Crazy_Arms_Lucas_CC_SA

This is an experiment I’m doing with Jay Dedman. He made the video, I made the music.

Jay Dedman hooked up my 2 spirit of gods music with his crazy arms videoblog entry. In the posting that started the thread, he had a licensing problem with music:

After posting my video today for Videoblogging Week 2007, commenters pointed out that I used a commercial song that I had no rights to use. Most people would be like ‘who cares?’..but in this case, it’s important. We just had a big event this past Saturday where Jon and Colette spoke about Creative Commons. If we videobloggers want respect from commercial companies (ie dont steal our stuff!)…we must respect existing copyright law. This means don’t use commercial music without permission.

time to get off the commercial media nipple once and for all.

Soundtracks for videoblogs are an ideal application of blog music. In both cases the media has to be fast, cheap, conversational and copyleft. This is an instance of remixing outside of the mashup genre, and an instance of redistribution outside of filesharing.

It’s also a case where the new medium shows how it is different in substance from the old one.

Blogging a soundtrack for a blogged video is about the same kind of thing as blogging a text comment on somebody else’s textual blog entry by a third party, except that the form of the conversation crosses boundaries from one art to another.

Catpower was the music provider in Jay’s first video, but Catpower was never involved in the thread. Since conversation is about who makes a conversational gestures as much as what they say, the stars from the old medium of offline audio need to make a deliberate effort to participate if they want to be part of the new medium.


This video was originally shared on blip.tv by jaydedman with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. (Donate)

2 spirit of gods

This is two guitar instrumental versions of the Mormon hymn “Spirit of God.” Neither has much of a godly spirit to it. I like them for the phrasing.

For more information on this hymn see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_God_Like_a_Fire_Is_Burning. I learned the tune from sheet music at Mutopia. I blogged a previous version of it on 12/3/2006. These are licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 per my standard license on my own music.

Version one here is abrupt and tricky:


feb 6 2007 spirit of god version 2 edit 2 (mp3)

feb 6 2007 spirit of god version 2 edit 2 (ogg)

Version two is woodsy and sweet:


spirit of god february 4 2007 (mp3)

spirit of god february 4 2007 (ogg)


Postscript: creating this blog entry was a lot of work, much more than it should have been, because of the relatively poor technical infrastructure for blog musicians and because of my blog host’s industry-lagging support for multimedia. Despite the lavish over-investment in web video in recent years, audio is still in a basically broken state.