Check out this music/sound generating instrument thing - looks great! Also check out the website

String Thing: "String Thing, by Benjamin Dove, is a cello-like electronic instrument played by stroking or beating metal rods with the hands. The use of body gestures, variable and visible to the audience, avoids the ‘mechanical’ and visually uncommunicative aspect of computer-based music performances.

string_thing_13[1].jpg

Four parallel metal rods are each divided into a long and a short section by a bridge element. The pressure and position of the fingers on the longer rod section are sensed to control pitch and expression; pressure on the shorter sections controls velocity, attack and volume. MIDI software converts the data into sound and, through magnets under each rod, vibrates the rod according to the pressure it senses, thus returning haptic feedback to the player.

String Thing produces continuous pitch: notes bend seamlessly into each other. Light from a laser pointer above each rod, reflected as a dot on the player's finger, is detected by a small webcam in the bridge; this movement controls the pitch.

Video of the prototype testing (wmv, 32mb).

Other work by Ben Dove: Audiograffiti.

"

(Via we make money not art.)

OK… So I‘m somewhat late to the party for this to be anything like ’breaking news‘ but having played for a week or so with the podcasting features of iTunes 4.9, I have to say I’m impressed; in typical Apple fashion they have managed to make process very simple and straight-forward.

I guess there are really 2 things I wanted to say about this …

  1. Get hooked up with delicious RSS eg: http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video :: this will get any new videos bookmarked on del.icio.us (and if you don't know what del.icio.us is, you really need to check it out; it's such an useful resource - even if only as the easiest way of organising your web bookmarks). There are all sorts of things posted up here - very entertaining!
  1. The future: RSS enclosures have unbelievable possibilities - how about subscription based music, where a 'Bayesian (t d f)‘ algorithm (like the one used for Junk filtering in OSX’s Mail.app, but in reverse - selecting things you do want), picks out music for you and automatically sends it through to you via RSS, directly into iTunes. And so on.

Anyway. Steam:Out

It was a real shiny gig. I loved watching Pink Floyd do some classic numbers. And the rest of the artists. All good. What bugs me is some of the negative publicity - about not enough black artists, Did it do any good etc.

For me, the issue goes like this … developed nations are economically pissing on the poor, especially Africa, with unfair trade rules and insufficient aid for the desperate plight they are in. We can change that by a. having a big enough voice to shout to world leaders, and b. heed how we shop. And this 2nd point is as important as the first because money talks loudly.

Fairtrade isn‘t just a good idea; it’s a moral responsibility. If even 1% of the 6.5 Billion or whatever people who watched Live8 decided to buy Fairtrade, we'd have an economic and therefore social revolution.

Get artists the world wants to see, whatever their colour or creed (seriously no disrespect due) and get them to deliver a message the world needs to hear. Does it get more complicated than that?

Over.

The Beatbox: physically programmable drum machine: "Beatbox

Yeah, we love to tweak our knobs and faders aight, so this project by Andy Huntington caught our eyes — it's a drum

machine whose sounds are programmable by actual physical manipulation of several control objects. There's not too much

in the way of description on this thing, but watch the video and you'll get the idea — it looks like factors such as

height and proximity are used to control tempo and other parameters.

(Via Engadget Via Josh Spear.)

As a continuation of my Personal Statement, here is a suggestion for the kind of project that I would be interested in producing. This is a rough draft, and requires refining (and may not be the project I work on in the end), but I think it gives a framework for the direction of my practice.

Aim: To aggregate a city's life (key identifying parts of the city) into a single point without intervention beyond initial set-up. The single point would thus become a representation of the city at any given point in time. The piece is driven by concepts of unity and diversity, and of community.

Method: A number of sensors located around the city connected to a central hub via mobile phone technology and/or WIFI (perhaps using a mesh network). As I envisage it, the sensors would be of varying types:- traffic, noise, air quality, temperature, weather, light, video, still images, and so on. The data returned by these would be aggregated into an installation piece, which could, for example, be represented as a grid of wooden pillars, where the height was based on the data for that sector.

Obviously the form of the aggregator representation may change, perhaps it might be a physical model of the city, with sections rising and falling. Maybe it would use a piece of fabric, stretched to different points that rise and fall, allowing images to be projected on the stretched fabric. The piece could be horizontal or vertical. Also the sensors may be set up to sample all of the aforementioned data, or perhaps just a single type. If all, then there could be different aggregators for different data, or a single aggregator with multiple forms of representation? Also perhaps the sensors could actually feed back either the aggregated data, or data from another part of the city, in some way (reinforcing the notion of unity and diversity within the city community).

The key principles in a piece like this are the fact that it is concept driven - it is a representation of unity and diversity in the city community, and the physicality of the representation. Clearly the representation would be more easily done on-screen, but this would deny one of the fundamental characteristics of a city; it's physical presence.

Comments welcome!!

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