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Pianos can emulate human voices, apparently

I never thought a piano could emulate a human voice, but based on these songs, converted from MP3 to MIDI and then back to MP3 again, it’s possible. It sounds like someone singing while being held underwater, but it’s clear enough to decipher: the lyrics to familiar songs, rendered in hundreds of notes, played all at once in a cacophonous, but undeniably impressive imitation. A blog post from Waxy.org outlines other examples of this phenomenon, including a frantic MIDI-fied MP3 of Hotline Bling that sounds like a horror film, and a “speaking piano” that delivers its own garbled, but startlingly clear interpretation of the…

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Forget Van Halen: these 70 Zebra finches are my new favorite rock stars

I’ve been trying and failing to learn how to play guitar since high school. No matter how many classes I take or Rocksmith sessions I play, the seeming complexity of the instrument always scares me away from any higher level practice. Now, to add salt to the wound, I’m being upstaged by birds. But to be fair, there are 70 of them. In an exhibition that went up at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on November 25th, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot released 70 zebra finches into a room where the only perches were 10 Gibson Les Paul guitars and four…

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Our documentary look at the art of videogames continues

The first two episodes of Laurent Checola and Thomas Kimmerlin’s collaborative micro-documentary Let’s Play introduced the emerging communities of developers experimenting with how to create exciting new experiences and tell emotionally resonant, even controversial stories within games. The third installment asks both developers and players to challenge the preexisting paradigms of gratification in games to explore new digital and emotional terrains.