Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 8th, 2009
Fourier analysis tells us that you can do a darn good job modeling any periodic waveform by adding together a series of sine waves. The image below was lifted from the Wikipedia article on the Gibbs phenomenon, in which the goal is to assemble a square wave. On Jim Bumgardner’s KrazyDad blog I came across [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 16th, 2009
Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of my all-time favorite books. As the name implies, there are many references to Bach’s music, particularly his fugues and canons. When I was reading the book back in high school, it was hard to track down and listen to all the music that came up in the book, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 21st, 2009
YouTube is filled with music. There are instructional videos, performance videos, and people simply practicing or showing off in front of their cameras. Find a piece you like and, from the comfort of your own home, you can play with them in a virtual jam session. Ophir Kutiel, an Israeli musician, was doing exactly this [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 26th, 2008
Stephen Malinowski is a polymath composer/musician/programmer who created something called the Music Animation Machine. What it does is animate music scores in a way that makes their rhythmic and tonal structures really jump out at you. For example, here is a Chopin Etude (opus 10, #7) Having warmed up with that, you’ll have fun watching [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 18th, 2008
A few weeks ago I wrote about how my iPod touch serves the purpose of a laptop in the kitchen. With the advent of the new iPhone 2.0, I was able to upgrade my iPod software (for $10) and get some of the new iPhone Apps. Among the apps are two that I suspect I’ll [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 9th, 2008
Back from a week-long vacation and a long web hiatus. The vacation was at the beach in North Carolina, and since it was an extended family gathering I got to play some music with my cousins and my brother. That’s my cousin Billy on the mandolin and my cousin Missy on the fiddle. My brother [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 21st, 2008
Here’s another one of those semantic distance stories: how long does it take to formulate the right question when you just know the answer is out there somewhere? One of the various obscure records* in my house when I was growing up was Songs & Sounds of the Sea. It was a collection of sea [...]
