matt's blog

One topic which always interests me is that of the emergence of robots which are able to detect their surroundings, and play unique music as a result, in ever changing patterns and styles. This is what the current robotic music exhibit at the royal botanic gardens in Edinburgh, Scotland does.

Called "Three Pieces", this fascinating exhibit is based around several robotic controllers, which use sensors to detect the changes and movement of life around them, temperature change, and environmental changes in the plant beds around them, to play correspondingly unique songs using traditional Chinese instruments and bamboo canes. This means that all living things in the garden, be they human, animal, or plant life, are what are "conducting" the music, constantly changing the composition to suit the activity of these life forms all around them. Naturally this fits perfectly with the surrounding plantlife, and the feel of the botanic gardens. I just love this idea.

Here is a video of the Three Pieces robotic musical exhibit in action.

The main unit is a traditional Chinese dulcimer, played by a series of individually controlled robotic bamboo sticks. There are also numerous robotic chimes hidden amongst the foliage throughout the garden. Each of these are separate robot musicians, but they communicate, and work together to play the music. This means that as you walk through the exhibit, you are walking through the traditional music composition, which is changing according to your own life form being present also. How freakin cool is that?! Also worth noting, is that while the musical "performers" are digital robots, the instruments they are using are organic - bamboo canes and traditional Chinese percussive/string instruments. This lends another unique angle to the music which is being altered to suit on the fly, all the time.

Apparently while the robots react to humans in their environment, the mood of the music is largely controlled directly by the plant life, which I can understand. Walk in there in the early morning with the simulated tropic environment humid with mist, and you'll hear one mood of the music throughout - while under full sun and perhaps with dryer soil conditions, the music will change to an all together different mood, to suit.

For those who are interested, here is the full article on how this intriguing intuitive robotic musical display was created. Thanks to createdigitalmusic for alerting me to this cool gadgetry.

For those of you who are interested in remixing, mashing up other tracks, or just plain freedom to create something new using some existing material as a starting point, check out this new open source music contest!

Adam Zwakk has put forward several ZIP files containing the individual multitracks that form complete songs - you can take those and create your own tune inspired by whichever part of them you like.

Check out the details Sole has posted now and get inspired to create something totally new...

The Tenori-On is a compact little 16x16 matrix of LED switches, which can be used to create all sorts of electronic music with a very hands-on experience - complete with a lot of visual feedback from the flashing LEDs.

Below is one of the official demonstration videos of the Yamaha Tenori-On in action...

The future is here people. Autonomous musical robots with built in samplers are roaming the Earth creating drum tracks by hitting nearby objects that they find, sampling the sounds, and looping them! The first bit of this video is a bit of a non event, but once the little robot musician gets under way it's well worth checking out!

Below is a video of the "Yellow Drum Machine" robot in action!

Pitbull has setup an old school hiphop competition, so ya better check yo self before yo wreck yo self ;)

He's put up a bunch of samples to work into your old school hip hop track, and the entries are starting to be submitted already. So what are you waiting for?! Check out the announcement.

So what's up?

As this tight-knit community has grown, it's been a real treat to meet all these great inspiring musicians from around the globe, and hear the non stop new tunes uploaded by everybody. I'm sure most of you here feel the same way about what we've got here. I regularly get a lot of emails thanking me for creating MakeTunes, and as I tell people, you're more than welcome - I'm happy to have enabled this to come about, and I'm in for the long run. I'm not about to stop now (or anytime in the foreseeable future for that matter)!

However, hosting many thousands of songs is not cheap. I don't want to swamp you guys in advertising, so while that can offset my expenses a little, I'm still putting more than USD$1100 a year into keeping this site running.

I've been trying to conserve storage space for as long as possible, but as you know, the music uploads never stop coming. This is a good thing of course - it's what MakeTunes is all about. But naturally storage space requirements keep going up, and now the time has come to buy a whole bunch more music hosting space to allow MakeTunes to continue to have songs added to the site.

This will cost me an *additional* USD$500 per year for this upgrade. Taking my MakeTunes expenses to a rather daunting USD$1600 per year. I just don't have that available in my current situation.

How can one person help?

I thought long and hard about whether to post this or not, but I decided in the end that you guys, the MakeTunes community, would understand if I explained the situation and put forward the suggestion of donations to go directly to purchasing the required extra music storage space.

If anyone is able to donate $5 or more, it would be hugely appreciated, and if you'd like, I will list all of the contributing members and ensure that you get the props you deserve for helping MakeTunes in it's hour of need!!

MakeTunes Donations Progress

Progress : 60% ($300 donated)

Please join me in thanking those who have donated to the MakeTunes cause so far!

Amittai

Ed

Audiohead

Julian Angel

Giechi Dan Productions

Mike_S

Bill

JonnyLightning

Illusive Mind

maoribeats

IngridTornado

Geomatic

Almighty Pattern

m1ch431

dammedifiknow

coolboy

Below is the paypal donation button. Thanks!

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know what's happening. I've finally had to remove the ability for anonymous visitors to download the MP3 files. I tried to keep this available for as long as possible, but it's no longer an option for me.

Logged in users abilities are not changing of course.

Guests can naturally still Play the tunes using the Flash Player, and simply need to login if they'd like to download a copy. This is the way most sites work, and I've had to join them due to issues with automated computer "bots" from other websites coming along and trying to download every one of the 7000 songs here.

Again, it's not something I wanted to have to do, but unfortunately my hand has been forced due to the behavior of these companies and others who ignore the webs standards, in order to keep MakeTunes running smoothly. I know you guys will understand.

Yes its happening again folks - Ed has got another electronic music competition underway! Once more your entry must include at least 2 samples from the linked remix samples pack that he's uploaded. I imagine once again there will be a great range of musical styles that emerge from this one source...

UPDATE
The competition deadline has been extended! So click here to read his announcement

The more entries the better, so grab your remix samples, and unleash that creativity!

You might have noticed I've been trying out a few adjustments to the layout here at MakeTunes, nothing too major, but a bit of shuffling around of the sidebar sections, and a shiny new logo, ooooh ahhhhh. Hopefully it's all working ok for as many of you as possible.

I'm very aware that for the 3% of people using 800x600 screen resolution, it's still not exactly great to use, but unfortunately I can't do much about that without breaking the site for the other 97% of people here. I really recommend you try at least 1024x768 - it can feel strange turning up your resolution at first, but you'll soon never want to go back - trust me! If you're not sure how to do this, its very simple - just right click on your desktop in Windows, click Properties, then Settings, and then slide the screen resolution slider to 1024x768 (for example), and hit the OK button.

Please feel free to let me know what your thoughts on the layout changes and tweaks are, especially if you've noticed something looks strange or broken! Thanks

Apple announced a few days ago that iTunes has just overtaken Best Buy in music sales, so is now the second largest music retailer in the US after Walmart. This continues the strong growth they've been experiencing since their launch in 2003.