Keeping The Receipts
I’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!
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?
Lukewarm Thursday Linkage
Holy crap, It’s thursday already?
These get the lukewarm moniker because a) it’s really friggin icy outside today, and b) I’m breaking the rule of three.
- Remember that huge-ass piano from Big? Well it is moving from some rich guys music room into the Philadelphia Please Touch Museum, which I assume means that you get to stomp Chopsticks out all over it.
- Cellists, your crotches are safe. For now. A very famous UK doctor (who I’ve never heard of) admitted to making up the condition of “Cellist’s Crotch” and submitting a letter about it to the BMJ, in which it was published. She said she did it in response to a previous letter describing “Guitarist’s Nipple”.
Oh, hang about, there was another link. Yay three!
- The most expensive concerts of 2008 – non-classical concerts, that is. Anybody fancy comparing the genres? “Orchestra Premium” seats for the Ring Cycle at the metropolitan opera: $2200. (yeah yeah, four concerts, I know)
It does start a bit quiet…
There oughta be a term for when you can’t find a video on Youtube due to the original being drowned in spoofs, remixes and other examples of poor production values. I was trying to find a video of Lux Aeterna, aka the arpeggioey theme from Requiem for a Dream, because I was gonna say that:
- “I just watched the film for the first time … blah blah blah … depressing depressing … but not quite as much as with David Lynch.” (That is, “his movies have more of an emotional impact on me.” Not: “Requiem would be more depressing if I watched it with David Lynch”. Though that’s probably true too.)
- “Those crazy kids in the Kronos Quartet played a lot of the soundtrack … blah blah blah … why gosh golly, they sure do get around a lot don’t they?”
HOWEVER. Instead of that happening — which is good, because in retrospect that sounds like an pretty boring blog post — I discovered that:
- The piece has been used in fifty-thousand different trailers, TV shows and adverts. Most famously in the trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
- Every fanboy (or fangirl/fanperson; we are equal-opportunity makers of derogatory remarks) on the internet has used that piece to put together their own horribly “deep” trailer for their favorite movie, which is usually Lord of the Rings.
- The version they use is inevitably the re-orchestrated score for orchestra and choir, because it sounds more — cough — “epic”.
Which all adds up to it being vaguely impossible to dig out a video of the string quartet orchestration. Or at least one that isn’t filled Hobbits, or have “It does start a bit quiet LOL” (seriously) whacked on the front of it.
Oh well, it turns out after all that I kind of don’t want to hear it again anyway. We can call that the Pachelbel effect.