Techno Music Technology

Where art meets engineering, cool things happen:

• How an innovative interface can unleash new live performance possibilities. (Thanks Jord)
• How an absurdly complex interface can still look (and sound) awesome. As long as it involves robots.

The Man is (Rightly) Keeping me Down

It’s been a light blogging week this week. This is supposed to be the place where I dump my thoughts, but my brain’s been pretty empty of late.

Work is the culprit. I really enjoy the opportunities I get to innovate as a design engineer, but engineering isn’t really a creative field. There is too much money on the line, and too many safety concerns to let one frustrated amateur follow his artistic vision. Instead, we go through this process where each spark of ingenuity has to be checked and justified by several people in succession. If anyone doesn’t approve, the design has to be revised, and the process restarted. I’ve been chasing signatures in this manner for the past two weeks, and its been sucking away my enthusiasm.

As of Friday, I think I’ve finally got everything approved, which means I can start wrapping my ego up with the next brilliant idea. (who says engineers learn from their mistakes).