September 2009
58 posts
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August 2009
57 posts
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Karawane, on Dada et la Musique
This is the...
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“The mu major chord is something musicically inclined Steely Dan fans have often...”
– Thing I did not know: the undeniable magnetic power of Steely Dan is linked to the use of a special kind of chord, and this special chord is explored in detail (with audio examples) at this website:
Steely Dan - The Mu Major Chord
(via sass)
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Spelling is Scoring
Edward Rondthaler, a man I had never heard of before, died a couple weeks ago at age 104. According to the New York Times, he was best known for his “energetic campaign to respell English,” which would result in the opening lines of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” changing from this:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had...
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Another great post from acousmata:
Raymond...
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Wagnerian Statistics
On Smith’s mind was an age-old difficulty all soprano singers face: They mispronounce lyrics when singing powerfully in the top half of their range. This “soprano problem” was formally recognized at least as far back as 1843, when French composer Hector Berlioz wrote in his Treatise on Instrumentation that “[sopranos] should not be required to sing many words on high phrases, since this makes...
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The Psychologically Ideal Bowie
Another study to file under “ROFLscience”: The “ideal” Bowie song, based on a statisical feelings analysis of lyrics in Bowie’s oeuvre, correlated to success on the charts. Here is psychologist Nick Troop, discussing and then performing the ideal song.
So, in a little proto-analysis of what’s going on here. We have a rather complicated system behind a...
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Is sheet music silent music?
The Fiery Furnaces’ next album will consist of instruction, conventional music notation, graphic music notation, reports and illustrations of previous hypothetical performances, reports and illustrations of hypothetical performances previous to the formation of their hypotheses, guidelines for the fabrication of semi-automatic machine rock, memoranda to the nonexistent Central Committee of the...
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Nick Seaver / Max Ernst / M.I.A + Diplo / Kelis +...
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But did they play a C scale in unison?
SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) — Pioneering rockabilly guitarist James Burton led an ensemble of about 800 guitar players Saturday in a celebration of his 70th birthday, but failed in his attempt to make the Guinness Book of World Records.
Guinness lists the world’s largest guitar ensemble as 1,802 participants led by Andreas Vockrodt in Germany in 2007.
Now I am curious what that many...
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Watch
Wet Sounds is an underwater sound art gallery. A DEEP LISTENING EXPERIENCE Touring swimming pools in the UK and abroad it presents sound art nd music collages to the public outside the niche gallery setting. The audience floats and dives, ears submerged, immersed in sound.
(via Everyday Listening)
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The Pre-History of Recorded Sound
In the various histories of the events leading up to Edison’s invention of the phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott is a standard figure. His contribution to the process is the phonautograph—a machine that used a stylus to record sounds not to be heard, but to be seen. The idea was that with some development, these recordings (basically wavy lines in sooty paper) could be...
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We'll See How You Fend as a Cotton/Poly Blend
The Royal Opera House is “commissioning” a libretto for a new “experimental” opera via their twitter account.
The Royal Opera House is to stage an opera created through social networking site Twitter. Members of the public have been invited to submit their “tweets” online - messages of up to 140 characters - which will form the new libretto. The first scene of...
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Nick Seaver: “Estefan on the Beach”
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“I’m in the room, I am currently sitting in different cases.”
– Translation Party
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Imaginary Landscape No. 5 for the Jonas Brothers
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Study 40b for Player Piano - Conlon Nancarrow
One...
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In C In Live
I recently spent a little time trying to make a version of Terry Riley’s In C using Ableton Live.
The original piece, if you’re not familiar with it, is a landmark of aleatory minimalism—a score with 53 short fragments that are repeated by the players in an ensemble of varying size. Each fragment is repeated until a player decides to move on to the next. The collective result of...
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I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^! - Nick Seaver and the...
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I Am Sitting in a #$%#%^!
This weekend, my sound class topic was “noise.” The class was split into three parts (in my ongoing attempts to make sure I always schedule in too many things to do): unwanted sound, noise/signal, and linguistic noise. One thing I wish I could have included was a discussion of noise and skill—whether assessments of “noisiness” have something to do with inferring intention,...
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samreich:
The Portsmouth Sinfonia, otherwise...
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WatchFun.
(via mediateletipos)
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WatchThis is an experiment, where I count one byte up - from 00000000 to 11111111. I have assigned a sound to each bit and when it switches from 0 to 1, the sound is played.
(via Rhizome)
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Maryanne Amacher - Head Rhythm 1 / Plaything 2, on...
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Hearing (with) the Ears
As I mentioned in a previous post, I just participated in a hearing study. The researchers are gathering data about people with tinnitus and hyperacusis, as well as people like me, with regular hearing. Part of the testing they do uses otoacoustic emissions (OAEs).
These are sounds actually made by your ear in response to sounds you hear. From what I understand, measuring these sounds (through a...
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