SonicTruths

Musicianship Podcast by Steve Lawson & Andrew Dubber | Loving & Living Music

Fri, 25 May 2012 07:15:00 -0700

The marvellously opinionated double act of Steve Lawson and Andrew Dubber carry on our series of guest posts by speakers from our Future of Musicianship event on May 1, 2012 in London. The Kiwi accent belongs to Dubber, the British one to Steve.

Steve Lawson & Andrew Dubber with Heli Rajasalo of Loving & Living Music

(via lovinglivingmusic.com)

A really fantastic addendum to the panel discussion. I particularly liked the discussion of music and jobs towards the end:

Andrew: Most of the young musicians who say [I want to play music for a living], they mean not that "I want my job to be playing music" but that "I want to play music, and I don't want a job!"

Andrew: So if you were re-writing music education poilcy from scratch... how do you approach that?

Steve: I think we play music to kids, and we get them excited about it. And we ask them "how do you think that was done?"" And then we teach them the music they love, whatever that may be.

If you've any interest in music education and how the next generation of musicians will develop, give it a listen:

Podcast on lovinglivingmusic.com.

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gTar: The First Guitar That Anybody Can Play (Kickstarter)

Wed, 23 May 2012 06:15:00 -0700

The gTar is a fully digital guitar that makes it easy for anybody to play music, regardless of experience. All you have to do is dock your iPhone in the body, load up the gTar app, and an array of interactive LEDs along the fretboard will show you how to play.
You may be asking yourself what it means for a guitar to be "digital." While most guitars have pickups to amplify the sound of vibrating strings, the gTar has none - instead, we've designed the gTar with sensors that detect exactly what you're playing in real-time and relay each note to your iPhone, which then produces the actual sound. This makes it possible for us to do all kinds of exciting things, so let's get into it!

(via kickstarter.com)

Wow, this looks fantastic!

A versatile digital guitar which really teaches you to play a normal guitar - while having you creating real music from day one?

This is the way forwards.

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Launch of "Gigs": London’s biggest ever street music competition

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:47:00 -0700

London’s streets will become a stage for hundreds of talented young singers and musicians aged 11-25 this summer.

We're looking for any act that is portable from super singer songwriters to exhilarating ensembles. Prizes up for grabs include music kit, training and a coveted TfL busking licence. Performers could get the chance to perform at iconic locations including BT London Live, Hyde Park during the Games.

Applications can be made at www.molpresents.com/gigs.

Watch the launch video to get the lowdown and see last year’s winner, The Robbie Boyd Band in action:

(via Mayor of London and youtube.com)

I'm excited about this! Music should be an essential part of bringing London to life this summer for the games.

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Researcher runs IP network... over xylophones!

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:35:00 -0700

Geiger's network protocol, Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), provides a fully compliant IP connection between two computers. His setup uses a pair of Arduino microcontrollers, some sensors, a pair of xylophones and two people to play the xylophones.

[...] The Arduino is attached to a series of series of LED's. Each LED corresponds to a hexadecimal character, as well as a key on a xylophone. As an LED lights up, the human participant strikes the corresponding key on the xylophone. Piezo sensors are attached to each xylophone, so that they are able to sense when a note is played on the other xylophone. The Arduino for the receiving computer senses the note and then converts it back into hexadecimal code.

[...] Typically, it takes about 15 minutes to transmit a single packet at this rate -- if the volunteer is patient enough to complete a whole packet, and doesn't hit any wrong notes in the process. Such dedication and proficiency has turned out to be a rarity in trials, however. "Humans are really terrible interfaces," Geiger said.

(via /. and networkworld.com)

I would love to see this. Actually, I'm not sure I would stick around for 15 minutes to see the first packet come in...!

Read the whole article, with link to the academic(?) paper here.

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New UK chart for streaming music launches today

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:30:00 -0700

Music streaming will come of age next week when the UK industry comes together to launch the UK's first Official Streaming Chart.

The new Top 100 rundown, which will launch on Monday May 14, will be compiled by the Official Charts Company with data from the nation's leading streaming services and supported by the Entertainment Retailers Association (Era) and labels association the BPI.
The Official Streaming Chart will be the first chart which ranks audio streams from both ad-funded and subscription streaming services in the UK, to reflect the growing interest in this new generation of music services.

(via mi2n.com)

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Sonic pain device to be deployed in London during Olympics

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:26:00 -0700

The Ministry of Defence has confirmed a sonic device will be deployed in London during the Olympics.

The American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) can be used to send verbal warnings over a long distance or emit a beam of pain-inducing tones.

The equipment was spotted fixed to a landing craft on the Thames at Westminster this week.

The manufacturer denies it is a weapon and the MoD said it would be used "primarily in the loud hailer mode".

(via bbc.co.uk)

A beam of pain-inducing tones.

This is one audio technology I am not in favour of.

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Revamped SoundCloud on its way

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:32:00 -0700

The Next SoundCloud Launches In Private Beta…..

“Next SoundCloud has been re-engineered from the inside out,” said Eric Wahlforss, founder & CTO. “It’s much more than an aesthetic change. By making use of state of the art technologies available in the latest generation browsers, we’ve created a technology platform that enables us to provide a much better user experience and develop new features faster.”  Notable features included in the private beta launch:

Read the rest

(via audiosilverlining.info)

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Radio Time Machine!

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:42:00 -0700

Hello, I'm a musical time machine. Go back in time to hear how popular music has changed from 1940 to today, as told by the Billboard Top 100.

Visit radiotimemachine.herokuapp.com

Fun!

Probably only fun if you're an Rdio user. (Free time-limited trials in the UK.)

Give it a try!

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Writing Music On iOS: Bag Of Potential or World of Pain?

Wed, 09 May 2012 07:55:00 -0700

Musician and educator Will Kuhn caused quite an uproar in the iOS music community last week with a thought provoking article entitled “Writing Music On iOS Is Still A Bag Of Hurt.” Despite the aggressive stance of the article’s title, Kuhn makes some intelligent points about the process of writing music on an iPad or iPhone and how it compares to the process of composing on a desktop computer. He laments the lack of plugins on the iOS platform and makes some great suggestions for moving things along towards more efficient iOS music making.

[...]

It’s hard to argue with Kuhn on some points – we’ve all hit frustrating walls on our iPads that have made us long for our favorite features from a desktop DAW – but I have trouble calling that a bag of hurt. I think there’s a lot of potential to change the way that we think about music production inside the iOS music world; I believe that we’re in a pretty amazing place right now and things are only going to get better.

(via iosmusicandyou.com)

iOS Music & You offers a thoughtful rebuttal to an interesting post about creating music on the iPad/iPhone.

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Name a style of music you dislike and Reddit's /r/Music will try to change your mind

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:48:00 -0700

Challenge: Name a style of music you dislike and it's up to fans of said style to find artists that could change your opinion.

(via reddit.com)

Reddit comes through: a great resource for learning to like new genres of music...

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New blog post: Celebrating USB Discographies

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:31:00 -0700

We live in an always-online world where increasingly we prefer downloadables and streaming media over physical products. And that’s certainly the case in the world of music (…with the possible exception of vinyl junkies).

One special case for me is the trend of artists releasing most or all of their back catalogue on a USB stick. Rather than leave fans to trawl around gathering the various tracks and releases and special editions and so on, some artists make an all-in-one bundle that saves you the hassle and bandwidth.

Here are three I’ve bought:

Read the rest at: sonictruths.net

I bought a £25, 20-album USB stick today and it made me think... What a fantastic idea.

So I wrote a short blog post celebrating the musical treasure trove that is the discography USB stick.

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Who decides the Future of Musicianship?

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The future of musicianship is a subject close to my heart due to my work with Easy Ear Training, where we try to use modern technology to make learning music more fun, easy and effective.

The event was fascinating, and the discussion broad and interesting. I won’t try to recount the discussion (not least because the entire panel session is now available online) but the event was eye-opening for me in a number of ways.

Read the whole post

(via sonictruths.net)

New blog post about a really excellent panel discussion I attended this week.

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Does "Mastered for iTunes" matter to music? Ars (fails to) put it to the test

Fri, 04 May 2012 04:18:00 -0700

Rubin explained his thoughts on the matter to MTV last year, calling the difference between the resulting "Mastered for iTunes" tracks and the original encoding "night and day."

"It seems to contain more sonic information than the typical iTunes file," Rubin told MTV. "It's much closer to the sound of the CD and it took several weeks of additional experimentation and mastering to reach the final iTunes master."

He then loaded the original high resolution master and began applying EQ adjustments. He exported a 24/44.1 WAV file, which we ran through Apple's tools to create an encoded AAC file that's identical to what would be generated by Apple itself. As before, we used Apple's tools to convert the resulting AAC file back into a 16/44.1 WAV file.

Now we could compare the original CD master, the file generated by iTunes from that master, and our own "specially mastered for iTunes" version. Subjectively, our tweaks made the track sound better. Much of the "boxiness" was gone, and the song sounded more "alive."

(via @monquixote and arstechnica.com)

Eurgh, this kind of unscientific "testing" makes me stabby.

You took the master and "applied EQ" before encoding to AAC... and what you got sounded different than just encoding to AAC from the CD version. No shit, Sherlock.

And all those "we listened and we could tell the difference" with no reference to blind testing? Gragh, Ars Technica should know better.

I admire the intent, to suss out whether "Mastered for iTunes" is just bullshit - but this article's just muddied the waters with more bullshit.

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A Piano Tuner is A Music Educator

Thu, 03 May 2012 23:50:00 -0700

I think the name “Family Music Consultant” is a better name for what I do, but few people would understand what that means. Instead, I just stick with the name “piano tuner”, a 300 year old profession that affords me the opportunity to be of service to people who are enjoying the wonderful journey of musical education.

via DLP Blog and coppellpianoshop.wordpress.com

Very interesting take on the term "music educator", in response to the recent blog post from Discover, Learn and Play.

Read the full post: "A piano tuner is a music educator".

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Introducing the Umusic Artist Gateway (the other kind of music mashup)

Thu, 03 May 2012 23:35:00 -0700

I’m delighted to announce the launch today of the Umusic UK Artist Gateway – a new way of talking about our artists online. We now have a data-driven, dynamically published and persistent web page for every one of our UK artists and each of their albums and singles.
[...]

The Artist Gateway pages are a hub - linking conversations and content from Vevo, Soundcloud, Deezer, iTunes, Songkick and Twitter. They encourage fans to discover more at Last.FM and MusicBrainz. The pages also link to exceptional editorial content from the BBC and The Guardian.

For our artists themselves, the new pages are a clever way to aggregate the very best of the web in one, highly searchable location. And if you’re a developer, then you’ll enjoy the fact that the data is available in three machine-readable formats and that everything can be linked to using MusicBrainz identifiers.

(via monkeyhacker and umusic.co.uk)

This is pretty super cool. A bit like the autogenerated BBC /programmes but for bands...

Some examples:
• Florence and the Machine
• Johnny Cash
and
• Nerina Pallot

Woo for data-driven websites, semantic markup and Musicbrainz identifiers. Perhaps there's hope for the major labels yet...! ;)

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Kickstarter for new Amanda Palmer record raises half a million $... in two days

Thu, 03 May 2012 01:36:00 -0700

(via @musicregistry and billboard.biz)

I'm a big Amanda Palmer fan, both of her music and her kickass attitude to all things art+tech.

She set up a Kickstarter to fund independent promotion of her new record. Modestly set the goal at $100k. And after just two days she's raised close to half a million dollars.

Go, pledge! Awesome.

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What Does Sweetness Sound Like? | Food & Think

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 02:01:00 -0700

What Does Sweetness Sound Like?

Does what you are hearing affect how you taste?

Charles Spence is multisensory researcher in London, who has been messing around with how sounds modify flavor. “We’ve shown that if you take something with competing flavors, something like bacon-and-egg ice cream, we were able to change people’s perception of the dominant flavor—is it bacon, or egg?—simply by playing sizzling bacon sounds or farmyard chicken noises.”

This might sound crazy, but the otherworldly ice cream makes one thing clear: The sound of food matters. So does the sound of the packaging and the atmospheric sounds we hear when we’re eating. We’re all synesthesiates when we sit down to dinner.

(via TheKitchn.com and blogs.smithsonianmag.com)

The effect of hearing sounds - on what you taste... Very cool!

Also, it's part of a series on music and food:

Jingles

Food truck tunes

Ice-cream trucks and the law

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Making Music Together Increases Kids’ Empathy

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 01:49:00 -0700

Music education produces myriad benefits, strengthening kids’ abilities in reading, math, and verbal intelligence. New British research suggests it may also teach something less tangible, but arguably just as important:

The ability to empathize.

In a year-long program focused on group music-making, 8- to 11-year old children became markedly more compassionate, according to a just-published study from the University of Cambridge. The finding suggests kids who make music together aren’t just having fun: they’re absorbing a key component of emotional intelligence.

(via somewhere-I've-forgotten-sorry and psmag.com)

Interesting new study from the Centre for Music and Science in Cambridge.

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Rock Star Neko Case's Farmhouse Kitchen

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:53:00 -0700

It's not every day you get to peek into a rock star's home kitchen — and it's not often you find a rock star like Neko Case, who lives in a 1787 farmhouse in Vermont, and who not only loves her homey kitchen, but keeps a piano there and composes much of her music right in the middle of the kitchen. Read on for a picture of her whole kitchen...

(via thekitchn.com)

DREAM KITCHEN ACCESSORY = PIANO.

Full article at Country Living.

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A Musician’s Guide To Pinterest | Indie Ambassador

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:33:00 -0700

Pinterest is a digital scrapbook of your life. A way to tell the world who and what you are with visual snapshots. A way to follow and connect with a community of like-minded people without talking. Digital stalking has just gone artsy, and apparently 10.4 million users have jumped on the bandwagon. 140 characters is just too much. Pictures speak louder than words.

But is this new social media site relevant to the music industry? Can musicians harness the power of Pinterest to their advantage? In a word, “yes.” Below is my guide to Pinterest for musicians.

(via DIY Musician and indieambassador.com)

Pinterest? Meh, I don't know...

But this guy seems to.

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