Category: Music

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Good News

What’s going on? Two chunks of good news for humans in one day?

– The Supremes ruled 5/4 that, gee, the EPA does have a legal right to regulate C02 emissions after all. This all dates back to 1970, when the EPA got away with murder — on the technicality that carbon dioxide was not technically a pollutant. It may help melt glaciers and snuff out polar bears, but hey, it’s just a common gas, none of the EPA’s bidnis. No longer.

– Non-DRM music from the EMI catalog will soon become available through iTunes. Not only will it be unprotected and playable on non-Apple hardware, it’ll be available as 256kbps AAC – far higher fidelity digital music than is currently commercially available. Apple wouldn’t be upping the bitrate if consumers weren’t demanding it; it’s heartening to know that users can tell the difference.

And there was much rejoicing, less gnashing of teeth.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Navvy
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Stuck Between Stations

Music writing on the infernal interweb is dominated by capsule reviews of recent releases. Some friends and I, missing the days of long-form music rants that intersect with real life a la Lester Bangs (and others), have been chipping away in the background for the past couple of months on a new site – an experiment in music writing, built by/for past-and-present music dorks with jobs and families and precious little free time, but who keep listening from the corner of the ear.

Stuck Between Stations is our project, named for a Hold Steady song and probably best summed up on its Why We’re Stuck page. We hope it blossoms like a swelling itching brain. We hope it doesn’t end up looking much like other music sites. We hope it finds like-minded souls.

Roger Moore has written an indelible treatise on the connection between global warming and The Arctic Monkeys. I’ve poot forth a thing on what happens when iTunes guesses cover art wrong, which morphs into a tract on The Shaggs. And have cross-posted a couple of March’s music industry posts from Birdhouse.

I explain why I’m stuck here. One of my personal goals in working with the site is to get un-stuck, though I don’t necessarily think being stuck is a problem. The site is Roger’s seed. Though it appears to consist of stuff from just him and me right now, that’s not the intent – we want to grow this thing to a dozen or so authors over time.

Let us know what you think.

Music: Talking Heads :: I Zimbra
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AOR RIP

While you were busy not paying attention, the world changed: “Buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.” That stat could be a smidge misleading, since an album may consist of, say, 12 songs, and only get counted as a single purchase, but still, “Individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States.”

We all know that the theory was that digital downloads would let people only purchase the songs they liked, rather than the entire album, but I had no idea the tide had shifted this far already. Me, I’ve bought exactly one single from iTMS in the past few years – a track from Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, which I needed for a performance piece we were prepping for a friend’s wedding.
Continue reading “AOR RIP”

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Short Attention Span Radio

Guitar solos are self-indulgent. The bridge is always boring. Verses are repetitive. Everyone knows four minutes is way too long for a song. What we really want is the hook – the essence. Give me a meaty riff, and ditch the rest. Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System) “creative editing” to the rescue.

Short Attention Span System takes the playlist and musically condenses songs to their essence. Through time compression, you get the memorable heart of each song, with an average length of aproximately two minutes with NO self indulgent guitar solos, NO long intros, NO repetition of choruses again and again. Radio returns to the snappy song length of the 1960s.

In other words, everything long is bad. Because time is an inconvenience, and self-absorbed artists with no respect for your fast-paced lifestyle are wasting it. Ummm… ewwww? So what happens to Hot Rats? Cosmic Charlie? Fool in the Rain? Mothership Connection? Born Under Punches?

But look on the bright side — nobody cares!

Radio SASS starts out with the memorable beginning, followed by the best verses, best chorus and then wraps it up just as you remember … Will listeners object? The answer is no. Several focus groups conducted by Harker Research show that most people don’t even notice.

Also interesting here is the name of the service: “Short Attention Span System.” Since saying that someone has a short attention span is generally considered a bit derogatory, this represents a sea change. SASS must think that people are not only aware of the fact that they have short attention spans, but also don’t think of that as a bad thing. The marketing here is aimed at the heart of what has traditionally been considered a human weakness, or a negative aspect of media snack culture. Kind of like selling potato chips under the name “Obesity Chips.”

And, oh yeah – the new protocol is patented. You can patent butchery?

Music: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan :: Yeh Jo Halka Halka
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Nose Flute

Rolandkirk Showing Miles images last night of Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing two and three saxophones at once, and the nose flute to boot. Miles was quite taken with this, and started explaining that he add extra, invisible nostrils placed at strategic locations around his head (specifically, three on his head, one in his chin, and two in his nose – an arrangement which provided opportunity for some interesting mathematical word problems: “And if you had five nostrils in your head and three in your chin, then how many nose flutes could you play?”).

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This morning he started rummaging through spare parts left over from a recent bathroom remodel and pulled out some plumbing. Stuck one piece in his mouth and another in his nose, claimed he was Roland Kirk, and performed a full half-hour set.

Was Kirk the Hendrix of the police whistle? (see last 60 seconds of Volunteered Slavery)

Quote: “I didn’t ask my mother to buy me a trumpet or violin. I started right on the water hose.”

Music: Nino Rota :: Valzer – La Dolce Vita
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Steve Responds to Norway

Last month I expended what were probably too many words in a discussion on a mailing list, making the point that Apple inherently values DRM-crippled music. How else to explain the fact the iTunes store attaches DRM to music even when the artists don’t want it there? Buy 100 songs from iTMS, I argued, and you’ve invested $100 in music that can’t be played anywhere but in iTunes or on the iPod. If Sony comes out with an iPod killer next month, you’d be reluctant to switch because you wouldn’t be able to take your purchased music with you. DRM is valuable to Apple, Sony, and Microsoft (who all exercise the same kind of data lock-in) even when there’s no direct profit in it, consumer convenience be damned.

Steve Jobs’ recent open letter to the music industry knocks a neat hole in my argument, making the point that, based on their data, 97% of music on all iPods is not protected, and that 3% is hardly sufficient incentive to prevent users from switching. Hmmm… Good point, but then why is some music available at eMusic (my favorite online music store by far) without DRM while the exact same music is sold as cripple-ware at iTMS?

Not sure what to think, but I appreciate that Steve is calling for an end to DRM. His letter is extremely cogent (one wonders how many lawyers’ hands the letter passed through before publication), and provides a great primer on the opposing forces with which Apple and other music providers find themselves wrestling. Of course, the fact that much of Europe is threatening to follow in Norway‘s footsteps in making the iPod (or rather the breakdown of consumer choice its DRM represents) illegal is likely a contributing factor.

Music: Kalama’s Quartet :: Kawika/Liliu E
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Name That Tune

Voice recognition has come a long way in recent years, but what about melody recognition? Just spent 10 minutes at Midomi, a new search engine that lets you sing, whistle, or hum a few bars into a Flash-based recording widget, runs a whole bunch of voodoo analysis on your input, and spits back results based on what song it thinks you must have intended. Potentially great for those times when you remember how a song goes but not what it’s called, or any of the lyrics. The goal is to sell you downloadable versions of the search results, but based on the miserable output it generated for me, it’s back to whistling for friends and co-workers – Midomi batted nearly zero.

Started with PiL’s “Track 8” – Midomi thought I was singing “The Rainbow Connection.” Whether that’s a limitation of the technology, or a matter of the song being too obscure, or that my rendition would have been unrecognizable even to humans, I don’t know. But when I couldn’t get it to recognize “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” my confidence in the technology’s ability to recognize common songs plummeted. My attempt to render Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea” fell flat as well (Midomi thought I was humming “A Spoonful of Sugar” — yipes. Tried whistling the same song rather than humming, but no dice — Midomi interpreted that attempt as “My Sharona.” Captain Beefheart’s “Orange Claw Hammer,” according to Midomi, must be a drunken version of “Edelweiss.”

Amy’s a better singer than me, so turned her loose. When Midomi guessed that her version of “Fly Me to the Moon” must have been one of “Like a Virgin,” “Rhiannon,” or “Ebony and Ivory,” she lost interest. Finally hit paydirt with “Happy Birthday,” but sheesh.

Music: Loudon Wainwright III :: Just A John
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Avid Pushing Garage Band

Why is Avid / Digidesign suddenly pushing Garage Band rather than Pro Tools? Is there an implicit acknowledgment here that PT is too complicated / expensive for a huge swath of users? Maybe this doesn’t seem weird to others — of course Avid can still sell you the hardware, even if you don’t go for their integrated M-Box/Pro Tools package. Maybe it strikes me as odd because of the endless battles we’ve gone through at work over the question of whether PT is overkill for our users (we’re now teaching Soundtrack Pro to multimedia journalism students rather than Pro Tools, so I guess we landed somewhere in between).

Apple profiles ukulele master Lyle Ritz, who recorded his latest album No Frills entirely in Garage Band (at age 75 no less). And it does sound gorgeous.

Music: Minutemen :: Bermuda
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Woofers

Woofer3

Designed by Sander Mulder & Dave Keune, Buro Vormkrijgers. This is functional kitsch; the wrong becomes the new right. By adding a function to an otherwise grotesque object, it acquires new aesthetic values, becoming an object of desire. Pun intended, this woofer holds the mids between an addition to your sound system and your loyal 4 footed companion. Available in a co-axial two way speaker system version [two dogs].

Fun as they are, somehow I just can’t see giving over my audio to a visual gag certain to wear thin after a few weeks. Or to have to repeatedly answer the obvious next question: “Are your tweeters shaped like birds?” Especially for 600 Euros.

Music: Stereolab :: The Brush Descends The Length