Kaossilator plus M-Audio equals … music?

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For the holidays, I bought myself a gift: a new M-Audio Fast Track converter box that will allow me to finally plug a guitar, or keyboard, or a microphone (for my saxophone), directly into my computer. From there, I can use Audacity to do some editing.

It seems odd, since I remember the days of using my Fostex Four-track cassette machine to lay down tracks, bouncing things all around on this tiny machine that became like a member of the family for years. Now, I have my PC and the convenience factor is nice, but the experience seems different.

Anyway, yesterday, I wanted to try the MAudio out (it’s nothing more than a small box with input and output holes) but most of my gear is over at my friend’s house (note to self: get over there this week).

I decided to try out my Kaossilator, which is a handheld modulator device that I play with from time to time, but not all that often. It’s difficult to explain, but you move your fingers along the screen and it shifts the tone. It’s kind of like a 1970’s Moog Synthesizer, but in your hand. It’s fun but difficult to get exact notes.

I plugged the Kaossilator into the MAudio (and used my old Dr. Rhythm drum machine), and created this little song. It almost sounds like something that Mile Davis would have thrown away after a night of partying. I missed a lot of notes with my fingers. But still, I like the groove.

And the MAudio box worked like a charm (the real reason for the musical experiment).

Listen to the Kaos Groove

Here is a video I did a long time ago when I got the device:

Peace (in the groove),
Kevin

Boolean Squared: Mr. Teach Declines

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This is the last installment of my Children of the Screen sequence of comics for Boolean Squared. I thought it would be cool to add an Avatar reference to the strip today (you know, my characters are all over that) and how 3D movie making is not quite there yet.

Peace (in 3D),
Kevin

Concept Mapping Two Collaborative Stories

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Some of you know (because some of you are writing with me) that I launched a collaborative story this week. In fact, I launched two stories. Both began the same way, but one is being done with Google Wave and the other is being written at our iAnthology site (which is closed to the public).

It’s been pretty fascinating to watch the story shift in different directions — in one, a character is believed to be the inventor of the Internet but he comes to visit our main character with a bloodied knife and a story to tell of mistaken  identity. The other is set in Italy and again, a “friend” comes calling, but he is on the run from some local bad folks who want a precious stamp.

I thought it might be interesting to use a new site someone recommended called Spicy Nodes (a concept map site that is still in beta) to chart out the elements of the two stories. I’m not sure how Spicy Nodes is any better or more unique than other concept mapping sites.

Here is what I have come up with so far (direct link to the node is here):

You can still join us at the Google Wave story (of course, you need to be in Google Wave to participate). And that raises a question in my head — both Google Wave and the iAnthology limit participation because you have to be part of either structure. I am thinking that maybe we need a third variation of the story — on Etherpad, which requires no log in.

And so, in seconds, I created the start of the story over at Etherpad. Come in and join us: http://etherpad.com/cY2ufkguQ2

Peace (in the node),
Kevin

Boolean Squared: Teachers as test subject

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Here is another in this series of Children of the Screen comics with Boolean Squared. I thought it would be funny to have the boys use something they learned from Mr. Teach (the Scientific Method) for their project in creating a holographic e-reader. Mr. Teach doesn’t find it quite so funny.

Peace (in the method),
Kevin

Boolean Squared: More Children of the Screen

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This is the third installment of my Boolean Squared comic around kids growing up in the world of screen literacy. With the world awaiting news of Apple announcing some sort of iSlate or ereader thingamabob, I figured it was time to get my characters into the action. As usual, they will take the idea  a bit too far.

Peace (in the chip),
Kevin

Boolean Squared: Labeling the Kids

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This is the second in a series of new Boolean Squared comics about Screen Literacy and kids, which follows an article by Kevin Kelly that I read and blogged about the other day. Here, I was thinking how adults (particularly those in the media) always want to tag each cohort of kids with some label.

Peace (in the name),
Kevin

Creating a Collaborative Wave Story

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A few months ago, I got an invite from my friend, Ben, to Google Wave. I heard the hype and wanted to check it out. So, I got my Wave site set up and … consider me so far pretty unimpressed. Wave is sort of like a merging of email, chat and a wiki. Or something. A disclaimer: Google still considers Wave in beta, so more is sure to come and maybe that will make it more useful to me.

Still, I am determined to try out some of the possibilities and see Wave in action, if I can. Remember: we can’t really think about the learning possibilities of new technology without trying it ourselves.

So, I decided that maybe Wave would be a good way to start a collaborative short story (a sort of exquisite corpse idea). The Wave platform seems like a natural way for a person to start a wave with the start of a story and then allow others to add to the story. It could happen in real time or over time. It would not matter, since Wave is built for both experiences.

So I started a story in a Wave, and went through the process of adding folks from my contact list (I think Wave migrates contacts from gmail) to the short story Wave, sent out a few Tweets to let folks know about it, and … just one person (Thank you Sheryl!) has added a few lines to the story. I think I did everything I needed to do: I added contacts into the Wave, I opened it up for the public, etc.

Here is the story that I began:

To say she was connected would be too simple a statement. She was never disconnected. Even in her sleep, her dreams came to her in bursts of 140 characters. (She knew this because she often woke up and jotted down her dreams, a habit she acquired in her college psychology course. Her notebook was full of nighttime ramblings.)

And so, the night of the storm, with the weather forecasters freaking out about the high winds and possible lightning, she, too, began to freak out. She checked for batteries. She stood waiting near the electrical outlets, ready to pull the plugs at the first flash of lightning.

The last thing she expected was the knock at the door, but then, the unexpected always comes at the unexpected moment …

I figure the next step is to open up the Wave story to my blogging friends who might want to explore along with me.

SO — if you want to join my collaborative story Wave, you can do that by going here — http://tinyurl.com/yjlln5g — and if you don’t have Wave but want to see what the fuss is about, just leave me a comment here and I will send you off an invite (I think I have about 25 invites to dole out) into Wave.

I’d love to see the possibilities of this thing, but I can’t do it alone (the beauty of Wave is that it is built on the concept of collaboration, unless you are alone on your wave, and then it gets pretty lonely in the surf).

Don’t know what the heck I am talking about? Here is an overview of what Google Wave is:

Peace (in the collaboration),
Kevin

Boolean Squared: Children of the Screen

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I got inspired to return to my webcomic, Boolean Squared, this morning after posting about the shift to Screen Literacy in my last post. So here is the first of a series of comics about my crew being called Children of the Screen.

After this series of comics, I will be introducing a new character — finally, a girl to mix things up a bit with the boys. She’s a smarty-pants, too.

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin

Are we now People of the Screen?

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I finished up the collection of articles in The Best Technology Writing of 2009 (a recommended book for those of you with gift cards in hand, wondering what to read) and Kevin Kelly has another fascinating take on technology and culture in an article entitled “Becoming Screen Literate.”

His premise is that the Age of Books on paper is in serious decline as we become more and more People of the Screen, using our computers and mobile devices for creating content, viewing content and interacting with content — including the stories that now rest between the shelves.

“We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift –from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality,” writes Kelly (177).

It’s hard to argue the point. Kindles are everywhere, and other ebooks are on the way (hello Apple). We are in the midst of some transition for sure, although whether we ever lose the emotional need for bound pages is another question (I say, no) but if a device comes out that makes an emotional impact as a reader, the book industry as it is set up right now will be in deeper trouble than it already is.

Kelly argues that this shift of visual fluency opens up more doors for us as participants. He cites sites such as Seesmic that are built around the idea of posting via video, and responding via video, and having those discussion archived like blog posts — systematic video conversations. The concept of the Mash-up — of grabbing and remixing media — show the possibilities of the screen fluency age, Kelly suggests.  He cites a site called TimeTube that shows the various iterations of videos from the original to the various creative spawns of the original — a video timeline of mashups.And he notes, the mashup has its roots in the age of Literacy.

“You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You  borrow a structure of one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases. (179)”

Here, I just did that, didn’t I? With Kelly’s words. Now, if I had a video of him, I could possibly remix his ideas (and the old Jumpcut site used to be a place to do that, although it has since disappeared. I’m sure there are already others in its place.)

Kelly admits that what is missing from the full-blown visual literacy movement is a search tool that can smartly scan through videos and find moments based on key phrases that would allow you more freedom for those reconstructed moments. Video search tools are incomplete, but does anyone doubt that someone (Google? Microsoft? Some unknown?) will invent a way to search the actual content of videos this way?

“Text, sound, motion will continue to merge into a single intermedia as they flow through the always-on network. (187)”

Clay Shirkey, meanwhile, has the last say in the book collection, noting in his piece “Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus” that more and more people are using technology for their own creative aims because we have migrated away from television and onto the computer. That “cognitive surplus” that we used to use for watching Gilligan’s Island or Friends is now being used to compose our own media (see the ever-increasing popularity of YouTube, for example, or Flickr or ….).

“Media in the 20th Century was run as a single race — consumption … People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they also like to share. (216)”

Shirkey’s point is that we are now in the midst of trying to figure out what to do with all of this cognitive surplus we have (now that we no longer care to sit like vegetables in front of network television, we have the time and energy to do other things) and the messy nature of the Net is evidence of that. Content and creation goes in all sorts of directions during these times (the “gin” reference in the title points to another time in history when there was a cognitive surplus) and watching it settle and move forward will be one of the most exciting things to watch in the next decade.

Don’t you think?

Peace (in the future),
Kevin