Sunday, March 26, 2006

Scrambled Hax

My friend Bill posted this link at work today. It’s a video sample from a guy who has written a program called Scrambled Hax. It is a music video audio sampler for DJs. I see it as an Audio mosaic program. You know those Photomosaic where they take a huge data base of pictures and then the program makes one of the pictures out of tiny little versions of the other pictures? It’s the same thing only with music videos. The application he built is meant for live performances with DJs using it on the fly complete with snips of the music video that the source was cut from. So he can beat box into the microphone and have the program convert it on the fly and play the result. If you’ve clicked the link you know what I’m talking about.

Several people responded to the thread that it was like audio masturbation and the whole topic went off into left field about what is or isn’t music. It sounded very much like the “what is art” argument and got just about as far. Disparaging comments about M.C. Hammer were in abundance.

Personally I didn’t like any of the “music” that what created the video clip but then again I'm not really into the whole "live DJ mix" thing. I was really just looking at the program which I thought was pretty damn cool. I can see some really good stuff being made out of this in the hands of some creative and talented people. It would also be really cool if they built it into those home karaoke machines.

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