When I was a kid, my toys had a short shelf life—not because they broke, but because I couldn’t resist taking them apart. Sure, playing with them was fun, but there was something magical about opening them up, seeing how they worked, and imagining what might happen if I changed things. It was like a secret portal into a world of wires, gears, and endless possibilities. Fast forward to adulthood, and I stumbled upon Qubais Reed Ghazala, the “father of circuit bending.” Reading about his accidental discovery—a toy amplifier that short-circuited and emitted strange, beautiful sounds—I realized my childhood curiosity had a name. It was circuit bending. Inspired, I grabbed a copy of his book, dusted off a screwdriver,...
The Cost of Outsourcing Memory As technology becomes more integral to our lives, there’s a growing concern that we are outsourcing too much of our cognitive workload. Smartphones and digital tools are convenient, but they reduce the need for us to exercise our brains. Studies have shown that reliance on external storage—like apps and devices—leads to “digital amnesia,” where we forget information because we know we can always look it up. While ancient societies trained their minds to store and recall vast amounts of data, modern society risks losing these abilities. A study in Nature found that heavy reliance on GPS systems reduces activity in the hippocampus, the brain region associated with navigation and memory. Similarly, younger generations are...
Oral Traditions: Humanity’s First Cloud Storage Imagine a world without hard drives, Google, or even books. In such a world, knowledge wasn’t stored on paper or servers—it was embedded in people’s memories, passed from person to person through oral traditions. These traditions were humanity’s first cloud storage, with redundancy built into the system. In Aboriginal Australian cultures, for example, songlines acted as oral maps, encoding detailed information about landscapes, waterholes, and navigation routes. These songlines were shared across multiple individuals, ensuring the survival of critical knowledge even if one “node” (a person) was lost. Like modern blockchains, oral traditions thrived on decentralization, with data stored redundantly across the network of storytellers. Consensus Mechanisms: Storytelling as Validation On a blockchain,...
A Look Back: Instruments that Pioneered Additive Synthesis Additive synthesis has a rich history of being used to replicate natural sounds, emulate acoustic instruments, and create entirely new timbres. Several iconic instruments were developed in the last century that used additive synthesis in groundbreaking ways, leading the way for modern sound synthesis technologies. 1. The Telharmonium (1897) The Telharmonium, created by Thaddeus Cahill in the late 19th century, was the first notable attempt at additive synthesis. This massive, electric-powered instrument used rotating electromagnetic tone wheels to generate sine waves that could be combined to create complex sounds. While the Telharmonium was far too large to be practical, its underlying principle—combining multiple sine waves to form complex sounds—remains...
Imagine you’re sitting by a campfire, and someone strikes up a single, pure note on a flute. That sound is a sine wave—one clear, simple tone. No complexity, no texture, just a single, smooth frequency waving up and down, like a perfect ripple in a calm pond. Now, if you invited more flutists to play different notes alongside the first one, the sound would get richer, more complex. Each note adds a new layer, a new ripple, creating a fuller, deeper sound. That’s the essence of additive synthesis: adding pure tones together to create something richer and more complex. Now that you’re warmed up on the basics, let’s journey into the quirky history, the science, and the future of...
