Journal

The Brilliant Idea

So what was that brilliant idea that started me on my rediculous quest? It was actually a pretty dinky but potentially interesting idea:

what does the media going through our networks sound like in its raw form?

• If you were to play back a movie or song in exactly the order in which the pieces arrived via bittorrent, how would it sound?
• If we were to tab into the mass of audio and visual data flowing through, say, a student dorm network and play back all the the layered, fragmented streams together, how would it sound?

I know this is similar to the work of scanner and other musicians who have been working on this for quite some time…but it seems easy enough to do with some simple sniffing and it could be very cool

I’ve had an IDEA! The only problem is I can’t share it with you or put it on my portfolio page because I’m scared that someone who’s better at making manufacturing happen than I am will steal my idea and I won’t be able to make $$$ off of it, which would be truly awful. There are some interesting aspects to this whole process which I want to discuss later (if an invention is a design for a digital display, is patenting it technically a software patent? embedded devices make the anti-software-patent stand a little more complicated). But for now I just want to mention how totally cool google’s patent search system is. One thing that I’m really getting a kick out of/being inspired by is the art included in the patent. Try to imagine what this thing is just by looking at the artwork…look’s to me like a patent for either a Utopian community or Disneyland…or maybe a cult: