From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):
I was reminded of a blind woman, a contemporary of Mozart and a most remarkable pianist, who, it is said, could no longer play after she regained some sight.
Lost her ability to play piano after she regained sight Read More »
In Clay Shirky’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007), he takes on the persona of someone talking about what new changes are coming with the Gutenberg movable type press. At one point, he says, “Such a change would also create enormous economic hardship for anyone whose living was tied to earlier scarcities.”
It’s not just writing and writers and publishers that now face that change. Scarcities drove the music and movie businesses, and those scarcities are disappearing. When music is no longer tightly controlled in terms of creation, availability, manufacture, and distribution, when it’s possible to download or listen to anything at any time, those businesses face rapid, discombobulating change.
Is it the government’s – or society’s – duty, however, to put those scarcities back into place, either through technologies or law?
Scarcities and the music, movie, and publishing businesses Read More »
A coffee shop where the employees all wear platform shoes, glitter make-up, orange spiked hair, feathers, and silver spaceman pants.
It’s name:
ZIGGY STARBUCKS!
My friend Michael Krider made the following suggestions:
Drink names:
When employees hand your money back after a sale, they say, “Here’s your ch-ch-ch-change.”
My new business idea Read More »
Audacity is universally recognized as the number one software program for creating podcasts. Hundreds of thousands of amateurs and professionals alike have created podcasts using Audacity.
Podcasting with Audacity: Creating a Podcast With Free Audio Software is designed to get you podcasting as quickly as possible. The first few chapters show you how to install Audacity, plug in your microphone, record your first podcast, and get it online as quickly as possible. The following chapters cover podcasting-specific topics, such as adding background music or conducting interviews. Finally, the remaining chapters focus on how Audacity works, with lots of tips and tricks to make complicated editing even easier.
Read an excerpt: "Edit Your Podcast" is available on the Web or download a 950 KB PDF. An unedited version of the book is available under as a wiki under a Creative Commons license at the Audacity website.
My new book – Podcasting with Audacity – is out! Read More »
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
Levy writes that when this happens, the music becomes a “soundtrack” for the scenery, which is a good way to put it. The iPod turns ordinary life — riding the bus, waiting in line at the post office, staring at a spreadsheet for 12 hours a day — into cinema. Levy describes the work of sociologist Michael Bull, who, when studying the habits of fans of the iPod’s great ancestor the Sony Walkman, found that people liked to think of themselves “as imaginary movie stars” playing out scenes dictated by the music in their ears. One subject who listened to music from spaghetti westerns said that the Walkman turned him into a “verbal bounty hunter” bent on firing “short cool blasts of verbal abuse” at his co-workers. The science fiction writer William Gibson once described the Walkman as having done “more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t remember any technological experience that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music and move it through landscape and architecture.” The iPod, with its greater capacity, alters perception even more profoundly; when the right song comes on, the world actually feels different.
Portable music turns life into cinema Read More »
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
… though iPods can store thousands of songs, the average iPod user’s library numbers just about 500 well-worn tracks.
Average iPod has just 500 songs on it Read More »
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
The attacks on FairPlay have been enlightening because of what they illustrate about the current state of DRM. They show, for instance, that modern DRM schemes are difficult to bypass, ignore, or strip out with a few lines of code. In contrast to older “patches” of computer software (what you would generally bypass a program’s authorization routine), the encryption on modern media files is pervasive. All of the software mentioned has still required Apple’s decoding technology to unscramble the song files; there is no simple hack that can simply strip the files clean without help, and the ciphers are complex enough to make brute-force cracks difficult.
Apple’s response has also been a reminder that cracking an encryption scheme once will no longer be enough in the networked era. Each time that its DRM has been bypassed, Apple has been able to push out updates to its customers that render the hacks useless (or at least make them more difficult to achieve).
Where we are technically with DRM Read More »
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
A third approach [to subverting Apple’s DRM] came from PyMusique, software originally written so that Linux users could access the iTunes Music Store. The software took advantage of the fact that iTMS transmits DRM-free songs to its customers and relies on iTunes to add that gooey layer of DRM goodness at the client end. PyMusique emulates iTunes and serves as a front end to the store, allowing users to browse and purchase music. When songs are downloaded, however, the program “neglects” to apply the FairPlay DRM.
Apple iTunes Music Store applies DRM after download Read More »
From Alex Bellos’s “Coke. Guns. Booty. Beats.” (Blender: June 2005):
In the slums of Rio De Janeiro, drug lords armed with submachine guns have joined forces with djs armed with massive sound systems and rude, raunchy singles. Welcome to the most excitingâ€â€and dangerousâ€â€underground club scene in the world. …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the glamorous city of Carnival, the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana beach. But the poorest fifth of its residents – about a million people, many of them black – live in the favelas, the claustrophobic brick shantytowns that cover the hills and sprawl chaotically out for miles into its outskirts. In the favelas, the city police have effectively relinquished control to armed drugs factions, who run their territory according to their own strict codes. Estimates put the number of young men involved in drug trafficking at between 20,000 and 100,000. It’s just like the movie City of God – only much more violent.
Favelas, the slums of Rio De Janeiro Read More »
From Sam Dillon’s “Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center” (The New York Times: 11 June 2006):
Wynton Marsalis
Musician
[Delivering commencement to] The Juilliard SchoolRealize that integrity is real, and so is starvation. Never let pay and the talk of pay occupy more time and space than the talk of your art. If you find that it is, go into banking or start a hedge fund or something.
Also, about pay, understand where you are. When I was 19, I was on a tour with Herbie Hancock and I started complaining to him before we walked onstage about what I was being paid. I said, “When am I being paid?”
He said: “Come here, man. Look out into the audience.” He said, “Now, do you see those people?”
I said, “Yes sir.”
He said: “They paid for these tickets. If you don’t walk out of here, how many of them are going to leave? Now, if I don’t walk out, how many will leave? That’s why you’re being paid what you’re being paid.”
Wynton Marsalis on recognizing your place Read More »
From Clay Shirky’s “File-sharing Goes Social“:
The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA’s waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded efficiency for resistance to legal attack. …
There are several activities that are both illegal and popular, and these suffer from what economists call high transaction costs. Buying marijuana involves considerably more work than buying roses, in part because every transaction involves risk for both parties, and in part because neither party can rely on the courts for redress from unfair transactions. As a result, the market for marijuana today (or NYC tattoo artists in the 1980s, or gin in the 1920s, etc) involves trusted intermediaries who broker introductions.
These intermediaries act as a kind of social Visa system; in the same way a credit card issuer has a relationship with both buyer and seller, and an incentive to see that transactions go well, an introducer in an illegal transaction has an incentive to make sure that neither side defects from the transaction. And all parties, of course, have an incentive to avoid detection. …
There are many ways to move to such membrane-bounded systems, of course, including retrofitting existing networks to allow sub-groups with controlled membership (possibly using email white-list or IM buddy-list tools); adopting any of the current peer-to-peer tools designed for secure collaboration (e.g. Groove, Shinkuro, WASTE etc); or even going to physical distribution. As Andrew Odlyzko has pointed out, sending disks through the mail can move enough bits in a 24 hour period to qualify as broadband, and there are now file-sharing networks whose members simply snail mail one another mountable drives of music. …
The disadvantage of social sharing is simple — limited membership means fewer files. The advantage is equally simple — a socially bounded system is more effective than nothing, and safer than Kazaa. …
From P2P to social sharing Read More »
From Christer Hamp’s “Archaeoacoustics“:
By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made, but I find the subject fascinating enough to dare the deep waters of the unproven and often scorned.
So far no ancient sound has been heard, and the experiments conducted have been attempts to reproduce the conditions at which such recordings would have been produced, successful attempts, according to the papers published.
What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter’s wheel from a pot, using a hand-held crystal cartridge (Astatic Corp. Model 2) with a wooden stylus, connected directly to a set of headphones. The second experiment yielded 60 Hz hum from the motor driving the potter’s wheel. More interesting were the following experiments, with a canvas being painted while exposed to sounds. In the third experiment the canvas was painted with a variety of different paints while exposed to martial music from loudspeakers. Some of the brush strokes had a striated appearance, and “short snatches of the music” could be indentified. For the fourth experiment, the painter spoke the word “blue” during a stroke of the brush, and after a long search the word could be heard again when stroking the canvas with the stylus.
Recover sounds from the ancient world Read More »
From The Sydney Morning Herald‘s’ “Clubbers to get into the silent groove“:
For those seeking tranquillity at Glastonbury Festival, a dance tent packed with clubbers is not an obvious sanctuary. But this will be the silent disco – 3000 festivalgoers are to be issued with headphones this year so they can turn up the volume without waking the neighbours.
The quietest party in town is a response to the problem of noise pollution at the festival, which has traditionally led the district council to issue a licence on the condition that the festival’s main stages and tents shut down on the stroke of midnight.
This year, the council is to grant a late licence for the new dance area on the condition that thumping beats and pounding basslines are put to bed at 12. But, thanks to Glastonbury technicians, clubbers won’t have to. For one night only, they will be given wireless headphones, so they don’t trip up when dancing to whatever record the DJ plays.
“I like the idea of people dancing in total silence,” said Emily Eavis, one of the festival organisers and daughter of the founder Michael Eavis. “Imagine if you were feeling a bit worse for wear and thought, ‘This would be a nice quiet place to sit down’.
AdvertisementAdvertisement“You would be completely freaked out to see 3000 people dancing in silence. It’s certainly quirky, but our big push this year is keeping the noise down because that’s what the council is keen on.”
3000 ravers, dancing in silence Read More »
Don’t know what the Long Tail is? Check out the seminal Wired article, or read the blog.
From The New York Times‘ “The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels“:
CD and digital album sales so far this year are down 8 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. And while sales of digital tracks through services like iTunes have risen 150 percent, to well over 320 million songs this year, that rise is not enough to offset the plunge in album sales. Overall sales are down less than 5 percent if the digital singles are bundled into units of 10 and counted as albums, according to estimates by Billboard magazine.
Still, despite the slide, dozens of independent labels are faring well with steady-selling releases by, among others, the Miami rapper Pitbull and the indie bands Hawthorne Heights, Bright Eyes, Interpol and the Arcade Fire. Independent labels account for more than 18 percent of album sales this year – their biggest share of the market in at least five years, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. (If several big independent companies whose music is marketed by the major music labels distribution units are included, the figure exceeds 27 percent.) …
In a world of broadband connections, 60-gigabyte MP3 players and custom playlists, consumers have perhaps more power than ever to indulge their curiosities beyond the music that is presented through the industry’s established outlets, primarily radio stations and MTV.
“Fans are dictating,” said John Janick, co-founder of Fueled by Ramen, the independent label in Tampa, Fla., whose roster includes underground acts like Panic! At the Disco and Cute Is What We Aim For. “It’s not as easy to shove something down people’s throats anymore and make them buy it. It’s not even that they are smarter; they just have everything at their fingertips. They can go find something that’s cool and different. They go tell people about it and it just starts spreading.”
There are several signs that as more consumers develop the habit of exploring music online they are drawn to other musical choices besides hitmakers at the top of the Billboard chart – a trend that suggests more of the independent labels’ repertory will find an audience.
On the Rhapsody subscription music service, for example, the 100 most popular artists account for only about 24 percent of the music that consumers chose to play from its catalog last month, said Tim Quirk, Rhapsody’s executive editor. In the brick-and-mortar world, he estimates, the 100 most popular acts might account for more than 48 percent of a mass retailer’s sales.
“It’s no longer about a big behemoth beaming something at a mass audience,” Mr. Quirk said. “It’s about a mass of niche audiences picking and selecting what they want at any given time.”
More validation of the Long Tail Read More »
I start playing Norah Jones.
Denise: I really like this music.
Scott: You say that every time I play it.
Denise: And you say that every time back to me.
Scott: Well, somebody’s stuck in a loop, and I don’t think it’s me.
From Nat Friedman:
For twelve months in 1998 and 1999, I went through this phase of trying to “diversify my interests,” and signed up to take piano lessons. My teacher’s name was Peter, this rigid Eastern European math major who instructed piano to idiots like me on the side. In our first lesson, I was showing off that I knew a few notes of Fur Elise, when he abruptly interrupted, shouting: “What? Beethoven? Do not try to express what you cannot understand!”
The strictest of teachers Read More »
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Jazzbo", about George Gershwin, in The New Yorker (10 January 2005):
[Gershwin] had been saved by the piano. On a fateful day in 1910, a secondhand upright was hoisted through the family’s Second Avenue window and, to general shock, scapegrace street fighting George, age twelve, sat down and tore through a popular tune like a vaudeville virtuoso. He had never studied a note. Many years later, Gershwin recalled the musical epiphanies of his early childhood: sitting transfixed outside a penny arcade as an automatic piano emitted noises that turned out to be Robinstein’s "Melody in F"; feeling a "flashing revelation of beauty" when the strains of Dvorak’s "Humoresque" reached him from the school auditorium while he was, in fact, outside playing hooky.
Gershwin the prodigy Read More »
Gad, but this is so British in elocution that it’s almost satirical. Yahoo reports that “Queen plugging into iPod“:
“The Queen loves music and was impressed by how small and handy the iPod is,” a royal insider told the tabloid on Friday.
“Obviously it is quite complicated to download songs, but I’m sure one of the courtiers will do it for her.
“Prince Andrew will probably also help out because he’s a real dab hand with gadgets.”
The Queen buys an iPod Read More »
So Jans & I are talking at the Broadway Oyster Bar last night, and all of a sudden Jans says, “Have you ever noticed how many diseases and other medical terms would make great band names? Like The Multiple Lacerations. Or The Compound Fractures.”
“You’re right!” I replied. “How about The Bleeding Ulcers? And The GI Tracts!”
Got any other ideas?
Great band names, part 24 Read More »