Category: tech

Nerdy stuff, things tech­no­log­i­cal in nature, unnat­ur­al and artificial.

Categories
music tech web

Auto-Tune / An evening on the Internets

We have a house guest this week, and we've been doing a lot of hang­ing out while read­ing and lis­ten­ing to music. Last night, the dis­cus­sion turned to Auto-Tune, and it quick­ly revealed the beau­ty of being at least some­what Internet-literate.

Houseguest - Dave ZohrobSpeak­ing of Inter­net-lit­er­ate, this is our house­guest: Dave.

It start­ed with Lil Wayne. I men­tioned to Mara and Dave that Stere­ogum has an irri­tat­ing post about Lil Wayne's use of Auto-Tune on SNL. It was irri­tat­ing because, to me, there's a dif­fer­ence between using Auto-Tune to com­pen­sate for your own inabil­i­ty to hit the notes (e.g., Kel­ly Clark­son in "Since U Been Gone"), and using it to increase the funky quo­tient, as Lil Wayne does in "Lol­lipop." Any­way, Dave recalled a Pitch­fork inter­view with Neko Case in which she has some salty words on the sub­ject of Auto-Tune. [tap­pi­ty-tap­pi­ty]

Neko Case: When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody's voice, I don't take them seri­ous­ly. Or you hear some­body like Ali­cia Keys, who I know is pret­ty good, and you'll hear a lit­tle bit of Auto-Tune and you're like, "You're too fuck­ing good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don't you know what that means?" It's not an effect like peo­ple try to say, it's for peo­ple like Sha­nia Twain who can't sing.

(It gets even salti­er). Then the con­ver­sa­tion turned to Auto-Tune's first major splash, which was recent­ly dis­cussed in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New York­er [tap­pi­ty-tap­pi­ty]

The first pop­u­lar exam­ple of Auto-Tune's dis­tort­ing effect was Cher's 1998 hit "Believe,†pro­duced by Mark Tay­lor and Bri­an Rawl­ing. Dur­ing the first verse, Auto-Tune makes the phrase "I can't break through†wob­ble so much that it's hard to discern.

Of course, then we had to hear "Believe," so Dave sug­gest­ed Fav­tape. [tap­pi­ty-tap­pi­ty] Bin­go; briefly, we revis­it­ed 1998. Then, it seemed like it made sense to lis­ten to Bedhead's cov­er as well. [tap­pi­ty-tap­pi­ty] It fea­tures a touch-tone phone as an instrument.So what's the sto­ry with using Auto-Tune on "Believe?" Did the pro­duc­ers seek it out because Cher couldn't hit the notes, or did they just want to get funky? [tap­pi­ty-tap­pi­ty] The Inter­net has your answer, sort of. It's from a 1999 arti­cle in the British mag­a­zine Sound on Sound, but the prob­lem is that the pro­duc­ers don't admit to using Auto-Tune; it was still a trade secret at that point:

The … obvi­ous vocal effect in 'Believe' is the 'tele­phoney' qual­i­ty of Cher's vocal through­out. This idea came from the lady her­self — she'd iden­ti­fied some­thing sim­i­lar on a Roach­ford record and asked Mark if he could repro­duce it.He explains, "Roach­ford uses a restrict­ed band­width, and fil­ters the vocals heav­i­ly so that the top and bot­tom ends are wound off and the whole vocal is slight­ly dis­tort­ed. It took a while to work out exact­ly what it was that Cher liked about this par­tic­u­lar Roach­ford song, but in the end we realised it was the 'tele­phoney' sound. I used the fil­ter sec­tion on my Drawmer DS404 gate on the vocal before it went into the Talk­er to get that effect."

Actu­al­ly, we now know the truth. It was Auto-Tune. All of this hap­pened in about 15 min­utes; we explored the arc of Auto-Tune in pop­u­lar songs, with exam­ples of ear­ly incar­na­tions and deep dis­cus­sion about how and why it was applied. Nice. [tap­pi­ty-tap­pi­ty]

Categories
ixd tech

Cooper Journal / My new blog friend

Oh gosh, hel­lo again. I stepped away for a sec­ond, and the next thing I knew a month had passed. Any­way, I'd like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce the Inter­netz to the Coop­er Jour­nal, a blog that we're pub­lish­ing at work. Launch­ing it was part of the rea­son why there's been some radio silence, shall we say, but I'm plan­ning on get­ting back in the swing soonsville. Any­way, check it out:

Welcome to the Cooper JournalYep, that's me on the couch.


Categories
flickr ixd tech web

UX / Flickr pisses me off

My Flickr page

Yes, I appre­ci­ate Flickr. After all, it allows me to store my pho­tos online, share them with oth­ers, and dis­play them on my web­site. Yay. Thanks for that. Still, it frus­trates me dai­ly. Here's why:

Sequence of photo display is set in stone

If I drag a dozen pic­tures into the Flickr Uploadr, God only knows the order in which they'll appear on the site. But I care about the order in which they appear on the site, because the LAST pho­to uploaded ends up being at the top of my Flickr home­page, and in that posi­tion of promi­nence it says some­thing about me. It annoys me that I can't con­trol this more.1

Little control over homepage layout; no way to make stuff sticky

So, if I can't con­trol the order of upload­ing, can I con­trol what's dis­played on my Flickr page? No. Can I make a set sticky, so that it stays at the top of the list? No. Can I dis­play only sets? No. Of course, Flickr has intro­duced new lay­outs, but all of them are sim­ply ways of arrang­ing the most recent stuff. Not help­ful to me.

No concept of new-to-a-user

I'm think­ing of my grand­par­ents here. Wouldn't it be nice if a meta-set (or some­thing) was cre­at­ed of stuff that's new to the view­er? I could just cre­ate a book­mark here, and they could check for new stuff.

Tagging is a royal nightmare.

Maybe no one has total­ly solved this yet, but here's some­thing that would work for me: I usu­al­ly upload mul­ti­ple relat­ed pic­tures at a time, and these pic­tures tend to share a lot of the same tags. So I'd like to cre­ate small groups of tags for a groups of pic­tures, and then quick­ly drag and drop, or mul­ti-select and apply, a tag to a sub­set of those pic­tures. del.icio.us's tag­ging inter­face is rudi­men­ta­ry, but it's vast­ly more help­ful than Flickr's:

What del.icio.us does well in tagging


The navigation confuses everyone except geeks and experts

Col­lec­tions? Sets? Archives? What's the diff? As my mom once asked me, "Where are the albums?" At the risk of sound­ing irre­triev­ably old-school, this par­tic­u­lar set of group­ing con­cepts is a frus­tra­tion to cog­ni­tion. (Also, if the dis­tinc­tion is made in this nav­i­ga­tion area, why aren't the things (sets) in the right col­umn labeled as such?)

Flickr secondary nav


No record of blogged pictures?

When I cre­ate a blog entry from a pic­ture, why isn't there some kind of record that the image has been blogged? A link? This just seems so basic to me. 1 Inter­est­ing side note: I bumped into some Flickr peo­ple at CHI, and I asked them about this. Their ratio­nale: The pho­to­stream is what Flickr is all about, and the strict­ness of the sequence is a use­ful gov­ern­ing prin­ci­ple. Umm, yeah. Flickr peo­ple may think of upload­ing as a con­tin­u­al stream, but I upload pho­tos in clumps — I don't always think about my pho­tos in the terms of the last pho­to uploaded, I often think in terms of the last group. I feel like I should have con­trol over the way those clumps are dis­played. If you force me to always show the most recent­ly uploaded indi­vid­ual pho­to, shouldn't you also give me some con­trol over the order of upload in your Uploadr?

Categories
ixd tech web

Adaptive Path UX Week / One of ux, one of ux1

I attend­ed (and spoke at) my first UX Week last week in Wash­ing­ton DC, and it lived up to its billing as a good ol' time. I met many amaz­ing peo­ple, stayed out too late, and yet was still moti­vat­ed to get up ear­ly every morn­ing to see the keynotes. That's say­ing some­thing. Most con­fer­ences can be con­sid­ered suc­cess­es if just one of those things happens.

UX Week 2007 ProgramThe UX Week pro­gram with my lucky cat.

Breaking it down

The ses­sions came in three vari­eties: (1) prod­ucts and inter­face imple­men­ta­tions; (2) design tools and process­es; and (3) ideas and inspi­ra­tions. Sarah Nel­son at Adap­tive Path orga­nized the con­fer­ence, and she recruit­ed speak­ers who were not the usu­al talk­ing heads.2 The mix of back­grounds, expe­ri­ence, and sub­ject mat­ter kept things live­ly. I espe­cial­ly appre­ci­at­ed the dis­cus­sions of process by AP folks like Indi Young, Kate Rut­ter, and Jesse James Gar­rett dur­ing the pan­el dis­cus­sion of CNN.com. All of these opened my eyes to new design tools and tech­niques, and exposed the fact that there is a lot of inno­va­tion going on out there. In terms of the flashy prod­ucts on dis­play, I'm inher­ent­ly too inquis­i­tive and skep­ti­cal to believe what peo­ple tell me dur­ing prod­uct demoes — I need to get immersed in them myself, and ask: How did you get there? Where did that come from? What need is that address­ing? How did the design evolve? Because I'm a nerd.3

Design is story-telling

As Leisa Reichelt point­ed out dur­ing our pan­el, a lot of speak­ers addressed the top­ic of sto­ry-telling in one way or anoth­er. Kevin Brooks of Motoro­la Labs led a work­shop on sto­ry­telling tech­niques; the folks behind the recent redesign of CNN.com described the way in which they craft­ed the sto­ry that they told their inter­nal stake­hold­ers; peo­ple from BestBuy.com and Sachs dis­cussed the use of video­taped cus­tomer sto­ries to make a case for a redesign. Of course, sto­ry-telling and design are inti­mate­ly inter­twined — two strands of a busi­nessy dou­ble-helix. I was inspired by the vari­ety of ways in which design­ers are telling sto­ries about the prob­lems to be solved, and the tech­niques and nuances involved in their approaches. 

UX is real

I go to few­er con­fer­ences than I should (so I may be a bit shel­tered), but I'll say this any­way: at the con­fer­ence, I got the feel­ing that UX was much fur­ther along to becom­ing an actu­al pro­fes­sion. UX prac­tices are no longer out­posts in the Wild West of dig­i­tal prod­ucts; our work is now iden­ti­fi­able ter­ri­to­ry in the busi­ness land­scape. Not long ago, there were very few things that wouldn't be con­sid­ered with­in the purview of user expe­ri­ence; now, the bound­aries of our prob­lems are a lit­tle more clear, and our expe­ri­ences as prac­ti­tion­ers have more com­mon­al­i­ties than dif­fer­ences. I feel like Tom Han­ks in Big. Now, if only I could explain what I do to my par­ents … 1 From one of my favorite movies of all-time, Freaks, i.e., one of us, one of us, we accept you, one of ux.2 Okay, except Jared Spool, but it's always good to hear what he's think­ing. 3 I admit: The inter­face for One Lap­top Per Child is ele­gant and intrigu­ing, but I'm polit­i­cal­ly ambiva­lent about the project itself. I'm fas­ci­nat­ed by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cre­at­ing an infor­ma­tion pipeline the devel­op­ing world, but I guess I'm not enough of a tech evan­ge­list to believe in the idea that dis­trib­ut­ing lap­tops is bet­ter than dis­trib­ut­ing more imme­di­ate aid. Maybe I'm not think­ing big enough.

Categories
san francisco tech visual

Google street-view meets new apartment

Mara and I just moved into the Low­er Haight ear­li­er this month, and Google just released a new Maps fea­ture — Street View — that has a pic­ture of our place. If I weren't writ­ing about this, I'd be speech­less. Wow.

Our new place on FillmoreOur place is the yel­low two-sto­ry walk-up that is bustin out of the top of the frame. I love that it was cap­tured on one of those semi-sun­ny days where lit­tle wisps of fog drift through. So nice to not live in the fog belt. Inci­den­tal­ly, here's the Chronicle's fog fore­cast. Doesn't look good.

Street Lev­el seems like use­ful func­tion­al­i­ty, esp. for fan­cy mobile devices, which I don't have. The con­trols are pret­ty straight­for­ward and easy to use on a desk­top, but I won­der about the ease with which one could nav­i­gate up and down the streets with those tee­ny arrows on a Palm or Black­ber­ry. This is real­ly nit­picky, but I think it would be effec­tive to intro­duce more map nav­i­ga­tion into the image, i.e. skip­ping to the next inter­sec­tion, return­ing to the orig­i­nal des­ti­na­tion, etc. Future-wise, it would be awe­some to be able to do stuff with the images — eas­i­ly insert them into oth­er things, string them togeth­er in con­nec­tion with direc­tions, etc. What I want to know is: How the heck did they do it? Thx, kot­tke.

Categories
san francisco tech tip

Free WiFi to roll into SF

Flickr photo


So appar­ent­ly Google and Earth­link are team­ing up to pro­vide free WiFi ser­vice to all of SF (via Giz­mo­do). While we're still a ways from know­ing what this will actu­al­ly mean — main­ly, will be acces­si­ble at 14th and Valen­cia, third floor apart­ment? — it is intrigu­ing to me that Google is involved. Unlike Earth­link, Google has nev­er gouged me, or failed to pro­vide ser­vice that I've paid for, or sold my name and home address to direct marketers. 

So I guess you could say that I'm hope­ful. Maybe some­day soon I'll be able to work from Pac Bell (er, I mean, SBC … er, I mean AT&T) Park, or Bue­na Vista Park, or the lit­tle red­wood grove out­side the Transamer­i­ca build­ing.
Or from my roof. (See the photo).