By the Mobile Action Lab

OAKLAND--Have you ever felt like singing your heart out, but you didn't have the moxie to perform your vocals in front of a live audience? There's an app that lets you karaoke to your favorite song with the option of adding Auto-Tune, which corrects your voice to stay on key. Only when you're sure you have a masterpiece do your friends get to hear it. The app's called StarMaker Karaoke with Auto-Tune, and here's one of the company's founders, Nathan Sedlander, demo-ing how it works. 

Youth Radio invited StarMaker's other founder and CEO, Jeff Daniel, to our Oakland studios to bring us behind the scenes in the making of StarMaker. In addition to being potential users, we produce apps through Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab. So our young minds are always seeking lessons from the pros on how to make our products legit. 

As a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate studying theoretical chemistry, Yael Elmatad studies phenomona like the quantum translation-rotation dynamics of confined molecules. And if your eyes start to glaze over just reading the end of that sentence, try to keep them open a few seconds more. Because it's the application of that kind of theoretical work that allows engineers to build things like robotic hands.

In this episode of Brains & Beakers, we're going to show you how to build one yourself. And, hey, why not -- we'll throw in some of the theory behind it too.

WATCH:

“Magic” is how Wired’s gadget blog describes it.

But of course it's really cold, hard science that's behind the mobile translation app Word Lens, hailed as one of the most compelling examples of augmented reality so far.

“We analyzed gigantic databases,” said the app’s co-creator John DeWeese, referring to the free English-Spanish translations he found online and used as the basis of the technology. “We had software that would process statistically and look at [how] that word probably matches up with that word.”

The result of that data crunching is an iPhone app that translates languages in real-time by actually replacing the text as seen through the phone’s camera with the translated text in the same color and font as the original. It may not really be magic, but you do have to see it to believe it – watch the technology in action in this interview by Austin de Rubira of Youth Radio’s Mobile Action Lab:
 

Turnstyle Talks: Word Lens from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.

DeWeese stopped by Youth Radio’s newsroom recently and spent an hour with a group of our reporters, commentators and producers. He walked them through the steps of how he created Word Lens, starting with getting laid off from a gig as a game developer and meeting his future Word Lens partner at a Hackers' Dojo in the South Bay.

Welcome to Brains and Beakers 2010!

Ever wondered how to make drums out of PVC pipe? Or Light-Emitting Diode (LED) graffiti? That's the kind of stuff we do at Youth Radio's Brains and Beakers events. 

Four times per year, scientists come to Youth Radio's studios in Downtown Oakland to demo their discoveries, methods, and inventions. Students interview the scientists and create media out of these dynamic dialogues. 

This month's Breaks and Beakers was hosted by Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, a new project supported by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative and the National Science Foundation. Through the Lab, young people partner with pro developers to create apps that serve real needs in youth communities. (You can learn more about the Mobile Action Lab here).

We invited two of our developer-partners, Nick Kruge and Nick Bryan, to show us how they use iPhones, iPads, failed sports equipment, and even upside-down wooden salad bowls embedded with electronics, to create new musical instruments. "The Nicks" demonstrated how they've been pairing music and computer science to research and re-invent sound-making. 

Photo Credit: Luis Flores/YOUTH RADIO

Both Nicks are students at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Nick Bryan is a co-director for the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPho) and Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), where the scientist-musicians use laptops, speakers, and smart phones instead of traditional instruments. These two guys have also worked directly on some of the most popular apps on iTunes. Now they're working with us at Youth Radio to create an app that re-imagines radio and activates youth expression by exploiting the unique properties of the mobile phone.  

In the video, the Nicks demonstrate how they can use a joystick to model sounds from a human throat, and how they transformed a weird gadget designed to test your golf swing into a magic harp.
 

For our latest Brains and Beakers workshop, Youth Radio hosted Tim Westergren, founder of the online radio service Pandora.com. Tim studied recording technology at Stanford and has worked in the music industry for 20 years as a composer, musician and record producer. In 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, he noticed that people were listening to more and more music online and wondered if there was a way to create a personalized web radio station that plays only songs that matched an individual listener’s tastes.

To do that, he launched the Music Genome Project – a collection of songs that have been analyzed one by one according to 400 musical attributes, like rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation. Their musical DNA, in other words. When you type a song you like into Pandora, the Web site plays songs with similar DNA. Call it compiling sonic taxonomy, sequencing musical phylogenetics… or just playing one hit after another.

In the first of five videos, Tim talks about how Pandora’s in-house musicians break down every song on the Web site into its musical characteristics. “Any piece of music, whatever the rhythm is, we can understand it through some combination of these attributes,” he says.

With support from the National Science Foundation, Youth Radio wants to change the way young people think about science--and scientists. What better way to do that than to make science a media event? Youth Radio joined forces with David Pescovitz from the website Boing Boing and the Institute for the Future to invite a stellar line-up of inventors, engineers, and investigators to our studios in Oakland, Calif. For each segment in the series, our guests provide interactive hands-on demos and then take questions from Youth Radio interviewers.

Brains and Beakers II: Behind the Scenes at a How-To Machine

For our second Brains and Beakers workshop, Youth Radio hosted Eric Wilhelm, founder of instructables.com. Eric is an MIT-educated engineer and avid kite-surfer. He started making his own surfing equipment and then writing about it online. Soon, he picked up a following. Other people wanted to share their own projects and create a Do-It-Yourself community. And so instructables was born. Now, Eric’s running a business, but he still thinks like a scientist—isolating variables, making interventions, assessing data, and then starting that cycle again—to grow his enterprise.

In the first segment  [above- 3:36], Wilhelm elaborates on how he started the site and describes how it works.

In the second segment [2:50], you’ll learn about some of Wilhelm’s favorite projects on the site.

(download mp3)
In this video, Eric spotlights one instructables project: LED throwies. See how one group of artists used this technique to create illuminated graffiti.