couple of links

Rumaging around the internet today has left me with a couple links to share with you all.

1) MP3 LINK to a radio show -- air talk -- with an interesting interview by Jason Squire about the Movie Business, and how radically it is changing with digital technologies -- sort of a condensed version of his wonderful "Movie Business Book." Squire is also a professor here at USC Cinema, and is currently Kurt, Erin and my instructor for the internship class. Anyway, check this stuff out -- very interesting.

2) LINK to a piece of freeware (LONG LIVE AMBROSIA!!!) called WireTap. WireTap lets you record anything coming from your mac into an audio file -- would have so helpful for creating the above MP3!

bye.

bash bush

Ah Ha! I always suspected Bush was a giants fan...

image via (the absolutely best site on the vast webernet...) dodgerblues.com

a, b, a, a, b (c)

another shard...

download a, b, a, a, b (c) [.mp3 ~1.7mb]

yes/

No, really

So, this comes from the guardian, so it would be a pretty elaborate hoax...

Germany's version of the Big Brother reality TV show will take a giant leap next spring with the opening of a small town mimicking The Truman Show concept.

In the Jim Carrey movie, a man called Truman is unwittingly the subject of a 24-hour TV programme that monitors his every living moment for the gratification of a worldwide audience.

In the city currently being built outside Hamburg the only difference will be that contestants will be willing participants in this next-generation leap into voyeurism.

There will be a forest, a town square complete with shops and a church tower, schools and businesses. Contestants will, it is hoped, live there for years; falling in love, going to school, even getting married. The producers hope to lure in businesses to employ them, teachers to teach them and doctors to care for the sick.

read the rest of the story here (registration now required...)

Link

zombieCodeAgain

zombie code again

thefeature.com looks at new mobile sound devices

cool article at thefeature.com today that takes a look at a few projects trying to redefine how music is listened to with mobile devices. The main two projects investigated are the Malleable Mobile Music System at sony csl in paris and the tUNA project by Michael Lew's colleagues at Media Lab Europe.

Man, I guess I need to publicize my project more...no talk of any GPS-location aware mobile music systems -- which seems to be such a large aspect of mobility (at least to me).

The csl project uses some sensing mechanisms to allow people to control different elements of the music via, for example, the amount of pressure they put on the device, etc. These relationships seem pretty one to one -- might be an interesting tool for a DJ to use (maybe...).

The tUNA project to me is more interesting -- allowing people to tap into other people's music feeds -- sort of like the whole iPod / Rendezvous thing, or the awaire design project from this past year's msr design expo.

The one thing cool about both (all all the other related stuff) these projects is that they require a more active role in the listening of music, which I think is a potentially really cool, if albeit different, trend.

Link via BoingBoing

embedding cc licenses in files

very cool extension of the cc license.

One of the difficulties with Creative Commons licenses for music and images is that the images and the music are often copied or forwarded without the licenses. By embedding the license information inside of the mp3 or jpeg data itself, it makes it easier to keep the license attached to the file.

link via joi

buldge

link via joi

fragment

another of many song fragments I've been creating. This one is sort of a 'go between' -- a piece designed to be entered or left at any given time.

fragment: MP3

google SMS

huh, this looks cool. I'd imagine that it's only useful for very specific searches like addresses, phone numbers, etc. But a cool idea none the less.

Link via Cool Hunting

authoring tool

experimenting with an authoring tool for creating multiple sound nodes + layers for when those nodes can be activated. for example, the nodes will remain in a static place (except the mobile ones...) but the sounds linked to it will differ depending on time of day you are accessing it.

placelab

Intel Research in seattle is developing a project called Placelab, which is a wifi-based positioning system that, like GPS, tracks the location of the device, but unlike GPS, works indoors and out. There is no information on the site about what the accuracy of the position data is, but I'd imagine that it's better outdoors than in, since word-of-mouth has it that there are more walls and stuff indoors. Walls truly are a pain in the ass. If only we could get rid of them...

This isn't necessarily the first such service to explore triangulation w/ wifi band frequencies, but it's an interesting development to watch nevertheless.

soundabout redux

so, short post, but looks like the new virgin electronics 5 GB mp3 player, aside from sucking in most of it's other capacities, has brought back the 2 headphone jack capacity made ever so famous by sony's first go-round on the walkman (the soundabout). Sony dropped the dual (dueling?) headphone jacks after about 6 months of manufacturing I think, but it's interesting that Virgin has brought it back. Maybe there is some tenuous tie-in with the new "reckless billionaire" show?

probably not, I guess.

Link via the recently back online gizmodo

are these shoes cool?

textually.org has a nice write-up about a new york times article that focuses on how mobile phones have crushed our sense of self-reliance.

Here's a quote from the nyt article:

"According to Christine Rosen, a senior editor at the journal New Atlantis and the author of "Our Cell Phones, Ourselves," a recent article exploring the social effects of the mobile phone, the ease of obtaining instant advice encourages cellphone users to respond to any uncertainty, crucial or trivial, by dialing instead of deciding. The green sweater or the blue, pizza or Chinese, the bridge or the tunnel - why take responsibility for making up your own mind when you can convene a meeting in a minute?

I think Rosen's work articulates a potentially larger social problem that, unfortunately, resembles a sci-fi writer's dystopia. This goes for more than just phones - although our dependence on these devices is probably the most significant cultural/social change in the last 5 years. Name another example.

link to the write-up.

link to the full article

rss weather

hrm. trying to figure out if uncovering certain layers of audio based on weather is possible. perhaps, as perry noted, impractical in Los Angeles, but worth investigating nonetheless.

RssWeather.com is one weather feed.

RainGuage is another. But that one is broken now.

here is a link to what this feed looks like via a simple php script I wrote:

Link via me

feedback

thanks everybody for the feedback tonight. Below are my notes -- hastily scribed before I forget them.

Perry: More unique ways to access sounds -- based on different things like Time of Day, Speed, Weather? (would be pretty cool...). Have mobile sound spots that are "themed," or like a particular character or voice or something...good idea. How much buffer time is there on the PDA -- how will that effect things like binaural sound, etc, i.e., what would the lag be between when the compass data was received, and when the sound that was mixed left or right, correlated to that specific compass reading, would be read through the buffer. This is great stuff. Before with Perry's criticisms of this specific project, I thought he was talking about more of a 1 to 1 mapping of stuff like speed = rate of playback, etc., which kind of turned me off. but talking through these points helped me out.

Noah: Noah is a real DJ, so perhaps my use of the DJ as a metaphor for my project was not the best for tonight (although for a non DJ audience, maybe...). Make some good points about how DJs do what they do, and how it could be applied to my work. This stuff definitely brings up the all-important issue of making an entirely composed space vs. a user-authored/contributed space. I think there is a happy balance somewhere, but for right now, I'm focusing on creating some compositions that I can control, as one of my primary interests in this project is not only creating the system to do it, which is a technology goal, but also creating a compelling virtual space for people to access. So I want to focus on creating that space first, all the while thinking of how I can add in the element of user authoring to the space, which I think is really important in order to make the system more dynamic.

Micheal Lew: Thanks to Micheal for the links. I was aware of most of these projects, save the sony one. They are all doing some great stuff with sound and location, although none are specifically focusing on a GPS+wireless based system. Very good references though, as a lot of these projects all address similar issues that I've been dealing with. Part of me wants to say that I guess it's not necessarily this technology platform that I'm developing -- it's more a means to an end of finding out why I think this project can be as compelling as I think it can.

http://www.csl.sony.fr/~atau/cafesoundlife/followmode.html#poster

http://www.medialabeurope.org/hc/projects/tuna/
http://www.tii.se/sonic-city/
http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mobsound/

Kellee: reference to NYC boombox event where people walk around with their boomboxes, weaving in and out of each other, which sounds like it would create a really great space -- esp. since these are mobile groups, moving around the city. I'd love to see / participate in one of these.

thanks again.

is it just me

or do all the new gawker blogs have really annoying graphics... hope the other ones stay the same...

jalopik

kotaku

screenhead

damn you nick denton, you blog mogul, you.

interface

new version of the web interface for my thesis project is up. it lives: here.

pls. check it out, any comments appreciated. additions: simulation of a random walk, preview sounds from nodes, more defined positions for each node (compositions embedded in paths...)