Baroque.me is a wonderful visualization of the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites. It’s quite soothing and hypnotic, if you’re content to let it alone to play. You can also grab each of the orbiting dots and disrupt the song (temporarily, until the project re-adjusts to the original tempo).
Plink is a great sound experiment by Dinah Moe. Using a combination of Chrome, NODE.js and the Web Audio API… users are able to switch “instruments” and collaborate musically.
Illustrator Andrew Kolb had the fantastic idea to transform David Bowie’s classic Space Oddity into a children’s book. A brilliant concept, and executed spot-on. You can view a few pages of the book here, or you can download the full PDF here. Kolb is a fantastic illustrator, and you should make sure to take a tour around his portfolio. Some…
The only song I really know by Amon Tobin is this one, which I actually love. I’m not sure who first gave this to me (maybe my friend Jon or Rob or Jay). I’m pretty sure it was one of those guys from my old Flash days, circa 2001. Every once in a while, I remember this MP3 in my…
With the recent sale of WKQX (which most folks in Chicago know as Q101), my friend James had a brilliant idea: to write an oral history of the station. Having broadcast Alternative Rock on the Chicago airwaves since 1992, the station has played host to innumerable bands… and has been the source of what I can only imagine to be…
Hauschka (whose real name is Volker Bertelmann) does some pretty fun things by adding additional objects to a traditional piano. Using things like containers of tic tacs, ping pong balls and paper clips… he’s able to create the illusion of multiple instruments, all playing at the same time. Appearing on NPR’s All Things Considered, Hauschka demonstrates how he goes about…
My friend and coworker James VanOsdol has just published a book! It’s entitled Off the Record Collection: Riffs, Rants and Writings About Rock. Here’s a blurb: Off the Record Collection compiles Chicago media personality/author James VanOsdol’s writings about rock and roll in its myriad forms, with special attention paid to classic rock, alt rock, and the dynamic Chicago music scene….
Sonar is an absolutely beautiful animation. It syncs up with the music in a lovely way, and I’ve watched this repeatedly now for a few times. I can’t seem to find much about this, beyond the fact that it was uploaded by YouTube user techdx5 about a year ago. Tracked down the video to Renaud Hallée, who can also be…
Isle of Tune is a fun Flash project that lets you create songs by constructing your own custom roadways. Created by Jim Hall, he describes it as “kind of like a SimCity synthesizer.” It’s a fun way to lose a bit of time, although I can see how some people can get more carried away with building their own song…
I recently got back into listening to i am robot and proud. In particular, I’ve been looping the first song I heard of his, entitled A Proposal to Tune the World to F. I learned about the artist way back n 2006, back when one used to do things like order CD’s. I’m happy to see so much of his…
I just found out yesterday from Allison that after 25 years, The Wild Hare will be closing its doors here in Chicago. The Tribune article does a nice recap of how the venue came to be, and how current owner Zelek Gessesse plans to head back to Ethiopia to open a new venue in his homeland. I learned of The…
Depsite the fact that this is a commercial for some kind of cellphone or cellphone case… it’s still a cool thing to watch. Reading over some of the BB comments, I’d like to stick in the camp that hopes this was entirely for real, and not a product of fancy CGI. I think this is a lovely bit of music…
Over at Twelvestone, my friend Ian created a thread where he converted his mixtape into a YouTube Playlist. It made me think again about mixtapes, and how the technology at the time made us more active, in both the curation and creation of these tapes. In 2009, I had the good fortune of appearing in my friend Jason’s anthology: Cassette…
Conductor is a brilliant audio visualization of the New York Subway system, created by Alexander Chen. Using data from the MTA’s public API, the piece displays train routes based on the official schedule of stops and departure times. Each line segment also turns into a musical note that triggers, if one line crosses over it (and will also sound a…