today and tomorrow

‘Absolut Machines‘ is quite an amazing project by Absolut Vodka. Basically, Absolut commissioned 2 interactive sound sculptures, which you can control through the website, you’ll have to wait in line though.
‘Absolut Quartet’ is a robotic mechanical orchestra, by playing the piano you can inspire the 3 robotic ‘musicians’. You can find some making of pictures in this Flickr set. The other one, ‘Absolut Choir’ is a machine consisting of 22 choir members, by typing in words and sentences you inspire them to sing. Both are just amazing!
On the website you can choose from different camera angles, see some documentation, download your composition as a video etc. It’s just a pain to use it. I think it’s a shame that the website doesn’t match the quality of the installations.
Here is a tip, just go to the press website if you want to get straight to the info.

Harddisko, it is what it is.
found at VVORK

This is probably the coolest homemade music sequencer. Made by Roman Haefeli.

A software-sequencer controls 8 solenoids, that knock on different things and therefore produce some rhythmic noise. Made with puredata, an arduino board and a selfmade relayboard to control the solenoids.

found at DE:BUG

Here are 2 other installations from the From Spark to Pixel exhibition. First: Hemisphere by Ulf Langheinrich. You had to lie on the floor under a gigantic hemisphere on which abstract animations where projected together with sound and stroboscopes. You had to lie there to experience it, but maybe this video gives you an idea.

An other installation was Ondulation by Thomas McIntosh. It’s basically a thin layer of water with some speakers beneath it. Due to the position of the speakers and the different frequencies, amazing wave patterns appeared. The water surface mirrored the light onto the wall so you could see the effect better.
There are some more pictures and 2 videos on the website.

I WANT A BIKE LIKE THAT!
You can read an article about them at The New York Times.
found @ Boing Boing

‘Karaoke Landscape’ by Norbert Möslang.
found @ VVORK

RGB MusicLab converts RGB (Red, Green and Blue) value of an image to chromatic scale sounds. The program reads RGB value of pixels from the top left to the bottom right of an image. One pixel makes a harmony of three note of RGB value, and the length of note is determined by brightness of the pixel.

Desription: Meek FM is an interpretation of type as sound. Using new software and the M.E.E.K. typographic synthesizer, the musician/designer develops sounds and typographic visuals in parallel.

Meek•FM Typographic Synthesizer, a project by Rob Meek & Frank Müller.

Phase of Sound #08 “reflection” by Link
found @ designboom weblog

I guess that the picture and the project title are quite self-explaining.
‘Colorsound’ by Alvin Aronson.