Documentary by Nate harrison
Friday, February 23, 2007
Bassline Baseline is a video essay that investigates the invention, failure and subsequent resurrection of the mythic Roland TB-303 Bass Line music machine in the last two decades of the 20th century. The narrative seeks to invite thoughts on technological mediation within product innovation and creative expression. The dead-panned 'documentary' video attempts to explore how and why creative tools fail and how increasingly more options, parameters or intermediaries devised during a tool's research and development phase don't necessarily lead to increased expressivity or virtuosity during the tool's lifetime of actual use, unless the super-structure of its cultural context is dramtically reconsidered.
Nate harrisonLabels: instruments, music, nate harrison
Zoundz
ZoundzTM creates a fusion of self- composed music with an accompanying light show. With it, users can create musical light shows never seen before. They can create their own riffs by placing one of Zoundz TM’ pawns on an interactive “hot spot” on the sound board. Each pawn associates with the sound it makes and by placing them on different locations and in different combinations, users can compose music all their own. The music portion can be fine tuned with the mode switch which enables users to adjust the tempo of the music, raise and lower the volume, increase or decrease an echo, or sustain and draw out specific sounds. Each interactive “hot spot” lights up when a pawn is placed on it and will groove to the tempo of your music. The color of the light also reflects what type of music the pawn produces with red indicating a sharper tone while blue reflects softer more soothing sounds.
ZoundzLabels: compose, light, music, zoundstm
Tactical Sound Garden
Given the ubiquity of mobile devices and wireless networks, and their proliferation throughout increasingly diverse and sometimes unexpected urban sites, what opportunities - and dilemmas - emerge for the design of public space in contemporary cities?
The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is an open source software platform for cultivating public "sound gardens" within contemporary cities. It draws on the culture of urban community gardening to posit a participatory environment where new spatial practices for social interaction within technologically mediated environments can be explored and evaluated. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project examines gradations of privacy and publicity within contemporary public space.
The Toolkit enables anyone living within dense 802.11 wireless (WiFi) "hot zones" to install a "sound garden" for public use. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants "plant" sounds within a positional audio environment. These plantings are mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location by a 3D audio engine common to gaming environments - overlaying a publicly constructed soundscape onto a specific urban space. Wearing headphones connected to a WiFi enabled device, participants drift though virtual sound gardens as they move throughout the city.
Tactical Sound GardenLabels: computers, devices, mobile, wifi
Dancing Balloons
From ELPA, a stylish Japanese lighting company, comes the Dancing Balloons, very stylish ambient lights that react to sound and change colors in a smooth and relaxing way. Made of a smooth plastic material, the Dancing Balloons make any room look modern, and are an easy way to add light and color at the same time.
You can easily choose the illumination pattern (highlighted in the graphic here) to one of 8 different types with the touch of a button, and rotate through six unique colors that are as bright as they are relaxing. The LED lights will last 50,000 hours, so there’s no need to worry about replacing them, and they run on low power as well.
Dancing Balloons
