“Brazilian Cups” on some kind of glass keyboard – “Mystery Guitar Man”

(waves hands around, brushes dust off)

Man, you go away for a week and the website gets all manner of cobwebs on it!

Back from vacation, but didn’t have a lot of Internet ‘splorin’ time, but I did come across this nice little music video by a prominent YouTuber named Joe Penna, who goes by the handle “Mystery Guitar Man“. I first saw Penna some years ago, before his YouTube “fame”, he did a fun stop-motion/video song where he “played” a song by glomming together short clips of himself playing one note at a time. It was a lot of fun, and he’s done a whole lot of other songs like that, as well as other types of music videos using creative digital video effects.

This one song isn’t so much that kind of music, but it is interesting in the type of instrument he uses. He tied together a keyboard with various lengths of sticks at the end, which hit glasses with a certain amount of water in each in order to make a note. Kind of like the people who play glasses by rubbing the rim, except this is more staccato. It works really well, for the song “Brazilian Cups.” The music only lasts for the first half of the video, though.

Enjoy!

Science is AWESOME!

Here’s a neat demonstration of vibration, frequency, standing waves and a whole lot of cool images, using nothing but salt, sound, a board, and an audio generator! I prefer this version with the music, but there’s a link on the page to the version with just the tones at the frequencies used.

Enjoy!

Nerdtour 2012 quickie: Artistic Tokyo Station

So, I thought I’d try to be a little artistic with another one of my photos from Japan. I see all kinds of “art” photos where the photographer uses grainy black and white, so I thought I’d do the same with one of my more-or-less “artistic” photos, converting the nice clean crisp color photo to this B&W thing. This is a shot of one of the platforms at Tokyo Station. I was headed to Yokohama for the day, and it was well past rush hour so there was hardly a person there. “Crowded Tokyo” is very selective in its appearance.

I don’t know if this works as “art” or not, since I’m not an artist, but here it is anyway! I guess it kind of looks like an old photo, or something…

_MG_6328