Classical Convert

Wireless Access

Most of today was spent trying — and failing — to persuade DNA to be stickier than it wishes. The rest of the day was spent on a personally more interesting, but equally frustrating project. I’m converting my old desktop into a media-serving, AVI playing, MP3 streaming beast. This makes inordinately huge amounts of sense because (a) I listen to all my music via MP3s, (2) I only really use my laptop, which has crappy sound, and (iii) I have a big old, shiny old, fairly new old widescreen monitor just BEGGING to display Hulu.

This project results in gallons of wire being chucked around the room, hard disks being ripped out, stuck back in, pulled out again, cursed at. It also results in the largest dilemma currently known to Ben-kind: what do I do about my radio? Do I get rid of it and wire everything through the computer instead?

No. I don’t want to get rid of my radio. I love my radio, despite its single 3.5mm input. Even if I had the most amazing freakin’ internettified electronic orgy of a media server imaginable, I would still want it. All the digital satellite stations in (or hovering above) the world can’t replace the warm-blanket reassurance of the local station identification monologues. It feels like someone is keeping an eye on the empty corridors of the county while I am falling asleep.

I think what the cool rich kids do is buy a huge fancy schmancy receiver type dealie, with fifty thousand audio inputs on the back. However, since I’m a destitute graduate student I’ll stick with my cute little 1-input JVC jobbie, and try to resolve the wiring issues with careful thought (and also maybe duct tape and solder).

Hmmm. I guess that wasn’t really much of a dilemma after all.

Tags: classical music, media server, xbmc

Scandalous

I think — (hope) — the scanner we have in lab is one of these bad boys:

The instructions, for the lucky scanjet owners:

1. Turn off scanner
2. Set SCSI ID to 0 (using dial on back of scanner)
3. Hold down green button
4. Turn scanner on

via eeggs

Tags: beethoven, hp scanjet, ode to joy, scanner

Over the Understory

Remember that YouTube Orchestra announcement? I remember reading the title and getting all giddy over the idea of a hugely interactive, distributed orchestral experiment. And then it turned out to pretty much be a glorified video audition. Ever since I’ve had a little collaborative-music shaped hole.

Well I just discovered this, which is so much more awesome, despite the no frills webpage and MS Paint style frontend. It doesn’t quite fill the hole, but it’s helping to wad up the edges.

The concept is that users submit loops all at 180bpm (or a sensible fraction of that number, 180 is chosen so it’s nicely divisible). When you go to the “listen” page, the site chooses several of these loops with similar harmonic keys and mixes them together. As you listen to the loops being played, they are randomly swapped with others, and the likelihood of being swapped is based on the current rating of the loop.

It’s obviously in a really early stage, but it’s well promising.

Tags: canopy 180, collaborative music

Ruben’s Tube

Ahhh… this brings me back to the heady days of Introductory Mechanics at Bristol:

Tags: ruben's tube

Let’s Remix Everything

Microsoft has — accidentally — unleashed the next musical era upon us:

(Here is the original, if you need a refresher)

The harbinger and bringer of this revolution is Microsoft SongSmith, which automatically generates a cheesy, MIDI style accompaniment to any vocal track you care to chuck at it. Naturally this has led to people generating deliciously awry cover versions of famous tracks, like that kids-TV-show version of the Beastie Boy’s Intergalactic, above.

Some other favorites are the Cheers style rendition of Eye of the Tiger:

And this Eurodancey version of Hotel California:

For all its silliness, I seriously think this is the near future of pop music.

DRM free downloads are standard now, and before long lossless audio will be commonplace too. I think the next big step is for bands (and orchestras) to start offering individual instrumental channels. Of course, you could still download the band-preferred mix of the instruments (i.e., something like the regular tracks you download now), but in addition you could download individual tracks for voice, drums, guitar, etc. and mix them yourself. The ex-consumers get to partake in the creativity.

And this is why software like SongSmith is so important. People will need tools to interact with these musical components at a level way above notes and chords. We need to seriously abstract our musical manipulation. I think the fact that people have gotten so excited about playing around with even this relatively simple tool demonstrates that there is a huge and hungry market.

Unfortunately, right now the raw materials — that is, a clean vocal track — are hard to get unless you happen to have an a-capella version of a piece, or know a dodgy friend of a friend who has access to original studio tapes.

Geek moment: this totally reminds me of the evolution of programming languages. Back in the beginning everything was programmed using machine code and assembly language, sets of indecipherable instructions like:

MOV ah,0x0

INT 16h

This is exactly like learning to read music in order to manipulate it: a long, hard and unintuitive learning curve. Something you have to devote a good chunk of your life to. Compare this to the graphical wires and functions I now drag around on a screen in lab every day, producing in five minutes programs which would take years to write in assembly or C.

I want ultra-high-level, powerful and clever tools to manipulate music.

But while we’re waiting, will someone with access to a voice-only version of the Ode To Joy, please — pretty please! — run it through SongSmith?

Tags: beastie boys, classical music, eye of the tiger, hotel california, intergalactic, music, ode to joy, songsmith, the eagles