Month: November 2008

mix2r

mix2r

A music-makers community which improves on prior art by adding a collaboration platform.

Mix2r basically echoes the traditional workflow involved in creating multi-track digital audio recordings with one important difference. It uses a centralized portal to allow collaborations between musicians from any geographical location as long as they can access the site and have a basic (free) or pro (paid) membership. Mix2r has a well thought out data model which allows needs and capabilities to be matched.

postapocalyptic visions of the record industry

From the comments on sue em all not good for labels, here’s Greg on the prospects for the music industry:

It’s kind of like Dr. Bloodmoney or one of the other good Phil Dick post-apocalyptic novels: most of civilization may have been destroyed, but some industrious tinkerer out there can probably put together a wood-burning car, the kindly kid in the radio shop turns out to be telekenetic, and the small rodents evolve high intelligence.

On my optimistic days, I find this state of affairs exciting and stimulating — you never know what weird creature could come along mext — but just as often it seems dreary and near hopeless: there is, after all, a lot to mourn for.

And Victor’s response:

it does seem that taking something away as fundamental as charging per “copy” would be wrenching under the most visionary, forward thinking authority.

Meanwhile, the death of “my favorite band” seems to me a cultural phenom almost separate from sue-em-all and more a by product of other forces. Kids don’t seem to pin their parental-anxieties on celebrity rocks stars like they did in past generations. I don’t mourn that.

Unlike most, I don’t think things are over for the labels. I think that they are going to shrink to the size of the licensing opportunities, for example in helping jeans, cars, and games to sell. But once they get there they’ll stop shrinking, because the recordings they own will stay cultural milestones. If the song publishers — an industry rooted in the 19th century — can remain a big deal in the 21st century, the record companies can find a durable niche as well.

gamestrument #2

sull posts a screencast of his session with the innerpartysystem gamestrument, in which he gets high score.

Question: how would you do “high score”? Couldn’t you have ratings on these things to enable that?

Question: is it possible to have really different expressions in a gamestrument, or is the expressive range more limited than that? Is there more than one song in a given set of samples, or are all jams pretty much the same?

Greg brings up r2dj and Bloom as relations if not siblings to innerpartysystem. I did play with Bloom, though not a lot. And with r2dj I watched the tutorial but didn’t snag it myself.

These are both generative music apps which accept input from the user. They’re different from the innerpartysystem app in the way that the user/player interacts. In innerpartysystem the user is directly triggering music events in real time, while in r2dj and Bloom the user is tweaking parameters. An r2dj creator is writing software to react to the runtime environment. In Bloom the creator is injecting randomness in a John Cage-inspired style.

Anybody out there gotten closer to them than this?

birth of the gamestrument

Embed:

No embed: http://innerpartysystem.shuffl.es/dontstop?r=63

That is fucking wondrous.

First of all, the impact of in-browser-music-making is not trivial or obvious. You can’t be blase about it.

But beyond that, what’s striking about this particular hack is how high-level it is. It pulls the end user up several levels from decisions like the selection of video clips or specification of harmonic progressions. The user is closer to the level of a music game like Guitar Hero, except that game play is open ended. You don’t score points by playing this game, you make music.

It would be cool to use a selection of these open-ended-music-games as the DJ for a party. Maybe there would be a person selecting and queuing up the games, so that there was some kind of playlist. The overall impression would be similar to parties where the music is coming from people doing Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

Know of anything similar out there? Instruments verging on games and vice versa?

internet audio FTW

Audio | For The SystemAudio | For The System

Hamlet:

Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.

Ghost:

[Beneath] Swear by his sword.

Hamlet:

Well said, old mole, canst work i’ th’ earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.

Horatio:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167

Not that this is the most amazing music in the world, but that the musical creativity flung across the corners of the internet is.

Flash album art at Thinner

The Thinner netlabel uses Flash for album art, but keeps the art conceptually very close to traditional album art — square, static, not too big. What they’re adding to the concept is subtle animations, which you’ll see if you go to one of the album pages, hit a play button, and stay awhile.

various artists – zu hause² remixes is an early version, and the changes are so subtle you barely notice them, like they’re trying to sneak past. daniel gardner – under the shower tower is more recent, and more active.