wax&wires

No word yet on whether or not the creeper teacher is included.

No matter how much we progress as far as technology is concerned, we always look back towards retro stalwarts for inspiration in the designing field. NVDRS Tape foxes around in the Cassette Tape construction but is actually a digital player. Deceptive looks aside, the player continues to follow the 45/60/90 minutes norm, holding 10/15/20 select [...]

I love where this is going. David Merril demonstrated Siftables at TED this year. Siftables are small blocks used to manipulate data based on their rotation, placement near other Siftables, and other gestural cues. At about 4:45 in, he demonstrates a sequencer using the blocks, and it looks incredible. Don’t just fast forward to that [...]

Natural wood, with its unique grain patterns, is what gives traditional acoustic instruments warm and distinctive sounds, while the power of modern electronic processing provides an unlimited degree of control to manipulate the characteristics of an instrument’s sound. Now, a guitar built by a student at MIT’s Media Lab promises to provide the best of [...]

[via engadget]
The world needs another instructional guitar tool like it needs another hole in the ozone layer, but in all seriousness, this one is stupendous. Er, it exhibits remarkable potential, considering that it’s not yet beyond the concept stage. Designer Eugene Cheong has dreamed up the Maestro, an attachment that can supposedly be adapted to [...]

[via crunchgear]
This is a pretty awesome idea. The Bulb-Sound-Speaker, designed by Castiglione Morelli, is, as you might guess from the name, a light bulb that’s actually a speaker. It’s powered in the same way bulbs are, via the screw-in bit there, and then there’s a Bluetooth transceiver and Altec Lansing speaker. You plug the other [...]

Sleek Audio’s SA6 user-tunable headphones have been on the market for close to a year now, and were just listed on Popular Science’s list of the Top 100 Inventions of 2008… though the SA6 couldn’t quite beat out a particle accellerator, or Boeing’s new plane-mounted laser-gun. Not bad for a pair of headphones.
They have now [...]

My dad just sent this over to me from wired.com.

My senior project in college was to develop a binaural audio plug-in that would simulate surround sound through standard ear-bud stereo headphones (see: wavearts panorama to get the idea). The plug-in would use HRTFs to trick the brain into thinking that it was hearing sounds from [...]

I found this a couple months back and figured a lot of you might get a kick out of it:

Daito Manabe’s Electric Stimulus to Face Test 3 is a bizarre (but awesome) innovation where he attaches electric stimulators to his face, and syncs them up with music to force his facial muscles to contract on [...]

Remember back in the day before email and ichat, before MySpace and Facebook, even before texting and twitter were all acceptable ways of communicating? Even before “143″ on your pager made your day?

When puppy love was in full force, you had two ways of conveying your emotions: you either stuffed a letter into her locker, or you made her a mix tape. The mix tape was a big step in the relationship. It was where you put your personality and character on the line, where you hoped to find some common ground with the future mother of your children, where you left Bryan Adams to do the dirty work of words, and then swept in to hijack the romance he had created.

Well the mix tape has become an endangered pastime…