[T]he “Previous Track” button loses and resets my playback position, which is extremely frustrating and disruptive to listening. And there’s no “Undo”.

This is a frustration for me too. I use my iPhone for almost all of my listening these days; and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit the wrong button — on either side — when I meant to press Pause.

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In the car MEGAN puts on one of her favorite recordings: Chick Corea's El Bozo from My Spanish Heart

TIM, jamming out: There's only like four chords here; but, Chick can make so much chromatic harmony in the voice leading. Listen!

MEGAN: Uh-huh.

TIM tries to sing some of the voice leading to, you know, learn her some stuff.

MEGAN: I feel like Chick Corea is telling me not to worry about chords right now.

She is so smart.

Next year, composer Steve Reich will debut a new work entitled “Radio Rewrite” at London’s Southbank Centre. The piece, to be performed by 13 musicians on March 5, 2013, is based on two Radiohead songs, Kid A‘s “Everything in its Right Place” and In Rainbows‘ “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

I wonder if Radiohead will play the premiere. That could be a great ticket.

(h/t: aworks)

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Simply asking Mr. Cube would have taken all of the fun out of it.

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Hundreds of musical attributes are used to describe songs. Twenty-six alone describe vocal performance: how breathy or gravelly it is, how much falsetto is used, and more. That’s too much nuance for software on its own. So we hired humans–specifically, professional musicians with four-year degrees in music. Every day, they come into the office, put on headphones, and listen to every song that will ultimately play on Pandora, listing as many as 450 different attributes a pop. When combined with users’ past listening habits, those detailed fingerprints enable our algorithms to discern, for example, that when you say you like the Beatles, you’re talking about their earlier sound and not their later one.

Somehow I missed that job posting. Too bad.

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My own cheeky suggestion is that the decline of the recorded music market and the rise in interest in good food, craft beer, etc among young consumers aren’t wholly coincidental.

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Paul Schütze: So duration is a function?

Elaine Radigue: It’s included in the fact of creating these kinds of sounds, which I was fascinated by early on; I loved these sounds. I want to catch or to deal with them so I have to be very careful and respectful with them. In between two tape-recorders, if you touch the microphone or the potentiometer [a level control dial or fader] even slightly there is change. If you do it too quickly or powerfully everything collapses. I have always been very fond of the second movement in classical music, which is quite slow, quite suspended. This is what I’m looking for.

I, too, am a sucker for second movements. They’re normally my favorite of the entire piece. I guess Elaine and I are romantics at heart.

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No, I don’t know why.

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The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Stay vigilant. Demand campaign finance reform.

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