A couple of curious projects have recently sprung new releases. Of a sort.
Mugs
The simpler, and sillier, one first: I’ve entered the mug trade!
Or strictly speaking, our company (hitherto entirely software) has.
Either way, you can now buy a mug with two of my drawings of cartoon giraffes playing musical instruments on it.
I’ve been drawing giraffes like these for a while, originally to amuse our kids and later to accompany academic papers or posters. These ones show giraffes playing an archlute and a modular synth: two rather niche items from near-opposite ends of the history of modern musical instruments. (The archlute one is a re-drawing of a sketch I originally used in the Digital Libraries for Musicology submission Software Sustainability Challenge: ECOLM and Lute Tablature.)
I’d like to say that buying a mug will also help support our open-source software work, especially those parts with no or very intermittent funding – but we’re not going to sell anywhere near enough to make a real difference. All the same, it may be a nice psychological boost.
In the end this is a fun diversion rather than a long-term business strategy. So if you’d like one, or think you know someone who might, order while you can!
Software
And so to the thing we’re actually supposed to be doing. “Sounds Different” is an interesting piece of (commercial, desktop) software for music audio visualisation and comparison.
Although it started for use in technical work, as something to help with quick comparisons of outputs of different signal processing algorithms, the same ideas are relevant to music performance practice and it’s handy as a companion to repetitious practice sessions or for general musical analysis. It is undoubtedly a technical program, but very useful if you are so minded.
Besides the comparative aspect, “Sounds Different” contains some powerful visualisations even for single recordings:
“Sounds Different” is commercial software; there is a free evaluation version, but beyond that it comes with an old-fashioned desktop-software price tag. Currently available for the Mac, either direct from us or through the Mac App Store; Windows and Linux versions should follow.
(Incidentally, anyone familiar with my earlier open-source tool Sonic Lineup will immediately see that “Sounds Different” is a development of a related idea. The focus is a little different, and I do hope to keep Sonic Lineup working as well, although it’s one example of the currently unfunded open-source software I referred to earlier.)
I expect I’ll be writing more about this at some point, but for now, here we are: software, and mugs!
The Breakfast Post 