Dave Haynes

Last last Tuesday night my wife gave birth to our beautiful son Joshua William Haynes. Being a very proud father, and a bit of a geek, one of the first things I did after coming back from the hospital was to set little Joshie up with his own Flickr account. I really like the thought that my son can take charge of the account when he’s older, just like my parents gave me my first photo album, with a record of his early years. Being born into a hyper-connected, web 2.0 world, I’m sure storing and sharing his photos online will seem like the most natural thing in the world to him.

But it was interesting then to get an opposite reaction from some of my family members and friends. My wife felt a little uneasy sharing these photos publicly (choosing to just email one or two photos to our antenatal friends) whilst my mum actually apologized for taking a look at the photos without asking me first. They all think Flickr is absolutely great, but there’s something hard coded into them that resists it still. Having done something one way for so many years it is difficult for them to make the shift.

That’s something that I’ve noticed in my work life too. At SoundCloud for example we’re setting new standards for music industry professionals to send, share and move their audio files. It’s clear that a lot of people are impressed by what they see and somehow can’t understand how they never expected a better way of doing things. However they still often turn back to old methods such as the generic file sharing services like Yousendit or Sendspace in their daily workflow. But that’s okay, like my families use of Flickr, it just takes a while for people to change old habits.

And I guess, with a newborn son I’ll have to change some of my old habits too!

I really wanted to share this with everybody… last night I stumbled across some incredible videos by Keith Loutit who is capturing ordinary life by using some really quite extra-ordinary tilt-shift and time-lapse photography. At times the boats almost look like models being moved around a bathtub. Being mainly shot in and around Sydney harbour the video below also really reminded me of the few days I spent there and proposed to my wife.

The North Wind Blew South from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Lucas Gonze turned me on to this awesome music-video-mashup-game-thingymyjig in a recent post where he coins the phrase ‘gamestrument’.

What’s striking to me about this is that it’s yet another example of what seems to be a current wave of new & fun ways of interacting with music. I’ve posted before about things like the online Guitar Hero-seque JamLegend and Yamaha’s inventive and interactive Tenori-On. And recently a few iPhone apps have caught my eye, in particular Smule’s Ocarina and the wondrous RjDj (videos below). It seems that the possibilities are endless and more accessible than ever before. Exciting times!

In the last fortnight I’ve been down to two very different music industry gatherings.

One, a formal MusicTank panel session in the basement at the MCPS-PRS. £30 per ticket, name badges, rows of stackable chairs and a mic-ed up ‘expert’ panel (pic below).

The other, an informal post-Musexpo meetup down at the Bloomsbury Bowling lanes. Free for anyone to go down, introductions over a beer, bowling shoes and a mixed bunch of digital music types (pic below).

I’d go to both again but I know which one I preferred. Experiencing both ends of the scale in a short space of time made me feel that what we’re doing with the OpenMusicMedia Meet (where we combine a mix of the two) is the right way to go. Reinforcing this is the increasing number of people getting in touch recently asking when the next session is.

There has been a bit of a gap since our last Meet, largely due to the combination of a very busy October for both myself and Jonas and my imminent fatherhood. But I’m hoping that we’ll have one more session before the end of the year and then quickly get back into the flow in the New Year.

I was catching up on a little blog reading this morning and this post via @fascinated really grabbed my attention. It shows a video of a new young artist called Little Boots doing a Hot Chip cover using the Tenori-on (which I wrote about earlier this year).

After a bit of digging around I also found out that Little Boots had recently been on Jools Holland’s ‘Later’. The track doesn’t blow me away but it’s great to watch this creative performance. Perhaps it’s just the novelty factor but I think the Tenori-on really makes for an engaging live instrument with it’s eye-catching lights and interactive ‘build as you play’ nature.

I want one for Christmas!

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