Posts Tagged ‘music machinery’

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Music, tech and culture roundup

September 28, 2009

oblique strategies

Auto-Tune, by way of Brian Eno: Montreal’s Islands (opening for the Psychedelic Furs and the Happy Mondays at House of Blues on October 10) are taking flak for the track “Heartbeat,” off their brand-new album, Vapours, for the heavily-Auto-Tuned vocals. In this interview over at Street Carnage, Nicholas Thorburn defends their decision to  use it, inspired by their use of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies in the studio.

What does your music look like? Paul Lamere is spending a lot of time thinking about visualizations of music these days. Want to help? He’s collecting visualizations of musical taste. Grab a marker, sketch out what you think your music looks like, and upload it Flickr, tagged with ‘MyMusicTaste.’

Indie music stars on the big screen. Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney and James Mercer of the Shins star in upcoming release Some Days are Better Than Others. You can watch the trailer here. No word on whether they’ll be contributing to the soundtrack (via Line Out).

MP3: Islands – Jogging Gorgeous Summer (no Auto-Tune, I promise) [buy]

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A quick round-up

August 8, 2009

Joel Tenenbaum

Still no internet at home, so instead of mainlining information, I’m getting methadone through my phone and the occasional infusion at Diesel. Back on a regular schedule shortly, but here’s some of what I’ve been squeezing through the needle:

In case you’ve missed it, Boston physics student Joel Tenenbaum (pictured above) is blogging his trial, defending himself against a $4.5 million lawsuit from the RIAA (parts one and two, at the Guardian Music Blog). Also, who gets the money the RIAA collects from filesharers? Not the indies.

Music Machinery had made me really excited about Spotify even before they had an iPhone app, so I’m latching onto rumours that they may be coming to the US.

On the agenda: checking out MTraks, which is billing itself as a indie-oriented eMusic alternative after the Sony debacle (and boy, the word on the transition was not good).

There’s a new website out of England called GigPay, for electronic performance contracts – the performer and the venue draw up a contract, the venue puts funds in escrow, and the performer is paid after the gig, and GigPay takes a small per-transaction cut. I’ve heard a bunch of horror stories from bands, and it seems like it would be a useful way for a venue to create, track and pay performance contracts (since you can do it by bank transfer or credit card, not just cash or cheque). But it also seems like there would be a big network effect hump to get over. Artists, others – what do you think?


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Music and tech news roundup

May 22, 2009

serato-recordplayer

An assortment of music and technology news from around the Internet:

Indie music label sponsors BitTorrent site. Florida’s Awesome New Republic, and their music label Honor Roll, decided to try a new strategy to reach potential listeners. They are sponsoring torrent site isoHunt via a banner ad linked to a torrent download of their debut album, Rational Geographic Vol 1. The idea, of course, is to get the word out about their music. [more at TorrentFreak]

Makers of DJ software to release vinyl. Serato Audio Research, makers of the widely-used DJ software Scratch Live, are releasing tracks on vinyl. In the Scratch system, all the music is in MP3s on a laptop, but the interface to control it is still in the form of two turntables. However, instead of the records storing the music itself, the two records are pressed with ‘control tones,’ which can translate the physical movement of the record by the DJ into a signal used to control the music in software (you can see the regular grooves in the photo above). Serato decided that, since they were pressing vinyl records anyway, they could do something cool with the other side, which has led to Serato Pressings. The first three releases include tracks by Diplo and Blaqstarr, and more records are in the pipeline

Social tagging and music. Paul Lamere wrote a terrific conference paper that includes everything you wanted to know about tags and music: the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can download the paper as a PDF here.

This week’s reading assignment. Canada’s Globe and Mail has been running a terrific series called The Download Decade, including a bunch of feature-length articles: Thank You, Napster; How The iPod Changed Everything; If Piracy is Wrong, Why Does it Feel So Right?; New Media, Old Rules; and the latest, Making Way for the Mobile Decade.

MP3: Awesome New Republic – Rotary Clone

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Music and tech news roundup

March 31, 2009

djhero

First off, the zed equals zee happy hour was a rousing success, with lots of terrific conversation. It was fantastic to meet so many Boston musicians and bloggers face to face, including some of the people behind Boston Band Crush, The Limits of Science, Electric Laser People, and Paul Lamere of Music Machinery and his colleagues at The Echo Nest. It’s a measure of how friendly the crowd was that there was waaaaaaay too much money on the table at the end of the night; if you came out last night, join us for the next zed equals zee happy hour in a few months and the first round is on us.

More news:

Activision and Red Octane have announced that DJ Shadow is signed up to help develop and test the hardware for DJ Hero, set for release later this year. The turntablist may also appear as a playable character. There are not-terribly-substantiated rumours (which I’ll happily spread) that Daft Punk may also be involved in the new game. [via Resident Advisor]

On a related note, MTV reports that Rock Band has sold over 40 million songs, for nearly a billion dollars in revenue.

According to a recent report, live music has now overtaken recorded music in revenue in the UK (£904 million vs £896 million). Although that includes neither sponsorship revenues nor digital licensing, which makes me wonder a bit about the author’s job title of Chief Economist. No word on whether the numbers include Rock Band downloads. [NME] [EDIT: removal of unwarranted snark; see comments for details]

Mission of Burma is blogging the recording of their new album! [via @clickyclicky]

DIY donk. Remix any track into the Northern England sound of bouncy techno. Music Machinery’s donkified version of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” made me laugh out loud, although I still had to turn it off after about 15 seconds.

DIY…keybass? bass keytar? Whatever, it’s pretty awesome.

MP3: Amanda Palmer – Such Great Heights* [more Amanda Palmer]

*the anti-donk version

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zed equals zee happy hour!

March 27, 2009

miracleofscience

Live in the Boston area and interested in indie music and how the music industry is evolving as a result of technology? Come to the zed equals zee Happy Hour this Monday, March 30th, from 6 to 8 pm, at the Miracle of Science in Cambridge. Join me and a slew of Boston-based musicians and bloggers, including some of the people behind Boston Band Crush and our special guest, Paul Lamere of Music Machinery, as we discuss the future of music over snacks and beverages. We’ll even be taking over the Miracle’s soundsystem with a playlist of z=z faves for the duration. Please join us!

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Click track or unassisted drummer?

March 9, 2009

weezer-tempo

A really neat exercise from the fantastic music-tech blog, Music Machinery. Using a set of software tools that allow you to manipulate audio, Paul Lamere analysed a number of songs to try to determine if the drummer  used a click track or not. The basic idea was to average the tempo over the course of the tune, and then look at each beat to see if it deviated from where it was ‘supposed’ to fall. He then plotted the deviation, in seconds, as a function of elapsed time in the song. You can see an example above, for Weezer‘s song “Troublemaker.” The hills and valleys suggest that their drummer wasn’t using a click track; it contrasts sharply with the graphs for Britney Spears’s “One More Time” and Nickelback’s “Never Again,” which were pretty much flat.

If you’re interested in the details, check out the original post here, where there are plots for many more songs. And make sure you take a look at the comments – there are a lot of interesting suggestions and thoughts there. In particular, someone ran the code on a Rush song, since Neil Peart has a reputation for being almost inhumanly precise; as you’d expect, the peaks and valleys were much shallower than most of the other drummers, but not quite as flat as the bands that used (or were presumed to use) click tracks.

MP3: Weezer – Troublemaker [buy]

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