Suck It, Autotune
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on October 23, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010Thanks to new voice synthesis technology, we’ll no longer need Auto-tune to fix pop stars’ crappy voices. In fact, we may not need the pop stars at all.
 T-Pain ponders life without auto-tune |
Finally, some good news in the world of pop music production. You know all those no-talent artists out there that rely entirely on auto-tune for their singing careers? Well, thanks to the voice synthesis software Vocaloid, we can now do away with their voices altogether. But why stop there? Because of recent innovations in the rapidly evolving field of holographic technology, we can even dispense with the artists themselves! This isn’t some sci-fi near-future prediction of things to come, it’s already happening. Just check out this concert appearance by Miku Hatsune, the Japanese pop sensation that – in spite of not even existing – has millions of fans worldwide. This should be a boon to the tragically poverty stricken, litigation-happy major labels that are using the same excuse they have since the 80′s for not making any money. Labels probably spend more on a typical artist’s room service in an hour than the total cost of this software package, and there’s even a free alternative called Utau. This is going to be bigger than you think; when you think “auto-tune” you probably think T-Pain, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West, but this now-two-year-old list of Auto-tune abusers (complete with audio example) already included artists like Dixie Chicks, Avril Lavigne, and Maroon 5. T-Pain probably has less to worry about than many others; as the undisputed king of Auto-tune abuse, he was approached early on by iPhone app developers to license his name for I Am T-Pain. Which I just have to say represents to me the ultimate in meta-irony: nerdy rich white guy iPhone owners thinking they’re hip and witty for acknowledging their total lack of masculine sexuality. But back to Vocaloid. The software seems to be stuck in a weird cycle of marketing and product development; it’s hard to tell if Yamaha has any interest in developing it as a recording tool, or if they’re going to let second party developers like Zero G and Crypton deliver it more as a “virtual celebrity” creation tool. Personally, given the two-dimensionality and high maintenance costs of many real pop superstars like Hanna Montana, Lady Gaga, and the artists already mentioned, I’d put my money on the latter. Vids below. Read the rest of this entry »
Losing Touch With User Expectations
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on October 11, 2010 by admin in Technology
Monday, October 11th, 2010Do you ever find yourself touching touchscreens that aren’t touch sensitive?
The other day, a friend handed me their Blackberry and asked me to call up Google Maps. After fussing with the device for a moment, I mentally cursed its lousy touch-sensitive interface, until I realized it wasn’t touch sensitive. I would’ve felt pretty stupid, but I see this kind of thing all the time, whether it’s someone trying to touch an LCD monitor to do something, or spastically backspacing on Google trying to get the right Instant Google/Google Autocomplete result instead of just typing what they’re looking for. I’ve already shared my thoughts on Google Instant, and the more I’m exposed to it, the more strongly I feel that Google shouldn’t impose this kind of “improvement” on me until they develop it to the point that they actually know what I’m thinking, which would eliminate the need for me altogether. In any case, I fear that because of smart phones, self-serve kiosks, and the iPad, we may briefly have to suffer these occasional human malfunctions. Personally, I’m prepared to wait; I’ve been quietly rolling my fingertips on my lifeless and uncaring work surfaces for years as I wait for the kind of tactile holographics that were featured in Iron Man 2 (video also below). This kind of interface may not be far away, but the best I’ve seen so far is a bit primitive; check out this clip from last year about touchable holographics being developed at Tokyo University. So what do we have available? Well, back in the world of two dimensions, there are really amazing tools for designers like Wacom’s Cintiq, and for education, there are tools like Hitachi’s StarBoard, and for business, the somewhat more limited Smart Podium, but these are all still pretty pricey. I think that as consumers, we may have to wait a bit for all of our devices to be more pervasively touch sensitive. One of the last products to be touted as consumer-oriented was Microsoft Surface, but the platform was made public way back in 2006, and I still don’t have any friends with touch-sensitive coffee tables. Perhaps because – as this hilarious video about Surface points out – why use a compact device like an iPhone to get maps and directions, when you can use a device the size of a small car? More video below. Read the rest of this entry »
New Google Technology Makes Humans Superfluous
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 14, 2010 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010Google’s search technology has become so good at predicting what you want to search that they’ll soon be doing away with you altogether.
Words could never begin to express the sense of relief I felt today when I read on the Google Blog that they’ve finally developed technology to do away with the human element altogether. After more than two years of generating original content every day, I run out of juice occasionally, and I was starting to worry that I would become one of the millions of user-generated content generators that fails to generate, and ends up apologizing for why I haven’t posted recently. By the way, if you need to filter the 111,000,000 results from that link, there’s a blog for that. And although I have some regrets that this new Google technology will render my existence unnecessary, in a way I’m looking forward to doing whatever it was that I did before the Internet came along. If only I can remember what it was without Googling it. In any case, until Google activates this new, completely human-free web, you may be interested to know that that as a user-generated content generator, you can already build an entire web site without even resorting to the content farms I was making fun of a few weeks ago. That’s right. Primal Pages lets you enter a phrase, and then assembles existing content from around the web for you. After you answer the question “What are you thinking about?”, you really don’t have to make any more conscious decisions except whether or not to click the “publish” button. As their tagline says: “If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds.” I for one welcome this human elementless web, although I didn’t go down without a struggle. I thought that if I made a YouTube clip of a letter to Google using Google Scribe, that the Internet search deity might lend an ear. Clip below. Read the rest of this entry »
Captcha’d Forever
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on September 4, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, September 4th, 2010The best use for those annoying squiggly log-in words called Captcha’s? COMICS!
I’ve often joked that the web is an excellent reflection of humanity and the human psyche. This is reflected in the fact that most internet traffic is generated by sex, trying to meet someone who likes you, or getting the free stuff you think you deserve. In the broader view – as often happens in the real world – the evolution of the web went something like this: some smart clever people create something cool, less smart people come along and join in, everybody has fun for a while, and then their stupider, greedier, eviler friends show up and eff it all up. This pattern is probably why a lot of humanity’s energy seems to be devoted to protecting itself. Like building thousands of nuclear bombs to make sure no-one uses them, or destroying your freedom to protect it. On the web, this behavior is why we have so many tools for proving you’re human, i.e., the many variations of the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). You know, those squiggly words you can’t read with your blurred vision and splitting headache the morning after a hard night of partying, when you’re trying to check your finances online to see if you burned your bank account in the last few hours of the night, the ones you don’t remember after buying the entire strip bar a round to prove to your favorite lap dancer that you’re loaded. It’s amusing that with Captchas we’re just protecting all the “good” web applications (useful web services) we write from “bad” web applications (spambots) we write. Typical human acts of futility. In any case, in spite of their assumed usefulness, Captchas have been cracked in a number of ways. Or have they? Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com points out some interesting fallacies in this article, and claims he has a 99% bot-blocking rate with what he calls a “naive captcha”, which is simply a well-designed captcha image that never changes! If you don’t think conventional Captchas are good enough, there a some alternative methods like this math-based Captcha, which will not only keep out spambots, but probably everyone but Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman as well. Other versions include solving a tic-tac-toe puzzle, or this one, based on pictures of cats and dogs, or this one, which requires you to solve hieroglyphics. And then of course, companies like Google or Microsoft will try to figure out ways to make or save money with them. Microsoft’s idea is to make you look at ads; Google uses Captchas to make you read the words their scanning technology can’t. Yup. Your obstacle to the content you want is Google’s free labor force. Probably the best use of Captchas I’ve run across though is using them for making comics. This Something Awful forum may have started it, but there are amusing collections here and here. Some images may be NSFW. My quick stab at it is below. Read the rest of this entry »
I Spy Something Red White & Blue
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 28, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, August 28th, 2010Why spying on your fellow Americans is your duty as a patriot, and how to do it.
For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me until the other day that because the Bush administration made spying on citizens part of the American Way (an idea that in spite of all his talk of change, Obama wholeheartedly supports ), we’re actually obligated to spy on each other to show our patriotism. As always, if you want to know how to spy, there’s a retarded eHow article on the topic. I hope the author of “How to Use a Webcam to Spy on People” causes the content farm Demand Media to get their pants sued off; before you write a piece like that, you might want to ponder the legality of what you’re suggesting. That issue doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone though (including us); there are hundreds of articles like this. Although we’d hasten to point out that the content farm hack that wrote How to spy on people for Hubpages.com also authored Tips on how to get a girl to go out with you and How to invest in the nigerian stock market. So frankly, you might just improvise. There are plenty of tools available, so the only limits on what you can do these days would be a result of your own lack of moral decrepitude or ingenuity. In light of the legal decision handed down the other day that allows government agents to sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car, and keep track of everywhere you go, why not just do it yourself with an Always Find Mini Realtime Covert Vehicle Tracker