I have a Variax 300 that I have been loving, but the other day i discovered some liquid leaking out of the back. Upon opening the battery compartment I discovered one of the batteries had leaked. I cleaned it up but then my sounds stated going haywire. Sounds were in incorrect places, clycling through or changing on their own, or not working at all.
Vaughan acts out a woman's crazy texting spree to a guy after 1 date. More Fletch & Vaughan stuff at or twitter.com/fletch_vaughan and to see the youtube video go to =vaGFV0YJg-0 now with pictures! :D
New research has started to identify causes for misophonia. A British-based research team studied 20 adults with misophonia and 22 without it. They all rated the unpleasantness of different sounds, including common trigger sounds (eating and breathing), universally disturbing sounds (of babies crying and people screaming), and neutral sounds (such as rain). As expected, persons with misophonia rated the trigger sounds of eating and breathing as highly disturbing while those without it did not. Both groups rated the unpleasantness of babies crying and people screaming about the same, as they did the neutral sounds. This confirmed that the misophonic persons were far more affected by specific trigger sounds, but don't differ much from others regarding other types of sounds.
The researchers also noted that persons with misophonia showed much greater physiological signs of stress (increased sweat and heart rate) to the trigger sounds of eating and breathing than those without it. No significant difference was found between the groups for the neutral sounds or the disturbing sounds of a baby crying or people screaming.
The team's important finding was in a part of the brain that plays a role both in anger and in integrating outside inputs (such as sounds) with inputs from organs such as the heart and lungs: the anterior insular cortex (AIC). Using fMRI scans to measure brain activity, the researchers found that the AIC caused much more activity in other parts of the brain during the trigger sounds for those with misophonia than for the control group. Specifically, the parts of the brain responsible for long-term memories, fear, and other emotions were activated. This makes sense, since people with misophonia have strong emotional reactions to common sounds; more importantly, it demonstrates that these parts of the brain are the ones responsible for the experience of misophonia.
An "endurance test": that's how Jamie Stewart describes the making of Xiu Xiu's latest effort Angel Guts: Red Classroom. Listening to this album is no less of an endurance test, that's for sure. If on the one hand discomfort never ceased to be part of Xiu Xiu's aesthetic, Angel Guts celebrates it in the most unapologetic fashion, recuperating the legacy of the big industrial acts of the late 1970s and 1980s and leaving pop behind completely. When describing the genesis of the album and situating the many changes that made it possible, Jamie (sitting comfortably in his new LA home) sounds particularly chilled and less circumspect than you would imagine. But you can still sense how this record must have been a particularly big beast to tame.
Part of that came from the interest in keeping the sounds very limited and constraining. There's really only so much that you can do with analogue gear. That's part of the charm, it forces you to push it a little bit further, if you want something that doesn't sound like something you've heard 50 million times before. And part of it was that a couple of the bands whose music we were drawing from were from the late 1970s and part of the 1980s: that's what they would have used, so it was an attempt to put ourselves in their shoes a little bit more than we would have... consciously. They sound totally amazing. I'm stuck there, I can't go back.
Some of them were definitely written with a particular set of sounds in mind. I knew exactly what I wanted 'Stupid in The Dark' to be about so I worked on the lyrics and the music together. I wrote the lyrics for 'Black Dick' two years ago not having any idea where they would have ended. I was very upset and very drunk in this all night dance club in Nuremberg on another tour; I just tried to classically dance the pain away, I was very annoyed at my bandmates. The words just sort of popped into my mind and I just wrote up a note of that. A few months later I was looking through my notebook and I found them, barely remembering having done it. With 'Bitter Melon' it was the opposite, at the time of the recording I knew what I wanted it to be about, so I wrote the lyrics for it and then tried to make music that might suit it. Differently with any other record, when I wrote the lyrics I sent them to John and Angela to go over. Usually I never share the lyrics with anybody, but they were really instrumental in editing them and having them be clearer.
Do you think that to this day Xiu Xiu are associated with the wrong 'scene'? Looking at the sounds, themes and imagery you used throughout your career it could be that Xiu Xiu have more in common with say, industrial music, than indie or alternative music more broadly.
So far this is version 0.1, so I can promise nothing in the way of stability or features. And also the Web Audio API itself is barely documented (many project hours were spent extrapolating what features are available!). But so far this thing makes some pretty awesome and crazy digital noise music.
It sounds totally crazy, I know. But it IS possible. My husband and I have been taking advantage of this system for over a year, and it works. We did our research and the system and company are backed by the BBB.
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