Playbutton is a wearable button containing an album or a mix that you can plug your headphones into to listen.
Roof-mounted sensors translate light, rain, wind and thunder inputs to generate an impromptu musical score.
Drawing its sounds directly from the elements, no day’s synthesizer-style music is the same — who knew lightning could sound like reverb and that moonlight purrs?
Another take on a musical house from the artist Swoon: http://kck.st/lDCdCT
Via Laughing Squid
Collect sounds from everyday life and use this app to make music with them!
Via Laughing Squid
Using Kinect, Romain Dumaine controls sound with gestures with an aim to enhance interaction between a DJ and the crowd.
Kinecthacks.com showcases other kinect/sound experiments.
Another Chrome experiment from Google, All Is Not Lost features the band OK Go and members of the dance troupe Pilobolus. Filmed from below a glass floor, bodies move and press against the glass (in seafoam green unitards, no less) to form kaleidoscopic shapes and your personalized inspirational message to Japan.
The online video was first shot in 3D and made possible by HTML5 — hence Google’s connection and endorsement of Chrome as the preferred browser. While it kind of feels like it could have been cooler, the video is reminiscent of the captivating, multi-window viewing experiences of the Wilderness Downtown and Soul-Mirror.
Try it out with your own message: http://www.allisnotlo.st/
Contributed by Francois Grouiller
There’s a new solution to a dead phone battery, and you can wear it on your body! That is, if you happen to be at a concert. And also have this crazy weird shirt. But the idea of using live sound waves to charge your phone — in this case, with the Orange Sound Charge T-Shirt — is fun, if a little impractical.
Facebook is partnering with Spotify to add music streaming to the site. While I’ve never actually missed the ability to play music within Facebook, I wonder if we’ll collectively have a “how have we lived without this” moment in a few weeks.
Listening to music with friends within Facebook already sounds like what turntable.fm offers but with a much larger audience. Depending on how many friends you have, that could be good or bad. It will be an interesting social experience nonetheless.
http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/05/25/facebook-to-launch-music-service-with-spotify/
Hype Machine released an iPhone app that turns music blogs into radio stations.
A super elegant sound visualization from British visual artist Quayola.
Probably the most interesting thing coming out of Google I/O last week was…The Google Music Project. It’s officially in BETA and soon to release (my sources say most likely due to legal clearances with labels), however, invites are being sent out to a percentage of users for testing the new service. Having had the chance to do so myself, it has been an amazing experience without having to “wire” your device to your computer in order to enjoy the music you love. It works on tablets running Honeycomb, latest smart-phones running the latest android build, as well as a web version to allow you to access your music anywhere in the world on any device.
The UI on the devices is really straight forward for the most part, and even syncs with android widgets to allow you to access it as quickly as possible. The site UI is interesting and simple, yet it’ll be great to see how they scale for users who have a large music library. I believe the most important thing to come is how Google plans to make this service part of the SOCIAL scene, as in a competitor to Spotify and/or iTunes (when that goes to the cloud hopefully this year).
http://music.google.com/about/