Craig Anderton created The Minimoog Tribute, an affordable expansion pack for Cakewalk’s Rapture and Rapture LE synths that “covers” the classic sounds rather than duplicates them, using his personal Minimoog. I interviewed him for CDM at NAMM and discovered that a portion of the proceeds from sales of The Minimoog Tribute go towards the Moog Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to preserving the personal archive of Bob Moog. It’s not just a collection of personal effects, it serves as a veritable archive of the history of electronic music itself and deserves to make it through time for future generations to explore and peruse.

Read more: Craig Anderton’s Tribute to Moog: Rapture Presets, and a Call to Save History

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Live from the Liz Revision living room…

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During Yuri’s Night in San Francisco you will have the opportunity to win a Tenori-On if you can create the most futuristic digital music interface / instrument (PS: The lineup is a veritable who’s who of contemporary, forward thinking electronic musicians: Amon Tobin, Tipper, John Tejada, Lusine, Scuba, Digitonal vs. Posthuman, [a]pendics.shuffle, Deru, Tycho, Mr. Projectile, Dr. Toast and Ganucheau).

Musicians have led many of the most innovative digital technological breakthroughs — the first digital synthesizer (at Bell Labs in the 50s), breakthroughs in modular electronic systems (modular synthesizers of the 60s), pioneering advances in digital storage and processing, unusual wireless interfaces and gestural controls decades ahead of the Nintendo Wii, and touch- and multi-touch tools years before the iPhone and Microsoft Surface.

But that’s all in the past. This is a design challenge for the future. We want to hear the best, most forward-thinking, generally coolest, Second Space Age-worthy instruments and digital music interfaces. If aliens land — as they did when met by a classic ARP synthesizer in Close Encounters — we want to be able to give them a great show.

Need extra incentive? The grand prize winner will take home a Yamaha Tenori-On.

How to enter

We’re looking for designs of “instruments” — whether self-contained, electrically-powered devices or hardware interfaces for computers. That can include tangible interfaces, physical computing, hacked hardware, custom-built synths and electronics, and other gadgets. These must use at least some custom software and/or hardware.

You are limited to one computer and one input device — but the “input device” can be as complex as an interactive table. If that sounds vague, just remember — ultimately, the judges and audience decide. Wow them, and all will be well.

Enter the Futuristic Music Design Challenge at Create Digital Music

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Gearwire’s Crosstalk returns from Los Angeles in its new audio podcast format. Bill Holland is joined by Owen O’Malley, and special guest Liz McLean Knight (Quantazelle, Createdigitalmusic.com, Liz Revision). Meet Liz and hear the Crosstalk picks for the best and worst things at Winter NAMM 2008.

My voice has a bit of unintentional distortion since I’ve been fighting this trendy virus thing that seems to be making the rounds (not this Virus–I’d gladly accept one of those). And I escaped with only one nerdy dork snort at a joke about the intertubes. I was stuffy.. yeah that’s it.

Crosstalk 38: Bashing Something That Deserves It — Guitar Hero

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About

Nextwebgen posted their 10 Worst Company Domains, which are apparently the result of people registering their domain names without running it through their public relations department, branding / identity / in-house graphic designers or at least one other literate human being who speaks English.

Gems:

The Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com

Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange
advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

Let that be a lesson to anyone starting up a company and thinking about names and domains… run it past a few people first. :-)

Top 10 Worst Company URLs

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Here’s a quick how-to by Gustavo Bravetti on making IDM-like patterns in Abelton Live. It makes me want to sit down and play with Live some more than I have.

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The National Association of Music Merchants holds an expo / trade show called the NAMM Show, that I helped cover for Create Digital Music. Apparently it’s the largest music products trade show in the entire United States. Judging from the traffic outside the convention center and the number of chain hotels in the area it makes sense. This funny poster we found posted outside the entrance is completely ironic–Anaheim is just someone with a Photoshop clone brush and a JPG of a strip mall.

That being said, NAMM itself was pretty cool. Here’s Peter Kirn and I’s overview: The NAMM Win and Fail lists.

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While on yelp.com I was in a thread where a few people thought a user had created a fake profile to promote his business, and someone mentioned there had been a study done that found gender differences in writing, and then created a program to analyze writing and determine the gender. I put the “girl”’s comments in and it came out as “weak male,” but so did almost everyone’s posts. Either way, it’s an interesting concept and fun to play around with.

In 2003, a team of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni) developed a method to estimate gender from word usage. Their paper described a Bayesian network where weighted word frequencies and parts of speech could be used to estimate the gender of an author. Their approach made a distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing styles.

A simplified version of this work was implemented as the Gender Genie. They showed that fewer words were needed and that writing styles varied based on the forum. For example, fiction and non-fiction differs from blogs (informal writing). Even though the genres differ, there are still gender-specific word frequencies.

This Gender Guesser system is heavily based on the Gender Genie. In particular, the word lists and weights are reproduced from the Gender Genie. The Gender Guesser extends the interpretation of informal writing to work on blogs and chat-room messages, and combines formal writing styles (fiction, non-fiction, essays, news reports, etc.). It also looks for weak emphasis — used to distinguish European English from American English. In general, if the difference between male and female weight values is not significant (a “weak” score), then the author could be European. This is because the weight matrix is biased for distinguishing genders in American English.

Gender Guesser

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