Discrepancy Recordings and the FlightDynamics Podcast
David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.
If you’re at all interested in the mind, read this!
and held it open for Clive to see. I started to sing one of the lines. He picked up the tenor lines and sang with me. A bar or so in, I suddenly realized what was happening. He could still read music. He was singing. His talk might be a jumble no one could understand but his brain was still capable of music. . . . When he got to the end of the line I hugged him and kissed him all over his face. . . . Clive could sit down at the organ and play with both hands on the keyboard, changing stops, and with his feet on the pedals, as if this were easier than riding a bicycle. Suddenly we had a place to be together, where we could create our own world away from the ward. Our friends came in to sing. I left a pile of music by the bed and visitors brought other pieces.
Thanks
he particular notes used in music sound right to our ears because of the way our vocal apparatus makes the sounds used in all human languages, said Dale Purves, the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology.
It’s not something one can hear directly, but when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, Purves said.
via Threv
It’s fusion of sound design, composition and stage performance, and a chance for laptop musicians to prove their skills in battle and develop techniques and strategies.
The 2 Preliminary rounds are July 9 and August 13, with the top 4 from each going on to play in the final on October 19. Winner of the final goes to Seattle for the National Championship round, and there are gobbos of prizes to win. Go sign up now. Oh, and Logickal will be taking part in an exhibition match against another heavyweight in what should be a challenging Musickal Iron Chef Challenge.
Newsvine - Music, Symbolism, Magic and Manipulation
These same principles were well understood by magicians, alchemists and proponents of hermetic thought. Early hermeticists viewed the world in accordance with the principle “as above, so below”. In their worldview, all of creation was a holistic, interconnected unit, whose binding element was the principle of harmony. This principle was one which they could easily test, through the use of stringed instruments. When two strings were tuned to the same frequency, when one was plucked, the other would vibrate in what appeared to be ’sympathy’. What we understand is that the plucked string causes the air surrounding it to vibrate, which then causes the second string to vibrate, assuming that both strings have been ‘harmonically attuned.’
- there are three layers of sound/music. Let’s say we have A for atmospheres, H for habitats and S for species.
- make three distinct kinds of each of these layers to three fixed themes (r relaxed, a active, e energetic)
- that gives nine (9) seperate tracks: Ar, Hr, Sr, Aa, Ha, Se, Ae, He, Se
- now combine all tracks in all possible combinations so we always have AxHxSx
- we should get 27 possible combinations if my math is cottent (3*3*3)
This is based on a Guardian Unlimited article about ex-Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio member Chris Watson and his field/location recordings for television. It’s a great background on Watson, and he also provides some of his conceptual ideas that will resonate very deeply with many of you who follow this blog and the music it pertains to.
The operative quote that led to Martin’s idea is based on what Watson teaches during his Wildeye sound recording seminar he gives in Norfolk (Oh, how I’d love to attend THAT!):
… he introduces the three layers of sound: atmospheres, habitats and species. They are natural terms, but could just as easily apply to recording, say, a railway goods yard. Atmosphere is the unobtrusive bed of sound - perhaps the gentle noise of distant traffic, the hum of air conditioning, wind in the trees. A habitat could be the general sound of that railway goods yard. The species is the specific animal (or train, or voice) you want to feature.
There is also a related post over at the Trond Lossius’ Lostblog where he comments on the “Auditive Horizon” - the point where sounds fade into the background noise of an environment, as opposed to the very real silence (0db) common on most digital recordings.
I’ll be revisiting this in the near future, I believe.
If you don’t know who Paul Laffoley is I strongly encourage you to visit my friend Miquel’s set of webpages. He is one of the single most intense visual artists in the world today - very, very hard to get one’s mind around. Miqel has been given permission by Laffoley to organize a project to create an online, high-resolution archive of his work. This is huge, because his artwork is currently available only in the poorest resolution scans in snippets around the web (although Miqel has collected everything he has found into galleries on his page) - for an example, click the thumbnail below to get an idea.
Laffoley’s work is incredibly dense, with a huge amount of information packed into every work. In the interest of expanding everyone’s minds - go drop a donation their way so this can get off the ground.
This is very creepy and even more twisted, but a very interesting showcase for what you can do with Quicktime these days…. Oh, the possibilites.
This looks fun…
Patterns are written in a step sequencer grid and a neural network is set to learn relationships between drums. After training, the network can accompany your drum programming in real time.
While looking at some proofs, it occurred to me that their structure resembled musical scores, so as an experiment I decided to see what they sounded like. Essentially, the musical notes correspond to the depth of the proof tree as the proof is constructed by the proof verifier. A fast higher note is produced for each step in the construction of a formula. A sustained lower note is produced when the formula is matched to a previous theorem or earlier proof step, to result in a new proof step (which corresponds to a proof step displayed on the Metamath Proof Explorer page that shows the theorem’s proof).
I recently participated in the latest Exqisite Corpse musical collaboration game with a number of other very talented artists, and now the game is over and the songs and source files are available thanks to Sebastian, who served as facilitator and moderator of the game, as well as designer of the very novel website for viewing the results. Here’s how it worked:
This exquisit corps consisted of several rounds of development, a moderator was in charge of ensuring that the collaboration was done secretly.
Round 1: All participants secretly submited one word. This word was passed on to another participant as their initial inspiration.
Round 2 and 3 consisted of each person receiving two results from other particpants which they were placed in charge of to edit and remorph for resubmital.
The resulting sounds from round 3 [plus some wild cards] were then used to create the final songs you hear here. So in effect everyone made all the material, and everyone’s imprint in in everyones resulting songs. Hope you will enjoy moving through the evoliution of the sounds from initial word to resulting product.
Of course, I’ll likely feature a bunch of these tracks on this weekend’s podcast…
After a couple of weeks dealing with the funk (the respiratory type, not the P-type) things are getting swinging again around here. After taking stock of the scraps, bits and itchy snippets scattered about Shabby Road, I find the following projects shaping up:
All of these are in the pipeline to receive release, but the exact methods thereof are yet to be determined. I will likely shop at least a couple of these around for label release, some for net.labels, and some just available here. I would like to get myself to settle down and provide some posts dealing with practical techniques and experiments, and possibly some further group remixing projects. In the meantime, I’ve got a new episode of the podcast completed - but I’m going to make you wait until this weekend to hear it.
Okay, back to work…
Andrew left a comment a few days ago in responce to my post regarding the sounds he was making available… I’ve been meaning to mention this for a few days, but better late than never! Here’s what Andrew said with some developments regarding those sounds he was sharing…
The links for samples have been changed, plus there’s a production contest
now using the samples; update:A new round of the sound design/production class I’m teaching
(called Making Music With Computers by the college, thus
MMWC for short) starts tonight; focus programs are Ableton
Live and Native Instruments Reaktor; for the first two assignments
in the class, students have to mangle a limited pool of samples
using certain procedures; so that students use the same audio
starting point, I give them a bunch of samples I’ve made for
them to tweak. I’m also making these audio files (loops, hits,
some field recordings, etc) available to anyone else who wants to
use ‘em (links below). If you missed out on them the first
time I posted about this (they’re royalty-free), here’s the download info:
http://andrew-duke.com/MMWCassignment1audio.zip
http://andrew-duke.com/MMWCassignment2audio.zip
(Note: these are newly named zips; the old zip locations are no longer
valid).Course info: http://andrew-duke.com/course.html
All I ask is that if you use of my samples in anything that you post a
link so
we can check out the results.A production contest of sorts has been set up by one of the members
on the mnml.nl forum using the above samples I made; here’s the thread
if you’d like to read more and/or join in:
http://www.mnml.nl/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6802
Working on messing with the sounds myself… can’t wait to hear what you everyone does with them!
An Audio Wiki…
(By all means, if I’m dense or out of touch and there’s another Audio-centric Wiki out there, let me know!)
Hard Drive Dying Dance Track Contest - Gizmodo
DJ Hitachi Global Storage has dropped six new tracks on us. Head Stuck to Platter, Slow Spindle Motor, and Head Damage 1-4. Yep, these are all the authentic sounds of hard drives experiencing meltdowns. Or, as Hitachi artfully puts it: %u201CThere are various noises that may indicate a failing hard drive. If you are experiencing any of the noises, please contact the technical support center at: 888-426-5214%u201D
Edit - I had great hopes for these sounds, thinking I could use them to create a track for my next release or my Project168 (one and the same?). I downloaded, and found them singularly uninspiring. Maybe I’m just on an off night. Maybe I’ve got too much on my plate. Maybe getting the graphic eq watch isn’t that important to me. 
Just found the noises cool, but not… K-RAD. Just so you know.
The Honest Hypocrite: The medium (of the universe) is the message
An article by Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon and Anthony Zee of the University of California suggests that a putative creator of the universe could have encoded as many as 100,000 bits of information into variations in the cosmic background radiation merely by tuning the starting conditions. The article by Hsu and Zee on arXiv.org goes into much more technical detail. Science has a slightly easier summary blurb as well.
The Covert Operators, authors of fine soundware for Ableton Live’s Operator, have a new webpage along with a new product for sale.
Just about a week or two ago I was contemplating the possibilities of using the FPS/MMORPG gaming paradigm as a method/interface for music production/performance - a “virtual venue” if you will. Looks like I need to find a copy of UT to try this out on…
ccPublisher 1.0 is a tool for tagging content with Creative Commons licensing. Much thanks to Glacial Communications for the link.
ChucK : Concurrent, On-the-fly Audio Programming Language
what is it? : ChucK is a new audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, and performance, which runs on commodity operating systems. ChucK presents a new time-based concurrent programming model, which supports a more precise and fundamental level of expressiveness, as well as multiple, simultaneous, dynamic control rates, and the ability to add, remove, and modify code, on-the-fly, while the program is running, without stopping or restarting. It offers composers, researchers, and performers a powerful and flexible programming tool for building and experimenting with complex audio synthesis programs, and real-time interactive control.
SonicBirth :: About
SonicBirth is an AudioUnit designing application. The first in its category, it allows users to build their own AudioUnit plugins, either by working with existing circuits or by creating circuits completely from scratch. SonicBirth is also an AudioUnits package, as it comes bundled with a set of plugins designed for standalone use as plugins as well as pre-constructed circuits to modify or build upon for creating new plugins. Whether you’re looking for traditional eqs, compressors, and reverbs, or softsynths, distortion, and filters, etc., SonicBirth allows you unprecedented freedom and creativity over your sound.
