ensemble

Listen to a real live mouse organ

We know mice are pretty actually pretty smart (as demonstrated by the trained rodents of MouseAgility), but are they smart enough to play music? Well, it depends on the instrument.

Duo Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli -- or Quiet Ensemble -- have created a "mouse organ" known as the Orchestra de Camera. Thankfully, it's a little kinder than the Katzenklavier. To work, 40 mice are put in 40 mouse wheels, which are rigged up to music boxes. When the wheels go 'round, the handle turns and the music plays. … Read more

Trouble hearing that caller? Phone captions your calls

LAS VEGAS--My stepfather doesn't have the best hearing, and phone calls can be a trial. He tends to crank the speakerphone volume to MAX.

Clarity, a division of Plantronics, is trying to help the tens of millions of people with hearing loss with its new Ensemble phone, which displays real-time captions of what the other person on the line is saying.

Developed with ClearCaptions, the Ensemble is an amplified phone with a 7-inch touch-screen tablet display for the captions.

While there are other caption phones on the market, the Ensemble is being billed as the first of its kind with a tablet interface, and is on display at CES 2013. … Read more

Ensembli demos simple, useful RSS aggregator

The RSS reader Ensembli is not a product for me, says CEO Michael Wheatley. It's certainly not a product for RSS junkies like Robert Scoble. People who use RSS feeds professionally, to stay on top of news and spot emerging issues they may not have been aware of, need feed readers that show them everything that happens in the news sources they know about. (Personally, I use Netvibes as a dashboard.) What Ensembli does is track the topics you tell it you're interested in. It then watches what you click on and fetches stories based both on those … Read more

Epson's 'complete' home theater in a box

Except for its lack of Blu-ray, the Epson Ensemble HD Home Cinema System may be the closest thing to a complete packaged solution that covers just about every nut and bolt for big-screen home entertainment. It comprises a full-HD or 720p projector, motorized 100-inch screen, 5.1-channel surround sound system, DVD media player, universal remote controller, and all relevant accessories such as cables and brackets.

The system is designed to simplify installation and minimize clutter, partly by integrating various components. A projection screen comes with a built-in SoundBar for the front audio channels, and there's a rounded projector ceiling … Read more

Why most digital distribution start-ups will fail

Music industry blog Coolfer has an interesting post this week about online tools for do-it-yourself musicians in which he points to a relatively new service called Speakerheart. I checked out the service, and while I agree with his assessment of the interface--it's based on Adobe's Flex (an offshoot of Flash) and is very slick and easy to use--I think that Speakerheart, like most other digital distribution start-ups, is going to have a very hard time.

The process is pretty straightforward: Artists sign up with Speakerheart to sell their songs through a digital storefront on the site. Artists have … Read more