Digital technology has transformed the listening experience. But there’s little in the way of physical artifacts of that act, and a diminished sense of humanized relationships to an individual being at the other end. From modern radio to Internet-streamed playlists, our listening world is DJed by automated robots in streams that flow through generic, mass-market speakers. The object and the content lack the design intention that imbued, for instance, the gorgeous radio sets of the early 20th Century and the personalities that narrated the programming.

Armed with a lasercutter, designer Matt Brown has a novel concept for how to redesign the act of listening. From the creator’s blog Real Tomato:

Greensboro, NC-based art music band Invisible are indiscriminate about technology – in a good way. Plastic cups, keyboards, typewriters, machines controlled by robotics, if it’s in the trash or at a thrift store, it has a place in the band. Sequences are executed in physical, radial player instruments, without a controlling computer anywhere in site. As voicemail tapes get sampled and typewriters tap lines of absurdist lyrics as each typed letter plays a piano note, something magical happens. Perhaps it’s that, novelty aside, somehow these sound-making objects come together for a reason – the machines assemble in the way the band does. And then a chair is a marimba.

The Rhythm 1001 takes “tangible” to a whole new level — everything sequenced is mechanical, triggering found objects. The video above features the sequencer at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Second Street Gallery. (Gents, if you ever visit Brooklyn…) Thanks to Evan Hill for the tip.

Is it “Digital Music”? I think it is very deeply so, perhaps because the objects get treated as discrete musical events (read: percussion).

Incidentally, guys, I agree with a lot of things you’re saying about the use of computers for music, but HAL here tell me he won’t let me fr

Transmission ends.

Distributing music on USB sticks or removable flash memory is an idea various parties have tried for the last few years. The Creative Commons advocates at self-proclaimed “non-evil” indie label Magnatune sold USB sticks pre-loaded with ten albums in 2004; Barenaked Ladies had the nicely-named Barenaked on a stick. But to really make the idea (ahem) stick, you’d need some big distribution. And that’s what a new initiative backed by the major labels and massive flash memory manufacturer SanDisk promises to do.

slotMusic.org | Press Release

See also GearLog, which notes that SanDisk previously did a free promotional SD of music

Wired News asks, “but why?”, to which I’d answer – it might well be easier to load music onto a phone in parts of the world other than the US, you might more easily distribute videos, and artists looking to increase the value of their CDs could innovate on revitalizing album art.

First, let’s start with the players, as that’s basically the big news here.

Hardware: SanDisk, the folks who invented flash storage and make more of it than anyone else

Labels: A huge set of the majors – EMI Music (which includes the likes of Angel, Capitol, Blue Note, and Astrelwerks), Sony BMG, Warner Music (including Atlantic, Nonesuch, Rhino), and the world’s biggest music company, Universal Music Group

Retailers: Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and other US retailers, with Europe to follow – keeping in mind, Wal-Mart remains the biggest brick-and-mortar seller in the US

When it’s happening: Exact date TBA, but officially by the holidays

Which artists: Most likely, lots of them. An EMI representative who spoke with CDM confirmed two chart-topping examples: Coldplay’s Viva la Vida and Kate Perry’s One of the Boys.

Now, you’d be right to be skeptical of how this format will be received, but it’s certainly a big distribution play with that arrangement of labels and retailers.

The hardware in question is basically SanDisk’s tiny removable flash memory format microSD, rebranded and repackaged as slotMusic. (A representative of SanDisk tells us there are some other subtle technological differences; more on that soon.) The important thing about this is that the hardware you buy has no DRM on it at all; it’s just standard flash memory you can plug into phones and mobile devices, or, via a tiny included USB sleeve, a computer.

SanDisk’s format specifies DRM-free, 320 kpbs MP3s as the music format. Gruvi, SanDisk’s previous attempt at turning their lucrative flash memory business into a music format was a miserable failure, but by contrast, it was locked with DRM features and, excepting a big release by the Rolling Stones, lacked support from labels and retailers. (I see Gruvi has even been largely erased from SanDisk’s website.)

Today’s reflections on the importance of album art:

1. Album art can be beautiful, whatever the recording medium. It can reflect great design, and extend the expression of the album itself (well, and it helps if the album is great). Justin and Colin have created the site Hardformat to celebrate design on everything from tapes and records to new releases. They have a gorgeous gallery of stuff, pictured above. I like what they have to say on their about page:

It seems like everybody’s talking about the end of physical music media. Who knows whether they’re right or not, but Hard Format is a little place we’ve set up to celebrate our love of brilliant music-related design. That means we’re going to focus on records, CDs, cassettes and their like. However, Hard Format isn’t intended to become a dusty museum devoted exclusively to past glories, though there’ll certainly be some of that, we also want to highlight the brilliant new design work being produced right now.

2. Physical objects could be a powerful force in the digital age. Digital downloads are wonderful. But there’s a coming renaissance in physical objects, premium album releases, and oddities. I’ve been talking with people about crazy ideas like DIY Blu-Ray discs or building custom MP3 player kits loaded with music. In the throw-away age of culture, it’s a chance to care about what an object is, who made it, how it got to you, and what it means in your life. And it’s a chance not just to bring back the goodness of the LP’s cover as artistic canvas, but to go beyond that to new expressive forms. Nostalgia is fine; making new things is better. Make the change you want to see. (Apologies to Ghandi.)

3. I really wish the album art on my digital downloads weren’t so $#(*& screwed up. I rip music from CDs, I download through promotions, I use eMusic, I buy from medium to obscure digital stores and digital labels and direct from the artist, and yes, very, very rarely from iTunes. Somehow, about half wind up without embedded album covers, and my iPod touch insists on syncing with iTunes. Has anyone found a good workflow for properly cleaning up your album tags, filling in the missing covers successfully, and syncing it to devices?

Comments welcome on my syncing woes. (Yes, even Winamp and Media Monkey aren’t able to clean it all up, though I do use the latter for clean-up.)

But in the meantime:

Hard Format: Reaching for the Sublime in Music Design

And for more album art collections, see their inspiration page

Or from vintage CDM and the opposite end of the spectrum, Terrible Album Covers, Fugly Bands

What could a pocket-sized computer be? It could be a new kind of album extra (yawn), a new kind of generative musical format that samples and responds to the world around it (whoo). It could be a more effective controller (fun), or an Indian drone (really). The Apple iPod touch / iPhone, as always, brings both wonder (potential as an art platform or recording device) and trouble (respectively, restrictions on who can see your art and problems actually getting mic input or transferring files). So here’s this week’s snapshot of what’s happening on Apple’s micro-sized pocket Mac phone mediaplayer thing.

First, some quick updates that I’m genuinely pleased about: