Speaking Piano – Now with (somewhat decent) captions!

Possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. A work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. [via Makezine and Neatorama]

Full translation of the words in YouTube:

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously arent normal Music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrom of the childs voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

(Most scary Halloween costume by Heidi Klum.)

She’s trying to be Kali:

(Hindu goddess associated with death and destruction.)

Read more about Kali at IndHistory.com (image is from here).

Kali, also known as Kalika (Bengali: কালী, Kālī / কালিকা Kālīkā ; Sanskrit: काली), is a Hindu goddess associated with death and destruction. The name Kali means “black”, but has by folk etymology come to mean “force of time (kala)”. Despite her negative connotations, she is today considered the goddess of time and change. Although sometimes presented as dark and violent, her earliest incarnation as a figure of annihilation still has some influence. More complex Tantric beliefs sometimes extend her role so far as to be the “ultimate reality” or Brahman. She is also revered as Bhavatarini (literally “redeemer of the universe”). Comparatively recent devotional movements largely conceive Kali as a benevolent mother goddess. (Source: Wikipedia)

Heidi Klum is blue!

(via American Progress)

[via Pkchukiss]

If you got bored in the beginning like I did, you could click to 20 pixels from the end of the seek bar to see the end results.

It’s some sort of Eclipse rendering bug. Your code is totally jumbled up and all the indentations and braces are all prancing around when you scroll up and down.

When such things happen, be daring – save your work. Close your file, make a silent prayer and open it up again. If your work get corrupted, you know you haven’t been sincere in your prayers.