with a challenge. Visit them to find out more. Oh, by the way, nice shades!


Finally, Biscuit has not come home, and Megan and bad kitty cats are losing hope that she will return. This is really sad news for our friends who started this “festival” – we hope that she does defy the odds and return, but our sympathies are with them now.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Bad Kitty Cat Festival of Chaos. Next weekend, we'll be hosting the old favorite Weekend Cat Blogging.

Preparing for tomorrow's today's performance, part 2

Things were looking pretty dire yesterday afternoon, with major audio problems on both the PC and Mac. Without going into details, I was getting intermittent pops, clicks and stutters on the PC, and the Mac was simply outputting something wrong. Eventually, I was able to get the mac working with clean audio, so that became the computer for today's performance, together with an E-MU 0202 | USB and an Xboard.

Basically, the mac is running Open Sound World, more specifically, the latest version that works with my new Python interface. Without the pesky graphical interface, the system is rock solid and a lot more efficient to program. It's more akin to SuperCollider or the practice of “live coding”, if you are familiar with either of those. So with this setup, I was able to get things up and running for today very quickly. And it is rock solid, though I don't want to jinx the actual performance too much by describing all the things that didn't happen.

The “instrument” for today allows two live recordings to be played back at various rates, controlled by the MIDI keyboard and knobs. I will be playing several of my Indian instruments to feed the recordings, in particular the ektar (single-string instrument) and the gopichand (also single string, with a bendable neck for pitch modulation).

Of course, the ketzela wants to get in the act again, too:

One last-minute change was dealing with my Xboard killing itself (something stupid on my part, really). Fortunately, I also have the Novation keyboard as a backup, and although the keyboard itself isn't as good, the controllers are a better fit.

The setup is also extremely compact. This is all I have to carry:

Well, actually, this and the folding table I usually bring. Still, it will be very light and relatively easy to set up (especially as the mac boots very quickly).