Brazilian artist Paulo Nenflidio, who’s currently showing off his work in Arizona, creates weird noise-producing sculptures like this robot drill spider, which ends up sounding as frightening as it looks.
In one of the odder announcements during the Macworld keynote, Sting, along with others like Norah Jones, will teach you to play guitar and piano in Garageband ’09.
Musical doorbells are annoying enough, but what if you gave your visitors the freedom to express themselves creatively? That’s exactly what designer Li Jian had in mind when he came up with the Pianobell. Unless you are friends with a lot of talented musicians, I don’t see much of an upside here. On the other hand, it could be amusing to torture your FedEx guy with a bizarre form of performance anxiety. Fortunately for him, the Pianobell is only a concept at this point. [Labexp via Freshome]
The Peterson BB-1 BodyBeat attaches to your finger/random appendage, sending tiny rhythmic pulses that you can feel on your skin. The non-aural stimulation will give you a silent way to count measures while playing the piano… and since you have to use your fingers to do that, you will have to clamp this to somewhere else. The question is where?
Although not the most tuneful of instruments, this plastic finger piano was a freebie with a kids’ magazine in Japan. I reckon it sounds like that high-pitched “weee” sound you get just before a bomb goes off in the movies. And until we can fit a baby grand into our apartment, this shinky-shonky toy will just have to do. [Geekologie]
Between iAno – the newly released iPhone app that turns your mobile into a piano – and the earlier released PocketGuitar, which does much of the same but with a guitar, it is only a matter of time before we see the first iPhone band. That will be awesomely groundbreaking, and what we ask is that you send us the video. We’ll post it, we promise*. Back to the present, iAno installs on Jailbroken iPhones and offers a fully functioning multitouch piano, as you can see in the great video above. A four-octave keyboard is represented in iAno, and the arrow keys at the top are used to navigate around. The software was put together by a developer going by the name of Mr Aardvark, and he managed to pack in polyphonic sound that allow five key presses to be heard simultaneously. Sweet.
Strapya might just have come up with this year’s most useless thingy, the Piano Can. Housed in what looks like a babyfood tin is a polythene keyboard that may or may not have been made out of an old plastic bag.
Most DJ setups consist of a park bench, some crates and a beat-up trash can. This Grand Master DJ setup? Much classier. Someone took a grand piano, added four subwoofers, some tweeters, and the standard fancy DJ controls to where the keys are supposed to be. Here are the full specs:
Dual Pioneer DVJ-X1 DVD Players, Edirol V-4 Video Mixer, 3 Marshal LCD Monitors, Allen and Heath Xone 92 Audio Mixer, Dual 15″ Subwoofers, 18″ Subwoofer, 12″ Subwoofer, 3 Bullet Tweeters, AB 1100 Watt Power Amplifier.
I’ve been waiting to buy a piano for years, but something’s always been missing. Sure, they’re timeless, classy instruments, but I require some tacky fad to be attached to anything I own. Something like an… iPod dock?
Perfect! The horribly named iQ is a piano with an iPod dock that can play back music as well as have music played on it. Why invest in a beautiful piano you can be proud of for years when you can get one that’s totally gimmicky and you’ll be embarrassed of in a year or two? –Adam Frucci
