The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi) by Rashaad Newson,  is the first of a six part video installation. The 3:55 min. digital video loop is made up of footage from various hip-hop videos. All the footage is digitally enhanced and re-edited to track the motion of the hands of the artists. The audio is a composite of sounds consistently heard in artist deemed Hip Hop music greats from a survey conducted with local New York radio stations Hot 97 and 105.1 These sounds are then weaved in and out of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”. The seeming fluidity of the image belies the painstaking nature of the production process: over 5000 individual video frames have been enlarged and repositioned to create the moving image.

Sonar is a digital 2D animation by Renaud Hallée. The musical loop is generated by shapes with cyclic behaviors. The animation was selected for the Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2010.

The Fragmented Orchestra, conceived by artist Jane Grant, physicist, musician and composer John Matthias and composer Nick Ryan, is a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain’s neurons. The Fragmented Orchestra connects 24 public sites across the UK to form a tiny networked cortex, which will adapt, evolve and trigger site-specific sounds via FACT in Liverpool.

Each of the sites has a soundbox installed, which will stream human-made and elemental sounds from the site via an artificial neuron to one of 24 speakers in FACT. The sound will only be transmitted when the neuron fires. A firing event will cause fragments of sound to be relayed to the gallery and will also be communicated to the cortex as a whole. The combined sound of the 24 speakers at the gallery will be continuously transmitted back to the sites and to each of the 24 sites.

The sounds of The Fragmented Orchestra will vary according to location; wind over Black Fell, inner city traffic, chanting from sports stadia and the chatter of migrating birds arriving for the winter will be combined with incidental and performed sounds from members of the public. The public, invited to play the instrument at the 24 sites, will be able to hear the effect their playing has on the overall composition of the piece at each site and at FACT. As members of the public use the instrument they will become both player and audience of a vast and evolving musical composition extended across the UK.

Creative Allies gives passionate art students, designers, creative types, writers, photographers, videomakers and fans (Allies) the opporunity to work with their favorite bands. Allies can from anywhere in the world upload their creations inspired by music. The creations can be licensed by the musician it was made for.

Musicians on the other hand can post requests for whatever they need made,  and allies can browse jobs to find something that strikes their creative chord.

For the 2009 Music Blog Zeitgeist, The Hype Machine tabulated the total number of songs from each band posted in 2009 by blogs on The Hype Machine. Then they invited 50 visual artists to create a new piece of artwork inspired by the band’s music and including the band’s name. The Top 50 Albums of 2009 were sourced from 550 bloggers personal Top 10 lists weighted according to their ranking.

Click here to view the artworks.