A\\Young\\Example

MEANWHILE, IN CHINA.

The Atlantic’s InFocus blog has a great feature today on the growing Chinese DIY community:

One visible sign of China’s recent economic growth is the rise in prominence of inventors and entrepreneurs. For years now, Chinese farmers, engineers, and businessmen have taken on ambitious do-it-yourself projects, constructing homemade submarines, helicopters, robots, safety equipment, weapons and much more. Some of the inventions are built out of passion, some with an eye toward profit, (some certainly safer than others), and a few have already led to sales for the inventors. Gathered here are recent photos of this DIY movement across China.

Yes to stair slides and robot rickshaw operators. Probably going to go with a no for the submarines and helicopters, though.

# photography photojournalism the atlantic in focus china chinese diy invention science lunacy

Posted 1 week ago 2 notes

Paulstretch is an innovative (and free) little program that allows users to slow down audio up to hundreds of times without suffering any changes in pitch. The program does this by sectioning off portions of the audio as it stretches it out, rather than simply spreading the audio as one big chunk. It gained a bit of internet notoriety a while back when somebody discovered that by slowing down a Justin Bieber song 800%, one can transform utter garbage into angelic Sigur Ros-ian introspection. Of course, in this “stretching” process you also turn a four-minute song into a 30+ minute one, but improvement is improvement, I suppose.

To demonstrate, I took a little four-minute demo I made on GarageBand and put it into Paulstretch. The result is a half hour of great writing/sleeping/dying(?) music. I don’t expect that you’ll listen to the whole thing, and you can get a pretty clear idea of what the program can do with a quick comparison of the above audio with the original here.


[Oh, and the “Album Art” I used is a picture from Circa 1983, the photo roll of one of the best photographers on the internet. Seriously. Check him out.]

# music recording garageband paulstretch audio sound ambient sigur ros justin bieber art soundcloud postrock post-rock

Posted 1 month ago 3 notes