I mentioned this project of David Byrne ‘Playing the Building‘ before. I’m still amazed by this installation. Xeni from Boing Boing TV had the chance to have and interview with David Byrne himself. It’s always nice when the artist explains his work.
There are a lot of hardware music projects out there: Big Ideas (Don’t get any) (the Radiohead Nude remix), Playing the Building, Absolut Machines, Harddisko, …
So here’s a floppy drive playing the Emperors March.
found at nerdcore
An other one is the ‘BeggingBot’ by Alexander Gurko, it plays music just by floppy and hard drive mechanics. A 3³/4 and 2²/5 inch floppy drive and a very old hard disk represent different instruments playing a nice tune by just moving their heads and motors. When the tune is finished the CD drive opens asking for money. Just pay some cents and the bot plays again.
found at Aram Bartholl’s Blog
Radiohead held a remix contest for their song ‘Nude’ from their latest album ‘In Rainbows’. The original title of was ‘Big Ideas (Don’t get any)’, James Houston took that as his inspiration. He recreated the song with quite a different lineup: Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead), Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums, HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar and a Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX.
found at MAKE: Blog
‘Playing the Building‘ is an amazing sound installation by David Byrne, yeah you might know him from the Talking Heads. I copied the orginal description because I could not formulate it better. You can visit it at the Battery Maritime Building in New York City till August 10th.
Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.
Of course a video is even better:
More info at Creative Time.
Here are 4 projects that I found interesting from the ITP Spring Show 2008. ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts in New York.
1. BrushBots by Christian Cerrito, small robots are moving over a canvas and paint with their brushes … just watch the video.
2. Speaker Synth by Lesley Flanigan.
Speaker Synth is a five-speaker array with no external audio input, created by Lesley Flanigan. The only components in the system are the instrument’s speakers, piezoelectric microphones, amplifying circuits, and the hands of the performer. Speaker Synth is played by positioning individual piezo microphones with their corresponding speakers and manipulating their associated on/off and volume controls to induce a variation of feedback effects. During the performance, samples from both Speaker Synth and a vocalist are captured and sequenced to build a dense sonic pallet of rhythms and melodies. The performance explores music making through structuring noise, highlighting relationships between analog and digital sound synthesis and between human voice and the voice of an instrument.
Here is a video of a performance with the instrument. (Part 2)
3. The Naked Pixel by Corey Menscher.
The Naked Pixel challenges our notion of decency in public arenas by using an LED tile to represent individual pixels of a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe sequentially over time. By viewing the piece, the audience is not only unaware of what they are viewing, but their primary visual cortex can not mentally construct the sequence of colors into a coherent image.
Using a light sensor, the piece detects nightfall and further “undresses” each pixel’s color into its binary value by displaying a sequence of ones and zeroes. This further obfuscates the representation of the potentially “obscene” image.
4. The Pasta Cycle by Jason Krugman.
The Pasta Cycle gets its name from an early prototype in which magnets rotating on its surface pushed elbow maccaroni around to form concentric circle patterns. The Pasta Cycle’s 2 x 2 foot box contains a rotating wheel covered in rare Earth magnets. As the wheel is spun around by a motor, it creates varying magnetic fields on the surface of the box, allowing the user to place magnets on it which get dragged along by the magnets on the wheel. The user can then place various materials on the surface of the box that get interfered with by the sliding magnets. Marbles and elbow maccaroni are the two materials of choice at this time.
‘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.
‘In Vestimentis Ursum‘ is a collection of stuffed animals that sing, dance, light up, or talk back. Matt Kirkland disassembled them to show the robot inside the toys. Some look quite creepy.
I’ve posted Lilypad before, it is a variation of the Arduino open-source prototyping board to create electronic textiles.
As you might have guessed, the Lilypad is the one on the right, the others are Arduino boards. Other electronic elements are also embedded in the embroidery. It definitely has a different look than all those other breadboard based physical computing projects.
work and picture by Beck Stern
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.