today and tomorrow

‘Untitled’ sound-installation by André Avelãs.

found at vvork

Sean Dunne made this little documentary about ‘The World’s Greatest Music Collection‘. Paul Mawhinney used to have a record store, from each record he sold he kept the last one to add to his archive. So in the end he has an unique collection of 3.000.000 records. Unfortunately he has to let go of it, but apparently no one shows any serious interest in buying it.
This movie is heartbreaking, Paul really was in it for the love for music.

Timbap is a platform-independent application for augmented DJing. It was developed by students and assistants of the University of Ulm (Germany). It provides a rugged tangible interface for browsing your music collection and manipulating playback by scratching, pitching, skipping etc. Like many others it is based on an acoustic timecode signal recorded to vinyl records. In contrast to existing digital solutions however, it completely releases the DJ from mouse, keyboard and monitor. Instead it relies on physical interaction with the standard club turntable only.

It still sounds quite strange, right? So basically it is a projected video interface for selecting mp3’s. Maybe this video will make it all clear to you.
Guessing from the amount of student DJ projects, there are a lot of bedroom DJ’s among the students out there.

found at MAKE: Blog

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 Attigo TT is digital DJ setup designed by Scott Hobbs, an Innovation Product Design student from the UK. There are already a few mp3 DJ mixing systems out there, but his is a little different. He didn’t use any breakthrought technology, just 2 touchscreens to manipulate a visualisation of audio files. He used Flash for the interface and Max/MSP to control the sound files. He has a lot of documentation on this project on his website. Honestly, I don’t think that it’s very innovative, but well done anyway. Hey it’s a functional prototype afterall.

Reuben Sutherland printed some short video clips on vinyl, just a few frames. Then he plays them with his turntable and films it again to use in his VJ work. The effect is quite good. VinylVideo is some other project where they really encoded video in the vinyl grooves, even more impressive.

PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT ONLY

I’m a true ni9e / F.A.T. fanboy, here is his next project: Explicit Content Only, a vinyl album. On side A you can hear a curse words only version of N.W.A.’s classic album Straight Outta Compton. On the B side is the Explicit Content Only version of Eazy-E’s ‘Eazy Duz It’. You can of course buy it or download the mp3’s. Or even better, watch it spin.

Vinyl Remarks is a website where you can find and submit text, which you sometimes find between the run-out groove and the record label . I really like this idea and the look and feel of it.

Here is a documentary about being a DJ in German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. as East Germany or the DDR). Back then you needed to take a class and pass a test to get your permit as a “Staatlich geprüfter Schallplattenunterhalter der DDR” (an official DJ of GDR). There was a 60/40 rule, they were only allowed to play 40% western music, 60% had to be East German.
You’ll need some basic German to understand all of it.

Nintendo Wiimote DJ + DS VJ + Ms.Pinky + Max/MSP/Jitter