Developer Andre Michelle played with the Yamaha Tenori-On (see video above) at a conference in Frankfurt, and then went home and wrote a gorgeous Flash version called ToneMatrix. It’s beautiful, and addictive, and now I really want it on my iPhone. Check it out yourself here.
Posts Tagged ‘music’
128 or 320 kbps – can you hear the difference?
March 11, 2009
Okay, we are going to do a quasi-scientific study here with the z=z community, to see if people can hear the difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps audio streams. Go to mp3 or not, listen to the two sound samples, decide—or guess—which one is at the higher bitrate, and then post your results in the comments, along with any ancillary information (like whether you used speakers or headphones). I couldn’t tell the two samples apart, at least not on my laptop speakers, but I had a 50-50 shot at getting it right, and I did. Let’s see if we can get enough numbers to exclude (or confirm) randomness.
UPDATE (Friday, 10:23 am PDT): We are up to 6 people who got it right and 5 people who got it wrong. I’d love to get some more datapoints. Please share this link and ask people to comment or to send me an e-mail or a tweet.
UPDATE (Friday, 10:49 am PDT): A poll! This is much easier. If you’ve already responded in the comments, please do not vote in the poll.
[via Music Machinery]
♬.ws: music search engine for Twitter
March 10, 2009
There’s a new music-related-service for Twitter, 
♬.ws. The basic premise is that you can enter the name of a band, and you’ll get a page with info on the band, a listing of relevant tweets, and links to iTunes, Amazon MP3s, and Musebin (a website of one-line music reviews and, not incidentally, the creators of ♬.ws). But the big advantage to the memorable-but-annoying domain name is a very short URL for your query, which can be embedded directly into a tweet (in lieu of a hashtag, for example).
I beta-tested it with two z=z faves, The Motion Sick and Logan 5 and the Runners. The Motion Sick worked pretty well, with only one nausea-related false positive. I was less successful with L5R; their album name, Featurette, hit lots of non-music-related tweets.
It’s an interesting concept, but I think it still needs some work. It’d be great if it also gave website and Myspace pages for the artists. And I hope they redesign the results page – I’d happily trade the 18-pt type and ugly Roman font for more tweets on a page and something more legible.
Economic effect of downloading a net win
January 23, 2009
A new report, commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands, to look at the effects of downloading was just released (here; it’s in Dutch, of course). Some of the findings were not entirely unexpected – for example, 35% of the Dutch population has downloaded content (music, movies, games) without paying for it, but they pay for content as much as those that haven’t ‘freeloaded.’
But the most interesting point was the following (it’s quoted from Ars Technica, who posted about the report):
The study concludes that the effects are strongly positive because consumers get to enjoy desirable content and also get to keep their cash to buy other things. Because the consumers save much more money than the producers lose, the net economic effects are positive. The report also reinforces the truth that unpaid downloads do not translate into lost sales in anything close to a one-to-one ratio.
It’s refreshing to see downloading considered in the context of society as a whole, rather than just in terms of money lost by corporations.
If anyone reads Dutch, I’d be interested in the rest of the report. Feel free to e-mail me or to share in the comments.
[via Ars Technica]
Canadian music for Obama
January 16, 2009
Like pretty much the rest of the world, Canadians are excited about the new US president, and apparently they get to convey this excitement by collectively making a mixtape. CBC Radio 2 is soliciting votes for a 49-song playlist, to showcase Canadian music for President-Elect Barack Obama. You can go here and vote for your favourite Canadian song in one of four categories: rock, classical, French-language, and jazz. While they’re calling it ‘Obama’s Mixtape,’ it’s really more in honour of the inauguration. But who knows – Obama has confirmed that his first foreign trip, as is traditional for US presidents, will be to Canada (his predecessor broke with tradition and went to Mexico instead – big surprise there), so maybe they’ll present him with a shiny new red-and-brushed-aluminum iPod preloaded with CanCon. Or something.
As would be expected, Wonkette has a snarky take on it: “This thoughtful gift shall represent the very essence of Canada, distilled into 49 beautiful songs about being polite, speaking passable French, and having depressoid sex under a pile of blankets 10 months of every year.”
If you want to get in on it, hurry – voting closes at 8 pm EST on Friday, January 16th. I don’t think you actually have to be Canadian to vote (I did fine with my IP address 100 miles south of the border), but it probably helps to have some familiarity with the songs. Vote.
(thanks, Tim!)
Want to write a book about an album?
November 16, 2008
The 33 1/3 book series is pretty awesome, and they are currently soliciting proposals for new books. If you’re not familiar with them, the conceit is that each book is about a single album, but the exact format is somewhat variable. For example, John Darnielle‘s tribute to Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality is a short novel, written from the point of view of an adolescent boy being held in a psychiatric facility. Colin Meloy‘s book about Let It Be by The Replacements is a coming-of-age memoir. And now it could be your turn. Have a beloved album that you can tell an interesting story around? Go here for full details of how to write and submit your proposal. But get going – the deadline is the end of the year. Here’s a list of the books to date.
MP3: The Decemberists – Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect (buy)
[via Three Imaginary Girls]
Local news: “Seattle, City of Music”
October 30, 2008
Mayor Greg Nickels thinks that Seattle is not getting the recognition it deserves as a music city, and last night he unveiled the Seattle Music Commission. Modeled after similar organizations in Austin and Chicago, it has a twelve-year mandate to work to improve Seattle as a city for musicians, for live music, and for music businesses. Nickels has had a somewhat rocky relationship with Seattle music venues, having spearheaded some fairly draconian city bylaws, including asking for the authority to shutter clubs that didn’t comply (the City Council balked, and ultimately Nickels decided to veto the scaled-back versions). However, he’s recently proposed rolling back the admission tax at venues and providing city assistance to help new venues start up. Last night also marked the release of a new economic impact study; highlights include the 20 000 or so music-related jobs in Seattle, the 1.2 billion dollars of revenue, and the fact that about 40% of this revenue comes from sales outside King County, bringing cash into the area. Nice to see the Mayor’s Office step up to the plate to help Seattle get even better as a music town.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer article. Mayor’s Office press release.
Image: Music sign at Seattle Center by Flickr user jcolman, reposted here under its Creative Commons license.
Concert notes: Miracle Fortress
March 25, 2008
[Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge, MA; March 22, 2008]
Montreal-based Miracle Fortress played a sold-out show at the Middle East Upstairs, opening for fellow Canadian scenesters The Most Serene Republic. Based on their single ‘Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart,’ I expected them to be quite a bit more ethereal than they were, especially given their fairly dreamy start – frontman Graham Van Pelt began with a solo piece. Instead, driven by Jordan Robson-Cramer’s propulsive drumming, they turned out to rock quite a bit. Their set was mostly drawn from their first full-length release, Five Roses (which, if you grew up in Canada, doesn’t evoke music so much as it does baking), as well as some new material.
Listen local: The Main Drag
March 8, 2008
Boston-area’s The Main Drag played last night with Freezepop and The Information and they were phenomenal (actually, all the bands were terrific). They first impinged on my consciousness in late 2006, when they won the Salon Song Search with “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter.” (Boston was well represented, with another local band, Hallelujah the Hills, taking third place). The Main Drag’s second album, Yours As Fast As Mine, came out last year – I can only presume that they spent their $5000 in contest money wisely. ‘Jagged’ and ‘gorgeous’ are both excellent descriptors of their string-laden songs.
Read: This is Your Brain on Music
February 21, 2008
This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel J. Levitin
When I was in graduate school, I mentioned within earshot of a professor that I probably know more about alternative and independent music from 1980 onwards than I know about anything else. The professor insisted that I must know more about my doctoral thesis, but I couldn’t agree – when I think about the thousands of songs I can recognize within a few bars or can sing or hum along to, to say nothing of the masses of ancillary information like band names, albums, song titles and who dated whom, the sheer number of terabytes in my head dedicated to music is staggering. But the really astonishing part is that I’m not unusual. Everyone is great at remembering music. This is the book that explains why.
Written by a platinum-selling music producer who went to graduate school to study cognitive neuropsychology, This is Your Brain on Music addresses the cognitive underpinnings of the remarkable human facility with music. Daniel J. Levitin starts with a brief, lucid introduction to the fundamentals of music theory, and then goes on to discuss how we discern rhythm and harmony, how the brain processes music, and how we remember songs, ending with a discussion of the evolution of ‘the music instinct.’ Levitin shows how these processes are complex and highly distributed, involving regions of the brain ranging from the most primitive (the cerebellum) to the prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher reasoning. Throughout the book, Levitin is clear but doesn’t oversimplify, and he alerts you to the many, many open questions that remain in the field. This is a great book for anyone who’s given any thought to how we think about music.
website [includes hundreds of musical samples that are referenced in the book]
Listen local: Hallelujah the Hills
January 11, 2008
Boston-based sextet Hallelujah the Hills had an unusual trajectory, reaching national prominence early, as a finalist in Salon’s Song Search contest for best unreleased song in December 2006 with their eponymous fight song. Their debut album, Collective Psychosis Begone, marries complex instrumentation with tuneful power-pop – like Animal Collective, but much more fun to sing along to. Check out their songs or go see them at the Middle East Downstairs on February 16, 2008.
MP3: Hallelujah the Hills – Wave Backwards to Massachusetts (live)
zed equals zee 