ringtones

Here are two ringtones I made.

This one is made up of the sound of a glass falling over and a lighter sparking... it sounds pretty outer-spacey and rhythmic. with a little more noise in the low frequencies, it would kind of sound like a didgeridoo:

Boomp3.com

I'm less happy with this one... the sample is the sound of keystrokes on a computer keyboard, but it was raining when I recorded it, and I couldn't really get the noise out of the recording:


Boomp3.com

Also, I found a cool site that has lots of open-source and public domain audio: www.archive.org. I was looking through the presidential collection -- I think I'll use an excerpt from Kennedy's inaugural address in something this semester... wonder what that'll be?

a different take on mechanized music

The Trons are a New Zealand-based rock band whose members are all robots. Here they are practicing:



And here they are in a music video:



According to their Wikipedia page, the Trons' vocals are produced by a tape loop with an actual tape deck, and the musicians are built mainly from old photocopier parts.

It's interesting that despite the absence of people in the band, the music is still so familiarly pop-y. See, for example, the 1-4-5 chord system in the first video -- a far cry from the music concrete and futurist ideals of other mechanized musicians.

I guess the next step would be to design a program that would write music for the Trons to play, and cut us out of the picture entirely. I kinda like the idea of robot minstrels -- at least until they turn on us.