Free Music from Some Lovely Indie Games

Posted by Danny on Monday, June 22, 2009 at 10:55 pm

A quickie: for folks who don’t necessarily enjoy video games but do enjoy very pleasant music, I’ve tracked down the soundtracks for World of Goo, Braid, and Blueberry Garden. For those who do enjoy video games but haven’t explored these titles, they’re all really, really great, original, independently-produced games with appropriately singular musical scores.

Kyle Gabler’s soundtrack for World of Goo is freely available here. If you don’t already know the music and are turned off by the name of the game, please give it a chance and listen to one of the most celebrated tracks, “The Best of Times,” on YouTube. Don’t forget to toggle High Quality. (Also, for hard-core fans and/or pianists, a fan arrangement of the entire soundtrack and sheet music are available here courtesy of Sebastian Wolff.)

Jonathan Blow selected the tracks for Braid from the work of a handful of established artists on Magnatune.com, a really neat model for flexible music publishing and licensing that escapes the DRM and general obsolescence of traditional publishers and gets around the distributor-biased conditions of iTunes. Unfortunately, the Braid soundtrack isn’t available for download without a Magnatune subscription but can be streamed at high resolution for free. See?


Music from Braid by Sieber, Kammen, Fulton and Schatz

Finally, the lonely piano score for Erik Svedäng’s heavily applauded Blueberry Garden has been made available by its composer, Daduk. The details are all here and you can pick up the files from the link provided on Svedäng’s blog without doing anything strenuous like signing up at Jamendo.com (whereat the album is hosted). It’s CC-by-nc-sa — how groovy is that?

Enjoy, I hope.

TED Talks: Introduction and Robert Full

Posted by Danny on Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 2:19 pm

One of my plans for this space is to regularly highlight TED Talks, which Geoff initially discovered by seeing Sir Ken Robinson’s Talk during a professional development day while on practicum in 2006. I gushed all over the place about it then, but for folks who don’t know about them, the Talks are a series of lectures broadcast from the annual conference of Technology, Entertainment and Design. They tend to be from ten to twenty minutes in length and feature some of the most prolific thinkers and workers in physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, philosophy, health, music, architecture, fine arts, journalism, politics, economics, and occasionally videogames. However, in addition to a showcase of exciting, vanguardey thought, one of the main purposes of the conference is to get all of these people in the same room listening to each other: synthesis of freshly developed ideas across arbitrarily (but often trenchantly) separate fields, for me, is the most valuable and promising aspect of the whole enterprise. They’re also groovy enough to make the lectures publically available on their website and as a video podcast (with a bit of advertisements thrown in tastefully after the talks), which is nice because full attendance costs $6,000 and you need to justify why you’re important enough to take up a seat.

From most people’s perspective, this is very Web 1.0: resources are produced and transmitted from the top down to an audience with little opportunity for viewers of the free talks to contribute meaningfully despite the expansion of commenting functionality. Nonetheless, even if one can’t easily grapple with the authors of the talks in a social constructivist sort of way, one can enjoy them as a gallery of novel thoughts, technologies, and expert articulations of ideas you might have already been incubating. For the most part, the production quality and presentation skills of the lecturers is superb; compare the signal-to-noise ratio for these talks with most of the new documentaries you see on the Discovery Channel and see if you don’t get excited too.

There are a lot of talks I’m itching to bring to your attention but I’ll start with a series of three by Robert Full, a “biologist” at UC:Berkley. “Biologist” is in quotation marks here because the study of life processes seems inadequate to describe the sort of work Full’s doing. Check out the first video:

Read more »

Interface Update!

Posted by Danny on Friday, June 19, 2009 at 6:14 pm

All this talk about tag clouds got me hankering to try one out, and all the exciting WordPress plugins I discovered while finding my cloud widget got me hankering to try them out, so I’ve made some fun changes.

Read more »

Wordle and Tag Clouds in the Classroom

Posted by Danny on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:13 pm

Dad was a devotee of computers probably minutes after discovering them as an undergraduate at Waterloo in the 70s.  He repeatedly tried to instil the same wonder and excitement in me, groping for ways to connect the nature of computing machines to my own interests and probably disappointingly artsy foci—anything, at least, to extend their significance beyond the video games I was playing.  One of the early uses, I learned, was for academics studying literature to compute word frequencies in texts, which was for me at once a completely novel idea, and seemed spectacularly boring and pointless.[1]

I hadn’t thought much about it until “tag clouds” started popping up on popular sites and the possibilities of this kind of data visualisation started revealing themselves despite my benightment.  Recently, Geoff brought Wordle to my attention. Read more »

Baba Yetu, Brutus?

Posted by Danny on Friday, June 12, 2009 at 12:48 pm

It’s possible at this point that I’ve grown a couple of semi-regular readers, so I’m going to try using this space in an exciting, active, Web 2.0 way. Your participation will require that you download a 5 megabyte mp3 (legally, even, it turns out) and be willing to post a comment. Participation will be enhanced by a familiarity with Sid Meier’s Civilization series of games, and/or atheism, but neither is necessary.

First, please download Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin and give it a listen. Read more »