Yuri Suzuki is a Japanese product designer and electronic music artist living in London. Here are 3 projects by him.
Sound Chaser
A train-style record player. Users connect the chipped pieces of records together to make new tracks. The records pieces are from cheap records bought at jumble sales or used record shops. This record player revives forgotten, old records.
Prepared Turntable
A turntable that focuses on actively composing and playing music.
This record player has 5 tone arms, each of which can have its volume controlled by its own fader.
This is an analogue answer for the digitalized DJ.
Finger Player
I guess that the video and the pictures explain everything.
The AirPiano is project by Omer Yosha, an Interface Design student from the FH Potsdam (Germany).
The AirPiano is an innovative musical interface which allows playing and controlling software instruments simply by moving hands in the air.
Above the AirPiano is a virtual matrix of keys and faders, each assigned with MIDI messages and ready to be triggered. The length of a triggered note is equivalent to the time a hand
is placed on the corresponding virtual key.
This is also confirmed by LED feedback.
The AirPiano Software allows easy setup, loading/saving presets and transposing notes.
The AirPiano is still in its prototype phase and its concept of a virtual matrix might eventually be used for other applications and purposes.
The AirPiano concept is filled as a Provisional U.S. Patent Application (Number: 60/989,986).
In this video he uses his AirPiano to control Ableton Live.
The Image Fulgurator is a project by Julius von Bismarck. Here is his description:
The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.
In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.
Video of the first test of an image fulguration in public.
Context:
This video shows an Intervention at the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. (former border of east and west Germany) The target of the manipulation was the famous “YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR” - sign.
The manipulation created a link from the former East / West border to the US / Mexican border in order to reimagine the dramatic situation at worldwide borders today. The massage was addressed to the tourists on location, that can travel easily over every border without risking there life.
The Tapehead Inspector allows you to read magnetic tapes manually. You can scratch your old tapes with this device! I really like that they payed attention to the casing, the hardware is hidden in an old videotape. Switching ‘tapes’ is no fuss eather.
‘Spinal Rhythms‘ is the thesis project of Eva Schindling. The subtitle is ‘Autonomous Embodied Evolution of a Biomimetic Robot’s Rhythmic Motion Behavior’, I’ve read it a few times and I’m still puzzled. It’s all about the physical movement of a stick-creature and its fitness. She didn’t use any electric motor to move the limbs but elastic shape memory alloy springs. Those contract when heated with electic current and expand when the cooldown, an Arduino board controls the whole system (an open source physical computing platform). It is of course very conceptual but maybe the video will clear up a few things.
Violence is an inevitable, mechanical function of the human brain, hard-coded down through time by culture, genetics, and evolution. Mediated experiences of killing change our perception of violence and death. As players die in a public video game server for Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, the electronic solenoid valves spray a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of nebulous kills.
Custom electronics based on an Atmega8/168 micro-controller are connected to a PC running a dedicated Counter-strike Source server. Players across the internet can connect and play live on the server, and each time a player dies, a java script written in Processing sends serial commands to the micro-controller, telling it to spray fake blood.
The ‘Digital MIDI Step Sequencer‘ is an Arduino based MIDI sequencer. I’m in awe for the breadboard design! Make sure you watch this video of the first prototype on YouTube.
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It is part of the whole Processing open-source movement. Everyone who wants to get into physical computing should get such an Arduino board.
I whish I was smart enough to build something like that … I’ll try to make an LED blink tonight, promissed …
“Besides the impressive functionality, this is some some very elegant breadboarding at work.” - Make Magazine
Tadaa the iPhone SDK is here, ok it’s still in beta though. So if you have seen the presentation video, you might be quite excited too. Just skip to minute 41 and there you have it, nintendo Wii-like controls for gaming. The big advantage that Apple has, is that they have full control over the hardware and software. And that’s where I see the weakest point of the Google Android platform.
And for those of you who are still waiting for the Flash plugin for the iPhone. I guess as long as Adobe doesn’t make a custom player, we won’t see Flash on the iPhone. How would the iPhone / Flash player scale down Flash content anyway? And is the processor strong enough? Battery life? … just forget about it.
I actually had to use someone else’s mac to have a look at the SDK, I still have a G4 Powerbook and you’ll need an intel one.
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