Spinalcat, the disk as a binary medium.

Spinalcat

Much of the appeal, which is still intact, to be credited to your turntable to the medium used, ie the physical disk and its manipulability. The correspondence visual and material that binds the visible features of the microgrooves to the sounds of a vinyl consequently reproducible, for example, makes the circular piece of polymers blacks a transparent container of information, usable in manifold ways. If the turntable, then, have survived to the digitization of music culture taking the side to mutations hybrid (such as Final Scratch , and Digital Turntable , it is because their mechanisms have been sufficiently abstract to be able to appreciate the way. The record player (turntable) for the Digital culture is increasingly a paradigm for manipulating information. This is brilliantly conjugated to its original role as a source of sound expression in Spinalcat , a thesis which resulted in a research hardware and software made ​​by Nikita Pashenkov. Actually, this work integrates the characteristics of the study and hacking pure at the same time. It is, in fact, two turntables whose needle has been replaced by a particular barcode reader, the: CueCat, a gadget created to automate the contact company-customer through scan special bar codes and the subsequent routing of commercial information via the web. This equipment is used here to read the special discs developed by the author, with pattern in black and white midi signals that become transformed in their respective events sound. All interpreted and displayed by a specially developed software that is capable of displaying real-time pattern beds on the screen and create a postscript file in the reading. If no change is made while reading the disc will have an exact copy of it on file, print and then physically reproducible. If you have performed accelerations or slowdowns, the file will contain a 'recording' of the performance, printable, and then 'materializzabile' also. The disc becomes a visual platform , where to draw and record sound through its interpretable variations binary. The material used to manufacture (printed card to the computer, plastic, collage of different media) becomes independent of the reader, as it does not touch the surface, but it makes the the same time recording and playback of material. In its plentiful documentation (freely downloadable) Pashenkov not spared in careful analysis and history of the use of the discs for encoding musical information, with painstaking research and systematization .'s work and his studio upstream, therefore, are a key component of the conceptual elaboration of disk usage in the musical culture of the last century and to the formation of an innovative technical and historical perspective that the witnesses 'importance, thanks to which the disc is able to be reincarnated in new forms after the revolutions electrical, electronic and digital.