What’s cooler than being cool? Ice cold. Exactly. The Swedish town of Luleå took that saying literally because they formed an incredible ice orchestra called Ice Music that uses musical instruments sculpted from ice—yes, ice—to performs songs inside a concert hall that’s basically an igloo.
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It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.
The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.
Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.
Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.
Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.
Back in 1985 Tipper Gore testified in front of a Senate committee warning that children were being exposed to all kinds of naughty stuff in modern music. Sex, heresy and violence were destroying good old-fashioned American values. Won’t somebody think of the children!
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This week the folks at Valve have released Steam Music Beta, a local music service that’ll allow you to easily play music while you play games with SteamOS. THis service … Continue reading
When it comes to piracy, there are those who believe that downloading songs is alright, and then you have those who think that it is wrong. There are many reasons why people download, because it is free, or because they want to see if they like it, but in the eyes of the law, it is illegal and that is something an anti-piracy app has recently been launched in the UK where it hopes to teach the younger generation the effect of piracy on recording artists. The app, dubbed Music Inc, is a collaboration between UK Music, the Intellectual Property Office, and Aardman Animations. (more…)
Anti-piracy App Launched, Teaches Youths The Effects Of Piracy original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Given that modern day computing is all about the user interface, rarely do we have the need to go into console mode. Perhaps technicians and other professionals still require the console mode to access parts of the computer, but for the most part, the average user does not need to access it. That being said we’re not sure how many newer users these days are actually aware that their computers have a console mode? Let alone be able to create music from the console? Well that’s what one YouTuber did. Diode Milliampere is an electronic musician living out if Chicago, Illinois, and in his latest song, Aquarius, he decided to piece together the entire track using MS-DOS.
According to his SoundCloud page, he explains how he managed to do all of this. “I use Adlib Tracker II, and MS-DOS program which sequences the Yamaha OPL3 chip. My earlier music was created with Ableton Operator and there are some LSDJ songs in there.” The end result is a pretty decent track, albeit rather 8-bit-ish like you might expect from an older computer game, but pretty entertaining nonetheless. If you have a few minutes to spare, then perhaps this song could be worth checking out.
Musician Sequences A Song Using MS-DOS original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Garage Band, Pro Tools, Logic, sequencers on tablets and phones—anyone can create music these days with zero programming knowledge. But Diode Milliampere shows you how it was done with MS-DOS. Yes, that command line inputting, C-drive accessing MS-DOS from 30 years ago. It turned out pretty well!
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The beauty of iTunes and other music services that allows single downloads is that songs in general are quite affordable. After all paying a dollar for a song does not seem to be too much to ask, right? Throw in the fact that the money spent will be going towards a good cause probably helps as well, and that’s exactly what U2’s free “Invisible” single did. The single was launched as part of a promotion with Bank of America, who agreed to donate $1 to (Product) RED for every download of U2’s Invisible single, and as it turns out it was quite a success.
According to the reports, the song has been downloaded over 3 million times since its ad was run during the Super Bowl. Based on this, the Bank of America is expected to donate over $3 million to the Global Fund to fight AIDs, tuberculosis, and malaria. Apple themselves have donated over $65 million since 2006. As it stands the song is still available for download but it is no longer free and will cost users $1.29 as the promotion has since ended. However the good news is that proceeds of the song, all of it, will continue to be given to the same charity, so for those who missed out on the deal but still want to do their bit for charity will be able to do so by heading on over to iTunes for the download.
U2′s Invisible Single Raises $3 Million For Charity original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Watch Jackson, an awesome four-year-old kid, become overwhelmed by a beautifully sad song while riding in his Dad’s car. He tries to fight off the tears but he can’t help it. He starts crying because the music is so touching but he doesn’t want to change the song. He can’t. He takes off his glasses to feel the hurt even more. Even if it’s so sad, he loves it. It’s an adorable struggle to see him embrace the emotions of music. We have all felt like this kid before. We still do.
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Music videos are a popular staple among YouTube users, accounting for a large percentage of the video service’s overall views and drawing in countless people every day. The Google company … Continue reading
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