Jul 28, 2010
By Eliot Van Buskirk
In a never-ending race to react to minute fluctuations in stock prices faster than anyone else in the world, financial firms have gone to extraordinary lengths to build the fastest possible networks, processors and software.
They measure their success by the nanosecond, which is the amount of time it takes light to travel a scant eight inches through a fiber-optic cable. While that might seem absurd to those of us still stuck on sluggish and overpriced consumer net connections, their obsession will, one day, likely become our gain.
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May 3, 2010
The shoe company ‘Palladium’ has released a very nice documentary that covers some of the pirate radio activities going on in London.
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Mar 8, 2010
Micah Frank, born 1977 in Columbia, Missouri, is a New York City based composer, sound designer and live performer developed Tectonic system to create realtime synthesis based on data from seismic activity.
Tectonic is a sound sculpture created in real time by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A tightly integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Ableton Live processes a stream of real-time data that is translated into synthesis and sample playback parameters.
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Jan 21, 2010
All kinds of of devices have been dubbed “sonic blasters” — from the Long Range Acoustic Device super loudhailer to the piercing Banshee to the Inferno (“most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life” according to Wired.com’s own Sharon Weinberger).
But a new device, developed in Israel, merits the “sonic blaster” label more than most: the Thunder Generator really is a blaster, producing a series of ear-splitting explosions. Some are so loud they could be deadly.
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Nov 4, 2009
Before the advent of the aeroplane, acoustic location was applied to determine the presence and position of ships in fog.
Acoustic location was used from mid-WW1 to the early years of WW2 for the passive detection of aircraft by picking up the noise of the engines. It was rendered obsolete before and during WW2 by the introduction of radar, which was far more effective. Horns give both acoustic gain and directionality; the increased inter-horn spacing compared with human ears increases the observer’s ability to localise the direction of a sound. There were three main kinds of system:
- Personal/wearable horns
- Transportable steerable horns
- Static dishes
- Static walls
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Oct 29, 2009
The EU is funding ambitious programmes to monitor human behaviour in the fight against crime and terrorism. Some people are afraid this will turn us all into suspects.
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Oct 28, 2009
Ultrasound and underwater sonar devices could “see” a big improvement thanks to development of the world’s first acoustic hyperlens. Created by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the acoustic hyperlens provides an eightfold boost in the magnification power of sound-based imaging technologies. Clever physical manipulation of the imaging sound waves enables the hyperlens to resolve details smaller than one sixth the length of the waves themselves, bringing into view much smaller objects and features than can be detected using today’s technologies.
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Sep 27, 2009
US police spark outrage by using wartime acoustic weapon to disperse G20 protesters in Pittsburgh
Only a few hundreds protesters took to the streets of Pittsburgh to mark the opening day of the G20 summit of world leaders, but the police were taking no chances.
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Sep 4, 2009
The Freesound Project web site is a Free Culture sound repository similar to OpenClipArt for illustration, Project Gutenberg for text or the Prelinger Archive for film. Launched in May 2005 in Barcelona by the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University, it quickly attracted contributors and an audience from around the world.
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Mar 17, 2009
By Marisa Olson | January 15th, 2009
Italian new media magazine, Neural, has just celebrated their fifteenth anniversary. The publication was among the earliest tech-savvy page-turners and still has an appreciation for the importance of paper.
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