If You Want An Expensive Chair Just Print Your OwnThe Magis Spun chair is a weird piece. It’s basically a kind of seat with a round conical base that stops it from sitting still in one place. Instead, it rolls and pivots around when you sit on it, which is apparently quite fun. They’re expensive though, which gave [Morley Kert] a neat idea. Why not 3D print one instead?
Obviously 3D printing a sofa wouldn’t be straightforward, but the Magis Spun is pretty much just a hunk of plastic anyway. The real thing is made with rotational molding. [Morley] suspected he could make one for less than the retail price with 3D printing.
With no leads on a big printer, he decided to go with a segmented design. He whipped up his basic 3D model through screenshots from the manufacturer’s website and measurements of a display model in a store. After print farming the production, the assembly task was the next big challenge. If you’re interested in doing big prints with small printers, this video is a great way to explore the perils of this idea.
Ultimately, if you want to print one of these yourself, it’s a big undertaking. It took 30-50 print days, or around 5 days spread across 15 printers at Slant 3D’s print farm. It used around $300-400 of material at retail prices, plus some extra for the epoxy and foam used to assemble it.
The finished product was killer, though, even if it looks a little rough around the edges. It rolls and pivots just like the real thing.
We don’t feature a lot of chair hacks on Hackaday, but we do feature some! Video after the break.

Warner Music Japan Chief Operating Officer Kazuhiro Shimada exitsShimada joined Warner Music Japan in November 2022
Source

FLOSS Weekly Episode 791: It’s All About Me!This week David Ruggles chats with Jonathan Bennett about his origin story! What early core memory does Jonathan pin his lifelong computer hobby on? And how was a tense meeting instrumental to Jonathan’s life outlook? And how did Jonathan manage to score a squashable brain toy from an equipment manufacturer? Watch the whole show to find out!

Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show Right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.

Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:

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AmplifyWorld launch Artist Fund scheme AmplifyWorld have announced the launch of a $500,000 Artist Fund programme that aims to support forward-thinking musicians worldwide.

Lenzo Yoon, one of the key execs behind the rise of BTS, is leaving HYBE (report)Exec joined the company in 2010 as Head of Strategic Planning
Source

Rigid Audio Releases FREE Kontakt Library Stompbox
Rigid Audio has released Stompbox, a set of 32 cinematic/hybrid drum and percussion kits for Kontakt 6.4.2. The need for deep, foreboding drums sometimes presents itself when you’re deep into composing cinematic scores. Thankfully, if you can’t afford a hugely expensive cinematic drum library, Rigid Audio has you covered – Stompbox retailed for $39, but [...]
View post: Rigid Audio Releases FREE Kontakt Library Stompbox

How to plan your next release 2024 [Jay Gilbert]Veteran music marketer Jay Gilbert offers an updated how-to guide for every musician, label, and music marketer on planning your next release.
The post How to plan your next release 2024 [Jay Gilbert] appeared first on Hypebot.

Maximize your Ad Budget as an Independent ArtistThis ultimate indie guide covers strategic planning and targeted marketing to maximize your Ad budget as an independent artist or label. by Tim Jack, CEO @ RiseLA, posted on Symphonic. Continue reading
The post Maximize your Ad Budget as an Independent Artist appeared first on Hypebot.

Music Tectonics launches 2024 Music Tech Startup CompetitionApplications are now open for the 2024 Music Tectonics Startup Pitch Competition. This multifaceted event empowers startups to gain exposure and get feedback from investors and industry experts.
The post Music Tectonics launches 2024 Music Tech Startup Competition appeared first on Hypebot.

“Groundbreaking” Brian Eno documentary film is different every time it’s shown in cinemasA documentary film about Brian Eno is landing in the UK this summer, and each cinema screening will showcase a different version.
Brought to life by filmmaker Gary Hustwit, Tigerlily Productions and Film First, Eno will launch on Friday 12 July and will play in Picturehouse Cinemas across the country, with a different version of the film played each day. This is said to have never been done before.

READ MORE: Brian Eno: “‘Why do we like music?’ is as interesting as ‘How did the universe start?’”

The documentary film consists of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, and “employs groundbreaking technology” to deliver a different version at each showing, for a runtime of 90 minutes. The official soundtrack will also be released available to stream or purchase on CD/vinyl on 12 July via Universal Music Recordings.
Hustwit and UK-based creative technologist Brendan Dawes developed generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno and his rich archive of footage and music especially for the unique run of each film.
Hustwit’s collaboration with Eno originally began in 2017, when Eno created a score for Hustwit’s film Rams. “Much of Brian’s career has been about enabling creativity in himself and others, through his role as a producer but also through his collaborations on projects like the Oblique Strategies cards or the music app Bloom,” comments Hustwit.
“I think of Eno as an art film about creativity, with the output of Brian’s 50-year career as its raw material. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”
Screenings will be available in the following locations:

Bath
Brighton (Duke Of York’s)
Brixton
Bromley
Cambridge
Central London
Chiswick
Crouch End
Ealing
Edinburgh
Epsom
Exeter
Greenwich
Hackney
Liverpool
Norwich
York

To find out more or book tickets, head over to Picturehouse.
The post “Groundbreaking” Brian Eno documentary film is different every time it’s shown in cinemas appeared first on MusicTech.

Antelope Audio expand Synergy Core Native collection Antelope's latest software release adds four new analogue emulation plug-ins to their Synergy Core Native subscription bundle.

“Once tech like stem separation is inside the CDJ, people will get a bit more creative”: Richie Hawtin on how real-time stem separation will impact live showsRichie Hawtin has shared his thoughts on the impact real-time stem separation might have on contemporary DJs, especially their approach to live sound manipulation.
Hawtin debuted his new concert series, DEX EFX XOX, at this year’s Movement Festival Detroit and Sónar Barcelona. The show sees him focus less on grandeur and visual spectacle, and far more on the most important element – the music.

READ MORE: Erica Synths and Richie Hawtin’s Bullfrog Drums will “teach you drum programming and sampling”

For DEX EFX XOX, Hawtin uses Traktor, Bitwig, his own MODEL 1 mixer, two A&H Xone K2 MIDI controllers, a Novation Launchpad, and a bunch of “custom scripts” that allow on-the-fly control over a suite of Roland software emulations, including the TR-808, TR-909, and the SH-101.
In the future, the use of stem separation – something he’s avoided up til now – may also make its way into his sets. In a new interview feature for MusicTech, he explains, “My shows are all pretty spontaneous. I’ve been reluctant to use any stem separation because it all has to be done beforehand. But real-time, high-quality stem separation is coming very shortly, and I’m excited because that will allow for even more fluid mixing.”
With his shows, Hawtin wants to revive that hypnotic state that immersive sound and lighting can induce alone. He wants his shows to feel more like a club experience, rather than concert which may focus more on feeding the eyes than the ears. Of the current DJ sphere, he says, “On one level, I see that the scene has exploded with the TikTok DJ generation who maybe think that DJing is just two CDJs and a mixer, but I’m starting to see some of the DJs who’ve been around longer really jumping into these hybrid setups.

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“Once tech like stem separation is inside the CDJ, people will get a bit more creative — but will we see a whole generation of DJs working on their own unique setup? I’m not sure that that’s going to happen.”
He adds, “I don’t want to sound like I’m slagging off the new-school DJs. Really, the production etiquette and technique of young, modern producers is fucking mind blowing. The music they’re making crosses and combines genres more than ever before — there used to be the house lane, the techno lane, the minimal lane. Now, it’s all going back into the melting pot and that’s where a lot of the energy and excitement is coming from.”
So, why does he feel rising DJs are not experimenting with their setup as much as they perhaps should? “Part of it is just the convenience of jumping on a plane with a USB stick and jamming out some great tunes,” he says. “I would have been excited if I could have done that 30 years ago, instead of dragging around three 50kg cases and a friend to help me.”
Find out more about Richie Hawtin, or view all of his scheduled live dates.
The post “Once tech like stem separation is inside the CDJ, people will get a bit more creative”: Richie Hawtin on how real-time stem separation will impact live shows appeared first on MusicTech.

Music isn’t getting worse, genre is

A couple of weeks ago Rick Beato put out a video titled “The real reason why music is getting worse”. The core arguments centre around too many people making music, and tech making it both easier to make music and  for people to be lazy creators. And while Beato followed his original argument with an ‘old man yells at cloud’ video (this time titled “I know you’re angry, so am I…”), he stood his ground. The problem is, what constitutes ‘good music’ is entirely subjective. If it was only about technique then the majority of popular music would consistently lose against classical or jazz. Music is good when it moves us. And it tends to move us most when we are young. Hence most generations thinking that the best music was made when they were young.

Of course there is a lot in Beato’s arguments, but the ‘problems’ he identifies are also the positive trends that underpin the tectonic shifts in today’s music business and culture. But (and I know you shouldn’t follow a ‘but’ with a ‘but’, but…) there is also a lot more going on. The tech and democratisation trends are merely responding to and catalysing wider cultural shifts in music –– with fragmentation and genre the prime movers.

There has been plenty written about genre coming to an end; that we are in a post-genre world. The truth is more complex. In some respects, genre was only ever intended as a way for audiences to navigate their way through music, signposts to what they will probably like. Genres still play this role, though mood and activity playlists are fast becoming an alternative architecture for categorising music. Nonetheless, genre  remains the primary way we understand music.

The canon of music genre was established years ago (pop, rock, metal, dance, hip hop, jazz, country, blues, classical, etc). Each of those meta-genres came to prominence with underpinning cultural movements and at specific periods in time, especially popular music: pop ‘60s, rock ‘70s, dance, hip hop and metal ‘80s, dance late ‘80s / ‘90s.

The last chapter of the genre cannon –– dance –– was the ‘90s (and yes, that is a statement that is asking to be disagreed with). All other genres since have formed within the now-canonised meta-genres.

The new genres of this millennium fall into four groups:

1.    Regional interpretations: amapiano, Brazilian funk, reggaeton

2.    Scene-driven sub-genres: hyper pop, drill, trap

3.    Genre reinvention: mumblecore, dovecore

4.    Genre revival: shoegaze, post-punk

Each one of these meta-genres push music in new directions but still claim membership to one of the genre canon.

The fact that meta-genres have become canonised is a reflection of the post-mainstream nature of music. Fandom has fragmented, and genre fragmentation is really the music manifestation of this foundational behavioural shift.

All of which means that the meta-genres are actually less important and useful than they were. They have always referred to the mainstream end of music fandom, with sub-genres being traditionally where the more tribal end of music fandom lives. While that tribalism still exists, the subtle-but-foundational shift is that the fragmentation of fandom means that many of today’s niche sub-genres are built around listening patterns more than tribal music scenes. Crucially, niche does not inherently mean small, it just means not mainstream (and just to complicate matters further, has itself become niche).

Perhaps the best way to think about music genre in the 2020s is less in genre terms and instead through the lenses of sound and culture. Music today is shaped in six key ways:

Technology: Music production technology is innovating at a rapid pace, not just in terms of what tech is being made but also how creators are using it. AI is accelerating and amplifying this. New, unexpected sounds are working their way into music and changing its shape and sound. Think hyper pop (auto tuned vocals, pitch shifted instrumentation), and neurostep (a dubstep sub genre that uses lots of hypergrowls and ‘neurotic’ sound design).

Cultural interplays: Regions fusing their local sounds with international sounds to create something new. Think Reggaeton’s fusion of dancehall, Latin music, and hip hop.

User modification: Music fans speeding tracks up or down, boosting the bass, or creating mashups all flow back into music’s creative melting pot. A TikTok user creating a trap / grindcore / ambient mashup could accidentally create an entirely new wave of sound. This will become increasingly widespread, especially when you put gen AI in the hands of music fans.

Scenes: Music used to create scenes. Now, music is often the soundtrack to scenes, especially online ones. As a consequence, music has the potential to evolve much more because it is not tightly bound by genre rules. Nightcore as the soundtrack to online games and manga communities was an early example, with its sound shifting over the years.

Context: Physical spaces used to shape music (think Paradise Garage, late ‘80s warehouse raves, etc). As we spend ever more time online, it is only natural that online spaces are becoming the places that shape music. Whether that be TikTok-core, Spotify-core or Roblox-core. TikTok-core is so meta that it is often referred to as ‘core core’. Even social media is reshaping music – look no further than techno’s shift  to Instagram-friendly, fast BPMs and big drops. If / when the metaverse finally becomes a thing, this effect could explode. Take a look at VR club Shelter to get a sneak peek of what the future may hold.

Genre fluidity: All of the above factors lead to genre fluidity, with artists increasingly happy to throw together elements of many different genres. In the old world, the genre-police would have angrily shouted down these efforts (and to be fair, some still do) but there is much more willingness to straddle genre’s old boundaries. The walls are coming down.

The music business, and music critics, are often too keen to identify new genres. But simply putting ‘core’ after a word does not invent a genre. Most often it explains a sound phenomenon, with music responding to one or more of the above six factors. Spotify-core is one such example. And because the digital world is forever changing, the nature of music is forever changing. If the 2010s was characterised by artists trying to make music that ‘works’ on Spotify –– with big intros, drops and hooks –– the 2020s is seeing music with a more aesthetic and mood based approach. This is music responding to its surroundings rather than the creation of music genre. 

Some of the change is truly innovative, some of it entirely reductive. And the reductive change is not simply driven by the long tail of enthusiast creators learning their way. The biggest artists and songwriters are just as culpable: of the 960 songs from the US Billboard Top 40 in the entirety of the 21st century just 32 diverged from 4/4 time. In the era of fragmentation, creators big and small will do whatever it takes to cut through. In this paradigm, genre can be a barrier rather than a signpost, confining a song to just one lane of music culture’s highway. 

Genre is not going away, but while it was once the only place music could go, it is now just one part of a much more nuanced and complex picture. And that’s a good thing.

EVE Audio upgrade SC3010 & SC3012 EVE's SC3010 and SC3012 now boast improved low-frequency performance specs that bolster their ability to serve as main monitors without the need for a separate subwoofer. 

Moog’s Spectravox: A slice of classic Moog for its semi-modular line£599/$599, moogmusic.com
It’s been a difficult year or so for Moog Music.
June 2023 saw the company acquired by Alesis and Akai Professional owners InMusic, with sources suggesting that the majority of production would be moving away from the US. That September, reports from the factory floor claimed that over half of jobs were being cut. “Moog [is] about to change forever,” wrote one former employee. Indeed, the following March saw Moog vacate its famous Asheville, NC home on Broadway Street. More recently, it was announced that its physical Asheville store was to close too.

READ MORE: Moog Mariana isn’t your typical Moog synth plugin — but we love its modern sound

Moog Music’s official statement following the 2023 layoffs concluded, “We ask that you […] keep an open mind as we put the finishing touches on some of our most innovative instruments yet.” Well, an open mind we shall keep. Besides — to zoom out for a moment — these sorts of shake-ups are nothing personal, and hardly new in the music technology industry (remember when Tom Oberheim finally got the rights to his own name back from Gibson?). What we producers are concerned about is the fruit.
Moog’s shift into developing plugins will no doubt have frustrated many analogue and hardware devotees, with the Apple Vision Pro-oriented Animoog Galaxy being one such invention that will likely have borne the brunt of that. The recent Mariana, on the other hand, showed real promise, and there are auspicious rumblings concerning a new hardware polyphonic powerhouse.
Moog Spectravox
Now comes Spectravox, an addition to what is arguably the biggest success story of Moog’s recent output: its semi-modular line.
Like the preceding Mother-32, DFAM and Subharmonicon, it comes as a Eurorack-friendly unit in its own elegant, wood-sided case. Like those other instruments, it is a compact, rather beautiful piece of Moog. Broadly described as an ‘analog spectral processor’, with the addition of a microphone via its Program input it becomes a capable analogue vocoder. Of all the ups and downs of the last 14-or-so months, could this be the thing to restore our faith in Moog?
‘How so?’, you ask. The answer to that question lies in the circuit at the core of Spectravox: its filter bank. The resonant filter bank, rarely if ever seen today in a 3U format, harks back to the earliest Moog designs, leapfrogging the mass of plunderable Moog history in between. Actually, the filter bank reaches even further back in time, to 1928 and Homer Dudley’s work on the Voice Operating Demonstrator, or ‘Voder’, which preceded the vocoder as a musical instrument with its telecommunications and military use.
An array of narrow band-pass filters that could emulate the characteristics of real world sounds — such as speech — with reasonable accuracy and no shortage of sonic excitement, the Moog 907 10-band Fixed Filter Bank was key to the Moog modulars of yore. In a world still getting its head around the advent of synthesisers, its ability to impart quasi-acoustic resonances to sounds not only helped assimilate electronic sounds into acoustical and musical realms, but also allowed synthesists to model existing instruments more closely. The Moog 907 most famously found favour with Wendy Carlos in her soundtrack for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Moog Spectravox
Spectravox really is a little slice of that history. Like the 907 it has 10 bands, and — not that it matters to any but the most ardent purist — these are set in accordance with Dudley’s 1939 Voder specifications. Nice. Each of these is endowed with its own band-pass filter, with the exception of the lowest band, which is a low-pass filter, and the highest band (a high-pass filter).
One major difference, though, is that Spectravox’s filter bank is not fixed, but moveable. Variable resonance and frequency positioning are controlled via a Spectral Shift knob. Spectral Shift makes it possible to sweep the whole lot up and down sequentially through the frequency spectrum, creating something that’s a cross between comb-filtering, flanging and phasing. In layman’s terms, let’s just say it very much sounds three-dimensional.
Being a filter bank, Spectravox expects a sound source, or a carrier, to be fed through it. This is provided on the panel as a single, healthy Moog-grade oscillator, offering pulse or saw wave shapes. You can of course bypass this (or send it elsewhere) and feed Spectravox whatever line-level sound you like via the Carrier input, opening up vast processing possibilities for more or less anything you can think of.
Flick the switch from Filter Bank mode to Vocoder mode and things get even more interesting. The Program input is where the tonal properties of incoming sounds — such as a voice — are analysed through the filter bank and then used to process the carrier signal. Traditionally, this would be the oscillator but with Spectravox it can be anything you like.
Moog Spectravox
Even without either of the above, though, simply turning up the resonance of the filters to ‘ping’ them by themselves creates an incredibly resonant, woody-sounding percussion instrument — and that’s before we get to turning any of these bands’ VCAs up or down to emphasise or de-emphasise them, which results in some incredible tonal variety.
If there’s one thing we find lacking in the filter bank, it’s the choice to use miniature knobs for its VCAs instead of the more substantial and tactile classic Moog knobs, considering how much use they get. Sonically, it’s fair to say the resonance of the filter bank never reaches into particularly aggressive territory, á la that of many other Moog synths, which would have given Spectravox significant extra scope. Instead, its response is excellently tuned, if a little tame.
In Vocoder mode, Spectravox’s range of tonal shaping is immense. Growling snarls, mournful drones, wailing noises — the list goes on. Don’t expect impeccably clean speech, mind. This is old-school analogue vocoding, after all. On account of this, it does require time to find the sweet spots. For instance getting the right noise-to-carrier mix in order to best grab the consonants of speech while retaining tonal richness, or the correct decay time for natural sounding movement.
Moog Spectravox
But this is the name of the game with old-school synthesis. No presets, no digital tuning, just a set of well laid-out controls and a quality array of sound-generating circuits. The patch bay covers just about every base (though not filter resonance, interestingly) and there are VCA inputs and envelope-following outputs for every filter band.
Spectravox’s panel is comparatively sparse next to those of its semi-modular siblings. One internal LFO is provided, normalled to modulate the Spectral Shift, immediately leading us to reach for patch in another LFO from elsewhere. It’s certainly worth noting that Spectravox begs for external gear, and so it may prove to be a gateway into Eurorack for newcomers to the system.
Could Spectravox be the thing to restore our faith in Moog? Quite possibly. It’s the kind of unit whose weighty heritage and fundamental quality makes the Animoog look like it was designed by an over-enthusiastic intern.
If this is the shape of things to come from Moog, then the future is bright, even if it does mirror the past.
Moog Spectravox
Key features

10-band analogue filter bank, offering low-pass, band-pass and high-pass filters
Analogue vocoder to analyse incoming audio and map it across the filter bank
Saw or pulse wave oscillator with two noise types
Single LFO, normalled to Spectral Shift
XLR/jack combination input

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