public practice

Check out
the good hearted musical activities at the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County
; for example public practice:

With the Music Center as backdrop and complete with the everyday sounds of downtown city life, each Public Practice session displays the process of practice, not performance, by a local, recreational musician immersed in warm-ups, scales, individual measures, tempo, short melodies, repetition or an unfamiliar piece of music.

slow music #2

What would slow music be?

A relevant aspect of slow food, per wikipedia, is that:

It claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion.

So local musicians and styles. Does that mean garage rock in Boston, hair metal in LA, and hardcore in DC? Here’s a gurdonark comment on the previous post:

I went last Saturday night to our local library auditorium, where the friends of the library sponsored a really fine jazz harpist doing arrangements of holiday songs, and the local symphony chorus did a selection of international songs of the various seasons. The arrangements and skill on display where amazing.

On the other hand, I saw on public television a major-label ensemble do a bombastic holiday special which was amusing in its scope, but ultimately entirely pre-packaged and non-local.

Maybe there’s an asshole factor. The musicians have to be pretty damn great, but the point isn’t to get arena rock musicians to come over for dinner. Having Axel Rose come over to mooch beers is probably a drag.

The World Institute of Slowness has an Alan Watts vs South Park mashup on slow music:

I dunno, though, man. The whole thing seems like it’s pining for the past.

One thing I’ll say about my own (living history) music, anyhow: it’s slow. The edits that most musicians make with software, I do with practice and retakes. If I want a section to be rounder or sharper I need to find a way to get my hands to do it in real time, and then I have to get enough repetition in that I’ll keep doing it when I’m on stage. If I’m making a recording I have to keep doing takes until I get one with all the details the way I want them to be. It makes me think about life in the olden days.

slow music

Allison Outhit posted this to the Pho list:

What we need is Slow Music. Just like Slow Food. It’s a perfect metaphor.

Slow Music would focus on local, sustainable artists who don’t have to travel thousands of miles to get to your “table”. Slow Music appreciates and promotes “heritage crops” (ie, life-long careers… Artists over 30…) as well as tasty new varietals.

Slow Music tastes better, looks brighter, comes in astonishing variety. It may look a bit flawed compared to the airbrushed Frankenbands we’re used to having foisted on us. But that’s because it’s non-GMO, farmed, produced and consumed with care by people who give a damn.

That’s a beautiful idea, not to mention a very fine marketing angle for local music.

For example, there’s a piano teacher in your neighborhood who really can play the hell out of Brahms, and there are people in the neighborhood who’d enjoy great Brahms playing if they didn’t have to get dressed up and go to symphony hall.

Streampad to AOL

Streampad acquired by AOL:

Streampad has been acquired by AOL! As many of you know, I’ve been working at AOL Music for the past year as a Lead Engineer. When I joined AOL a year ago, it quickly became apparent how much in line my vision for Streampad was with the roadmap of AOL Music. Now, we can combine the vast library of assets and editorial voice of AOL with the playback and library management features of Streampad.

Dan Kantor, the author of that post, was the creator of Delicious PlayTagger as well as Streampad. The impact of this move on online music would be for AOL to ship large scale software incorporating Dan Kantor’s webby vision.

monome as turntable

The glitch musician Bit Basic, who made the excellent Grating Rainbows netalbum on Monotonik, has created a…

Max/MSP patch for the ‘monome’ interface called ‘dj64’. It allows the user to model the actions of conventional turntables


dj64 for Monome – by Bitbasic from simon on Vimeo.


Thinking about the monome in terms of the convergence of music making and gaming, this casts the turntable as a primitive ancestor of the handheld game console.


P.S.: I turned that audio page on Internet Archive into a playlist by incorporating Goose/Yahoo Media Player/FoxyPlayer and linking with this syntax:

<a 
href="http://www.archive.org/details/mtk186" 
class="playthispage">
  Grating Rainbows
</a>

style in web dev

One of the major threads in the substance of style by Virginia Postrel, which I blogged about on October 31, is about understanding why a rational buyer would invest in purely decorative assets. How can it be that spending more on a black iPod than a white one is a good decision?

The answer comes out to a riff on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which oversimplifies to the point of being wrong or at least deceptive. The Maslow perspective on buyer goals is that they are prioritized according to how primitive they are. Breathing is more primitive than friendship, hence it gets more priority.

Maslow’s idea suggests that it’s a bad idea to put money into esthetics before you are completely done attaining more primitive goals. So if you haven’t bought dinner yet, don’t get that shiny red ribbon in the store window.

Postrel’s rebuttal is that (in my words), esthetics are a value like anything else and you will choose to invest when the economics are favorable. You need a new car and you want a red ribbon, but one costs more than you have and the other is pocket change.

She has an illuminating example about the looks of computers. Personal computers got a lot better looking in the past ten years, specifically beginning with the Sony Vaio and Apple iMac. (Tangent: blobjects). At the same time they reached a certain parity with consumer needs: the relentless progress of Moore’s law stopped making a practical difference to buyers. Buyers don’t particularly need further increments in system performance, or at least their need isn’t on par with the cost. On the other hand, they do need more attractive living environments, and the additional cost of a more attractive box on their desk is reasonable.

Consumers started to emphasize shallow looks over meat and potatoes performance because the return on investment in looks started to exceed the return on investment in performance.

What it means to web developers and makers of music products is that you should consider chrome as part of your overall value proposition. Hiring a graphic designer might do more for the user than hiring a database administrator. Visual customization to match their profile page might be a higher priority for the user than functional customization with an API. A fashionable look might matter more to them than a fast load.

You have to weigh the relative importance of looks from the user’s perspective. They may be happy to squint for the sake of a sexier font choice, but then again squinting may drive them away to a site which is more readable. There’s no one answer.

The takeaway for me is that users needs are not a strict hierarchy, and sometimes the best thing for them is to put development time and money into sex appeal.