Ice Cube’s ‘Good Day’ pinpointed →
Great detective work.
Simply asking Mr. Cube would have taken all of the fun out of it.
Great detective work.
Simply asking Mr. Cube would have taken all of the fun out of it.
Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora:
Hundreds of musical attributes are used to describe songs. Twenty-six alone describe vocal performance: how breathy or gravelly it is, how much falsetto is used, and more. That’s too much nuance for software on its own. So we hired humans–specifically, professional musicians with four-year degrees in music. Every day, they come into the office, put on headphones, and listen to every song that will ultimately play on Pandora, listing as many as 450 different attributes a pop. When combined with users’ past listening habits, those detailed fingerprints enable our algorithms to discern, for example, that when you say you like the Beatles, you’re talking about their earlier sound and not their later one.
Somehow I missed that job posting. Too bad.
So stupid, it’s staggering.
Tom Ewing has an interesting idea:
My own cheeky suggestion is that the decline of the recorded music market and the rise in interest in good food, craft beer, etc among young consumers aren’t wholly coincidental.
Paul Schütze: So duration is a function?
Elaine Radigue: It’s included in the fact of creating these kinds of sounds, which I was fascinated by early on; I loved these sounds. I want to catch or to deal with them so I have to be very careful and respectful with them. In between two tape-recorders, if you touch the microphone or the potentiometer [a level control dial or fader] even slightly there is change. If you do it too quickly or powerfully everything collapses. I have always been very fond of the second movement in classical music, which is quite slow, quite suspended. This is what I’m looking for.
I, too, am a sucker for second movements. They’re normally my favorite of the entire piece. I guess Elaine and I are romantics at heart.
This one is by Philip Glass.
No, I don’t know why.
Marco Arment:
The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.
Stay vigilant. Demand campaign finance reform.
If you haven’t read about it elsewhere, the Bang on a Can All-Stars have released a free download of their CD, Big, Beautiful, Dark, and Scary, via their website. The CD commemorates the ensemble’s 25th anniversary.
WFMU has, as part of its tribute to the late Earle Hagen, forty-two versions of Hagen’s iconic saxophone-powered ballade.1
I like Herbie Fields’s version, but that vibrato is tough for me to take seriously. Don’t miss Illinois Jacquet or Boots Randolph either.
They spell it saxaphone, which I’m sure is a mistake and not an element of their style guide. ↩
The BBC website ran this headline:
Beethoven music shaped by gradual deafness, say experts.
The crux of their “study” is that Beethoven used less high notes in his middle period. The posit that Beethoven’s failing hearing strongly and uniformly influenced his middle-period compositions. After his hearing completely deteriorated, they say, he returned to using the higher frequencies.
And then, at the very end of the article, they write:
However, the researchers have admitted the findings are not conclusive as they used a limited number of Beethoven’s compositions.
A fuller picture would require a “complete and exhaustive statistical and spectral analyses of the composer’s complete catalogue”.
Basically, they “cherry-picked” pieces that fit their headline, wrote some anecdotes that may or may not be exaggerated to fill in the hypothesis, and hit [POST]. Crack journalism, right there.
Beethoven is probably the most studied composer of all time. I am not exaggerating when I say that I am shocked that a “complete and exhaustive statistical and spectral analyses of the composer’s complete catalogue” does not already exist.
[L]egend has it that [Kim Jong Il] wrote 1,500 books, all of which are stored in the state’s official library. It is also said that he wrote 6 operas, all of which are better than any in the history of music.
He also was said to have scored 11 holes-in-one in his first round of golf, so…
I’m not at all sad that he is gone. And, for once, it doesn’t make me feel icky that our government was involved in a tyrant’s death. This is good riddance of a horrible person.
Andy Baio for WIRED:
Unless you’re a huge fan of Norwegian death metal, it’s hard to see this as anything but a win for Rdio.
I must agree. Rdio is my streaming service of choice.
Dan Visconti writes:
What is the Trojan horse that draws us into the intuitive world of art, and makes for an understanding greater than rational apprehension alone can provide for? It’s the raw, sensual nature of the experience itself, which remains stubbornly indivisible, unique, and present.
So eloquent. Go read the whole thing. This is what I believe in.
From Boom’s Dungeon:
These days it seems that every young composer who writes non-tonal, athematic, dissonant music is routinely described as an avant-garde composer, even though the music does not push (let alone cross) any formal or aesthetic boundaries that are less than half a century old.
It might seem like semantics; but, Boom (Mr. Boom?) is right. That word means something, and it’s not an aesthetic.
This is from today’s amazing Chamber Music Today post:
In an age when noise and unpleasant/irrational/blurred stimuli bombard us every day, the Tallis Scholars’ sound in this sort of brightly reverberant performance space restores our belief in clarity — restores our belief in the fidelity of human communication across large distances in space and time. It is as though high signal-to-noise ratio becomes an aesthetic and cultural emblem of Civilization itself.
In ≈2000 beautifully written words the CMT guy both reviews a spectacular performance by The Tallis Scholars and explains why being a lossless-snot is not just a philosophical idea, but a physiological preference.
Then, THEN, he breaks down the misconception about the actual range of human hearing and shows, with charts, how much better 192 kS/s sound is than the current standard 44.1 kS/s.
As if that’s not enough for one post, there’s extensive links to sources and further reading. Slam dunk.
I can’t say how much I loved reading this post enough. Sure, it’s right in my wheelhouse; but, it’s also an example of what I wish more reviews were. We all know that [NameOfMusicGroup] is likely to put on a great performance — performance-reviews that call-out poor efforts are rare these days. What the CMT guy did was really listen to a performance, then spun it around in his head and came up with some very interesting comparisons to recorded music and some ideas about how we can make everything better. This post was so much better than 99% of what ends up in my RSS feed-catcher. I wish there were more like it.