SEC drops Ether probe but still seeks billions in penalties from Ripple: Hodler’s Digest, June 16-22The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its case against Ether. However, in another crypto case, the regulator still demands billions in penalties from Ripple.

Beetlecrab Tempera: ‘As soon as we placed our hand on the grid and played a chord, we knew immediately, ‘Okay, this is it’”Beetlecrab’s Tempera isn’t your typical musical instrument. It’s not even your typical synthesizer.
It started life as a university project: an A4 piece of paper with a dozen reels of cassette tape stuck to it, which could be ‘played’ with two hacked-up tape heads. Scrubbing across the tape with the tape head would play back tiny samples of the audio, like a tactile, analogue version of a granular synthesizer. Getting any coherent musical ideas out of it was near-impossible, though, admits its creator and Beetlecrab co-founder, Andre Sklenar. It was essentially only useful for “artsy stuff” and as an ambient soundscape machine (which is still pretty cool, honestly).
Sklenar and his business partner, Adam Heinrich, revisited this academic adventure shortly after releasing their first synth, Vector, in 2021. With its hybrid synth engine and workflow centred around an ‘Orbiter’, Beetlecrab’s debut product was intentionally experimental. Tempera builds on Vector’s idiosyncracy; this granular synth won’t let you play notes or chop samples in the way you’re accustomed to — it forces you to get hands-on and explore sound in unfamiliar ways.
The Tempera by Beetlecrab. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
“The interface and the capabilities of a synthesizer largely determine the musical result,” says Sklenar. ”So we tried to make the interface substantially different, to break this comfort zone; just blow it away so it’s just not there anymore and you’re forced to get out of your automatic thinking.”
From the moment I first switched on the Tempera, I was hooked. Not because it was helping me create masterpieces (it wasn’t), but because every time one of its 64 touch-sensitive pads was hit or one of its knobs were turned, it would make a fresh and unique eerie, erratic sound. For the first hour, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was having fun letting the Tempera and its stock samples guide me on a weird sonic journey.
“Yeah, it happens to me as well,” jokes Sklenar from the Beetlecrab HQ in Prague, Czech Republic. “When developing, someone might report some kind of bug; I start looking for it, then I get completely distracted and realise later I need to actually find and fix the bug. But I love that very hands-on nature of the Tempera.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Beetlecrab’s Prague office isn’t exactly bustling. Sklenar is talking to me via video call from the workshop, with a backdrop of cardboard boxes and materials. Alongside he and Heinrich, the two co-founders are joined by an assembly engineer and a QA engineer, making each Tempera and Vector to order. The brand’s first
Sklenar enjoys having a small operation; he and the team are able to keep in direct contact with their customers and address issues, gather feedback for future firmware and, nicest of all, receive praise directly.
There is plenty to praise about the Tempera, in fairness. The granular synthesizer packs a pool of 4,096 stereo grains, played by four concurrent ‘Emitters’ with 16-voice polyphony. You’ll mostly be using the 64 backlit pads, which are divided vertically into eight tracks, each one containing a sample of up to 11 seconds long that’s split across the eight strips. You can play the samples by touching one of the pads and, depending on the mode you’re in, selecting a pitch with the keyboard overlay.
…I know, it’s a lot, but stay with me.
The four dials at the top of the Tempera can be used to tweak parameters, shape envelopes, edit sample lengths and alter the Emitters. An effects engine lets you apply chorus, delay, reverb and more, while an onboard mic lets you record sounds to manipulate immediately. You can save and load your sounds to the 8GB internal storage and a microSD card.
Oh, and also, there’s a fun feature that will trigger other samples around your finger position, so you can get some fascinating, diverse soundscapes in an instant.
Ok, got it? No? That’s alright. Tempera isn’t an easy beast to tame at first, but experienced users have found incredible ways to get creative with it.

Producer and content creator Jeremy Blake at Red Means Recording was a close collaborator in the making of the Tempera. In a recent video, he showcases it as a manipulator of jungle drum breaks, while others have found it incredibly useful as a cinematic scoring instrument.
But Beetlecrab’s problem, Sklenar says, is conveying to potential customers what the Tempera actually does.
“As it turns out, one still needs to read the manual, maybe get a walkthrough,” he says. “But I think that as soon as one grasps the basic concept that it’s grain emitters on top of a sound bed of samples, it kind of clicks. There are no hidden shortcuts or weird shift workflows. Once you get the concept, the rest is okay. We tried to make it more approachable [than Vector], which I’m not sure we succeeded 100 per cent, but we gave it a go.”
Sklenar, who confesses he’s not a natural marketer or promoter (“nor I would find marketing very interesting”), sayshe and Heinrich were nervous about releasing the Tempera. How would they get the concept across? Even when making preset patches, known as Canvases, for the Tempera, the two realised they had still had to do more to demonstrate how each feature works.
Really, the best way to get to know the synth is to get your hands on it. Heinrich and Sklenar knew this from the moment they had the prototype underway. “We had a prototype spread out on the table,” says Sklenar, “with code running through it to trigger the grains. ‘As soon as we placed our hand on the grid and played a chord, we knew immediately, ‘Okay, this is it.’”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
When Sklenar and Heinrich took the Tempera to Superbooth 2024 in Berlin, they were met with immense positivity and intrigue. Most Superbooth attendees are on the hunt for the quirkiest musical machines, so Beetlecrab’s two products were bound to be a hit. Even there, though, synth lovers were approaching the Tempera expecting it to be a Launchpad or grid synthesizer. They’d trigger the 4,096 grains and 64 emitters, instantly hearing a rich, complex and convoluted sound.
“The thing is, the machine can handle it,” laughs Sklenar. “It won’t break a sweat. It’ll just explode with grains. It’s a huge arsenal of stuff and it’s important to learn to control it, to be sparse, not to go super crazy. So those are the challenges, but the response has been amazing. People can’t put it down.”
The Beetlecrab team has heard inspiring stories from its Discord channel and email inbox, with Sklenar recalling one user who set it up for their child to experiment with. Once you see the Tempera’s brightly coloured pads of blue, pink, yellow and green, you can see how a kid would gravitate toward it — well, adults too, actually. That appeal was always part of the plan.
“We definitely wanted to design something that is beautiful and functional. That was actually the condition for us doing anything at all,” Sklenar explains. “ I think that function is more important than form but that doesn’t mean that form is not important.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Lights might flash and dance around the Tempera, but each has a purpose. The four colours represent the emitters, and they communicate when sound is being played, how it’s being played, and what sound is being played around them. It’s a stunning display that invites you to keep tinkering and seeing what’s next. And it’s a smart move by Beetlecrab. A social media presence is vital, and we’ve all seen videos of homemade Novation Launchpad shows, so the Tempera’s aesthetic appeal is likely to entice creators to film themselves playing mind boggling sounds. From that perspective, Sklenar and Heinrich’s marketing proficiency isn’t so bad after all.
Some content creators are already having a field day with it. The aforementioned Jeremy Blake at Red Means Recording has expressed his love for it, as has high-profile music technologists Andrew Huang and Loopop. Blake’s involvement was actually key in bringing the Tempera up to scratch. Although his sound design videos with the synth are impressive and educational, Sklenar tells us that Blake’s experience with the Tempera was a rollercoaster.
“He’s a man of patience, because I would send him a firmware that fixes three bugs but creates two new bugs, and that was basically the mode of operation for all of the period between May to November [when the first public batch was released]. Of course, he’s an artist, I’m an engineer, so I’m prepared for maybe higher levels of frustration with machinery. But for him to try to be creative with a machine that would sometimes do random stuff must have been frustrating. Jeremy has been great, though — he created amazing samples for the Tempera tailored specifically for it.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Unlike Blake, I still haven’t figured out exactly how to make the most of the Tempera. But Sklenar is right; being able to practically touch the sound as it’s being played is hypnotic and makes you want to learn more. But at $720, can you really afford to pick something up and not know how to use it?
“With a machine that does something different,” explains Sklenar, “it always takes a little bit of time to find its own audience, because everything is so saturated these days. But Tempera works for ambient music, it can record instruments, can be played very organically and expressively, and there’s all these little granular noises…There’s an amazing person on our Discord who’s using Csound — a programming language that lets you programmatically create audio samples — to generate samples that fit specifically on the touch grid in very creative ways, like making pixel art on those samples with the LEDs. You can really paint with it.”
The Tempera’s users have kept happily busy, but Beetlecrab has kept even busier. Everyday, the team is gathering feedback from its customers to create new updates, iron out bugs, create new tutorial content, all while balancing another three or four synthesizer projects. But, as we gather from our call, Sklenar and Heinrich are thrilled to be able to bring their wacky imaginations to life.
“I mean, there’s nothing better than this. We have, like, three to four synthesizers in the pipeline from blueprints through to prototypes. And it’s so rewarding, because I can actually see the machine assembled; I can see it travelling to the testing station, then I see it being rotated into the packer, and then it’s in the box, and then I can see it on the shelf, then it leaves, and three days later, I get an email saying ‘I just received my Tempera, I’m loving it.‘ It’s such a great thing. It’s perfect, really.”
Learn more about Beetlecrab’s Tempera, which is available now. 
The post Beetlecrab Tempera: ‘As soon as we placed our hand on the grid and played a chord, we knew immediately, ‘Okay, this is it’” appeared first on MusicTech.

Ilya Sutskever isn’t done working on AI safetyWelcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. This week, Ilya Sutskever launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after formally leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, alongside Jan Leike, was integral to OpenAI’s efforts to […]
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Uncovering ChatGPT Usage in Academic Papers Through Excess VocabularyFrequencies of PubMed abstracts containing certain words. Black lines show counterfactual extrapolationsfrom 2021–22 to 2023–24. The first six words are affected byChatGPT; the last three relate to major events that influencedscientific writing and are shown for comparison. (Credit: Kobak et al., 2024)
That students these days love to use ChatGPT for assistance with reports and other writing tasks is hardly a secret, but in academics it’s becoming ever more prevalent as well. This raises the question of whether ChatGPT-assisted academic writings can be distinguished somehow. According to [Dmitry Kobak] and colleagues this is the case, with a strong sign of ChatGPT use being the presence of a lot of flowery excess vocabulary in the text. As detailed in their prepublication paper, the frequency of certain style words is a remarkable change in the used vocabulary of the published works examined.
For their study they looked at over 14 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 obtained via PubMed. These abstracts were then analyzed for word usage and frequency, which shows both natural increases in word frequency (e.g. from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and Ebola outbreak), as well as massive spikes in excess vocabulary that coincide with the public availability of ChatGPT and similar LLM-based tools.
In total 774 unique excess words were annotated. Here ‘excess’ means ‘outside of the norm’, following the pattern of ‘excess mortality’ where mortality during one period noticeably deviates from patterns established during previous periods. In this regard the bump in words like respiratory are logical, but the surge in style words like intricate and notably would seem to be due to LLMs having a penchant for such flowery, overly dramatized language.
The researchers have made the analysis code available for those interested in giving it a try on another corpus. The main author also addressed the question of whether ChatGPT might be influencing people to write more like an LLM. At this point it’s still an open question of whether people would be more inclined to use ChatGPT-like vocabulary or actively seek to avoid sounding like an LLM.

2024 Business Card Challenge: NoiseCard Judges the Sound Around YouLet’s face it: even with the rise of the electric car, the world is a noisy place. And it seems like it has only gotten worse in recent years. But how can we easily quantify the noise around us and know whether it is considered an unhealthy decibel level?
That is where the NoiseCard comes in. This solar-powered solution can go anywhere from the regrettable open office plan to the busy street, thanks to a couple of 330 µF capacitors. It’s based on the low-power STM32G031J6 and uses a MEMS microphone to pick up sound from the back of the card, which the code is optimized for. Meanwhile, the LEDs on the front indicate the ambient noise level, ranging from a quiet 40 dB and under to an ear-splitting 105 dB or greater.
When it comes to building something the size of a business card, every component is under scrutiny for size and usefulness. So even the LEDs are optimized for brightness and low power consumption. Be sure to check it out in action after the break in various environments.

IK Multimedia Offers FREE Fender ’57 Custom Champ Amp Sim Combo
IK Multimedia is giving away the Fender ’57 Custom Champ amp sim combo to new AmpliTube 5 Custom Shop (CS) users until the end of June. AmpliTube 5 CS is a free virtual guitar rig platform for Mac and Windows. The Officially Certified ’57 Custom Champ sim is based on the 5-watt, single 8″ all-tube [...]
View post: IK Multimedia Offers FREE Fender ’57 Custom Champ Amp Sim Combo

Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicLast week, our tips and advice for independent, do-it-yourselfers covered growing a fanbase, Marveille’s secret to millions of Spotify streams, top AI tools, and more.
The post Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: New music industry’s week in reviewLast week was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception. Judges called out Live Nation, EDM was on the rise over rock, new names. Continue reading
The post REWIND: New music industry’s week in review appeared first on Hypebot.

Universal Music signs deal to train AI to make “ultra-high fidelity vocal models” of its artistsUniversal Music has inked a deal with artificial intelligence start-up SoundLabs to create “official ultra-high fidelity vocal models for artists using their own voice data for training while retaining control over ownership and giving them full artistic approval and control of the output”.

READ MORE: From Kraftwerk to AI – Berlin’s love affair with music technology

The deal means that singers on Universal’s roster can train AI models using their own voices and retain ownership of the results. They will also have full control over how they’re used. In theory, this could also mean they could record a new album without actually singing a single word themselves.
In a press release, Universal Music say: “It empowers artists and producers to explore bleeding-edge vocal transformations, including voice-to-voice, voice-to-instrument, speech-to-singing, language transposition, and a myriad of previously impossible vocal transformations. Together, UMG and SoundLabs are collaborating to allow UMG artists to create custom vocal models that will be available for their exclusive creative use cases, and not available to the general public.”
“It’s a tremendous honour to be working with the forward-thinking and creatively aligned Universal Music Group,” adds SoundLabs founder BT, who famously worked on the 1986 hit Blue Skies, featuring Tori Amos. “We believe the future of music creation is decidedly human.
“Artificial intelligence, when used ethically and trained consensually, has the Promethean ability to unlock unimaginable new creative insights, diminish friction in the creative process and democratise creativity for artists, fans, and creators of all stripes.
“We are designing tools not to replace human artists, but to amplify human creativity.”
Although the use of AI in music remains controversial, its use is accelerating fast; almost two-thirds of young creatives are embracing AI in their music making, according to a recent study.
The post Universal Music signs deal to train AI to make “ultra-high fidelity vocal models” of its artists appeared first on MusicTech.

UMG partners with SoundLabs to launch AI vocal plug-in MicDropUniversal Music Group and SoundLabs are launching MicDrop, a groundbreaking AI vocal plug-in. Find out how this new tool will change the way artists create music. via Celebrity Access SoundLabs,. Continue reading
The post UMG partners with SoundLabs to launch AI vocal plug-in MicDrop appeared first on Hypebot.

Omnisphere Specto from The Very Loud Indeed Co. The Very Loud Indeed Co.'s latest release comes loaded with 120 Omnisphere patches that offer a wealth of cinematic sounds.

The Very Loud Indeed Co. release Omnisphere Specto The Very Loud Indeed Co.'s latest release comes loaded with 120 Omnisphere patches that offer a wealth of cinematic sounds.

The Warped Tour of Summer Camps: Art-in-Action for KidsJoin Loyal to the Craft and Woodward for an unforgettable experience with their first-ever “Art-in-Action” Summer Camp from Sunday, July 28th to Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 at Woodward PA. This week-long experience offers campers vibrant programming with exclusive music performances, art and digital media workshops, and epic shred sessions.

For the first time ever, Woodward will host performances and meet-and-greets with rising bands in the pop-punk scene. The current lineup includes high-energy punk duo Raue and 13-year-old artist, drummer, and Emmy-nominated actor Recker, with more to be announced. 

Art-in-Action Camp, presented by Loyal to the Craft, is an experience designed for the bold and the creative that will spark limitless creativity with hands-on learning from legendary artists, musicians, and brands that define action sports. The goal is to help kids who are interested in the world of action sports find their passion. The camp will offer rich programming each day that is focused across four different genres: music, art, digital media, and sport.

Campers will have the chance to explore the brand new Artist Lounge, the ultimate hub for Art-in-Action campers and a chill zone for everyone to indulge in music, creative arts, and visual wonders. With a stage and state-of-the-art media lab, the Artist Lounge is the perfect hangout to unwind and dive into the creative essence of action sports.

"As a teenager, music, arts, and action sports were my greatest inspirations. I dedicated myself to the scene, following the Vans Warped Tour, setting up a booth to showcase my drum brand, and forging connections along the way. Now, being able to create an epic week bringing back that same type of community to the next generation of kids is truly a dream come true," says Mike Ciprari, Founder of Loyal to the Craft and SJC Drum. "My goal is for campers to build lifelong relationships and leave equipped with the tools, knowledge, and motivation to pursue their dreams relentlessly."

Booking for the “Art-in-Action” Camp is now open at: www.woodwardpa.com/art-in-action-camp The post The Warped Tour of Summer Camps: Art-in-Action for Kids first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Bitcoin price bouce will occur when ‘weak hands’ capitulate and hashrate recoversAnalysts say Bitcoin price will rally only after BTC miners capitulate and the network’s hashrate recovers.

The fight over Fisker’s assets is already heating upFisker is just a few days into its Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the fight over its assets is already charged, with one lawyer claiming the startup has been liquidating assets “outside the court’s supervision.” At issue is the relationship between Fisker and its largest secured lender, Heights Capital Management, an affiliate of financial services company […]
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