Yamaha is sponsoring a free event at 1015 this Friday, April 18, which includes live performances by the likes of Pole, Robert Lippok (of To Rococo Rot), Sutekh, Safety Scissors, and I am Robot. This event will serve as a launch party for a novel instrument that wowed the crowd at SIGGRAPH in 2005: Tenori-On.
A touch-sensitive sequencer with a LED matrix interface, Tenori-On offers a fun way to visually represent music while you make it. It’s easy to create and manipulate loops, manage layers and and even import samples via an SD card slot. Tenori-On looks like a fun piece of gear for live shows too — you can string a few of them together or hook one up to your laptop, mixer, etc. via MIDI. Best of all, friends and audiences can actually see the music progress with the dancing LED lights on the double-sided tablet. Designer Toshio Iwai will give a live demo of the instrument at the party.
A great lineup is in store for Yuri’s Night at Nasa Ames. Of note on the audiovisual side is a psychedelic drawing interface installation by Joshua Ott,Ezekiel Honig, and Morgan Packard (see screenshot above).
Other artists like Jon Tejada, Lusine, Deru, and [a]pendics.shuffle will keep the tunes going alongside all of the technological wizardry that one can expect of a Bay area geek spectacle. See you there!
Neiman Marcus has teamed up with Jeff Han to offer Han’s multi-touch media wall in the luxury retailer’s 2007 Christmas Book. Han’s company, Perceptive Pixel, Inc., designed the eight-by-three foot surface for effortless, hands-on interactivity for work and play. Here’s the promo video for this offer:
Han’s touch-driven wall can be exclusively yours for a starting price of $100,000, far less than other lavish holiday gifts from Neiman Marcus — past offerings include a charter space flight on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo for $1.76 million. While hardly an example of technology for the masses, it’s an exciting peek at the future of intuitive design.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Han’s demonstration of the interactive wall at TED in 2006.
Cool that last.tv has come around, fusing the music listening charts generated by the popular social music site last.fm with their matching music videos from YouTube. The site is still fairly basic and doesn’t offer much in the way of choosing specific artists’ music vids, and the video player’s selection appears rather inaccurate. The first few video plays from my last.tv experience included a lot of older Warp artists - Aphex Twin, Autechre, funkier live videos from the Detroit Grand Pubahs, plus some more random tidbits like Shin Chan, “Stem Cells in the Adult Body (Part 3 of 4)” and someone’s re-enactment of Law & Order (I don’t watch that show, so not sure where that one came from!). Kudos for the clever idea, though.
It’s another gorgeous day in San Francisco, Macworld is in full swing, and Steve Jobs’ keynote address has sent fans everywhere raving. Both the iPhone and Apple TV, whose development has been rumored for months, were announced this morning.
I’m less moved by the prospect of my cell phone and iPod being combined than by the exciting potential of the iPhone’s multi-touch technology. I’m curious to see how Apple might implement this into future products, as it radically changes the way people interact with data, media and the web through breakthroughs in interface design and intuitive technology. It also reminds me of other recent advances, including Jeff Han’s presentation at TED.
These new directions signal Apple’s move away from the once defining “Computer” in its name — it’s now going for Apple, Incorporated — and its rapid conquest of the digital media market. Macworld always brings me back to my first introduction to computing, the 512K (”Fat Mac”, pictured above). Lightning fast at 128KB with a whopping 8MHz processor, it came with not one but *two* 400K floppy disk drives (the family splurged) and a black and white screen sporting 512 x 384 pixels for then-advanced graphics and gaming. All for $4000. Guess it’s never too late to start becoming nostalgic…
Shhoooo — I’ve never laughed so much at audio hardware!!! Check out this midiGUN: it’s a midi controller designed to be held like a hand-held weapon to be used with Ableton Live, Traktor DJ, and other audio software. The midiGUN comes with 16 controllers which you can program in 16 different sets, a mini 2-D joystick and even a laserbeam which you can shoot at your “audience” while shaking in front of your computer… enjoy!
November 13, 2005 at 7:20 pm · Filed under Music, Technology
Swung by the LS party last night @ Varnish to co-mingle with the various freaks and geeks who define the SF tech/Burning Man/art scene. It was a grand sight: bondage clowns gone bad, bunnies wearing pinafores, and vehicles decked out with various textiles, sequins, swirling murals, and kitschy toys attached to every available inch of surface area. We hung out on a tiki hut/truck complete with a thatched roof and strung lights
Then with the Ryan King and Mr. Cocoalicious, I made my way to the Independent to catch Adult. As usual, Nicola commanded the same flat intensity that sets her photography apart: highly stylized, yet cooly removed from any emotional attachment. Watching her stare back at the audience made me smile, as it felt like she was redefining the idea of the female gaze (”Don’t f*ck with me, I’m too tragically hip to connect with you”). Her blank look and exaggerated vocals offered sharp contrast to her drippingly sweet, almost naive “Thaaankk yoouuu” narratives between songs. It felt like witnessing a schizophrenic punk diva switch between her different personalities…
It was also interesting to see Samuel share the stage with Nicola and Adam. His influence on the D.U.M.E. mini-album (Thrill Jockey/2005) shone through with the punchier rhythms and atonal coloring that pervaded throughout the album’s six tracks. But the audience rocked out the hardest to Adult.’s older synthpop material, which the band largely withheld until their extended encore. “Contagious” and “Nausea” from their earlier Resuscitation (Ersatz Audio/2001) brought the house down.
Afterward, Zam Zam’s kept us entertained with trip-planning to SXSW as well as drunken Irishmen pelting out their pride through rounds of pints and impromptu singing… God bless SF.
Swung by the LS party last night @ Varnish to co-mingle with the various freaks and geeks who define the SF tech/Burning Man/art scene. It was a grand sight: bondage clowns gone bad, bunnies wearing pinafores, and vehicles decked out with various textiles, sequins, swirling murals, and kitschy toys attached to every available inch of surface area. We hung out on a tiki hut/truck complete with a thatched roof and strung lights 