From the Wall Street Journal: "Volkswagen has a clever new television advertisement in the U.S. featuring the rock guitar hero Slash wailing away on a guitar plugged into a stack of VW cars. (See it here, on YouTube.)

"On its face, the Slash ad is just to promote VW's offer of a free guitar with certain of its cars. But the real message is about the future of car audio: It's all about the connectivity, dude.

"Not so long ago, the key features in mobile audio were things like a six-disc CD changer... The next wave has more to do with auto makers providing plugs and ports for connecting various digital-storage devices with the audio system. The simplest of these is the 'AUX,' or auxiliary jack. That's the little socket that allows you to plug a portable audio device into the car's audio system...

"The problem with just plugging your iPod into an auxiliary jack is the 'human-machine interface'.. twiddling the iPod's touchy little control wheel while piloting a car at 70 miles per hour... One solution... is to integrate the iPod with the car's audio system so the driver can select tunes using the normal audio controls. BMW was among the first to market with a factory system for integrating iPods into the audio system, but others are following fast...

"The next step up from the auxiliary jack and the iPod docking plug is a USB port (pictured below), which allows you to plug in memory devices or other USB-enabled devices... [one of the leading suppliers of factory-vehicle audio systems] Visteon's [senior manager of North America product marketing T.C.] Wingrove says he expects installations of USB ports will grow by 80% a year between now and 2009.

"At Mercedes-Benz, the new S Class has a 20-gigabyte hard drive as part of its music system, and a slot for a PCMCIA card. Other new Mercedes will likely come with similar systems that allow drivers to bring large amounts of digital entertainment into the car without an iPod.

"The final frontier: wireless connections... Next up are wireless USB connections and wireless charging. Such systems might involve a pad mounted in the cupholder that would charge a properly equipped digital device...

"Auto makers still have something to offer, if they can create systems that integrate all the varieties of digital data consumers want to bring along for the ride in displays that are useful, easy to control and, in the case of audio systems, sound great."

Wall Street Journal subscribers can read this entire story online here.

From CNN Money: "When I first heard about the Hype Machine, an infant Web service that's making noise in the realm of online music, it was  breathlessly described to me as 'the future of all media.'

"Normally, I would've dismissed such panting as ... well, a bunch of hype. But since the heavy breather happened to be Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, I figured that the Hype Machine, at the very least, merited further investigation. So I asked Fred Wilson, venturecapitalist extraordinaire and inveterate rock and roller, what he thought. 'The service,' he replied, 'is the best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones!'

"The Hype Machine, I soon discovered, is a one-man band: Its creator and sole proprietor is a 20-year-old Russian immigrant named Anthony Volodkin...

"There's a little bit of Shawn Fanning in him, along with a touch of Jann Wenner. And while the Hype Machine may never be as famous or influential as Napster or Rolling Stone, Volodkin's baby contains elements of both, updated for the age of blogs - which is why it's so damn interesting...

"On the website's front page is a list of songs, refreshed every hour, being discussed on any of more than 600 blogs that the service is programmed to monitor. Next to each song are links that send you to the blog post, let you listen to the track, and route you to iTunes or Amazon.com so you can buy the cut.

"The last of these is especially important,... [because it] reinforces the image that Volodkin wants to foster for the service as nonpiratical. He points out that he's made it impossible to download tracks from the Hype Machine...

"For any media-minded investor, the appeal of Volodkin and the Hype Machine is easy enough to see... New tools are being invented (Pandora, Last.fm) for navigating the new digital soundscape. New avenues for promotion (the MP3 blogs) are emerging as star-making vehicles for acts like Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley...

"In this context, it's not surprising that the Web is also enabling what Volodkin calls a 'new kind of conversation about music.'

"The old kind, of course, was dominated by magazines such as Rolling Stone. But now those publications seem archaic, antiquated - irrelevant, in a word. (As Volodkin puts it, making me feel like Father Time, 'I don't think I've ever looked at a magazine to check out new music; that must've been cool!') And they've left behind a vacuum that the Hype Machine could readily fill."

Read the entire article at CNN Money.

From Wired: "Remember those time-lapse films from biology class that showed flowers blooming in a matter of seconds, and tender shoots  turning into blades of grass in the blink of an eye? Of course you do. And now, thanks to composer, programmer and laptop artist R. Luke DuBois, you can experience the wonders of compressed time all over again. In sound.

"DuBois, who teaches computer music at New York University and will direct the Princeton Laptop Orchestra next spring, has developed a technique he calls 'time-lapse phonography.' With the help of Max/MSP, a graphical development environment designed for music and multimedia applications, DuBois devised an algorithm to compute the statistical average of all frequencies in an audio sample, reducing vast swathes of music to tiny, amorphous sound clips...

"A time-lapsed piece of music is basically a set of frequencies devoid of melody or rhythm; you can sometimes hear various frequencies "beating" against each other in oscillatingwaves of interference, but there's little to make you hum along or  tap your foot. Yet time-lapse phonography reveals other kinds of information that aren't normally accessible to listeners...

"DuBois fed all 857 songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1958 and 2000 into his algorithm. He then allotted the time-lapsed version of every tune 1 second of playing time for every week the original spent at No. 1. The result, called 'Billboard,' traverses 42 years of pop music history in 37 minutes, with songs appearing and disappearing every few seconds. A QuickTime movie displays the names of the songs and their performers as the years fly by...

"And while DuBois' method obscures many small-scale features of individual songs, it underscores large-scale shifts in musical taste. Material from the 1950s and 1960s, which favors vocal melodies, guitar parts and horn punches over bass and drums, comes out the other end of DuBois' time-lapse algorithm sounding like a series of ethereal chords sung by a ghostly choir: The textures are clean and clear, with a high end that resembles an old vocal synth patch... But '90s-era hip hop,.. with its emphasis on drums, bass and ordinary speech, translates into noisier bursts of sound.

"Subtle stuff, but for those attuned to such aural clues, listening to 'Billboard' in its entirety is like getting a crash course in evolving production values."

Read this entire story at Wired.com here.