Classical Convert

Novelties

I hate the word “novel”. Scientists are obsessed with it. Not in the bookish sense, in the “like wow, that’s totally crazy” sense (which is how scientists talk). To give you an idea of how often it’s used, there are over 380,000 papers containing that word on PubMed (an index of US life-sciences papers) ALONE. That doesn’t include papers from physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. Novel this, novel that. Everything is freakin’ novel. It’s not an “unusual” enzyme, or a “creative” technique, they are “novel”. Eugh. I can’t stand it.

This rant (I think, I’ve completely sidetracked myself now) came from that being the first word which got all up in my grill when trying to discuss the following two… atypical… ways of interacting with sounds.

This is Visible Sound from the design group (whatever that is) with the appropriately pretentious name SOUNDS.BUTTER. It sews sounds. Well, their waveform anyway.

And then we have….

Which uses a handheld scanner to play notes which seem to (loosely) correspond to squiggles scribbled on a piece of illuminated paper.

Any more of this kinda thing out there? If I find about seven of them I can do one of those link-whoring list posts.

Tags: music, novel, technology

Bevel My Edges Baby

Audiophiles, do you find the musical fidelity of your CDs lacking? Does your soul yearn for the pure analog joy of the wax cylinder? Perhaps the problem is that your CDs are not circular enough. But take courage! For a shade under a G you can amend this horrible affliction, and start enjoying life again.

Yep. Eine Deutsche company called Audio Desk is selling these sweet babies for the not-a-rip-off-at-all sum of $899. The device uses a sharpened tungsten carbide blade — no wait, burin; blades are for cheapskates — to bevel nothing less than a perfect 36 degree angle onto the edge of your discs. This minimizes light scatter which of course results in “pronounced improvements in focus, transient attack, detail and transparency”.

Personally, my focus is pretty tight, but I always suspected my transient attack was awry. Well, not any more, at a price like that I can afford one for every one of my mansions.

Tags: cd improver, rip-off, technology

“I built this machine…”

I love machine/music hybrids. It satisfies my mechanical, geeky, physics-PhD side while also socking it to the right-cortex. Physical parts are hot. Cogs, exposed mechanisms, gears… oh my. This guy — a street performer in Bath, the beautiful town next-door to Bristol, the city of my undergrad days — combines both with a semi-automatic guitar accompaniment to his fiddling:

I built this machine

because of unreliable guitarists

It don’t smoke!

It don’t drink!

And it’s never late.

Tags: guitar, musician, technology

The Future Was Yesterday!

Aha. My predictions are already well on the way to truthhood. In this spectacularly corporate video Melodyne show off how you can now twiddle around with individual notes in recorded music. Now they just need to populate a database with information about which chord sequences and structures are emotionally successful, and human editing is no longer needed to produce tomorrows cookie-cutter pop.

Hoorah for technology! Sort of.

Tags: melodyne, music, software, technology