Classical Convert

The Future is Now!

Oh. My. Gosh. The future the bright! Bright! You might conclude exactly the opposite initially though, so bear with me.

The following video demonstrates Microsoft’s latest Apple-esque foray into software meant to liberate ones artistic insides. Basically it lets someone with no musical talent (like me) except for a passable singing voice (unlike me) magically have piano accompaniments generated based on whatever notes they sing:

You may notice two things after watching this. One, these people do not really have passable singing voices. Two, the accompaniment is slightly worse than the singing is. However, it’s the idea which is the cool thing, and the real coolness is in the future of this and its potential broader consequences.

While this automatic accompaniment might not really work right now, it’s bound to be about 173 times more effective in about five years, especially if they throw in a dash of Auto-Tune so the singers don’t sound like ass. There will also be a full set of accompanying instrumental lines instead of just piano, which will be generated from friends tapping out rhythms using five-buttoned guitars and fake drums. Naturally each crappy plastic instrument will be almost perfectly self-correcting, so that zero to minimal skill is required. Everyone will be able to automagically sound like their favorite pop-tart of the moment.

So why is this good? Sounds pretty horrible so far, right? Well, the goodness happens when everyone realizes how easy it is to make this stuff, that literally everyone is churning it out, and it all sounds the bloody same. At which point the heavens will open and flocks of unicorns and rainbows will sprout up everywhere, and everyone will realize that there is much more exciting, well-constructed, meaningful music to be heard then the standard top 40 detritus. Hallelujah!

Or perhaps we’ll just end up surrounded by the bad stuff to an even greater degree, due to it being played loudly, constantly and uniquely irritatingly by every kid in the neighborhood. Right in your ear.

Tags: automatic accompaniment, Microsoft, music, mysong, singing, software

Playing With Your Food

This is definitely the cutest video of a family concert involving a musical instrument carved from a vegetable I have ever seen, and that’s saying something:

Today’s sterling vegetable fascination started this morning with the gemuse-orchestra:

While it’s entertaining and all, I consider banging squashes as cheating. It also seems quite pretentious for the not so high level of musical quality. It did make me want to find out how to carve a carrot into an instrument. That would be a great dinner trick. You know, at all those myriad dinners in which you have massive whole carrots and tiny little sharp knives to eat them with. Surprisingly there are around 20 hits on youtube for “carrot flute”, although ocarina or recorder seems more realistic. This is when I discovered the very not pretentious guy in the first video, who I shall make my chief court vegetable musician if the opportunity arises. He’s frickin’ sweet:

Part of his awesomeness is due to his impressive selection of instruments (mushroom, broccoli (win), radish (even more win)) and a slightly bigger part is due to his top notch enthusiasm, particularly evidenced by his facial expressions. The complete selection of his videos are here. Nothing is quite as cute as that first one, though.

Tags: carving, instrument, vegetabel orchestra, vegetable

Music Understanders Report In!

Yes, music understanders. I don’t care if mister high and mighty spellchecker thinks it necessary to shove a wiggly red line under it, it’s a word. Lexographical iniquities aside, here’s the meat of today’s problem: I’m dumb when it comes to music theory. I have no classical training, and barely any professional teaching to speak of. I do have a basic grasp of a bunch of stuff, but that sets a pretty low bar hanging to bang into. I’ll evidence this complaining and not-quite self-loathing with an example. Take these two sections in Mahler 6, juxtaposed here sequentially (filled with long words tonight we are) one from the exposition, and one from later on:

This is one of my favorite bits in the first movement, the unexpected change in that descending sequence is ridiculously satisfying. So what’s going on here? My not terribly educated guess is the second version modulates to some related major key (such as C-major) instead of dropping all in A-minor. At least, I assume it’s in A-minor since that’s the tonic of the symphony and it’s the first theme.

Sometimes I really wish I had had a bunch of music lessons.

Tags: classical music, keys, mahler, theory

Wine Labels Aren’t This Bad…

As a follow up to yesterday’s rant about Monster cable, here is my favorite tagline from their description of the grandiosely named Interlink® LightSpeed™ 100 High Performance Digital Fiber Optic Cable:

High velocity of propagation for less time smear.

No crap. It’s light. Its “velocity of propagation” is pretty darn high. Yes, they are selling this cable based on the fact that light travels quite fast. Sigh.

Anyway, I shan’t let that bother me. I just finished a very annoying cell biology prelim (even as a big old and supposedly wise graduate student I am Shanghaied into taking classes to satisfy the grant gods at NIH) and am now relaxing with a couple of beers and super-tuesday MkII results on the telly. All this election stuff is pretty exciting, a lot more so than the ye olde English stylee stuff from back home. The Americans really get into it all way in advance, instead of being all blasé and polite and basically boring. Maybe it’s just because I’m more aware of the process at this ripe old age.

Currently it looks like nothing much on the interesting (i.e. Democratic) side of things is happening, all two of them are still statistically tied. The big take-home message for me is that thank god my constituency doesn’t have lots of people in it. I cast my vote in about three seconds, whereas those poor kids in Texas are standing on tables and indulging in “organized chaos”.

Hooray for the boonies!

Tags: election, monster cables

The Evil That Is Monster Cable

One of the memes-of-the-day is this post at audioholics in which audiophiles could not distinguish between Monster cable and a coat-hanger used as a speaker hook-up:

We gathered up a 5 of our audio buddies. We took my “old” Martin Logan SL-3 (not a bad speaker for accurate noise making) and hooked them up with Monster 1000 speaker cables (decent cables according to the audio press) [around $80 for two]. We also rigged up 14 gauge, oxygen free Belden stranded copper wire with a simple PVC jacket. Both were 2 meters long. They were connected to an ABX switch box allowing blind fold testing. Volume levels were set at 75 Db at 1000K Hz [sic. Should probably be 1000Hz]. A high quality recording of smooth, trio, easy listening jazz was played (Piano, drums, bass). None of us had heard this group or CD before, therefore eliminating biases.

The music was played. Of the 5 blind folded, only 2 guessed correctly which was the monster cable. (I was not one of them). This was done 7 times in a row! Keeping us blind folded, my brother switched out the Belden wire (are you ready for this) with simple coat hanger wire! Unknown to me and our 12 audiophile buddies, prior to the ABX blind test, he took apart four coat hangers, reconnected them and twisted them into a pair of speaker cables. Connections were soldered. He stashed them in a closet within the testing room so we were not privy to what he was up to. This made for a pair of 2 meter cables, the exact length of the other wires. The test was conducted. After 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire. Further, when music was played through the coat hanger wire, we were asked if what we heard sounded good to us. All agreed that what was heard sounded excellent, however, when A-B tests occured, it was impossible to determine which sounded best the majority of the time and which wire was in use. Needless to say, after the blind folds came off and we saw what my brother did, we learned he was right…most of what manufactures have to say about their products is pure hype. It seems the more they charge, the more hyped it is

I’m quite aware this isn’t a scientific experiment (this would be great to do double-blind with full documentation) and that soldering coat-hangers together is almost certainly going to result in a tonne of reflections and nasty crap happening at the junctions. Whether that messiness of signal results in distortion at the speakers is a matter for the electrical engineers and blind testers.

However, I am also quite confident that Monster cable is a huge ripoff. A prime example of this ripofftitude is their wonderful selection of toslink — fiber optic — cable. The 600dfo stuff will cost you $80 for one 2m piece. Compare this to the stuff on monoprice: $3.74. It’s frickin’ optical fiber. The light is bloody on or off. That extra $76 is not going to improve your audio transmission quality one iota.

I will say this in defense of the Monster cable: the connectors are pretty. Not $80 pretty though.

Tags: coat hanger, monster cable, music, speakers, wires