sound
To carve a volume into the void of darkness
The arbitrariness of the sign
Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms
Most important of all are the pauses
Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines.
The distance of a whisper.
Silence
A Book by John CageSonic architecture
An Article by Daisy AliotoBrian Eno is well-represented in iOS. His other apps like Bloom, Trope and Air invite listeners to touch the screen to make their own composition. Reflection ($30.99) is different, there is no interaction for the listener. The interface has three buttons: a pause button, a sleep timer, and AirPlay. Reflection produces endless permutations of Eno’s 2017 album, an hour and five minute long title track.
“Just calling it an app is akin to saying Falling Water is just a building,” writes one app store reviewer. “I would not call this an app,” agrees another, “Between the music and visuals it’s more like sonic architecture.” The visuals consist of slowly morphing rectangles that only seem to change in the split second you look away from the screen.
drawing.garden
A Website by Ben MorenGardening, but with emojis and less time.
tree.fm
A WebsiteTune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.
An audio professional's take on vinyl
An ArticleThe analog-digital debate in audio is a longstanding one, and while it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, I thought I might be able to offer some background as a longtime audio professional and musician. Recordings are a beautiful mix of technical and aesthetic concerns, and this post will attempt to tease out how to navigate these two framings of music recording, especially with regard to the often-oversimplified distinction between analog and digital recordings.
A Library Demand List
A Website by Robin SloanThis visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.
Makespace.fun
An ApplicationIn today’s software, live video feeds are stuck inside static rectangles that can’t go anywhere. MakeSpace flips all that on its head. Your cursor is your live face, and you can roam free, controlling who and what you want to be close to.
Picking locks with audio technology
An ArticleThe series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key's shaft. Knowing this, a working copy of it can then be 3D printed.
The vanishing designer
Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.
The same, the same, the same
Look around us. Every business is an app and every app feels the same, because every designer has the same resume, follows the same process, graduates from the same program, uses the same tool, scrolls the same Dribbble feed, reads the same Medium articles, expects the same career outcome, lives in the same ideology bubble.
Design as an engineering problem
The Silicon Valley giants, testifying with their runaway success, claimed to have “solved” design as an engineering problem. The solution substituted the human essence of design — intuition, ingenuity, and taste— with the tangibles, measurables, and deliverables.
Companies say they are “design-driven”, but designers are actually driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU. We rigorously run tests, studies, experiments as if innovative ideas are hidden in spreadsheets, waiting to be extracted by data scientists.
The heat death of design
Losing the design diversity means falling into a singular narrative of how design must be done, which grants unfair and self-reinforcing advantage to the mainstream while discouraging, stifling, or even punishing the idiosyncratic designers who bring unorthodox but remarkably innovative processes to the table. The true opportunity cost is the diverse future that humanity can no longer access.
A future without diversity is fundamentally stagnant: imagine designs so standardized that you can’t tell them apart. While every design is guaranteed to be good, none will be great. New designs are marginally better than previous ones with the rate of improvement eventually approaching zero. We have reached the heat death of design.
Design with courage
- Make a bold decision (that is controversial).
- Make a mistake (as a result of a bold decision).
- Challenge “conventional wisdom”.
- Challenge authority (that preaches conventional wisdom).
- Challenge hierarchy (that perpetuates conventional wisdom).
- Ignore the committee (and the need to converge).
- Decide who your clients are (and aren’t).
- Ignore clients that aren’t (especially those who pay the most).
- Cultivate clients if none exists (instead of compromising your design).
- Be a generalist (and ignore your job title).
- Be a specialist (who specializes in being a generalist).
- Design things from scratch (and build them yourself from scratch).
- Design things that no one wants (yet).
- Design freely (and think freely).