Sunday, July 17, 2011

The key of C

Believe it or not, I did manage to open Cayley's mind to one of my favorite movies of all time:  Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a John Hughes classic so loved that even a fan's recut trailer got over a half million views on YouTube (the original trailer was crap, failing to capture the essence of the film it was intended to promote).


Ferris' $8,000 synthesizer was reportedly an Emulator:
www.wikipedia.org
But that was 1985, and this is 2011, when one can purchase a machine with about a hundred times the Emulator's capability for less than 5% of its original price:
We spent some time last night trying to make it replicate the famous cough scene from the movie, which has apparently been all but stripped from the internet due to copyright infringement.  The internet is littered with other Bueller clips, but not that one.  The best I could do was locate an audio recording of one of those scenes here: Ferris plays "The Blue Danube" on his keyboard using sampled coughs and sick sounds.

So we couldn't make it cough and we couldn't make it fart, but it has a few hundred other voices:
OK, laughing, nothing radical about that.
Car pass??  And if that's too mild for you...
...you can always make it go BOOM.
Demonstrating once again the strange priorities we hold as a society, it's acceptable  for a keyboard to emulate a machine gun, but not a bodily function common to everyone.
Anyway, we hope to find some good intro piano lessons for Miss Cayley.  In the mean time, we can amuse ourselves extensively with the cheap wonders of technology in a keyboard that probably has more computing capability than the entire Apollo space program.

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