That this installation was conceived as an advertisement for the Sharp SH-08C, a 3G mobile phone that's long been obsoleted, discontinued and forgotten, and that the installation itself holds up nearly a decade later, kinda makes you think about the longevity of tech products (and also about the line between art and marketing)...
There is a Wong Kar-Wai short film that is still watched by film buffs, even though it was made as an advertisement for 1990s-era mobile phone technology in Hong Kong.
I have noticed that for some reason, simple melodies play a bigger part of Japanese daily interactive life, especially to do with transport and retail settings. Search for a story about how every JR station in Tokyo has its own special theme melody for when the train doors close?
Also, side story, I remember there was some road in Nevada or maybe near Sacramento (?) where GM (?) sponsored a melody road with the lines cut in the pavement. The song was the Lone Ranger (William Tell). However, maybe it was just me being a stickler, but I felt it was horribly out of tune when I heard the video. I think they got the spacing of the lines wrong.
The station jingles in Japan can have quite a deep meaning in Japan - for example the Shin Imamiya Station plays a part from Dvoraks 9th symphony - "From the New World". Coming from Czech Republic we recognized the melody immediately & knew what was going on - the station is very close to the famous Shin Sekai or "New World" district of Osaka. A really nice touch. :)
Which is interesting because Morihiro Harano (who conceptualised and created the xylophone video) directed the OK Go music video for I won't let you go, partnered with Honda.
Chevy was first though, if i'm not mistaken.
This is an amazing thing to watch, and listen to. I see it's been on HN for 3 hours with no comments, so I assume it will fade from the starting screen soon. I hope not, because I think other HNers might enjoy this as much as I did.
Some people dislike romanticizing a nation like that, but I regularly see a kind of creativity among their general populace that I miss in other groups.
One of my favorite examples of that I was admiring just now are the people on Instagram who post as if they’re cute plushie characters:
I didn't mean that it's unique to Japan, just that I frequently notice a refreshing -whimsy- among them that other more austere/cynical peoples might dismiss as childish etc. (e.g. the places I've usually lived in).
The Instagram links just happened to be something I was browsing at the time.
as well as rescuing the post-Atari video game industry crash with Nintendo Entertainment System + Super Mario (a creative breath of fresh air after the likes of E.T. on the 2600)
You're comparing one of the best, most-influential games on the NES with a rush-produced cash grab on the Atari 2600. There were many better games on the 2600. Also, the NES came out six years later than the 2600, so it's way easier to make more detailed and more interesting games for it.
Well yeah, it sounds like you are still agreeing to my original point that Japanese ingenuity, at a later time, successfully rescued the industry from a crash caused by said cash-grabs. That is exactly what happened! I still remember the panicked industry reactions here in the US when Nintendo showed up and raised the bar tremendously. What were your favorite 2600 games?
Yet they revived the industry because of strict licensing and the ‘Nintendo seal of quality’ label that assured you that if you bought a game it wasn’t a rushed stinker.
There used to be a fence in the seaside town of Shanklin, Isle of Wight, UK which played "I do like to be beside the seaside". Sadly a storm tore it down and it's no longer there. Video from 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9R2UCsBpTE
I’d really like to see something similar, but with a second voicing added. Although I have no idea if syncing two balls is possible, so they’d have to build the second voice into the boards themselves.
If you travel by road to Mt. Haruna / Lake Haruna in Gunma, Japan, there are safety posts along the side of the road at the summit that IIRC basically "play" "Itsy Bitsy Spider" as you drive by. I left my window open even though it was snowing so I could catch it. Pretty fun stuff.
Ah, another "theoretical expert" - you're of course free to try to improve upon their design, but I think what they ultimately built is the end result of a lot of effort (and probably trial and error) already. If you look closely at the video, you will notice that the pieces are slightly V-shaped to recenter the ball if if deviates from a straight line, and as long as the ball is in the center, the tempo is correct. When it goes off to the side, it will be pushed back to the middle, but will inevitably be slowed down slightly.
I think there are many possible shapes and the difference is basically tuning. There are makers of wooden musical instruments a'la xylophone and they just cut it in fantastic shapes, different each time, and then tune individual parts by removing some of the material.
