Baroque.me explores a new way to visualize the first Prelude from Bach's Cello Suites. Using the mathematical relationship between string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music's underlying structure and subtle shifts. Read more – ‘Baroque.me: Bach Cello Suites No. 1, Prelude’.
I thought it would be interesting to zoom out from the Les Paul doodle's rapid-fire statistics and look at a longer timeline of musical traditions. Javascript vs recorded sound. Twitter vs folk music. QWERTY vs oral tradition. Read more – ‘Folk Music and the Les Paul Doodle’.
The Google doodle celebrating Les Paul is live today! I recorded the guitar sounds for it a while back in my apartment. Took some quick photos while I was doing it. Read more – ‘Google guitar doodle recording photos’.
Just saw that Google Correlate has gone live, analyzing search activity patterns and real world trends. Already hooked after a couple quick tests. Disclaimer: this is not serious data analysis by any means, just playing around. Read more – ‘Google Correlate Search Patterns’.
With months of listening to plucked string samples and bezier curves for the MTA.ME and Crayong projects, I’ve been itching to find a slightly different field to play in. The relationship of color and music is one that I’ve been interested in for some time. I remember perking up in my college psych classes when [...] Read more – ‘Color Music Research: Part 1’.
This weekend, Tyler Williams, Aidan Feldman, and I formed a team for New York’s Music Hackday. Our goal was to build a musical instrument with the Kinect’s 3d camera. I bought a Kinect and we opened the box for the first time Saturday morning. Project summary Stringer is a virtual string instrument played with a [...] Read more – ‘Stringer: Kinect instrument’.
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram. Read more – ‘Conductor: mta.me’.
This is a new piece I started this weekend. Tentatively titled Conductor, it recreates the New York subway system as a musical instrument. It’s currently built in HTML5 + Javascript. SVG was very useful, as I could create the design in Illustrator, then import the coordinates into Javascript. These videos are still in-progress tests. I [...] Read more – ‘Conductor in progress video’.
I’ve been porting the the strings app (Flash version in above video) into HTML5. Canvas has been dealing with the graphics well, but have found some limitations with its Audio. The Flash Version Here’s how the Flash is setup. There are 38 plucked sound samples along a chromatic scale. When a string is created, it [...] Read more – ‘Limitations of layering HTML5 Audio’.
I posted the prototype video of the plucked-strings application at my Tumblr recently, noting that it needed a name. After fellow Google Creative Labber Val reposted it, he quickly got an email from his friend Richard with a set of options. Very gracious. Naming a project makes the finish line seem closer. Read more – ‘Strings app name’.
This past September, I was in Seattle (to play a show as Blue Sky Black Death’s vocalist). I bumped into my friend David Lu, and over lunch at Elliot Bay bookstore, we took an idea he had and sketched it out on a napkin. The idea was simple: A musical instrument where drawn lines becoming [...] Read more – ‘Strings early video demo’.
