Hello you. Everyone’s boring about something. I could prattle on about electronic music in every email, were I not concerned for your sanity. At the risk of falling down the rabbit-hole, there’s something pretty interesting about electronic instruments: they were way ahead of the curve on something that’s now commonplace.
🏘 Model villages aren’t just for kids: Places like Bekonscot are a form of outsider art and deliver a cheerful jolt to unexamined notions about our own place – and size – in the world.
💙 Coventry’s City of Culture 2021 branding is a “Brutalist blue tribute” to the city: and what an absolute bloody triumph, from design studio Uncommon. “We want this identity for Coventry to be something people look back on and refer to with pride, because city identities are really culturally important.”
🗣 We Learned to Write the Way We Talk: Ironic Capitals and strettttchedddd out words have allowed us to communicate our feelings in writing like never before.
💨 The world’s greenhouse gas emissions will be tracked in real time: One of the challenges in managing the greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere is that they aren’t measured very well. Impressively, the new Climate TRACE Coalition is assembling the data and running the AI.
⏳ The Long Time Project is focused on finding new ways to help us care about the long-term future, so that we take responsibility for it in the short-term. It aims to galvanise public imagination and collective action to help us all be good ancestors.
🤖 GPT-3 and the future of human productivity: People commonly worry about an AI takeover of the entire human workforce, starting with knowledge workers. This looks at some of the potential benefits AI could have on the way we work, and in particular its future impact on human productivity.
🎨 Dictionary of Colour Combinations originated by artist, art school instructor and costume and fashion designer Sanzo Wada (1883-1967) who, in that time of increasingly avant-grade and diversified use of colour, was quick to focus on the importance of colour and laid the foundation for contemporary colour research.
💻 Socialism’s DIY Computer: The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple: to make technology available to everyone.
A culture of connectedness
Connected devices define our age. A smart device is set apart from its predecessor not by intelligence, yet, but a state of perpetual connectedness. We’re now used to connecting and sharing between devices and people. That took widespread adoption of technologies and protocols by many different competing manufacturers.
Electronic musical instruments have been doing that same thing for nearly four decades, via an interface standard called MIDI. Looking back, it’s amazing that so many different manufacturers all more-or-less adopted that one standard. Further, Atari then released a computer with MIDI support and sockets built-in, igniting the era of making music with computers. Pretty much everything you’ve heard ever since, from pop hit to movie soundtrack, has been produced on equipment communicating via MIDI.
Even though MIDI has evolved over time, there are clear signs we’re outgrowing it. First, it has always suffered from a lack of fidelity that’s often noticeable to the listener. Secondly, instruments can be much smaller now, so those those big old five-pin DIN plugs on the cables are just too wide. Thirdly, many synths now exist not as a black box covered in buttons but as a piece of software, strung together virtually. And fourthly, in this era of mobile-first and Bluetooth headphones, connecting things with wires is passé.
Early this year, the organisation that manages the protocol announced MIDI would finally move to Version 2.0, thereby throwing off the fidelity limitations. The creative possibilities are extensive. But as original MIDI slips from uncool to unloved, we should celebrate its spirit of collaboration. MIDI has allowed countless people, devices and corporations to work together to creative ends. It’s a good model for any digital transformation: open standards beat closed ecosystems every time.