By Evan Ackerman
I’m spending today at the ETech Emerging Technology Conference, and I just got back from a talk by Aaron Koblin. You might remember Aaron from his Sheep Market project, where 10,000 people were paid two cents each to draw “a sheep facing to the left” via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a service (that you can participate in!) that lets humans perform crowd computing in exchange for money. If you haven’t seen this project, it’s awesome, especially if you like sheep.
In his talk today, Aaron showed two other crowd sourced projects… One was an image of a hundred dollar bill composed of 10,000 individually drawn pieces. The other, in the video above, was a rendition of Daisy Bell, the first song ever sung by a computer and made famous in 2001 (the movie, so in 1968). Aaron’s version of Daisy Bell was sung (and accompanied) by a mix of 2,088 people singing one syllable each, when they had no idea what they were contributing toward, just that they would get paid six cents. It’s pretty remarkable.
Video about the Ten Thousand Cents project, after the jump.
I think they’re playing it backwards. It sounds so evil!