Awesome Stuff: Sound And Technology

Another week of awesome stuff crowdfunding projects. This week we've got two interesting projects that involve people hacking together cool, but very different, devices to let you do stuff with sound.

• First up, we've got the Touch Board from Bare Conductive. It's very difficult to describe just how many cool things can be done with this, so I very strongly suggest watching the video below to get just a sense of what you can do (there are lots of examples in the video). But, in short, it's an Arduino-compatible sensor board that has a bunch of features that can easily be built into a variety of different projects. Among the features: touch sensing, distance sensing, mp3 player and it works with electric paint. Seriously, just watch the video and think about all the stuff you can do with this thing: This project blew past its goal of £15,000 pretty quickly and is hovering around £75,000 with a little under two weeks to go. It would appear that people have lots of ideas for cool things you can do with such a platform.
• A few years ago we wrote about a great musician named Moldover, who came up with a creative way to get people to buy his album (and pay a lot more than album prices for it). He turned the CD jewel case into a fully functioning virtual theremin. I bought it and it's awesome (as is the album...). I actually used to bring it to conferences all the time when I was speaking about cool things that musicians were doing, but I got worried that an overeager TSA agent would take away the weird CD case with all the electronics in it (though, no one ever questioned it the times I did take it). Moldover's back and he's working on a new album and a new instrument. This time, the instrument is what he calls a "voice crusher," which basically does exactly what you'd expect something called a "voice crusher" to do -- and it fits into a cassette tape case. The video below also has the traumatic story of what inspired this latest album. With about two weeks to go, Moldover's already surpassed his $20,000 goal, but even he admits he really needs a bit more to make this all work to the level he wants. Moldover's a great musician, who's also working on really cool projects, and giving fans a real reason to buy. Check out the project and see what you think.

That's it for this week, go hack together something awesome.

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