Dinosaur Flesh is Back (x3)
from extinction
We couldn’t salvage their pea-sized minds
or their reptilian hearts.
But now that we can clone dinosaur flesh
at least that is a start
To all the friends at my birthday party
chompin down on t-rex nugs
How cool is it that this is dinosaur flesh?
Give your mom and daddy hugs
To all the friends at my birthday party
chompin down on t-rex nugs
How cool is it that this is dinosaur flesh?
Back from the Cretaceous
Call: The Future of Food Expo is a showcase of the most innovating tastes and ideas in food. From new technology and startups to food nonprofits, B2B and media organizations, the booths will provide an interactive peak into the future of food. The expo is free and open to the public. It will be held in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in conjunction with the Taste Talks festival. Taste Talks showcases the culinary cutting edge for a food-obsessed generation through symposiums, workshops and discussions.
Proposal: Soulless Meat Chips – Songs imagining the future of soulless meat live on a flash memory chip packaged inside a bag of meat chips.
View the full proposal here.
Following up on the melody sequencer, here’s a drum sequencer! It runs on socket.io in a collabo with Jeff Ong. It saves the current pattern on a server, and so everyone who accesses the site is modifying the same pattern live, together.
Heating grates sound great. I used to sit by them as a kid and strum metallic chords while basking in their warmth. It’s like campfire music.
At Home Depot, I found a heating grate. I played with it using my fingers, rubber, wood and metal drumsticks. They all sounded cool. I bought the heating grate.
Next I needed a box that could help shape the sound of the instrument. I bought a 1x48x5.5 plank of resonant oak wood, measured some sides, and cut with the chopsaw.
Nine years in the future:
“Would anyone like a meat loaf?”
“Sure I’d like a meat loaf”
“and what kind of meat would you like in it?
Your options are poultry, bovine or mariscos”
“Hey I’ll try the poultry”
“Excellent choice.”
“Synthetic?”
“Of course!”
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro and never look back!
Cell differentiation
to mammalian muscle
Guided by the medium
or “growth factor”
or “nutrient broth”
wash, compress and texture
flavor, color, sterilize
before it’s thawed and eaten…
what do you call muscle
that never once flexed?
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro and never look back!
Is it Karshrut if no beast is slaughtered?
But not completely animal-free
Cultured meat could it be some body?
A new delivery system for protein
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
Foretell Winston Churchill, appalled by bones and gristle
Prescient L. Ron Hubbard, feast on Chicken Little
To neo luddite with a pork fascination
Your small batch ain’t gonna do this time
How many pigs to feed eight and a half billion people?
The answer’s one. Sausage links!
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro Phenomenon
In Vitro and never look back!
Here’s my github repo for Code of Music.
The first assignment was to make a melody sequencer, and here’s where I’m at with that:
I used p5.js and p5.sound. I created an array of Oscillators and Envelopes in order to make it polyphonic. Right now the noteArray is just 6 notes of a pentatonic scale, which always sounds great. But it can be modified or extended—in the long run I’d like to be able to tweak the scale on the fly, including expand/shrinking it. Same goes for the wDiv variable which represents how many beat divisions there are in this little loop. I need to tweak the mapping of block to mouse position to make sure that the blocks appear where the user clicks. This probably means switching to p5’s rectMode(CENTER).
I developed the p5.sound library for Google Summer of Code, but didn’t get as deep into musical timing and synthesis as I would like. I’d like to keep refining it throughout this class, and already made a couple improvements in the process of making the melody sequencer.
This week I experimented with a different approach to Sonic Scrolls, where different colored blocks are placed beneath a camera and trigger different sounds.
Our fabrication prompt was to make multiples, so I set about making a ton of blocks. I used the chop saw and stacked a couple blocks of wood to hold my measurement of roughly 2cm. It turns out that this is wrong:
So I steadied the piece with my hand rather than trying to sandwich it.
I made a ton of blocks…
Then I sanded them with the belt sander. I kept some longer pieces that I didn’t want to run through the chop saw.
I thought it might be fun to add magnets to the pieces, so I gave it a shot, but need to get the right epoxy.
I started to color them, and considered buying some paint, but I’m not sure I want to use the blocks for this purpose anymore. I might try to use them as keys to a touch-sensitive musical keyboard instead…
I am going to become an expert on In Vitro Meat. I picked this topic out of a hat.
I went to the Future of Food Expo on Saturday with a mission: to talk to people about In Vitro Meat. Something that Nancy Nowacek mentioned really resonated with me: She said she doesn’t like cocktail parties for shallow small talk, but when she has a topic she is interested in, and other people might have the answer, then she gets into the conversations and is driven to go to these types of events. That’s exactly how I felt about the Future of Food Expo: normally, I would not really be that interested in going to an expo. But now that I have In Vitro Meat, I have a purpose.
There was not any in vitro meat at the expo, but there were a few interesting ideas about meat and the future of food in general.
I met people from The Future Market. The Future Market asks “What could a grocery store and its products look like in the year 2065?”. They had an architect/design rendering of the space. They had a newspaper, The Studio Sentinal, published on Sept 13-14 2065 with headlines like Gross Domestic Happinnes At All Time High Since 2043. And they had samples of a product that were packaged like Wheat Thins, but made with different types of grains in a process they wanted to advocate called Crop Rotation that embraces the diversity of crops rather than homogenizing them into Regular Wheat Thins. It’s a project that verges on critical design, a “food design and innovation agency” called Studio Industries. “We are a group of food innovators, designers, scientists, marketers and entrepreneurs passionate about steering the world toward a better – food future.” Interestingly, like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, they do not describe their work as “art.”
The Future Market said they are intrigued by In Vitro Meat as a way to re-imagine what protein is. They suggested I check out Food Tech Connect magazine, and Beyond Meat in California. They also suggested checking out Hampton Creek Foods and their product Just Mayo, because they work with a plant-like egg powder called Beyond Eggs rather than real eggs. Keywords are Health, Taste, Sustainability for the world and Accessibility: “good food should be accessible to everyone.” But what is “good?” I told Emily from the Future Market that I was conducting research for an art/design class, and she also recommended I check out the textile butchery work of Aufschnitt Berlin, who create stuffed sausages out of fabric and cloth, exhibited at the Paris 2014 Maison & Objet furniture and interior design festival. I found a link here and will dig in more soon.
In general, the Future Market is against processed foods like soy, and against trying to emulate meat, but think that new types of foods shoudl instead be used to re-imagine what food can be, especially with something like meat which to them, in the end, is just protein/nutritional value.
The farmtopeople.com booth caught my eye because they had snack bars made out of real meat. The meat was all grass fed, organic, raised by small farms. They also had snack bars made out of crickets, because crickets have good protein/nutritional value. These foods are available on their website. I asked Mike from Farm To People if the website he helped found would carry in vitro meat bars. He seems opposed to the idea, because it’s not really meat, and it isn’t produced by farms. He told me that when you eat one of these snack bars from a 100% grass fed cow, you can taste and feel the difference psychologically. With in vitro meat, it’s not a living being, and it just won’t be the same. Admittedly he was not very up on the latest trends in in vitro meat (and neither am I yet) but he was intrigued by the sustainability factor, even if it doesn’t make sense for his website which is about Food • Lifestyle • Gifts and “small-batch handcrafted goods”. Continue reading
For the first day of Code of Music, we paired up, found online sequencers, tinkered with them, and then reimagined them after drawing two oblique strategy cards.
I was delighted to see Billy playing with this Fruity Loops emulator.
Like so many others around the world, I acquired a copy of Fruity Loops as a teenager, and it transformed the way I approach music.
I’d previously messed around with Audio Mulch, which I found to be very confusing. I made some music with it, but it wasn’t clear to me where the sound was coming from or what I was doing to shape the sound.
Fruity Loops was the exact opposite. You open it up, hit play, start filling in a grid, and that grid becomes a musical building block.
I came to FL with a bit of a musical background. I took a few piano lessons when I was younger (what I really wanted to do was play the drums, but somebody told my mom that piano is a percussion instrument, too). I also had about a year’s worth of guitar lessons. I had a vague understanding of musical notation, but couldn’t quite sight read on either instrument. I had come up with a few musical ideas, but never thought to transcribe them—musical notation seemed very detached from the music itself.
Fruity Loops taught me to approach music in terms of Pattern Mode and Song Mode. FL always starts with Pattern mode. In Pattern mode, you have rows representing individual drum hits, each with 32 columns to fill. The columns are slightly tinted, and as you start to fill them in, you realize, intuitively, that four columns is equal to one quarter note. In other words, you start with two bars of music. FL could be thought of as a sort of musical notation. But I never really considered any of that. I just wanted to play with patterns.
I think every FL user spends a lot of time in Pattern Mode before they advance to Song Mode. Song Mode is similar to Pattern Mode, but on a larger scale. Your blocks are no longer individual drum hits, but entire 8-bar patterns. In Fruity Loops, a Song is simply a bunch of organized Patterns.
I started to use Fruity Loops with friends. We experimented with different ways to shape the sounds. We imported our own samples recorded with a PC microphone. My friend Justin had more traditional music training than I did, and he inspired me to start using the Piano Roll to experiment with melody and harmony. Together, we tried to recreate pop songs like Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody” and I think we came pretty close. As I became more serious about music in general, I kept coming back to Fruity Loops as a reference point. For example, I took a Ghanaian drumming class in college, which sent polyrhythms floating around my head, and I tried to transcribe these ideas in Fruity Loops. Interlocking rhythms challenged the Fruity Loops view of music as starting on the one, but I figured out ways to make it work.
Though I haven’t made any music with Fruity Loops in nearly a decade, it’s been very influential on my conception of music, both as a listener and as a composer. It helped me break musical structure and rhythm into bite sized blocks. And Fruity Loops’ views (pattern mode, song mode, and piano roll) correlate with other DAWs.
Billy and I drew two oblique strategies:
We attempted to apply these to the online FL emulator. Billy had never used FL before, and the online FL emulator actually falls short of recreating some of the most intuitive pieces of Fruity Loops. For one thing, it doesn’t load with any sounds- you have to drag them in.
Our sequencer would have preset sounds, openly resisting change so that if users want to bring new sounds in, they can search for sounds easily, and “once the search has begun, something (good) will be found.”
Some features didn’t seem very necessary, like one of the first parameters Billy started tweaking was the panning knob. To me, Fruity Loops is all about creating rhythms, and the mix (volume / panning etc) comes, so maybe that should not be a feature that can be changed as immediately, resisting change until you have a reason to change it.
One of the things I love about FL is the way beats are divided up so you can sense where the beats are without knowing anything about music theory, time signatures or the definition of a “quarter note.” It might be interesting if our sequencer had a metronome to help guide the beat to fall in the right place to start. I think this could be a nice constraint especially for new users, to have some pattern pre-loaded.
With melody, FL has a piano roll which can be intimidating. I would like to treat melodic voices more freely, without needing to set every note (and figure out some music theory in the process). I’m inspired by the app Figure which lets you set the number of notes in a scale and some aspects about it, and I think having a preset scale of notes available at first might be a fun way to guide users.
My design approach definitely leans towards helping people make music whether or not they consider themselves “musicians,” and I think that these types of constraints can also be inspiring for anyone, regardless of their musical background. To me, the oblique strategy of resisting change means limiting options at first, but it is still open to change down the line. Most importantly, once the search has begun—i.e. once the user has an idea of something they want to do, whether it’s a more complex melody or a panning/mixing idea—that option needs to be easily findable.
