JBL has always been a purveyor of fine audio, which makes total sense considering its parent company is Harmon Kardon. A few years back, I reviewed some Reference 220 earbud headphones, which were affordable and sounded great on the iPod. This time around, JBL has teamed up with Quiksilver’s surfin’ sister company Roxy on a line of headphones that are catered towards young women. Do they stand the test of time? Perhaps.
If you’re a true geek you’ve likely either dated a Japanese girlfriend or fantasized about having one. If by any chance you actually have one, they would surely go totally nuts over these Panda Ear buds. You know how girls, in general, not even specifically Japanese, are into this cutesy shit.
Even if you’re a hipster dude, you might dig wearing these buds. One thing’s for sure. Even though you might look a little desperate, the ear pandas are sure to get you some feminine attention. Check them out for $15 from FredFlare.
You may be used to making music with apps like GarageBand, Logic Pro and Pro Tools. But did you know, that you can use the world’s most popular photo-editing software to manipulate sound? Using a program called Photosounder, John Keston was able to save a piano recording as a bitmap image file. He then loaded it into Photoshop, added some blur and filtering and saved it. The result was an ethereal, church-like sound with his piano distorted to hell and back.
Looks like a really fun way to play around with sound. I wonder if you could use this technique for live sound manipulation a la Eclectic Method. I guess we’ll see as 2009 pushes on.
It’s no news that we’re Arduino nuts here at Gearfuse, but lately, we haven’t seen anything that has really pushed the boundaries of the popular microcontroller. Now some smarty pants named Martin has come along with a schematic that allows real-time audio processing with the Arduino. This means you can create guitar FX pedals, equalizers and a whole lot of digital instruments thanks to this setup. Says Martin:
The first set of examples alter an incoming audio signal and put it back to an audio output. We achieve effects like Reverb, Phasor, Flanger or Ringmodulator. The second set of examples are outputting computed waveforms like Sinewave, Bell and Xylophone sounds.
Think you can handle it, Mr. Programmer? Then get to it.
Once in awhile, I come across an invention that blows my mind in terms of creativity and functionality. Jay Silver’s Drawdio most certainly fits into that category. Drawdio is a pencil that has a simple synthesizer hooked up to the graphite. Based on the conductivity of graphite, drawing on paper will produce various different sounds creating a one-of-a-kind music experience. This is user-interaction on a whole other level.
Believe it or not, you can build your own Drawdio. The famous Lady Ada is selling kits on her website for $19.50. What are you waiting for? DRAW!
Here’s a wedding ring that’s out of the ordinary. A “Yes, I Do” sound wave is cut-out of the ring. No engraving your significant other’s favorite love poem on this ring. There’s no room for it. Designer Sakura Koshimizu uses lasers to cut out the shape of the waveform produced from your own “Yes I Do.”
Using some sound editing software, Sakura records your voice during the ceremony. The software will show the sound waves on the screen, which are then fed into a laser which cuts it out of the silver. She even makes earrings out of the cut-out sound waves. No wasted materials here, folks.
While actually called the “pistol shrimp,” its characteristics make it more befitting of the title: banshee. Despite their small size, pistol shrimp are capable of letting loose a sound of 218 decibels that stuns their prey before they devour them. The pressure wave produced by such a sound is capable of killing a small fish. It’s like a gunshot emanating from a bite-sized crustacean, and that’s why it’s named the pistol shrimp.
With rising sea temperatures in UK waters, experts believe that the pistol shrimp’s numbers are on the rise. They claim it’s the temperature in the water, but I say it’s the fact that they’re monogamous and are all about inbreeding. That could explain the bizarre ability their other friends do not possess. Don’t screw your relatives, it could have bizarre results.
This is about as cheap as it gets when it comes to DIYin’ your own speakers for an iPod. Designer Dmitry Zagga fashioned these together after having his credit card declined at the Apple Store. Look who’s laughing now. They’re just like the clubhouse telephones of days past, where simply attaching a string to two ends of a can fashions together a communication device unlike any other.
These speakers are just as simple to make, too. Get four paper cups. Punch holes in the back of two of them. Place them on top of the other two, linking them together with two tooth picks. Then, stick your earbuds through the holes. It’s ghetto magic!
The musical trio from Tokyo, Japan known as d.v.d. sound like a blast to see live. The group consists of drummers Itoken and Jimanica and visualizer Takashi Yamaguchi. As the drummers play and beat on the drums, Takashi projects and manipulates brilliant imagery on a screen. The sounds trigger geometrical shapes and landscapes via Processing (just like Metamorphosis 2), ensuring that it’s a real trip. PingMag has a fantastic interview with d.v.d. and I highly recommend you check it out.
Either I’m on some awesome drugs that I don’t know about or the Russian artists who designed this oversized iPod are. OK, I just gave myself a blood test; I’m sober. That means that both Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin are out of their skulls for crafting this large, warped, fully-functional iPod.
It looks like they put a giant iPod in a brick oven then, once it was well done, connected some 500 XL speakers to it. I can’t imagine the purpose of this thing besides a conversation piece while you shout over the loud music coming through it. That is, if you can get around the tiring effort you’d have to put forth while simply looking for a song. Count me out.
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