Computers to give music a bit more swing
A "Hack Day" is a fairly geeky event where everyone gets together and thrashes around with some computer code, electronics or even machines. They originated at Yahoo and the end result is "cool stuff" and obviously on a more practical level they work as a bonding exercise and may well solve some problem facing the company organising things. Indeed the BBC has run "hack days" in the past.
But I'd never heard of a musical hack day. But they exist and here's one rather excellent result. By creating computer code that takes any song and stretches the first part of the beat and compresses the second half all while keeping the pitch the same. The end result is you give any song a swing beat. If you click here you can listen to some results. "Sweet Child O' Mine" is absolutely brilliant.
The project was created by Tristan Jehan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on a PhD in the "hyperinstruments group". I have no idea. But it sounds much more interesting than my PhD looking at "charge transfer studies on semiconductors".
I'm David Gregory, BBC Science Correspondent for the West Midlands. My first law states: "Science is the answer." There is no second law. Feel free to drop me a line: 
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