Eigenharp Is a Future of Music Composing

Electronic instruments, particularly synthesizers and controllers, are one of my big fascinations, and I am very excited by the presentation I went for on Thursday. About 3 weeks ago I heard about company Eigenlabs which released the new electronic instrument - Eigenharp Alpha. I have found out that they are touring in UK and will be showing in Glasgow on 29th of October. So I booked a ticket and went to The Classic Grand on Jamaica Street and...

Amazing quality instrument with 120 highly sensitive keys, 12 percussion keys, 2 touch strip controllers, a breath pipe and numerous pedal inputs. The real deal are the keys which have touch sensitivity down to a micron... You hook it to your Mac (PC software coming soon) via special base station, which is a sonic brain for Eigenharp. And you can map basically every physical-modeling or virtual instrument, setup or plug-in that you have there, with a lot of stuff supplied by Eigenlabs and with extremely accessible interface.

When I was holding it I felt like being in a band that was playing in Cantina in 4th episode of Star Wars:


There is no point to write about all the features. The point is that 8 years of Eigenlabs hard work resulted in this 'musical spaceship' which will probably define the direction in synthesizers design in the next years. The interface is merging two worlds that are so difficult to connect - a futuristic, tactile, sensory, physical device with unlimited and complex galaxy of software synthesizers. And they do it in a way that you won't spend half day to map 5 sounds into your controller...

It is £3950 worth monster, that I would probably buy if I would have that money just for the sake of learning how to play the instrument of the future...

For now, as a mortal, I can still go for Eigenharp Pico. Its just... not the same ;-)

Printing Image on Your Eye

I will be talking a lot about Augmented Reality. This is an exciting feature that recently invaded most of mobile phones running Android or iPhone, with the number of geolocative applications like Layar, Nearest Tube or Accrossair Browser. It is very simple at this stage, you use camera implemented in your phone together with 3G and GPS location information to display various data on the objects surrounding you. Sounds neat, but in practice I found it bizzare. You stand in the middle of the street waving your phone, but then you get access to information quite quickly and visually attached to reality surrounding you. I used Layar and Nearest Places on iPhone, but I found it a short term fascination. Too small, to distractive as an interface, too complex, not exciting enough.

But the potential is there, a massive one.

Augumented reality projected directly to your retina is a very close possibility.

First you got Brother Industries who designed 'retinal image display' (upper image), where a device attached to glasses frame is drawing the image on your retina using a laser.

Second you got those contact lenses from Prof. Parviz at the University of Washington (lower image), who want to print circuits and LED based displays on the contact lens.

Now both devices are certainly in the trial stages, but its a question of 2-3 years before it will be fully developed and tested by the US army, before making it to the market.

Of course that would lead augumented reality into the new stage where you fully incorporate visual display into your daily real world.

[photo credits: Parviz Research Group, University of Washington; Brother]

Become Lifehacker

My recent discovery is Lifehacking. When you work with the computer for 10 hours a day on average (not mentioning iPhone time) you get easily distracted. Although internet can stimulate your brain function, your attention is under constant electronic attack and you might find yourself in a situation when you won't get things done. Study from University of California at Irvine shows that "you are interrupted once every 11 minutes; after any interruption, you take 25 minutes to return to your task".

So the question is how to improve my daily interaction with computer, mobile phone and media? How to 'firewall my attention'? How to increase a control over time I spend at work?

The answer is: Lifehacking. A series of tricks, hints and hacks that you apply in your daily existence to make things better between you, your devices and your time.

Gina Trapani wrote an ultimate geek guide with 116 small hacks described, on different levels of difficulty. You don't need to use them all, the point is to read this book as a hypertext page, where you jump only to the hacks that are useful for you.

This is definitely my book of the month.

PS: I would say this post is for Dr Dude-Chick who is my pal in the journey for searching new ways to optimize life ;-)

Manifesto

This is my third blog, with two previous ones failed. The idea behind the past ones was to write about myself and it was usually working for couple of months, before there was no motivation and also nothing really exciting to write about. I didn't have an urge to dissect my daily life and brag about it online and so my past blogs died after months of inactivity.

But recently I thought that there is something I could share with people, and these are different ideas about technology and science that I have everyday when I search the vast landfields of internet, read the newest scientific papers and generally think about possible directions in my own and others research.

So this third blog isn't supposed to have different format, with small updates on things I found out there that are not about myself, but about the technological reality that surrounds me.

Stay tuned, I hope this time it will work ;-)