Blog haze: it’s the dimmed state of consciousness that comes from reading too many blog entries about such and such a remix creative commons resampled installation art piece about intellectual prop . . . there, see I’ve already fallen asleep. But wait, this is really, truly, incredibly cool. If you don’t believe me, just watch the video.
The bizarrely-capitalized sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! takes an audio sample, slices it up into rhythmic slices and categorizes it in a database by spectral content, and then (here’s the good part) retriggers the audio based on an input. In other words, you can beatbox into a microphone and get a totally mashed-up version of MC Hammer in response. Check out the entertaining video for a sense of what’s going on.
The software itself will be unleashed on the masses, open source; it was created with c++, Python and PureData. (Okay, so you have to know not one but three geeky things. So we’ll probably just watch the video and leave it at that.) As near as I can tell from the software page, Pd does the audio/video playback, C++ does the analysis, and Python is the database. There are no effects: this is really just a (very clever) playback mechanism.
For the world beyond cool online videos, I do think vocal input has been wildly underutilized in new music tech. I could see an interface like this completely reconceptualized for a wide variety of material (think melodic or timbral re-slicing) . . . and who’s to say you have to use 80s music videos?
Previously:
Recycle TV: Remixed TV Beats
DIYers, take note — this previous TV remixer project also released source code, in Max/MSP (no mucking about with C++ and Python code, if that scares you!)