Results for research

de la Mancha has announced the release of ballistic, a 15 slot drum sample player designed to get you making beats quickly without a million parameters to adjust.

de la Mancha ballistic – the little brother to erratic2

Simple but effective, it boasts flexible midi triggers, sample audition, sample tuning, 4 choke groups, mute/solo options, sample reverse, sample normalisation, a lofi option and several kits of samples donated by many generous sample providers such as Loopmasters, Zero-G, Digital-Redux, Goldbaby, Soniccouture, Real Music Media, Ronnie @ Rekkerd, sink, polyslax and bedroom producers

Even better, all proceeds of sales of ballistic will be donated to Cancer Research UK, helping them in their aim of beating cancer.

ballistic features

• Plays any 16, 24 or 32 bit stereo / mono WAV files from RAM for low CPU.
• 15 sample slots, each triggered by user-definable midi note.
• 4 choke groups, each slot can be assigned to a group and be cut by a group.
• Each sample can be tuned in tenths of semitones.
• Mute and solo for each sample.
• Volume and panning per sample.
• Sample reverse.
• Sample slot normalisation.
• Selectable mono/stereo.
• Lo-fi option.
• Sample audition button.
• Multi-out capable, 15 stereo outputs for routing to individual mixer channels in your host.
• 637 samples (76 MB) covering acoustic kits, vintage electronic, analogue synth, dubstep, hiphop, breakbeat, 8-bit, glitch, jazz and esoteric noises.
• Samples donated by Loopmasters, Zero-G, Digital-Redux, Goldbaby, Soniccouture, Real Music Media, Ronnie @ Rekkerd, sink, polyslax and bedroom producers.
• 21 presets covering various kits.

Ballistic is available a VST instrument for Windows PC for $10 USD. All money received from sales of ballistic will be donated to Cancer Research UK.

Visit de la Mancha for more information.

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on March 11th, 2008:

• Circuit bent mechanical furby sequencer – The Furby Gurdy! (YouTube video) – Each furby has 4 controls: mute, crash, loop and reset. The handle turns 8 cams which operate corresponding microswitches to create interesting rhythmic patterns.

Furby Gurdy! Find more cool circuit bent instruments on David Cranmer’s website.

• Bloxes – Bloxes are building blocks made of interlocking pieces of corrugated cardboard, folded together. Their unique shape and structure make them exceptionally strong and lightweight — you could build yourself a platform to stand on, and then pick it up and move it wherever you need to.
• This is your Brain on Jazz: Researchers use MRI to study spontaneity, creativity – A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.
• Chopper Tremolo Effect – Simple and low quality circuit (built it in about an hour), based on a simple NAND oscillator from an LED Chaser circuit.
• 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures – Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion.

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on November 19th, 2007:

• Anton Corbijn Talks Ian Curtis – Interview with Anton Corbijn, director of Joy Division biopic Control.

Anton Corbijn (photo by Carmen Valino)

• Lost in the Static – Lost in the Static is a simple little game that uses some surprising aspects of the human perceptual system to create a visible world out of animating static.
• Foamee – Foamee is a free service that helps track who you owe beers to (and vice-versa) using the popular messaging service, Twitter.
• CJO – Abstract – Organic agriculture and the global food supply – According to researchers at the University of Michigan, organic farms can produce more than enough food to support the world’s population without converting any additional land to crop production.
• pantone autumn – Chris Glass collected leaves from a single maple tree to create this pantone autumn image.

Wellcome Trust scientists have identified for the first time how our brain’s response changes the closer a threat gets.

From the article:

When faced with a threat – such as a large bear – humans, like other animals, alter their behaviour depending on whether the threat is close or distant. This is because different defence mechanisms are needed depending on whether, for example, the bear is fifty feet away, when being aware of its presence may be enough, or five feet away, when we might need to fight or run away.

To investigate what happens in the brain in such a situation, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London created a game where subjects were chased through a maze by an artificial predator – if caught, they would receive a mild electric shock. The researchers then measured their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

In short, the closer the threat, the more we rely on primitive behaviour for quick-response survival mechanisms (fight, flee, etc) instead of planning our response strategies to the threat.

Check Science Magazine for more on this.

Link via Boing Boing

Why does the shower curtain move toward the water? David Schmidt, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, came up with an explanation.

David says:

Maybe it happened to you this morning: you entered the shower and the curtain moved in to engulf you. I have recently discovered a new explanation for this common phenomenon, thanks to modern fluid-simulation technology.

According to David, a low-pressure region –created as a result of a spray driven vortex– is what pulls the shower curtain in.

The best way to keep the curtain from sucking in is to sew weights in the bottom or use a thicker/heavier curtain (because the force is pretty weak it will hold the curtain in place).

Link via Kottke

Clive Thompson mentions a study in which Dutch scientists recorded and compared the song of the Great Tit in urban and rural areas.

The report, features in this month’s issue of Current Biology, finds that Cities change the songs of birds.

In the new work, the researchers studied songs of the great tit (Parus major), a successful urban-dwelling species, in the center of ten major European cities, including London, Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam. The researchers then compared these songs to those of great tits in nearby forest sites. The results of the comparison showed that for songs important for mate attractions and territory defense, the urban songs were shorter and sung faster than the forest songs. The urban songs also showed an upshift in frequency that is consistent with the need to compete with low-frequency environmental noise, such as traffic noise.

I enjoyed watching quite a few Great Tits and Blue Tits feeding on nuts and suet on my balcony last summer but I didn’t know their song was different from their friends in the forest.

Great Tits on my balcony: Feeding the baby

To read the full paper by Hans Slabbekoorn and Ardie den Boer-Visser you’ll have to pay (ScienceDirect), but you can check out some audio samples of the bird songs for free.