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Pixelsynth lets you turn your face into a song

Pixelsynth is a new web app from coder Olivia Jack that allows anyone to compose songs simply by drawing or uploading pictures. It’s available for free over on her Github, and it works by setting music to images in a method similar to a commonly used scientific and musical tool called a spectrogram. Like how sheet music is a language for representing different pitches of notes, spectrograms are visual representations of the spectrum of frequencies that make up a sound. Every song has a spectrogram that can be derived from it, and conversely, any image can be plugged into a spectrogram…

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An Aphex Twin tribute morphs the virtual body into horrifying shapes

Richard D. James (better known as Aphex Twin) has often seen his songs associated with disturbing, warped bodies. In the early ’90s, the label he co-founded and that produced his music, Rephlex Records, described his style as “braindance.” Pitchfork‘s Paul Cooper wrote about this terminology in 2002, saying that “‘braindance’ escaped the mind/body binary opposition of electronic music– here was a rhythmically hyper, complex genre that retained its club roots by appending fantastically supple limbs to the listener’s fervid imagination.” The corporeal imagery conjured there is hardly an embellishment on Cooper’s part. By that time, the music videos directed by experimental…

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Okay our actual favorite story ever: Notch pays $46k for rare Aphex Twin album

Notch is just awesome. The creator of Minecraft has paid an outlandish sum of $46,300 at auction for an extremely rare, unreleased pressing of an album by electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin. The album first had emerged on an online auction site. The Internet freaked out because it was never-before-heard music during a peak period of creativity for Aphex Twin falling into the hands of a private collector. Fans convinced the seller to host a Kickstarter campaign to sell digital copies of the album before he sold the original artifact. And then Notch swooped in and bought the original vinyl…