Entries Tagged 'Music' ↓
September 4th, 2005 — Music
Thanks to VH1.com and TiVo I’ve been catching a lot of classic metal video’s from back in the day. When I was a kid, Dokken was my favorite band (yes, I can admit that!). I had all their tapes and loved the music. But it wasn’t until right before the first breakup of the band that I finally saw a video from them. I just thought that they just didn’t “do” videos (kinda like Metallica before “One”). Then on one of those flashback shows I saw Jeff Pilson (the bassist) groaning about how bad their videos were.
He wasn’t kidding.
Thanks to the Vh1 Classic show “Metal Mania” that Tivo keeps recording for me I have now been able to witness several Dokken videos. I’m really glad I didn’t see these back in the day, I probably would have stopped listening to the group. Not all of their videos were that bad, but there were some that were pretty cheesy.
But then again, cheesy is a realtive term. Kiss made some really, really, really cheesy videos. Everytime I see one of their videos from the 80’s I have to tell myself “They are a good band. Just go listen to their greatest hits. Looks and sound are two different things…”. And of course Kiss is not alone in sounding better than they looked (in videos), others that leap to mind are Twisted Sister, Ratt, and Poison…. among others.
I guess it just goes to show you that its the music that matters, not the image. When I listen to the music today it still rocks. When I watch the videos… well, they look a bit dated (i.e. goofy).
August 19th, 2005 — Music
One of the things I like the best about the internet is that it allows anyone to have a voice (although, sometimes that is the worst part about the internet too). And one group of people that I think need a voice bad are the independent artists.
There’s a lot that’s wrong with the music business (and the other entertainment businesses for that matter). The internet not only allows us to voice what is wrong but to also offer up an alternative.
Kristin Hersh is a great singer-songwriter who is using the internet to do her thing. Check out her newly re-designed website here and be sure to check out her thoughts about the music industry. Also check out her free music! I’ve been listening to her for a few years (she was in Throwing Muses, 50ft Wave, and has several great solo albums), and I highly recommend her stuff. It good!
May 28th, 2004 — Entertainment, Music
I’m a big fan of a lot of Boston area bands like
Throwing Muses, Belly, Juliana Hatfield, etc. I’ve been following
Kristin Hersh for a while now, and she has a new project called
50 Foot Wave. They are incredible. Seriously.
50 Foot Wave is planning to release several small albums a year and tour a lot (50 to 100 dates a year). The name pretty much describes the sound. Its a three piece band rocking out at full throttle. You can download (MP3) their 6 song EP/album for only $6 from their
website.
Check them out, they are sooooo cool. I’m a big fan of the idea of independent music, and Kristin really represents that idea well. My favorite tune at the moment is
Clara Bow. For me right now, this is a serious contender for the best album of the year. (My other choice would be Incubus’s “A crow left of the murder” which is just rocks to no end.)
May 20th, 2004 — Music, Programming
Have you every had an idea and then a little while later you see someone else had the same idea and actually acted on it? That happens to me every now and then, and yesterday it happened again.
There’s the article on the IBM DeveloperWorks site that talks about using Cellular Automata to create music. About a year or so ago I was brainstorming trying to think of that one elusive “cool” program that I could write. One of the ideas I thought of was a program that could generate techno style music.
To me, techno music sounds pretty mechanical sometimes. (Yes, there are cool song and groups, but I’m talking about overall.) And since a lot of music is programmed into synthesizers, I thought there had to be a way to make a program that could “generate” MIDI’s. The only problem is what would make a good source of data?
Simply feeding in strings of random numbers would certainly do the trick, but that probably would make for some pretty interesting (in a bad way) music. I certainly don’t think it would be anything one could dance to.
The only thought I could come up with would be if you could somehow get related data like the grabbing the last 1000 queries into
Google and then doing a frequency count on the terms. The most frequent term searched for could be translated into the underlying “beat” for the song (translating meaning somehow turning the word into an MIDI instrument and its’ pitch, etc.) and then adding the less frequent terms on top of it as other instruments. (sort of like a guitar that comes in and out of a mix on a song that features a drum and a piano.)
I never implemented it, mostly because I thought there would be a problem with getting a steady stream going. The web is so turbulent I was afraid that the beat/melody of the song wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds before degenerating into noise only for a new song to rise up. I guess I could have it loop on that good part, but how do I tell the computer what a good part is?
The
article on the IBM website has a really interesting approach. By using cellular automata the program will get a fairly steady stream of data so the underlying beat of the program is more steady (listen to the sound samples).
I’m not real knowledgeable about music theory, but I know what I like. And I think this is an interesting topic. I’ve heard people in the past comment on how video games could really be more immersive if the music could swell at the appropriate moments in the game (i.e. right before you get attacked by a monster). Perhaps a system like this could “read” the action in the game and then drive the sounds and music. Who knows, the Cellular Automata derived music (and the rules to convert it into MIDI) could be the wave of the future for games.