8th Grade Synth-Rock Fantasy

(related playlist here)

Art Forms in Nature

I just discovered Proteus, a documentary about the life and work of 19th century German biologist / artist Ernst Haeckel. It's beautifully done. You can rent it on netflix or buy it on amazon.

The monograph Art Forms in Nature is an affordable collection of his work. My only complaint is that it doesn't include any of the hundreds of his drawings of comparative anatomy and embryology, subjects Haeckel was well-versed in.

A couple of these embryo drawings were inaccurate, so all these years later, they're still being flaunted by creationists today as proof that "Darwinists" are liars. Haeckel promoted the recapitulation theory, which claimed that an embryo goes through the evolutionary history of its species while in utero. The theory has long been discredited, so I personally don't see the big deal. But if you're interested, there's more on that here.

Besides being a magnificent artist, Haeckel discovered and named literally thousands of lifeforms (most of them aquatic invertebrates which he captured himself while sailing around the world) and was instrumental in furthering Darwin's discoveries. Here's a pleasant youtube collage of some of his work:

Buy My Stuff

Just a reminder that you people really should be buying my stuff. I've only made one sale since Christmas. What, is there a recession going on or something? Just look at this fine merchandise, and the things buyers have actually said about them on my 100% positive feedback page:

Horseshoe Crab Lamp

"Many things are great about this lamp. it looks amazing, both when lit and turned off alike, it's sturdy- my cat knocked it off the wall with his tail and no cracks anywhere, and the seller is a good guy. I'm all-around pleased."

Cthulhu Bobblehead

"Outstanding bobblehead statue. Whimsical yet eldritch. If you are a Lovecraft/Mythos fan, you NEED one of these."

USB Roach

"Love the cockroach, thank you for making and shipping it so quickly... gross and gorgeous, all at the same time."

The Glowworm Solar Lamp is currently sold out, but I'll be making more of them in the next few weeks. Check back at my etsy page for updates.

Tanz Roboter

Angry Red Planet

Tonight, Jan. 27th, Mars will be closer to Earth (60 million miles) than at any other time between 2008 and 2014. Try to get out and take a look. Here's a star map for tonight, tomorrow and friday.

If your telescope is powerful enough, perhaps you'll see something like this clip from Angry Red Planet, the most scientifically accurate depiction of Mars in its day:

Chimp-Cam

If you're in the UK, this premieres tomorrow. It'll eventually play on the Animal Planet channel in the states, date TBD.

So far, it looks amateurish. Somebody send one of these chimps to film school, already.

Duster!

Frankensynth 3

So far everything is functioning on The Frankensynth as it should, including the MIDI keyboard input. Here's a recording using one oscillator and delay/reverb:




With the guidance of Clark S. Nova, I've bought the parts for the homemade step sequencer (including those lovely mirrored knobs at a salvage store). There are ten rows of controls, one row for each note in a ten-note sequence. From the top down: the LED flashes when that note is hit in the sequence. The knob controls the note's pitch. The two-way switch determines whether the note is heard or not (used to enter a pause in a sequence) and the 1/8 phone jack takes a patch cable. Whichever of the ten ports the cable is plugged into determines the sequence length (so if the cable was plugged into port #8, the sequence would be a 8-step loop). I've fastened the components to a sheet of cardboard to act as both a design template and a wiring rig.







Breadboarding the sequencer circuit. I plan to add a timer circuit and a tempo knob, then plug it into the synth and see if everything works, before I solder anything together.

The Klaus Nomi Post

The Book of Jerry

I thought I'd exhausted all possible chimp avenues well over a year ago, but today boingboing.net guestblogger Stephen Worth (director of the Hollywood Animation Archive) brings an incredible story:

Jack Dutton had a chimpanzee named Jerry. He and his wife Dorothy raised him as their baby. Little Jerry slept in a crib and wore diapers, and soon, he was potty trained and sleeping in Dorothy and Jack's bed.

One day, Jack was talking with some of his local orange grove owners and he found out that a lot of them were mysteriously selling their property. Rumors were going around that the cartoonist, Walt Disney was buying up land in Anaheim to build some sort of amusement park. Jack started to piece the information together; and using a map, he quickly realized that his property was just a hop, a skip and a jump away from what was soon to become Disneyland.

He heard unbelievable things through the grapevine- there were plans to build a river with a steamboat, a city of the future, a wild west fort, and a make-believe jungle populated by robot wild animals... Jack sat down at his kitchen table with a map of his orange grove and began to daydream. If Disney was going to make a jungle with fake animals, why not create a real jungle with real animals? In his head, he saw a jungle themed restaurant and garden with Jerry, "The World's Most Human Chimp" as the centerpiece attraction. Jack sat up all night drawing up his plans.

The next day, he rolled up his maps and bundled up all his notes and went down to Bank of America. Building his jungle was going to cost a lot of money, so why not try to get a loan? His friends thought he was crazy, but as soon as he pointed out the location of his orange groves on the map to the bank manager, the whole tone of the meeting changed. You see, Walt Disney was being financed by Bank of America too, and the bank knew even more about what Disneyland would eventually become than Jack did. Jack walked out of the bank in a daze. They had given him more money than he could have ever dreamed of!

Jack went to work transforming his orange grove into a jungle showplace. He dug a pond and landscaped around it with tropical plants from around the world. He assembled a menagerie of animals- a bear, ostriches, elephants, exotic birds and even an old, worn out circus lion- and of course, Jerry.

Jack built a restaurant called "The Palms" which was shaped like an L around the front corner of his property. To one side was a coffee shop, cocktail lounge and a beauty shop (aptly called "Headhunters"). Around the other side was Jack's living quarters- a spacious home where he could live among his animals and oversee the operation of his jungle themed attraction. Things were great. Walt Disney often entertained big name celebrities at the construction site of Disneyland, and they had nowhere else to go for dinner afterwards than The Palms. No matter how big a star, Jerry still stole their limelight.

Jerry lived in a typical little boy's bedroom, no different than any other boy in the 50s- but there was one difference. One whole wall of his bedroom was a floor to ceiling sheet of glass facing out onto the gardens. Visitors to the Jungle could stand outside and watch Jerry's typical day from beginning to end...

Every morning, Jerry would wake up and get out of bed. He would bathe himself and brush his hair and teeth. Then he would go to his closet and select his pants and shirt for the day. He would get dressed and head out the door for the restaurant. Jerry would make a grand entrance to the applause of the diners having breakfast in the coffee shop. Jerry would grab a newspaper off the rack and hop up on a stool at the counter. A waitress would patiently take the order as Jerry carefully examined the menu. Jerry's lips would flap in a simulation of speech. The waitress would listen carefully, "Yes Jerry, ham and eggs... over easy... wheat toast... milk and orange juice..." Jerry would open the paper (usually upside down) and sip his milk just like every other patron in the place. When the food arrived, Jerry would eat with a knife and fork and a napkin tucked under his chin. It was a truly remarkable sight.



Disneyland finally opened in 1955 to huge crowds, and Dutton's world started spinning out of control. Teenagers broke into the gardens at night and teased the animals. Someone stole the flamingos out of the pond. One day, Dutton was out walking near the lion's cage. He arrived to find a young couple sticking their baby through the bars to take a picture of their kid with the lion. He rushed in and pulled the baby back. "What the hell do you think you're doing?!" he raged. The father explained that they thought all of the animals in the Jungle were tame. The old circus lion may not have had all his teeth, but he certainly wasn't tame!

The insurance company that covered liability for The Palms and the Jungle caught wind of the problems with the animals (after several lawsuits) and raised their rates. Dutton had reached his last straw. The animals had to go. He sold the elephants and the bear, and gave the alligators away to a zoo. Pretty soon, all the animals were gone... all except for Dutton's "baby boy", Jerry the World's Most Human Chimp. Dutton swore he would never part with his simian son.

Dutton dressed Jerry in a gardener's outfit and gave him gardening tools and a hose. Jerry happily wandered among the guests watering and raking. But it didn't last long. One afternoon, Dutton heard a furor coming from out in the garden. He ran out to find Jerry tossing a toddler ten feet in the air and catching him over and over. He quickly intervened and hustled the boy off with his parents. The kid had actually enjoyed the play and the parents weren't upset. But this couldn't go on. Jerry had become an adult chimpanzee. He had the strength of several men.

Sadly, Jack moved all of the furniture from Jerry's glass walled bedroom into the lion's old cage. He tried to make it look just like his room in the house. But when he put Jerry inside and closed the door, Jerry had a nervous breakdown. The chimp cried and cried- all night long and into the next day. He wouldn't stop crying. It was heartbreaking to see. Jack tried to find baby sitters to look after Jerry during the day, but it just didn't work. He called zoos, but none of them would take in a "humanized chimp". Jerry required too much attention for a public zoo to be able to deal with. Finally, Jack Dutton sealed off the entrance to the Jungle and closed it to the public.

Every day, Jerry got up and got dressed in his gardener's outfit. He puttered around the pond hoeing and hosing, but there was no audience of tourists around any more to watch him work. He was all by himself in the Jungle.

One day, Jack Dutton handed Jerry a shovel and a hoe and told him he could do his favorite thing- go out and dig a great big hole. Jerry thought digging was terrific fun and eagerly set to work. The day passed leisurely. Jack sat by the pond with Jerry just like old times. Around sunset, Jerry's friend the cop showed up for a visit. Jack and the cop had a cigarette watching the sun set over the canopy of lush palm trees. Jerry continued to play- digging in his hole.

Finally as the last rays of the sun played over the rippling pond, the cop stubbed out his cigarette and reached for his service revolver. He held it to the back of Jerry's head and pulled the trigger. Jerry fell face forward into the hole.

Decades later, Jack Dutton lived in a trailer park a few blocks from where The Palms had stood. As he browsed through his scrapbook looking at the photographs of Jerry with all the movie stars, and the newspaper clippings of Jerry getting the traffic ticket, a tear came to his eye. "I loved Jerry like my own son. But if I had it all to do over again, I would never have humanized a chimp."

Frankensynth 2

Since the last Frankenpost I've finished up the circuit building. I lost track of the total assembly time, but it was well over 60 hours. Make sure you're willing to put in at least that much time before you buy one of these kits.

. . . the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.
(-Mary Shelly)

Here I've already troubleshooted the MIDI-to-CV convertor, the keyboard is working properly,and the VCO is being heard for the first time. Yet to be calibrated, it draws its first breath. Too think, only days ago, it was but a mass of IC circuits, transistors, diodes, resistors and wires in little plastic bags.

The VCF and VCA have yet to be hooked up. When those are working, I'll be disposing of these factory faceplates, building the circuit for a homemade step sequencer, and getting started on a customized case.

It's Alive: Elysia chlorotica

from wiredscience.com:

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

Pierce emphasized that this green slug goes far beyond animals such as corals that host live-in microbes that share the bounties of their photosynthesis. Most of those hosts tuck in the partner cells whole in crevices or pockets among host cells. Pierce’s slug, however, takes just parts of cells, the little green photosynthetic organelles called chloroplasts, from the algae it eats. The slug’s highly branched gut network engulfs these stolen bits and holds them inside slug cells.

Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe.

But the chloroplasts need a continuous supply of chlorophyll and other compounds that get used up during photosynthesis. Back in their native algal cells, chloroplasts depended on algal cell nuclei for the fresh supplies. To function so long in exile, “chloroplasts might have taken a go-cup with them when they left the algae,” Pierce said.

There have been previous hints, however, that the chloroplasts in the slug don’t run on stored-up supplies alone. Starting in 2007, Pierce and his colleagues, as well as another team, found several photosynthesis-related genes in the slugs apparently lifted directly from the algae. Even unhatched sea slugs, which have never encountered algae, carry “algal” photosynthetic genes.

At the meeting, Pierce described finding more borrowed algal genes in the slug genome for enzymes in a chlorophyll-synthesizing pathway. Assembling the whole compound requires some 16 enzymes and the cooperation of multiple cell components. To see whether the slug could actually make new chlorophyll a to resupply the chloroplasts, Pierce and his colleagues turned to slugs that hadn’t fed for at least five months and had stopped releasing any digestive waste. The slugs still contained chloroplasts stripped from the algae, but any other part of the hairy algal mats should have been long digested, he said.

After giving the slugs an amino acid labeled with radioactive carbon, Pierce and his colleagues identified a radioactive product as chlorophyll a. The radioactively tagged compound appeared after a session of slug sunbathing but not after letting slugs sit in the dark. A paper with details of the work is scheduled to appear in the journal Symbiosis.

Zardus, who says that he tries to maintain healthy skepticism as a matter of principle, would like to hear more about how the team controlled for algal contamination. The possibilities for the borrowed photosynthesis are intriguing though, he says. Mixing the genomes of algae and animals could certainly complicate tracing out evolutionary history. In the tree of life, he said, the green sea slug “raises the possibility of branch tips touching.”

“Bizarre,” said Gary Martin, a crustacean biologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Steps in evolution can be more creative than I ever imagined.”

Auction Pick: Oozinator

I have nothing to add.

Place you bid HERE. And unless you work in a fertility clinic, you're going to need refills.

Negroes in Space

This is not a parody. This commercial actually happened.
(referred via dangerousminds.net)

Soundlab 1-18-10

Solo recordings, live without overdubs.
Gear: softsynths (absynth and reason), ribbon synth, chimera bc16.

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Lesbiants

From Sciencedaily.com:

Most social insects—the wasps, ants and bees—are relatively used to daily life without males. Their colonies are well run by swarms of sterile sisters lorded over by an egg-laying queen. But, eventually, all social insect species have the ability to produce a crop of males who go forth in the world to fertilize new queens and propagate.

Queens of the ant Mycocepurus smithii reproduce without fertilization and males appear to be completely absent, report Christian Rabeling, Ulrich Mueller and their Brazilian colleagues in PLoS ONE this week.

"Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant," says Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behavior graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. "Asexual species don't mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don't generally persist for very long over evolutionary time."

Previous studies of the ants from Puerto Rico and Panama have pointed toward the ants being completely asexual. One study in particular, by Mueller and former graduate student Anna Himler (now at Arizona State University), showed that the ants reproduced in the lab without males, and that no amount of stress induced the production of males.

Scientists believed that specimens of male ants previously collected in Brazil in the 1960s could be males of M. smithii. If males of the species existed, it would suggest that—at least from time to time—the ants reproduce sexually.

Rabeling analyzed the males in question and discovered that they belonged to another closely related (sexually reproducing) species of fungus-farmer, Mycocepurus obsoletus, thus establishing that no males are known to exist for M. smithii.

He also dissected reproducing M. smithii queens from Brazil and found that their sperm storage organs were empty.

Taken together with the previous studies of the ants, Rabeling and his colleagues have concluded that the species is very likely to be totally asexual across its entire range, from Northern Mexico through Central America to Brazil, including some Caribbean islands.

As for the age of the species, the scientists estimate the ants could have first evolved within the last one to two million years, a very young species given that the fungus-farming ants evolved 50 million years ago.

The Price Is Right

Noted Thespian / Art Connoisseur / Gourmet Chef / Lothario Vincent Price chooses the right man on a special Halloween edition of The Dating Game. They keep plugging "Dr. Phibes Rises Again", which came out in '72, so I'm guessing it's from that year.

I hate to say it, but when the lucky girl was finally unveiled, the first thing I thought of was Eric Stoltz in "Mask".

Cell Wars

Frankensynth 1

I received my Paia 9700 Modular Synthesizer Kit in the mail seven days ago, and have been investing every spare moment in building it since then. It contains four modules: a dual VCO, dual VCF, VCA, and a MIDI-to-CV convertor. When everything is assembled and I got it all calibrated and working, I plan on ditching the factory case and panels in favor of a custom-built clear plexiglass case to match my ribbon synth and theremin. At this point I'm a little over half done with the circuits, and I've put in about 36 hours of labor. Here's some pics of the assembly.


sorting the resistors. I find it easiest to tape them directly onto the chart while sorting, which speeds things up during installation.


the blank board for the formidable, time-sucking VCO module...


..which is filled a couple hours later with all the resistors.


the nearly-assembled VCO, with the circuit board connected to its control panel and just a few loose wires that need to find their places.


The back of the VCF control panel. The pots and ports have been put in, and I'm just starting to lay the grounding wire.


Putting in the IC's for the MIDI-to-CV module.



The assembled factory case, with the completed VCO and VCF modules. The other two are just the blank faceplates, so while I finish up on their electronics I can also start making measurements for my customized case. On top is a miniature MIDI keyboard which I found second-hand. I'll be breaking this out of its case and putting the keys into the same cabinet as the modules, making for a very compact modular synth system. I'm also looking at schematics for building a simple 8-step sequencer and integrating it directly into the case. This looks pretty simple to do, and won't add much more space. Stay tuned for updates.

The Buchla Music Easel

Don Buchla created his first synthesizer in 1963. It was commissioned specifically by Morton Subotnick for his groundbreaking Silver Apples of The Moon composition.

Robert Moog made his first synth in 1963 as well. But his approach was radically different. Wheras the Moog was designed for musicians like Walter Carlos, who were classically trained and out to prove that a synth could imitate an orchestra, the Buchla was made to take fuller advantage of electronics. The performer had input, but there were many random factors that seemed to give a Buchla synth a life of its own.

In 1973, Buchla designed the incredible Music Easel, which was a wonder for its time; it actually could run on batteries and store patches. For some reason, only 14 of them were manufactured. From the original press release:

The Music Easel contains many of the elements commonly used to generate and process sound: a keyboard, sequencer, pulser, preamplifier, envelope detector and balanced modulator; oscillators, gates, envelope generators and filters; facilities for mixing, monitoring and reverberating. Interconnection within the Music Easel is accomplished with a combination of switching and patching, a system which is flexible, expedient, and open ended. Logical, compact organization and color coded graphic feedback facilitate rapid and effective interaction. Multiple correlations between a performer's actions and the Music Easel's responses are readily implemented, enabling a degree of expressive articulation heretofore impossible with electronic instrumentation.

Further augmenting the Music Easel's real time performability is the capability of permanently storing and immediately retrieving complete instrument definitions (patches) or portions thereof. (An "instrument definition" includes settings of parameters, degrees of articulation, switch positions and interconnections.) Storage entails the installment of resistors on program cards; retrieval is accomplished by plugging in a desired program card and activating a switch.

Music Easels are provided with six blank program cards, an assortment of programming resistors, and a comprehensive instruction manual. Available accessories include additional program cards and resistors and a 12 volt battery pack. Complete with case and charger, this battery pack will power a Music Easel for approximately three hours per charge.

Housed in a rugged aluminum case, the Music Easel is built to travel. Weight is 30 pounds; dimensions are 6" x 17" x 22" (carry on baggage for jetliners).

Get set for some amazing Buchla magic:

Related: Love in The Age of Circuitry

It's Alive: Surinam Toad

Surinam toads reproduce using "amplexus", which involves the male holding onto the female, and instead of copulation the two of them release their gametes simultaneously to fertilize outside their bodies.

Then, according to wikipedia, the partners rise from the floor and flip through the water in arcs. During each arc, the female releases 3-10 eggs, which get embedded in the skin on her back by the male's movements. After implantation the eggs sink into the skin and form pockets over a period of several days, eventually taking on the appearance of an irregular honeycomb. The larvae develop through the tadpole stage inside these pockets, eventually emerging from the mother's back as fully developed toads.

Basket Case

Op-ed review by Timmy, age 7:

Basket Case is a monster movie. The monster lives in a basket, and a man carries the basket around. This is because the monster can't walk very good, because he has no legs.

Sometimes the monster likes to come out of his basket and beat people up.



The man who carries the basket says that the monster used to be attached to his stomach, but doctors removed him. So now he leaves the basket in the doctors houses to teach the doctors a lesson, because he wanted the monster to stay on his stomach.



The man meets a lady, and she likes him, but she is scary. Not scary like the monster, but scary like a crazy lady. Stranger Danger!



The monster gets mad, and throws things around the room.



Then the monster gets jealous of the lady and kills her, and then the man kills the monster while at the same time the monster kills the man. The End.

The Delia Derbyshire Post

I've only recently discovered the music of Delia Derbyshire, a BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer who innovated electronic music years before synthesizers were invented. The BBC chose to keep their Radiophonic staff anonymous, so she never got the respect she deserved. She scored approximately 200 pieces for radio and television, the best known of which is certainly the Dr. Who theme:



from wikipedia:
The original 1963 Doctor Who theme was recorded well before the availability of commercial synthesizers. Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used musique concrète techniques to realize a score written by composer Ron Grainer. Each and every note was individually created by cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down segments of analogue tape containing recordings of a single plucked string, white noise, and the simple harmonic waveforms of test-tone oscillators which were used for calibrating equipment and rooms, not creating music. The swooping melody and pulsating bass rhythm was created by manually adjusting the pitch of oscillator banks to a carefully-timed pattern. The rhythmic hissing sounds, "bubbles" and "clouds", were created by cutting tape recordings of filtered white noise.

Broadcast in 1964, "Dreams: Inventions for Radio" was a program that mixed descriptions of dreams with Derbyshire's minimalist electronic score. It makes for great listening while soldering together circuit boards, as I learned last night:



White Noise was a 'supergroup' made up of Derbyshire and two other electronic composers. They released one album in 1969, and it's a hallucinatory wonder. This short track bridges somewhere between pop music and very, very experimental musique concrete. Other electronic artists (like Jean-Jacques Perry) were doing similar work at the time, combining synthesizers with tape manipulation, but the end results weren't nearly as daring as this:



(another track from White Noise is on the recent Anton Levay playlist,)

'Blue Veils and Golden Sand' is one of her better-known standalone pieces:



Finally, here she explains her exacting, maddening technique of tape composition:



Derbyshire died of kidney failure in 2001, aged 64, just as she was getting back into music. A tribute site is here.

UPDATE: It's been a week since I posted this, but youtube just caught up with me; one of their 'recommendations' to me was "Alchemists of Sound" a BBC documentary about the Radiophonic Workshop. Check it out.

Jan. 4 is World Hypnosis Day

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Chimp To The Rescue

Get Your Lightguns Ready...

Chicago in 3D

There are 73 new images in the 3D galleries, shot at Chicago museums over the last week. Get your anaglyphic red/cyan glasses on, and click the images to start the automated slideshows.

The Museum of Science and Industry:




The Field Museum of Natural History:




The Thorne Miniature Rooms at The Art Institute of Chicago:



And A dozen or so images of scale models from the above museums, as well as the Chicago Historical Society, have been added to the 'miniatures' gallery:

Sinister Circus

Anyone who grew up in Chicago in the 70's or 80's will remember the Circus Exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. It's still there, albeit scaled down, and moved from its prominent location on the main floor down to a corner of the museum's basement, where it's largely overlooked.

These mechanized miniatures (and the exhibit as a whole) always spooked me as a kid. I've tried to evoke that feeling with this video I shot. The music is a modified calliope recording, with added softsynths and effects.