This Week We Heard

Relevant and inspiring happenings tied into music and media

Bose turned your NFL social chitchat into melody with FanTracks

14

Jun

Seb

The audio brand has turned social media users’ tweets into jams. Throughout Super Bowl’s Sunday big game, the company encouraged the public to post social updates via Twitter using the hashtag #LetsHearIt. The words and accompanying emojis were then translated into song and sung to a variety of musical styles varying from country, gospel, funk and even a metal rendition. An innovative way to cash in on the Super Bowl with an interactive campaign that doesn’t involve producing a costly TVC. Recorded in Bose’s music studio and then reposted via its social channels, Bose literally “making everything sound better, even 140 characters”. Check out some of the renditions on Bose’s dedicated Tumblr page.

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Pixelsynth: create wild sounds with any picture you like!

30

May

Seb

A new browser instrument called Pixelsynth allows you to create music using a library of pre-selected images or uploads of your own – with interesting results. Created by US coder Olivia Jack, Pixelsynth’s scrolling cursor rolls its way across a monochrome image and plays notes when it comes into contact with a light-coloured pixel. Every song has a spectrogram that can be derived from it, and conversely, any image can be plugged into a spectrogram to create a series of sounds to go along with it. Essentially, all images sound like something. Hours of fun.

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SoundCloud teams up with LANDR to master your tracks for free.

30

May

Seb

Video killed the radio star. Streaming killed downloads. Home taping is killing music. Is the cloud about to kill the mastering engineer? LANDR, the instant online mastering service, already looked a bit that way. The drag-and-drop service lets you download a track that is algorithmically mastered – no humans directly involved. LANDR now links directly to SoundCloud to make that happen. The move may say as much about SoundCloud as it does about LANDR or mastering. It’s clear the world’s leading sound upload service wants to continue to offer a complete solution for sharing noises. Personally, we wouldn’t trust our music to an algorithm.

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PepsiCo opens state-of-the art content studio in Manhattan: The Creators League.

30

May

Seb

The food and beverage giant strengthens its ties to the entertainment world and launches an in-house content creation studio called ‘The Creators League’ in the business epicentre of New York. Proclaiming a daring vision of “selling enough unbranded content to cover the costs of creating ad content that does fuel product sales”, it’s a bold move through which the brand hopes to reap benefits beyond the content produced. With its stratospheric goal of “behaving like a Hollywood studio”, the company’s vision is of ultimately funding their own marketing.

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Optus’ data-less streaming, but most crucially: ‘Live At The Necropolis – Lords Of Synths’

16

May

Seb

A few weeks back Optus announced that select pre-paid customers will be able to stream music on their phones from partners Spotify, Guvera, iHeartRadio, Pandora and Google Play without using up all their precious data. Publicising most recently that the campaign will be bolstered with a series of live music experiences, exclusive content and discounts, Optus is stepping up its focus on music as a key passion point to attract new customers. Clearly Optus understands the power of music, as do Adult Swim: their most recent one-off special titled ‘Live at the Acropolis: Lords of Synth’ parodying synthesiser pioneers Giorgio Moroder, Vangelis and Wendy Carlos is a must watch.

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Low battery VS speed rapper: Asus and the amazing tongue twister Mac Lethal

16

May

Seb

Asus’ Zenfone Max claims to last 38 days on a single charge. Partnering with Superheroes (the agency “saving the world from boring advertising”) they decided to pit a low-battery phone against notorious speed rapper Mac Lethal for a series of hidden camera branded content pieces. Filming genuine reactions of people overhearing his impossibly fast low-battery conversations and hashtagged #NoNeedToRush, one of the videos received a combined 10.7M views, 169K Likes and 47K Shares in less than two weeks. That particular stunt was filmed in a supermarket in Rotterdam, shot with a hidden camera to capture real-time reactions of unsuspecting shoppers.

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