Inventing Interactive
Ok. Step number one, watch this visualization of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring… Wow, right?! It was created by Stephen Malinowski, using his Music Animation Machine. Ok – it’s not interactive (the alleged theme of this blog) but it’s amazing. I could do a hundred posts on different way to visualize music. I just realized I haven’t yet posted about […]
I love my new Sonos system. It took me a while to understand what it offered and why I might want it, but now that I’ve got it, I just want more. So – it was pretty cool to discover that Sonos has been (quietly) periodically sponsoring interactive installations that feature their technology… Right now […]
I love thinking about ways to make recorded music more engaging — more interactive. And I’ve posted before about ways to make music interactive — including modern sites like 3 Dreams of Black, more fluid experiences which border on synaesthesia, playful conducting for kids, and old-school music cd-roms. So it was really cool to stumble […]
What is it like to conduct an orchestra? The easiest way is find out is to just try it yourself. Which is what this cute project from Magnetic North lets kids do. Wave your arms around and see how the orchestra adapts. It looks like a lot of fun. My only question is if it’s […]
I miss record stores. And I’m feeling nostalgic today. As a kid I remember taking the bus to the three story Tower Records in Westwood, flipping through albums, searching for things I’d heard on the radio. As a teen I’d drive to the mammoth Tower on Sunset, discovering new artists via Tower’s small, but quickly […]
This video demo of Konkreet Performer, a music control and performance instrument for the iPad, was interesting because it positions itself as a break from traditional mixing-board metaphors for music UIs. I have no idea how usable it is, but it’s great to see the experimentation! (Link via CreativeApplications.Net.) It reminded me of this recent […]
In the late 90’s, Underworld was super-popular among my graphic design and new media friends. It wasn’t just Underworld’s music, it was the way they used visual design and motion graphics as part of their brand, and as a central element in their live performances. They weren’t just music – they were media! And it […]
There’s no reason I can’t talk about my own projects on this blog, right? Just keep in mind that this story starts in 1999, when the web was mostly just html pages, some Director/Shockwave, a little Flash, and mostly dial-up modems. The social web didn’t yet exist. Napster was being sued by everyone. And the […]
Yesterday I received a Barneys Co-op catalog in the mail — in which all of the photos were shot in 3D. Because they used the red-blue anaglyph method, they also included a pair of glasses. It may be an old-fashioned technology for 3D, but it’s still pretty fun. (You can also see the 3D catalog on […]
Eye magazine published a fascinating article in 1997, Sound, Code, Image, on how graphic scores can “liberate” music from the five-line grid of traditional music notation. It looked at the work of composers from the 50’s to the 70’s, and their experiments at making musical scores more graphic and expressive. (And just today the Eye […]
I love music visualization and explorations of synesthesia. MOCA’s 2005 amazing exhibition Visual Music, highlighted a wide (and deep) range of work tracing the development of music in the visual arts. For example, one of the show’s featured artists John Whitney (who’s son, by the way, was one my earliest employers), created amazing work which […]
In 1996 I saw the Mediascape exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo. A collection of digital art, some interactive, it was bold show from a major museum. It received mixed reviews — but one of the pieces there left a lasting impression on me. It was “Piano – As Media Image” by Toshio Iwai. From the […]