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.

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.

It's been a little while since a music related online service has come along which has made me drop everything and rush to try it out and find out more. MoreCowbell.dj is that thing. The service is a spin off of US tv show Saturday Night Live, where a special show featured Will Ferrell as Gene Frenkle, the cowbell player, and Christopher Walken as the music producer, Bruce Dickenson. It's simple but sure-to-be-massive mechanic allows users to add a variable amount of cowbell (and optional Walken) to any track they upload. They can then embed the newly modified track as a widget in their blog, social network profile etc. Here's one I made earlier:

The really exciting thing about MoreCowbell.dj is not the service itself, but the set of APIs that it's been built on. The Echonest provide a range of APIs which enable developers to build their own digital music applications without the need for expensive servers loaded with clever custom music software. Developers can use the service to analyse tracks and return important information like beats per minute and time signature which will undoubtedly lead to a whole raft of new browser based music apps.

How many times have you seen that title on a forum or blog post and groaned, waiting for the nerd dogfight to unfold with a tedious inevitability?

This is different though. The internet at it's most brilliantly pointless has brought forth a piece of music made entirely from Windows system sounds. And not to be outdone the Mac community have made one out of OS X sounds too. The fabulous thing is, the Windows tune is complex, overblown and cheesy, while the Mac version sounds like a pretentious piece of stripped down jazz. It's as if someone has distilled the very essence of each platform into a couple of minutes of music.

Windows version:

Mac version

Picked up from Listening Post