“Fantasia” was the pioneer, with whole stories set to classical music. Today, it’s iPods and computer MP3 players that run algorithms – some simple, some quite sophisticated – to turn anything from jazz to thrash metal into elaborate visual displays.
But how much more beautiful and meaningful could those visualizations be if you delved into the lyrics of the songs and tapped into the wealth of images now available online?
Last fall, as part of a “new media art” class, three Brown University freshmen set out to find out. What they created so impressed their professor, Mark Tribe, that he encouraged them to enter a competition sponsored by MTV’s 24-hour college network, mtvU, and Cisco Systems.
And they won, one of only five teams nationwide to be chosen to receive $30,000 grants to further develop Osiris (the name of their program) and also get a chance to submit detailed business plans and pitch MTV and Cisco executives for a supplemental grant of up to $100,000.
Along with the other winners, at New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California–Los Angeles, they will serve as mtvU’s student-run digital development team, helping design its broadband and multiplatform programming.
“We’re loving it,” said Sebastian Gallese, of Fort Worth, who’s the biggest techie on the Brown team, while his friends Schulyer Maclay, of New Hampshire, and Zachary McCune, of Newport, focus more on the artistic side.
“We think this program will change the world,” Gallese added, though he quickly noted that they realize “this isn’t going to solve world hunger or AIDS.” And yet they can all envision people around the world using and loving this program.
It’s easy to see why.
Take the video for “Come On Come On,” a fast-paced pop song by OK Go, which flashes images of kids’ faces, power lines, gummy bear bags, a sunset, handwriting, yellow caution tape, a snowman … all pulsating to the beat, blending in and out with all sorts of visual effects, coming together, shuffling like cards, changing constantly for 3 minutes.
It has no meaning to speak of, and yet you watch.
And it’s not entirely random. As Gallese explained it, the technology works like this: The MP3 contains basic data about the song, and with that, Osiris can tap into LyricWiki.org and pull up the lyrics. Then Osiris filters the lyrics to strip off useless words – “and, to, the.” Then it pulls up images from Flickr.com, by running the words through the search engine.
Eventually, the three want to enable Osiris to pull images from the user’s hard drive and from the full range of online image sources, from Wikipedia to The New York Times to Google Maps. And they want to make Osiris completely Web-based, so it’s universally accessible.
That’s why the grant is so important, Gallese and McCune said.
“We’ll be able to hire a programmer to help us make this work in the most efficient and beautiful way possible,” McCune said. And they’re going to need some more hardware – especially since this summer, they’re back home, in three separate states – and a server. They’re also developing a full business plan to try to get the $100,000 supplemental grant.
For Cisco and MTV, supporting student projects such as these is a way to tap into young people’s ideas to develop the next big technologies.
“College students are the pioneers of tomorrow’s digital landscape, and this program was designed to both galvanize and tap their creative spirit,” said Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU, in a news release. “We’re completely blown away by the groundbreaking digital ideas germinating on college campuses.”
But what is the students’ goal here: to develop a commercial technology, or to create something that will be freely shared around the world?
“That’s a tough question. That is pretty much the core debate that we always have,” McCune said. “I think either way would be great. I think what we want really is that this is an ubiquitous product, whether it’s licensed to Apple or we must have open-source software.”
