The recording translates the length of its vinyl groove into audio allowing listeners to experience the 1/4 mile length of the spiral as the record is played. Every inch of the needle’s path is audible in the form of a click, each foot as a beat and distances of 10 feet are heard as a blip. These sounds gradually slow as the stylus approaches the center, (the stylus travels less distance in the groove with each revolution of the record). Along the way, the voice of the narrator mentions the horizontal dimensions of particular objects.
This tangle is the unbroken, vinyl residue resulting from the initial master cutting of Quarter Mile Groove. Unraveled, this thread of vinyl would be 1⁄4 mile in length.
Katie Paterson recorded the sound of 3 glaciers (Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull and Solheimajökull) on Iceland. She then pressed those recordings on ice record made of melt water from those glaciers. The records were played on 3 turntables and it took almost 2 hours till they were completely melted. You can listen to one here.
Neo Gramophone is concept by Lars Amhoff, it is an reincarnation of a classic gramophone. It can play music streamed from your iTunes, a subsurface touchscreen menu let you control the music player. I’m currious if it will get past this concept phase, but it’s a nice object anyway.
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.
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.
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.
