Freezedream Prototype Cartridge for SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis!

The amazing Freezedream has made a cartridge for the SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis / Nomad.

little-scale Workshop and Performance @ Format Festival 2010

I encourage everyone that can make these two events, both on the 11 March, to come along if possible!

Sebastian Tomczak presents "Bent But Not Broken: Lo-fi Hacking for Everyday People" as part of the 2010 Format Festival in Adelaide, South Australia.

Car-boot treasures and back-of-the-cupboard discoveries finally put to use: exploring obsolete video games and circuit-bent toys for art-making. Participants will pull apart and repurpose noisy children's toys as manic music machines and discover the possibilities of chipmusic with an introductory course of composition for Game Boy.

Date: 11 March, 2010 - 6pm to 8pm
Venue: The McKeague Space, 15 Peel Street, Adelaide
Ages: All ages
Cost: $10 (you get to keep any circuit bent toys!)
Experience Needed: None
What to bring: Nothing. Laptops would be helpful but not necessary.

little-scale Live as part of the 2010 Format Festival in Adelaide, South Australia.

Fresh from playing the internationally-renowned Blip Festival in New York City, Adelaide-based musician little-scale (Sebastian Tomczak) invites you sit back and enjoy a live DJ set, complete with obsolete video game consoles, from the SEGA Mega Drive to the Atari 2600. With home-brew hardware and chipmusic tunes, this is a night of experimental electronica and 8bit beats.

Date: 11 March, 2010 - 9pm
Venue: The McKeague Space, 15 Peel Street, Adelaide
Cose: Free!

Phillips SAA 1099 MIDI Interface Demo Track

Listen here: http://chipmusic.org/little-scale/music/my-sappy-heart-saa-1099

Introducing the SAAMI (Phillips SAA 1099 MIDI Interface)

Today I designed a MIDI Interface for the Phillips SAA 1099 programmable sound generator. It allows the user acces to all of the registers and functions of the IC:
• Six voices
• Relatively pitched frequency resolution over an 8 octave range
• Two noise sources (selectable and routable to the six voices)
• Noise can be clocked via an internal division or one of the oscillators
• Two envelope generators with various settings
• 2 x 4bit stereo field control

Although the unit is working already, I still want to make some refinements. However this, along with everything else, will be released soon.

little-scale: Superluminal Motion (2010)

I signed up for the annual RPM Challenge, wherein participants write an album sometime throughout February. On Saturday, I wrote 'Superluminal Motion' - nine tracks / 35 minutes of music made from the sound of a party popper and a red balloon (happy birthday Derris-Kharlan!). Thanks to Malmen, Ten and Tracer, i cactus and GOTO80 for the inspiration.

Thanks to Lauren for the amazing photography.


Tracklisting
01. Symmetry
02. Baryogenesis
03. Filament
04. Ekpyrotic Model
05. Flavour
06. Superluminal Motion
07. A Reversal of Entropy
08. Gravitational Collapse
09. Hologram


Download / Purchase
Download this release here.
Purchase this release here - worth it just for the photography.

We Baked A Cake For Derris-Kharlan!

Cheap USB to MID Interface

Although MIDI is old, some would argue that it is outdated. I don't believe so, and for me it is useful to have USB to MIDI interface. I think that other people in the chip, lo-fi and DIY communities would tend to agree with me. From time to time, I hear people complain about how expensive a USB to MIDI interface is. For the most part, the cheap ones can be terrible in terms of lag, compatibility and whether all data is sent or received. However, I have had a reasonably good experience with this USB to MIDI interface. The price is around US$12 including international shipping. I am running it on a Mac OS X 10.4 MacBook from a USB1.1 port hub, to which my audio interface is also connected. I have had no issues with this interface, but of course I can't guarantee that you won't have issues with your machine.

Paul Slocum's Game of Life Extrusions

Slocum says:

"I wrote a script that takes the lifetime of the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life and extrudes it into a three dimensional object... Time is equated to the Z-axis, and every live cell/pixel is converted to a cube, output as raw vertices..."

Inspiring work. Read more here.

Score for 'Error Repeat' (2009)

Error Repeat (2009) on Calm Down Kidder Records

Download score here.

BlipFestival 2009 Review on PopMatters.com

"The “mad professor” vibe came about because he took to the stage wearing a suit and started with sequences which were among the most abstract yet..."

Read the whole thing here.

Game Boy Cartridge Party

I'm in Update Arts Magazine!

'Nothing Has Been Left Unspoken' and 'I.F.E.' Review by GameMusic4All

"All in all this is a stellar release that will be getting repeated listens from me for some time. This release also keeps up the high quality of music from both little-scale as well as Handheld Heroes."

Read the whole thing here.

'Office Yoga Made Easy' Review by Cheapshot

"A brilliantly mellow and in places challenging EP which should make people sit up and listen to what ELSE is going on in the world of chip music."

Read the whole thing here.

Score for 'Always By Your Side (1)' (2009)

Always By Your Side (1) (2009)

Score for 'Dynasty' (2009)

Dynasty (2009) on Pause Music.

Attorney-General of South Australia Does a Backflip on Internet Censorship

The Attorney-General of South Australia last night revealed that he has made a backflip on the SA political internet censor law.

"My generation expects people to be honest and truthful in public commentary, and to stand by their commentary in their own name, but I think we have to concede that there is another generation coming up who disagrees with us and is asserting itself politically".

The fact that the government, the A-G, the opposition and the minor parties were willing to put this law through without consultation from the people whom it would affect is ridiculous and undemocratic in itself - it shows a certain level of smugness in my opinion.

Now that the law will be repealed, does this make everything okay? Will it stop them from attempting to push through similar laws in other circumstances or for other scenarios?

South Australia and Political Censoring of the Internet

It is difficult to believe that this level of political censorship and meddling is happening now, in this country, in this state. The state government is almost on cue with larger, federal issues of internet censorship in Australia and the rating of video games in Australia, all of which are aspects of modern culture and the rights of the individual. Is this country going insane?

"South Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet. The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires anyone making an online comment about next month's state election to publish their real name and postcode."

Read the whole article at news.com.au.

So if you're going to leave a comment on this post, you are now legally required to leave your real name and your postcode too. Surely laws such as this one are a slippery slope once entered into?

For the record, my full name is Sebastian Tomczak and my postcode is 5014.

Buildings in Queenstown, South Austrlia

Waveform Buffer Editor for SEGA Mega Drive YM2612

As an extension to the previously mentioned triangle waveform mode, I have introduced additional routines that allow the user to set the waveform of that mode. These routines coupled with a handy Max/MSP patch allow for very easy waveform editing.

Triangle Bass Mode for SEGA Mega Drive YM2612

A quick trial. I've added a "triangle wave" mode to the previously mentioned noise channel mode for the SEGA Mega Drive MIDI Interface.

Noise Channel for SEGA Mega Drive YM2612

I have added a noise channel component for the FM chip of my SEGA Mega Drive MIDI Interface. The aim is to simply offer a little more variety in terms of what sounds can be achieved with the YM2612, so it's quite basic at the moment. The channel (which is actually a 'half channel' as it is split with FM channel six / the DAC channel) has the following features:

• 3 bit volume control is mapped to velocity
• 6 bit frequency control is mapped to pitch (specifically, notes 0 - 59)

A demo video is below.

I Won True Chip Till Death's Artist of the Year Award!

So I won True Chip Till Death's Artist of the Year 2009 Award. I wish I could have been in NYC for the Gala Evening on Saturday night though... I hope everyone had a great time! Thanks to those people that nominated me.