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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

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Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

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“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

iPhone Becoming Experimental Music Instrument of Choice

It could be a while before Ge Wang and the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) starts to feel the heat, but the The London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra served notice last week at the City’s Open Hack London that experimental iPhone music performance is alive and well.

Wang, of course, founded Smule, developer of the internationally popular Ocarina app, as well as the recently released Leaf Trombone (App Store link), and conducts SLOrk, the renowned ensemble of student computer scientists and musicians using 20 MacBooks to compose and perform new music.

The London-based iPhone OSCestra is a crew of eight musicians, conducted by a chap using a Wii controller, who opened their lone performance so far with an impressive (and authentically geeky) performance of the “Doctor Who” theme.

Jim Purbrick apparently conjured the idea for the venture just a few hours before the Open Hack event, a one-day symposium sponsored by Yahoo! on May 8 that brought together tech-savvy hackers for a day of coding and communicating.

Purbrick and his music mates downloaded the free app mrmr (App Store link), an app that supports customizable audio controllers and sends data wirelessly to other devices using OSC (Open Sound Control). A controller could be a piano-style keyboard, a bank of faders, or an array of knobs and buttons — essentially interactive widgets that allow users to control sound and music.

The free desktop application OSCulator caught all the data, and sent it to Ableton Live, a powerful performance and production platform.

In this instance, the orchestra performed using a bank of synthesizers running within Live. If you’re interested in going beyond Garage Band and making music on your Mac, it’s worth checking out the Live demo.

[GigaOM]

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer, musician, web designer attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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4 comments

    i got it information about iphone and i use this phone.
    can you give me few images iphone new eddtion

    from 02:16 to 02:45 sounds just amazing, who could imagine that people will be able to make such a beautiful frequency sounds nowadays with iPhone.

    Just amazing!

    … and people wonder why the aliens don’t land ….

    when talking about instruments-apps for iPhone you must not forget to mention “Bebot Robot Synth” — chiptunes yaay!

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