Our shared human culture is largely formed by music. Artist Evan Holm pays homage to all of the musicians who have helped to form this culture with his functional sculpture Submerged Turntable. It is exactly what it sounds like: a turntable is submerged beneath water but still manages to play back a song that can be heard nearly perfectly above the water.

Holm’s vision comes from the idea that one day, every trace of human culture will be crushed and buried beneath the passage of years. The Submerged Turntable is symbolic of the whole of civilization slipping into the black pool of obscurity and loss.

The sculpture isn’t as bleak as that description may sound, however. Holm calls it “optimistic.” Just after the civilization is lost to the deep, dark, unknowable pool of time, a song is pulled back through the veil. This, according to the artist, is his celebration of all music and musicians, and in fact every artist who has helped to form our collective human culture.

The post From the Void: Submerged Turntable Pulls Music From Water first appeared on Gajitz.

Creating music is easier than ever now thanks to the availability of digital music tools. Most of those tools, however, require at least some training or specialized knowledge before you can start making music. Not so with the Dyskograf, an art installation that creates music with nothing more than the markings from a felt tip pen.

Invented by art collective Avoka, the Dyskograf is primarily a graphical disk drive that translates drawings into music. Using a camera mounted on an arm, the graphical disk drive translates markings on a paper “record” into rudimentary music sounds. The more marks the user adds, the more layers of sound are piled onto the new song.

The interface allows for a unique physical connection with music, something that is in short supply in the era of digitized, hands-off music.

This unusual method of composing music allows for mistakes, coincidences and surprises. In this way, it is quite different from the traditional paper-and-pencil method yet also far removed from the digital composing and editing used by many modern musicians. It is at once a throwback to a more physical time, an homage to the digital world, and a brand new musical creation medium unto itself.

The post Interactive Turntable Makes Beats + Songs From Drawings first appeared on Gajitz.

Most of us learned when we were children that a tree’s interior rings can tell a lot about it. But thanks to Bartholomäus Traubeck, we can now not simply look at tree rings – we can also hear them. Traubeck’s Years project is a modified turntable that plays slices of trees just like records.

There’s a lot of complicated stuff in the project, but the rundown is that it uses a loop-based software music sequencer called Ableton Live to turn those lovely tree rings into even lovelier music. Each tree slice has its own unique “song,” letting us listen to the music of nature in a whole new way.

The post Sounds of Age: Record Player Makes Music Out of Tree Rings first appeared on Gajitz.

There’s a very devoted world of audiophiles who wholeheartedly believe that nothing compares to vinyl. And they may very well be right. But the problem with vinyl is that it’s far less portable than, say, CDs or MP3s. This briefcase turntable will let you play your records wherever you go – and the internal speakers will give you stereo enjoyment no matter where you roam.

But even better than playing your vinyl wherever you go is converting all of your old records into digital format easily. The USB port on this briefcase turntable lets you plug it directly into your computer, turning those bulky records into files. Of course, we fully expect you’d still carry the turntable around for those special occasions when digital just won’t do. Unlike a lot of the really great gadgets you see here, this one is available now from Think Geek.

The post Geek On the Go: Portable Turntable Briefcase MP3 Converter first appeared on Gajitz.