Despite suffering a now-infamous trip to the emergency room due to a rubber earbud tip getting lodged in my ear canal, I maintain that in-ear headphones offer the best combination of sound quality, portability, and blockage of outside sounds, although I now use the foam tips instead of the rubber ones. You can keep those…
Many objects that play recorded music have screens. Sometimes the screen plays a music video, but mostly it displays helpful — if static — information about what’s playing. The possibilities for depicting music visually are much wider, given the surfeit of music data that is available for, and/or can be generated from, literally any recorded song in…
America’s Soundtrack won’t teach you everything about U.S. history, but it presents some key moments through the lens of popular music — 31 songs about historical events that actually happened on a nifty interactive timeline. This interactive web app, hacked together by Mark Stoughton (Mistake Pointer-Outer for Evolver.fm publisher The Echo Nest, a subsidiary of Spotify), places…
Socks that vibrate to music. Artist playlists based on your tweets and your weather. A visualizer that reacts not only to the music that’s playing, but also to your flailing hands. Music Hack Day San Francisco — the latest stop on the ongoing, global Music Hack Day tour — was the place to see these…
Turntable.fm, whose launch was originally reported here, was an amazing, first-of-its-kind web app that nobody uses anymore, because it flamed out and people moved on. The problem with this group listening app, which let a handful of people choose music for everyone in the room, with everyone represented as cute little avatars in an actual room…
Artists often find inspiration in their surroundings. Unless they are quick to jot down their ideas, those can be lost forever. This is precisely why some recording artists use the notepad functions of their smartphones and tablets to capture song ideas and lyrics, although that approach fails to take advantage of the fact that the…
Ten years ago, we spent much of our seated time staring at computers and televisions. Now we get to stumble around staring at smartphones, too. But if I’m right, the future won’t be all about staring at screens, in part because the same sort of democratization and specialization that has transformed the software industry is…
Audiophiles make easy targets for mockery, the way they spend hundreds or thousands on speaker wire, when a blind listening test once famously revealed the humble coat hanger to be a suitable substitute (at least over short distances). Sometimes, an electron is just an electron. But not everything about the audiophile way is hooey. Speakers…
You might have played Patatap last week as it made its way around email, Facebook, Twitter, and other avenues. If you haven’t, you probably should. People like this “portable animation and sound kit” that lets you “create melodies charged with moving shapes” on a touchscreen web browser (phone or tablet) or on a computer. In terms…
Once a year, the South By Southwest music, tech, and film festival draws huge crowds of people from all over the world, sometimes contributing as much as a third of all of Austin’s revenue for the entire year. Last year (the most recent for which numbers are available), SXSW drew 155,000 people who “injected more…
Our ongoing investigation into how home audio is changing in 2014 has unearthed a surprising nugget of sonic wisdom, for those of us who are trying to take home audio just a little more seriously. Now that legitimate digital music services sound so good, fans no longer have to put up with dodgily-encoded MP3s from…
Hot on the heels of South by Southwest comes the Ibiza-loving, fist-pumping, superstar-DJed Winter Music Conference in Miami, with its mega-dance parties and electronic/hip hop trade show. In a way, it’s sort of like SXSW for EDM. Evolver.fm has obtained an exclusive list from Shazam of the EDM artists that were tagged the most at…
It’s 2014. Many of us already have connected speakers that we can control with apps, using a variety of wireless protocols, with Apple AirPlay and Sonos being particular crowd favorites, and many other promising wireless solutions on the horizon. Music has led the way through many major technological developments, from the iPod music player begetting…
