UNDERDOG of PERFECTION - Page 86 - a blog on technology, music and geek culture from room34

The Rise of the New Groupthink

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The Rise of the New Groupthink
Susan Cain, writing for the New York Times, explores the correlation between introversion and creativity, along the way profiling one of the great introverts of our times, Steve Wozniak. Quoting Woz in his memoir:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

(Via Charles Hennen.)

Facing the 2012 RPM Challenge

February is just a couple of weeks away, and as I have every year since 2008, I’ll be participating in the RPM Challenge.

What’s that? It’s simple: produce an entire album (10+ songs or 35+ minutes) entirely during the month of February.

My concept this year is a bit different than in the past. This time around, I will not be using any instruments… just my iPhone. I’ve assembled an interesting collection of music creation apps (which I will detail in a future post, but for now will represent with a pair of screenshots, below), and these will be the only tools I will use to generate sounds. I may sample my voice, found sounds and instruments using my iPhone’s microphone, and I’ll do final mixing and post-production on my MacBook Air, but as much as possible this will be an album produced on the iPhone. Given the nature of some of the apps I’ll be using, I also expect this album to be a lot more experimental/avant garde in style than most of my recent solo work.

I am tentatively calling the album i. And I am also considering producing a companion album, called The Way Out Takes, that will consist of unedited versions of the more experimental tracks that end up on i.

Stay tuned for more details as I think them up.

SOPA is DYING; its evil Senate twin, PIPA, lives on

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SOPA is DYING; its evil Senate twin, PIPA, lives on
Cory Doctorow brings us some good news over on Boing Boing concerning House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s decision to shelve SOPA (for now). Cory also hits on just why fighting this legislation is so important:

[T]he net is more than a glorified form of cable TV — it’s the nervous system of the information society. Any pretense that is used to build censorship and surveillance into the network will touch every part of networked life.

Mormons, Evangelicals, and the President’s Religion

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It was nice of the New York Times to give us an introduction to Mormonism in today’s paper. But I think what this suggests is that we really need a lesson on the U.S. Constitution, specifically Article VI, Clause 3:

[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Edge cases

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On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch
Yesterday the New York Times reported on an incident where an audience member at a New York Philharmonic performance interrupted a Mahler symphony (literally… the conductor stopped the performance) with an iPhone alarm.

It was understandable, in context. And I think John Gruber gets it exactly right:

You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.