Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: media & arts

Depending on who you talk to, everything is either fine, or we’re living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia in which we forgot to drench everything in colored neon lighting. There’s little to be done about the digital surveillance panopticon that stalks our every move, but as far as the aesthetic goes, [abetusk] is bringing the goods. The latest is a laser jacket, to give you that 2087 look in 2019.

The build starts with a leather jacket, which is festooned with 128 individual red laser diodes. These are ganged up in groups of 4, and controlled with 32 individual PWM channels using two PCA9685 controllers. An Arduino Nano acts as the brains of the operation, receiving input from a joystick and a microphone. This allows the user to control lighting effects and set the jacket to respond to sounds and music.

[abetusk] does a great job of conveying the tricks needed to successfully pull this off. The instructions should allow any curious maker to replicate the build at home, and code is available on Github to help run the show. There’s lots of detail on proper enclosures, connectors, and cabling techniques to avoid the wearer inadvertently pulling everything to bits when wearing the garment to the club. Remember, there’s nothing more punk than educating your friends.

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Art for humanity via technology, for the music geek in you Enjoy:-)

Ge Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
His research focuses on programming languages and interactive software design for computer music, mobile and social music, laptop orchestras and education at the intersection of computer science and music. Wang is the author of the ChucK audio programming language, as well as the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). He is also the co-founder of Smule (which makes social music making apps and has over 100 million users) and the designer of the iPhone’s Ocarina and Magic Piano.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

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The biggest rubik’s cube… ever, being solved by a computer.

Please watch the new updated video instead (unless you really enjoy YouTube’s AudioSwap music): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cedyW6JdsQ

Enjoy!!!

*I FORGOT THE NAME OF THE PROGRAM, I HAD IT A LONG TIME AGO!

The only program I can find (but it is not the same one as the video) is ACube 3 available here:
http://software.rubikscube.info/JACube/index.html

But I can’t test it because its not working on my computer.

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This particular version of Dadabots has been trained on real death metal band Archspire, and Carr and Zukowski have previously trained the neural network on other real bands like Room For A Ghost, Meshuggah, and Krallice. In the past, they’ve released albums made by these algorithms for free on Dadabots’ Bandcamp — but having a 24/7 algorithmic death metal livestream is something new.

Carr and Zukowski published an abstract about their work in 2017, explaining that “most style-specific generative music experiments have explored artists commonly found in harmony textbooks,” meaning mostly classical music, and have largely ignored smaller genres like black metal. In the paper, the duo said the goal was to have the AI “achieve a realistic recreation” of the audio fed into it, but it ultimately gave them something perfectly imperfect. “Solo vocalists become a lush choir of ghostly voices,” they write. “Rock bands become crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breeds of multiple recordings become a surrealist chimera of sound.”

Carr and Zukowski tell Motherboard they hope to have some kind of audience interaction with Dadabots in the future. For now, you can listen to it churn out nonstop death metal and comment along with other people watching the livestream on YouTube.

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The idea is to give craftspeople the tools they need to incorporate digital services to the items they’re already making. Poupyrev made it clear that he doesn’t want fundamentally change tried and tested items, like a jacket, into a computer first, and an article of clothing second. He wants to imbue everyday items with digital functionality.

In its final form, Poupyrev envisions clothing, furniture, and accessories that are all connected to the cloud, each providing their own, specialized functionality. Users will interact with screens using their sleeves and pause their music by tapping their glasses. Step trackers will live in our shoes, translators will live in our ears, and medicinal nano-robots could be injected into our blood streams. The very notion of a computer will radically change as little computers get placed into everything.

“This could allow makers to image and create a new world where things are connected and we don’t need keyboards, screens, or mice to interact with computers,” he said. “I’ve been working on this for 20 years and as it’s taken shape I’m realizing that we’re not building an interface. We’re building a a new kind of computer, an invisible computer.”

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When artificial intelligence systems start getting creative, they can create great things – and scary ones. Take, for instance, an AI program that let web users compose music along with a virtual Johann Sebastian Bach by entering notes into a program that generates Bach-like harmonies to match them.

Run by Google, the app drew great praise for being groundbreaking and fun to play with. It also attracted criticism, and raised concerns about AI’s dangers.

My study of how emerging technologies affect people’s lives has taught me that the problems go beyond the admittedly large concern about whether algorithms can really create music or art in general. Some complaints seemed small, but really weren’t, like observations that Google’s AI was breaking basic rules of music composition.

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https://youtu.be/RdoLcgxvf98

White Rabbit
Recorded Live: 11/8/1975 — Winterland — San Francisco, CA
More Jefferson Starship at Music Vault: http://www.musicvault.com

Personnel:
Grace Slick — vocals
Paul Kantner — vocals, guitar
Marty Balin — vocals, percussion
David Frieberg — keyboards, bass, vocals.
Craig Chaquico — lead guitar
Pete Sears — bass, piano
Johnny Barbata — drums, vocals (on track #4)

Summary:
Recorded after the monumentally successful Red Octopus album release, but prior to 1976’s Spitfire album, this Jefferson Starship concert captures the band performing a diverse set before a hometown audience. With singer Marty Balin back in the fold, the group again contained the three primary vocalists from the Jefferson Airplane, now supported by vocalist, keyboardist, part-time bassist, and ex-Quicksilver Messenger Service member David Frieberg; the young guitar prodigy Craig Chaquico; and the superb rhythm section of bassist/pianist Pete Sears and drummer Johnny Barbata. The group was riding high on the multi-platinum Red Octopus album and was arguably at a new peak of popularity.

This set is not only represented by material from the early Jefferson Starship albums and a couple of Jefferson Airplane classics, but interestingly features live performances of material from Grace Slick’s first solo album plus two of the best tracks Marty Balin recorded with his post-Jefferson Airplane project, Bodacious D F.

The recording begins in progress, with the group wrapping up Vic Smith’s “Drivin’ Me Crazy,” the most infectious track from the obscure Bodacious D F album. This sweeping, heart-breaking song about longing for lost love serves as a perfect vehicle for Balin’s romantically emotive vocals. An extended version of the Jerry Gallup/Craig Chaquico composition, “That’s For Sure” follows, clocking in at nearly twice the length of the studio recording featured on the 1974 Jefferson Starship album, Dragonfly. With barrelhouse piano support from Sears, Grace Slick next takes over with a very bawdy take on “Better Lying Down,” a track from her first solo album, Manhole.

In a rare instance of drummer Johnny Barbata fronting the band, they next deliver “Big City,” the song he co-wrote with ex-Canned Heat guitarist Joel Scott Hill and original Flying Burrito Brothers bassist Chris Etheridge. Here Barbata handles lead vocals on a song soon to be recorded for the group’s next album, Spitfire. Returning to Dragonfly material, David Frieberg next fronts the band on “Come To Life,” a song containing words by the Grateful Dead’s lyricist extraordinaire, Robert Hunter.

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Lasers have been used to send targeted, quiet messages to someone from several meters away, in a way that no one nearby would be able to hear.

How it works: To send the messages, researchers from MIT relied upon the photoacoustic effect, in which water vapor in the air absorbs light and forms sound waves. The researchers used a laser beam to transmit a sound at 60 decibels (roughly the volume of background music or conversation in a restaurant) to a target person who was standing 2.5 meters away.

A second technique modulated the power of the laser beam to encode a message, which produced a quieter but clearer result. The team used it to beam music, recorded speech, and various tones, all at conversational volume. “This can work even in relatively dry conditions because there is almost always a little water in the air, especially around people,” team leader Charles M. Wynn said in a press release. Details of the research were published in Optics Letters.

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Canada’s billionaire power couple, Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman, have donated C$100 million ($75 million) to the University of Toronto for an artificial intelligence complex.

The gift, from the duo behind private-equity firm Onex Corp. and Indigo Books & Music Inc., is the largest in the university’s history and biggest for Canada’s technology sector, said the academic institution. It will be used to build the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Centre starting this year.

“You’ve seen companies like Uber and Google and so many others starting to make real commitments to Toronto, and this is drawing people from around the world to come to Toronto to be part of this,” Schwartz, Onex’s founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview at Indigo’s headquarters in the city. “That legacy is going to last for a long time.”

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Boston University researchers, Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, released a paper in Physical Review B demonstrating it’s possible to silence noise using an open, ringlike structure, created to mathematically perfect specifications, for cutting out sounds while maintaining airflow.

“Today’s barriers are literally thick heavy walls,” says Ghaffarivardavagh. Although noise-mitigating barricades, called sound baffles, can help drown out the whoosh of rush hour traffic or contain the symphony of music within concert hall walls, they are a clunky approach not well suited to situations where airflow is also critical. Imagine barricading a jet engine’s exhaust vent—the plane would never leave the ground. Instead, workers on the tarmac wear earplugs to protect their hearing from the deafening roar.

Ghaffarivardavagh and Zhang let mathematics—a shared passion that has buoyed both of their engineering careers and made them well-suited research partners—guide them toward a workable design for what the acoustic metamaterial would look like.

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