Everything old is new again. Haven’t old people been saying that for decades? We’re seeing increasing numbers of people carrying around Discmans and Walkmans for their retro kitsch value. Designers Rocket & Wine are playing on our weird obsession with obsolete technology with their Rawman 3000 concept.

Given the resurgence of portable CD and cassette players, Rocket & Wine designed three sizes of portable vinyl players. The 7″, 10″, and 12″ models are meant to be carried around so you can enjoy the rich, deep sounds of vinyl while you strut down the street. Along, we assume, with all of the skips and scratches that come with moving a record player around while it’s playing.

The Rawman, if it were in fact a real product, would come with stereo headphones, a USB port, Smartcard, an antenna to enable Bluetooth connection, and a carrying strap. When it’s not being carried around, making you look like the hipsterest hipster ever, it could be plugged into home speakers for a “big, rich sound, that […] only can be compared to a very elaborate and expensive component stereo record player system.”

Although the product is a spoof and will most likely never see production, we can absolutely see someone trying to make this happen. After all, if people are enamored with the inferior sound quality and breakage-prone qualities of the cassette, why not strap on a record player to go for a jog?

The post Time Warp Accessories: Wearable Portable Vinyl Players first appeared on Gajitz.

If you’ve ever reached into your pocket or bag to grab your earbuds and come up with a handful of hopelessly tangled cord, you know the struggle. There are cases to hold them, but if you’re anything like us, you lose those pretty quickly. The designers behind Helix want to help you keep your earbuds nearby and tangle-free.

In the process, they’ve created a fashion accessory that effectively hides the technological prize inside. The wristband, which comes in a variety of main color/accent color combinations, opens up to reveal a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. With a couple of swift movements you release the earbuds from their storage spot, turn them on, and jam them in your ear-holes.

According to a study that the designers cite, people spend about four hours a day listening to headphones (not true for us in particular because we like to obnoxiously blast our music from our computer speakers, but whatever). As the Helix is still in the design refinement stages, there aren’t any customer testimonials about how comfortable the earbuds are over long periods.

The designers seem to have focused a lot more on the design of the wristband rather than on that of the earbuds themselves, which is a little troubling. The Bluetooth control unit hangs down a bit under the chin, vaguely bringing to mind the little string that holds a kid’s cowboy hat on. Still, the wristband IS very stylish and looks like it could be easily integrated into any wardrobe for any gender.

At the time of publication, the project’s Kickstarter campaign has raised more than double its initial funding goal. When/if the Helix makes it to retail markets, it will retail for $199. For that price, the sound quality had better be totally amazing. The last thing we need is another expensive wearable that we give up on after a few weeks because it proves to be pretty, but not exactly a powerhouse in the functionality department.

The post Wrap Music: This Wrist Cuff Holds Your Earbuds For You first appeared on Gajitz.

Combining audio with extreme portability and visuals is something commonly done with synthesizers, but probably never this easily. As part of an event held at the Royal Academy in London called “Sensing Spaces,” it’s a multi-sensory feast.

The title for the device is ironic: ‘Contact.’ It would appear the user is strumming strings or hitting bongos, but when the lights go up, the impressive fact is that it can turn almost any hard surface into an arranger-style synth. The system of touch acoustics is driven by contact microphones, passive sonar and waveform analysis.

Created by visual artist Felix Faire, Contact’s audio is processed through software platforms Ableton Live and Max/MSP. After volume adjustments are plotted along an X/Y axis, with a few flicks of the wrist, electronic music tracks become audio-visual treats.

The post Making Contact: A+V System Creates Music On Any Surface first appeared on Gajitz.

Audio preservation has evolved to the point where centuries-old recordings become computer files. From Edison’s phonograph that recorded onto wax cylinders, to vinyl (possibly the most debated form of recording), to the compact disc, these shifts focused primarily on audio quality. But there have been recordings for just that purpose: to preserve the audio. So when a possible recording showed up in the pages of a book, media preservationists took notice.

A few years ago, a survey was done of the different time-based media objects in the stacks of Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. An amazing 569,148 different forms were identified. What the report didn’t mention, however, was a hidden ‘record’. A member of the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) at IU Bloomington discovered a circular picture buried in a volume of German reference books. While not the first ever audio recording, it revealed much more upon further inspection.

The disc-shaped image was titled “Der Handschuh,” which is a poem by Friedrich Schiller. The MPI investigator proceeded to apply some slick audio recording tricks to the image. After a high-resolution scan was done of the image, the spiral was converted into parallel lines by a process called polar-to-rectangular-coordinates transformation. The lines were then ‘pasted’ together used audio editing software.

If it hadn’t gotten tricky yet, it certainly did on the next step. According to the MPI’s website, the engineer “[ran] these images through ImageToSound, a program that converts them into WAV files as though they were variable-area optical film sound tracks.” A stereo track was made into a WAV, and the seemingly mundane picture in the book came audibly alive.

The image turned out to be a demonstration on how the lines theoretically contained enough information to produce sound. The technology was first created by Emile Berliner, the creator of the gramophone. But the picture found in the depths of Wells Hall at IU Bloomington turned out to be “the oldest known recording of a complete literary work in the German language.” It’s eons behind that FLAC rip you did of a CD in terms of audio quality, but the fact that it was digitized from a book is one amazing feat. The WAV file can be heard at MPI’s website.

The post Ripping Pages: Book Image Becomes a Digital Audio File first appeared on Gajitz.

By now, just about every studio trick or effect can be easily added to an audio track. At the click of a mouse, the average bedroom producer can add flange, distortion, chorus or filter. The holy grail of audio effects, reverb, was the subject of this experiment done by Audio Zero and Wikidrummers.

The two web teams employed drummer Julien Audigier to bang out a drum pattern in various natural settings. The goal was to capture the marked distinction in reverb that each setting would produce.

When finished with each recording, the accompanying video was edited to show not only the differences in reverb, but how it would sound when they’re blended together. The layered effects produce some amazing tones, and the video is edited so seamlessly that the effect is almost dizzying.

The post An Audio + Video Track To the Beat of the Same Drummer first appeared on Gajitz.