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http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68826,00.html?tw=wn_9culthead
The article also gives links to a couple mp3s (follow the link and scroll down to the end of the article), and they were decent, I thought.
If one geek's trash is another geek's treasure, start sending all those CD jewel cases you've been tossing to New York City, care of digital media artist Tristan Perich.
Perich is the man behind One Bit Music, a project that uses simple electronics to turn clear, plastic CD cases into personal, lo-fi music players.
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Find local technology jobs. Part handheld danceteria, part art, the creation squeezes an album's worth of Perich's original electronic dance music onto a tiny, 8-KB microchip. The electronics and battery are housed inside a clear, plastic CD case, along with volume, power and track-skip controls. Perich, who is also a graduate student at New York University, hand-programmed each track. Listeners can plug headphones directly into the side of the case and get their groove on -- no iPod or CD player needed.
"This was kind of interesting to me because it gives you a reason to go back into record stores," he said. "This is something where the music can be recorded and distributed online, but part of the fun of it is carrying around the actual object and seeing the entire process in front of you.
Perich presented One Bit Music on a recent Wednesday night at a dorkbot-nyc chapter meeting. Though it wasn't the first demo of his project, Perich knew a dorkbot unveiling would be a test of One Bit Music's geek cred, since the group tends to draw a crowd that knows its bits from its bytes.
"I was so excited for it," he said.
Clearly in his element, Perich turned on a One Bit track, filling the darkened, standing-room-only Chelsea gallery room with blips and beeps. Though reminiscent of old-school Nintendo games, the music sounded fuller than expected, given the size of the device's chip.
Yet, it is one-bit music, Perich said, meaning at any moment in time the music is represented by just one bit of information.
Perich handed an audience member a console with a pair of headphones, which slowly made its way around the room while he spoke.
The project gets to the root of electronic music, he said, as all the sounds are written as MIDI files in the zeros and ones of binary code.
"The kind of extremely digital nature of binary information is what I was getting at," he explained.
He's also getting back to basics, in a sense, with the format. While his CD case player has a 20-hour battery life, it's definitely not following the smaller-is-better trend of digital music devices. Still, Perich sees a place for it among consumers who want new methods of musical expression, and, as he told the dorkbot crowd, it should be available from record label Cantaloupe Music in January. He hopes it will cost about $20 to $25 and be sold in record and museum stores.
Despite the visible simplicity of One Bit Music, Perich's aural creations impressed the dorkbot attendees. After speaking, Perich was peppered with questions on everything from the device's clock speed to whether or not he'd considered using solar energy to power it.
His answers -- 8 MHz, and no, he doesn't think he could fit a solar battery powerful enough to run the device in the relatively small case.
Still: "You could unsolder the battery and hook it up to anything you want. In fact, I encourage that. That's cool," he told the audience.
After getting individual earfuls of One Bit Music from the shared console, audience members felt they'd heard something pretty cool. There were comparisons to video-game music, amazement at the complexity of the songs and amused reactions to the unexpected nature of the project.
Nina Verheyen could hardly believe the music was all written in binary code.
"Plus, I like the sound," she said. "It's weird and lovely and the combination is striking."
Brooklyn resident Eric Redlinger was also impressed.
"The more you listen to it, the more it evolves, and then you have to keep reminding yourself it's coming off of one little chip sitting inside of a CD jewel box," he said, taking off Perich's headphones so somebody else could have a listen.
The article also gives links to a couple mp3s (follow the link and scroll down to the end of the article), and they were decent, I thought.