As some of you might know, my husband and I live in Austin. One of the great things about living in Austin is that you can take advantage of all the fun stuff that surrounds SXSW every spring. Last year we designed a mobile site to help us get around all the free parties and unofficial events that were going on and it was so helpful we thought that this year we’d share it with everybody as a full-blown mobile app. We’re really proud to announce that Thinx Drinks is now available in the iTunes App Store and its totally free!

Some of the app features:

• Nearby feature shows all the parties and events near your current location, plotted on a map for easy navigation.
• Browse events by date or use the searchable database to find events by name, band, or venue.
• The My Parties feature lets you mark your favorites for quick reference later.
• RSVP from many events from within the app.
• Other features include social media and iOS Calendar integration. The app syncs to information stored the cloud to give you up-to-date listings.

I hope you find it as helpful as we do and hopefully I’ll see some of you around town!

The Colour of Popular Music and Song by the creative house Dorothy

Dorothy on the project:

From Black Sabbath to The White Stripes, Purple Rain to Pale Blue Eyes. Our two new litho prints feature colour wheels made up entirely from the names of bands and songs with colours in the title.

The Colour of Popular Music [features] the names of 154 bands (and artists) and The Colour of Song [features] the titles of 576 songs

Microsonic Landscapes by Realität 

About the project:

An algorithmic exploration of the music we love. Each album’s soundwave proposes a new spatial and unique journey by transforming sound into matter/space: the hidden into something visible.

It should come as no surprise that Einstürzende Neubauten would form the most erratic landscape. 

Photographer Christopher Payne’s series Steinway & Sons Piano Factory is a fascinating look at how these famous pianos are made.

Payne on his work: 

We’re each born into a moment of wonderment and of loss. It’s different for each generation. As a photographer I’m interested most when they come together in a way that overwhelms me. Having been trained as an architect, I tend to see those qualities in certain old buildings and industrial processes, how what once were marvels of design, construction, and function fell gradually into oblivion. That was the underlying theme of my books “Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals” and “New York’s Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway.” In those books it was necessary to create for the viewer a whole that could only be assembled from parts that survived here and there, across the country or across the city.

My Steinway photographs are the opposite, a deconstruction of something we all know and love as a whole. The kind of manufacturing and craftsmanship that happens at One Steinway Place, where people transform raw, messy materials into some of the finest musical instruments in the world, has nearly vanished from the American workplace. This concerns me deeply, not only because I come from a musical family in which such craftsmanship was revered, but because I live at a time when fewer and fewer people make their own music. Steinway is not disappearing, not by any means, but the opportunity to look deep inside it revealed to me one of the supreme and most discerning accomplishments of the human hand and imagination.

Space Monkey is a music video created as a collaboration between Ben Lee and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It’s a great reminder of the importance of “home”. See it here:

Instruments From the Inside is an advertising campaign shot for the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker by Wenn Andreas Mierswa and Markus Kluska. I hope it’s an ongoing one because I’d love to see the inside of some more instruments.

The Atom Ukulele by Celentano Woodworks

Walking Inside is a generative project by Eshwar-Emilio Cassanese in which math, music, points and algorithms were combined to “follow an idea”. 

About the project:

[These are] experiments to combine generative art in illustration. All textures and elements were created in generative, mathematical formulas for wind and biological organisms. processing and after effect.

Bartholomäus Traubeck’s Years is a record player that plays slices of wood instead of vinyl. 

About the work:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

You can hear a sample of the beautiful music that results in this video:

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

Selected work by Andy Gilmore.

About his work:

A master of color and geometric composition, Andy Gilmore’s work is often characterized as kaleidoscopic and hypnotic, though it could just as well be described as visually acoustic, his often complex arrangements referencing the scales and melodies in music.