We just finished this rather unorthodox project to promote “Black Ice”, the latest album from giants of rock AC/DC. The idea came about because we realised that many people work in offices where there’s a fairly heavy internet usage restrictions in place, and we loved the thought that we could subvert those policies with AC/DC’s music.

We decided to use the Excel format as it’s almost universally allowed through corporate firewalls. The result is the world’s first (and probably only ever) music video in Excel format, which plays back as ASCII art directly in the fields of the spreadsheet. You can download the spreadsheet here and try it out yourself.

Andrew Godwin’s LastGraph is a clever tool which allows you to produce information graphics from your last.fm data.

The service’s coolest feature allows you to create a PDF (or SVG) poster of your listening history between two dates. Here’s mine from August 08 to today:


See a larger version

The fancy visualisation technique for the posters originally came from Lee Byron’s “What have I been listening to?” project.

The site also offers some premium features which allow you to hotlink graphs for inclusion in your own website (as well as helping out the project) for only £5 (or $10) a year.

Upon checking out the app store this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ “Bloom” for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Simple and beautifully executed, the application allows you to create your own ambient music via a simple and intuitive touch interface. You can also run the app in “listen” mode and watch it generate the soundscape for you. Perfect for falling asleep to.

This app succeeds in three ways – simplicity, immediacy and beauty. You don’t have to know anything about music to achieve instantly great results. Your gran could understand the interface intuitively, and because it’s Brian Eno the music is beautiful and the aesthetic minimal. Ten out of ten.

Tumbltape is a brilliantly simple service which takes a Tumblelog and turns it into a playlist. For those of you wondering what the hell a Tumblelog is, it’s a type of blog which consists of short messages, pictures, music and video rather than the lengthier posts found on your traditional blog.

The combination works particularly well with my friend Laura KP’s blog, as she posts a lot of music. Check out the result here. I love it when things like this just work as if by magic.

This music video by fellow Irishman Glenn Marshall is generated entirely from code using the marvelous Processing language developed at MIT specifically for use in programmatic art. The video looks amazing, although I am very slightly disturbed by the small swimming objects in evidence throughout the piece...