music

DL Cade

Mhoto Automatically Generates Music for Your Pics Based on a Photo’s Content

It might not be quite a trend yet, but associating sound with photos isn't new either. Whether we're talking about interesting photographs created with sound (like Martin Klimas' paint photos) or about a camera that captures both sound and light, the idea of pairing sight and sound in photography has come up before.

Mhoto is a company with an idea along those same lines, only instead of capturing the sounds happening at the moment you take a photo, the company's tech creates music based on a photo.

DL Cade

Music Festival Bans Photography, Asks Attendees to do the Enforcing

There have been several stories lately of musicians banning photography and asking fans to keep their cell phones in their pockets and enjoy the show. Most recently, Prince's "purple rules" had security guards at The City Winery in NYC snatching phones in mid-air and kicking people out.

The Unsound music festival taking a larger scale (though less aggressive) approach: festival organizers have banned photography and filming festival-wide, and are asking that festival attendees be the ones to do the enforcing.

Pat David

Revisiting Pharcyde’s ‘Drop’ Backwards Music Video

Yesterday we shared an amazing time-lapse music video spanning 24-hours on a Parisian rooftop.  While the video did, in fact, make my jaw "drop" (there's a pun coming), it got me thinking about one of the most amazing music videos I've ever seen: "Drop" by The Pharcyde.

David Becker

Does Everybody Get to be a Concert Photographer Now?

"Please turn off or silence your cell phones, and absolutely no photography."

The request at the beginning of Tony Bennett's (Yes, I'm old and I like jazz. Deal with it.) rapturously received concert last week at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall was standard stuff. What happened afterward was far from standard, however.

Michael Zhang

After Unflattering Viral Photos, Beyonce Now Banning Pro Photographers

How do you solve the problem of professional concert photographers snapping unflattering photos of you during your live shows? One way is to ban them completely, and that's exactly what Beyonce is doing with her latest concert tour. Policies like hers may be growing in popularity among artists who want to control their image, but the policy is still causing quite a hoopla.

Michael Zhang

A Blast from the Past: Paul Simon’s Hit Song “Kodachrome”

After sharing that short feature yesterday on the last roll of Kodachrome, it seems appropriate to share this once-super-popular song written about the same film.

Simply titled, "Kodachrome," it was written by American musician Paul Simon after the first breakup of Simon & Garfunkel.

Michael Zhang

Carol Of The Bells Played Using Sounds From Inside a Photo Frame Factory

Custom photo frame maker Alphabet Photography has scored one of the first big viral marketing wins of this holiday season by releasing the creative video above a couple of weeks ago. In it, they play the popular Christmas tune Carol of the Bells using various objects inside the warehouse in which the company's photo frames are made.

Michael Zhang

Interview with Rock & Roll Photographer Oliver Monroe

Oliver Monroe is a Los Angeles-based photographer who has photographed some of the world's most famous bands and music artists in concert. Visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Oliver Monroe: I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, where my dad worked for the Department of Defense. In 1979, I moved to Los Angeles to further my career as a photographer. After nearly 10 years in the music/entertainment business, I hung up my camera bag and became a commercial film editor for the next 5 years. Wanting to see daylight again, I left editing and started a multimedia development company. I currently own a video encoding company, which caters to the entertainment industry.

Michael Zhang

Lyric-Lapse Music Video That Required 6 Hours of Work for Every 3 Seconds

Dream Music: Part 2 is an amazing stop-motion and time-lapse video by Marc Donahue and Sean Michael Williams that features a technique they call "lyric-lapsing". Using still photos, they somehow planned the time-lapse sequences just right, so that the singer in the video is actually mouthing the words as he scurries around to various locations. They state that the video is a "musical voyage into the depths of the subconscious", and that it was designed to "transport the viewer from their own reality into a world of dreams and at the end, [...] awake to wonder how we were able to take them there."

The magnitude of the effort is what's truly impressive. The creators spent six months shooting the photos across two states. Every 3-4 seconds seen in the video required about 6-8 hours of work to create.

Michael Zhang

Creative Portraits of Classical Musicians

Denmark-based photographer Nikolaj Lund specializes in shooting the world of classical music, and captures some pretty unique portraits of musicians with their instruments. He takes the subjects out of their natural environment -- the orchestra pit -- and has them do epic poses in random places (e.g. streets, oceans, deserts).

Michael Zhang

Beautiful Macro Photos of the Insides of Musical Instruments

Photographer Bjoern Ewers directed this creative advertising campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra that shows beautiful views of the insides of various instruments. Shot using a macro lens, each one looks more like a giant music hall than a musical instrument.

Michael Zhang

Still Life Photos of Desserts Spinning on Vinyl Records

"33 RPM" is a project by Stockholm-based photographer Philip Karlberg that consists of still life photographs of various desserts spinning on various vinyl records. The combo above shows "'Don’t look back into the sun' by The Libertines: Sundae surprise."

Michael Zhang

Sound Painting Photographs with Paint and Speakers

Photographer Martin Klimas, whose porcelain figurine photos we shared yesterday, has a series of photographs that look like 3D Jackson Pollock paintings. He spent six months photographing portraits of sound by playing music through a speaker that's crowned with paint. Klimas dials up the volume and then photographs the paint coming alive from vibrations caused by the sound waves.

Michael Zhang

Classic Album Covers With Dead Band Members Removed

Reminiscent of the Fatescapes series we featured recently, LIVE ! is an ongoing project by Hatim el Hihi and Jean-Marie Delbes in which they post classic album covers that have had deceased band members carefully Photoshopped out of them.

Michael Zhang

Sara Bareilles Music Video Features Polaroids and Contact Sheets

The music video for Sara Bareilles' song "King of Anything" has everything contained in Polaroids and contact sheets. The concept is pretty neat. Can you imagine how mind-boggling this video would have been if they had done it in stop-motion with individual Polaroid photos and carefully exposed film strips? That'd be epic.

Jessica Lum

Single-Take Music Video for ‘She Runs’ by Tim Halperin Had $500 Budget

This music video may not have the suave nature of the single-take Old Spice commercials, but then again, neither do the unlucky men who fall victim to their runaway love interest. Plus, musician Tim Halperin had this video made for his song, "She Runs," with a budget of a mere $500. The video was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II.

Michael Zhang

“End Love” by OK Go Blends Stop and Slow Motion in Awesome Ways

OK Go, an LA-based rock band, makes some of the most creative music videos you'll ever see, from the treadmill video that amassed over 50 million views on YouTube to their gigantic Rube Goldberg machine one that dropped jaws around the world. Their latest video for the song "End Love" is yet another display of pure creativity, as they blend stop motion and slow motion techniques in strange and awesome new ways.