Boris Smus

Ever wanted to join a band? I bet you have! Why? Because collaborative music making is an incredibly enjoyable and rewarding experience. But the barriers to entry are high: not only do you need to have baseline musical skills, you also need considerable managerial talent to find and bring together disorganized musicians. To find partners to jam with, people use craigslist and band matching sites to try to establish relationships with randoms. Why not leverage our social networks for this purpose?
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Look at the riders of any city bus. Many of them are plugged into their music players, tapping away to the beat. I propose to augment our natural love of rhythm into a ubiquitous wearable drum system. The target user of this system isn’t only the typical rhythm loving bus rider, but also an amateur drummer. Drum kits are heavy and unwieldy, making them difficult to transport to a jam session. The proposed system can also act as a stand-in for a full drum-kit for quick, impromptu jamming. read more…

One day I wanted to add a feature to Guitar Unleashed which exists in some of the better guitar tab sites. When a user hovers over a chord, they are shown a diagram representing the guitar fret with overlaid finger positions required to produce this chord.

Many of the most popular sites do this by showing  a crude, plain-text representation of the chord. For example, a C chord is shown as follows:

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I’ve been collaborating with my dad on an experimental web-based guitar chord editing service. It’s still a work in progress, but we are ready to launch a beta version. Please visit http://www.guitarunleashed.com/ to check it out and provide feedback.

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When I want to learn a new song on guitar, I often search for chords online. There are many sites that provide chords and tabs, and Google indexes them nicely. But the quality of chords is often poor, and there’s no way to submit corrections. When I ran a MoinMoin wiki, I kept my fixed versions of songs there. Even making modifications to existing chords was painful though, since it involved hand-editing a plain text file and ensuring that the chords were properly aligned with the lyrics. My preferred solution to this problem is to write a web application to facilitate easy collaborative editing of simple folk/rock/pop songs.

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