August 5, 2009

Kid in a treehouse

This past weekend was our annual neighborhood party, Retro on Roscoe. It's a all-out fest that ignites the blocks around it for 48 hours. As such, some friends of ours host an annual pre-party that spans all five of their contiguous backyards -- something you don't often see in the city.

I was asked to DJ the party whose theme this year was "Boogie Nights", basically 70's tunes infused with other tracks that carry forward the ethos from that era. The booth was a treehouse smack in the middle of the party which we outfitted tip-to-tail with music and lighting gear. I played from 8pm to 3am and, though I almost wet myself (with no backup until late), it was an astounding event.

I had a stripped-down setup (compared to, say, Christmas Party), but it was ample. Just the Macbook Pro running Ableton Live, a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol multichannel interface, and an Akai APC40 control surface. The Akai was perfect, a monome-esque grid with the knobs and sliders of a Novation SL Remote -- though far sturdier.

I had hundreds of song fragments pre-loaded and warped -- something that gave me almost unlimited flexibility to respond to the crowd without letting things drop. I even entertained requests from those brave enough to scale the nearly vertical steps.

I didn't want to come down. Why? Let's recap. I was in a kickass treehouse with another geek (Tom, on lights), a good friend, and a cooler of beer. We were controlling several hundred watts of music and commanding the best view of the space. Sure, we were one chain link's failure away from death by falling steel, but if that's how I was supposed to go, I wouldn't complain.

A few have asked for a recording from the night. I'm still cleaning up most of it, but here's an excerpt from when I think the most people were out in the yard dancing. (Specifically the slightly sped-up Diana Ross with a few claps and bloops layered on top was the pinnacle, if memory serves.)

[Download]

Full photoset here.

PS - I'm two-for-two luring Chicago's finest with low frequencies. I suppose next Christmas we'll go for the hat trick.

Posted at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 12, 2009

'Bout damn time

It's out. Jesse's posted his 2009 Inauguration Mix.

Superb track curation, tasty scratches, all mixed live like a guy who knows what the hell he's doing.

My contribution? I am a spectral fraction of the crowd-cheering waveform from the Grant Park speech layered in. So, yeah, I'll be demanding royalties.

Pull it down and turn it up.

Posted at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 5, 2009

OO5

A short note to let you know that I am pleased to be part of the 2009 incarnation of Out of 5, a weekly theme-based mix site put together by Andrew and nine of his pals. The mixes are only up for a week, so grab them while you can. (Alerts via toot, here.)

This week's theme: songs about resurrection, coming back to life, returning, resurfacing. Perhaps a theme more suited to April and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, but we have to stay optimistic here in Chicago, spiritual home of seasonal affective disorder.

And yes, it took every shred of restraint not to submit the theme music to Return of the Living Dead, obviously.

Now just to kickstart breakbeatbox and we'll be off to the races.

Posted at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 22, 2008

Christmas in Hell

There are many ways to ruin Christmas. Crappy gifts, drunken co-workers, eye-searing sweaters, family itself. (Hollywood makes a mint on the mini-genre of mirth-to-misery.)

But I'd like to go deeper than that. I'd like to attempt to scar your subconscious. I want to slice into that corner of your childhood memories that is still very fond of Christmas music. Sure, you say you hate these tunes now, that the infernal jingling-bells-makes-a-song-Christmassy trick makes you want to gore your ear with a flaming yule brand.

But you lie. And I would like to help you confront that lie, to eradicate the joy.

Back in the 1990's, in the final supernova of cassette tape usage before its demise at the hands of digital, my pal ASG made me a unique holiday mix: the kristMess tape. Much of it is thick atonal drum-and-bass, but the nugget at the center is the gift beneath the bow. My gift. To you.

Feel free to use this liberally throughout the next week as circumstances dictate. If Ebenezer and the Grinch aren't cutting it for you and holiday horror doesn't set you back on the right path, just put this on loop and relax. Halloween is only ten months away.

See also: Carbone Dolce

Posted at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 13, 2008

Codemusic

Lately I have been loving a few truly innovative audio apps for the iPhone, none having to do with it being an iPod.

I had always thought that mobile audio creation software were frivolous party tricks. Hey, look at me, I can play Baby Got Back on my 3"-wide keyboard! But that's changed.

A while back I wrote about an idea for including audio processing code in the header of MP3 files. The premise was that, in addition to creating a music track, the artist would provide parameters for real-time playback modification based on user input, randomness, or anything else. The song would never (or at least wouldn't ever have to) be the same.

The team at RJDJ have taken this idea to the extreme. The free and pay RJDJ apps in the iTunes store both provide "scenes", akin to music tracks, complete with artwork. These scenes are nothing but audio processing algorithms.

All input happens via the lavalier microphone on the iTunes earbuds. Basically the scenes take the ambient noise surrounding you and remix it. Some of the scenes do this subtly, some are more musical, but all of them make you the focal point of the remix -- not so much a musician as a conductor. I've listened to the noise of the L train, walking down the street, and the cacophony of three kids at dinner time. It is completely entrancing. Location-based remixing.

So, to our list of traditional musical interfaces -- stick hitting animal skin, horse hair pulled across wire -- we add one's physical movement through life's soundscape.

Here's a more musical scene based on my eastward walk through the city a few days ago*. Note especially the interpolation of me almost being hit by a cab crossing Michigan Ave. at 1:16 (red marker on map). The horn makes the piece, in my opinion, but the beauty of this particular scene is how the bleeps and bloops are modulated by the ambient street noise.

View Larger Map

Of course this map isn't connected in any way to playback control, but with the iPhone's GPS it seems like an obvious evolution of the RJDJ app. The possibilities are many. How about a View in Google Maps button in iTunes? Or a site that aggregates user-created tracks and plots them over one another on a map, a personal-social musical-spatial mashup. Dan Hill's city of sound, indeed.

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There are some other apps of note too.

Bloom is a generative music app from none other than Brian Eno, working with Brian Chilvers. You initiate notes of music by touching the screen. Each note plays and interacts with other notes in expanding concentric circles, like dropping pebbles in a pond. As with scenes in RJDJ, the parameters of note interaction are constrained by "moods". These are the algorithms that govern the evolution of the sounds you start off. Spore for music. (Not a coincidence that Eno did the music for Spore, of course.)

Ocarina is one of those apps that makes you love the creators for thinking of it. Basically Ocarina turns your iPhone into a high-tech flute. OK, you say, I can see touching the screen like you cover the holes of a woodwind, but where do you blow? Why, the microphone of course! They've turned the lack of a wind guard on the iPhone mic into a feature! Light exhalation makes less noise on the mic and produces a lower intensity of the current note combination, and conversely. It's brilliant really.

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* There's no easy way to export audio from RJDJ, but this handy tool allows you to parse the backup file that the iPhone generates on your machine. You can pluck out the .wav files right from the RJDJ folder.

Posted at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 3, 2008

The Mashability Index

A while back my brother gave me several thousand songs from GoodBlimey.com. Almost all the tracks were mashups. Each song was composed of two songs by two different artists fairly equally smooshed together.

All the track titles were in the A vs. B format (e.g., Black Eyed Peas vs Kraftwerk) -- and this gave me an idea.

I exported all the track data as a text file. Then my pal Chris Gansen wrote a script that nuked everything except the two artist names for each track and transformed the data into a spreadsheet like this

A	B	1
A	C	1
B	D	1
C	D	3
C	B	2
. . .

Where the first two columns were artists names and the third column was the number of times they were mashed together in unique songs.

Then it was just a matter of plugging the data into ManyEyes and playing with the visualization types. The best by far is the bubble chart view. (Here's the interactive chart.)

Each circle above represents a single artist. The larger the circle the more other artists the selected artist is mashed with.

The color slices actually tell you at a glance which other artists have been mashed ... if you are an autistic savant who can pick out a single color in a sea of several hundred chromatic gradations, that is.

Much easier is clicking a circle which highlights the other artists with which it is mashed.

An alternate view gives the most complete information complete with number of mashed tracks per artist combination.

One other useful view was the network diagram. It shows actual connections between artist combos. The best feature of the diagram is that selected nodes highlight all the other artists with which it is matched. Easy to figure out who's connected to whom. (Here's the interactive diagram.)

So what have we learned? Certainly my data set does not contain every mashup ever made. But there were thousands and I think the charts give a good sense which artists mash best (look for the big circles) and mash best with whom.

But there's far more that could be done. For one, there's no data in these charts on which songs are being mashed. I have the info -- just haven't figured out how to integrate it. What I really would love to get at is why two artists make sense together. This would require stylistic data, notoriously subjective and consequently unreliable. Still, consider this but a start of the analysis.

Two particular projects influenced my work on this index. The History of Sampling by Jesse Kriss is a bar that I didn't even come close to hitting, but it provided a great place to aim. And Andy Baio's analysis of the samples in Girl Talk's Feed The Animals showed what could be done with an idea, Amazon Turk, and some cool visualizations.

In truth, getting this data into shape was a massive pain in the ass. It was horribly formatted to begin with and took a great deal of kicking and shoving to play nicely with Many Eyes. Above all thanks to Chris -- but Jesse Kriss, Frank Van Ham, and Martin Wattenberg of the Many Eyes team deserve applause too.

This is a lot cooler than My Music Genome, isn't it?

Posted at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 1, 2008

Evolving my music genome

So, iTunes Genius feature, it's just you and me. Face-to-face. Gloves off. You think you know what I like? OK, you get one track to prove yourself.

No, no, that's not fair. I'll give you something really juicy to crunch on. How about you take a playlist that I described a while back as My Music Genome, the very seed (in my human algorithm-based estimation) of the majority of what I listen to now? Musical eugenics.

Oh, you don't make playlists from other playlists? Only single tracks? Sucks. Fine, let me do this one-by-one. 12 tracks in the list; 25 recommendations per track. Let's start being genius ... Go!

Wait, what's that? You can only identify 10 of 12 songs in my genome? You're telling me that you have never heard of Orbital's Impact or Vapourspace's magnum opus? You have the Orbital track in your music store, for god's sake!

OK, fine, go for it with the remaining 10. I'll wait.

• Going Under - Devo
• The Robots - Kraftwerk
• This Wreckage - Gary Numan
• Squance - Plaid
• Halo - Depeche Mode
• Jericho - The Prodigy
• C/Pach - Autechre
• Stigmata - Ministry
• Aquarius - Boards of Canada
• Phantasm - Biosphere
• Gravitational Arch of 10 - Vapourspace
• Impact (The Earth Is Burning) - Orbital

Cool, 10 new playlists. Let me open them right up. 250 tracks. Subtract the "source" tracks, that gives me 240 songs that you think spring from my base musical tastes. Interesting.

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There are plenty of ways I could slice this data -- Last.fm tags, AllMusic moods, BPM, waveforms -- and I just might. But right now what jumps out at me are the duplicates. That is, the recommendations that come from two or more "source" songs from my genome. This might mean something.

The duplicates are important because they narrow the tree back down. They're the inbred family members, points where multiple threads of interest converge. (In the image above, Hyped-Up Plus Tax by Dabrye, for instance, is a recommendation generated from both Plaid's Squance and Kraftwerk's The Robots.)

The overlaps are few, but meaningful.

• Aftermath - Tricky
• Children Talking - AFX
• Chime - Orbital
• The Curse of Ka'zar - Lemon Jelly
• Dominator [Joey Beltram Mix] - Human Resource
• A Forest [Tree Mix] - The Cure
• Future Proof - Massive Attack
• Gone Forever - Ulrich Schnauss
• Hyped-Up Plus Tax - Dabrye
• Laughable Butane Bob - AFX
• Little Fluffy Clouds - The Orb
• Me? I Disconnect From You - Gary Numan + Tubeway Army
• Mindphaser - Front Line Assembly
• Monkey Gone to Heaven - Pixies
• Paris - MSTRKRFT
• Satellite Anthem Icarus (apocryphal) - Boards of Canada
• Stars - Ulrich Schnauss
• We Are Glass - Gary Numan

A few identifiable strains emerge from this new "evolved" playlist. (These characteristics don't necessarily reflect the dominant style of the artists themselves, just the tracks, which is more precise anyway.)

• shoe-gazy, downtempo: The Cure, Ulrich Schnauss, Boards of Canada, Dabrye
• hard-edged: AFX (aka Aphex Twin), Human Resource, Front Line Assembly, Pixies, MSTRKKRFT
• genre-benders: Tricky, Lemon Jelly, The Orb

(Not sure where Gary Numan fits in that typology, but he deserves to be in every list as far as I am concerned.)

Wow, John, that's amazing, you're thinking. You've managed to waste countless hours compiling data to tell yourself that you like soft music, hard music, and music that mixes the two. Such insight!

Actually it is interesting because the artists in this new playlist are some of my most-played. Lemon Jelly, Ulrich Schnauss, and Boards of Canada have been on heavy rotation for years. Clearly they are the fruit of stylistic seeds planted long ago. And now we have something approaching empirical proof. Truth is, most of what I listen to is either ambient or hard-edged or some outlying miscegenation. And there's plenty of music that doesn't fall into those categories.

The most interesting data point is that Satellite Anthem Icarus by Boards of Canada is the song that the iTunes Genius most thinks defines my music listening. It is part of multiple playlists generated from the source playlist.

But here's the crazy thing. That particular track is a fake. It is not the actual Boards of Canada track by the same name. It was included in a partially-bogus torrent download just prior to the official album being released. But I did actually fall in love with it. It is one of my favorite of their tracks. Except that it isn't theirs. (Full story of this odd situation here.)

So, according to iTunes, the song that most represents the evolution of my musical taste is one that it should by all rights not even know about.

Now this gets to the heart of the mystery surrounding the Genius functionality itself. What exactly is it doing? It recommended this fake song to me which is neither named precisely what the real track is (in my library I have "(apocryphal)" in the title) nor is it the same length. And if by some crazy chance Apple is doing waveform analysis, it sounds nothing like the real version. So how could Genius recommend something that's iTMS obviously doesn't have in its library? Related, why would Genius not recognize the Orbital track in my library when I renamed it precisely as it is named in iTMS?

UPDATE: Commenter Pedro helpfully notes that this "fake" is actually Up the Coast by Freescha. Which makes this whole experiment really interesting. I agree with Apple that this song is extremely emblematic of my distilled music tastes, yet as noted above none of the metadata I had would have informed Apple to that. Is it possible that Apple is actually doing music analysis in the manner of Amazon's text analysis? I really can't believe that if for no other reason than that the initial Genius scan (when you run 8.0 for the first time) would take forever, which it did not. Still I want to believe. This is the way recommendations should happen.

I really don't know how the recommendations are being generated, but I do think it is based on something more than store purchase data. Consider the jump from Ministry's Stigmata to TMBG's Ana Ng.

There's pretty much nothing similar between industrial music and irony-laden pop. But these two songs are definitely related when you consider their respective "hooks": both use heavily-produced, effected, and clipped guitar noises as their main musical trope. Coincidence? Maybe, but why else would they be connected? Not music store data, methinks. Obviously Apple's exact algorithm is a secret, but I'd love to know more.

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Some procedural notes. It helped that I already had a short playlist of stuff I considered influential. (Though I find it a lamentable shortcoming that Genius can't generate a playlist from a playlist. It would have to infer commonality first then generate a new list. How tasty would that be?)

I then just set Genius to create a new playlist per track. Various recombinations of the playlists yielded a clean list which I flipped into a spreadsheet using the very handy Export Selected Song List AppleScript.

From the spreadsheet data I experimented with and aborted a bunch of different visualization ideas. At one point I had a monstrously large 10-headed Venn diagram in Illustrator that hurt to look at.

Eventually I created the network diagram in the screenshot at the top of this post using the wonderful Many Eyes social visualization site. (Yes, Many Eyes is IBM. Disclose that!)

A fuller, more interactive version of this visualization is available (Safari recommended, if you are on a Mac). Also the source data is there for the playing. I am sure there are other ways to massage it.

Enjoy this level of music nerdery? Dive into the Ascent Stage back catalog:

• The Mashability Index
• Aural decoration or, further adventures in filtering one's music library
• Beyond shuffle
• Culinary turntablism

Posted at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

August 18, 2008

Call of the wild

In Kenya I stayed in a tent camp -- not at all a luxury and a great way to extend the daytime safari thrill of being surrounded by animals. It was a thrill mostly unseen as the night came alive with noises that were always just outside the radius of the feeble gas lanterns around the camp.

Maasai tribesmen, hired by camp, patrolled the grounds at night, but it was still unnerving. Perhaps even more so when I'd start to wonder why we needed guards in the first place.

Cracking branches, rustling in the brush, and occasional screeches in the distance -- it all made getting up to take a leak outside the tent at night positively terrifying. In fact the night before I arrived a lion came into camp at night and roared for about twenty minutes. The Maasai said it was just "talking" to its pride.

Coincidentally I had been reading a fascinating survey of 20^th century music that mentioned in passing a study by two psychologists exploring the reason that certain musical passages give people the chills.

Their theory? It's related to the call of the wild, which also explains the feeling of hearing an animal cry in the distance in a dark tent.

In our estimation, a high-pitched sustained crescendo, a sustained note of grief sung by a soprano or played on a violin (capable of piercing the 'soul' so to speak) seems to be an ideal stimulus for evoking chills. A solo instrument, like a trumpet or cello, emerging suddenly from a softer orchestral background is especially evocative.

Accordingly, we have entertained the possibility that chills arise substantially from feelings triggered by sad music that contains acoustic properties similar to the separation call of young animals, the primal cry of despair to signal caretakers to exhibit social care and attention. Perhaps musically evoked chills represent a natural resonance of our brain separation-distress systems which helps mediate the emotional impact of social loss.

Put another way, a solo instrument breaking free from the larger family of sound evokes in humans a kind of separation anxiety, an empathetic response that, like separation, is largely fear-based. And this response, the authors posit, is evolutionary. It's related to animals (or human babies) calling out for attention. The call of the wild is a call of isolation. And isolation is scary.

They continue, attempting to explain the chills further.

In part, musically induced chills may derive their affective impact from primitive homeostatic thermal responses, aroused by the perception of separation, that provided motivational urgency for social-reunion responses. In other words, when we are lost, we feel cold, not simply physically but also perhaps neuro-symbolically as a consequence of the social loss.

"Homeostatic thermal responses" ... yes, a hug. Chills as symbolic response to a lack of skin contact with others of your group. (Consider this image of a monkey baby clung to the bottom of its mother.)

The best example I know of this phenomenon in music ("A solo instrument ... emerging suddenly from a softer orchestral background") comes a little more than halfway through the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, about 27 seconds into this excerpt. There's nothing else like it in the entire piece. It has given me chills ever since I first really heard it in college.

See also a podcast from today's Guardian on related evolutionary insights from music.

Posted at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 30, 2008

Enjoy the silence

Today I stole an interesting link from Coudal about the removal of layers of ambient sound from a space as a kind of subtractive symphony.

Living in a house with three small children, I ponder silence as an abstraction, without empirical evidence. If nature abhors a vacuum, children abhor noiselessness. It's instinctual, the reptile cortex responding to a threat of nothingness. Clear a space of quiet in my home and some child will yelp for no good reason. Like dangling meat in front of an animal that's just eaten. It'll still lunge.

But our response to silence is more complicated than that, of course.

Alex Ross, in his fantastic survey of 20th century classical music, The Rest Is Noise, explains Stravinsky's innovation in syncopation (which is essentially putting silence where the rhythm suggests it shouldn't be):

As the composer-critic Virgil Thomson once explained, the body tends to move up and down in syncopated or polyrhythmic music because it wants to emphasize the main beat that the stray accents threaten to wipe out. "A silent accent is the strongest of all accents," he wrote. "It forces the body to replace it with a motion." (Think of Bo Diddley's "Bo Diddley," with its "bomp ba-bomp bomp [oomph!] bomp bomp.")

That concept makes a great deal of sense to me. The body physically desires to fill in the rhythmic gaps that music opens up. You may think you can only shake your booty to four-on-the-floor, but in fact silence, judiciously deployed, is just as effective at getting you going. In fact, more so: it's cognitively unsettling to hear silence where a beat should be. Don't just stand there, replace it with a motion!

And now, silence.

Posted at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 21, 2008

My music genome

Humans share a common genome, so sayeth the biologists and the musicologists. But no one has the exact same genome. The various human genome cataloging projects compile an aggregate model, as does Pandora.

So, like the botanists stashing seeds in a vault in Norway in case of apocalypse, I present my own music genome -- the albums that form the basis of my musical evolution.

There are other strands of nucleotides in my musical history, of course -- Pink Floyd, The Smiths, They Might Be Giants come to mind -- but the albums below have given rise to the most positive mutations. They aren't my all time favorite albums or even the best in their own classes. But such is how one's taste in music evolves.

Message to Future Scientists: If you are able to reconstruct me from fossilized genetic information please reprogram my musical knowledge according to the following list.

Gary Numan - Telekon
Kraftwerk - The Man-Machine
Devo - New Traditionalists
Ministry - The Land of Rape and Honey
Depeche Mode - Violator
The Prodigy - Experience
Orbital - Orbital 2
Vapourspace - Themes from Vapourspace
Biosphere - Substrata
Plaid - Double Figure
Autechre - Tri Repetae++
Boards of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children

And a mix I made, one track per album, just for you: My Music Genome.

Posted at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 29, 2008

Rave to the grave

So last night, mid-Zombiefest, my brother got a text message from a bar that he DJ's at saying that the replacement DJ was awful: "He's playing 'let's talk about sex, baby' get over here now". The bar manager needed an emergency DJ, stat.

We deliberated. Neither of us had anything set up for such a thing, we were in the midst of chronicling the undead, and had been drinking since 3pm. Oh, we were also wearing zombie masks. We didn't deliberate long.

The DJ at the bar was none too pleased to be getting the hook. That's what you get for playing George Michael to a bar full of twenty-somethings, buddy.

In our rush out of the house we forgot headphones. Let me suggest that this is a rather vital omission when attempting to play music. Cueing was, you know, impossible. It was all completely impromptu without a matched beat to be heard. But it was damn fun. Just back and forth musical one-upsmanship, echoes of Christmas Party.

In many ways a bar full of drunken patrons is not all that different from an assault of the living dead. Single-minded of purpose, responding only to the crudest instincts, lurching from prey to prey.* Yep, a Friday night bar scene.

The bar manager begged us not to put the zombie masks on. Inexplicably, we did not play Thriller.

The crowd was odd. The manager said they wanted 80's and 90's stuff. OK, can do. But every request that came in (none written on cocktail napkins, alas) was for hip hop, perhaps the most under-represented genre in my library. I mean, I have a good bit, but that's not the point. I probably didn't win the bar repeat customers by being a complete ass about music I didn't want to play. Thankfully we had our pal Chris with us and after a while I just pointed to him as the designated request-taker when someone would approach. Shoulda been wearing this.

The bar wants us back tonight. The undead filmfest has resumed and we're properly organizing tunes for the eve. I'm taking requests online only, so get yours in now.

* This is, in fact, the actual premise of Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave, the inability to distinguish drug-addled revelers from brain-craving corpses. Tom Petty knows.

Posted at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 23, 2008

DJ Internets

Had to get that egostroke of a post off the front, so here's a fairly cool use -- the first to my knowledge -- of the EchoNest song analysis API that let's you create custom beat-matched playlists just by pointing to tunes (or your Last.fm feed). Not at all perfect, but an interesting start. Here's a quick one.

More fun at thisismyjam.com.

Posted at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 21, 2008

Do it Justice

Many consider the Daft Punk headlining of Lollapalooza the most amazing arena rock show of 2007. But after tonight I gotta think Justice will one day claim the same title. Crazy Frenchmen. I've heard it called it the "French touch" but something's in the water of Seine because these frogs can seriously rock out. It is 1970's proto-headbanging in the electronic milieu. Just fantastic.

Here's a concert-goer from the show. Looks like vector art, but he was human after all.

Posted at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 19, 2008

A shape that resembles music

For the few of you who saw the 1998 electronica documentary Modulations* and the fewer of you who remember Autechre's brief, perplexing interview, you may be surprised to learn that they can be remarkably insightful. Or at least the Rob Brown half of the duo was in a recent interview with Pitchfork.

Pitchfork: Do you ever feel limited by technology? Where you have ideas or songs that you're imagining or certain arrangements that, because of the tools you have, can't be realized?

Rob Brown: ... The gear can guide you -- you can choose one bit of gear and it's obviously got its restrictions and its limitations, but at the same time, you've got to exploit what it's capable of and what it's best used for. Sometimes you try not to be too overly analytical, trying to let it flow for a bit first and see where it's leading you and then see what sticks to it, see what it implies. A lot of it is implications. Some of our earlier albums, like Confield, are almost all implied music. But it's cohesive because we spent long enough fashioning the idea down -- to a shape, if you like -- that actually resembles music.

Implied music, wow. And he's not talking John Gage-y silence-type conceptual music. That idea -- of a music that peripherally or fragmentedly suggests the music that informed it -- really does make Autechre's "difficult period" (Confield, Draft 7.30, Untilted) click for me. Go back and have a listen. But first read the whole interview. Oh and also, pick up the new one Quaristice. It's a new direction that, well, implies older directions. Really digging it.

* Easily one of my top three favorite movie posters of all time.

Posted at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 12, 2008

Aural decoration or, further adventures in filtering one's music library

Last Saturday was our school fundraiser, an elaborate auction/party. One of those things you just don't think as being a big deal until you have children in school. The amount of planning required is only slightly less ridiculous than the amount of money raised.

Last year when planning began I was appointed in absentia to be the "entertainment chair", meaning the music guy. Naturally I envisioned myself on the decks slamming beats late into the night. But no, that wouldn't do. Couldn't really, as the focus needed to be on getting people to make outrageous bids for items, not crowded on a dance floor.

So I hired a band. Working with them put me right back in high school when playing keyboard in a band was pretty much the most important thing I had going. (You might remember such acts as The Jerks, Big Green Milk Truck, The Young Republicans, and Relativity. Wow, now there's a blog post that needs writing.) I had to resist every urge not to rent a smoke machine, 'cause, I mean, who can rock out without a smoke machine?

Anyway. There was also the issue of "interlude" music, what to play from my iPod during times the band was not on. Easily the most challenging playlist I've ever put together. What exactly is the mood that you want to set at an auction? Classical, too stuffy. Country, wrong demographic. Classic rock, too retro. Jazz, maybe, but either you like it or you don't. It was so much more difficult than I imagined. I needed an angle.

The city of Chicago helped me out. Apparently our local airports will soon play only music from bands from Chicago. They're covering all the genres, but leaving out really upbeat stuff. No Pumpkins or Ministry, probably no R. Kelly. The reasoning is that people are already on edge at an airport and don't need 160 BPM to push them off the cliff -- a similar problem to my own, in a way.

So I sliced my music library by Chicago-based bands. There's no tag for this, of course, so it was all manual. Last.fm's tags helped out immensely -- but wouldn't it be cool if Last.fm could actually add biographical data to MP3 headers? I added "chicago" to the grouping tag for all this music and put together a smart playlist to segregate it.

Andrew Bird
Califone
Chicago Underground Trio
Exploding Star Orchestra
Kanye West
Ministry
R Kelly
Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Smashing Pumpkins
Styx (huh?)
Sufjan Stevens (honorary, only for Illinois)
Tortoise
Wilco

OK, fine, but that includes everything from Sir Georg Solti to Alain Jourgensen, neither appropriate. So, using Tangerine I generated a new playlist of Chicago-related band tracks between 100 and 145 beats-per-minute with medium intensity.

Lastly, I removed stuff that would, you know, upset those of fragile sensibility. Like, say Ministry's Stigmata: "School families, silent auction table three closes in -- cutting my face and walking on splinters, I lost my soul to the look in your eyes!!! -- whoops, sorry. Next track."

So what did I end up with? 239 tracks became 59, far more music than I needed. Full track list after the jump.

The method was dorky, both horribly imprecise and overly complex, and unknown to anyone that night. Yep, just right.

Next year: embedded subliminal messages. Bid more, you will bid more now!

Armchairs, Andrew Bird
Simple X, Andrew Bird
Spare-Ohs, Andrew Bird
Hell Is Chrome, Wilco
Hummingbird, Wilco
Handshake Drugs, Wilco
Wishful Thinking, Wilco
Theologians, Wilco
I Am One, Smashing Pumpkins
Window Paine, Smashing Pumpkins
Trick Bird, Califone
Apple, Califone
Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!, Sufjan Stevens
Chicago, Sufjan Stevens
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!, Sufjan Stevens
Gamera, Tortoise
The Source of Uncertainty, Tortoise
Blackbird, Tortoise
Madison Area, Tortoise
Why We Fight, Tortoise
Goriri, Tortoise
CTA, Tortoise
Deltitnu, Tortoise
Not Quite East Of The Ryan (remix of 'Spiderwebbed'), Tortoise
Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Smashing Pumpkins
Pink&Sour, Califone
A Chinese Actor, Califone
Impossible Germany, Wilco
Sky Blue Sky, Wilco
Leave Me (Like You Found Me), Wilco
What Light, Wilco
Eden 2, Tortoise
Blackjack, Tortoise
I Set My Face To The Hillside, Tortoise
In Sarah, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Women And Men, Tortoise
Jetty, Tortoise
Everglade, Tortoise
Christmas Time, Smashing Pumpkins
Sting Ray And The Beginning Of Time - Part I, Exploding Star Orchestra
Sting Ray And The Beginning Of Time - Part III (Psycho-tropic Electric Eel Dream), Exploding Star Orchestra
Kamera, Wilco
Jesus, etc., Wilco
Heavy metal drummer, Wilco
Pot kettle black, Wilco
1979, Smashing Pumpkins

Posted at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 25, 2008

Scapegoat

Though I am not the author of this particular graffito I do agree. Typically when anything goes wrong in my life I blame house music.

Posted at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 23, 2008

Breakbeatbox

Got a new little project to share. A friend of mine out in Boston (loaner of the mythical monome) and I thought it might be fun to play a game where we create short musical compositions then post them for each other with a rule on how the next submission should proceed. A musical exquisite corpse, audio Layer Tennis. Whatever it is, it forces us to make time to make music, if for no other reason than not to be outdone.

http://breakbeatbox.com

By the way, start with "Doctored". Jesse's was the first track.

Posted at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 29, 2007

Most played music of 2007

		last year
1	Biosphere	1
2	Fatboy Slim	--
3	Aphex Twin	17
4	Office	--
5	Sufjan Stevens	2
6	Tycho	--
7	Justice	--
8	Mike Relm	11
9	Ulrich Schnauss	15
10	Apparat	--
11	Amon Tobin	--
12	Der Dritte Raum	6
13	Ladytron	12
14	Air	--
15	Matthew Dear	--
16	LFO	--
17	The Black Dog	--
18	Shpongle	--
19	MSTRKRFT	--
20	Jóhann Jóhannsson	--

Interesting how few artists made it on the list from last year. Sorta proud of that. Biosphere of course is unassailable, as ol' Geir accompanies most night's trips to sleep. The list is Most Played, you see, not Most Actually Heard.

As I compile these stats year after year it is becoming clear the bias built in. For one, iTunes/Last.fm doesn't do a great job of logging very long tracks -- such as unbroken DJ/live sets -- which this year accounted for much of my listening. Not sure a track is logged unless its end is reached, so though I could listen to an hour of a set if I don't hit the end it is statistically invisible. Also, since I don't automatically synch music to my iPhone or iPod iTunes never knows about play counts that happens outside of itself. This also skews things mightily since so much of what I listen to is not in front of my computer.

More stats here.

Posted at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 28, 2007

Album art tag cloud

This nifty site takes your Last.fm or MusicMob profile and creates an embeddable cloud of album art (linked to artist pages) for your most played tracks. As with text clouds, the larger the image the more plays. I like.

Posted at 4:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2007

Grid Music

I want to be a DJ. Those who know me know this to be true.

For about 18 months I've been playing with Ableton Live, a truly extraordinary application for creating music both linearly and on-the-fly. It is absolutely perfect for live entertainment. But last year, at its debut at our annual holiday party, it was (or rather, I was) a bit hobbled by the mouse-only access to its dizzying number of on-screen controls.

This year the problem is solved. I picked up what's known as a control surface (basically a ton of hardware knobs and sliders) called the Novation Remote SL Zero which interfaces directly with the virtual controls of Ableton. Fine, great, I can mix and twiddle. But what was needed to put it over the top was the monome, that venerable, limited 8×8 controller that debuted to the infinite joy of audio geeks everywhere last year.

The monome is really a dumb device, a 64-button USB controller. But it has a loyal, smart following who've developed some amazing applications. One of them, called monogrid, let's you chop up a song into discrete musical quanta so that they play out across the grid. Each button triggers that part of the sliced song, effectively turning the whole piece into a remixable unit -- not unlike a turntable does, without the need to scratch across unwanted parcels (both a good thing and a bad thing).

Here's my brother mucking around with Daft Punk's “High Life”. Yes, his own metronome is a little off midway through, but that's just proof that he's really playing the thing.

Dorky? Yes. Crowd-pleasing? Absolutely.

Tags: ableton, audio, DJ, monome, music

Posted at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 20, 2007

Intense listening

Here's an interesting idea for organizing your music library from my pal Len.

Instead of shoe-horning music into arbitrary and fluid genres or using the freeform grouping tag, Len uses the five-star rating field in iTunes as an intensity indicator. This breaks down generic distinctions entirely and focuses on the content of the music instead. It isn't just BPM; determining a song's intensity also factors in loudness.

One star is the most low-key: nearly all your ambient and new age tunes, some classical, some jazz, etc. Two stars would encompass things like ambient downtempo, much of the blues, etc. And so on up to five stars which contains your drill-and-bass and deathmetal.

But the point here is that the stars are not genre markers. Classical tracks could live in any one of the five star categories. As could most genres. You merely filter your music based on intensity. This makes sense to me because it represents how I feel before I put a song on. Rarely do I think, gee, I'd love to hear some smooth jazz right now. More often I am merely craving something downbeat and relaxed. This could be a country tune for all I care (though I certainly hope it isn't).

More importantly this frees you from the shackles of taxonomy. Is that ambient or electronica? Can I call a mashup rock-and-roll if it contains a Mangione interlude? Etc.

This method is labor-intensive, no doubt. Instead of marking a whole album with a genre you have to listen to each track and note its intensity. But it can be done programatically. Tangerine is an OSX app that will crawl your library and pop the BPM into track metadata. It also allows you to create playlists by choosing intensity curves. You could imagine a smart playlist (actually I bet it would have to be an applescript) that assigned star ratings to all tunes in a certain BPM range.

How do you organize your library? Or, more specifically, what is your route into it? By artist, by genre, by intensity?

Tags: bpm, itunes, music, intensity

Posted at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 6, 2007

Kingdom of Pain

The Police played Wrigley Field last night, only the second concert allowed in the ballpark. It was a great show. Stewart Copeland is a genius and, apparently, a Cubs fan. Here's a pretty good review.

It was a bit odd seeing people so dressed up in the ballpark, cheering with no team on the field. It felt ... wrong, somehow. Though it does continue my spate of unique outings at Wrigley this year.

More pics at Flickr.

Tags: chicago, police, concert, wrigley

Posted at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 12, 2007

Beyond shuffle

Had a thought.

Been listening to this on my iPod for a while (it is three hours long). There are sections in it that sound like the interference headphones and speakers get from incoming mobile signals. At first I thought it was my phone, but it isn't. It's in the recording, sorta like a watermark. Since it is a live recording perhaps it was picked up during the show.

It got me thinking about randomness in music recordings. Artists have been talking about this for decades, trying to approximate the variability of a live performance in a static recording. Basically it isn't possible, though that which does exist tends towards empowering the listener to muck with the tracks. But what about merely giving the artist the ability to vary the song on a given listen?

You'd not need a new audio format, it seems to me. What about using the comments metadata section in an MP3 (or AAC, whatever) to include an executable chunk of code that could manipulate the actual audio stream? Obviously your player would need a plug-in of some sort to run the code, but that's easy with the extensibility of most apps these days.

How would it work? Well, the song would play normally. The plug-in would look for comments and would be alerted by some string that announced that the contents were executable. If the plug-in were sophisticated enough it could do anything from simple effects (flanging, phasing, echoing) to actual audio insertions and overlays. You could imagine an online component that would go out and pre-fetch snippets or sounds that could be layered into the pre-recorded track. The key would be variability. It would not happen every time -- or rather it would not have to happen every time. If it did, why not pre-record it? The idea is akin to apps today that live a dual existence on one's machine and also, in part, online. If you didn't have the plug-in the song would play normally.

It wouldn't substitute for an artist's creative freedom during a live show, but it would reinsert variability into the act of playback -- something that's been a part of the musical experience far longer than the era of recorded sound that we live in.

Update: Nick Nice, the artist behind the mix linked above, contacted me. He confirmed that the noise was in fact from his phone being too close to the mixer when an SMS was coming in.

Tags: generative, metadata, music, variable

Posted at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 4, 2007

This is what happens back at home when I travel

The inmates run the asylum (and my Last.fm account, apparently).

Tags: kids, lastfm, music

Posted at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 31, 2006

Most played music of the year

I end 2006 having played 17,677 tracks through iTunes since I started using Last.fm last year. Here are the top twenty artists for the last 12 months, in order.

Biosphere
Sufjan Stevens
Casino Versus Japan
Richie Hawtin
Midwest Product
Der Dritte Raum
Yagya
Plaid
Imogen Heap
Gary Numan
Mike Relm
Ladytron
Junkie XL
Boards of Canada
Ulrich Schnauss
Four Tet
Aphex Twin
Boom Bip (huh? haven't listened to this in ages)
Girl Talk
Ryan Elliott

Interesting to compare the change since the 10,000 mark last March.

Tags: itunes, lastfm, music

Posted at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 18, 2006

Merry Christmash

Looking for some interesting new holiday tunes? Look no further than Wayne&Wax. Wayne Marshall is one smart DJ. An ethnomusicologist by training, Wayne is currently a postdoc at the University of Chicago (lucky Chicago), a prolific blogger and masher.

Have a listen to Remix-mas and check the other free tracks listed from that post, including the new Christmas compilation from DJ BC of The Beastles fame. (For the love of all that is holy download "Imagine Santa" if you only can take one track. Goosebump material, that is.)

Other Wayne&Wax mashes of note include the Boston Mashacre, it's followup Boston Smashacre and A Crunk Genealogy. The last was created for a course on Electronic Music he recently taught at the Harvard Extension School. The syllabus itself is a work of art, with custom mixes and a deep bibliography every week to illustrate major themes. Just superb.

Wayne also blogs at the riddim meth0d.

Tags: christmas, mashup

Posted at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 14, 2006

Dreamy Tangerine

You know that field in iTunes for beats-per-minute? Ever wondered what the hell it was good for? Well, now we know. Tangerine, a scrumptious little OSX app, will analyze your entire library -- mine of some 12,000 tunes took 15 hours -- and plop the BPM into track metadata -- another 12 or so hours. So that's nice: more complete metadata. But Tangerine actually allows you to do something useful.

Tangerine locally logs BPM and beat intensity. You can then construct playlists by selecting a frequency and intensity range and choosing a pattern.

The playlist view is nicely done. Songs are represented by their cover art and scaled vertically to represent BPM, horizontally to represent duration. You can of course save your playlists to iTunes.

This particular fruit will set you back $25.

Tags: itunes, bpm

Posted at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 4, 2006

A game called echo

It's the plight of the comeback musician who's trying to do more than just cash in on old material. The new music is what motivates the artist personally, but it is the old stuff that fills the clubs and pays the bills. Gary Numan, who you might argue established the bridge between a moribund punk scene and new wave, has been back for about a decade. He's all goth now -- dark and Reznory -- and he admits that he doesn't want to play much but his new music. Yet, his fans still crave the old stuff. Not necessarily the hits (Cars, Are 'Friends' Electric?), but classics, the music that made synthesizers cool before a single Flock of Seagulls video ruined it all.

Well, Numan thinks he has a solution. He explains the concept of a classic album "mini-tour":

For quite some time I have been concerned about those fans, most of whom have been with me for many, many years, that would like to see more older songs played live. As you are aware, my own desires have been to play less older stuff as each new album comes along, especially since '94 when things got much heavier and darker. I have struggled to come up with a solution. One that enables me to continue to play predominantly newer material at the shows and yet doesn't seem to be ignoring the wishes of those people that are a, not as interested in the newer stuff or b, do like the newer stuff but would still like to hear more older songs. So this is my first attempt at trying to do something that is some kind of a solution.

I think this is a great idea. Four shows only. Non-reworked versions of the original material from the album Telekon. If you're a long time fan this clearly will give you palpitations of excitement. If you're a new fan (and in Numan's case he really does have a lot of 'em, believe it or not) then this is a chance to dial the wayback machine to the left and hear the roots of his current musical incarnation. Either way the shows are going to sell out. And Numan who "hate[s] nostalgia with a passion" can accommodate his fans without giving up the style that keeps him playing.

My bet is that when Numan finally sits down and tries to get the band to play the songs as they were back in 1979-1980-1981 he'll learn some things too. Diving back that deeply into an old style might not be nostalgic, but I bet it'll be enlightening. Like meeting a friend years after a falling-out. Only the next new album will tell.

Posted at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 1, 2006

Month of the monome

Today I packed up the monome music controller to send back to its owner. (You may recall the story of how I got it, here.) What a fun month it has been. The monome was a great excuse to convene friends for experimentation, drinks, and the pleasure of serendipitous music-making (in that order).

Here's a condensed clip of various sessions over the past month. A magnum opus it ain't, but it is quality nerdporn that's for sure.

Craig puts it nicely. Chris shows it nicely.

Thanks for the device, Jesse!

Posted at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 2, 2006

Ohm sweet monome

I've had the extraordinary luck* to get my hands on a monome, the amazing USB controller that'll do just about anything you want it to. The monome is an 8×8 grid of sturdy backlit buttons. And that's really about it, functionally. It interfaces with a slew of music apps that turn it into a keyboard, a sequencer, a ribbon slide, or just about any tactile way you can imagine to control sound. And the design! If it weren't so sturdy I'd call it cute. Form and function, as one.

I spent a great evening playing with the monome last night. Everything you hear in this short clip is from slices of the intro to Also sprach Zarathustra (the 2001 theme).

[*] Luck being a friend who has loaned it to me for the month while he gets married and honeymoons, presumably because he was forbidden from taking it with him. The first sign of doomed marriage, if you ask me.

Posted at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 17, 2006

Musical floods, musical islands

Last.fm and Pandora are great, no doubt, but for real introduction to new music either you need to work a shift at a college radio station or ... befriend a bunch of people with broad taste and an expansive collection. Not being in college, I choose the latter.

In the past nine months I've grown my music collection (in sheer filesize) by probably 15-20%. My musical horizons, much more than that. This is almost exclusively due to meeting new people and swapping music. Social networking indeed, but it has all been offline. The Long Tail is a remarkable phenomenon but it is damn long and there's no roadmap. For me it comes down to it trust in a live human being for recommendations -- still my favorite way of experiencing new tunes. Here's a selection of artists that I've taken to in (let's round up) the last year.

Sufjan Stevens
Four Tet
Boy Least Likely To
Richard Villalobos
My Morning Jacket
Feist
Doves
Chicago Underground Trio
Badly Drawn Boy
Calexico
Imogen Heap
Mojave 3
Sigur Rós
Ladytron
The Arcade Fire
Phoenix
Charlie Hunter
Broken Social Scene
The Kleptones
James T. Cotton
Audion
The Notwist
Nomo
Detroit Experiment
Cornelius
Alex Gopher
Midwest Product
Yagya
Lusine
Lali Puna
Dosh
Claro Intelecto
Casino Versus Japan
Matthew Dear
The Avalanches
DJ Cam
Twine
Mike Relm
Rjd2
DJ Shadow
Tadd Mullinix
Porcupine Tree
Ulrich Schnauss
Tycho
UNKLE

It has been a good year.

And yet. You don't know what you have until it is gone. A few days ago, the network card on my home fileserver crapped the bed. In an instant, I was cut off from all music and media. Being headless, the Linux machine that I store everything on was totally inaccessible: obviously I couldn't log into it, but I couldn't even work on the machine without lugging a monitor out of storage. Before I figured out what was going on I went through the five stages of data loss: (1) Concern, (2) Anxiety, (3) Panic, (4) Lightheaded Otherworldliness, (5) Viewing Sharpened Pencils as Implements of Suicide. But I did lug that monitor and the files are alright. I bought a NIC (for -- not kidding -- $5) and should have it all back soon.

It has been an interesting period of deprivation. All I can play is what I had loaded on my iPod at the time of the failure. Like being frozen in time, my music queue is now only a sliver of a catalog, a snapshot of what was last updated. It is pleasant, in a way, to have fewer choices. There was a time when you only owned so many CD's -- no vast digital archive, no P2P, satellite radio, or streaming music. You just had to listen to what you had at the time. A few hundred megabytes stuffed into a bottle floating in an ocean that you just can't drink.

Posted at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 11, 2006

Wired up in my capsule to the moon

Last year I wrote about taking a waterproof iPod and headphones into a sensory deprivation chamber. I chose Biosphere's album Autour de la Lune. It was a fascinating experiment. Borderline hallucinogenic and deeply relaxing, the total sensory focus on the ultra-minimal tones of Autour de la Lune was the closest I had ever come to being completely lost in sound. After that session I started wondering how linked my own body rhythms had become to the music during the hour of sensory focus.

Well, fast forward almost a year. A few weeks ago I went back to the tanks armed with a heartrate monitor in addition to the waterproof iPod. In I went, on came the album, and the simple EKG started logging.

The superimposed waveform on the heartrate graph is an example of info design awful enough to make Edward Tufte flatline. No, I'm not implying that the sonic peaks and valleys of the music corresponded with spikes (no valleys, thank goodness!) of my heartrate. Obviously the heartbeats per minute units have no relavance to the waveform heights. However, the time axis is in synch. So, you can see what my heartrate was at any moment in the music (song titles in bold black at top).

What to make of it? First the outliers at either end can be discarded as they are my elevated heart rate from entering and leaving the isolation tank. (It ain't easy with all that gear and warm, hypersalty water sloshing around your nude body.) The first thirteen minutes are somewhat erratic as I'd expect from the acclimation phase. You bump the sides and basically spend a bit of time just calming down. Still, the music during this phase was somewhat erratic too. There's not enough data to correlate my heartrate with the music, of course, but both do even out around minute fourteen. The end of the first song, Translation, is a complex, consistent drone and it is right at this point that my heartrate starts to level off. During Rotation, a "spikier" collection of tones, my heart rate became more variable again. The most interesting phase is next with the song Modifié. This is one of the subtlest tracks on the album and here my heartrate drops to its lowest point of the whole session. This is the hypnagogic state, the time when you can't tell if you are asleep or awake, dreaming or thinking -- the reason you're in the chamber to begin with. From there, the heartrate warbles a bit (during Vibratoire, appropriately) and then begins a steady clim back up during Déviation.

Autour de la Lune ("Around the Moon") is a concept album/tone poem heavily influenced by Jules Vernes' novel of the same name. The novel, one of the earliest examples of science fiction, is a continuation of the story of a mission to the moon from his first lunar novel "From the Earth to the Moon". I probably won't get any closer to the actual surface of the moon than Verne did, but then again in the sensory deprivation tank I was strapped up with medical telemetry all astronaut-like, floating in a capsule of total isolation on my way to a place far away. My trip around the moon.

A word of warning. Both times I've done this I've had some pressure issues in my head and ringing in my ears for a few days afterward. I am not sure if it is due to the insert headphones, the low droning of the music, the saltwater, or a combination of all these factors. But it is annoying. The perils of spaceflight.

See also My Beating Blog, an interesting experiment where each post is accompanied by correspoding heartrate data.

Posted at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 25, 2006

Mashedness

The concept of the mashup is all the rage these days. The mixability of online apps and services to create something fundamentally new is in part what makes Web 2.0 so appealing. (Here's a great matrix of web apps and how's they've been mixed with others.) Plotting crime stats on your neighborhood map (Chicagocrime.org), finding out what music acts are upcoming based on your recently played song list (Upcomingscrobbler), viewing photos relavent to your current location (WhereAmI.At?) -- all are yokings-together of discrete applications to create something brand new.

The mashup as a musical genre is similarly in vogue right now, maybe more so. If the classic remix is a song dressed up in a new clothes then the musical mashup is a conjoined twin strutting around in a single, seamless overcoat. Mashes from artists like 2 Many DJ's, DJ Z-Trip, DJ BC, The Kleptones, and Mike Relm demonstrate that when two or more songs are woven together the result is usually more than a bunch of shared downbeats. For example, where DJ's have traditionally relied on beat matching to pair songs, often mashups choose source material based on thematic similarity. The songs in the mash are like conversants in a dialogue, talking about the same thing. Soulwax does this superbly. Of course, the beats have to match too, but that's a lot harder to do when you also have to match what they are about.

Both forms of mashing are of course technology-driven. Web app mashups owe their existence to open API's and standards while musical mashes have proliferated because of the ease of use and ubiquity of digital editing software (and standard audio file formats).

Recently I was listening to an 80's format streaming radio station and a Beatles medley came on. This isn't the 80's, I thought, until I realized that this was one of the early 80's products of Stars on 45, the pop act that recreated popular music set to a unifying beat. I loved this when I was younger. Stars on 45 created medleys of the BeeGees, famous TV tunes, Motown, and other generic categories. By today's mashup standards it seems amazingly simple, but what I didn't know is that Stars on 45 hired sound-alike studio musicians to carefully recreate the original songs -- no sample restrictions there, though in truth they were ripping off much more of the originals than today's quick-sample artists do, but I digress.

Instead of integrating the actual recordings to create something new, Stars on 45 recreated the originals with total faithfulness, a move which gave them the flexibility that today's technology does. In a way it reminds me of early legacy technology integration projects with all manner of cryptic conversion and middleware transmogrification of data just to get a few apps to talk to each other. The end-user might not know the path the data took to get to him, but to someone who could peer under the hood the process was needlessly byzantine.

And this is where my powers of analogy exhaust themselves.

Posted at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 14, 2006

Chickens

I married a Southerner. Happily. This has meant many things, all positive, including an expansion of my perspective on the American experience that I'm grateful for. But it also means that my wife has a genetic predisposition to enjoying country music. True, this has mostly faded in the years since college and since we've moved to Chicago. But ocassionally she needs a fix and because our music is all part of one server and played through an app that sends all songs played to a server that I excerpt on this blog you'll sometimes see my queue tainted with twang. And normally this twang comes from The Dixie Chicks.

Now, I have no specific aversion to country music. I just don't care for it. I went to college in Nashville where I experienced a broad range of the genre, from near-folk to "new" country and everything in between. Never cared for any of it.* But whatever. The thing is, I really respect The Dixie Chicks. You might recall that they proclaimed embarrassment being from the same state as Bush a few years ago. At the time, America was preparing for war. This didn't sit well with the bedrock mainstream radio audience of country music. Death threats were hurled, stations were boycotted, everything you'd expect from a demographic trying their best to affirm stereotypes of gun-toting, chest-beating, and a profound confusion of the difference between loving America and loving America's leadership. The Dixie Chicks took it in stride, apologized, kept touring to sold-out crowds and that was that.

The Dixie Chicks have a new album. Country stations by and large still cave to the vocal few who find it unpatriotic to play their music. And yet, the Dixie Chicks are one of the most frequently downloaded acts on the Internet. Mainstream radio, running scared as it is from downloadable music, streaming music, and satellite radio, needs to do everything they can not to lose more listeners, but this is really quite pathetic. They are digging their own grave by not playing what people want to hear. Truth is, most people don't really care what the Dixie Chicks or any other band stand for. They just like the music. If stations keep listening to an extreme minority they'll end up playing only for them and fulfilling the feared outcome of not having a market that can support their ad-based model.

Not all heavy metal is about eating babies and Satan worshipping, so why should all country music be about ramming an American flag up a terrorist's ass? Please people. The market will bear this out. If enough people are truly upset about the Dixie Chick's stance then they will make no money, their label will drop them, and they will cease to be viable as a commercial music act. But for now, this isn't happening. Accept it and relish the fact that most of the places that country music listeners most fear don't embrace that kind of freedom of speech or free-market mechanism. It is as thoroughly American as a pickup truck.

[*] OK, I will admit that I do find bluegrass somewhat interesting. When I was a DJ on our college station the slot before mine was a long-running and award-winning bluegrass show. As I queued up my records and CD's in the second studio I came to appreciate the genre in the brief slice I got over the monitors. But just you try to make a smooth segue from banjo to Front 242. Not possible.

Posted at 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

May 7, 2006

Culinary turntablism

Does anyone remember the scene in The Golden Child -- maybe I should first ask, does anyone remember the movie The Golden Child? From 1986, with Eddie Murphy? Not one of his best. There's this scene where he enters a Nepalese temple and encounters a ceremonial pillar that rotates around its vertical axis. Not knowing what to do, he scrubs it like a turntable DJ, making a scratching noise. Laughter ensues.

I think of that scene when I eat out in China because of the mechanism known as the zhuan pan at the center of the table. Known in the west as a lazy susan, this rotating platter is a fixture at traditional tables in China. It is both an efficient delivery mechanism and a wonderful social lubricant. Everything is communal and by definition participatory as the platter rotates forth and back. You just reach in with your chopsticks as a dish you like comes by. If you can get beyond the sanitary issues of this particular disease vector it becomes clear that the zhuan pan is a marvelous thing.

There's something musical about the whole process. The zhuan pan is a DJ turntable set up.

Consider it this way. The dishes are notes/chords/samples -- discrete musical units of some kind. They appear at a point in time on the platter and rotate more or less consistently until they are removed or moved (more on this in a moment). So you have discrete units repeating in time from the perspective of a fixed point which in this case is me, the eater, but metaphorically is the armature of the phonograph. Units are added in time, layered in so to speak, and repeat at the same interval. Dishes leave the table periodically -- their particular musical loops end. But the dishes return, smaller this time (the waitstaff transfers uneaten portions to smaller plates to make more room on the table) and they are placed closer in to the center of the rotating platter, allowing people easier access to the newer, fuller dishes at the periphery. In other words, the loops return in a changed state and with new, quicker intervals (rotating more quickly since their radial distances are now shorter). The zhuan pan rotates backwards too, but only quickly, a "scrub" if you will, to let someone grab a morsel that made its way by too quickly. The overall motion is forward.

Data visualization geek that I am I started considering the possibilities -- which of course weren't visual at all but more like data sonification (a field to be sure but not one much popularized). What would this meal sound like if the zhuan pan were a recording?

zhuanpan.mp3 | 1.4MB | 1 min, 1 sec

So I recorded each dish as a separate track in GarageBand. Each measure corresponded to one minute of the meal starting with the arrival of tea, which is the downbeat bass drum that remains constant throughout, the engine of the entire affair. Each new dish comes in more or less as I recorded it on a timeline in my notebook during the meal. (My hosts graciously obliged my notetaking as the curiosity of a unaccustomed Westerner.) Some dishes are single notes, some are short phrases, and at least one, the fish "flower," is a constant note modulating in time with the rotation of the table. Each unit repeats with a period of five minutes. This is an average based on the number of revolutions of the table, but it is almost exact for at least the first two rotations of the 50 minute-long meal. With the exception of the tea-beat, volumes fade out for each track based on the consumption of the dishes. As noted above, the period of at least one dish, West Lake soup (represented by the piano), speeds up midway through the meal as it was transferred to a smaller plate and move closer to the center of the table, rotating faster. The two vinyl scratches correspond to an extended counter-rotation of the table. At 60 BPM one second correponds to roughly one minute of elapsed meal time. I think the time signature is 5/4, but I'm rusty on my Brubeck so who knows.

It is not what I'd call a chart-topper, but it isn't cacophonous, though at quicker BPM's it does get a bit muddy. I clearly could have done more. Instrumentation could be made to correspond more closely to the food type. (But what does "silver agaric" sound like?) Discord could be used to suggest tastes I did not care for. But the general idea is clear. Maybe on the next trip I can videotape the whole thing for the time-lapse music video this cries out to be.

In China you often encounter a circular jade plate known as a bi. It is ancient in origin and its purpose is not completely understood. The bi is flat and usually has a circular hole at the center. Movable type, gunpowder, paper. The recordable disc?

Posted at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 2, 2006

10,000

Last weekend I passed 10,000 music tracks played since I started logging them via Last.fm (then Audioscrobbler) exactly one year and one month earlier. Let's do the numbers.

The children are contaminating my playlist. Three of the top five tracks (Milhouse Relm, a remix of the Simpsons theme, De Do Do Do, and The Slow Train) are those that I play as requests for my boys -- nightly. All fine songs, of course, but not really indicative of my listening habits. It's like my wife using my Amazon profile. You know, I don't really care what people who bought the Epilator also bought.*

Nearly every other track is an ambient tune. This isn't fair either, really, since I often put on albums to fall asleep to, these albums invariably being downtempo. If only Audioscrobbler logged those tracks I actually heard as opposed to those I have played. EEG interface maybe?

I don't synch my iPod with iTunes so the tracks that I consider to be truly representative of my awake listening habits don't get logged. But then, am I really defined by what I listen to on my commute?

The Top Artists - Overall gives a much better sense of my last year of music. Interesting that Sufjan Stevens cracks the top 20 given that I only started listening to him last month.

What I'd really like to see in 2006 are richer visualizations of the Last.fm data. I'd love to see a schematic of artists over the course of a day. Also, richer data analysis. How often do I switch from artist X to artist Y? How many times did I queue up album Z before 3pm? That sort of thing. Does this exist?

[*] 13 and 16 are also kiddie tunes. What? Of course the Star Wars Imperial March is for the kids!

Posted at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 4, 2006

Anthem cage match

Bryce pits Sun Microsystem's derivative dotcom cheesefest "The Power of Sun" against IBM's causasian-men-slapping-each-other-on-the-back-between-verses 1931* classic "Ever Onward IBM".

First of all, if you have to have the German division of your company modify the words of an American pop song, you know you're in trouble. Perhaps Falco was busy? David Hasselhof in reverse. Second, Ever Onward is but one of dozens of songs from the official songbook. Enter a few more Sun contestants and we'll talk.

I'll admit that the hymnal aspects of the recording of Ever Onward are a little troubling, but even then IBM was ahead of the curve. They were, as today's corporate parlance constantly reminds us, trying to read from the same page.

I can't wait to get home and dump these suckers into Garageband. IBM-Sun mashup comin"!

[*] 1958? No way!

Posted at 4:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Digital music 2.0

Digital music is mainstream, that's for sure. But we're only now seeing the true power of what having one's collection digitized can do -- beyond the obvious portability of it all.

In the vinyl and CD eras, one navigated a music collection by album. There was no other way to do it. You selected the record/disc and then maybe the track and that was that. Digital music libraries with filterable metadata, smart playlists, and all manner of apps for organization make navigating music a lot more flexible, if not significantly easier than the old days.

CoverBuddy gives you an iTunes-like interface that represents albums as cover art thumbnails. CoverFlow takes this concept one step further and presents 3D cover art that you can flip through as though through a booklet of CDs.

Fun for sure, but it is online music services that truly open up possibilities.

Most talked-about these days is Pandora from the Music Genome Project. Basically a streaming radio station set atop a massive database of style data for thousands of songs and artists, Pandora delivers tunes based on the internal characteristics of a single song (or more) that you like. Once you start listening you can further hone your tastes -- er, genetic composition.

Pre-dating Pandora is Last.fm and their Audioscrobbler service. This too delivers customized recommendations and a personal radio station, but it is based on what like-listening users have played rather than a close (human) analysis of styles. (It also powers the playlog of Ascent Stage.)

MusicBrainz offers a different slant. Think of it as a wikipedia for musical meta-tags. CDDB on steroids. MusicBrainz offers downloadable applications to help you properly tag your music in a way that reflects the user-contributed info in their vast database.

But this presents a problem -- at least to me. Certainly artist and album information can be somewhat standardized, but much of tagging is subjective. For example, I find that I almost always start listening by heading into a genre first and then to an artist and then (maybe) to an album. The genre category is my front door. But it is also the most subjective and least standardized. One person's Ambient is another's New Age, Heavy Metal another's Hard Rock; Dance another's Techno. But that's a good thing. There's opportunity for personalization, to make the categories your own. Here are mine.

1980's	If it was released in this decade and has that new wavy feel (i.e., not classic rock) then it goes here. Obviously a problem category since it is the only chronological one.
Alternative	If it was ever played on mainstream radio and is not 1980's or classic rock, it goes here.
Ambient	Mostly electronic. Not New Age.
Audiobook	Including spoken word.
Children's	Obvious, though certain bands like They Might Be Giants have kid albums that might as well be in other genres.
Christmas	Obvious.
Classic Rock	There's certainly a cutoff date for this in my mind, but I have no idea what it is.
Classical	Obvious.
Country	For my wife. Please disregard.
Electronica	Most everything, but increasingly difficult even to know what part of an album constitutes electronic.
Halloween	Obvious. (I love Halloween.)
Jazz	Obvious, though there's much overlap with certain sub-genres of Electronica.
Mashup	My newest genre. For categorizing music whose reason for being is to mess with generic labels.
New Age	Gotta put Ottmar Liebert somewhere.
Oldies	I suppose this is chronologically-bounded too. Classic rock and roll, pre-1970.
Original	My own music.
Pop	Not 1980's, not rock, not alternative. Prince, for instance.
Soundtrack	Both scores and soundtracks, actually.
Surround Sound	There's no confusion on this one. Pure sonic muscle-flexing.
World	Global styles.

There are more here than I would like, but this is the smallest number that adequately divides. My feeling is that keeping the number of these doors few is key. Too-fine generic subdivision makes a top-level category useless. I have a friend who sub-divides using the Grouping tag religiously. (There's even a guy out there who hacked iTunes to let him more easily categorize classical music.) Yet, to me, that way insanity lies. You can always further describe something, but how much is enough? Is genre a function of chronology, musical style, popularity?

I'm disgressing. The point is that there is no answer to these questions and that is a good thing. Genre is personal. I'm the first to admit that my categories make no good sense and overlap horribly. I'm all for data standards, but not in this case.

Which isn't to say that digital music depersonalizes the experience. If anything it has multiplied the possibilities of expressing oneself. Collaborative, themed mixes are all the rage these days. And just recently Jason Freeman released the iTunes Signature Maker, a stunningly cool app that scours your music collection and creates a unique sonic "signature" of your musical taste -- a kind of schizophrenic flashback through what matters most to you. The output is uncanny. Here's mine (2:12 minutes, 3.1 MB, MP3).

Posted at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

December 7, 2005

Composting waveforms

My interest in Four Tet led me to a novel application he uses called AudioMulch. In a nutshell this program allows you to build a visual diagram of how your sound sources will flow, enabling what the developers call "an analog approach to electronic music." The main window allows the composer to stitch together "contraptions" -- basically nodes that either input, output, or modify sound -- to create a kind of sound machine that can be tweaked entirely visually. The interface is fascinating (not unlike the video processor GraphEdit, which I mused on so long ago) and gets you creating interesting sounds immediately. The tool is powerful, too, permitting layering and full sequencing. And the potential for creating visually interesting networks of contraptions (beautiful in their own right) that also create cool music is really appealing. I'll work on that.

Posted at 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

Set it to purée

"Now the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don't's. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a very delicate thing." - Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

What's more fun than making a music mix? Making it via e-mail with friends, of course -- especially friends with extremely different musical perspectives. So we did. The rules of the game were that we would rotate theme selection and then pick songs one after another. You didn't have to defend your selection (though some of them begged defense) but each person got one veto per mix. After looking at these mixes I'm sure you wish you had a few too.

Guilty!
The Top 15 Choons You Will Rock Out To Till The Day You Die.
(but won't admit publicly...until now)

• Unbelievable - EMF (Unbelievable [single], 1990)
• The Stroke - Billy Squier (Don't Say No, 1990)
• Night Fever - Bee Gees (Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Soundtrack, 1977)
  
• Fire It Up - Busta Ryhmes (Turn It Up/Fire It Up [single], 1998)
• The Devil Went Down To Georgia - The Charlie Daniels Band (Million Mile Reflections, 1979)
  
• Parents Just Don't Understand - DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, 1988)
  
• Here I Go Again - Whitesnake (Whitesnake, 1987)
• Love Machine - Girls Aloud (What Will The Neighbours Say?, 2004)
• Man! I Feel Like a Woman - Shania Twain (Come on Over, 1997)
• Rock Your Body - Justin Timberlake [Sander K retouch] (Rock Your Body (single), 2003)
  
• America - Neil Diamond (The Jazz Singer [soundtrack], 1980)
• I Wanna Be Your Lover - Prince (Prince (s/t), 1979)
• Billie Jean - Michael Jackson (Thriller, 1982)
• Jesus Built My Hotrod [Redline/Whiteline version] (Jesus Built My Hotrod [single], 1991)
  
• Jane - Jefferson Starship (Freedom at Point Zero, 1979)

Musical Meds
Songs that can make your mood do a 180°

• Hazy Shade of Winter - Bangles (Less Than Zero [soundtrack], 1987)
• Sixyten - Boards of Canada (Music Has The Right to Children, 1997)
• Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant (Electric Avenue [single], 1981)
• Oblivious - Aztec Camera (High Land, Hard Rain, 1983)
• Sexuality - Billy Bragg (Don't Try This At Home, 1991)
• Gorecki - Lamb (Lamb [s/t], 1996)
• Uncertain Smile - The The (Soul Mining, 1983)
• Love Song - The Ocean Blue (The Ocean Blue [s/t], 1989)
• The Same Deep Water As You - The Cure (Disintegration, 1989)
• In the Garden / You Send Me / Allegheny - Van Morrison (A Night in San Francisco, 1994)
  
• Impact (The Earth is Burning) - Orbital (Orbital 2 [The Brown Album], 1993)
  
• Song 2 - Blur (Blur [s/t], 1997)
• Add It Up - Violent Femmes (Violent Femmes [s/t], 1983)
• Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me - The Smiths (Strangeways, Here We Come, 1990)
  
• It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - R.E.M. (Document, 1987)
  

Agree, disagree? Discuss.

Posted at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

November 28, 2005

Tale of two online music stores

I've been known to buy music from iTunes Music Store. What's that, you say? Why buy from iTMS when the Russian sites offer the same tunes for a fraction of the price? In part, I like the pay-for-what-you-buy mode better than the give-us-a-bunch-of-money-upfront-and-then-we'll-debit-per-track mode. Something is just a tad slimy about that. Even so, there's really only one reason I buy from iTMS and that is JHymn, the program that immediately and easily allows me to rip the crappy digital rights management out of the files. If I bought it I want to be able to play it whenever, wherever, and on as many machines as I damn well please.

But this isn't an iTunes screed. I'd like to make a simple comparison between iTMS and the other music store I use a lot, Bleep.com.

		iTunes Music Store	Bleep.com
unencrypted music		no	yes
web-based		no	yes
playable on all devices		no	yes
full song preview		no	yes
zipped download of multiple files		no	yes
reviewer bias in comparison		yes	yes

I'm not sure these factors matter to the average online music buyer, but I wonder how long iTMS can stay dominant. Sooner or later the casual music buyer will figure out the problems in the iTMS model. In fact, I know a few people who just want to make mixes for their friends -- for instance, as party favors -- and have no idea why they can't do so with their iTMS-restricted files. Something's gotta give.

OK, maybe it was an iTMS screed.

Posted at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 30, 2005

Drop the needle

I couldn't wait for the CD so I purchased the new Biosphere album Dropsonde in vinyl, my first record purchase in four years or so. Coming on the heels of my recent Boards of Canada fake-track debacle (only possible in these digital music-obsessed days) it was a completely enjoyable, material experience. I was instantly in grade school again, fetishizing the platter and poring over the cover art as if I held a Rembrandt in my hands. Of course I immediately digitized it and have embarked on the daunting -- though so pleasingly nostalgic -- task of doing the same for all the 33's and 45's that I do not own digitally. On some of the records I actually remember every scratch and hiss as if they were part of the original recording.

Ways in which vinyl is better than bits:

- Imperfections in the vinyl, especially those caused by the owner (needle dropped too hard, flattening of the grooves from overplay, etc.) make that album more personal, indelibly stamping it as unique and yours-alone. Call it analog watermarking.

- At a glance you can instantly see the relative durations of all the songs on a side. Sorta like the advantage of an analog watch. You only need spatial awareness to see that you have a quarter of a circle's worth of time before your meeting.

- Perfectly hitting the blank grooves between songs with the stylus is damn satisfying.

- Cover art, cover art, cover art. Bigger, badder, bolder.

And the album Dropsonde? It is as good as they say. Geir appears to be infatuated with jazz percussion. The minimalism of Autour de la Lune is gone and occasionally a higher-range line ("melody" would be imprecise) takes over in a way reminiscent of his older work. Highly recommended.

Posted at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

When the original just won't do

So what happens when you find out that an album you downloaded illegally because you were so anxious to have it that you broke a longstanding pledge not to deal with sketchy P2P networks and with every intent of actually buying the album when it was released -- hang on, let me catch my breath -- OK, so what happens when you do buy the album legally and you find out that five of the tracks on the album are fake, or maybe not fake but certainly not from this album if they are in fact by the same artist at all and that you in fact like those tracks better than the legitimate tracks (of the same name!) on the officially released album? What happens then, I ask!? You're in a real pickle, I'll tell you.

You know by now that I really love the new Boards of Canada album. 10 of the 15 tracks I had downloaded are identical, so it is safe to say that 66% of it my initial reaction is unqualified. But the other five tracks -- they are so typically Boards of Canada and fit in so well musically that I am almost incapable of admitting what is obvious. Someone -- maybe BoC themselves -- released a bogus copy of the album on filesharing networks. Yet, two-thirds of the tracks were legit. And the non-legit ones might as well have been from the same band they are so musically identical.

There's raging debate over whether these tracks are from another band or from early BoC -- and in fact there appear to be different bogus albums out there -- but the point is that I fell in love with an album that was musically holistic, but which I now know to be not what the artists' intended. But, truly, the "fake" tracks make a better album.

This is like falling in love with the cover of a song before ever knowing the original and not liking the original when you finally hear it.

Bad John, bad. Filesharing bad!

Posted at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 4, 2005

Brothers in knob-twiddling

Mike and Marcus of Boards of Canada recently gave a great interview to Pitchfork where they revealed that there is an unreleased acoustic version of Music Has The Right To Children and -- after an off-the-record pause to debate the point -- admitted that they are, in fact, brothers. The reason for not publicly admitting it? They wanted to avoid comparisons to Orbital, another fraternal British electronica band -- one that happens to occupy the same stratum of respect that I have for BoC.

So that got me wondering. Is there something about a brotherly relationship that leads to exceptional musical collaboration? Certainly there are many bands composed of family members, but specifically two brothers?

I'm not convinced this isn't coincidence, but perhaps -- perhaps -- this has to do with the bedroom-studio nature of electronic music. That is, like most electronic music neither bands' music requires elaborate studio setups or live recording. It is compact, home-brewed, and easily something that you'd be able to yell "hey, brother, come listen to this!" from the other room. This, as opposed to the rock band evolutionary culture that normally includes rockin' out in a friend's garage or at a party down the block. It's less conducive to experimentation in the home and, maybe, less conducive to collaboration between brothers.

Who knows?

Posted at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

September 29, 2005

Gather 'round the Campfire

Boards of Canada essentially screwed their career with their first album, Music Has The Right To Children, by creating a musical singularity, something that by definition could not be followed by anything that could elicit the listener response that it did. Universally praised, MHTRTC sounded like nothing that preceded it and little that has come since. It was a once-per-decade work that made you simply stare jaw-agape at whatever you were playing it on -- stereo, computer, portable, whatever. It isn't often that music astonishes, but this album did -- and does. We wished them luck with future releases.

Peel Sessions, an EP, some remixes, a new track here and there for a compilation, a reissue of a limited release pre-first album (which was damn good) and then their second album-length effort, Geogaddi. This was a great album, better by far than most band's first. But it was the just-attractive sister of a supermodel. Laudable, but.

So in comes album three, The Campfire Headphase. Still cursed by their first, BoC comes damn close to being reborn virgins on this one. It is a great album. Buy it when it comes out -- in lieu of the P2P tracks you already have (like me). There's more structure, more 4/4, but none of this seems to compromise their style.

BoC have discovered the guitar. This is not as problematic as you would think. Their classic detuned loveliness infects the strings too and is well-integrated. Three clustered tracks are the core of this album. Satellite Anthem Icarus is choice ambient material (not unlike recent Mr. Projectile). Peacock Tail is the standout track, happy and eerie like a stoned clown. And the deep echo on the bass after the rhythm literally falls to pieces is just powerful. Dayvan Cowboy is the soundtrack-worthy selection. It evokes late-Orbital sweepingness and drama that you'd never find in earlier work, but it achieves what it shoots for.

Enough already. This is good stuff. Get it if you can.

Posted at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 16, 2005

Audiophile

Here are the characteristics of my perfect digital music file format. Would someone please invent? Note that most of these are not compression type specific. It stands to reason that much of this functionality could be included in new ID3 specs and/or extensions to the MP3 file type.

- Robust metadata, at least equivalent to current ID3 spec plus ability to embed dynamically updatable rating data (good idea, Greer!), links to websites, and machine-readable score data for classical pieces.

- Artwork support for multiple files (images or rich media) including the ability to reference an external file or the embedded artwork of another audio file. For instance, it would save hundreds of MB of file space if you could have a single file on an album contain the artwork for all the tracks on the album.

- Ability to recall point at which the file was last played (bookmarkable), like an m4b file.

- Ability to designate (or not) totally gapless continuous play for a selection of tracks (normally an album).

- File type that is essentially a pointer or shortcut. An application of this would be to allow you to delete two of the three identical versions of, say, How Soon Is Now? because it exists on Meat is Murder, Hatful of Hollow and the Smiths Greatest Hits. The track could live at one place but be included as an alias in the other. When copying the albums with shortcuts the system would offer you the ability to copy the full track or just the pointer. (Would do the same for the externally-referenced artwork in the idea above.)

- Variable compression including lossless. Same file format, just different compression schemes.

- No DRM of any kind.

Posted at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

LAN party

Sometimes a shared music library pops up from somewhere on your LAN segment and it becomes your mission to hunt down its owner.

An example. This library comes from someone who uses "party" as a verb. A lot.

But which co-worker?

Posted at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 8, 2005

Rock music

Permit another Biosphere post, won't you? This is too good to pass up. The Isle of Skye in Scotland, formerly known to me merely as the home of a single kind of scotch, is the site of major new environmental art installation scored by Geir Jenssen of Biosphere fame. Quite possibly the opposite of sensory deprivation as you hike your way through the multimediated terrain, The Storr: Unfolding Landscape runs through Sept. 17.

Equipped with headlamps, guides and walking sticks, the audience takes a three and half kilometre, at times strenuous, walk which will take up to two hours to complete. They will witness one of Europe's most dramatic and inspiring landscapes at night, whilst nva create an immense landscape work, lowing among the unique geological features. A specially developed new 'Hansel and Gretel' reflective light network will create a path through the beautifully lit rock formations. Contemporary sounds from the Norwegian composer Geir Jenssen, based in Tromso, and the voice of Skye's legendary poet, Sorley MacLean, along with live song will drift down from the mountainside, creating an intense and personal experience for each walker. [More]

Much has been written about the musical echos of the sparse arctic landscape of Jenssen's native Norway. And this isn't his first use of a remote locale for his work. But the otherworldly natural formations, speciality lighting, and intergrated Scottish poetry suggest a truly unique experience.

I gotta get to Scotland.

Posted at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 14, 2005

Anxiety of influence

It takes a very bold person to admit that Rave 'Til Dawn, one of the first compilations of rave electronica in the 1990's, is on his favorites list of the last twenty years. Or maybe just realistic. Kottke is just this person.

This is the worst album on the list but may be the most influential in terms of my future listening habits. For a kid who grew up in the country and went to college in a small Iowa city, hearing rave music for the first time was a complete revelation for me. I had no idea people were making music like this, so fast, so joyous, so unlike anything that anyone I knew would enjoy listening to. I loved it immediately and have been a huge fan of electronica ever since.

I remember a few years ago when I was digitizing all my music, selecting certain CD's that I wouldn't bother with. I dumped nearly all the post-RTD rave compilations (not sure there ever was a rave album by a single artist) either because it was simply too cheesy or of no redeeming music value whatsoever. But I couldn't quite let go of Rave 'Til Dawn -- and it certainly fit both those criteria. Maybe I just accorded it some respect for where it led me.

Perhaps the best thing about this album is that I smile whenever I think of the looks that my too-cool fellow DJ's at the college radio station would throw my way when I pulled it out of my bag. What, no navel-gazing?! How dare ye?!

Posted at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 6, 2005

Surrogate band

Having watched the four songs performed by the reunited Pink Floyd at this weekend's Live8 concert I'm now wishing I hadn't. Oh, it was nice to see all four blokes on stage at once, sure, but there was no sense of real camaraderie or even musical cohesion. The reunion was supposed to demonstrate something along the lines of "if a rock 'n' roll band can work things out, can't we end poverty?"

Waters seemed more like a devoted fan who has been pulled up on stage to sing a few numbers with the band. He was clearly way more into it, melodramatic even, than the other fellas. And, insult to injury, Gilmour has been singing the Waters lines live for so long that they sound a little odd coming from the original. (I know, I know, Waters performs Pink Floyd live too.)

Maybe Pink should have stayed back at the hotel.

Posted at 7:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 4, 2005

An Evening With Kraftwerk

The venerable German quartet Kraftwerk returned to Chicago tonight, the first time in seven years. No single group has influenced my listening tastes more than Kraftwerk and so seeing them live is always a treat.

I was struck by a few things tonight. Though Kraftwerk is praised for its groundbreaking style and influence on hip hop, industrial, and electronica, their style is often denounced (and parodied) as stiff, unfeeling, and immutable. It is true that the energy from the stage doesn't come from band members doing Townsend windmills. But in fact if you consider Kraftwerk's output not so much songs as themes (leitmotif seems the most apt word here, ja?) which are reworked and tweaked over the course of decades you see that they are in fact quite dynamic as artists. Consider that there are only a handful of themes in their ouevre -- transportation, fame, energy, human-machine integration, computing -- and that each has evolved either by incorporation into new songs (Tour de France into Aero Dynamik), by digitization and reworking (The Mix),or by considerable updating (Tour de France into Tour de France 2003). A good example is the way Radioactivity has evolved from a paean to Marie Curie to a polemic against nuclear energy.

The live show is extremely nostalgic. As pathbreaking as Kraftwerk is their live visuals contain long sections of period-specific artwork, vintage video, and command-line-aesthetic computer graphics. In fact, the band has never actually been about the future, though their subjects are often futuristic. Though they are all digital now, the aesthetic of Kraftwerk is still firmly rooted in sensibilities of the past. This is atypical in their musical genre. But then, they pretty much invented the genre, so they're entitled.

I am embarrassed to admit that after 25 years of listening to Kraftwerk and attending three live shows I only tonight noted the irony that the Most Sampled Band in History actually invented the sample well before digital recording made it possible. Rather than pre-record sounds of everyday life Kratwerk usually imitates them. The clank of a train hitch, the crank of a bike wheel, the Dopplery overlap of horns on a highway -- all these things are imitated using sounds and parameters from the synthesizers, rather than samplers. Call it mimetic synthesis, low-fi sampling. Call it royalty-free.

Posted at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

Is there anything cover art can't do?

Continuing the recent themes of cover art and interesting uses of web services and open API's (in the marginalia sidebar), here's AmazType, a creative little app that creates a word-mosaic of your search term from the covers of books and music at Amazon that are related to the term. So, "Shakespeare" would return that word created from the covers of all the books containing his works.

I consider this a perfect use of technology.

Posted at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

ScrobbleViz

Audioscrobbler continues to amaze me. Profiling your listening tastes and creating a personal stream from that profile is cool, sure, but you soon crave a visualization of the network of relationships that your taste is at the center of. Enter the TouchGraph app for Audioscrobbler. It is pretty basic, plotting relationship maps of artists based on the same algorithm that computes your musical "neighbors." But you could easily see a more generic app that could take your Audioscrobbler XML feed and continually morph the map (like the Eternal Egypt screensaver, blogged yesterday, does). Clicking on any node might take you directly to a stream of that artist (or the iTunes store). Or maybe there's an integration point with the attractive (and more info-dense) LivePlasma.

My current thought-exercise, though, is what to do with the links between the music nodes. How could you sonify them? What does the musical connection between, say, Johnny Cash and Cake sound like?

See also: In the gutter

Posted at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 6, 2005

In the gutter

I've been messing around on the right side of the blog alot lately. Here's what's new.

I've felt the need for some way to post blurbs that either have no relevant link or don't warrant the focus of the main flow. Thus, the micropost. Right now it is updated manually, but I am looking to automate. Gotta be an MT sideblog plugin or something, right?

The marginalia section is a del.icio.us-powered link farm. I'm not quite done tagging the links themselves, but when I am that'll start all kinds of fun. Like this.

Recently played tunes comes courtesy of the excellent Audioscrobbler service. If you have not checked this out yet, do. Basically, you install plugins for your audio programs (iTunes, etc.) and everything you listen to is logged at Audioscrobbler. Over time the site develops a very nuanced profile of your musical tastes. But the real value is in the social functions. You develop musical "neighbors" and can track musical "friends". Best of all your profile powers a customized radio stream called last.fm. Personalization and social computing done so right.

Two sidenotes on this section. First, like the marginalia, the recently played list is just an RSS feed formatted and served by RSS Digest, which I recommend. But the shortest refresh period is 30 minutes for RSS Digest and this really is not quick enough for the playlog feed. So I am exploring the MTRSSfeed plugin to take one step out of the process. Anyone had any luck with this?

Second, while Audioscrobbler has plugins for iTunes and syncs up with the recently played tracks on your iPod there was no "plugin" for the Audiotron networked audio device, the component that supplies music to the rest of my house. Not tracking the Audiotron would have meant radically skewing my listening profile since the genres I listen to throughout the house differ substantially from what I listen to in front of my computer. But, as happens so often on the web, as soon as you need something, it appears. Kelly Felkins posted a Perl script called Atronscrobbler for doing precisely what I needed. Not only that, but he was kind enough to make code revisions on-the-fly to get it to work for me. The script runs on a computer and just polls the Audiotron and pushes updates to Audioscrobbler. Now, with the exception of the kids' music that is skewing my profile, I am completely covered. Anyone else have the Audiotron-Audioscrobbler combo going? If so, there's a group devoted to it now.

The recommended music section is mostly the same, except that links to the iTunes Music Store now contain my affiliate code. If you don't want Apple to make a micropayment to me for the referral then you can skip this. But why would you deprive me of these penny fractions? Note that, where possible, album info links to discogs.com. Also, I will link to un-DRM'ed files, if they exist, rather than to iTMS.

The outbound links section is redone and powered by Blogrolling. I'm not sure it is working entirely properly yet.

Lastly, the GeoURL badge links to this blog's neighbors in meatspace.

There are other minor updates, but that's the bulk of 'em. Thanks for reading.

See also: Marginalia

Posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

February 5, 2005

In music news ...

The genre-puréeing duo Lemon Jelly has released its third album, a "retrospective" called '64-'95. (The dates refer to the years from which the album's samples were gathered.) I've only listened through a few times, but this is good stuff, different enough from the seminal Lost Horizons, similar enough to remind you why these guys don't sound like anything you've ever heard. I bought the tracks online, but apparently there is a well-designed DVD version available too. Fantastic work.

Speaking of trailblazing duos, Autechre will release a new album called Untitled (don't they already have an untitled album?) in April. They'll tour globally too. Yum!

I gave my iPod shuffle a try today. Works just like you'd expect: tiny to the point that you forget it is there, no skipping, etc. I didn't miss having a screen at all. Well, that's not completely true. I found some new music and wanted to know what the heck I was listening to. Like others I had laughed at Apple's chutzpah in promoting random play like it was some revolutionary feature. But now I wonder if it is as simple as that. Shuffle does become more important the more music you own since the chances of listening to a track you haven't heard in a long time (or ever) is inversely proportional to the amount of music you have loaded onto your iPod. In other words, the more music you load the more likely you are to listen to the latest tracks or known favorites. Is it possible that Apple is playing up the shuffle and auto-fill features both as a marketing angle and to remind us how much fun re-discovering music is, further solidifying our love affair with their devices? Eh, probably not.

Maybe?

Posted at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 20, 2005

Cityscape as graphic equalizer

This video is making the rounds and for good reason. Vernie Yeung directs the amazing visuals to Faultline's "Biting Tongues." At first I was reminded of those students at Brown who wired up the lights on the university library to play a building-scale version of Tetris, but I think what's going on here is a projection of images onto a skyline. (The last frame is the clue.) Whatever Yeung did, it's gorgeous.

(Thanks, Len!)

Posted at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 9, 2005

Vapourspace

Certain genres of music seem to age less well than others. For better or worse, they seem more firmly tied to the time of their creation: they feel dated. To some degree electronic music suffers this way. Could be that the heavy reliance on technology -- whose pace of change is rapid and discernible even to non-aficionados -- is to blame. Could be that electronic music exhibits a higher percentage of amateurism because the barriers to entry are perhaps lower than other genres (got a turntable? a computer? just a tape recorder? you're good to go). Or maybe it is because the bewildering matrix of sub-genres -- trance, sythnpop, nu jazz, gabba, drill and bass, illbient, house, IDM, they grow like fractal screensavers -- disallows a unified sound that can transcend the moment.

But I generalize. The best of any genre bubbles to the top, remains fresh, and rewards the listener who lets it age. In 1994 under the name Vapourspace, Mark Gage released the symphonic hour-long Themes from Vapourspace and its 35-minute little brother variation Gravitational Arch of 10. This LP and EP were by far the most important to me of the 1990's, forking the road in my musical appreciation into a few different branches. Vapourspace showed that one could remain magnetically neutral and musically inventive sliding between the poles of four-on-the-floor club techno and bleep bloop experimental electronica.

Recently Gage posted an excerpt of Gravitational Arch of 10 from a 1994 soundcheck in Switzerland on his website. I was struck by how fresh it sounds, even now. Gage was ahead of his time in 1994, but not 11 years ahead of his time. He just got it right, moved beyond labels, and made a thing of beauty. The original albums are out of print, I believe, so look hard for 'em. This vintage is just maturing.

Posted at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 29, 2004

Two degrees of separation

Each year I give away a CD's worth of music to my friends at the end of the year. Not so much a compilation of the year's best, it is merely a collection of the music I enjoyed this year regardless of when it was released. Since I give it away at a party the tracks are largely uptempo. This year I tried my hand at mixing the whole shebang into one continuous track using Traktor, a simple program of shocking complexity. I wasn't completely successful, but the experience did add one more bullet item to my growing list of resolutions for 2005: learn to match beats so as not to create music that sounds like an EKG pinging cardiac arrhythmia. (Full list of resolutions coming soon.)

My pal Len Perez also released a mix for his friends this year -- four CD's to my one -- so I thought it interesting to note the overlaps. Granted our tastes are similar, but this very small scale collaborative filtering is still notable given that we receive our musical inputs from different sources.

So, the overlap: Orbital, Sasha, Mr. Projectile. Orbital released their last album this year; Sasha his first (studio album, that is). Mr. Projectile is the one to watch -- perhaps the most promising artist of his genre this year.

Posted at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2004

Satisfying inconvenience

A while back Bailey's liqueur was running an ad called "Zero Gravity Bar" wherein neo-retro hipsters float about slurping up weightless Bailey's globules. I loved it -- not so much for the space theme but because of the music. Part Herb Alpert, part Fatboy Slim, it perfectly evoked a future with a loungy past. So, I had to find the tune of course. Googled "Bailey's Zero Gravity Bar". Got a few hits at some odd forums that are devoted solely to discussing commercials. Had I stumbled upon these forums in any other circumstance I would certainly have made fun of the people who post to them, but in this case they had what I needed. Or so I thought. The few that mentioned this commercial were fairly certain the track was called "Les Fleurs" by 4Hero. (This was confirmed by Bailey's website, which I should have gone to in the first place.)

OK great. Checked Apple Music Store. Nothing. Checked the sketchy Russian download sites. Hit! Downloaded for a cool $0.10. Wrong song. Damnit. Turns out there this song applies to the non-US version of the commercial. More Googling. For a few weeks -- weeks! not a normal unit of time in Internet search terms -- there were no new leads on the song. Then, after finding more chatboards devoted to commercials (the ad-obsessed are a diverse community, I reckon), it was noted that the song was called "Swing It Back" by Avenue A. There was a link to a production company which listed the album as "Never the Less" and had a sound clip. I verified that the clip was the correct song. OK great. So, you'd think that armed with all this info getting the song would be a no-brainer. Back to Apple Music Store. Nope. Sketchy Russian stores. Nyet, nyet. Walmart and company. Hell no. Peer-to-peer. Nothing. Let me tell you: never was a sequence of words less conducive to a Google search -- 'avenue', 'a', swing', 'it', 'back', 'never', 'the', 'less'. I turned up next to nothing. It was the first time in a long while that I was stymied in online searching. This, of course, was making me want the song all the more. I was becoming willing to pay far more than a dime for this track.

Eventually I tried searching not on the keywords that I had (since they returned junk) but on other words that might be associated with them 'jazz', 'beat', 'trumpet', etc. Actually I always threw 'avenue' in there as it was the most unique of the original terms. I came across a wholesale distributor who seemed to carry the album -- in Chicago no less. And, for a few hours per week a commoner like myself could walk in and buy something. This is the opposite of online music shopping. It was not cheap, not convenient, and not on-demand. I had to wait for a three-hour window on a Saturday to drive myself to the shop. Of course, the actual space probably was what an online operation looks like: stacks and stacks and stacks of music, organized for inventory purposes not for consumers browsing the aisles. I had my album. Having only heard a short commercial and an online clip, I was now the proud owner of twenty-two dollar's worth of album. But that's the thing. I was happy to pay. Maybe I was just glad to relive the experience of hunting for an album like I did when I was younger. (I have fond memories of flipping through cut-out bins in record shops looking for some obscure album.) Maybe I simply recognized that scarcity in a world of online ubiquity drives price way up.

Best of all, the whole album is amazing. "Swing It Back" isn't even the best track. I highly recommend the album -- if you can find it. Or, rather, especially if you can.

UPDATE: I've received lots of requests to share this track and/or album. I'm sorry to say that I can't. I've e-mailed the band to see if there is a reissue in the works. Will post any info that I uncover here.

Posted at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)