Music

Cigar box music player

Cigar boxes are great containers for loads of things. I had a bunch on hand after going to the local wine shops and asking for donated cigar boxes. Inspired by the Rock and Roll Speakers project in Fashioning Technology, it seemed like a good idea to have my students build their own music player embedded in a cigar box. This is a major project, taking several weeks, though it probably could be done by an individual in an afternoon without introducing many of the concepts we’ve worked on.

Continue Reading Chris Connors6
Drill-powered “fort” speakers

Drill-powered “fort” speakers

MAKE subscriber John Kelbley was doing some expansion/improvements on his kids’ “fort” and wanted to deliver music to the (unpowered) space. His solution was to use the rechargeable powerpack from an an old 12 volt Ryobi drill and use the drill body as a stand for two outdoor speakers he found on clearance. Amplification is […]

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Making Football Hero

We never do the same thing twice, and the projects can be pretty stressful as we’re always taking a risk and sticking our necks out, often doing things that have never been done before. We also work with relatively small budgets. Luckily it’s almost always worth the hard work though.

The Maker scene and the general explosion in low cost high technology have been a huge inspiration to us. Many of the things we do would have been pretty much inconceivable ten years ago. It’s also important that we try to work with technologies that the world and his dog aren’t all trying to innovate with. So for example we’ve stayed away from augmented reality as pretty much everyone is trying to create something with those tools.

Continue Reading Chris Connors2
Mark’s violin update

Mark’s violin update

Mark Williams’ electric violin, which he has been building over the past few months is nearly complete. Other than the neck and a few other items, the whole instrument has been scratch built, mostly at the Boston Fab Lab. He has a nice gallery of photos detailing the build.

I’m almost finished painting it, and I just string it all up for the first time since the project exposition to test out the new pickup magnets. It works GREAT! So amazing to play something I’ve built from the ground up. Just have to finish the fingerboard and bridge and then wait for the paint to finish curing so I can buff and polish it.

Continue Reading Chris Connors

Street View’s embedded videos

Phil Clandillon has a cool new video project featuring Google Earth mashups with panoramic images of specific locations relating to the background of the music on The Editors’ new album.

To promote UK band Editors’ new album, In This Light And On This Evening, we’ve created a hacked version of Google Street View which allows users to preview the album in the areas of London which inspired it.

Users can travel to areas of the city where we’ve hacked in our own custom locations. The new additions consist of our own custom panoramic images, shot at night by photographer James Royall. Within each location the user will hear music from the album, which was inspired by the mood and magic of London at night. Each of the nine tracks on the album has its own location.

Continue Reading Chris Connors