Composer/producer Jon Brooks has a love piece for the Braun AB-30 alarm clock, and its iconic designer Dieter Rams, entitled, appropriately enough, “Music For Dieter Rams.”

“Every sound on this record, from the melodic sounds to the percussion, the atmospheric effects to the bass lines originates from the Braun AB-30 alarm clock.”

In turns whimsical and reflective, the minimal soundtrack is inventively melodic. Pads and beats extend in roomy spaces, giving patterns room to breathe, free of ornament or effect – just as you’d expect music in homage to Dieter Rams to be. Calmly repetitive, the music hums away cheerily and efficiently, all of the zenlike balance of a Braun clock with none of the anxiety of an alarm. Some would be pleasant to wake up to. But it’s not all restraint, either: sounds cover the spectrum, squeezing every imaginable timbre out of the source material, up to the spacey, futurist cut “Elektronische Schaltungen.”

Dieter Rams’ aesthetic I expect has had a deep impact on neo-modernist electronic musicians, whether in the production of their music or as an impact on software and hardware design. (At least, it has between baroque layers of music and faux wood paneling and imaginary tubes reproduced on screen, which have their own, distinct place.) I think a lot of us would like to see more Rams-inspired design in music and visual tech, more of his humanistic notions about design. They don’t all have to be spun as Jon Ives-ian Apple chic, either – indeed, it’s a reminder of the importance of returning to the source of some of those aesthetic choices.

But that makes these musical poems all the more moving. They’re in no way slavish, translating one set of ideas to a novel medium, and dealing with the materiality of the product itself. It gives a design for a humble clock still one more way to last.

Read about this and other projects on Jon’s blog:
http://cafekaput.blogspot.com/

And more of the “good design” thoughts of Dieter Rams:

It’s not a sound design tour-de-force in the same way as the Dieter Rams album, but also well worth listening: Music for Thomas Carnacki.

More in the vein of the Braun project is a Brooks’ wonderfully-clever “Electronic Music in the Classroom,” as produced by a fictitious D.D. Denham and pupils. It’s simultaneously retro parody and freshly-modern; like the Braun piece, it effuses sonic wit.

What if blowing tunes on beer bottles was raised to the level of musical science?

Through even the mundane medium of packaging, design can transform the everyday. DJ and designer Matt Braun of Philadelphia, collaborating with Chris Mufalli, use labels to tune the level of beer remaining in the bottle for musical results. Pitches are printed on the labels, allowing you to exactly match the liquid inside to a pitch you want, and join along with your fellow imbibers for a performance.

It’s not just a label that’s different. Ridges on the sides of the bottles make them double as Guiro-style percussion. The neck was adjusted for ergonomics. Even the wooden box becomes a tongue drum.

It’s all decidedly non-digital, group fun – Create Beer Music? (Actually, technically, they’re printing with digital tech, the quantization of liquid to discrete equal-tempered pitches is a digital process by definition, and you hold it with your fingers. So there.)

So far, this has been used in a microbrew, but the duo are looking for a partner. I’d love to have this at our next Handmade Music, if any of you are in the bottling business.

Tuned Pale Ale [2d3d5d.com - project site]
Found via the wonderful, whimsical design blog etre, maintained by a usability and design consultancy
Thanks to Johan Strandell / 40hz for the tip.

The Tuned Pale Ale are just one of a number of unique designs from Matt Braun, all emphasizing making the ephemeral world of sound more physical.

Matt’s site is a smörgåsbord of design concepts, many involving creative uses of lasercutters and 3D forms. There are “tuned gig buckets” for busking similar to the beer bottles, useful tools for DJs using 45s, and wooden drums made from digital images of the sounds of other drums, producing “generations” of instruments in which the sound of one gives form to the shape of another.

Two of my favorites are pictured here. Custom-made shirts use user-modifiable CAD illustrations to produce wearable art made from analysis of any sound file – below, Michael Jackson’s P.Y.T. becomes a pink tee. Another project in early development explores making skeletal three-dimensional forms from the structure of musical harmonies.

I look forward to seeing how these projects evolve; Matt’s looking for collaborators.

http://2d3d5d.com/

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:

For this system, you would have a speaker with an rfid reader, and laser-cut paper radios with rfid chips inside. The radios themselves are designed by musicians, charities, brands, and designers. When the paper radio is placed over the speaker it changes the radio station to what the artist has chosen. Other noises and interactions can be programmed in too. Alec Baldwin’s radio for example could politely ask everyone to turn their lights off from time to time. People could have the paper radios around their house in different rooms. The supremes radio might be a better living room station. This system tries to add a little bit of fun to internet radio, and give people a connection with the artists they choose. The radios themselves would hopefully be cheap and collectible little sculptures, each one accessing unique stations.

The artist, D.A.R.Y.L., is a recent alumnus of Sweden’s Umea institute of Design.

I think we need a new, specialized Creative Commons license that describes “Great Concepts I Probably Won’t Get to Developer Further so Please Go Run with It With Some Credit to Me.” (Okay, maybe with a shorter name.) I love the possibilities this project suggests, if for no other reason than the beautiful sculptures created with the lasercutter.

The works themselves are printed out a single sheet and assembled. THat demonstrates some of the power lasercutters can provide, and the promise they hold for localized production of objects. (Use eco-friendly recycled paper and inks, and this is a consumer product that doesn’t deliver a dropkick to the planet.)

I just interviewed Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy, and he told me saw a survey that showed some 80% of music journalists listen through music via the built-in speakers in their laptops. That would be terrifying if true – I’m not certain that it is – but regardless, I think there is a clear need to rethink listening processes and objects.

Check out the post and the blog for more inspiring images. Via the wonderful Saturn Never Sleeps blog by Rucyl Mills and King Britt.