Awake
Techno | 46:01 | October 2009

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1. District One (a.k.a. Bart Skils & Anton Pieete) — Dubcrystal
2. Saeed Younan — Kumbalha (Sergio Fernandez Remix)
3. Pete Grove — I Don’t Buy It
4. DBN — Asteroidz featuring Madita (D-Unity Remix)
5. Wehbba & Ryo Peres — El Masnou
6. Broombeck — The Clapper
7. Luca & Paul — Dinamicro (Karotte by Gregor Tresher Remix)
8. Martin Worner — Full Tilt
9. Joris Voorn — The Deep

A Live One
House | 45:17 | February 2010

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1. Rico Tubbs — Hip Rave Anthem
2. Sawgood — Ctl Ur Brain (Calvertron’s Jedi Mind Trick Mix)
3. The Body Snatchers — Call Me feat. Sporty-O & Yolanda (Lee Mortimer’s Troll Under The Bridge Mix)
4. Les Petits Pilous — Wake Up
5. Wolfgang Gartner — Fire Power
6. Santiago & Bushido, Colette — Make Me Feel
7. Carbon Community, Burufunk — Community Funk (Deadmau5 Remix)
8. Neelix — Disco Decay (Felguk Mix)
9. Gooseflesh — Blow Up
10. PNAU — Embrace feat. Ladyhawke (Fred Falke & Miami Horror Remix)

Plants are incredibly temperature sensitive and can perceive changes of as little as one degree Celsius. Now, a report shows how they not only “feel” the temperature rise, but also coordinate an appropriate response—activating hundreds of genes and deactivating others; it turns out it’s all about the way that their DNA is packaged.

The author can’t simply say that plants can feel, so instead he writes “feel,” indicating a figurative sense of the word. Why? Because the word ‘feel’ implies some amount of consciousness. (In fact I have argued that ‘feeling’ signifies a baseline for the existence of a subject.) Only the animal kingdom gets feeling privileges.

And then, in another article posted on Science Daily, we have a similar example, but this one is even more baffling. The context is that research has shown that playing Mozart to premature infants can have measurable positive effects on development:

A new study… has found that pre-term infants exposed to thirty minutes of Mozart’s music in one session, once per day expend less energy—and therefore need fewer calories to grow rapidly—than when they are not “listening” to the music…

In the study, Dr. Mandel and Dr. Lubetzky and their team measured the physiological effects of music by Mozart played to pre-term newborns for 30 minutes. After the music was played, the researchers measured infants’ energy expenditure again, and compared it to the amount of energy expended when the baby was at rest. After “hearing” the music, the infant expended less energy, a process that can lead to faster weight gain.

Not allowing plants to feel is one thing. And I can even understand the discomfort with writing that newborns are listening to music, because that may imply they are attending to it, which is questionable. But why can’t human babies be said to hear music? This is the strangest case of perceptual chauvinism I have yet come across.

(via Autoblog)

(via NextNature)

Here’s a typical definition of organize:

• v. arrange in an orderly way
• v. to make into a whole with unified and coherent relationships (yourdictionary.com)

These definitions aren’t satisfying. What makes an organization orderly, unified, and coherent? The definition Hass implies is much more illuminating: to be organized is to be divided according to the sense organs of a perceiver. Now we’re getting somewhere!

But moving in a slightly different direction, what the hell are we doing playing a musical instrument called an “organ”? And what does all this mean for Edgard Varèse’s famous definition of music as “organized sound”?

organ

• n. from the Greek organon meaning “implement”, “musical instrument”, “organ of the body”, literally, “that with which one works” (Online Etymology Dictionary)
• n. an instrument or means, as of action or performance
  (Dictionary.com)

Substituting “organ” in Varèse’s famous definition with these, the word “music” means:

• music is sound with which one works
• music is sound that is a means of action or performance

For the first time I understand what Varèse meant when he said music is “organized sound.” We use the word music to mean sound that is utilized by someone to work or perform. Nothing more, nothing less.

Everyone’s ears have suffered the effects of repetitively-played canned music, be it in workplaces, hospital environments or during phone calls made to directory inquiries numbers. On this basis, the research team decided that it would be “very interesting to design and build an intelligent system able to generate music automatically, ensuring the correct degree of emotiveness (in order to manage the environment created) and originality (guaranteeing that the tunes composed are not repeated, and are original and endless).”

And on a related, melodious note, I recently discovered that people have been using auto-tuning software on everyday sounds and speech. Cool! Here’s an auto-tuned baby crying.

If babies could be made to always sound like this when they cry, would the birth rate go up? Would people be less motivated to help infants in trouble because the crying would be less irritating? Would the kid develop musical abilities unlike any in history?

(via Althouse)

The “Emoti Chair” as they call it is built to bring musical pleasure to the deaf and the hearing impaired. The chair has a multitude of build-in speakers and vibrating devices delicately calibrated to “translate music and sound into movement. Whether it be rocking or vibrations, the music can be heard through the movement of the chair, expressing to the person sitting, the emotion heard in sound.”

Hear

An upgraded preview player includes a volume slider and a playlist. The playlist is brilliant because it allows you to add up to 200 songs and then listen continuously, which I predict will cause me to come to the site a lot more often just to put on a long list of music and let my computer play while I do other things. I could see myself leaving my computer for a while, but then noticing that a track is really cool and coming over to buy it. The addition of a volume slider is a surprising. User tests must have found that this was a requested feature, but I hate having multiple gain controls for the same digital source. Everyone should know how to use their computer’s volume controller, why clutter the Beatport interface by adding another one?

Taste

New content finding and filtering tools have been dubbed an upgrade to “taste.” Kinda cute metaphor. Hard to judge how useful this will be until I try it. If the new tools bring me more music that is to my taste, it’s a win.

Smell

I can’t imagine the metaphorical sense in which Beatport will improve its smell. Allowing you to “sniff out” better music? Shipping Beatport merchandise that smells like crates of records and spilt beer? This blogger speculates that it could be some sort of green-angle thing, like, since you are downloading music instead of shipping it, there’s less air pollution. That would be lame!

See

This is almost certainly the addition of album artwork. Especially now that Traktor Pro can handle it, the lack of album art on Beatport is a major shortcoming. I don’t care what the artwork consists of, I just want a visual cue to accompany the verbal and auditory ones that create the idea of a piece of music in my mind.

Touch

Well, again I have no idea what they have in mind here. Maybe the user interface has been made snappier, which could make it metaphorically more responsive to the user’s touch. That would be nice.

Here we have an explanation of musical timing as an analogy for a moving body:

Virtually every culture and civilization considers movement to be an integral part of music making and listening. Rhythm is what we dance to, sway our bodies to, and tap our feet to… It is no coincidence that making music requires the coordinated, rhythmic use of our bodies, and that energy be transmitted from body movements to a musical instrument. (57)

‘Tempo’ refers to the pace of a musical piece—how quickly or slowly it goes by. If you tap your foot or snap your fingers in time to a piece of music, the tempo of the piece will be directly related to how fast or slow you are tapping. If a song is a living, breathing entity, you might think of the tempo as its gait—the rate at which it walks by—or its pulse—the rate at which the heart of the song is beating. The word ‘beat’ indicates the basic unit of measurement in a musical piece; this is also called the ‘tactus’. Most often, this is the natural point at which you would tap your foot or clap your hands or snap your fingers. (59)

Levitin also delves into the possible evolutionary reasons for music, noting that music seems to always go with dance, and that the concept of the expert musical performer is very recent:

When we ask about the evolutionary basis for music, it does no good to think about Britney or Bach. We have to think about what music was like around fifty thousand years ago. The instruments recovered from archeological sites can help us understand what our ancestors used to make music, and what kinds of melodies they listened to. Cave paintings, paintings on stoneware, and other pictorial artifacts can tell us something about the role that music played in daily life. We can also study contemporary societies that have been cut off from civilization as we know it, groups of people who are living in hunter-gatherer lifestyles that have remained unchanged for thousands of years. One striking find is that in every society of which we’re aware, music and dance are inseparable.

The arguments against music as an adaptation consider music only as disembodied sound, and moreover, as performed by an expert class for an audience. But it is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of “experts” performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unknown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized. The embodied nature of of music, the indivisibility of movement and sound, the anthropologist John Blacking writes, characterizes music across cultures and across times. (257)

I agree. Even though we may use modern technology to exploit musical cognitive faculties for maximum effect, the idea that music/dance is a counter-evolutionary accident seems wrong to me.

You can find the website that accompanies the book at yourbrainonmusic.com.

(via Engadget)

Donald Norman might break it down like this:

• Pull out the “tuning knob,” which looks like a standard gain control and doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be pulled. In fact, when the knobs on normal guitars are pulled in this way they come off, so most guitarists have learned to avoid pulling on knobs.
• Make sure you’re not touching the neck or the tuning keys! You know, those things that look like they were made for human fingers to touch and that are an essential part of the manual interface to all other string instruments? Forget that, and instead keep this knowledge in your head: hands off.
• Strum the guitar several times. While you do this, crouch over your guitar so you can see the LEDs on the front of the tuning knob, which faces the audience.
• After a few strums, the LEDs change color. Now you’re “ready to rock.”

Meanwhile, Moog has extended the creative capabilities of electric guitars with innovative, elegant technology that may actually deserve the title “world’s first,” though Moog is confident enough in their product that they don’t bother with that kind of marketing nonsense. By feeding some of the output signal back into the strings, the instrument allows precise control of the envelope of the sound. “Infinite sustain” as well as banjo-like damping are both made possible. Powerful stuff.

The McGill University Digital Orchestra is putting on their first performance on March 5th at 7:30 p.m. in Montreal’s Pollack Hall. The lovely and talented Xenia Pestova will be playing the Rulers, an instrument I invented. The piece she will be playing, which I haven’t heard yet, was composed by D. Andrew Stewart and is the first music to be written for the instrument. There will be a live webcast of the show. To watch it, launch the QuickTime application (free download) a few minutes before the start of the show, select “Open URL in New Player” from the File menu, and enter: rtsp://132.206.142.8/pollackhall.sdp

The ButtKicker seems to be an instrument-independent vibrotactile feedback augmentation device for musical performance self-monitoring. And that’s kinda cool!

What I find especially interesting is how the words “world’s first robot guitar” are tossed around in this press release. First of all, it seems as if the word “robot” is being used vaguely to refer to the presence of a servo system. If this guitar is robotic, then so is my laptop for its ability to read and eject optical media. I think we’re going to see more of this, similar to the way “net” was overused in the nineties. We are entering a robo-sheik era where any product that can possibly justify doing so will be incorporating the word “robot” into its name.

As for the “world’s first” claim, someone should tell Gibson about TransPerformance, the company that has already been selling automatic tuner retrofits since 2005, as well as the dozens of other music technology projects that are based on guitar interaction and involve motors. It’s old, but anyone who hasn’t yet seen the League of Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) video of the LEMUR Guitar Bot should check it out:

It’s easier for me to accept calling the LEMUR Guitar Bot a “robot” than the Gibson self-tuner. What do you think?

Update: I’m having issues with the video… apparently Sony’s MPG isn’t being recognized by any video playback application I’ve tried yet except for the Finder preview. YouTube and Motionbox both don’t recognize them either. I hope I will solve the problem soon.

Under the new rules, the retroactive royalties owed by almost all of today’s independent webcasters will be greater than their total revenue. Wait a second,

How can the value that music brings to webcasters exceed webcasters’ revenue? Of course, the value of music can’t be made so low as to ensure every webcaster makes a profit; but isn’t it equally ridiculous to raise that value to ensure that no webcaster can survive?

Could the Copyright Royalty Board have been unaware that its decision would have lethal financial consequences for most webcasters? Or could it be their intention was to shut down the large majority of today’s channels, to leave the entire market to enormous media companies chasing high-profile advertising? Either way, the effect a purely mass-market approach will have on webcast playlists will likely be similar to the effect it has had on the quality of traditional radio.

The internet offers many strong advantages over traditional radio: it lacks expensive and paralyzing FCC regulations, while affording a lower barrier to entry, infinite bandwidth, and a more precisely targeted audience. The fact that internet radio stations can survive with little administration and technical infrastructure means stations can be numerous, small, targeted, and innovative. In contrast, a payola-ridden and highly politicized scene on the airwaves has led to less diversity in programming than ever before. In my opinion, there is very little good music on traditional radio — something that anyone with a modicum of taste can hear absolutely clearly.

I do not know if webcasting helps or hurts the status quo of the recording industry, and I don’t care. I don’t have a stake in it anymore. However I do believe that webcasting brings higher quality music into my life. People seem to like internet radio, so the labels should find a way to profit from the quality that internet radio uniquely offers rather than change the product in a way that will reduce its appeal. Otherwise they are missing a lucritive business opportunity, and commit the unforgivable sin of stamping out a vital part of many people’s musical enrichment. Just another example of foolish behavior on the part of the recording industry I suppose.

For more, check out this roundup.