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Stuck for compositional inspiration? Is the I Ching not quite up your alley? Want to do some serious Bard roleplaying in D&D? Take a gander at these bad boys:
Available for a bit less than twenty bucks at musiciansdice.com. (via Wired)
Tags: dice, musicThe geekier amongst you may have been aware of the latest please-oh-please competitor to Google being released last Friday. It’s called Wolfram Alpha, and it’s actually pretty clever — it’s got a little search niche all to itself. The idea is that it’s an interface to organized data, instead of just an interface to a bunch of other webpages. That means you can do queries like: “Wisconsin median household income / musician salary” or “calories in 1 bowl of corn flakes + a glass of OJ” or “probability full house“. And tonnes of other stuff.
Some of my favorite tools are the music ones, since (as I’ve harped on about before) I don’t have a music education, but love trying to understand formal structures and intervals and such. It lets you work out:
All of these produce cute little diagrams of piano keys, along with other miscellaneous information.
You can also search for composers and get a little timeline, but that isn’t terribly impressive right now. It seems pretty clueless about pieces as well: Beethoven’s 5th give you info about the (horrible) movie, for example.
Does anyone have any more musical searches which work out nicely?
Tags: music, wolfram AlphaI’m back baby. Back from this. From 10am last Saturday, until 10:30pm today I have been inundated with, dunked in, and squeezed full of Science. It’s been five days of: posters, symposia, brainstorming sessions, platform talks, overpriced (but life-support-ing) coffee, face-sheering-off Bostonian winds, room-sharing, note-taking, schmoozing, on foot GPS navigating and supervisor pleasing, and more.
And now I am home, re-enjoying the luxury of personal space and time. And filling in some gaps: the songs which whirred over the week without an escape hatch. Pieces prompted by relations on the rented minivan’s radio, or pieces of en passant conversations. At the moment it has been mostly:
And:
No classical. I almost never feel like listening to classical music after getting back from a trip. I need to come up with a very well thought out 5 second theory to explain that. Too tired to try that tonight though.
Night night!
Tags: biophysical society, musicMicrosoft 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
