3 favorites from Music hack day Stockholm

Last weekend my friend Henrik Berggren organized the Swedish edition of Music hack day in Stockholm. 30+ hacks were churned out in 24h, all for the love of music - so here come three special ones, chosen mainly for their aesthetic appeal.

Radio Free Hackday is a wonderfully analog creation for online music discovery. Simon Hohberg and Robert Böhnke replaced the power supply of an FM radio with an arduino hooked up to a computer (see pic above). The arduino tracks the position of the frequency display and lets the user toggle between music from different cities or music of different genres (based on the Citysounds.fm and Soundcloud api:s). The music is transmitted to the device via an FM transmitter hooked up to a computer. Kudos for enhancing legacy electronics! I guess the inverse of their hardware hack would be to keep the radio intact but have a multi-frequency transmitter stream your friends playlists on different frequencies. (Or if you're lazy and stick to one frequency, use twitter as a commandline / remote control to change what's being streamed e.g., @radiofreehackday #olofster_playlist.) But then again, where's the fun without the arduino?

Matthew Ogle's HacKey takes your last.fm username and tells you what keys define your musical taste in colorful pie charts. Matthew writes that he wanted to build something "utterly useless" but I beg to differ. The data becomes really interesting once you start comparing your taste to other's  - see below a comparison of my favorite keys vs. that of a friend's (I never really use last.fm so not sure how accurate the chart is for me, but I'm not surprised Henrik is a C major).
Olofster

vs. Henrik:

Would be really fun to see tempo and beat data added to this. Alternatively, if given another 24h I bet Matthew could could tell us what the musical mood is of the last.fm userbase - or even see if there is any seasonality in it as there seems to be in the Boston Common flickr pictures (btw, this is a great visualization, you get the point immediately without losing any of the rich detail in the raw data). I bet B-flat minor is a winter favorite. Anyhow, now I know which key I am: C-sharp major.

Last but not least, the guys at Winston Design, Alexis, Joel and Arvid, put together an extremely slick app,  Holodeck, which enables artists to create a web presence drawing upon Soundcloud, Songkick, Tumblr and Last.fm. Very clean. And a great name too:)

Following or followers?

(via Avi Flombaum, via Rus, via the New Yorker :)

Cooking for looking loves your submissions

Some of you might have stumbled upon a fun blog of mine recently - Cooking for looking - an attempt to define culinary surrealism - making food that tastes great but doesn't necessarily look like food. (Or making a dish that looks like a different kind of dish e.g. looks just like a burger but is actually a dessert - I challenge you to make that one!:=) . I had been doing this for some time myself and was then encouraged by friends to spread the surrealism online.

These kinds of blogs have grown in popularity recently and the Times even ran an article on Cakewrecks the other day. Now, Cooking for looking is somewhat of the opposite of Cakewrecks - or thisiswhyyourefat.com for that matter - (I follow both) in that you show off your culinary bravado rather than your #fails. So good luck and share your creations on cookingforlooking at gmail.com. Oh, and check out the edible garden ... before the edible mummy wrecks it all.

Mr Krax finds a voice of his own

Krax (who hatched here) finally found a voice of his own, or rather became the unvoice of the Sweden social web-barcamp. Thanks to Henrik's ruby magic in the car and my cardboard craft the night before, he could read all tweets hashtagged #mrkrax in the main tent. Check out the Linux wizard below trying to figure it all out.

Update: Ted posted a really good summary of sswc on his blog (Swedish only).

Mr.Krax and Sweden social web camp

Heading down to Sweden social web camp with my friends Henrik Berggren and Ted Valentin and our new pal Krax (check out what that means in a Swedish dictionary). Krax hatched in the family kitchen late yesterday evening and has yet to learn how to speak. We're doing our best to remedy that by the time we arrive at Tjärö in the archipelago in southern Sweden.



Update: Watch Krax speaking tweets

Creating the illusion of biking in the sky

Last Sunday I attended the NYU ITP grad student's open house and came across this marvellously analog project by Marios Diamantis - an upside down bike - check out the video I took from the exhibit below (note that the TV is upside down too and that he's pedaling backwards). Still can't make up my mind whether this is functional or dysfunctional. There is an officially sanctioned video here. Enjoy.

Innovation In C

Tonight I participated in the miracle of Terry Riley’s 'In C' (to borrow an expression from Louis CK) at Carnegie Hall. 'In C' is an amazing piece. This is what the score looks like:The rules of the game are as follows: All performers play the same page of 53 melodic patterns in a sequence but with each musician having the freedom to determine how many times to play a specific sequence before moving to the next. Any kind of instrumentation is possible.

Basically the entire piece is improvised which is neat as each musician chooses when to phase in or out. But what’s really neat about it is that it gets you thinking about innovation. We tend to think of innovation as a one-man show. (And even in cases in which we say that organizations innovate we don’t really think it’s the group being creative). Here, on the other hand, the individual’s contribution isn’t interesting – what’s interesting is how the group innovates. It’s the interaction between individuals that creates musicality. As Terry Riley puts it in the performing directions:

“One of the joys of 'In C' is the interaction of the players in polyrhythmic combinations that spontaneously arise between patterns. Some quite fantastic shapes will arise and disintegrate as the group moves through the piece,”

Note that Riley writes “as the group moves through the piece”. 'In C' strikes me as the perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Music flows from the interplay of patterns that "spontaneously arise". I tried to think of any digital equivalents during the performance but came up blank. Not sure mashups meet the bar. Any suggestions? (Listen to a sample?)


PS: Also, if you will, why not consider 'In C' as a metaphor for (internet) business. It seems dead easy to perform (I’ll probably regret saying this), but in principle anyone who can read rhythms can do it – much like anyone with basic programming skills can put together an app. Provide the platform and have others do the legwork