Continuing the little debate I have been having with David on our podcast (you do listen to our podcast, don’t you?), and with various Eighth Blackbird apologists on twitter I submit the words of the indelible G. Bruce Boyer:
It is both delusional and stupid to think that clothes don’t really matter and we should all wear whatever we want. Most people don’t take clothing seriously enough, but whether we should or not, clothes do talk to us and we make decisions based on people’s appearances.1
On the other hand, there are people, particularly in the fashion industry, who take clothing too seriously. We aren’t doing biomedical research or working on some nuclear collider. Clothing is not everything in life and it won’t solve problems of famine and overpopulation. It’s a fine balance you have to strike and that’s what I try to do.2
The researchers then modified the recordings of fingernails and chalk, removing or attenuating various frequency ranges. They also modified the sounds by selectively extracting either the tonal, musical-pitch parts or the scraping, growling, noiselike parts of the sound. Some listeners were told the true source of the sounds, whereas others were told that the sounds were part of contemporary musical compositions. The same listeners then rated the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the sounds while the researchers measured physical indicators of distress: the listeners’ heart rate, blood pressure, and the electrical conductivity of their skin.
This research could be very useful for composers who want to control the audience’s comfort level throughout their compositions. I think it is especially useful information for film composers.
The free song of the week on iTunes is Here and Heaven from the new album The Goat Rodeo Sessions. The group of performers consists of Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile.
I’d call the style of music bluegrass you’re not embarrassed to own. There’s some nicely tuned vocals and an instrumental section that reminds me of the opening credits for Deadwood. Anything that reminds me of Deadwood is already off on the right foot by me.
Why in these terrible times do we need a TV singing competition? Why do we need football? Why do we need to watch a bunch of guys in pajamas try to hit a ball with a stick? Reality singing is the most noble gladiatorial competition of our culture, with people fighting to the death not with rubber balls, but with song. Why does that upset you so much? We need competitive singing now more than ever.
Every day we hit “random” on Wikipedia. We then have ninty minutes to write and record a song about whatever article pops up.
Imagine if Björk, Thom Yorke, Steve Reich, and an I Ching had a baby.1 And then that baby grew up listening to the radio. Then, oops! Pamplemousse! So, that baby marries(?) a similar, and appropriately compatible baby who knew a little GarageBand. Then they made a BandCamp site, but, you know, ironically.
That’s this.
Thing is, Charlie Williams and Emma Hooper are not clowns. They’re quite good when they spend more than ninety minutes thinking about music. It’s too bad that this is what they’re getting internet-famous for.
I like this part of the Chicago Tribune’s article:
Consumers fill their sleekly designed, increasingly compact music players with thousands of songs that are continually recycled. The tracks are listened to over marginally adequate ear buds on an inferior format (MP3 files contain less sonic information than a CD or vinyl album), often to complement other activities.
Don’t get me wrong. I do love my iDevices. A lot.
But there’s no doubt that the iPod-ification of the music-consuming population has led to less real listening.
My advice: wallpaper your life with podcasts. Listen to music.
My general stance on things from the 1980s is this: Everything is better now than it was then. I believe in iteration and, save a few masterpieces from every era, there’s nothing that couldn’t stand being updated. And Footloose, the famous Kevin Bacon kick-starter, is one of those things that could stand some re-polishing.
If we could go back at the ’80s with a Brillo pad and scrub away every gated/reverbed snare drum from those recordings, I would lend my arms for the task. Gated snare drums were the rounded-corners of 1999 — they caught on in a big way before anyone asked “Why?”. You had to have gated snares in the ’80s. You probably had to pay more for not-gated snares because the engineer would need to re-route the signal chain. Although the sound defines a generation of pop music, we look back at time and wonder what we were thinking.
I was excited to hear that the Footloose soundtrack was being updated for the 2011 re-make. I assumed that the new version would be sans-gated snares. I was hoping that the movie studio would grok the shadow of the original film into which they stepped and hire great singers to really make those songs sizzle. Those songs are hard.
Well they didn’t, and the singing is simply horrible. My favorite track from the ’80s version is Almost Paradise, which was sung by the lead singer for Loverboy, falls completely flat containing wrong notes, inappropriate breaths, and horrific tuning. It’s sung by a guy who opened for Taylor Swift, and a girl from Nickelodeon, which likely says something about the market target for the film. (Hint: I’m not in the target demo.) It’s enough for me to safely resolve not to go see the film.
In the ’80s we had good intentions. Phil Collins thought that synthesizers and gated snares sounded good, so he put them all over his records. Then he went ahead and sang a great vocal too. I guess what we do in the 2010s is barely try, or care, and everyone gets the same haircut. So, at least for now, everyone please step away from the Whitney Houston, Queen, and Prince tracks and let this whole Glee thing, where everyone is fifteen and sings like a high-schooler, blow over.
Sure, you can spend obsessive hours thinking about how Boulez created the elaborate pitch structures in his 1955 masterpiece, Le Marteau Sans Maître. But you’re better off instead simply relishing the sultry atmosphere the music creates, the web of connections and allusions that Boulez conjures between René Char’s text and his writing for the seven-piece ensemble, including the exotic textures of guitar and xylorimba.
Some of the best things in life are free, and starting today, Rdio is one of them. New Rdio users in the US can take advantage of many of our popular features for free, including streaming full songs without hearing a single ad — a meter at the top of your profile will show you how much free music you have each month.1
I can see the meter move after only playing a single track. So I think the meter is for about an hour, maybe two of playtime. Even so, the web app is nice, the audio quality is reasonable, the desktop and iPhone apps are very nice. And there’s no ads. Feel free to add me.
Mike Teager gets it right on teaching music appreciation:
[I]f you don’t put in the work to help someone understand the intricacies of a five-minute pop song, how do you expect him/her to willingly thrust him/herself into a 45-minute symphony? Or three-hour opera?
