Yes I know that everyone is pinging Chatroulette stuff around the moment – but this deserves the limelight. I’ll spare all the waffle but if you haven’t seen it all you need to know is:
1 – Merton creates Chatroulette Piano Improv.
2 – Ben Fold creates Ode to Merton.
I thought long and hard about posting these videos because I imagine quite a few people won’t like a) what Doug Stanhope has to say, and b) the way he says it.
His bio reads like a NSFW website warning: “Dougs material ranges from true-life graphic perversion to volatile social criticism. Doug is vulgar, opinionated, brutally honest and shockingly uninhibited and is certainly not for everybody.” But I think his observations are dead on.
Filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs over the course of several months.
This is the Rube Goldberg machine version. In other words, a video depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.
The Clavilux 2000 is an interactive instrument for generative music visualization.
The setting of the installation consists of three parts:
- a digital piano with 88 keys and midi output
- a computer running a vvvv patch
- a vertical projection above the keyboard.
For every note played on the keyboard a new visual element appears in form of a stripe, which follows in its dimensions, position and speed the way the particular key was stroke.
Colours give the viewer and listener an impression of the harmonic relations – and each key has it’s own color scheme and “wrong” notes stand out in contrasting colors.
Would love to see Les Dawson do his piano ‘routine’ on it.
EDIT
For people who have no idea who I’m talking about – here’s the man himself.