Tag: Music

Neil Young has been talking up his forthcoming high-fidelity music service and music player for a few years. That service and the player will now be launching via Kickstarter and it is called PonoMusic. That is a horrible name, each time I see it I think PornoMusic and hum bow-chica-wow-wow to myself.

If you’re into recording or playing music, you’ll definitely want to enter this giveaway that we’re doing in partnership with our pals at Gear Diary and IK Multimedia.

So what happens when six people play Pac-Man simultaneously on a huge maze? Sounds like fun. Now combine that with a concert, and you get this crazy piece of interactive performance art.

The Super Mario Bros. theme is nearly 30 years old. It’s quite old, but not as ancient as the sheng, a Chinese instrument that’s mentioned in texts from 11th to 12th century B.C., which means it could be about 3,000 years old.

If you ever played Rock Band, you might recognize the name Harmonix. Harmonix is the company behind that game, and word is that the company is working on a new music game. But time the game is said to also be a first-person shooter.

Wearable technology is still at a very early stage, but we’re seeing more refined and truly useful examples every so often. Bragi’s Dash is the latest example. Calling this tiny pair of devices “headphones” is as fair as calling the iPhone a “phone.”

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot.

GoPro makes some of the most popular cameras out there for recording action sports. Typically when we see video made with one of these cameras it is on YouTube and often has people doing things that are dangerous.

A few years ago we featured a harmonica crammed into a NES cartridge. YouTuber basami sentaku’s harmonica not only has a Famicom cartridge case, it produces 8-bit sound with the help of a sound chip from a NES.

Hercules has unveiled a new and reasonably-priced controller for aspiring DJs to learn their art. The device is called the DJControlWave and it is designed especially to work with the iPad. The DJ controller connects to the iPad using Bluetooth and has no speakers of its own.

We’ve seen a way to play drums using normal objects and even a steering wheel. DrumPants takes on the final frontier: you. Despite its misleading name, DrumPants are not actually pants or even restricted to pants.

Remember when you needed a phone line and a dial-up modem to get online? Heck, I was using modems to connect to services like Compuserve and Prodigy before anyone even knew what the Internet was. One of the most annoying things about dial-up modems was that stupid squealing sound they made when you were trying to connect.

If you’re looking to make music with your iPhone or iPod Touch, check out this add-on, which looks pretty neat. The AUUG Motion Synth is a combination grip/case for your iDevice, which lets you use your hand and motion to play music.

A few months ago we heard about a supercapacitor designed by a high school student that could lead to quick charging and longer lasting mobile phones. The Blueshift Helium speaker gives us a taste of that future.

At first glance, Split might look like a pair of handy dandy wireless earphones, but they’re more than that. They’re actually self-contained MP3 players that you can control without a display or buttons. Greenwing Audio definitely succeeded in making the most compact music players I’ve ever seen.