Love video games and jazz? Well, Scott Bradlee and Ben Golder-Novick teamed up to bring you this: classic video game music in piano and saxophone!

Love 8-bit Nintendo games but not necessarily 8-bit musical
instruments? Wish you could hear the soundtracks of those games
rendered by live musicians as you play?

Eight Bits of Jam will come into your living room and provide real-time acoustic soundtracks to old school games such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda,
Mike Tyson’s Punch-out, and many more. All you have to do is put the television on ‘mute’ and Eight Bits of Jam will take care of the rest.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by vaughnadam81.

This Volkswagen commercial is about one effort to get people to take the stairs instead of the escalator (presumably for the exercise). The company turned a staircase at a Stockholm subway station into a piano and videotaped how travelers responded.

via Urlesque | Commercial Credits

Austrian composer Peter Ablinger digitized a recording of a child speaking and then programmed a mechanical piano to replicate the sounds. The video above is in German, but Hack a Day has provided a translation:

I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

The content of the speech is taken from the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009.

via Gizmodo | Composer’s Webpage

Andy Woodruff noticed that Ohio has 88 counties, the same number as keys on a piano. So he went to work on a map application that assigns a note to each county. You can play a song on the map (a couple of songs are plotted out for you) or reassign the notes based on census data such as population, number of rental houses, or median age. You can even hear what a route from one place to another sounds like! Link to map. Link to the story behind it. -via the Presurfer

(vimeo link)

A short film by The People’s Republic of Animation. The musical instrument featured is a Katzenklavier (previously at Neatorama). -via Metafilter

This is part of Neatorama’s “A Day Without Cats Counter Protest” inspired by A Day Without Cats on the Internet.

Concert Hands is a gadget designed to replace traditional piano instruction by controlling the user’s hand and finger movements:

The software takes the song file and converts it to a proprietary file system where the controller box distributes the signal to the wrist pilots and finger sleeves. The finger sleeves are placed on all fingers of both hands and the user’s wrists lay gently on the wrist pilots. When the music begins the wrists pilots guide your hands across the piano to a specific location and the finger sleeves receive a pulse to indicate which key to press. The idea is after a period of time the repetitive motions and signals will develop muscle memory within the end user and enable him or her to play their favorite songs on their own.

Link via DVICE

Here’s a wonderful impromptu piano performance at the Mayo Clinic by 90-year-old Marlo Cowan and his wife of 62 years, Fran.  A cheerful reminder of how to have a long life and a successful marriage.

– via crainium

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

Lots of dogs howl when people play piano, but Porter likes to make his own music.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

When he was 16 years old and despite having no formal training, Adrian Mann of New Zealand decided that he was going to build a piano. Not just any piano – but the world’s largest and longest grand piano, built from scratch entirely by hand. Four years later, he completed his masterpiece …

– via stuff

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

Not to be missed: Link [embedded YouTube] – via AQFL