There was a great article on Time.com about Auto-tune last week. It talks about how Auto-tune touches all pop music you hear over the radio, making silent and not-so-silent tweaks to songs. Basically, it applies autocorrelation to make any singer sing in tune.

There was also some great discussion on Hacker News.

I decided to fire up GarageBand and apply its version of Auto-tune (Enhanced Tuning) on my voice. It’s actually incredibly easy to sound just like most modern pop artists, sans the great audio equipment. Here I present you the first verse of Kanye West’s Love Lockdown, as sung by me. Please keep in mind I did this in 5 minutes on my Macbook Pro mic.

With Auto-tune (.m4a)

Without Auto-tune (.m4a)

I’m absolutely loving the Ocarina app for the iPhone. They’ve done a superb job of creating an instrument that is a true joy to play, and that has the expressiveness of actually holding a wind instrument in your hand.

What I also love is that they’ve built a community of people creating music scores and sharing notes on how to play the app.

At $1, this is one of the top apps I would recommend. Grab it soon as I hear they will be raising the price.

Enjoy some Zelda from me:

Zelda Ocarina (iPhone) from James Yu on Vimeo.

I got to see and play with the Tenori up close at the San Francisco Apple Store. It’s a neat little sequencer device that is really easy to play with and create creative electronic music.

I took a little video of Ray performing on the Tenori. He makes it look incredibly easy.

Ray Performing on the Tenori from James Yu on Vimeo.

Makes me want to buy one, but at $1200, the price is a bit steep.

(By the way, I’m loving my new Flip Mino so far)

It looks like VH1 had Tay Zonday make a Summer Break version of Chocolate Rain. It looks like Tay may be making it big. We’ll know it when he finally gets his own Wikipedia page.

This is one of the most stunning remixes I’ve heard–it’s Snoop Dogg and Kirby, an unlikely combo. They work so well together it’s frightening. Listen for yourself.

This is a video of Imogen Heap performing one of my favorite songs, Hide and Seek, live for 103.1 FM. Her use of the vocoder on the vocals is simply beautiful and penetrating. Ironically, the sparseness of the vocals lends depth to the song.

Here’s the original audio and video:

This is DJ Kentaro doing what he does best: rocking it on the vinyl. Pretty amazing stuff about halfway in.

And here he is DJing at the 2002 DMC Technics World Championship. He was the first Asian to win the Final in the championship. He was 20 at the time.

I also noticed that he doesn’t use any headphones. Is that common? It has to make is so much more difficult to find and manipulate the beats.

The hang drum is a steel drum-like instrument that employs air resonance for tonal sounds. The instrument is played with the fingers, and the sound is described by many as mystical, and very relaxing. Personally, I think it’s got a very modern electronica sound that can be incorporated into a lot of ambient music.

The only problem is that the only people that make hang drums are two guys in Switzerland. And, of course, they aren’t able to keep up with worldwide demand. The last time I looked, hang drums were going for $2000 on eBay.

In the meantime, enjoy the hang drum videos below:

And, this guy hooked up contact mikes to the hang drum and added delays to each line. The results are nothing short of amazing. If this were my first time hearing it without the video, I would have guessed the piece was painstakingly sequenced using digital software.

   Digg this article!

5. Coldplay – The Scientist

Coldplay tells you to remember to buckle up. Imaginative, but not that hard to shoot, since he doesn’t appear to walk forwards, and there are multiple takes.

4. God Lives Underwater – From Your Mouth

Producing perfectly shaped foods from a mouth is amusing.

3. MuteMath – Typical

The band performs with wacky elements in reverse, done in one take.

2. Cibo Matto – Sugar Water

This is one of my favorite videos directed by Michel Gondry. The two women are shown in split screen, and both are running in the opposite polarity with respect to one another.

1. The Pharcyde – Drop

This one take masterpiece, filled with multiple complex elements and layers, is directed by Spike Jonze.

The slit-scan effect is a cool technique in photography and video where a slide with a slit is moved across the imaging device. Basically, you can do weird effects that treats each row of the image in an independent manner. For example, in the image of a hammer thrower above, the slit was moved across the film instead of a shutter, and produces an image whose rows slice the thrower at different points in time. It’s a startling effect.

In the video below, the same effect is used in video. A woman turns around in place, but, instead of seeing it all happen at once, we see her body impossibly contort as the slit scan is performed. In this case, it’s a digital version called the “time displacement” effect.

And of course, this effect has been used in various other media, like this music video from the Belgian band Goose below (effect start at 1:53). Also, they have a giant version of the rotating window optical illusion. Fun stuff.