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April 01 2011
Is That a Drum in Your Pants, or… No, That’s a Drum in Your Pants
Some song-lovers may say that music’s in their genes. One young British boffin goes a step further by putting music in his jeans: he wears the world’s first pants-borne, playable electronic drum kit, complete with eight different drum sounds. And just so those pants aren’t lonely, another group of engineers has figured out a way to print sensors onto plastic, possibly making way for commercialized yoga mat drums (did somebody order that?) and more drums made out of things that aren’t drums.
The bloke inside the drummable jeans is Aseem Mishra, a 17-year-old British student who nabbed this year’s Young Engineer Of Great Britain award. His invention allows people to perform drum solos on their legs (video) by tapping eight paper-thin sensors sewn into the back of the fabric. The prototype must be plugged into a loudspeaker-toting backpack to make noise; Mishra says future models won’t be tied down like that.
Why would anyone create such a thing? As he told BBC News, he’s always thought that lugging his drum kit around for his band’s gigs were a hassle. “I think at the time I might have been tapping on my legs,” he explains, “and I thought, ...
March 18 2011
Weird App Morphs Music to Match the Picture on Your iPhone
Imagine flipping through pictures on your iPod as you listen to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, but instead of hearing the Fab Four’s familiar tune, something slightly different tickles your eardrums—and it changes with each snapshot. The tempo slows when you view a Rembrandt still life, the volume goes up with the blurred image of a headbanger, and creepy laughter resounds as you look upon a dark, moonlit landscape. This is more or less what a new iPod and iPhone software application aims to do, filtering and slightly modifying songs depending on what’s showing on your screen.
As Apple explained in a patent it published last week, they’ve developed an algorithm that looks at image data and determines “one or more characteristics,” such as “sharpness, brightness, motion, magnification, zoom setting,” and others. Next, an audio processor translates these photo observations into variations in tempo, volume, and pitch—adding its own sound effects to boot. The end result is a music experience that’s fully integrated with your photo album (and some would argue, as gratuitous, stupid, and insanely fun as Apple’s Photo Booth software). And it ...
January 05 2011
If Ke$ha Was Into Astrobiology, She Still Wouldn’t Have Made This Video
Need to teach 13-year-old Ke$ha fans about the quest for extraterrestrial life, but worried you won’t capture their attention? Fret no more. Fresh off of YouTube comes a parody of Ke$ha’s song “We R Who We R,” refashioned into an informative and utterly dorky song about astrobiology.
The video credits Jank for the lyrics and video and mrskimful for the music. We applaud the creators for their shout-outs to moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus–all promising destinations in the search for microbial life in our solar system. But we have to take exception to the quick, unqualified mention of bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, and the video’s implication that this recent finding stretches scientists’ notions about what kinds of life can exist. Have they not been following the roiling controversy over whether that finding is valid?
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October 18 2010
Dance, Fembot, Dance–Right Into the Uncanny Valley
The world’s first robot pop star, aka Divabot, made her debut last week at the Digital Contents Expo. Tech News Daily’s take on her:
The warbling robot, with the Star Wars-esque designation HRP-4C, stands at about five feet, two inches (1.58 meters) tall. It has the appearance of a young Japanese girl, although one admittedly wearing a RoboCop suit minus the helmet.
The Divabot was born from the brains of researchers at Japan’s Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. She can sing realistically because of some special software that mimics human head, mouth, and facial movements, called VocalWatcher, and she synthesizes the song with software the team created called VocalListener (their original bot used Yamaha’s Vocaloid software). The researchers even added in real-life breath sounds and blinks to make her even more humanoid. The team believes that Divabot is the first of many robo-entertainers to come, team leader Masataka Goto told Tech News Daily:
“For robots to become widespread in society, I think they need to be used widely in the entertainment industry,” said Masataka Goto, leader of the media interaction group at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology that is developing HRP-4C. “As one way of enabling this, we’ve tackled the challenge of seeing how well a robot can imitate a human singer.”
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Videos: Youtube/kmoriyama and Diginfonews
September 09 2010
Science Sing-Alongs: Higg Boson vs Google Periodic Table
If the 2008 Large Hadron Collider rap didn’t appeal to your musical sensibilities, you might try two science songs now making the internets rounds.
The first isn’t really new at all: Joe Sabia has employed Google Instant for a pastiche based on Tom Lehrer’s 1959 Elements Song, which in turn parodied Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 Major General’s Song.
[via Boing Boing]
Returning to the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s control center has hosted a sing-along. What’s especially enjoyable about this parody of Flanders and Swann’s The Hippopotamus Song are the physicists working in the background. See twelve second in–when one guy appears to do a face plant onto his desk.
[via The Inverse Square]
Not satisfied? Stay tuned for a hip-hop neuro-rap and Dr. Dre’s forthcoming space-themed album, called The Planets.
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August 23 2010
Space Shuttle Competitions: Make Astronaut Music, Bring a Shuttle Home
How do we say goodbye? As the Space Shuttle program comes to a 2011 close, NASA has announced two shuttle-related music competitions. Also museums are already lining up like Black Friday shoppers to get their hands on one of those soon-to-be retired vehicles.
In a contest dubbed the “American Idol for space,” NASA invites musicians to create an original song to compliment the STS-134 mission, and asks them to submit their musical stylings online by January 10, 2011. After a NASA panel picks a set of finalists, website visitors can vote for the winner. The top two songs will play during the final shuttle flight in February 2011.
Another ongoing competition asks the public to choose from a top 40 list of previous “wake-up songs”–music used to help astronauts rise from their orbiting slumbers. Selections include the theme from Star Trek (old school version), Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” and U2’s “Beautiful Day.” The top two will play during the STS-133 mission scheduled for this November.
Museums are also entering into a competition of sorts to snatch up a shuttle. The retired shuttles will be free, as The Wall Street Journal reports, but museums must pay shipping and handling totaling around $28.8 million dollars per vehicle, must have a jumbo jet landing strip nearby for delivery, and should have a clear path to an indoor site for display, since the museums cannot disassemble the vehicles.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum already has dibs on the fleet’s oldest shuttle, Discovery, but Atlantis and Endeavour are up for grabs. The Smithsonian has also graciously offered to give its current prototype Enterprise to another museum once it gets the real deal.
Smithsonian shuttle curator Valerie Neal told The Wall Street Journal that the museum has asked NASA to keep Discovery as complete as possible, including space toilets, for posterity’s sake:
“Who knows . . . Maybe one day we’ll have some extraterrestrials come here to look at our space history.”
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Image: NASA
June 16 2010
The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
OK Go strikes again.
Their last video memorably featured a Rube Goldberg machine that filled a two-floor warehouse and took four minutes to complete its sequence of wonder and mayhem. This time, the tech-happy band recruited Jeff Lieberman and Eric Gunther–artists, musicians, and all-around interesting guys–to direct the video.
Together, the team warped time. Check out the video, and read below for some details about the project from Lieberman.
From Lieberman:
“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”
“We also made a special friend in the process. Her name is Orange Bill and she’s a goose. You will agree that she clearly has a future in music videos.”
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June 15 2010
Vuvuzela vs Sound Engineer: Has the World Cup Stadium Horn Met Its Match?
Though these multicolored horns might look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, World Cup followers can attest that the vuvuzela is a loud and droning reality. South Africa’s soccer stadiums are resounding with their buzzing calls, driving TV audiences to distraction and causing many a viewer to reach for the mute button.
Some spectators have called for bans on the instrument, but FIFA has refused. Its president, Sepp Blatter, said via Twitter: “I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?”
But there may be a technological fix, an audio filter meant to cancel out, acoustically, the collective roar of the plastic horns.
The Telegraph reports that German recording and mixing engineer Clemence Schlieweis believes that viewers can cancel out the sounds blaring from their televisions by playing his 45-minute track of an “inverse” sound wave. He made the sound by manipulating a recording from a match broadcast, and compares his technique to ones commonly used by sound engineers to improve recordings’ quality, to remove the buzz of an air conditioner from an interview, for example.
But some acoustics experts are skeptical, given that the vuvuzela’s sounds are anything but uniform. Trevor Cox at the University of Salford, told The Telegraph:
“I can’t see how it could work. The vuvuzela chorus may come across as a single sound on television, but it is actually hundreds of instruments being blown at different times.”
But if Schlieweis’s recording can’t beat the vuvuzela, another technology is allowing spectators to join the chorus. The vuvuzela iPhone app is the number one downloaded free iPhone app in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Netherlands, UK, and South Africa, with reportedly over one million downloads.
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Image: flickr / Dundas Football Club
June 02 2010
Mozart’s Glorious Music Wasted on Waste-Eating Microbes
An hour southwest of Berlin, in the town of Treuenbrietzen, Mozart has played non-stop for two months. The classical composer’s audience? Waste-eating microbes.
As Spiegel Online reports, the German waste-facility’s owners believe the music, coupled with more oxygen, will make their microbes eat biosolids more efficiently, saving money and leaving less residual waste. Their idea comes from the German firm Mundus, headquartered in Wiesenburg, whose founder cites Mozart’s “very good effect on people.”
It’s fairly easy to poo-poo this experiment, especially given other wildly-marketed but later refuted claims attributed to the man’s music. Many of these Mozart miracles first surfaced after Frances Rauscher at the University of California, Irvine questioned in a 1993 paper (pdf) in Nature if listening to classical music could increase adolescent performance on IQ tests. Though Rauscher found that the music did seem to increase performance, later studies showed no effect.
Though the waste-facility spent hundreds on fancy stereo equipment, management hopes the scheme will save them thousands in expenses each year. One only hopes that the music will make their human employees a bit happier at a job that might otherwise stink.
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Image: flickr / gruntzooki
May 20 2010
I Swear: Subatomic Particles Are Singing to Me!
May 06 2010
Evolution, With Dope Rhymes and a Funky Hip-Hop Beat
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