Bangin’ new augmented light sculpture by Grosse8 and Lichtfront. Projectors shed light onto this wooden sculpture, making it come alive with color. Set to a nasty beat by Jon Hopkins, who we will keep our eye on from now on. (via Core77).

The phrase, “Your language is so colorful” just took on a new meaning. A new program called Word DNA, created by Luke Loeffler, color codes your rhymes. You plug the text into the program, and it gives you back a color bar that adds certain hues to the words that rhyme. We tried it out with the below rhyme, and it showed rhymes we didn’t even realize were there.

YrWall -Interactive Digital Graffiti - Lokey from Lumacoustics on Vimeo.

YrWall is like a giant computer screen that you can paint on with spray cans that use virtual paint. Pick your color and cap size, then spray and the wall does what you tell it to. No cops, no fumes, no drip - no bombing either. It looks like you can mess with the transparency, which is cool; but what would make this really fresh would be if you could spray different textures. Seems like a good way to add the physical element that’s missing from digital art, which is only important to the artist, not the viewer.

The above is a demo for The Rev, a music visualizer created by the Barbarian Group. It’s a sound responsive program full of depth, texture, variety and constant change. The visualizer was created for a British energy drink called Relentless. The iTunes version can be downloaded at their Web site. For more on how it was created, check this blog post by Flight 404, one of the developers. The song used for the demo is called ”Six Months Without Light” by a downtempo band called The Flashbulb.

Image by Jennifer Daniel

NEAR THE START OF THE NEW YEAR, Apple revealed that it would begin selling all of its music on iTunes without copyright software. The move was welcomed by many as the introduction of a new era. But where does the move actually take music?

By shedding the software, listeners have many more options about what they do with the music they buy. But there are hurdles on this path towards freedom of use, including new privacy issues and inflexibility in upgrading collections previously bought at the iTunes store. Furthermore, new copyright software - often called DRM, which is shorthand for digital rights management - is popping up at Apple and iTunes for other forms of digital culture.

the jump » »

A little while back, Culture System featured a story on how people search for music. It was about a survey of people meant to represent the whole population. In a bit of bad news for this blog, it found that the majority of people do not go online in search of new music.

The study did note, however, that music heads and the "Internet cognoscenti", as the report called the web savvy, search for music in a different manner.

And a couple of new studies might help to shed a little light on this part of the population.

A recent non-scientific survey of users of the blog aggregator Hype Machine found that, like the first report, friends still played a large role in discovering music for Hype Machine users. But friends were only the runner up as a source of music, not the prime source. Online editorials were the go-to place for Hype Machine users.

But one of the readers was a little peturbed that the study didn’t include radio as one of the multiple choice options for sources of new music. A total of 7.6 users wrote this alternative into the "other" category.

Entertainment Media Research also just recently published(pdf) a study of digital music consumption in the UK. (Net, Blogs and Rock’n'Roll caught this one.)

In this online study of 1,700 people, MySpace ranks as the most important web site for music, with YouTube coming in second. More importantly, perhaps, is that 10 percent of respondents said the social networking sites have led to purchases. This is surely to increase now that musicians are able to sell MP3’s directly through their MySpace profiles. And it’s just in time: nearly half said it needs to be easier to buy music from the sites.

Regardless of their popularity, two-fifths agree with the statement that the networking sites "are full of idiots nowadays". Yes, they really asked that question. So scientific.

Sure, you could drop a couple thousand dollars on recording equipment and then travel around North America looking for field recordings like Amon Tobin did for his latest album, The Foley Room. But the rest of us are probably a bit too budget-challenged for all that.

For musicians looking for noises lifted from the real world, the world wide web can be a great resource. The three sites that I’ve found most useful so far are Freesound, SoundSnap, and FindSounds.

The first two use only Creative Commons licensed sounds and tag all of their samples for easy browsing. All employ high quality sounds, and can be downloaded in a variety of sound files. (If you run into a sound file you’re not sure how to use, like .ogg or .aiff, click here for file converters. You wont need to download any software.)

So, if you’re bored of hearing a setup that consists of a lead guitar, bass guitar, and drummer, work something out and flip it Musique Concrète style. With these sites, you can dig up sounds ranging from the audio from a factory floor to the rattle of a spray can to the purr of a tiger.

For a recent example of someone taking this idea as far as you could, check my post on Coldcut’s "Timber".

When anybody with basic computer skills can download music, buying it online has almost become an altruistic act. If it’s free, why pay for it other than to support the artists they enjoy? (Well, there is the remote chance they are scared of getting sued.)

Some internet companies are taking a "glass is half full" approach to this situation. They are banking on the goodwill of people who already buy online, and hoping they would be willing to pay more for music if it were to benefit the artist.

The older of the two companies out there - that I know of, at least - is MagnaTune. The site allows listeners to hear the site’s catalog of artists for free. But to download songs, users have to pay. The site has a base charge, but a buyer can choose to pay more for a song if they like. All money is split with the artists 50/50.

And the new cat on the block is SongSlide. They start songs off at 59 cents, and allow buyers to slide a bar up to donate more money, with all of the extra profits going to the artist.

The catalog of these sites is very limited and makes them more of an interesting experiment with a good faith business model.

But can it pay off? The co-founder of SongSlide, Devin Brewer, tells Freakonomics that the average song sells for $2.08. But this may be due to the novelty of the site, and its limited audience. More telling may be the sale prices at the older MagnaTune. While the site doesn’t provide average sales data on their statistics page, their albums with the highest average sales prices are not that encouraging. Few sell for much more than the base rate of $8.00.

"Music Burgler"

Another telling anecdote may be the experience of Jane Siberry. At first, she allowed listeners to download her music free, but gave them the option to pay. The model was successful… only until she got some media coverage. She then got a swarm of new listeners - who decided to download and never pay.

Take from this what you will, but buy music. (How much have you spent on alcohol this month, hm?) 

A friend of mine named Waer created this mash up a couple months ago using Jamglue.

Mum’s 2000 self titled album was heavily funk influenced and more rhythmic than its more recent spacey, chill out stuff. The shining achievement on this album is the first song; “Zero Gravity,” the song remixed here. Coming with a tuff hip hop structure, it was perfect for the sample play of mashing up an Obama speech with music.

He chose Obama because of the ease of access to MP3s of his speeches (and because the bar he worked at was throwing a fund raiser for him.)

So, enjoy. It’s not bang you over the head with his political views or anything. It’s still unfinished, he only finished one "verse,"so the second half of it is just the original "Zero Gravity" song.

 

  

Number 5, from the 80’s movie Short Circuit.

Musipedia - as in a Wikipedia for music - has got a new music search program that looks for music by melody rather than text. The site has a keyboard (above) that you search with by clicking the melody. It also has a function where you can whistle the tune. It then searches for the melody in a Wiki database filled with melodies submitted by the public. Great idea, too bad I wasn’t actually able to use it! Maybe it’ll be more useful to someone who can play the piano.

It seems like most of the music technology institutions are after similar technology. I guess it’s the next "killer app" for the music world.

The Musipedia site also has some great links to comparable services.

<Via MusTech>