Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin.
The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines.
The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you'll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.
Junho Park's graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE's playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them.
But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music's streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don't guess where culture is going, you know.