Category: Artistic

Soundgin Audio Synth On A Chip

Today on Retro Thing I saw that there is a new on chip audio synthesizer on the market.

The Soundgin is a serially controlled Sound Synthesizer in a PIC.
It produces complex sound effects, synthesizer style music and English speech with an unlimited vocabulary.
For use in manufactured electronics and home projects. .
The Soundgin is an 18-Pin Microchip PIC18F1320 that has been programmed to generate complex sounds by incorporating six oscillators which can interact with each other in various ways. The oscillators are configured by sending short serial commands to the Soundgin via the RX pin. These configurations result in the Soundgin’s oscillators continuously generating sound. The Soundgin also contains presets that can be used to configure the oscillators to generate predefined sound such as a Gong, Steam Engine, Etc… The six are spit up into two identical units referred to as Sound Engines.

The sample on the page are quite good. I can see this as an easy to implement addition to a  lot of DIY music projects or a speech synthesizer for robots.

[via retrothing]
Soundgin

Prophetic Postcards Back From 1914

Old Russian postcardsThis is good look at a future that might have been.

This is a series of old postcards back from 1914 describing their look in future of Moscow city.
Authors in 1914 tried to figure out how would their city look after 100-200-300 years from then.
We now can see were they successful or not.
The picture above shows how should look one of Moscow highways in 200 years after 1914. It should be totally polished with an ice so that ultramodern air-motored sleighs could glide fast and easy.

English Russia » Prophetic Postcards Back From 1914

Apophysis Fractal Flame Editor

Oh cool, a fractal flame editor for Windows. What’s a fractal flame? Well it’s like a regular fractal except that it the colors can be moderated by the structure and not the density and a few other things that frankly I just don’t have the maths to explain. More info can be had here if your up for some heavy equations and stuff. I just know that they look darn cool and can be animated. They can also be edited and transformed via  a GUI  window.

Apophysis.org
Cosmic Recursive Fractal Flames

Gisele Kerozene


Years and years ago there was this TV show called Night Flight. I’ve written about the show at least once, remembering all the new and cool things that I saw on it. Well one of the things I remember the best was a short film called ‘Gisele Kerozene‘. It stood out from the other shorts that were shown that night because it was a masterful display of  live action stop moion animation. Seeing all those flying  broom stick riding witches racing around a city was something I had never seen before. It’s a technique that is very hard on your actors, they have to keep jumping up and down in order to keep hovering (think yogi levitation) and the camera operator needs to be quick on the shutter to catch everyone at the apex of their jumps. It’s hard, some friends and I messed around with it years ago with my super 8 film camera. If I could find the results I’d post them. I haven’t seen ‘Gisele Kerozene’ in years and when I found it on YouTube Ijust had to tell everyone.

How to Create Professional HDR Images

The good doctor This is a very nice little tutorial on hoe to produce those nice high dynamic range photos that people like to go on about. This one uses Adobe Photoshop CS2, so if you have a copy your in luck. This tut even covers some basic work flow techniques that help when your trying to figure out how to start making your HDR masterpiece.

Backing Winds: How to Create Professional HDR Images

Realtime Mandelbrot Fractal Generation

Now you can explore the wonders of fractals with this online generator. I’m with Revo of Ektopia on this one, I used to sit in front of my Commodore 64 and wait for hours as a short fractal zoom loop slowly rendered on the screen. After I moved to the PC platform I did the same thing with Fractint. Now there was a program!

[via ektopia]
Realtime Mandelbrot Fractal Generation CGI