Amateurs are doing amazing things these days with consumer-grade high-def camcorders, especially Canon’s HV30 MiniDV unit (which retails for about $800) and its predecessor, the HV20. The impressive clip below is the work of a Memphis college student named Kyle Shields, who acquired a new audio library and wanted to test out some of the gunshot sounds. So he used his HV20 to film a short backyard shootout with a friend. The ominous music, the well-crafted audio track, the Saving Private Ryan-style green filter, and Shields’s talent with the camera combine to make this a very cool little experiment. I wish video technology had been this advanced when I was his age.

To watch this in actual high-def, go to the Vimeo page.

There’s a whole channel on Vimeo devoted to people’s experiments with Canon’s HV30 and HV20 camcorders. The selection is hit or miss, but some of it is quite good indeed.

[via my pal Jonathan Hayes.]

For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the Brooklyn Bridge at night and fire camera flashes in sequence, capturing everything on video from a fair distance away. I love the increasingly larger scale of Improv Everywhere’s missions.

But I thought I should note that on two different occasions back in 1999 and 2000, a group of my friends organized a very similar project at the top of the Empire State Building. Led by my pal Tom Igoe, a world-class tinkerer who teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a group of several dozen people gathered on the skyscraper’s southern observation deck to do waves of sequenced camera flashes.

The New York Times ran a story about the 2000 event a couple of weeks later. Both Flash-a-Thons were captured on video, the second from two locations downtown: one at the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway and Waverly, the other from an apartment on East 18th Street. In the low-res compilation video below, the flashes go left to right and then right to left, and then there’s some assorted mayhem at the end.

You can read more about the 1999 and 2000 Flash-a-Thons on Tom’s site.

For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has developed technology that can analyze polyphonic audio and break it up into individual notes, which can then be pitch-shifted, time-shifted, and otherwise mucked with. What this means is that the audio of anything from a guitar chord to a full symphony orchestra can be twisted into an entirely new piece of music. It’s long been possible to pitch-shift monophonic audio, such as a singer’s voice, or to pitch-shift an entire music track. What has never been possible before—and this is truly revolutionary, in a way that will eventually have a major impact on the music you listen to, whether you ultimately know it or not—is the ability to break apart complex, polyphonic audio into its constituent parts and rebuild it into something else.

To name just one application of this technology (and I’m sure someone will do exactly this): You could take the vocals-only version of the Beatles’ “Because” from Anthology 3 and completely reharmonize it into a new piece of music (even on the fly, with a MIDI keyboard), and it would still sound very much like John Lennon and the Beatles.

Celemony’s (slightly cheesy) promotional video explains everything:

After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

Check out this astonishing TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the development of an amazing visual technology called Photosynth. As Arcas’s bio on the TED site explains:

Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

This is a revolution.

[via NewsDesigner.com.]

Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.

I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):

Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.

Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. I own one and am obsessed with it.

“Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.

Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.

Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.

On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.

Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.

In 1979, when I was 10, my father bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 for my family. The TRS-80 was an attempt by Tandy, Radio Shack’s parent company, to enter the burgeoning home-computer market. It was a rickety, cheaply made little thing that totally earned its derisive nickname, “Trash 80.” But I was fascinated by what it could do. Those were the days of Asteroids and Space Invaders; my friends and I were part of the first generation of children to grow up obsessed with videogames. When my dad brought the TRS-80 home, I was convinced it would be like having an entire arcade of awesome videogames in my bedroom. That was not, um, the case. My version of the TRS-80 had something like one kilobyte of memory—no joke—and didn’t utilize a disk drive; you loaded programs into its memory using a standard audiocassette player. But I still had fun with the thing. I remember programming it to play back a funk-free rendition of “The Hustle” comprised entirely of staccato eighth-note ticks and bleeps. God, I was so fucking cool.

Anyway, getting to the point: I was assigned an oral report in my sixth-grade English class a year or so after we got the computer, and I chose to talk about my TRS-80. I still have the notecards from that oral report—see below—and they’re pretty hilarious, and not just because my handwriting is totally freakish. In the last few years, I’ve re-created this speech in front of New York audiences three or four times, most prominently at a 2003 installment of my brilliant Upper West Side neighbor John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book series. I read two oral reports from my childhood and adolescence that night; the other one was my 10th-grade Led Zeppelin report, which I posted about here.

(For the record, my computer-geek period only lasted a year or two. By 1981 or 1982 I had lost interest in computers—though not videogames—and I didn’t really start using them again until the early ’90s, right after I graduated from college. During my undergrad years I wrote my papers by hand in notebooks and then stayed up late typing them on my electric typewriter while listening to every Van Morrison LP in my collection—and reaching for Liquid Paper when I made a mistake. Ah, good times.)

Here are my two favorite lines from the report:

[Y]ou can buy a line printer that prints the information on the screen onto paper, which can be quite useful if you don’t want to copy something by hand.

[…]

Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy.

Here are the seven notecards. I’ve posted a full transcript at the end of this post, in case you find my freakish handwriting unreadable.

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