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

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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