A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:
On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.
Myself and Jessica joining in some reels and jigs.
Effects pedals in the browser, using the Web Audio API. Very cool!
Be sure to read Trys’s write-up too.
Rob has turned his exhaustive spreadsheet of all the concerts he has attended into a beautiful website. Browse around—it’s really quite lovely!
Rob’s also writing about the making of the site over on his blog.
A short text file, imbued with meaning and memory.
Aw, this is so nice! Chris points to the way that The Session generates sheet music from abc text:
The SVG conversion is made possible entirely in JavaScript by an open source library. That’s the progressive enhancement part. Store and ship the basic format, and let the browser enhance the experience, if it can (it can).
Here’s another way of thinking of it: I was contacted by a blind user of The Session who hadn’t come across abc notation before. Once they realised how it worked, they said it was like having alt text for sheet music! 🤯
I really enjoyed chatting with Mark and Ben on the Relative Paths podcast. We talked about service workers and Going Offline, but we also had a good musical discussion.
Mark your calendars, Brightonians: one week from tomorrow, on Saturdaay, April 28th, come and see my band Salter Cane playing in The Brunswick.
We will rock you …in the most miserablist way possible.
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
We asked you to tell us what you’d put on a new Golden Record. Here’s what you chose.
Ever thought about what you’d put on the Voyager golden record? Well, what are you waiting for? Your website can be your time capsule.
This looks like a rather good documentary about the best band in the world.
A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.
You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.
One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.
It turns out that Brighton has a mandolin orchestra. This aligns with my interests.
Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.
Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.
Hypnotic.
If you were at Patterns Day and you liked the music that was playing during the breaks, here’s the playlist. All the artists are based in Brighton.
Absolute genius! I’ll never hear Sgt. Pepper’s quite the same way again.
I somehow missed this when it published last year—a profile of my band Salter Cane.
Salter Cane can be labeled ”gothic country”, ”melancountria”, “country noir”, ”folk noir” and ”alt-country darkmeisters”.
This is really good fun! And thanks to service workers, it works offline too.
The rounds are: