19/04/2014 Click

British soldiers a decade ago. You are fully up`to`date with the front

pages of the morning papers. More on the website. We will have a full

bulletin at two o'clock. Now on BBC News, it's time for Click.

This week 's Click will be music to your ears, hopefully, as we play the

technology that can make a fortune out of energy falls `` anything. We

will meet the hackers creating music for everyone's tastes. And we will

meet the man who made it his mission to digitise a real classic. All of

that, plus the latest technology news, and something fresh.

Welcome to Click, I am Spencer Kelly. This week 's programme has a

musical motive, so I came to the home of the Proms, the Royal Albert

Hall. Since the hall opened in 1871, a white writing of different

acts has graced the stage, from classical orchestras to electron at

her `` electronic. Excuse the rehearsals, I have a show to put on

tonight. The Albert Hall does not only play host to musicians and

performers, but a digital classroom will open for the public which aims

to explore and teach more about the links between music technology and

science. In an attempt to make this venue relevant, the halls education

team has created special applications which demonstrate the

importance of maths to music. Within the tablets themselves, the kids can

use applications we have created where we can get them to tap into,

using their pens, music notes. Then they can create fractions, and then

they can create beats. Then, we can record those beats with the sound,

and they will have a brilliant piece of music to take home. The

satisfaction of doing that and creating music digitally, they

should be impressed! Tablets, one way to inspire the new generation of

maestros that could one day take to the stage. In fact, technology is

being used to help them collaborate on all sorts of bizarre

compositions. Hacker`thon. The concept is simple, when we went to

Boston recently, we visited a special one. One dedicated to music

technology. And, they did not do too badly. This is MJ, a pan piping

beatbox. He has popped him to see how things are going at the music

Tech Fest Hackerthon. It is a convention that rings together the

most creative and eccentric music technologists on the planet, and is

famous for its 24 hour session which I am going to enter. Last year 's

winner made this. Adam John Williams had a guitar make a whole new noise

by adding an accessory. My mission is to hack something musically

awesome and make it through 24 hours of hard`core coding. Along with the

obligatory pizza. Some people have come here with ideas in mind, like

Sean, he is a gifted musician, biomedical researcher, Coda, and

fire dancer. That is a dragon staff. I want to put rotational sensors on

it. To make that work, this designer will help him to 3`D print a micro`

sensor. It sounds like fun but I do not have ideas yet. Ten hours in, we

move to a TV studio up the road for the overnight segment. It is a cool

venue with a stage, musicians, and a roomful of kit to stream content to

live on the web. Tonight, it is rammed with Brit controllers,

computers, and hackers, wherever we can fit. In the back room, James is

making a guitar controller with nifty coding, and he is making a

guitar controller with nifty coding, and Houston to plate. He is using a

programme which is used a lot in media applications. `` and is using

a paper plate. It is passed our bedtime, so to keep up our energy,

we take to the stage for loud brainstorming. (FUNKY MUSIC) back to

work, one of my stage cohorts was this man, a hacker specialising in

machine generated music and the user could therapy. He is working on a 16

legged music controller, made from a painting. `` musical therapy. I want

this to be my instrument. It is 4am. I compose music for it, it has

16 legs, and a head. It is fun collaborating! If you come to the

festival, and collaborate with another wonderful mind, who has been

researching something different, some in magical can happen. The 3`D

printer is printing the Microsoft is a holder, and CJ has been covering

everything in sight with paint and crocodile clips. He is using a

controller to conduct the paint segments and connect them to a

computer. I am working out whether standing up all night is putting up

barriers to creativity or making us crazy. It could be both! Finally,

inspiration struck over breakfast, when I said a doughnut tasted like D

Major. For the first time in my life, people heard it, and thought"

dataset" . They asked me more questions and I ate donors! `` eight

more doughnuts. My senses are mixed together a bit, I hear music when I

eat things. Yes, really! The developers liked this idea, and

together, we made an application which pairs food and music. We are

going to build it. Alex is using a programme which is like a sketch pad

for working out what an apt mallet to look like, and helps us imagine

the layout and what we would like to do `` an application. I am working

on which data is requested and how the application and user will

interact. I am finally hacking at Hackerthon! It feels so good. We are

nearing the 24`hour mark. And... We have an application! We finished the

first draft in time. We went back to Microsoft research to present our

idea. SoundBites. Three, two, one, eat! (PIANO MUSIC PLAYS) now you

have that spiciness. After 24 hours of being awake, I am not tired but

excited to see whatever one else has come up with. Sean's dragon staff

works a treat, and the faster he spins it, the faster the music

plays. CJ's controller is a triumph. My team won one of the top prizes

for our application. We are continuing to work on it together,

making me a fully fledged music hacker. Watch this space!

I wonder what the BBC canteen food sounds like to her! Talking of

which, we know what a trumpet sounds like, right? And the guitar? But,

what about, the Royal Albert Hall handrails? Or the glass doors? Or

the railings? It is called Moji. The dongle can be attached to anything.

As long as it is not too solid and can fire braked a bit, the Moji can

detect vibrations and the application will turn them into

sound so the whole world can become your orchestra. `` can vibrate. The

designer has added a mode for those who are less musically minded, which

will play a predefined tune, as you tap out the rhythm. Because I am not

the best drummer in the world, or in this shot, we thought we would let

Bruneau play us all the way to the next technology news. ``Bruno.

Levenson has lost the next fight against the FBI. He was appealing a

ruling that said he had refused to hand over Impey `` construction keys

over to the site. He said by handing over the keys, it would grant the

government access to 400,000 strong users. Once the biggest bitch queen

exchange has been placed into administration by a Japanese court.

It was announced in February that hundreds of thousands of coins were

stolen, worth ?100 million `` ``Bitcoins. As of yet, no timeframe

has been set for the process. Prepare to make those annoying TV

spoilers a thing of the past. At least if you are using this browser.

A new extension, called silencer, allows users to add phrases which

will be blanked out Facebook and Twitter updates. There is a wedding

in game of thrones, you can be of spoiler free surfing until you catch

up. The heartbeat bug is causing problems on the Internet. And

website for parents in the UK announced this week that they had

data stolen by hackers exploiting the bug. They have obtained

passwords before the website picked up on it. If you are concerned about

your security, we have handy advice about it right now. A quick word on

how to protect yourself from this Heartbleed bug that we have been

mentioning. Not all websites have been affected,

but for each of the affected services you use, the current advice

is to change your password, but only after that service has fixed the

problem at its end. How will you know when this is? Here are some of

the larger services that said they were not affected at all so no

action is required. These are some of the services that have already

patched the bug and recommend changing your password. You will

find a link on the website to a moored detailed list of affected

services. `` a more detailed. There are more services and sites which

have yet to fix the problem. Our advice is to check in with the home

page of each of those services and contact them, and change your

password when it is safe to do so. Back to the Royal Albert Hall.

Plenty of musicians these days use tablets in their setup, I thought I

would show you this. A neat little application. You draw your picture

and record your voice at the same time, like this. " la la la la la la

la la la la close quotes. Brilliant, I know. I'm sure we can all see the

point of that. Now, we are getting to grips with some other technology

that uses the human voice. If you always wanted to master the

violin, but could never get your head around learning to play, there

could be hoped for you. This application allows you to shoot like

a trumpet or low like a base by using your voice. This is to allow

for people to get ideas out of their head, without needing the dexterity

to play an instrument. It sounds great, but to put it to the test, we

invited singers from a range of genres to take part in an improvised

live performance in the BBC's Live Lounge. From Kelly, hard`core scream

and, Joe, folk artist Elle, and death metal rocker Alex. I decided

to join in as my operatic alter ego, Madame Eleanora Genara. Without

microphones connected to a laptop and the application fired up, let

the vocal harmony commence. OK, if you are not wearing headphones, it

is hardly a modern`day masterpiece, at hearing the complete composition

through the software sounds infinitely more impressive. The

magic of the application is that it works by using a microphone as

immediate input, and an algorithm identifies the pitch at superspeed

and assigns a note to your voice. This note can be played out as any

digital instrument with no latency, meaning you can get almost immediate

feedback while you perform. I see it as something that could be a tool

for learning and raw creativity. There are still a few things to iron

out in this version, namely, how to tweak the settings to deal with

screaming death metal musicians and percussion sounds. They are harder

for machines to pitch. But it is easy to get carried away. Times up!

Out! Even the rehearsals are pretty mind

blowing, let me tell you. For years, technology has really struggled to

reproduce those. Real instruments. One of the most challenging has

always been the piano. With more powerful machines these days, it has

become possible to fall out human ears. That is, it has become

possible to fall out human ears. That has come at a cost, human

effort. From Boston, Joe explains his musical journey.

This is the main page of Ivory, and we have a range of features where

you can select the kind of piano you want. You can hear the pedal noise,

so we can turn pedal noise off or on. The sound quality is another

level beyond conventional digital keyboards, because we take advantage

of the faster processor speed, and the larger memory. And larger sample

sizes, and those sorts of things. I had worked for a hardware

synthesising manufacturer for almost 20 years, so I made digital

keyboards and digital pianos, as did my partner in crime. We were

constrained by the limitations that the instruments have. We didn't have

a lot of memory, and one instrument I did for them, which was very

successful, had a 1 megabyte piano. Our latest piano is 49 GB. It

basically goes like this. Play a note... And let it became to

silence. And there is no talking like I'm doing now. There is no

moving, there is no breathing. It is about as tedious and boring as it

looks, because you have to do this multiple times for every key, at

every conceivable velocity level. The softest, the loudest. Other

musicians think I must be crazy, it must be torture. And they are right,

it is taught. Some people think it might be interesting, I would like

to go to wait sampling session sometime, sometimes they say.

Usually, an hour later they want to leave. I am willing to say, never

weaken quite literally replicate the experience of sitting behind a

physical instrument, but this physical instrument will never be

able to quite do what Ivory can do, which is to put several instruments

at our fingertips. A man on a musical mission. Time for Webscape.

Did you know that Google handles and around 12.5 billion search request

every month? It is not the only service to offer to uncover those

hidden online gems, as Kate Russell has been finding out.

Web search queries tend to work best if they are very little. But if you

take the genre and give it a metaphorical twist, you can uncover

some very interesting things. Yossarian Lives is an experimental

search tool, allowing you to search for things metaphorically. That

means you can find the conceptual distance that the results should be

from your query term. You can save your result and add your

interpretation of the metaphor. There is no disputing Google's are

to dominance in the search sector. It handled over 2 trillion search

queries last year, and over a billion people use it to search

every month. You will get a lot of results if you query Google. But,

perhaps not the most interesting results. Another alternative search

tool is Blippex, which instead of ranking results with an algorithm no

one understands, many because it is a closely guarded secret at Google,

it is powered by data collected about real people's browsing

behaviour. One of the browsers that lingers on a page, the more interest

that is deemed to be. That makes perfect sense to me. You can

contribute by installing the extension, which anonymously tracks

your page reviews. To a different kind of gaming experience, and one

that takes me back to the good old days when gameplay was king over

special effects and graphical acrobatics. The demo levels of

Thomas was Alone, can be downloaded. As the water began to rise, Clare

have vowed to save this little rectangle in as many restarts as it

took. The mysterious thing about this game is how attached even get

to a bunch of geometric shapes. No faces, Linz, or fashion

accessories, just blocks of colour. But they all have their own

personalities. In a world where graphical bells and whistles has

become such an big part of gaming, it makes a refreshing change. The

action is brilliantly narrated by Danny Wallace, ringing the whole

package together with a slick and professional finish, despite the

minimalist styling. Chocoholics will be looking forward to Easter. This

has plenty of at home activities to burn off some of the access cal and

entertain the kids. In the UK, it will guide you to one of 250

National Trust organised event days. `` . Those links are available at

our website. That is a with a link to our sister programme on BBC World

Service radio. Just as these musical number draws to a close, I thought I

would show you a website for anyone who has a song they love so much,

they never want it to end. Choose a track from the list, or upload your

own, and the infinite jukebox will analyse it, looking for points where

the song could be looped or jumped on to other parts of itself. By

tapping the resulting circular representation in the track, you can

jump around and remix it to your heart's content. And maybe best of

all, as it approaches the end, it jumps seamlessly to a much earlier

part, so that the song goes on forever. Music to my years, well,

someone's years. That is it. If we have inspired you to take up a

musical instrument, please do. If you just fancy tweaking, we live at

BBC click.