Interactive Designer, Matthew Irvine Brown, has come up with a whimsical and practical application called Rehearsal Joypad for beginning musicians to hone their musical talents through the magic of Marching Bands.

Brown is of the “practice makes perfect” school of thought and he created a series of wonderfully abstracted marching band insruments, including the cornet, french horn, trombone and everyone’s favorites, the Sousaphone and Euphonium. These practice instruments are to be used with an accompanying video game of a marching band marching their way down Main Street, USA.

The game uses familar music game interfaces where the players precision in following the music is reflected in the precision of the marching bands performance. By playing the game repeatedly, the player can effectively learn the basic scales and fingering before moving onto the real instrument.

And the music for the game is based on the works of 19th century composer William Rimmer whose compositions are strikingly similar to Nintendo classics such as Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. To hear a sample song from the game, click here.

The Rehearsal Joypad won Brown First Prize in the 2006 Student Awards at the Royal College of Arts, London.

While the world waits with bated breath to see which countries will round out the quarter semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup, the Grand Finals of another World Cup will kick off tomorrow. In one of Europe’s largest sporting venues, in Paris, qualifiying champions in the realm of competetive video gaming, a.k.a, e-sports, will meet for the 4th Annual Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC 2006).

The ESWC is based on the simple premise of bringing together to world’s best video game players once a year for an intense and entertaining event for participants and spectators.

Players from over 50 countires will play in one of the following World Cup “events”:

Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike (Womens)
Quake IV
Warcraft III
Trackmania Nations ESWC
Gran Turismo
Pro Evolution Soccer 5

To give you a sense of the importance of this event in legitimizing gaming as a true competitive sport, the ESWC writes of e-sports: “Nothing is down to chance in electronic sports. It is all a matter of reflexes, psychology, training, and the ability to merge into a digital world and feel its force.”

British artist, teacher and cultural activist Christian Nold has assembled an amazing technology project called BioMapping.net, which combines a global positioning system receiver, a galvanic skin sensor that crudely determines emotional response, and Google Maps to render ‘emotional maps’ that correlate a person’s emotional state and their physical location as they journey through a landscape. The result is an individual, emotional narrative of place.

Nold is using the technology to create a massive emotional map of Greenwich, England. As more and more people use the technology, a map of emotional ‘hot spots’ emerges. One can imagine taking a “chilled out” tour, avoiding all of the ‘maximally excitable’ locations, or an inverse “freak out” tour of panic-inspiring locations.

Most of us are only aware of, at most, a couple of computer operating systems. Sure, almost everyone knows Windows XP, and about 5% of us belong to the Cult Of Mac. But while some indistinct number of consumers have heard of Linux, few of us have installed or used it. That’s a pity, since there are many interesting, elegant, and even lovely variants out there to play with.

That’s where OSVids.com comes in: the site meticulously posts videos of many different operating system variants, letting you peek in on a fanciful topiary garden of user experiences. Most of the examples are Linux variants, but there are also videos of Microsoft Vista in action, giving you a sneak peek at what most people’s computer screens will look like in the next year or two. It’s definitely worth a look.

Well, if you can…that ain’t nothing compared to what these four young DJ’s from Paris can do. This DJ’ing collective called Birdy Nam Nam are also DMC World Team Champions.

Scratching involves one or two turntables, and a mixer with a crossfader. Using the “scratching hand” to cue up and spin the record to the desired spot and then using the crossfader in the other hand to cut-in and out of the scratched record. Now that’s coordination.

With each flick of the wrist, these DJ’s lay beat on top of beat to create almost hypnotic tracks. Whats so impressive is that four individuals can so seamlessly combine their musical talents with the digital tools to create such an effortless sound.

Click on the image below to watch the video, and keep your eye on their speed on the crossfader. These boys can probably out=”Select-Select-A-B-B-A-Start” any gamer out there.

Sure, I expected to find confessional teenage “salty tears on my pillow” type statements… and yes, there were some “I love Trevor from my Language Arts Class” proclamations. But the sentiments on Lovelines, anonymous and without context, elicit a sense of shared vulnerability. It’s a forum to express love, like, indifference, dislike or hate, yet, none of the authors are aware that generating the content for Lovelines.

Using a sophisticated data search engine created by artist and web developers Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, Lovelines scours blogs every few minutes and picks out statements of desire. And in a web-society where metrics are king, the search engine also remembers the age, gender and location of each blogger.

The range between love and hate are explored in three different ways, or three “movements” as the artists describe them: Words, Pictures and Superlatives. On the bottom of the interface is a slider with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out as you approach Hate.

The creators have said that “We realize that the heart of all fixations is the desire to own, possess, and consume”. In creating Lovelines, they allow all participants in the site to share in a collective online experience of desire.

Lovelines was created for Oral Fixation Mints, those lovely breath mints that come in equally lovely tins.

For their excellent “Urban Planet” special online section, the BBC recently convened six leading thinkers on urban planning and the human environment to discuss the world in 2050, when well more than 50% of humanity will be living in cities — many of them hypercities — mostly in what is today the developing world. Among them, Stephen Graham of the University of Durham points out that urbanization is an unintended byproduct of technological progress: the more we use advanced technologies, the more our cities seem to grow, even as they should enable us to live anywhere.

Of particular note is the impressive data visualization (above) that shows the growth of large hypercities across the globe from 1955-2015. And be sure to read PopTech 2005 presenter Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, for a provocative look at the future of the urban experience.

Beloved web comic, literate zeitgeist-channeler and star of both PopTech 2004 and 2005 Ze Frank was profiled in the Styles section of Sunday’s New York Times for his recent “open sourcing” of The Show, his must-watch daily video podcast.

The burdens of daily creative production led Ze to invite some of his fans (and critics) to write one of The Show’s script’s for him, called Fabuloso Friday, which he then exactingly performed. The results are… charming, and might just define the limits of bottom-up, wiki-fied collaboration: sure, 500 monkeys banging on typewriters might one day get you Shakespeare, but its unclear if even 50,000 monkeys will ever be as funny as Ze. (I think that’s a compliment.)

Check out The Show, the Comedy Wiki the fans used to produce the ‘open source’ episode and reminisce with this .mp3 archive of Ze’s 2005 PopTech appearance.

On Friday, WHYY Public Radio and Public Television in Philadelphia did a fantastic, 6-minute segment on “Alive from Pop!Tech“, for NPR’s Morning Edition. The segment includes clips from Jesse Sullivan and Cameron Sinclair. Have a listen here.