Synaesthetic Binaural Bassline Generator

Move fun that trying to create colour palettes, here is a sound palette creator. By using colours as the basis for sounds, this tool creates harmonic, and sometimes inharmonic basslines that modulate together to form a powerful binaural beat, and a series of grooving basslines.

A colour wheel is designed so that harmonic colour palettes can be easily found by placing the colours at set spacings around the wheel. The only real difference between sound and light is the speed and shape of the waveform, something that this instrument helps to bring back together. I was thinking of calling this kind of tool a synaesthesizer!

Sound Wheel

Instructions for use :

Double Click to add a new note and form a chord
Click anywhere black to remove a node (or right click)

Use the following keys to :
Z – Increase Intonation Range
X – Decrease Intonation Range
M – Change the next note’s Timbre
N – Change the next Timbre
UP – Move child chords closer to the centre
DOWN – Move child chords away from centre
LEFT – Change Variable Intonation (Microtonality Mode)
RIGHT – Change Variable Intonation (Microtonality Mode)

Open the Sound Wheel in a new window

Places talking about the SoundWheel :

• CNet
• Wired
• Think Design
• Elephant Candy

Renegade Web Radio

Bored of the charts? Looking for sounds to keep you occupied? Look no longer with music and mixes from around the world in one simple interface – combining a podcast, blog and mix aggregator – held together with AJAX magic

check it out
nomadradio.fm

Features

• Cross Fading between tracks
• Prefetching of the next track so that there aren’t any gaps between songs
• A fast visualiser that reacts onbeat as well as to the frequencies
• Saved volume and a rotary dial
• AJAX backend so that you can browse around without losing audio
• Flash <-> Javascript bi-communication

Get involved and send over your mixes!

introducing a new way to enjoy music!

Mix your favourite music blogs with your social bookmarks, add streaming radio and folksonomy… integrate with new music web services plus the latest web trends and what do you get…?

What is it?

A fancy new website that collects your favourite music blogs, MP3s and net playlists into one universally accessible site. Read about music, discover new music, and listen to & download the latest songs based on your web-based bookmarks and the social bookmarks of thousands.

What does it do?

The use of a social bookmarking service allows you to bookmark practically any music service. You can save simple RSS or ATOM feeds from your favourite music blog, your XSPF playlists, even M3U radiostreams! The volume of music services is growing by the day, so you can aggregate all your favourite music from sites such as Imeem, IJig, The Hype Machine, BlogDigger or any blog from the thousands collected on el.bo.ws.

Furthermore, if you use last.fm webservices – which I highly recommend – you can save your recently played songs, find out which songs you already have in your collection and get advice on music that you would like but just haven’t yet heard.

How does it work?

The channels are saved in your favourite online social bookmark collection. If you don’t have one, look no further than Del.icio.us…

Simply save the RSS feed from your favourite music blog using the tag mp3blogfeed and your music-blog will be automatically available to everybody in the world on the home page with the most recent at the top. If you prefer to only see your own bookmarks, simply enter your del.icio.us username in the settings box, or if you are using another service, the correct RSS URL.

Playlists are automatically saved onto your hard disk as shared flash-cookies along with such useful things as volume and the last page you visited – dive back in from where you started!

Technical details

Written entirely from the ground up in actionscript 2 – no components, no templates.
Uses Shared Local Objects to save xspf playlist, volume and recent browsing history.
Features javascript data api to allow bookmarking and the emailing of blog links.
Uses your existing social bookmarking services – imports RSS, XML & OPML.
Intelligent caching of data and pre-empting of user desired information.

Features a scrolling data window with mousewheel input, inertia and variable speed scrolling.

Note : This project has been discontinued due to lack of time thanks to my new job as the head of flash at Last.fm!

Future Retro Kitch

Designed as the main logo for the reborn ‘Box Office Poison’ band. Commissioned for the sleeve art, T-shirts and PR material, the logo is sultry and exotic, with just a cheeky dash of kitsch.
Subversively there is a hidden face. Can you find him???

Lock in the cool

Designed as the logo for an ultra efficient cool box, the logo was embossed on the product and used on all the print material.

It was an interesting project, and I kept my thinking very literal and simple – an ice cube locked in a zipper! There were many incarnations for the client, everything from full colour 3D rendered cubes to abstract interlinking boxes.

The Client settled on the original clean style – which incidently was favourite anyway

Turns dreams into music

Ever wondered how your dreams sound? Ever wondered what your dreams would sound like if they had soundtracks? Wonder no longer with the dreamCapturer.

A USB product that accurately predicts your mood in realtime, creating a mood-mapped soundtrack of your sleep from your first dream through to the last.

With musical backing from members of the Hallé and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, thousands of mood instilling sounds were compiled together to form a database of samples capable of recreating any mood or emotion. From anger to happiness through to more obscure emotions such as ambivalence and angst.

With a fully animated graphic user interface designed in Flash, the dreamCapturer analyses your mood and represents it onscreen with character driven feedback. If you are stressed and your mood is a mixture of anger and rage, the onscreen character snarls and dips his eyebrows, if you are calm and happy, the onscreen character smiles and nods. Of course this is all in time to the music!

How it Works

Connect the dream quilt sensor to your thumb and click the big blue button. Immediately your ‘baseline‘ mood is being analysed. Over the space of a few minutes of constant use, the dreamCapturer learns what your normal mood is and begins the music process. As soon as you are calibrated, the dreamCapturer gets to work every tenth of a second recognising alterations and trends in your mood and looking for relevant sounds in its audio database.

The database is categorised into four channels of audio each with its own specific emotional fingerprint :
the first channel is the percussion where pace and action are described;
the second channel hosts the classical instruments which bring major and minor emotions;
the third is the bass where fear and sensitivity are shaped;
the final channel holds melody sounds and masked audio such as pink noise.

Once the dreamCapturer begins interpreting your emotions, it harmonises the four channels with relevant sounds all set to the BPM set by the percussion channel. If you are having a nightmare, prepare to hear some uncomfortable sounds… of course happy dreams are relaxed and enjoyable late night listening.

Depending on many parameters measured from your body (and not your brain!) the dreamCapturer recognises when you are falling asleep, and when you are awake and does a pretty good job of figuring out how many dreams you had in between! When you log back onto your computer in the morning you can check your emails, and now you can check your dreams-inbox as they are stored in the dream vault.

Technical details

1. USB 2.0 hot pluggable.
2. Uses GSR (lie-detectors) and body temperature to determine mood.
3. Fully animated GUI programmed in Flash. Realtime character representation of mood.
4. Low latency mood capture with accurate mood determination algorithms.
5. Audio samples from bin-aural to classical from well respected musicians, scientists and artists.
6. Save your dreams, banish your nightmares or email them to your friends.

A Kettle for the Visually Impaired

A large proportion of the world has trouble seeing, or trouble moving. Boiling hot water, Mains electricity, Manual operation … Kettles are hardly the safest or easiest to use items. Enter the sense kettle. Self filling, self pouring, easy to operate and designed specifically for people who are blind.

As a self contained unit, the sense kettle never needs to be moved, fills itself when empty and has a large steady untippable footprint.

The deep groove guides the operation from boil to pour

Designed to be placed in corners of kitchen surfaces, the kettle can easily be located by feel alone along walls and its rough two-tone texture makes operation easy whilst remaining completely cold to the touch.

Operation is unique. There is a shut-line that separates the orange and white sections, a groove that starts at the top of the kettle and flows vertically down the face. If you put your finger in the groove and follow it down, the buttons interrupt your flow until they are pushed which forces them flush, continuing the groove onto the next button.

There are two buttons : Fill & Boil

Clicked at the start and thrust out once boiled to an audible alarm.

Pour

Insert your mug under the nozzle on the corner of the cube and pour.

The cup angles away from the user to prevent spillage

The tray is specially designed to tip the mug away from your body, so if you accidentally overfill, there will always be a safety gap at the top of your mug. A pressure sensor prevents pouring without a mug and all overflowed water is safely discarded.
One of the niftiest features is the glowing cube of water. As a product for the visually impaired, knowing the state of the device at all times is imperative, so there is always physical and audible feedback. The cube starts glowing blue and fades to red as the water boils.

Shown at home in the kitchen

This was a very simple idea but highly effective when demostrated. All in all, the Sense kettle is a quality of life enhancement device.

The sounds of skateboarding

Every watched a skate film and wondered what the incredible music playing is? Wonder no longer with Skate sounds – the first website in the world to offer the tracklistings to many of the world’s great skateboarding movies. Keenan in Mouse? Rattray in Anthems?

Conceived in the mid-90s, skatesounds was a database driven reference guide to the music in skateboarding movies.
The logo was produced for the original incarnation of the website which allowed you to locate song information based on simple search criteria.

Originally the roadmap was to add social features so that anyone could update the site, to statistical charts highlighting which songs are most popular, which styles are least used and, for example, who skates to the most Wu Tang (Gino!).

You can see the original version archived at

The Skate Sounds Archive : Snapshot 1998