This is what happens when I put my iPod on random during the walk into work in the morning:

• "Everything's Under Control" — Meat Beat Manifesto — Actual Sounds and Voices
• "Reveille" — The Black Watch — Proud Heritage
• "Éirigh Is Cuir Ort Do Chuid Éadaigh Cóiríu" — Clannad — Dúlamán
• "Honey Medley" — Max Q — Discovery
• "L'inverno: III. Allegro" — Nigel Kennedy — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
• "Suite No. 10 "KA": II" — Aki Takahashi — Giacinto Scelsi: The Piano Works 3
• "Return of the Jedi: 'Jabba the Hut'" — The Boston Pops — Out of This World
• "Wie Glauben" — Carter Burwell — The Big Lebowski
• "Neon Lights" — Kraftwerk — The Man-Machine
• "Goriri" — Tortoise — A Lazarus Taxon

This has got to be about the coolest performance I've seen, and not just because it was bloody cold and windy. The Continuum keyboard by itself is fascinating; it's essentially a piano keyboard with a continuum of pitches and an extra dimension of modulation. But it's clever: It can tune itself so that you don't have to be precise in order to play in tune, but it doesn't get in your way when you want to bend pitches or slide up and down. The output is MIDI, which controls a synthesizer, which in turn modulates a pair of Tesla coils!

Zounds! The crackling of the electricity through the air is music, and not just something you could generously construe as music, but totally rocking tunes, polyphonic, melodic and harmonic, expressive, and dangerous.

Here's one more short video. Hopefully EOH will post some high-quality videos with better sound; it looked like they had some decent recording equipment set up.

Congratulations to the people at the 2008 UIUC Engineering Open House who put this together!

I sing bass with the Illini Statesmen Barbershop Chorus. I've been a member of their parent organization, SPEBSQSA (now, sadly, simply the Barbershop Harmony Society), for about six years. I'm currently serving as the webmaster for the chorus.  read more »

The bottle-o-phone project never really panned out. A sad story, really. The idea came to me while taking Doug West's wonderful graph theory course at UIUC.  read more »

I volunteer at WEFT Champaign 90.1 FM, the local community radio station. I'm the chair of the Web Committee, which oversees the website, mailing lists, and various other online assets.  read more »