
Bicycle Built for 2,000 (2009) - cribbles
http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/info.html
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kbutler
Without Flash: [https://vimeo.com/3571124](https://vimeo.com/3571124)

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sixQuarks
it sounds so creepy

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r00fus
If zombies could sing.

Seriously, part of choral performance is you (as a singer) need to constantly
adjust your pitch and timing with others to produce harmonious output.

This would be far more interesting if such an effort could be done based on
the individual samples by manipulating the audio in real-time.

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kbutler
Autotune the samples? Lots of software available to do that, but then you get
"Intensive Hair Unit"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8coX8VkUKY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8coX8VkUKY8)

I think Bicycle creator's intent was more to demonstrate the "Musical Talent
of the Crowd" \- the creepiness was a bonus.

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ant6n
Autotune should sound less odd if the correction is relatively small.

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DerfNet
There's something... poignant? about how this sounds so dreary, and is the end
result of mturk workers getting paid pennies to record their voices.

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cardamomo
This brings to mind the work of composer Paul Lansky, who has been playing
with voices to similar effect (albeit with a different process) since the
1980s.

Here's a brief description of one piece, "Notjustmoreidlechatter:"
[http://acousmata.com/post/104620348/notjustmoreidlechatter](http://acousmata.com/post/104620348/notjustmoreidlechatter)

His work can also be heard on Radiohead's _Kid A_ :
[http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/radiohead.ml.html](http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/radiohead.ml.html)

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sushisource
Perfect injection of surrealism into my day

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rdiddly
Thanks for the ear worm, Harry Dacre from 1892!

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chrismorgan
When I visited the US a few years back I brought a recently-purchased
recumbent tricycle with me and made a cycling tour of it as well as speaking
at the conference I had come for; I had been looking into things like duty
tariffs simply to assure myself that it was fine to take with me and bring
back without needing to worry about it, and I observed interesting specific
items in the list of duty tariffs. First of all, understand that the legal
definition of bicycle in Australia is something along the lines of “a
primarily human-propelled vehicle with at least two wheels and a seat for each
passenger”.

One item in the duty tariff list was a bicycle with seven wheels and five
seats or something very much like that (it was a few years ago, can’t remember
precisely). I presume that, for such an item to have got on the list (in 2003,
I think it was added) someone had imported an item matching that description.

Still more fun was that when I mentioned it to someone (might have been the
bike shop I got the recumbent tricycle, or Greenspeed themselves; can’t
remember) they fancied they knew the vehicle in question (and wasn’t
particularly impressed with its efficiency, being fairly shoddily made).

So I was all psyched up for an article about a bicycle built for 2,000,
imagining something like the Greenspeed Anura, a delta trike where you can
remove the front wheel and hitch it to the back of another Anura—so that you
could, if you really wanted to, have an utterly unworkable articulated trike
built for 2,000. (I fancy it wouldn’t corner very well, but I’d be fascinated
to see how it’d work.)

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Dangeranger
If you have never watched Aaron Koblin's TED[0] talk about visualizing
humanity with crowdsourced data I cannot recommend it enough.

[0]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_koblin](https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_koblin)

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sp332
Interesting how many people went flat.

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setr
Only the voices should be different; why are the background instruments also
out of sync?

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usrusr
Nobody was singing the whole song, only individual, isolated notes (both for
regular instruments and the phoneme synthesizer) went through the mturkers, in
homage (machinage?) to how the original was programmed.

Personally, I would have preferred a version that kept the "voice" from the
original and only replaced the non-voice instruments.

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lilfatbitch
It's 2113 and all those voices are now dead

