There is, of course, the iGuitar or the Pocket Guitar, each allowing you to play any song a physical guitar will allow you to play, but fitting into your pocket much easier. But what if you took two or four smart phones and set each of them up to do a different musical task, and played them all together? Rick Wakeman used to need 400 cubic feet of stage space and a dozen hours per show to assemble a fraction of this audio power, and that only after a crew of teamsters moved, mounted, and bolted together the gear for him. Today it can be done by a single girl with four smart phones, one for voice processing and the others to do the band instrument parts. The Futures so bright, I gotta wear shades!
Music is evolving right along with everything else as we rush faster and faster towards the singularity. These days, you can use your cell phone or tablet to enjoy any kind of media they support, but with the correct apps you can so much more; you can create the music yourself, limited only by your imagination and skill set. Using the same devices and the proper social media software, you can be in touch with other like-minded friends and creators from all over the world around the clock, to brainstorm, write, and jam, until you get a grasp of exactly what you want to bring to life. Finally, again with the smarter versions of the same devices, you can actually play the music and display the video together, in real time, from anywhere on the planet, for everyone to experience. Here are a few examples, starting with the Korean Pop Star Yoari and her iPhone playing band covering a Beyonce song, and then the MoPho Ocarina Band (with instrument details) looking into the concepts behind using smartphones with social media interfaces as musical instruments. As a music addict from long ago, I find this topic one of the more exciting aspects of living in today’s modern world of the future, and will be returning to it again.
Dragoncon is one of the biggest media parties every year, based solidly in Fandom from its origins to its current incarnation, and encompassing one of the largest collections of creative folks from the US. One aspect of that creativity is expressed within the AMV or FMV competition, an event many cons have taken up. In its simplest form an Anime Music Video or Fan Music Video contest encourages you to take some video footage, either created by you or extracted from a favorite show or film and give it a song for a soundtrack. It rapidly gets more complicated than that, as you select the best scenes, try to match the lip movement to the song lyrics, and finally try to tell a unique story from these component parts. But even if you only achieve the first level, you have created something that has never before existed, which is always a good thing. I should also mention that the source laws for fair use have changed this past year, so you are allowed to rip your video segments directly from the DVDs if you want to now.
The DragonCon AMV 2010 is now over, and you can see the winners at that site (and maybe one or two at the end of this post). But the competition for 2011 just got serious this past October 1st, when the Fandom Music Video Awards went live. They are accepting contest entrants in three phases, or rounds: October 1st to December 31st, now underway, January 15th through April 15th for round two, and May 1st to July 31st for round three. Each round shall have its winners, and the finalists will be part of the con itself. The first video in the next segment includes some rules, hints, and trips. The others are a few of last years winners, starting with the Best In Show winner Building Steam, made from video from Steam Boy and the soundtrack being Steampunk band Abney Park’s Building Steam. Good Luck!
Yes, there really is such a contest, and you have until November 18th to submit your entry. The folks at the animation software company Toon Boom have teamed up with Shatner’s My Outer Space to put the competition together. According to the contest page you become a member of My Outer Space (it’s free), and then download three William Shatner audio clips which are 22 seconds long each. Using the Personal Learning Edition of Toon Boom Animate or Animate Pro (free download), you then design, storyboard, and animate your own video to create an imaginative finished product. Prizes in this contest include online animation courses, a full suite of animation software, and the grand prize is getting to work on a full animation project being developed at My Outer Space. Have fun building!
Everyone here does remember that Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, invented computer programing? Her good buddy Charles Babbage invented the Difference Engine, but couldn’t get it to do much more than the obvious add, subtract, multiply, and divide. When Ada invented the computer algorithm, she merged the algebraic mathematical procedures structure (to achieve a result, you have a sequence of steps to preform with a specific order, each of which does a small segment of the complete task, and holds the results for final assembly) with Babbage’s mechanical analytical engine.
She also created the concept of the non-volatile storage medium in which you could save your programs or results for reuse later, which from the day she invented it in the 1830s until a better method was devised in the 1970s meant punch cards. Just like the Algorithm, it wasn’t a new idea; punch cards had been used to control mechanical processes for several hundred years at that point, specifically looms. In fact, the first punch cards were only used to channel the thread you wanted to the spindle you wanted it to be processed by, using a notch on the edge of the card to guide it to its destination.
But like all technologies, it evolved; and by the 1880s census the punch cards as modified by Ada were being used to tabulate how many of who lived where more efficiently than ever. That cut the governments processing time down to a fraction of what it had been, and ushered in the first real taste of what would later be described as Big Brother when Huxley got around to writing. It also encouraged the government of the time to dump a lot of money into the whole mechanical tabulating industry, since they saw a reduction in their costs for statistical gathering and processing of census data in the regions where such tools were available. While not exactly the first worm that fed on its own tail, the cycle of calculation improvements (from both hardware and software improvements), generating better results faster than before, and resulting in additional funding to improve the hardware and software, was one of my favorite early examples of a positive feedback loop.
Trailer mashups have been happening more and more frequently lately, and as you might suspect getting better and better. This one is so good that Edgar Wright gave his seal of approval to the Scott Pilgrim/Last Airbender mashup. Someone else did the same thing with The Matrix. The final one is very outrageous; and Expendables/Supertoons mashup. I gotta admit, these do bring a grin.