4 January 2010—Though flexible devices such as roll-up displays have been promised for several years, their commercialization has been stalled by a missing ingredient: a flexible form of flash memory. But researchers at the University of Tokyo have recently developed an organic, floating-gate nonvolatile memory that behaves like flash memory, which may solve that problem.
While silicon-based flash memory is fine for the mass data storage found in cellphones, digital music players, and thumb drives, fabricating it requires high processing temperatures, thus ruling out its production on flexible substrates like plastic. Organic semiconductors, however, can be processed at temperatures well below the melting point of most plastics.
What's more, "the cost of flash memory is too high to use in applications that require large arrays of memory," says Tsuyoshi Sekitani, an assistant professor in the University of Tokyo's department of electrical and electronic engineering and one of the researchers who developed the new memory. "But we can print our organic memory on flexible substrates and over large areas using inkjet printers. So costs will be low."
Very interesting idea, but I'm not really impressed by the music it generates.
Thanks for the tip, Aasemoon - I liked it so much - http://www.jackdlogan.com/music/winduino_II.html - surely, the Aeolian harp must have been the way humans first learned about pitched sound; in its original form - "Aeolian harps in literature and music Aeolian harps are featured in at least two Romantic-era poems, "The Aeolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode", both by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In William Heinesen's novel The Lost Musicians set in Tórshavn, Kornelius Isaksen takes his three sons to a little church where, in the tower, they sit listening to the 'capriciously varying sounds of an Aeolian harp', which leads the boys into a lifelong passion for music. Aeolian harps are mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita. A lyre is mentioned in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" which is another name for an Aeolian Harp. An aeolian harp is featured in Ian Fleming's 1964 children's novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to make a cave seem haunted. Henry Cowell's Aeolian Harp (1923) was one of the first piano pieces ever to feature extended techniques on the piano which included plucking and sweeping the pianist's hands directly across the strings of the piano. The Etude in A flat major for piano (1836) by Frédéric Chopin (Étude Op. 25, No. 1 (Chopin)) is sometimes called the "Aeolian Harp" etude, a nickname given it by Robert Schumann. The piece features a delicate, tender, and flowing melody in the fifth finger of the pianist's right hand, over a background of rapid pedaled arpeggios. One of Sergei Lyapunov's 12 études d'exécution transcendante, Op.11 No.9, is named by the author "Harpes éoliennes" (aeolian harps). In this virtuoso piece, written between 1897 and 1905, the tremolo accompaniment seems to imitate the sounding of the instrument. Young Thomas at work on his harp. In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30 foot
