Luigi Felici and the folks over at have put the finishing touches on - a VST synth that emulates quite well the sounds and function of a circuit-bent or otherwise broken drum machine.
As they describe it, “To the fact that the broken sound is desirable. Yes! Knobs turn for satisfaction defective!”
© Michael Una for , 2008. | |
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What is the sound of an invisible hand playing a MIDI controller?
Yes, in the latest evidence that the Interwebs really are Douglas Adams’ imagined , a conversation from CDM’s humble forums about the economics of Radio Shack and MIDI jacks has led to a blog response from a non-musician defending the true legacy of Adam Smith.
I’m serious. I’m not just, you know, dumbing down CDM and pandering to the economist audience to pick up cute economist girls.
The blogger also feels our forum poster say “dude” too much. Like, whatever. Don’t have a cow, man.
It started with a thread about the . (Personally, I wouldn’t try to extrapolate any kind of larger economic theory from a chain run as badly as Radio Shack has been under recent management, but our posters did, and I digress.)
UK economic blogger Gavin Kennedy fires back:
The myths about the invisible hand are widespread and deep. It has been switched from supporting an argument of Adam Smith about risk-avoiding merchants contemplating the risks of foreign trade into an all purpose guide to individuals in markets …
The real wonder about markets is that there is no central direction; there are no invisible hands, feet, or disembodied parts, guiding anybody. There does not need to be! The relative prices of whatever is exchanged are the only guides needed. It’s called the price system. That’s what Adam Smith actually said.
And he compares the myth of the invisible hand to the myth of Santa Clau– hey, stop crying, Suzie. I’m only joking. The invisible guiding direction of market economics is real, and it’s going to bring you a MicroKORG next Christmas, but that’s not until December and your birthday isn’t even until October.
Ahem.
Of course, Gavin is right.
Image credits: gravestone of Adam Smith, ; gravestone of Radio Shack, .
© Peter Kirn for , 2008. | |
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HypnoSapien (aka Patrick Petro) loved the Zendrum, the . But he wanted something compact with a specific configuration. He writes:
Check out the new Zendrum ZAP desktop midi percussion controller, the first truly professional level instrument of its kind. I contacted Zendrum about custom building this particular model for me with this particular pad configuration. They loved it and made it a full production model.
The results: a Zendrum that costs less than the other models (US$999 list) and fits into tight spaces.
Of course, cool as this hardware may be, it’s easily upstaged by the ridiculously dexterous finger-drumming chops of Maestro Petro, as seen in this demo video:
As Patrick says, “Good stuff! My ZAP is my 256’s new best friend. Mmm…wood.”
Actually, that’s not a bad coupling at all — one of my criticisms of monome way back before all the Web buzz when it was released was that its buttons lack velocity sensitivity. With monome handling button-pressing duties and ZAP responding more as an instrument, your fingers should be very happy indeed.
[Zendrum Catalog]
© Peter Kirn for , 2008. | |
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We live in an age of disposable electronics. iPod battery wears out or new prettier iPod arrives, and old iPod gets tossed. Or, if you’re Norwegian sound artist and musician Espen Sommer Eide, your iPod could live a second life far more interesting than its first.
The Slåttberg is a custom musical instrument fashioned from an iPod running Linux, , the iPod-ready version of open-source multimedia patching software Pure Data, a 60s-era loudspeaker cabinet, an internal amp, and, most importantly, a big crank. Plugged into a Moogerfooger FreqBox, the resulting instrument feels like a reimagined analog Hurdy-Gurdy. Espen says he was inspired by deconstructing Norwegian fiddle music, and it comes out in the instrument not only in the sound but in the sense this creation is something Norwegian ethnomusicologists might collect, alongside ancient Scandinavian flutes.
Those of you in Norway, let us know how the premiere goes, and what else happens at the festival — sounds terrific. Espen writes:
Hi being a regular reader of your site, and since your article about the pdpod a while back inspired me to use my old ipod for this project - I thought you might be interested to check it out. A preview video of a custom built musical instrument by Espen Sommer Eide, artist and member of Alog and Phonophani. The Slåttberg will premiere at the Borealis Festival for contemporary music Bergen, Norway late february 2008.
Alog, by the way, is the acclaimed duo of which Espen is one half. And anyone who (the “famous gestalt psychological figure representing both a duck and a rabbit depending upon the point of view”) wins still more bonus points.
© Peter Kirn for , 2008. | |
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AFP - A Swedish prosecutor filed charges on Thursday against four people suspected of running one of the world's most popular websites for illegal downloading of films, music and computer games.
AFP - Egypt's telecommunications ministry appealed Thursday for Internet users to stop downloading movies and MP3s so as to give priority to businesses after damage to an undersea cable forced all traffic onto backup systems.
Have you been keeping up on the latest trends in the music industry? Even though sales of digital music have risen by 40% since last year, the IFPI reports that there are 20 illegal downloads for every legally purchased track. Many companies are betting that an ad-supported revenue system is the future of the music industry. Not surprisingly, labels have been hesitant to come on-board with an ad-supported model and are currently lobbying governments around the world to enforce a new internet music tax.
Let us know what you think about these new ad-supported services. Would you get your music from them instead of iTunes or similar digital music stores? Can you think of a better way to sell music online? Let us know.
is a new service that gives fans free legal music. Fans discover new music and legally download full-length, high-quality versions of their favorite songs while compensating both the artists and the record labels through non-intrusive and relevant advertising.
takes a different approach to free, ad-supported music by embedding an ad in each song that users must listen to before listening to the music.
(CBS) now lets you stream the full track of any song three times for free.
is a music sharing site that has convinced major labels to add their catalogs for a cut of the ad revenue the site generates from a user listening to a song.
Know of another site you like that we did not list here? Let us know in the comments.
And by this I don't mean I'm changing my mind, merely that it's the next entry.
which put me in mind of the comments I dug up from 1999 on my end in regarding how albums as such would no longer be a dominant form. To quote the story:
The end result, then, seems to be same as pundits have been predicting for the last few years: as the audience that grew up on the album as it's understood dies out, the format itself will become an ever-shrinking, vestigial art practiced by throwbacks and holdouts ignoring that MP3s have long-since-obliterated any sense of obligation on listeners' parts to keep the songs they think suck, the art form doomed to a (very slow) death once playlists made it possible to self-edit an album without having to wear our your skip button or nudge the stylus ahead every few songs.
The comments section exploded into a bit of a war over that but the conclusion strikes me as sound, if of an overdetermined sort. If there's been a constant complaint about the record industry over this decade, it started with the idea, often voiced in the days of Napster, that companies were charging too much for discs that people only ever wanted one or two songs off of in the first place. It's a comment that tends to reinforce its own logic, but it is always has a curiously built-in assumption -- namely, that albums were uniformly created in a cookie-cutter way where there was a key item of purported economic value surrounded by a bunch of unnecessary packaging.
You can flippantly agree with that if you like, but step back a bit -- we're not talking about endless bags of potato chips where half the content is always guaranteed to be air. If every person thought every album was always going to be the same way in the sense described -- if in fact that could be proven to be the case, objectively -- then it would make sense. Instead, it became an understandable but illogical canard, but one with just enough emotional impact to work. After all, we'd think, we've all been burned that way before, one way or another. True, doubtless -- but constantly?
This may all seems little more than sophistry at this point; the cows have long since bolted, etc. etc. -- pick a metaphor or simile you're comfortable with. Still, even though I agree with there things are going now, I'm not thinking it was necessarily the baseline assumption made at the start of the decade -- if anything, that was more an understandable excuse. Playlists, as the Idolator post notes, were the real turning point -- the ability to rapidly search, organize and present material, whether through iTunes or iPods or something else again. The impact will continue to play out, of course.
More tomorrow, as I continue to work through all those CDRs...
So. Today is/was supposed to be Day One of a new online service with an irresistable headline: blared the Times of London this morning, breathlessly announcing the launch of a "game-changing intervention in the declining record industry" at the in Cannes.
, is a new ad-supported online music service that,
...is the first free P2P service to be fully embraced by the music industry. With a base catalog estimated at between 25 and 30 million copyrighted tracks from all the major labels, publishers and a host of leading indies, QTRAX has the largest legal library of any music service on the market.
How will they do it? Through DRM (Digital Rights Management) encoding of tracks from the four major record groups, and, the Times observes, "As with iTunes, customers will have to download Qtrax software. They will own the songs permanently but will be encouraged to “dock” their player with the store every 30 days so it can gather information on which songs have been played." Oh, and the service is not compatible with your iPod.
Only..... it rather embarrassingly turns out that Qtrax had failed to cross a few t's and dot a few i's........
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Qtrax, a new free music download service, backed off claims that it has deals with all four major music companies after Warner Music Group denied it had agreed terms with the start-up.
"Warner Music Group has not authorized the use of our content on Qtrax's recently announced service," Warner, the No. 3 music company, said in statement late on Sunday.
Qtrax said late on Sunday, "We are in discussion with Warner Music Group to ensure that the service is licensed and we hope to reach an agreement shortly."
A source close to Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, told Reuters it also did not have a deal with Qtrax but discussions were continuing.
The Los Angeles Times also reported on Sunday that EMI Group executives said it had not agreed terms with Qtrax.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second largest music company, was not immediately available.
Ouch! What a way to launch - missing three out of four of your major partners? Just one of many dubious claims to this new enterprise, I think.
What I found most interesting about the Times of London story was not so much the story but the reaction of the readers. They are neither fooled nor amused at the many obvious flaws in the Qtrax business plan. (scroll to the bottom to read 'em). If I'm a Qtrax exec, these comments would make me plenty nervous:
They've created an Internet radio station that spies on you. All of your musical listening preferences are just one subpoena away from public information. God help you if you've been listening to death metal and are going through a child custody battle. Big Brother wants to watch you.
A crippled music industry is finally admitting defeat. Of course Qtrax will not work! I'm done with spying softwares and people controlling what I do, listen to, etc. Leave alone the advertising.
If there isn't native Linux support, iPod support count me out straight away.
If it's full of ads or poor quality rips - also count me out.
So does this mean that EMI and the others in the RIAA will compensate those whose lives they have ruined by lawsuits?
I really suspect that anything which has been "in development" for 5 years is at least 4 years too late.
Amen to that. If you're still with me this far down, you might enjoy what the resident snarkologists (caution!: some geek-speak and may require translation) have to say about how the "backend" of the Qtrax system...
So when the going gets weird, the weird get ad-funded. Even in the short, strange history of digital music, they don't come weirder than Qtrax, a music service that launched here at Midem in Cannes today. It's a marriage of two desperate industries – the music business, and the ad-supported web startup. To steal a phrase from Sun's Scott McNealy, it's like watching two garbage trucks colliding.
So how weird is this?
Qtrax delivers an unlimited supply of free music to the web surfer, for them to keep, by scraping the Gnutella P2P network, sticking ads on the front end, filtering out the bogus files (that the IFPI and RIAA have put on the P2P networks in such abundance over the years), and wrapping the song files in DRM.
If that isn't surreal enough, the company pushed a bewildered looking James Blunt on stage with a broom to say how stealing from the sweat shop was wrong. And that he didn't really know much about what was going on – but he'd like to.
Qtrax is staffed by refugees from SpiralFrog, the clueless ad-supported web startup that was unveiled in a blaze of publicity but never quite launched properly – yet still managed to fork over $2m to Universal Music, the world's biggest record company, before it had made a single transaction. These business geniuses have now raised $30m from venture capital for their latest suicidal tilt at the market.
If you're going to fail, I guess, then fail hard and fast.