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Music

The "Love Song Machine" Lets Internet Users Create Beautiful Music

Somewhere in Providence, RI there is an office full of bells. You can play love songs on those bells via the internet.

Somewhere in Providence, Rhode Island there is a design office outfitted with seven colorful bells rigged to an Arduino micro-controller. The bells have been ringing virtually non-stop for the past three days, powered by the musical whims of thousands of online users. The project, called Love Song Machine, is the work of interactive design firm Tellart, who created the interactive instrument for Valentine’s Day as a fun experiment in bridging virtual and physical worlds. Little did they know what they were getting themselves into.

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In the past three days, the bells have been played nearly 4,000 times by over 2,000 users—a constantly changing mix of bell arrangements created by the folks from Tellart and original compositions submitted by the online community. Users arrive to the Love Song Machine website and are able to choose from one of the 15 pre-loaded songs or to simply drag and drop bells onto a timeline to create their own. Once you press “Play Song” you’ll be directed to a live stream showing the bells in the Tellart office performing your tune. Most popular selections from the pre-loaded tracks include “Funky Town” and “Because The Night,” but the folks from Tellart tell us that they also got Rick Rolled more than two dozen times. Which comes as no surprise because it is, after all, the internet.

We caught up with them via email today to see how they were holding up. We’d be going nuts by now, but these guys are troopers!

The Creators Project: What inspired this project?
Tellart connects all kinds of physical things to the internet—from train station lighting systems to health gaming apps using wireless pedometers; from museum exhibits to chairs. We recently made a project with Google for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra that was an augmented reality musical instrument. We had so much fun doing that, we figured we would create another iteration for our friends as an internal experiment. And so the bells, or Love Song Machine, was born and launched as a Valentine’s day card.

Were you surprised by the reaction you’ve received thus far?
It really is crazy that this thing has been ringing non-stop for a few days now, and all night long, too. We are designers and though a lot of our work, especially in advertising, is whacky, we are not in the business of making art, so there is no profound message behind this thing. We just thought it was the most distilled way we could assemble the things we do in all of our projects: people using everyday things (bells) either through web and mobile interfaces, or to control stuff on the web through everyday objects. This time is was the former—we found these cute colored bells in an octave, had some solenoids left from a recent project, and there it is. We did act on one insight we gained from the YouTube project we did, and that is that many people appreciate having some pre-made material to start out with, to edit and play with; then they will create their own songs.

As for life in our office, it has been super fun and super annoying. Even though we have been building things like this for over a decade, it is still incredible to hear a new song start and remember that it is coming from a real person sitting somewhere in the world, at their computer…right now. And of course we have heard incredible renditions of everything from the Flintstones to the Godfather theme songs, but we have also had our fill of people sending a string of a hundred of the same note, over and over.

Is the incessant bell ringing driving you nuts yet?
We’re hanging on. I will say that fresh compositions are always appreciated, we’ve heard an awful lot of “Funky Town.”

How do you plan on expanding the project beyond the Valentine’s Day theme and how long do you intend to let it run?
The Valentine’s version will most likely run for the rest of the week. After that, we have some ideas for new features (especially ways for sharing songs), and we’ve had a lot of requests for a more advanced music-making experience (sharps, flats, better timing, etc.). We’re also going to publish a short video of some of the best performances at the end of the week. This might be the end of the road for the bells, but we do this sort of thing all year long, so stay tuned.