Restoring a Micromoog
December 13, 2010Some time back, I acquired a Micromoog analog, monophonic synth. These little beasts are a single oscillator synth, but include a sub-oscillator, 24dB/Oct filter, good modulation, ribbon pitch bend and CV interfacing. The clincher was one appeared cheap on Ebay advertised as requiring “Tender Loving Care”: the wooden base needed replacing, but that it did…
Resurrecting a PowerMac G4
November 10, 2010A friend who has returned to studies, and therefore low on cash, had bought a second hand PowerMac G4 Mirror Drive Door model. After a good many years of service with the previous owner, and a year with him, the G4’s power supply died, as that model is inclined to do. Repairing the powersupply is…
I’m a Twit…
October 4, 2010Yes, I’ve succumbed to another form of distraction, I’m now tweeting on twitter. It was the combination of Jordan’s hilarious International Jet Trash and Henkjan’s Music Cognition tweets which made unable to resist…
My letter to Chris Bowen
September 24, 2010Courtesy of the Australian Greens Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, there is a letter writing campaign to Chris Bowen, the new minister for immigration in Australia. Here’s my letter: Dear Minister, It’s time to fix our immigration system. Our current immigration system is failing the world’s most vulnerable people.
A History of Preferential Voting in Australia
August 16, 2010With the Australian federal election impending, once again it’s time to ignore the personality contest and concentrate on reviewing the policies of the various contenders in your electorate. Reading some of the news comments by non-Australians reveals little is known about preferential voting and it’s value to creating Australia’s stable political system. While this article…
The Renaissance of Trolley Buses
August 5, 2010As part of the upcoming Australian election, The Greens party of Australia have been strongly advocating rolling out light rail (i.e. trams) in Australian cities, in particular, in Perth. While I applaud the advocacy for light rail by The Greens, the greatest impediment to adoption will be the start up cost. This consists of the…
Shooting the Messenger
July 29, 2010Taking an almost random sample of the response to the Wikileaks revelations of the criminal slaughter of Afghan civilians by the overwhelmingly U.S military, Foxnews diatribe by Gutfeld is perhaps the local maxima. It’s curious that while Gutfeld is accusing Julian Assange of selectivity in what he is choosing to leak: “The fact is, their…
Foot-tapping with Rubato
June 30, 2010This is an example of automatic interpretation of an anapest rhythm undergoing extreme asymmetrical rubato (tempo variation). The foot-tapper plays a hi-hat sound along to a test anapestic rhythm (repeated short-short-long) which is being varied in it’s tempo. The tapper has found the underlying repetition rate and selectively chosen to tap on the first beat…
Clapping to Auditory Salience Traces
June 30, 2010The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) of Morlet and Grossman can also be applied to decompose a rhythm represented by a continuous trace of event “salience” derived directly from the audio signal. We use a measure of event salience developed by our EmCAP partners Prof. Sue Denham and Dr. Martin Coath at the University of Plymouth.…