Any given thing will sooner or later be used as musical instrument. Even dot matrix printers, you ask? Even dot matrix printers. Paul Slocum hacked the firmware of his 1985 dot matrix printer to let it print in different frequencies.

» read on!

A little extension to Last.fm generates Charts of your personal listening habits. In contrast to the official Last.fm-Profile-Charts, it doesn’t rank artists by the number of times that you listened to their songs, but by the time you spent listening.

» Last.fm Normaliser

» read on!

Some time ago, I visited the Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Most exhibited artworks could only raise limited interest in me, but there was one exception: The music installation „Opera for a Small Room“ by Janett Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Unlinke our interactive music installation Dave, this installation is not interactive, but it is nevertheless impressive.

» read on!

Searching for new music is still a tricky business. In Discover New Music That’s Perfect for You, I once presented a few recommendation systems which adopted to the personal taste of the user.

Critical Metrics walks a different path. It systematically spiders through music reviews in various media. The collected recommendations are then presented at the website. This way, you do not find music recommendations which are selected for you personally, but good music in general. Filtering the music to your personal taste remains your job.

You can listen to the music suggestions directly at the site (for free of course). All recommended songs are provided via a flash player in good quality and full length. You can’t download the songs, but there are links to various online shops where you can buy the music if you like it.

You can search the musical repertoire of Critical Metrics in different ways. Right at the top of each page is a menu where you can choose different sources for recommendations. You can also choose how up-to-dateness. Besides that, there are search functions and browsing by the providing source (like iTunes). There seems to be functionality for organizing play lists, but I didn’t test it.

Personally, I’m having difficulties finding the right music for me at Critical Metrics. This might be the fault of my weird musical taste. :) Nevertheless, I like the idea of this platform.

» Critical Metrics

Earmaster Pro is an e-learning program for musical ear training. It is supposed to help you perceive intervals, accords and rhythms more accurately.

» read on!

The Internet opened many new beautiful ways of communication, many of them even in real time. Unfortunately, Internet connections have always had a latency that has been too high to allow musicians to play across the globe. The small delays which appear on every net connection are a massive problem for musical applications.

Now, another project takes the challenge to create a global rehearsal room. eJamming AUDiiO claims to have overcome the latency with smart algorithms.

I did not test this software myself, but I do not believe that they have really overcome the delays. I have yet to see an Internet connection which has a latency low enough to jam together. Online gamers probably know the difficulty of Internet latency. I guess this basic latency is still present even with eJamming AUDiiO, but they probably try to make it not matter anymore.

Digging around on their website shows that my guess is not completely unfounded:

You MUST hear your own music with the slight delay eJamming AUDiiO imposes on everybody’s music to keep you all in sync.

So basically, the software delays everything, even your own sound, to keep all players in sync. This is probably a little difficult to get used to, but seems like a promising approach.

Currently, eJamming AUDiiO is still in a beta phase and free of charge. It is expected to cost about 10-15 Euros per month when it finally launches, probably in July.

» eJamming AUDiiO

(via Gitarreninstitut Kassel via Kreativrauschen)

Last semester, Erik and myself created an interactive music video installation called “Dave“. It was the - so far - most intense project I have done. Well, it was worth it. :) We created the first installation of this kind that I know of.

The recipient, surrounded by displays, can alter the course of the video by interacting with three pillars. Interaction does not only change the video, but also the music. Nonetheless, the music preserves its character, because all possible variations are preproduced.

We created a little webpage with details about dave. There are pictures and videos which hopefully give an impression about the installation:

» Dave: The Interactive Music Video Installation «

There’s also a German version of the same pages.

Too bad that it existed only for one day. It’s hard to describe the feeling when you were actually standing within it. Videos can’t really show that. *sigh*

JVC Japan presented an MP3-Player which floats in water. The JVC XA-AW33 (shiny name…) is waterproof and equiped with circular LED lighting for visualization effects. The manufacturer even claims that the music creates ripples in the water while playing music.

Unfortunately, the floating player can only load 256MB of music and plays music in mono. However, it’s cool! :)

Now if it was available in Europe and didn’t cost 125 Euro (~165 USD)….

(via Golem.de)

You are 17.35 % Mainstream!

Crap! Looks like I am less alternative than I thought. :)

With the Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter, users of Last.fm (see “Discovering Music that You Like“) can see, how much their listening habits overlap with the evil mainstream. You only have to enter your Last.fm username and the webservice calculates - somehow - your mainstream factor in percent.

» read on!

Music is great. Music is manifold. Everyone has his own taste of music. What is loved by one might be refused by the next.

These different preferences make it pretty difficult to find new great music. The spectrum is - fortunately - large, but finding the music that appeals to you personally turns out to be like the search for the needle in the haystack.

Several internet services have lined up to help easing your search - time to give you an overview of the most important services of their kind.

• Gnoosic
• liveplasma
• Last.fm
• Pandora
• iRATE
• Conclusion

» read on!