Tonight I saw an article about Bondskanselier (prime minister) Merkel, of Germany,  talking to the USA Congress; in which she is thanking the USA with their help making the 2 German countries back to one….
She is also talking about World War 2 – about the regrets etc. etc…. Well – just watch the little clip I will put on the bottom of the page…..

This little talk kept me wondering… and also made me search – because I remembered seeing something similar lately; a German talking German while international cameras are rolling….

And yep – found it; an article of Atlantic Review – in which you can see Guido Westerwelle, new German Minister of Foreign Affairs, giving a BBC reporter some hard time; because Guido (darf ich Sie Duzen..?) is refusing to talk English to the reporter… because “they are in Germany and in Germany you talk German”….

I really thought that Mr.Guido Westerwelle was acting very weird…. to me it seems like he is not capable of having a conversation in English…..

And then; Prime Minister Merkel is talking German in an English speaking country…..

For my job; I did (and still do) have a lot of contact with Germans – and I garantuee you => it is almost impossible to have German people talk English….!
And yep; I am talking about BIG BIG international companies…..!! I have no idea if we are talking about a lack of education or a lack of decency.

So – Merkel and Westerwelle are giving some good examples uh..??

But I really hope that Mr.Guido Westerwelle is telling his Prime-Minister to use a bit more decency; she should have done her speech in her nice German English…. as she was in an English speaking country.

What do you think…??

Merkel in front of US Congress

Guido Westerwelle refusing to talk English

In Europe we have this nice discussion about Windows 7.
As you probably know; Microsoft had some problems with Neelie Kroes about their monopolistic behavior regarding Internet Explorer. Neelie thinks that Microsoft is not allowed to make an Operating System including their own web browser…..
Well okay; they are allowed to do so – BUT then they should also offer the browsers of competitors.

So; Microsoft did change their Windows 7 and people will see a list of browser and they can install the OS of their choice on Windows 7.
Nice uh..??

Well Mozilla Firefox is not totally agreeing; they think it is not fair to make the list in alphabetical order – now Apple Safari will be first on the list….
They would like; the biggest browser first, BUT Windows Explorer should be last => as they already got earned a lot of users in an "unfair way"!
Which would give Firefox the first spot.

Pffff – I am a huge fan of Firefox; I would not even know where I can find the Explorer icon on my Windows machine…. BUT – I really do think this is a childish behavior of Firefox…

Personally I do think it is Windows their own Operating System and they should be allowed to put just their own web browser on it…

Just like the company Apple does; buy an Apple computer – you can only use the Apple software and the Apple browser….
Same as the Apple iPhone; Safari is installed and Apple even has the rule that competition of existing software on the iPhone is NOT ALLOWED.
Which makes me wonder; why is Neelie after Windows and not after Apple…?
Just because Windows is bigger?
Thought we all had equal rights – well – not according to Neelie.

Just had a little random thought……

WHAT happens if there is a certain life form on the moon…?
Could bombing the moon mean; a big war…?
AND – who started this war…?

Well – as you can imagine – I do no have any “details”….. but I do think the USA is taking a big risk today!

Maybe we could tell the moon “we are innocent; those mean martians did it…..!!”

But hey – if it goes wrong…. Americans – with this one; you are on your own!

Oh yes – as promised => moving to another server is not that easy.
The main page is working – but the links to the posts are not…. = but we are working on it !!!

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Update – WE ARE BACK ONLINE – ON OUR NEW SERVER !!!

Pls tell us if there is any improvement !!!

So – after some “trash talk” about Lily Allen – time to show that some artist do have a nice sense of humor!

We all know the band Muse….. uh…. well…. maybe not all – but Sjeltur DOES…..
If you do not know them – in the following clip you will see the Italian soccer tv program “Quelli Che Il Calcio”; and they also do not know the band Muse….

The band was not allowed to play live on this show…. so – it was not really needed to put the right man on the right spot.

After the break you will see;

The singer playing the drums
The bassplayer doing the guitar and keyboard
The drummer is singing and plays the bass guitar….

As seen on; NRCNext.nl  (Dutch)

Lily Allen is a British pop singer, her record company sold enough copies of Lily Allen albums to get several gold and platinum certifications. Recently she started a blog called “It’s not alright” against music piracy. According to her filesharing is a “disaster” for emerging artists “as it’s making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge”. She wants a summit in the UK for artists, record companies, internet service providers and the government to discuss the future of the music industry. She probably has a point that filesharing is bad for new acts in the future, but ignores that it’s actually not bad for new artists. And it turns out Allen is a pirate herself…

New technology make old business models obsolete. It has been this way in the past, and it will be in the future. Many years the music industry made tons of money because consumers needed the industry to obtain the music they wanted. The business model of the industry relied on the distribution of physical carriers of music, like gramophone records and later compact discs. In those days the industry had a monopoly on this business and they abused it, the consumer paid ridiculous amounts of money for physical carriers of music, although the consumer never became owner of the music itself.

But things have changed, nowadays music can be put in a computer file and transported through the internet, at almost no costs. It’s easy to give someone else a copy of that computer file. This new technology leaves physical carriers obsolete, making the business model of the music industry obsolete. It turns out that many consumers are willing to pay a fair amount of money to get their music online, but instead of adapting to this, the music industry is desperately clinging to the past. And so does Lily Allen. Despite her young age, she sounds like a dinosaur when she is parroting what the music industry says. The industry likes to play on the image that “copying music is stealing from the artist”, although this view is misleading. Because music isn’t a physical object, it can’t be stolen. Even laws don’t view copyright infringement as theft. Then the industry says “without people paying for music, the music industry will die out.” But the music industry will not die out, it will change in favor of true artists.

The reason Allen is parroting the music industry is probably because she is one of those acts that need the industry, instead of being a true artist. No less than 8 producers worked on her debut album Alright, Still. So 8 producers were necessary to produce less than 40 minutes of music, this tells you something about her own capabilities to produce music. After the release of her second album It’s Not Me, It’s You, she gave some more insight how the music is produced, saying “Greg (producer) builds the chords up and I just sing along and make up the words and then once you’ve got the bare song, we decide which way we’re gonna go with the production.” That is the production by Greg Kurstin, she is not credited as being a producer of the album herself at all. This practice is common in the music industry, the industry puts an act in the spotlight, but the people who actually produce the music remain relatively anonymous, although they are the true artists who come up with the creative musical ideas. Creating music is an art, this is what makes someone an artist. Someone who is merely reproducing that music, either on record or on stage, is not. That’s an act. The industry likes acts, they are very profitable.

It’s time true artists are put in the spotlight, many talented people didn’t get a chance for years because the record companies were more interested in acts that quickly made tons of money for them. With the decline of the old industry, a new modernized industry can emerge that understands new technology and adopts views on copyright sustainable in the future. Artists will be more in control, they don’t need the old industry anymore as a man-in-the-middle that’s soaking up most of the money. Artists now have the opportunity to distribute their music directly to the consumer. Money generated by selling music and merchandise, performing on stage, at a reasonable price, still provides an income for artists. The total revenue of the new industry in the future will probably be smaller than the revenue of the old industry, but the difference is that the money goes where it belongs, the artists, not the bosses of record companies.

It turns out Lily Allen is a pirate herself. On her blog she reproduced an entire article by Techdirt author Michael Masnick without permission. She gave a reaction, saying “I think it’s quite obvious that I wasn’t trying to pass of those words as my own, here is a link to the website I acquired the piece from.” Masnick thought it was funny, Allen is complaining about the horribleness of copying while copying. Also note the use of the word “acquired” instead of the word “copied”. So it’s not OK when you copy a Lily Allen album online, but it is when you acquire it..?

Update: Turns out when she tried to get attention a few years back, she made a couple of mix tapes with loads of songs from others, mixing in her own tracks…

Many artists that appear are not with the record label Allen has a contract with, EMI. And even if they did, EMI claimed that they never authorized distribution of MP3s for publicity purposes. So Allen is really a pirate! Arrrrr!

The story is just getting better and better.

Allen announced she is quitting the music industry. Her campaign against piracy seems to end as well, all posts on her blog are deleted. Luckily, Google cache reveals that she did put a comment on her blog, blaming EMI: “anyway the snippets of songs you hear on those mixtapes are about 30 seconds to 1 minute in length, in traditional mixtape style, it is infringement, correct, but it’s not my site, it’s EMI’s.” And also: “i am not a hypocrite, i don’t illegally download music, and i still think unauthorised file sharing is wrong”. And she is playing stupid: “i made those mixtapes 5 years ago, i didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then, and my attitudes towards mixtapes have changed since then.”

Even if it’s true the website is EMI’s, she made those tapes, uploaded the files, and used the tapes for her own promotion. That’s actually worse than just downloading a few songs for personal use, like most people do. Allen wants that these people get disconnected from the internet for a while when they do, it seems Allen should not be allowed to get a connection to the internet during her whole lifetime, following her own logic. Although she tries to blame EMI, she clearly admits what she did is infringement (“i made those mixtapes (…) it is infringement, correct”), then probably realized how hypocritical she really is. In a desperate attempt to hide her admission of guilt she deleted all posts from her blog, probably hoping nobody read her admission… Too late, Silly Lily. We read it, the cat is out of the bag now, and nobody will take you seriously ever again.

Of course, she has a different explanation, “the abuse was getting too much”… Well, that’s what you can expect when you take the moral high ground first and then it turns out you’re doing all those “bad” things yourself. But that’s not the real reason she deleted all her posts. She tried to hide her hypocrisy. And failed.

Another update: The MP3s are no longer available for downloading. And apparently Allen changed her tune, the plan to kick off people from the internet is now “too draconian”, British newspaper The Times reports today. Now “restriction of the infringers’ bandwidth to a level which would render filesharing of media files impractical while leaving basic e-mail and web access functional” should do the trick… Last night British artists and acts had a meeting do discuss the matter, the group also “condemned the vitriol that Allen had faced on an internet blog that she had set up to argue against music piracy”. Sure, she had faced some “vitriol”, but most comments posted on her blog were actually well-argued, and most of the “vitriol” appeared when it turned out Allen was guilty of copyright infringement herself. No word about that, though. The British artists/acts just ignore this little inconvenient fact, probably because many of those artists/acts were quite vocal about their support of Allen’s campaign against “piracy”. It would have been embarrassing, of course, to admit that one of their own is actually a pirate…

Earlier this blog brought you a story about possible developments in computer technology and music in the future. With increasing computer capabilities it might be possible one day the computer produces music that’s good by human standards. It was mentioned that new algorithms inspired by nature might be used for this, evolutionary techniques improving the quality of a new music piece over time. There is already an example of this approach on the web and you can participate!

It’s called Evolectronica, breeding electronic music. Here it’s not about evolving new sounds, but the evolution of the music itself. Evolectronica starts by building audio loops from randomly chosen sounds and effects. These loops are streamed over the internet to the audio player of a listener. Because the computer is not capable (yet) to determine what’s really good or not, the listener can give his or her opinion which loops are liked or disliked. Loops that are liked have a bigger chance to reproduce, to make new baby loops. Over time the music gets better. Give it a try, you can find Evolectronica here.

Sitting at the hotel – going through the pictures taken…. I found this one and I just wanted to share it with “the public”….. another Sjeltur “Masterpiece”….

Taken during a walking trip…… ya have to love this duck…..and water !!

Maybe this question sounds absurd to you. Maybe you think there’s no limit on new musical pieces that can be created. But this can’t be true, limitations on human hearing puts constraints on the number of possible sounds we can hear. Since not all sound is music, it follows that the number of all possible musical pieces must be smaller than the number of all possible sound pieces. Today humans are still the creators of good music, their music is superior to music created by computers. Computer technology changed the way how composers create new musical pieces, but the computer is a “dumb” tool in most cases. It’s a great tool to create new sounds and to compose music with those sounds, but the creativity of the composer is still needed to produce new good music that’s perceived by listeners as such. This may change, though.

How many sounds are out there we can hear? There are limitations on human hearing, putting an upper limit on this number. To make an estimate on the number of possible sounds we can hear, let’s assume digital sound systems can produce all these sounds. This assumption is justified, digital sound systems are actually capable of producing sounds well beyond the limits of human hearing. Humans are able to hear sounds with a frequency in the range of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz) and with a wide range of intensity, from barely noticeable sounds to very loud sounds that make your ears hurt. Digital systems nowadays are capable to produce sounds with high frequencies, much higher than humans can hear, and they are capable of producing sounds with very high accuracy way beyond the pain threshold of human hearing. The number of all possible sounds these digital systems can produce is larger than the number of sounds humans can hear.

Imagine a digital sound system capable of producing all possible sounds with the same limitations as human hearing. In other words, the digital sound system produces all possible sounds that humans can hear. The highest frequency that can be heard is 20 kHz and the maximum dynamical range, from barely noticeable to the pain threshold, is about 130 dB. Then the digital system would be a 22 bit/40 kHz system. Now we can calculate the number of all possible sounds a human can hear within a given time frame. Suppose we take a time frame of one second, then the number of possible sounds a human can hear is about 2 x 10^264906. This is a very, very large number: it’s a two followed by 264,906 zeros!

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s very easy to write a computer program that’s able to produce all possible sounds, the entire sound space. But although the computer gives us the exact solution of all possible sounds, it will take a very long time for a computer to complete this task, an amount of time far beyond astronomical time scales, even for short sound pieces. So this is nowhere near practical. And after the computer has finished, it will turn out that most of these sounds are not very interesting. Most of these sounds would appear as random noise, with no structure at all. The number of sounds that actually make sense is considerably smaller. The number of sounds that’s perceived as music is even smaller. On a human scale the number of possible musical pieces might be large, but compared to all possible sounds it’s probably a very small number. Musical structures seem to put tight constraints on the sound space of all possible sounds to be perceived as music by humans.

For example, we can estimate the number of all possible “melodies” that can be played within a given time frame. Known limitations of human hearing can provide an estimate on this number. Humans can distinguish about 200 notes per octave and are able to distinguish about 50 notes per second. The result will grossly overestimate the number, because “music” close to the limitations of human hearing isn’t perceived as music at all. In reality humans like music with tighter constraints on the number of available notes per octave and the maximum number of notes played per second. But this estimate provides a usable upper bound. Within the frequency range humans can hear, the number of all possible “melodies” we can play during one second is about 7 x 10^100, a seven followed by 100 zeros. Compare this number to the number of all possible sounds calculated, it’s a very small number. Because this number is grossly overestimated, the number of melodies musically meaningful to humans is a lot smaller in reality. The constraints musical structures put on the sound space are very tight.

Is it possible for a computer to calculate only that small part of the entire sound space containing musical structures? So far it turns out to be very difficult. Some progress has been made in this direction, but music created by computers is still inferior to music created by humans. On the other hand, computer technology is growing fast. With the increase of computational power it becomes possible to use new algorithms that are not just crunching numbers with exact solutions, but instead mimic processes found in nature that can approximate solutions. The solutions are new and interesting, bypassing most of the noisy solutions that make no sense. A genetic algorithm is an example of this. The algorithm starts off in a random, disordered state and produces noisy sounds with no structure. It then evolves gradually, away from the noisy solutions to solutions with structure, sounds that make sense. Eventually it moves to solutions that’s perceived as music by humans.

But we’re not there yet. These algorithms require a lot of computational power, today’s computers are just too slow. To get an idea how far scientists are with genetic algorithms and sound, here an example. It’s not producing a new sound, but the algorithm tries to copy a given, existing sound. First you hear the target sample, a sound fragment the algorithm tries to copy. The next fragment is the result after iterating the algorithm for about 800 generations, then after 6,500 generations, 10,000 generations and finally after 19,000 generations. Although not perfect, the final result is a good approximation of the original sample. These algorithms need a lot of computational power, for results only lasting seconds the processing time is many hours with computers we have today. We can improve the quality of the copy some more, even to the point they are indistinguishable, but this requires so much computational power making it impractical at the present time. And it should be noted, this is just copying an existing sound, not creating a new sound, let alone a new sound perceived as music.

But with increasing computer capabilities we should see the first practical applications of this approach not too far in the future. Now it takes hours to copy a given sound fragment that lasts only seconds, but given Moore’s Law it should be possible to do this real-time in, say, 10 or 20 years from now. After that, real-time synthesis of new sounds using these methods shouldn’t be far behind, followed by systems that can produce new sounds, as a musically meaningful structure.

If we don’t hear this, the attempt has failed. Perhaps it turns out computers are not able at all to produce music and humans remain the creative source behind all new musical pieces. Then we will not run out of music anytime soon, because the number of all possible musical pieces is still large on a human scale.

When we do hear musically meaningful structures then perhaps it turns out computers can provide structures, but only humans can put these structures together in a way that’s perceived by most people as good music, and music created by humans continues to be distinguishable from music created by computers. This scenario is likely to be favored by composers of the early 21st century. The computer becomes a great tool producing structures, a composer can edit these structures in a way contemporary composers can hardly imagine. In this scenario we will not run out of new music anytime soon either, humans are still the creative source and this puts an upper limit on the pace humans can create new musical pieces.

Or computers eventually leave human composers obsolete. Perhaps the computer provides us a map of the entire music space. Although such a map would be very interesting to explore, the consequence is that there would be not much left for human composers to create. When a human composer creates a new piece, the computer creates a whole new genre of music. Contemporary composers probably view this picture of the future as downright pessimistic. It even gets worse, perhaps the tight constraints that turn sound into music puts a limit on the number of possible musical pieces low enough for a computer to produce all these pieces within a reasonable amount of time. Then there’s nothing new left for humans to discover and humankind truly runs out of new music.

We don’t know how likely these scenarios are. We don’t know how much music is out there, perhaps the music space is large enough that even computers can’t produce all music within a reasonable time frame. A suitable model of musical structures might give us an upper and lower bound on the number of all possible music pieces one day, this would provide us more insight on this question. Given the development of computer technology, the question if computers are able to produce good music by human standards should at least partially be answered sometime this century, with a glimpse of what might be possible already in the decades to come.

Ah well – sjeltur.nl showed a controversial ad yesterday – so – why not another one uh..??

What do Aids and Adolf Hitler have in common…?
Yep – they are both responsible for a lot of killing…..

So….. this following ad is telling you that “Aids is a mass murderer”"…..

World AIDS Day Ad: Hitler from ANIMALnewyork.com on Vimeo.