Click here to view the embedded video.

A flock of birds had been busy on the path, and as they scattered, and the slope evened out, the music provided a perfect accompaniment. That made me start to think about how in modern times we have the luxury of personal soundtracks. I bet that most music is now listened to on MP3 players, while people are walking, or running, or sitting on the train. It’s pretty obvious that if this is true, it must only have become true within the last thirty years or so. That’s amazing. If you wanted to walk or run somewhere with a soundtrack before around 1980 (when the Walkman was invented), you basically needed a marching band to be running alongside you.

That’s mind-blowing — and something I usually take completely for granted, as I’m sure does everyone else who was born on this side of 1980.

Featuring all of your favorite vague adjectives:

… the sound was so opulently gorgeous it almost defied belief! It was a total incarnation of the perfectionist’s wildest dreams: rich, velvety, airy, awesome, liquid, yet incredibly detailed. There were none of the analog disc’s problems. No marginal mistracking, no subtle VTA-error distortions, no disc-resonance smearing, no feedback-induced low-end boom or mud, no ticks or pops or pressing grumbles even at the highest listening levels. And there was no analog-tape flutter or modulation noise or transient-rounding or print-through or hiss.

I’d love a history of these reviews for each new audio technology as it came out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(For those who don’t spend hours of their leisure time shifting around ones and zeros, this chick is supposed to be singing along to the music. The game processes the notes being sung and gives you points on how well you match the melody. However, the software doesn’t care about timbre or anything fancy, it’s just looking for pitch, so really you can use anything that can produce a tone. Like a flute.)

I tried this once by whistling. It turns out I’m not so hot at holding whistled pitches either.

They started up straight away. Just push play. It was just one mechanical action between you and the music, nothing to boot up and double-click on. It was much less of a physical divide when there is only a split second action required between you thinking “I want to hear this music”, and that music actually starting. With MP3s it’s a much more elaborate protocol of clicks, responses, re-clicks and confirmations. Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.

Of course, you now inevitably have a much larger library of music at your mousetips, but you have to go through the booting up ritual even just to see that selection of songs. If, after browsing by mouse through the acres of uncovered albums you decide that in fact nothing suits your mood right now and you’ll listen to chattering rain on the windows instead, it’s too late. You’ve already committed yourself to booting up the computer. There’s this extra task “starting up the computer” which has incised itself into the middle of the music, it’s now a three part process.

But it’s not like that’s a majorly taxing physical task. In terms of purely calorific value, pressing your Dell’s power-on button is worth about negative one-quarter of one M&M. But that’s not the point. It’s the time taken, the wait for the music library to appear on the screen, the worry that the battery might run out before the peasant’s in Beethoven’s 6th get back to their partying. Every little disconnect adds up.

What I want is a hefty leatherbound catalog of my music. Every beefsteak-thick page has the album art, liner notes and track list on it. If I touch the page with my palm my computer instantly starts to play the selected piece. Of course, the major problem would be how the hell to add extra pages to the thing. It’s totally cheating if this all done on a single electronic screen like an iPod. I want physical, tactile interactions. I want to flip pages. I want to be able to measure the size of the library by the heft of the book in my hands — and until we can electronically create mass, which is never — that’s not gonna happen.

I strongly feel that people want music to retain some physicalness, but in an age of MP3s I’m not sure how we do that.

For now, I’ll click folders, and be thankful for the gigabytes of music. I don’t miss CDs enough to retreat back to them.

Instrumental edition. To keep the eye you aren’t pretending to do work with entertained we have for your internetting pleasure….

• The BeoTime alarm clock — homing in like a laser-sighted jaguar on that group of  people whose love for woodwinds is only slightly surpassed by the huge piles of money lying around their castle. Yours for a tad under four-hundred smackaroos.
• A woodier woodwind – Like the arboreal George Mallory, this guy had an inextinguishable urge to get all homnidy with what nature had provided. Unlike Mallory this meant wiring up a tree in his backyard and then bowing the crap out of it.
• Playing the black keys – If, like the NYPD, you are finding it hard to relinquish the mechanical ball of joy which is your typewriter AND your wax-cylinder gramophone is currently in the shop for repairs then this musical typewriter might be just what the old-timey doctor ordered. Then again, if you enjoy your music to actually be composed and, you know, pleasurable perhaps it’s better to pass.

Have a good weekend! I have not one, not three, but TWO work barbeques to attend over the next two days — although surprise suprise, now that it’s Friday the weather is switching from as sunny to possible to dribbling water. Oh dear.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And this Eurodancey version of Hotel California:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?