Stop playing with your food and start playing with your music, with Zounds, a weird musicmaking device that uses colorful and oddly-shaped objects to play different musical phrases depending on where you place them on the board, which lights up with psychedelic colors at the same time. Using touch-sensitive buttons on the base, you can bend notes, and change the tempo, echo, reverb and volume of all that racket as well.
When you get sick and tired of all that "other-worldly" noisemaking, plug in your iPod or MP3 player and you can use its built-in speakers to play back music accompanied by a light show that might itself become annoying after a while. This $50 toy might be fun for about five minutes, but after that the kids will get a hold of it. Parents beware, and keep your earplugs handy.
[Zizzle, via ]
It's not often that three big players hop in bed together and invite us to watch. So we wasted no time this afternoon at the Sansa Rhapsody music orgy, where SanDisk showed some slow tender lovin' to their new bedside partners Best Buy and Real Rhapsody.
The hour-long menage a trois led to the birth of four new Sansa players.
There's the 2GB e250R ($139), the 4GB e260R ($179), the 6GB e270R ($219), and the hulk-size 8GB e280R ($249). All four feature a 1.8-inch TFT color screen, can be expanded by popping in a microSD card and come pre-loaded with hours of music you didn't know you wanted.
They also include an FM tuner, voice recording, and have a removable 20-hour battery (though you have to unscrew 4 screws to get inside the battery compartment).
The player is meant to compliment the Best Buy Digital Music Store with Rhapsody 4.0 ($14.
99/month with $0.89-cent downloads, or free-for-all $0.99-cent downloads).
We compared it to our second gen 4GB iPod Nano. R-rated hands-on pics after the jump.
It seems service provider or cellphone maker these days is starting their own digital music store. Not one to be left out, Samsung's announced that they will make their own line of digital music players that work with their own proprietary download service.
Samsung's already got the digital music player side down, making swanky devices like the , but will their agreement with MusicNet be enough to get them into third or fourth place behind iTunes and other already-established music services?
The music store is expected to launch later this year.
You know those little air horns that people bring to concerts and other events?
Yeah, the same ones that manage to deafen you for a short period of time and result in a beating to the operator of the horn. Those small horns have gotten quite the upgrade. The Hornmassive is exactly that, a massive horn.
It is capable of making noise that can be heard 1km away. This horn is primarily used at music festivals.
Supposedly the Hornmassive is capable of delivering superior sound, throw, range and efficiency from the 2-ton 2000-watt horn.
Now, would it be mean for me to hope they take it to Burning Man and blow all of those hippies away?
Update: Well I'll be damned. There was a giant horn at Burning Man.
The information for that project can be found . It was at Burning Man from 1999 to 2002. Guess it didn't do good enough of a job at blowing away the hippies.
Thanks, Dan
Double neck guitars are old hat, so make way for the Pikasso, a 42-sting guitar that was borne out of a challenge to make a guitar with "as many strings as possible." The guitar has four necks and two sound holes, plus enough pizzaz to wow even the most "woe-is-me" emo kid on the block. Interestingly, the guitar makes use of a design element called "the wedge," which tapers the size of the guitar so that it's thinnest where it presses up against the guitarist's body.
This gives the guitarist a better look at the fret board so he knows what he's doing. I'm sure that once you've gotten the hang of playing a 42-stinged, four-necked guitar you can probably pick and a play your counterfeit Les Paul like a pro.
The Pikasso, which took two years, or some 1,000 man-hours to build, can actually be heard on a number of recordings by Pat Metheny.
Apparently, he's pretty good.
Don't expect to see this at your local Guitar World, though.
Not everyone can be a violin playing master, but with the Vistuoso Violin, you sure can pretend to be.
Watch as "[a]n invisible hand glides the bow across the strings producing a genuine violin sound -- with no human in sight." The sounds produced by the violin are actual violin sounds and not the deceiving sounds of a digital synthesizer.
The Virtuoso is MIDI-compatible and was invented by one of the guys at the helm of NASA during its famed Apollo program.
Be sure to watch the infomercial-quality video explaining the ins and outs of the Virtuoso.
Price? Methinks it'd probably be cheaper to get professional violin lessons than shell out the $17,500 required to purchase the Virtuoso.
At least the seller includes some accessories with your purchase, like a display cabinet and a 40-watt amp.
A study by Rand Corp. concluded that teens who listen to sexy music on their iPods started having sex sooner than kids with other types of music.
The types of songs classified as "sexual" were all over the map mdash;hip-hop, rap, pop and rock mdash;but all contained sexual content in the lyrics.
Among heavy listeners, 51 percent started having sex within two years, versus 29 percent of those who said they listened to little or no sexually degrading music.That's very useful information for teens.
So boys, if you're trying to get your sweetie to go all-the-way downtown Charlie Brown for the first time, load up her iPod with some choice tracks.
News RSS