Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of David Merrill

February 16th, 2009 – In the last couple of days, people have been a twitter over the latest mind-blowing reveal at TED: MIT Lab’s Siftables. For those of you who don’t know what TED is, I highly recommend you visit the TED website, just be sure to block off a couple hours because, if you’re like me, you’ll end up watching multiple lectures. TED is a conference that brings the brightest minds in the world in all disciplines to give lectures, and to show the latest experimental technology that directly affects all of us.

The TED video on Siftables, has been all the buzz on the internet. Basically Siftables are little blocks that have video screens and can detect, and therefore interact with, other Siftables. At the end of the TED presentation, co-creator David Merrill shows a music sequencer where some blocks represent the sequenced events and interact with blocks that represent loops and effects. By touching the loops and effects to the sequence blocks, a song can be physically assembled. It has the potential to be a very cool tool for live performances and to revolutionize the way that music is made.

The presentation got me thinking about how we’ve historically interacted with information and how we might interact with it in the future. Back before we had figured out how to record music, it was ephemeral. When we figured out how to record music, we could capture time, play it back, rewind it, fast forward it; we had control over what before seemed impossible. Music was physical, either arranged into waves on a magnetic tape, or carved into vinyl.

When we got to digital, the music became ones and zeroes. It zips around the world, can be copied indefinitely, sent anywhere, reconstituted out of ones and zeroes wherever we want it to. It’s not physical, it’s ephemeral, but in a different way than live performances. But then, out of the blue, comes Siftables. They bring back the live aspect (I doubt you would want to “record” by keeping the blocks permanently glued together, you’d want to use a separate recorder outside the actual physical Siftables), they bring a physicality back to music (in that the pieces need to be manhandled), and they bring the emotional response that you can only get when physically interacting with something.

I’m not sure if the Siftable physical computer UI is an evolution/revolution as many are hailing it, or rather a renaissance. Maybe technology is cyclical and this is the beginning of our second cycle. Or maybe I’m sleep deprived and I’m reading into this too much. What’s your take?

And yes, you’ll be able to buy these, right after they finish all their patenting.

Siftables