Monday, October 8, 2012

Use of JFugue spotted in article on Scala and Xtend

I love finding mentions of JFugue in articles that are not music based. Duncan Mac-Vicar has been playing with Scala and Xtend lately, and realized that Xtend does not yet have character literals, which he discovered while using JFugue's Rhythm API.

(BTW, Martin Odersky's Scala class on Coursera ("Functional Programming Principles in Scala") is in its fourth week now, and the class is excellent - I highly recommend it!)

Also posted to my idea2product blog

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Higgs boson data turned into music

Domenico Vicinanza has converted data from positrons passing through cloud chambers into music. He took the images of charged particles moving through deuterium (such as this one) and placed those images onto musical staves (see this page for more explanation). Later, composer Ben McCormack took the notes and adjusted some of the timing in the music, wrote countermelodies, and composed the following piece.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Today at JavaOne: Rewriting an Open Source Music Program in Scala

If you're at JavaOne this year, don't miss Brian Tarbox's talk, "Rewriting an Open Source Music Program in Scala" Brian will talk about his experience converting Log4JFugue to Scala. (Of course, Log4JFugue, which uses JFugue to let you listen to your log files, won the Duke's Choice Award at JavaOne 2010). Brian's talk should prove to be intriguing: "The majority of the session is a hands-on, code-on-the-fly re-creation of the Scala version from scratch. You will see the differences between the languages and get a feel for coding in the functional paradigm. You will also understand that Scala need not be scary. No background in Scala is required."

Brian's talk is scheduled for Tuesday, October 2, 3:00pm - 4:00pm, in the Hilton San Francisco - Golden Gate 6/7/8