Interactive, Web-based Music Video for 3 Dreams of Black

Remember the Arcade Fire Google Chrome Video that I talked about a few months ago? It utilized the new HTML 5 standard and combined it with google maps - to create a personalized music video based on your location. Very neat stuff.

Today's post is something that further pushes the envelope with "web-based" music videos...and it's really awesome (it's brought together by Chris Milk, the same people who did the Arcade Fire vid).

"3 Dreams of Black" is a track from the concept album "ROME" by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. The album features Norah Jones and Jack White and will be released some time in the near future. In the mean time, they've released a really neat promo video that is designed specifically for viewing through a web browser. In fact, much like the Arcade Fire video, you can ONLY watch it online, using google chrome. But boy is it cool.

It's so interactive that it feels like a video game - you can change the view point, and guide the animals as they morph and interact with the environment. In fact in many ways it's closer to a video game, because many of the elements are rendered live (if you don't know what that means, it just means your computer is actually creating each frame, instead of just playing each frame).

What's more, you can also create your own animals/creatures to appear - and some of them will even automatically appear in other people's viewing experience. It's not just interactive, it also connects viewers to each other!

See the actual video at www.ro.me

See the behind the scenes video here:


What do you think?

world's first location aware album

 What happens when you combine the idea of a concept album with the localized interactive innovation of trackdropper? Bluebrain's new album, The National Mall.

Bluebrain has come up with a really neat concept album about the national mall in Washington, that can ONLY be listened to when you're at the national mall. In fact, each song has a specific location around the mall, and you have to physically go there with an iphone to be able to listen to the songs:

"'The National Mall’ works by tracking a users location via the iPhones built-in GPS capabilities. Hundreds of zones within the Mall are tagged and alter the sound based on where the listener is located in proximity to them. Zones overlap and interact in dynamic ways that, while far from random, will yield a unique experience with each listen. The proprietary design that is the engine behind the app will stay hidden from view as the melodies, rhythms, instrumentation and pace of the music vary based on the listeners’ chosen path. ‘The National Mall’ is an ambitious project that will allow users to listen to and interact with a work of music in a way that’s never been possible before."

The part that really excites me are the overlapping zones - it will be really neat to see what they've done.

Awesome!! I would probably combine it with a regular downloadable release, but the idea is definitely something that pushes interactivity to a new level.

The Invisible Instrument

On this blog I've talked about Music Hack Day here, and here in the past. Seriously, this is a concept/conference that just keeps giving!

For those who aren't familiar with it - Put together music nerds with computer nerds, give them 24 hours to hack together a music related application/program, and you have... Music Hack Day.

The winner of the top prize for Music Hack Day NYC is really mind blowing (okay, I said that about other Music Hack Day creations, but it's all so true!), and it's called The Invisible Instrument. Created by Tim Soo, it combines the responsiveness of real instruments, the programmability and portability of digital instruments, and the fun factor of air guitar! Just watch the video, and you will want to try it yourself. The program is in development though, so if you like what he is doing, help fund the project by going here!

Shoes as an Instrument #2

Awhile ago, I posted a blog about a shoe that Nike made (purely for promotional purposes, not for production) - in which a set of shoes were fitted with MIDI triggers on the soles. That blog post his here.

Adidas has now come up with something very similar - but this time it's wireless and a little bit more collaborative. Check it out below!

Shimon, The Robot That Can Improvise Music

In one my previous posts, I talked about "seperating performance from recording". In it, I discussed the digitization of an actual performance, such that you can simulate a recording - say a piano piece by Thelonious Monk - and replicate it on a real piano (If this doesn't make sense, you're not alone. It's something that's hard to explain with the current lingo in music. So go check the other blog post). Today's post is a similar endeavor, but with an even more challenging task - a robot that can not only simulate a player, but improvise over live music.

This can be done of course, by the fact that music - even improvisation - follows a set of general rules. Yet the fascinating thing here, is that the type of improvisation can be programmed to be characterized as different real life artists. As the video explains, Shimon (the name of the robot) can programmed to be "30% artist A, and 40% artist B, and the rest something else". At the same time, it is able to react to real time input by the musicians Shimon is playing with! That's an amazing technical accomplishment!

Of course, this makes me ponder the same question as the other post: Would you truly enjoy this music? Would it somehow "cheapen" it? Does it even matter?



And here's a full performance:

TrackDropper - Geocaching with Music!

Ahh... Music Hack Day. What a wonderful concept. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can check out my blog post on it here. Here's a really cool idea that came out of Music Hack Day London 2010: TrackDropper.

As I'm sure many of you net savvy readers are aware, geocaching is one of the neatest things to catch on in the last decade. With the advent of cheap GPS devices and the internet, the nerdy scavenger hunt has become an accessible and fun way to discover things about the places you go to - whether that is your local neighborhood, or somewhere in a foreign country. It lets you be just a little more connected to your surroundings, to your fellow human beings in a way that is strangely personal.

And then comes Trackdropper, created by Andrew Bruce, Chris Lowis and Yves Raimond. The concept is very simple: instead of just sharing music online to anyone who has an internet connection, this app associates a specific location with the music file. In other words, you have to actually go to the location to download the music. Geocaching....with music!

Yes, it's illegal, and it's piracy with a twist... but the potential to make this something extraordinary makes this really exciting.

By associating a specific location with your music, a musician could write a song that is specific to that place. You could dictate the surroundings, the atmosphere, the noise and smells that a musical piece is associated with! And because you have to go there personally to get it, that strange sense of being "personal" could be experienced by the listener. Imagine singing a song about a specific scene, a part of a river, a famous building.. and you can have the listener actually see the real thing as they listen. On a more practical usage, You could also easily release a song at a specific location to be timed with a public performance/signing, or other publicity events.

The app is currently limited to the Android phone, but isfree for download here. Go re-discover your own neighborhood!

TrackDropper from Yves Raimond on Vimeo.

Interactive, Personalized Music Video by Arcade Fire

I don't know how I completely missed this until now, but better late then never!

The new music video - although calling it that doesn't really describe everything that's going on in it - by Arcade Fire is one heck of an interesting experiment. It's a joint project between them and google. "...google? Google made videos?"

...well, not exactly. This is where it gets interesting.

Instead of a normal video, it's an interactive experience that combines traditional music videos, google maps, your own text input, mouse movements, and browser technology. Using a specific video clip as the basis, it uses the ability to place different sized browser windows to create a seamless experience that is custom made to each person.  By adding a location - and google streetview's photos of that area - the video renders 3D images of your address, while adding 3D animations over it.  At the same time, the multiple windows create a split screen (split several different ways) viewing experience that jumps between the windows, rendering different things. It's really quite neat, not just as a music video but as an internet browsing experience. Indeed, it's a refreshing and surprising way to enjoy the internet itself. This really changes the concept of the music video.

But really, this won't make any sense unless you see it yourself. To see it properly, you'll need to download google chrome.

So go see The Wilderness Downtown - An interactive film by Chris Milk, featuring "We Used to Wait" by The Arcade Fire.

To learn more about this project, and how it's done, go here.

Need a Drummer? A Guitarist? A Kazoo..ist? Musical Collective Might Be The Solution

If you're a musician, song-writer, or composer, you've probably been faced with the following dilemmas: You have an awesome idea, but you don't have the instruments to put it down in a recording.  You can't afford to pay for a professional studio musician, but you really need a drummer.  You have a great snippet of a song/piece, but maybe you don't know what to do with it.

In other words, you want to collaborate with someone...but you don't have the right people around you.

In the age of the internet however, this shouldn't be such a problem. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of a forum for this specific niche - you had craigslist to jam with locals, you had music forums to discuss technical/equipment related things, and you had sample library websites where the focus is a little different.  The closest thing were electronic music forums, but there wasn't much out there for composers and other musicians.  What musicians wanted was a forum where they could post snippets, ideas, or even entire songs - and have other musicians and composers add things to it.

Well, we seem to have finally arrived at such a forum.  The Musical Collective is brand spanking new website that is aiming to become the hubris for musical collaboration. It's still in it's infant stages, but I am hoping that it takes off - as the founder, Brad Westness says:

I wanted to make a place where people could collaborate on music, kind of like the famous stories of "The Postal Service" completing their album by mailing tapes back and forth. I thought this would be a little more convenient than mailing tapes.

Way more convenient indeed.

What do you think?

No Instruments? We Have Iphones!

This is an interesting story of creativity coming out of adversity and constraint. Atomic Tom, a band based out of Brooklyn, recently had their instruments stolen. An unfortunately fairly common problem for bands. I can't imagine how bummed out they would have been - but it turns out they are garnering more attention than ever before, thanks to their creativity.

Using nothing but their iphones and a battery powered amp, they decided to make a video of them playing in the New York subway system. That's right - all of their instruments are music apps for the iphone. It's a fun little video, and the song is pretty good too.

Creativity trumps again!

"Take Me Out" by Atomic Tom

*UPDATE OCT 20* -- Turns out they didn't actually have their instruments stolen, they just said that to provide a better effect. I guess that's good news. Also, for those who are curious, we now know what apps they used:

Guitar - iShred
Drums - Drum Meister
Bass Guitar - Pocket Guitar
Piano - Piano Virtuoso

Write Songs on the Fly! LaDiDa Iphone App

This is a neat little app, much in the same vein as the microsoft songsmith which I talked about in a past blog post. To quickly explain: this app lets you sing any melody you think of, and figures out the best chord progressions and arrangements that suit the melody. You don't have to have a clue about music theory or composition, but you can create a song.

Ofcourse, not everything is the same as microsoft songsmith. This app seems to use pitch correction more liberally, but more importantly, it's completely portable.

As the microsoft songsmith showed however, this type of musical creation software is probably still too early to be taken seriously as a musical creation tool for "serious" artists. If youtube is of any indication, songsmith was used as a novelty application, rather than a musical application. Indeed, it's used more as a way to insight laughs, rather than as a way to create music you want to listen to (although it was really fun to listen to "real" songs being put through songsmith, to see if songsmith would come up with the same chord progression as the original songs. It pretty much failed 99% of the time.).

Now that it has become portable, I wonder when this type of app will be good enough to break that "novelty" barrier?

Music Hack Day

Put together music nerds with computer nerds, give them 24 hours to hack together a music related application/program, and you have... Music Hack Day.

It's a marathon coding session that encourages programmers to come up with new, innovative ideas about the way music can interact with computers. So far it's been a great success in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston and Stockholm. Upcoming events are going to be held in San Francisco and Amsterdam. At the end of the event they showcase their apps, which can then be downloaded on their official website.

According to their homepage: "The main goal of Music Hack Day is to explore and build the next generation of music applications. It's a full weekend of hacking in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it's music related."

Apps range from things that apply to social networking sites such as myspace and facebook, to music streaming services such as soundcloud and last.fm, as well as standalone apps and websites. As you can expect, the products are not incredibly refined - but the ideas that come out of these events are sometimes really impressive.

Take a look for yourself at musichackday.org. If you click on the past dates you can see the prize winners from past events etc.

Convert Websites into Music

On this blog, we've seen programs that compose songs based on the landscape of the moon or based on the numbers in Pi, as well as one that was based on birds sitting on wires. Here's another one called "The Codeorgan" based on websites!

According to the website, The Codeorgan analyzes the "body" section of the website and translates that content into music. It seems that it is based purely on the HTML code though, so many websites based on php or java won't be as long and intricate - because there is less HTML code in the body section in those websites.

...so what does this page sound like?



What do you think of it? Go and try out other websites at their page, and let us know if any websites produce something really special!

Also, here's the description from their website:
"THE CODEORGAN ANALYSES THE *BODY* CONTENT OF ANY WEB PAGE AND TRANSLATES THAT CONTENT INTO MUSIC. THE CODEORGAN USES A COMPLEX ALGORITHM TO DEFINE THE KEY, SYNTH STYLE AND DRUM PATTERN MOST APPROPRIATE TO THE PAGE CONTENT.

FIRSTLY, THE CODEORGAN SCANS THE PAGE CONTENTS AND REMOVES ALL
CHARACTERS NOT FOUND IN THE MUSICAL SCALE (A TO G), AND THEN ANALYSES THE REMAINING CHARACTERS TO FIND THE MOST COMMONLY USED 'NOTE'. IF THIS IS AN EVEN NUMBER THE PAGE IS TRANSLATED IN TO THE MAJOR PENTATONIC SCALE OF THAT PARTICULAR NOTE, IT BECOMES MINOR IF THERE IS AN UNEVEN NUMBER.

SECONDLY, THE CODEORGAN DEFINES WHICH SYNTHESIZER TO USE. THIS IS
BASED UPON THE TOTAL NUMBER CHARACTERS USED ON THE WEBPAGE – THERE ARE CURRENTLY 10 SYNTHESIZER EFFECTS AND THE ONE CHOSEN IS PICKED BASED UPON THE PERCENTAGE OF CONTENT.

LASTLY, THE CODEORGAN SELECTS A DRUM LOOP BASED UPON THE RATIO OF CHARACTERS ON THE PAGE VERSUS THE NUMBER OF CHARACTERS THAT ARE ACTUALLY MUSICAL NOTES – THERE ARE CURRENTLY 10 DIFFERENT DRUM LOOPS TO PICK FROM.

GO AND MAKE BEAUTIFUL MUSIC TOGETHER.

THE CODEORGAN PEOPLE"

Shoes as an Instrument

...Or more specifically, a MIDI trigger.

Although this video is part of a Nike Ad, it's pretty interesting. If you've seen my previous post on modifying the guitar hero controller into an instrument, it's a similar concept. Instead of changing guitar hero buttons into a MIDI trigger, the shoes have been modified with sensors that respond to how they are bent.

Gimmicky - yes - but fun nonetheless. I'm slightly disappointed that they didn't use dancers wearing the shoes, but check it out!

MelodyCatcher & Musipedia: A Different Kind of Music Search Engine

I recently came across this website, which is really interesting.
MelodyCatcher.com is a music search engine, but it's unlike anything else I've seen. I've seen lyric search engines, or those search engines on phones that will recognize what song is being played. This is entirely different though: you input notes in standard notation.

The technological idea is pretty cool: input a bunch of notes, search for midi files that have those note intervals (so it can be in any key), and if there's a match it lists them.

However, the usage is not as intuitive as the site seems to think: In my personal opinion, you have to be pretty good at playing by ear to be able to transpose things note by note. However, it's really useful if you already know how to play a specific piece on an instrument....but you can't remember what the name of the piece is.

Alternatively, this is a neat way to see if something you've written is a song that already exists!

------

Edit:

Also, check this site out: Musipedia.org

It's a similar, but more expanded music search engine. It not only does a search based on a similar criteria as the one mentioned above, but also for rhythm patterns, the contour of a melody etc. It's pretty cool.

Using an Old Nintendo as an Instrument

Anamanaguchi is a band from New York which consists of 2 guitarists, a bassist, a drummer... and an old NES. You know, that fun little gray machine that you play games on. Or at least games from the 80's.

Instead of using regular keyboards however, they hacked an NES to enable the designing/programing of sounds. Now that's a fun concept! The music is obviously very "video-game" like, but because of the "real" instruments that play with the NES, it has an added depth that's interesting. Check it out!



The Anamanaguchi Website

Using the Landscape of the Moon to Compose Songs

I once posted about composing a song based on Pi. Here's a website that's based on similar principles, but instead of using an irrational number, it uses data from topography maps. In other words, the notes are based on the height of the landscape.

The landscape in this case though, is the moon! Moonbell is an interactive website where you can dictate the topographical line you want the program to follow, and the musical scales to base its composition. A neat little idea.
Moonbell Website

Modifying the Guitar Hero Guitar into a Real Instrument

So following a post about a Guitar Hero type program that teaches you how to play the real thing with this post... is perhaps overkill, but this too excited to ignore. It combines my geeky yearnings with my musical needs!

This video is of a guy who has modified the Guitar Hero controller for the Wii, and turned it into a synth. It's basically a synth controller that is triggered by the Guitar Hero controller, so in reality it's not that impressive - in terms of a new instrument, it really isn't one. Except that it's just plain awesome, because it's a Guitar Hero guitar being used as a real instrument! Hahahaha---!

Watch him play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with it. It actually works!

Guitar Hero for Real Guitars (plus hilarious variations)

I have mixed feelings about Guitar Hero: On the one hand, I can understand how it's fun. I also think it's a really good way to integrate and market music, since it's not just background music, but integral to the experience. Yet the experience.... is essentially just karaoke for guitar, an enhanced "air guitar" experience. Don't get me wrong, I actually think Air Guitaring is really neat, especially those competitions they do - If you've never seen clips of it, you should check it out.

My hesitations however, come from the fact that there are people out there who are REALLY good at it. The time spent perfecting a song on guitar hero... could have been spent playing and learning the real thing, and it just seems like such a waste. Perhaps I'm being harsh here, because it's not like anyone says "the time spent jumping in Mario could have been used to become a better high-jumper"... because it's a video game after all. Yet because the experience is so close - the finger movements, the picking, even the whammy bar - it seems like it's a relatively small jump to make (that being said, I actually play guitar and I can say with confidence that I suck at "guitar hero", so I'm not saying the two are THAT similar. I'm just saying that it's relatively similar, compared to say... jumping in Mario, and jumping in real life, where there is really nothing in common at all).

Enter "Guitar Rising". Guitar Rising is a game that is currently in development, which can be easily summed up as: Guitar Hero.. for Real Guitars. Using an electric guitar as the controller, it's essentially a rolling, colour coded guitar tablature that follows the music. The biggest challenge for the developers though, is in making this an entertaining experience, rather than a chore. Learning an instrument involves lots of mistakes, frustrations, and patience - which is why learning an instrument isn't necessarily all fun and games. But as Guitar Hero has shown, people are willing to learn difficult and repetitive motions so long as it keeps entertaining. It will be very interesting to see how this product bridges the real instrument with the entertainment that guitar hero provides!

GuitarRising
by jakeparks

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Bonus Section!

Here's some hilarious Guitar Hero/Rock Band accessories and variations that exist...

Air Guitar Hero - Now you can play guitar hero, but without the plastic guitars!! Get closer to the real Air Guitar experience right at home!


Rock Band Fog Machine/Strobe Light!! - What good are the screaming girls and guitars... if you don't have a fog machine and a strobe light? Well fret no more! Rock Band has an official fog machine and strobe light. Hilarity.


And Finally...
Guitar Praise, because God hates rock music - Sick of the secular and sinful nature of popular music? Want to play Guitar Hero but your mom won't let secular music into the house? Then Guitar Praise is for you! ...Even if you don't like secular music, both guitar hero and rockband support custom songs, so why is there a need for this??


If you know of any other hilarious variations or add-ons, please share!

Seperating Performance from the Recording

I've debated for a long time about whether to talk about today's topic. I generally like to post things that I genuinely feel are really great aspects of music, but today's topic is something that I am fascinated by, but also quite uneasy about at the same time.

The video today is a lecture from TED.com again. It involves a project in which the performance of a song is separated from its recording. Confusing? It's a new way of thinking about music and what we mean when we refer to "music" (the ontology of music is a whole area of philosophy that I won't bother going into now, but maybe another post some time...). The idea is that instead of capturing a specific recording with mics, or writing down specific notes on paper, another way (and supposedly a better way) to capture music is to digitize the actual keystrokes, how hard a piano is struck, and how far the pedals are pushed down etc. In other words, it captures all the personal choices that performers make, and turns it into digital information.

With that information, an instrument, and a computer... theoretically you can make the computer play the instrument exactly like the original artist , thereby enabling the listener to truly experience the piece as it was played.

Now the question is: are you really listening to the original artist? Or anything resembling what musicians actually do when you listen to them play live? Or is it missing something?

I am torn about this. I think it's unfair to immediately dismiss this, because we have some precedent for this in the music world. When recordings came out, people were fascinated, but also scoffed at the idea. When CD's were invented and recordings shifted from analog to digital, people also thought it lost something. Finally, when mp3's further compressed the sound, some people were uneasy as well. While all these criticisms are totally correct in their points of argument, it's also true that the majority of the public has transitioned, and it has changed the way we experience and listen to music (I realize that just because lots of people are okay with it, it doesn't make it right...but if people enjoy it, then arguably it's still doing what music is supposed to do in the first place).

That being said though, I do feel like this still fails to capture what he claims - the "spirit" of the musician. Being a musician myself, I know that playing music in front of people involves more than just the notes I play, the strength and lengths of the notes I play.. in fact, it involves more than me, my music, and my instrument. Playing in front of people involves a dialogue with the audience, much like a conversation. Depending on the mood of the crowd, my mood, the room, the mood of those I am playing with... it all changes. The people conducting this project don't seem to understand that, and it frightens me that they are thinking ahead to the point where they think they can play/compose a piece of music in place of the actual composer/player.

Either way though, an interesting thing to ponder, lots to think about. Let me know what you think!

So this is what the most annoying and most enjoyable song sounds like...

This is well over a few years old at this point, but so is the Armonica, so who really cares? My non-existent readership? (That will either be slightly funny, or incredibly depressing...depending on your own opinion of this blog. hahahaha)

I'm talking about the Komar & Melamid and David Soldier compositions. It's an attempt at composing the most annoying/hated song, as well as the most liked song.

What they did was conduct a survey which tried to find out what instruments, topics, styles and so forth, that the general listener enjoyed/hated the most. Using that data, they combined all the most "enjoyable" elements into a song, and combined all the most "hated" elements into another song. The results? ...strange... very...strange.

The most unwanted song is statistically likely to be enjoyed by fewer than 200 people in the whole entire world. It is 25min long, with children singing holiday songs and jingles about Walmart, bagpipes, opera and rap etc.....dysfunctionally pieced together in abrupt changes. There's actually hardly any dissonance, which is pretty neat: They created the most "listenable" unlistenable music. It's totally fun to listen to, although yes, it's pretty bad. Check out the opera singer rapping. It's hilarious:


Right Click to Download "The Most Unwanted Music"

In comparison, the most liked song is statistically likely to be enjoyed by 72% of the population, plus/minus 12%. It is of radio friendly length, moderate tempo, with guitar, piano, low male and female vocals singing slow rock/r&b etc. So what does that all add up to? Easy Rock. Adult contemporary, easy-listening. I have to admit, the string-swells, the key changes, and the sax...kinda made me cringe. But don't take my word for it! Experience it yourself:


Right Click to Download "The Most Wanted Music"

I copied these links from the Wired blog, so for more information check their page.

For more detailed information about the compositions, check the composers webpage.