By

Robert Henke

When we started working on Live, and finally showed a first Version in 2001, the big music software companies did not take us very serious. “A laptop on stage? You must be crazy!” or “This interface looks horrible!” were reactions we got often. However, we are now the most successful music software company out there, with an incredible number of customers all over the world, and our software massively changed the way electronic music is created and performed.

It became very easy to make music. And this is bad. Everyone can make a boring uninspired piece of music in a lunch break, and it will sound good and ‘professional’. It became really very, very easy to make music with our software. And this is great! Because it not only allows highly musical people with limited budget to create fantastic and complex music, it also allows those folks like me to dive deeper into the creation and exploration of music, sound and structure than ever before. I never spent less time thinking of technology and more time making music with it. Well, apart from my engagement with the company.

. . . part of Music Mondays

I’ve recently become a huge fan of these guys and their audio visual jungle noise!

This entire animation was created with wooden blocks, no CGI at all. That’s pretty amazing if you ask me. If you loved the video check out the “making of” where the band gets interviewed about the creative process (subtitled).

. . . part of Music Mondays

Check out Little Boots and her band mates in Vancouver as they head down the slopes. They are in Toronto April 29 and Montreal April 30 so hopefully I will be able to check the show out!

Total professionals, doctors are top notch. Especially doctors of philosophy!

Download an mp3 of my remix of Vibrapshere’s Wasteland. I have uploaded it to zippyshare, for the time being. Download Vibrasphere – Wasteland (firewire coldplaysucks re-edit) here.

You can also check out a video of the remix in Ableton here:

TOO MANY STEROIDS, AGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

By Alex Massaad

THE rumbling bass from the party animals next door need no longer keep you awake at night. Cheap and effective soundproofing can be yours in the shape of novel tiles made from latex and a few plastic buttons.

Low-frequency sounds, especially, seem to seep through most domestic walls. That’s because of their long wavelength, says Zhiyu Yang at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon. Bass sounds at 100 hertz have a wavelength of over 3 metres in air, “and several times longer in solids”, he says.

To block out all sound, buildings would need walls several metres thick. Now Yang and his team have developed soundproof panels made of latex and plastic buttons, that will do the job (Applied Physics Letters, DOI: 10.1063/1.3299007).

These noise-cancelling panels consist of a latex rubber membrane stretched over a 3-millimetre-thick rigid plastic grid of 1-centimetre-wide squares. In the middle of each square is a small, weighted, plastic button.

When sound waves hit the panel, the membrane and weighted buttons resonate at difference frequencies. “The inner part of the membrane vibrates in opposite phase to the outer region,” says Yang. That means the sound waves cancel each other out and no sound gets through.

Each weighted membrane only cancels out sound waves within a small band of frequencies. But changing the weight of the buttons alters the operational frequency, says Yang. By stacking five membranes together, each tuned to a specific band, you can create a soundproof panel that works in the range from 70 to 550 hertz.

With these panels you can soundproof homes, says Yang. And the panel’s weight is equivalent to ceramic bathroom tiles, “although it’s slightly thicker at 15 millimetres”, he adds.

The panels could be used “in noisy environments such as airports”, says Xuanlai Fang at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “If these metamaterials can be manufactured economically, the impact can be very significant.”

How to do mpc pad finger drumming from Brandon Murphy on Vimeo.

Her voice is just ridiculous! Another great live video from Florence + The Machine. Don’t fall for the false ending, it keeps going!

Check out more Florence + The Machine Videos here.

Watch: Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Read: Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: Fan writing as textual poaching” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1988). 29 Nov. 2009
< http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/15295038809366691 >

My last screening returns to the land of fiction as I wanted a good example of the types of borrowing and rewriting that already exists heavily within Hollywood. Hopefully with the previous weeks exposure to liberal copyright politics the students will take a closer look at who has the right to control and change this culture. I went back to revisit our friend Henry Jenkins for another look at the relationship between consumer and producer in the Star Trek fan universe. Jenkins notices a trend of fan “poaching” where fans take away a chunk of the universe for their own personal celebration or use. From “adult interaction games, from needlework to elaborate costumes, from private fantasies to computer programming” Jenkins identifies a multitude of ways that Star Trek fans have recreated elements of the media for the basis of their own creative works. Jenkins concludes that fans are unaware or unafraid of copyright protection laws concerning the Star Trek universe and have continued “undaunted by the barking dogs” to poach cultural texts from copyright owners for celebration in their own way, on their own terms.