the most important 6 seconds in music history

Amen Breaksince i seem to be in a musical mood, here’s another post for sound lovers:

if you’ve listened to any song that uses samples, be it hip hop, drum n bass, dub or a lot of other flavors, you’ve heard the “amen break”. it’s a sample from the b-side of a single of the winstons from 1969, that only lasts 6 seconds.

it’s absolutely amazing how far those snare beats came, it became the base of nearly every drum n bass and jungle song.

nate harrison made an eerie fascinating installation/art project where he narrrates the story of this ubiquitous peace of musical history.

i’ve been hooked to the 20min-movie after the first time he plays the original sample. nate manages to run down the complete story of that key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression during the progress of the movie. he shows a lot of examples, compares them to the original recording and even covers the implications of sampling material on copyright law.

you can only listen to the movie, nothing really happens, except some cuts between a turntable and speakers, but i found it worth watching the progress of the needle on the wax, giving a meditative touch to the story.

you can watch the movie here or download a copy on the archive.org.

if you only have a slight interest in musical history you must watch it!

[via boingboing]

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the sound of traffic [update]

Soundoftrafficit’s been quite a long time since i’ve posted something about new software additions to my mac. this app here is actually completely useless, but nonetheless it’s been running since half an hour.

sound of traffic is a tiny java application (112 kb) that converts your network traffic into midi notes. my traffic sounds like a laid back chill-out track (i’m downloading/seeding the latest episode of the it crowd over bittorrent and updating some feeds from time to time). the app needs your admin password to access some devices and only works on OS X and Unix [1].

ändu, couldn’t you use this for your next song?

a funny little time-waster!

[via osxhints]

[1] leo ported it to windows, so nobody has to stay out…

update: jan used sound of traffic in one of his cool pieceocasts

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the it crowd

Entertainment Tv Microsites I Itcrowd Images Gallery1while on the way to oberwald i finally found some time to watch the it crowd (on my psp). since cory doctorow posted about that new show on boingboing, i’ve been downloading all the episodes of the ultimate geek comedy.

the show is about a sysadmin duo. the two ubergeeks moss and roy [1] get a new boss who has far better knowledge of shoes than of computers. each of the first three episodes i’ve watched up to now is hilarious, the people that rode on the train with me must have thought i’m utterly insane, because i couldn’t help to chuckle and laugh out loud. it’s not the plot that is so funny, but the fact that each episode progressively gets weirder and belly rupturing funny.

i can’t wait ’till the next episodes are aired, i’m in geeky television heaven.

since users outside of the uk cannot directly stream the videos from the channel4 website, you have to fire up your preferred bittorrent-client and download away!

oh, and piece did use some samples of the show in one of his latest pieceocasts.

[via boingboing]

[1] moss writes an email to the fire brigade because he cannot remember the phone-number of the emergency services (the changed the number from 919 (or so) to something different – which is another hilarious joke by itself).

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picture of the week 07

yesterday i spent a wonderful day in oberwald. ninas mother spends at least a week per year there, mostly with some friends. she invited nina and me for the weekend, to do some cross-country skiing.

it always amazes me how much snow you can find in oberwald. it makes the ugly slush you find here in bern feel even nastier.

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oh, the cross-county skiing was great, thanks for asking. this time we tried with rented equipment, so we could skate, which is even better than doing it the classic way.

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picture of the week 06

the past saturday i’ve spent a day in plan-les-ouates, near geneva at the first masters meeting of the swim team of plan-les-ouates. martin and me were the ones starting for bern, kurt and pesche started for basel.

the image below shows pesche going for 1:15.39 in 100m butterfly.

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if you’d like to see the rest of the images, the you should proceed to this flickr-set of mine. and if you want to see what i did the weekend before, take a look at this set.

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this blog is now cocomment enabled!

after reading a lot of buzz about cocomment (explained a wee bit here :-) i thought it’s about time to jump the bandwagon.

and now, after adding a little bit of code to the individual entry archive this blog is now officially pimped -ehrm- cocomment enabled.

have no idea what i’m talking about? i only start to get the implication of cocomment, but let me explain it here, as far as i get it: up to now, whenever i commented on a blog/site somewhere, i had to remember to visit the site later on or add the comment feed to my feedreader to not loose that particular conversation string. cocomment should be able to overcome that, because it enables a lot of sites (even flickr!) to “send” the comments back to one central location. i’m now able to track those comments in a central location and follow conversations more, thus participating more (talk about positive feedback loop).

so, if you want to see in which conversations i take part or want to stalk me you should look here or add this feed to your preferred feed-reader.

but now it’s officially too late, so i wish you all a good night!

[via the blogoshpere, steph and matthias]

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multi-finger GUI

Multitouchit is rumored that the next iteration of the ipod will feature a nice screen with a 3.5″-touchscreen and a digital scrollwheel.

however cool that may be, i was really impressed by that tech-demo from the new york university here: bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user input on a graphical interaction surface. it shows how one would be able to interact with an OS/GUI with multiple fingers and two hands. wicked!

you can directly grab the demo reel as a 17 mb .mpg-file or 12mb .mp4-file (both linked in the coral-cache-version to save some bandwidth).

[via fscklog and fscklog]

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picture of the week 04

the past saturday we wanted to go skiing. when we arrived in adelboden at 20 past 9 in the morning we were informed that the whole ski-region is closed because of the guggiföhn (a wind with velocities up to 246 km/h). we then waited for more informations, but around 10:30 it was evident that the chairlifts and cablecars won’t open for the day.

we then decided to switch to the engstligenalp, but it turned out that the föhn was blowing there, too.

before we drove to grindelwald we first called them, and indeed, they were closed, too. so after a short debate we decided to do something really silly, namely drive from frutigen to le bouveret into the aquaparc, without changing any clothes and leaving ski equipement for five persons in the car.

this explains why pesche stands in front of those toboggans with his snowboard clothes:

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in the end it was also rather funny, but a skiing day would have been more welcome.

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lhc panorama

Lhcdo you want to take a look at the biggest microscope ever built? do you wonder how it sounds in the huge assembly hall of the two atlas magnets?

then you should take a look at this qtvr-panorama of peter mc cready. and you should also definitely check out the other panoramas he made. you can access them in through the navigational buttons in the lower pane.

sigi, bärni and herman, do you remember how we stood in those halls some years ago? (and seen some really weird stuff going on, like those photographers for …. :-)

[via boingboing]

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rocket powered bike

sometimes later in the afternoon at work i wish for something like this. a rocket bike with a rather impressive acceleration, from 0 to 96 km/h in five (!!!) seconds.

the bike where the rocket is bolted on looks a bit goofy, but i guess you could improve that easily…

now i just want to see a video of it in action!

[via makezine]

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video.google.com for psp

google revamped their video service. you can now buy a big selection of videos. but the more important thing (for me, personally…) is, that you can download pretty much every video, readily formatted for your psp/ipod/big box on the floor.

now i really need tho fork out those 15 bucks for pspware, so i don’t get that nag-screen when synching my movies over to my new gadget.

oh, and google earth is now officially out of beta and available for the mac, too.

there goes my afternoon….

[via the google blog]

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a big bunch of tickets

Dsc02811this weekend we’re again gonna go to gensingen, to take part in a masters competition of the ssv ingelheim. today i went to buy our tickets (three people; pesche and another guy from basel and me). as you can see in the image to the left, it was rather a big undertaking.

the problem is that we all have different schedules: i’m starting in bern, the two others are starting in basel. then we proceed all together to gensingen. on sunday we travel back home together, but only until karlsruhe. pesche and me are stopping there, to visit an old friend (rouge, you know him too, it’s mike bucko…). the third man is directly going home from there. pesche and me are having diner with mike and then pesche is gonna go home to be ready for his work-week. since i got two days off work, i’m gonna stay a bit longer and enjoy karlsruhe.

in the end it turns out, that we need 21 slips of paper for that journey. not too bad, aight? (yes, i know that you can only see 18 of ’em, three of them are stapled to three others).

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indoor panorama

Singstarfrüecher ischmä ir pfadi umds lagerfüür umeghocket und het lieder usem rondo gsunge.

hüt hocketme vorem flachbildschirm-tv und spielt singstar, und es isch mindischtens genau so luschtig…

ds panorama ufem foti obe chasch entweder auf biudli aluege, oder hie aus quicktime-panorama (2.1 mb .mov)

english: ages ago we’ve been sitting around a fire and singing songs from the scout-song-book. today we sit around a flat-screen-tv and play singstar. kinda the same, innit?

picture of the week 52

after we had two performances in a row on saturday i drove all the way up to eywald to our new years eve-party. the conditions on the road were a bit tricky, so i arrived just in time for a toast to the new year.

the picture below shows me and nina with some sparkles. i really hope that we have a lot more of them in the new year!

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the rest of the images i took are here.

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