We at CatSynth are happy to announce that CatSynth: TheApp! is now available for Android. You can get your copy on the Google Play Store.
It has all the same features as the initial release of iOS, including an Android-optimized reader and manager for the blog, and of course a couple of Mystery Synths 🙂
So please download, leave us a good review, and share with your friends. But most of all, just have fun with it.
We at CatSynth are excited to announce the release of CatSynth: The App! for all iThingies (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch). It is available in the App Store now!
CatSynth : The App! brings you the odd world of cats, synthesizers, music, art and more in a beautiful interface optimized for your handheld device or tablet. New articles are added quite often, so we hope you come back frequently to check them out. And you can always make new and unusual music with the included Mystery Synths!
It should work on all devices running iOS 7.1 or later. Please check it out, maybe leave us a nice review, but most of all just enjoy it. And for our friends on the Android platform, don’t worry, we should be releasing the app for Android quite soon 🙂
By Max for Cats, via matrixynth:
“Available here: http://sonicbloom.net/en/packs/max-fo…
Noland is a unique Synthesizer with individually automatable XY-control.Noland lets you store custom XY automations and colour schemes as Presets.
NolandFX is a old-school harmoniser effect, also part of this pack.
Max for Cats crafts Software Instruments, Effects, MIDI devices, Sound Design and Samples for Ableton Live.”
I am Max user for some projects, but still haven’t taken the plunge into Max for Live. Time to do so? (and not just because of the cats)
I don’t usually talk about stuff I do for my day job here, but when I do it’s because it’s particularly interesting or amusing for this audience. I recently appeared on the popular podcast Android App Addicts first as an interviewee and then as a guest commentator for a few episodes. Basically, it’s three guys who casually talk about Android apps, bring a few each episode to share and discuss. The conversation is at a the level of the geek user rather than deeply technical.  I appear in episodes 210-213 if you want to check it out. In episodes 211 and 213, I do share some cat-related apps, as well as a synth app in 212 🙂
The hosts, Steve Cherubino, Steve McLaughlin, and Eric Arduini were very open and welcoming, and I would like the thank them for having me.  It was a lot of fun, though I do hate the sound of my own voice.  It also reminds me of the challenges of speaking extemporaneously – in music I can do that with ease, but not as much with speech.
One day when I have free time (?) I would like to restart a CatSynth podcast, basically starting where I left off with the World of Wonder on San Francisco Community Radio but taking it in less strictly musical directions.
Last week we lost Dennis M. Ritchie, whose work influenced much of what we do with computers today both as users and software developers.
From the New York Times obituary:
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator…
It was only a week earlier that we were marking the passing of Steve Jobs and noting the contributions he made to Apple via NeXT. The operating system of NeXT which became Apple’s Mac OSX are Unix systems. Similarly, the much of the heavy computer programming from large-scale servers to iPhones is done with C and its descendents C++ and Objective C.
“The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,” said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs.
A great many of us who studied computer science and practiced computer programming have the classic text that Kernighan and Ritchie co-wrote, The C Programming Language, known affectionately as authoritatively as “K&R”.
C is at hits heart a “systems programming language.” It’s a small language, structured in the imperative programming style of Algol and PASCAL, but the individual functions and operations are close to the machine language, simple bit-shift, arithmetic and memory location (pointer) operations. As such, it is very unforgiving compared to some of its predecessors, but it was efficient and simple and has enough expressive power to build operating systems like Unix, scientific computing, and the inner works of most software applications through the object-oriented successors, C++ and Objective C. Much of my software work has centered around these descendent languages, but when it comes to doing actual computation, it’s still C.
“C is not a big language — it’s clean, simple, elegant,” Mr. Kernighan said. “It lets you get close to the machine, without getting tied up in the machine.
Higher-level languages, like the PHP used to build this site, are ultimately implemented as C and C++ programs. So both this website and the device you are using to read it are products of Dennis Ritchie’s work.
I needed some intellectual diversions over the last couple of days, and last night I took another look at concept of software art that has intruiged me recently.
Fluxus is a system for live software art that combines programming with audio, visual and interactive elements. It comes to us from the same people who made Quagmire, in which programs ran inside of monochrome images.
Some interesting statements from the Fluxus website:
act of a flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream; a continuous succession of changes
On a more technical level:
Fluxus reads live audio or OSC network messages which can be used as a source of animation data for realtime performances or installations. Keyboard or mouse input can also be read for simple games development, and a physics engine is included for realtime simulations of rigid body dynamics.
The use of OSC is of particular interest, as such a system becomes an interesting companion to Open Sound World. It also rekindles my idea of providing an OSC-based livecoding environment for OSW.
Unforunately, I have had some difficulty getting it installed (or compiled) for Mac OSX, so I haven't been able to do much myself. Hopefully I will be able to get that working soon…
I have finally reposted my doctoral dissertation, this time in HTML format as well as PDF. The title is Perceptual Scheduling in Real-time Music and Audio Applications. I propose an algorithm for improving computational performance of expensive synthesis techniques, such as additive synthesis and resonance modeling that preserves audio quality, and measured both the improved CPU performance and the perceptual quality as measured by expert listeners in controlled experiments.
I think this actually a good time to review and reflect upon this work. Five years have passed since I graduated from UC Berkeley with my PhD. I probably have the only doctoral dissertation in Computer Science that includes James Brown as a citation. While I enjoyed working on the dissertation, including the formal experiments, the work I do now developing music software (and then using for my own composition and performance) is really a better match for who I am.
As discussed in an earlier post, I have had a sometimes challenging relationship with academic science. I have the technical and analytical “chops”, but I am too much of a creator and a romantic to find personal meaning and reward in rigorous experiments and analysis of data. I love the aesthetic appeal of science and mathematics, and especially look for unusal and serendipitous connections rather standard incremental results. Simply put, I am an artist, not a scientist, even when I'm working on software engineering projects.
phd
thesis
doctoral dissertation
music
software
computer science