Music (15)

Artists are doing it for themselves

Submitted by kratib on Tue, 2008-04-01 14:07.
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Intelligent musicians have realized that the Internet gives them the opportunity to reach their consumers directly, bypassing the dinosauric and frankly greedy middleman, yielding a fairer deal for everyone who deserves it. Radiohead and NIN are definitely not your average teeny boppers :-)

Musicians, take a good look at this page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbye/1813174776/

Guitar as 2D Piano

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-07-14 12:33.
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I've long regarded the guitar as a proto-2D piano, because whereas the piano keyboard is linear, one-dimensional, the guitar fretboard has cells arranged in 2D. However, on the guitar, one hand has to pluck the string whereas the other shapes the chords. On the piano, of course, it's enough to press the keys, so both hands are used to play notes.

So I was wondering what a true 2D piano would look like, one where both right and left hands would play notes. Turns out the answer has been with us since the late 70s, when Eddie Van Halen introduced tapping. But the full realization of it came yesterday when HC showed me some YouTube vids of contemporary (and young) musicians. Check out ZackKim and weep!

Louis Armstrong and the Sphinx

Submitted by kratib on Wed, 2007-07-11 10:36.
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I was watching episode 9 of the excellent documentary "Jazz", by Ken Burns yesterday when I bumped into this shot. I immediately grabbed it from the screen. Louis Armstrong was indeed a worldwide ambassador of jazz.

PS. You can buy me the print from the New York Times store ;-)

Music hacking

Submitted by kratib on Fri, 2007-06-01 01:57.
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It's more fun to compute

wav2xml

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-05-05 16:14.
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Take an MP3 file, extract the instruments performing the music (as well as the singing - we're dreaming anyway) and convert this information to sheet music in MusicML format for example. The Melisma Music Analyzer seems to be performing part of this function.

The first application of such a technology would be to find music by content: humming a tune to the system, which would then search for a similar melody in its database. Or input a partial mp3 file to find its reference. This is becoming a hot topic, as witnessed by the Google results. Existing systems are starting to emerge, like this one.

Linux as Jazz

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-05-05 14:20.
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Perhaps better entitled "Open Source as Jazz, and Linux as its popular standard".

In jazz, each musician improvises his part in the tune's performance. Knowing the skeletal structure of the tune, the musician applies his knowledge of harmony, rhythm and melody, along with some social knowledge of his fellow musicians, to produce meaningful phrases, amounting to intelligible overall statements. In doing so, the jazz band collectively creates a spontaneously original variation on a theme.

A Linux user also participates in the continuous recreation of his system. From writing shell scripts to automating simple tasks, through submitting bug reports and code patches to open source projects, to hacking kernel modules or desktop environments, nothing in Linux is the last word and thus improvisation is always needed.

Music as process notation

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-05-05 14:06.
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Music notation defines a choreographed sequence of musical actions to produce a desired physical result, the performance of the piece. The similarities with general process description are plenty but speculative. Instruments/staff lines correspond to roles. Notes correspond to sequential actions performed by each instrument, with its precise occurence and duration in the execution. Same for non-action, rest. The binary subdivision of time is a feature of musical notation and could prove very convenient for expressing more granular process timing. Music notation supports the concept of looping or iterating (via sectioning and those double dots) and of branching (D.C. al Coda). Music notation does not include interactivity with the performance-time output, process description does not provide for such interactivity either.

The natural groove

Submitted by kratib on Sat, 2007-03-17 13:06.
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We (humans) use many expressions in our everyday life related to rhythm:
"Miss a beat"
"Find my rhythm"
"Go at your own pace"
"Get into the groove" ;-)

In my experience, I've noticed that external events can happen either on the beat or the off-beat. Which beat you ask? Well, take a conversation between two people for example. When we speak, we do so at a certain pace, which immediately implies a beat (and associated off-beat). If I want to interrupt you while you're talking, I should choose an opportune moment where you'll be least likely to react in time to continue talking, which is on the off-beat of your speech. There are classic movie moments that illustrate this phenomenon:

Intel jingle

Submitted by kratib on Tue, 2007-01-09 21:01.
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Music is a great mnemonic tool to establish mind share. Technology companies have been using it successfully: the Nokia ring tones, the Microsoft Windows startup and shutdown tunes and the Intel Inside jingle have become almost universally recognizable.

It is a creative challenge to devise a short (~5 secs) musical sequence that has a strong enough individuality to be remembered and associated with a brand. As an amateur musician and professional software developer, I am interested to find the logic/art behind these jingles, so I looked for a transcription of existing ones. Here's what we found:

Music festival web site pattern

Submitted by kratib on Fri, 2006-10-20 01:19.
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I attempt to document common practices for designing a music festival web site for an upcoming job:

Most festival sites use standard CMS layouting: header, footer, side menus, and main content.

HEADER:
* Schedule
* Artists (aka Line Up)
Artists pages contain a brief write-up on each band, a photo, a link to their schedule during the event and an external link to their site.
* Map (aka Getting There)
* Tickets

MAIN BLOCK:
The main block is typically a photo rotator displaying artists' photos with their names, or a photo collage of previous gigs. Below are news items concerning the festival.

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