Comments on: Rubik Music Machine

Rubik Music Machine

signal — Mon, 15 May 2006 21:34:24 -0800

The Rubik's Cube was of course primarily intended as a live music-making instrument. The whole 'solving it' craze was missing the point.

By: freebird

freebird — Mon, 15 May 2006 21:54:33 -0800

I thought I was joyous and happy when I watched the video. When I realized you'd pointed us to a playable version I was filled with a soul-deep glee I can only hint at in this textfield. Thank you for this, "Douglas Edric Stanley" and signal.

By: ab3

ab3 — Mon, 15 May 2006 22:41:35 -0800

wow. just messing with the controls on this thing makes music a hell of a lot more listenable than pretty flowers...

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Tue, 16 May 2006 06:14:02 -0800

Wow. I'd love to see this in the hands of a really good improvising, live-sampling electronic person. (Mathew Herbert springs to mind.)

By: shortfuse

shortfuse — Tue, 16 May 2006 07:50:00 -0800

Sweet. Such a familiar, friendly, inviting interface. The Shockwave app sadly crashes my Safari, so I can't tell for sure - but based on the video, it seems like the music is affected only after you make a change to the cube, put it down, and let the software recognize the change in state? He says "There's also a performance aspect to 3. Music is a live medium, and has been modular and algorithmic for centuries; the digital field should reflect this and allow for musicians to perform digital algorithms with their hands, just as they do with the guitar." But it doesn't seem like you can improvise with it fluidly by rotating the sides with your hands quickly, say in time with a beat, if you have to keep putting it down like he does in the clip. That's very discrete + not very guitar-like. Maybe you could do some quick-and-dirty video recognition, so that the software can watch the cube as you rotate it with your hands under the camera. You might need to initialize the cube by marking the corners of all 6 sides with specific colors, so that with an image of any one side, the software knows what the state of the cube is. So it'll know exactly the state of the cube at any given time as you keep changing it.

By: pombe

pombe — Tue, 16 May 2006 08:23:31 -0800

Very cool idea, though the music he makes with it in the video is pretty repetetive and not that interesting. I don't know if that's a function of the fact that it's an early test, or reflects the need to put the cube down as shortfuse said, or is a limitation of the number of faces on the cube. Still, I like it.