The ever interesting Music thing points us at a brilliant project from Noah Vawter at MIT. It's called Ambient Addition. It's a walkman-like device that listens to the sound around you and turns it into music on the fly. It filters the ambient noises through a vocoder and pre-arranged chord patterns to give you harmony and takes more stacatto elements and transforms them into rhythm tracks. It's genius. You can still be of the world around you, but listening to something melodic, harmonic and rhythmic. It's best explained by his video here.
Well, here's something that could have saved John Cage quite some time and effort.
Posted by: Camiel | December 19, 2006 at 01:12 PM
fabulous..... oh, this is like a really good day in a peaceful state, all the world's sounds are bhajans, hymns... i want one..... oh modern life has some ups, besides the downs on the news..... thanks
Posted by: gregory | December 19, 2006 at 01:48 PM
This would be good for cycling.
I wonder what happens if you wear it to a gig. Would it sound like a construction site?
Posted by: dylan trees | December 19, 2006 at 02:34 PM
Russell do you remember when we were talking about context planning?
I've been trying to write a piece for the APG on emotional geography, context planning and territorial branding. There's something twirling in my head about the capability of brands to create spaces not just for commercial purposes but as real environments capable to trasmit the brand values.
I know this sound a bit complicated and unclear, but so far what I have is just a lot of unconsequential thoughts.
But more and more I've got interested in these kind of devices (I wrote about it here: http://www.lucavergano.com/the_blurber/2006/12/this_is_your_so.html)
as a possible medium to transmit some aspects of the brand personality.
Do you think this blurb can lead anywhere? Are you (or anyone else reading) interested in this subject or has more accomplished thoughts
to develop the issue?
Cheers
Posted by: Luca Vergano | December 20, 2006 at 08:42 AM
Wow. I want one of those...
Posted by: Rob Mortimer | December 20, 2006 at 12:20 PM
Plenty of musicians are doing similar things, just less automatically. Binaural source recordings processed in software like Audiomulch.
Examples: Check Kranky records' Chris Herbert, and Strategy.
Hopefully this device will evolve into an open platform, so I can integrate VST plugins of my choice, and my own melodic patches.
Great start though.
Posted by: Ben Blench | December 21, 2006 at 05:31 PM