Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.
Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.
Hypnotic.
If you were at Patterns Day and you liked the music that was playing during the breaks, here’s the playlist. All the artists are based in Brighton.
Absolute genius! I’ll never hear Sgt. Pepper’s quite the same way again.
I somehow missed this when it published last year—a profile of my band Salter Cane.
Salter Cane can be labeled ”gothic country”, ”melancountria”, “country noir”, ”folk noir” and ”alt-country darkmeisters”.
This is really good fun! And thanks to service workers, it works offline too.
The rounds are:
Listen to the sound of Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.
I giggled at quite of few of these mashups.
This is quite wonderful: a recreation of the video for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times made entirely with HTML and CSS.
Salter Cane play a dark, melancholic folk-rock, full of doom and darkness, murder and mayhem.
If that sounds like your idea of a fun time, come along to the Latest Music Bar in Brighton next Thursday.
The thesis: any film is improved by playing Walk Of Life by Dire Straits over the ending.
The proof: this website.
(this is absorbing and brilliant)
An examination of how sites like The Session are meshing with older ideas of traditional Irish music:
There is a very interesting tension at play here – one that speaks directly to the design of new technologies. On the one hand, Irish musicians appear to be enthusiastically adopting digital media to establish a common repertoire of tunes, while on the other the actual performance of these tunes in a live session is governed by a strong etiquette that emphasizes the importance of playing by ear.
There’s an accompanying paper called Supporting Traditional Music-Making: Designing for Situated Discretion (PDF).
This geography lesson makes a nice companion piece to Johnny Cash has been everywhere, man.
This sounds genuinely good—Alvin and the Chipmunks slowed down to reveal their true ’90s post-punk goth-grunge nature.
I absolutely love the way that my archive is presented here. Matt and Hannah have set the bar in how to shut down a service in an honest, dignified way.
Okay, this is kind of nuts: some researchers have seeded a neural network with all the tunes from The Session. Some of the results are surprisingly okay. It’s certainly a fascinating project.
It’s a real shame that Hannah and Matt are shutting down This Is My Jam—it’s such a lovely little service—but their reliance on ever-changing third-party APIs sounds like no fun, and the way they’re handling the shutdown is exemplary: the site is going into read-only mode, and of course all of your data is exportable.
Yahoo, Google, and other destroyers could learn a thing or two from this—things like “dignity” and “respect”.
Heydon’s putting together a collection of songs from webby people. I need to either give him a Salter Cane track or record some tunes for this.
If you were at Responsive Day Out on Friday and you liked the music that was playing during the breaks, here’s the track listing. Creative Commons licensed.
Here’s a really nifty use of the :checked behaviour pattern that Charlotte has been writing about—an interface for choosing a note from a piano keyboard. Under the hood, it’s a series of radio buttons and labels.