The Age of the Personal Soundtrack
Sometimes I would give my left leg — well maybe just a little piece of it, perhaps just the slimmest sliver of a pinky toe — to be able to instantly conduct some piece of market research all the way back through history. For example, I would love to see a graph which shows what activities people were mostly doing while listening to music, plotted all the way back through several thousand years. This piqued my interest after I listened to the third movement of John Adams’ Grand Pianola music on the walk into work last Friday, and the music crescendoed in sympathy with cresting the hill:
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.
Eugh, I know the feeling…
via Reddit. Anyone know where it originally comes from?
Fairly Hot Friday Linkage
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.
Getting Dicey
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)
Wolfram Alpha
The 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:
- Properties of notes – e.g. “F#“
- Intervals – e.g. “7 semitones“
- Scales – e.g. “E blues phrygian“
- Chords – e.g. “C major seven“
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?