Loosely Assembled » audio

Dripping with Sound

fekaylius — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:40:04 +0000

The sound of a water droplet, pure and quiet, resonating from your iPhone at random times throughout the day or night. Bzzt Drip creates an aura of contemplation and focus around you. Honor yourself with this gentle and humble Audio Perfume.

Bzzt Audio Perfumes are the latest must-have identity accessory. With an ever growing selection of free and premium offerings, Bzzt acts like an always on application as it sprinkles you with sound no matter what applications you’re running, even while your phone is in standby mode.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Wrap Yourself in the Reassuring Sounds of the Tactile

fekaylius — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:21:25 +0000

Punctuate your singularity flavored lifestyle with the reassuring sounds of the tactile.

Thump is a new Audio Perfume that will season your physical presence with the sounds of closing doors, moving objects, and similar analog friction and impact based sounds by enabling your iPhone to play these sounds at random times.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Audio Fragrance for Your Inner Celebrity

fekaylius — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:00:12 +0000

The latest Audio Fragrance from 0009.org, Bzzt Paparazzi, endows you with the glamorous sounds of photographers snapping your picture at random times of the day and night. Just like real paparazzi, these sounds may interrupt your dinner, your work, even your precious beauty sleep, but that’s just the price you pay for being a star.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Audio Perfume for The Sonic Elite

fekaylius — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:16:42 +0000

Have you ever heard something that other people can’t hear? I’m not talking about voices, I’m talking about sonic frequencies.

Some people are naturally more sensitive than others when it comes to sound, but our sonic range also decreases with age. This creates an interesting situation where many young people can hear tones that older people generally can’t. Some kids have used these sounds as secret ring tones and message alerts, so they can stay connected in class. The teen-averse have flipped it around, cranking up the volume and blasting this ’silent’ tone in their stores to keep unwanted kids away.

This idea that the airwaves are teeming with invisible data that certain people (and animals) have privileged access to, while the rest of us stumble through life with virtual earmuffs on, is at the heart of the latest Audio Fragrance from 0009.
Bzzt Silent punctuates your complex audio aura with a handful of tones that live above the threshold of common human adult hearing. Whether you are part of the sonic elite or not, rocking this audio accessory will mark you as one of the few brave souls willing to live on the cutting edge of this mostly uncharted territory.

Like all Bzzt Audio Perfumes, Bzzt Silent plays audio clips on your iPhone at random times throughout the day and night. The sounds will play no matter what other applications you have open, even when your iPhone is asleep in your pocket. Some days you may get a handful of sounds, other days nothing, Bzzt will certainly keep you guessing. You can mix and match different Bzzt apps to create your own customized blend.

Audio Perfume for Today’s Futurist

fekaylius — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:00:43 +0000

The Italian art masochists known as the Futurists embraced the loud, chaotic and violent nature of the newly emerging world of pre-WWI Europe. They strove to represent this universal dynamism in their artwork.

The newest Audio Fragrance from 0009.org, Bzzt Digital, is inspired by these aggro individuals who lived life with the throttle wide open. Bzzt Digital offers an updated twist on their aesthetic, with corrupted and distressed sounds from the deep subconscious of the digital age. These clips are fast, loud and jarring, the perfect audio soundtrack for today’s Futurist.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Bzzt – Ambient Social Game or Audio Perfume

fekaylius — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:45:16 +0000

The experiments continue around here with the introduction of another Bzzt iPhone app, the Bzzt Insect. Let your pockets drip with the sounds of musical bugs.

The Ambient Social Game element is that you are inviting a tiny amount of public spectacle into your life, the eventual need to explain the noises to someone, and the hopeful possibility that you will encounter new people in the world who also have the same taste for quirky fun.

There is also something about this series of apps that could be thought of as Audio Perfume, defining oneself by the subtle sensory experiences you offer out to the people around you.

As you can see on the redesigned Bzzt site, there are more versions are in the pipeline, and as always, I’m open to collaboration or custom development if you have a specific need.

So check out Bzzt, and let the sounds start dripping.

Neural Voice API

fekaylius — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:40:03 +0000

New Scientist has an interesting article about computer aided speech.

Ramsey, who suffered a brain-stem stroke at the age of 16, has an electrode implanted into a brain area that plans the movements of the vocal cords and tongue that underlie speech.

These sensors end up driving a vocal simulator, allowing Ramsey to make sounds with his mind.

I like this approach of tapping into the vocal control regions instead of the fantastical notion that you could simply tap into the “thoughts”. You could still have private thoughts, and express externally by intentionally “speaking”. It seems important to remember that computer brain interfaces will almost always have to read the signals naturally intended for output, and that a mind reading machine is still quite unlikely.

You could also hypothetically send those signals elsewhere, having them drive another device besides your own vocal simulator, you could have them broadcast around the world, sent to a voice to text translator, or simply stored as raw data on a backup drive of everything you have ever said.

Read the Neural Voice API article.

The Sounds of Monkeys’ Brains Concentrating

fekaylius — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:01:17 +0000

From a CCRMA final project called Sonifying & Visualizing Neural Data by Mindy Chang.

Drawdio: Turn Almost Anything Into a Theremin

fekaylius — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:19:05 +0000

via: youtube

wow, so hackable, so rad

Automated Last Ever

fekaylius — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:53:03 +0000

This is a description of my dream audio app.

One a network, it would look for any shared music, it would grab tracks from multiple sources and mix them together using a few randomized methods, overlapping a few of them at various volume levels, creating a highly textured collage of sounds from the music that is physically surrounding you.

In essence, it’s a computerized version of Ken

(looking up Ken’s stuff on the web reminds me a fun project Carrie Dashow invited me to participate in with Ken in Williamsburg, where we wandered the hood with cell phones going back into Ken’s mixer, which was going out live over free103.9 locally. We’d convince strangers that they could be on the air live, and they could say whatever they wanted, or even sing.)

Fixing FireFlyMediaServer on a 1.1.3 iPhone

fekaylius — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:55:10 +0000

FireFlyMediaServer on the iPhone is one of the best things about a jailbreak, but with the 1.1.3 firmware, and all the root vs mobile user data and perms being jumbled around, I couldn’t even find an example online of how to get the thing up and running properly, it would install and show up in the uictl list, but spat out an error about a script not being able to complete. I think in retrospect that error has something to do with scanning the iTunes library.

I’m no expert at all, but here is the path i took to making it work:

1. Make sure Uictl shows org.fireflymediaserver.mt-daapd.plist in black, if it’s red, tap it, and select load -w.

2. In a browser on a wifi enabled compy, go to http://[the_ip_address_of_your_iphone]:3689 – use root/dottie – this is not connected to your phone’s ssh pw. (you can also hit 127.0.0.1:3689 in the phone’s browser, but it’s pretty small, and the screen isn’t designed for the small layout)

3. In the configuration section, edit the path to your music, it seems to assume root (from the early days) but needs to be updated to /mobile/

4. Go back to the server status and start a new full scan of your music files, this might take a minute or ten.

5. Now, if you had iTunes open already, and saw the empty device in the shared section, you can just eject it, and reconnect to see the updated content!

I also found that your music will simply be listed by song, so using the server’s own playlist creation tool is suggested, especially if you’ll be browsing this music in anything other than iTunes. (I’m thinking about putting a roku in the car, so I can stream songs from the iPhone to the car stereo over wifi. I’ll post that story once it actually happens.)

Keep these nearly extinct species alive, as a ring tone.

fekaylius — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:16:09 +0000

With 69 exotic field recordings, from wolves to frogs to hawks, RareEarthtones is a great idea that has been taken beyond just an idea, but, I still wanted more, I wanted something different, something special, so, i merged all these together into one very dense track to get a wild feel.
Tell me what you think, i’m sure you will get some nice stares using this as a ringtone.

Listen above, or download it here.