Uri Nieto

Last project for the iPhone I’ve been working on is called The VoxCarina, which is half a TalkBox, half an Ocarina. Check it out here. Alright!

I have been blown away with this fascinating visual/audio illusion. Watch the following video and listen carefully on what he’s saying.

Now close your eyes and play the video again. Do you hear the same thing?

Most people will hear “Da-da, da-da” (or “ga-ga, ga-ga”) when watching the video with the eyes open, but then will hear “Ba-ba, ba-ba” when they close their eyes. In this video, the audio and the image do not relate, however our brain tries to make them relate somehow. What we are actually hearing is “Ba-ba, ba-ba”, but what we’re seeing is a man saying “Ga-ga, ga-ga”. So our brain is trying to find a middle point and we hear “Da-da, da-da” (or “ga-ga, ga-ga”).

This is known as the McGurk Effect, and you can read the original paper written by Harry McGurk & John MacDonald in 1976 here.

I’ve been working on this application for the iPhone called Sonic Skull Shot (SSS) for the past week as an assignment for the course Mobile Music, taught by Professor Ge Wang.

It is a nice OpenGL application for the iPhone that makes use of the accelerometer and some touches to create a sling shot to throw skulls while synthezising some sound. It took me so many hours to do that, but in the end I think the result is pretty good.

You can download it from here!

This quarter I signed up for the course Mobile Music, taught by Professor Ge Wang. It is a course to write music code for Mobile devices, mostly focused on the iPhone.

Yesterday was due the first assignment which was writing three small music apps for the iPhone. I must say that the library created initially for Smule and later modified for the MoPho (Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra) is extremely amazing.

Check out my small apps here. Enjoy titans!

With this great title (A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything), Jürgen Schmidhuber presents a fascinating scientific paper that tries to find an answer to the question “Is the universe computable?”

You can find the paper here.

And here there are some great quotes:

The Great Programmer does not worry about computation time. Nobody presses Him. Creatures which evolve in any of the universes don’t have to worry either. They run on local time and have no idea of how many instructions it takes the Big Computer to compute one of their time steps, or how many instructions it spends on all the other creatures in parallel universes.

Possible limitations of the Great Programmer. He does not need not be very smart. For instance, in some of His universes phenomena will appear that humans would call life. The Great Programmer won’t have to be able to recognize them.

The Great Programmer reappears. Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers. If our own universe allowed for enough storage, enough time, and fault-free computing, then you could be one of them.

More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care. The processes that correspond to our brain firing patterns and the sound waves they provoke during discussions about body and soul correspond to computable substrings of our universe’s evolution. Bitstrings representing such talk may evolve in many universes. For instance, sound wave patterns representing no- tions such as body and soul and “consciousness” may be useful in everyday lan- guage of certain inhabitants of those universes. From the view of the Great Pro- grammer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”.

Conclusion. By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer’s point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away.

I really enjoyed reading all of this. However, it’s sad to my religion beliefs not to have found anything related to a Flying Spaghetti Monster on this paper.

I’m taking Music-320, a great course of Digital Signal Processing and Digital Filters at CCRMA. We have the last assignment due next week, and since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the professors came up with this funny excersice that I copy here below.

Damn it, I love this shit.