Let them sing it for you has been circulating for a couple weeks now. The first word that I typed in was “hello”. The database returned the very expressive and questioning first word of the refrain “Hello? Is it me you're looking for?” from Lionel Richie's Hello. I was a pleasantly surprised by the selection and tickled at the fun I could have with friends and family with this text-to-sound generator. The only beef is that longer phrases can be pretty jarring as words and meanings leap from one musical context to another. Some combinations can be pleasant but then some words, like the extended sung “I” from Chris Isaac's Wicked Game, you never really want to stop!!!

I've been listening to a lot of sets lately, aka complete hour long mixes, versus the mish-mash playlists of mp3s and CDs that i throw together for work/play.

Last week, reading my favourite music critic blogs, i stumbled on the mix page at bassnation, and downloaded a handful of sets. I'm really digging a Roots to Congo Natty tribute mix by the Grevious Angel Soundsystem.   From about 7:30 till 10:15 rumbles one of the juiciest riddims that I've heard in a long time. I've been grinning with it on repeat for sometime now, internalizing the goodness. Time to dig up the playlist and find out who's behind this!!!

Uploaded a manual classic house blend. I think the playlist is pretty tasty. Several more long mixes are in the pipeline ... though not in the same musical vein.

It's been fun exercise for another reason. I'm currently developing an automatic mixing “engine” for Umixx (see projects). The engine formalizes many of the DJ choices involved in making a “smoove mix” live or in studio mixing sessions. These choices are based in part on simple similiarity comparisons based on song tempi, but also involve lots of other musical meta-data that suggest one song pairing over another. More on this later ...

Putting up details of Galileo and other pismo powerbook based research-y content has ground to a halt thanks to an upgrade that I've been wrangling with on and off over the last week. Finally, this morning, I was able to coax some love out of the card and “so far” is very good.

In other non-related news, we now know all about the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow. It is still to be determined if the said swallow is African or European, and if it was carrying coconuts. hehehe.

hello, Willkommen in de'f child productions.

currently in an adding content phase. The last coupla weeks I've been wrangling out a “dropped ball” on my web hosting plan. Everything is sorted now hopefully.