simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with music

The Kaiser Chiefs have a new album out called "The Future Is Medieval" Their web site lets users make custom versions of the album by choosing tracks and designing the cover. My version is at the above link. It's a cool idea. Wonder if it will increase sales...

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Drunk Girls is the new video from LCD Soundsystem (Wikipedia). It is stunning! Directed by Spike Jonze. Embedded below from the You in Tube.

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Video of Australian band Axis of Awesome demonstrating why all pop songs sound the same: four chords.

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Jim Pavloff has put up a couple of videos up on YouTube that re-create two Prodigy numbers in Ableton Live. He starts from a clean slate and gradually builds up the songs from samples and loops. It's fascinating viewing.

Smack My Bitch Up

Voodoo People

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Codeorgan analyses the source of a web site to produce music algorithmically based on the sites contents. Here's what simonb.com sounds like (MP3). Cool. Sounds OK to me. Could this be a new way of reviewing sites - based on what they sound like. This is what microsoft.com sound like. Not so good.

The audio was hijacked from Safari using Audio Hijack Pro.

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Playing around with the Sony Ericsson S500c, I tried out the built-in MusicDJ app. Similiar to GarageBand it allows the user to build up a song in blocks. It's a bit fiddly trying to compose on such a small screen and it's really something that you need to do either with headphones on or away from other people. MusicDJ uses MIDI rather than real audio clips to keep the file sizes small but it is possible to convert to audio as follows. I transferred the file to my Mac (by emailing it to myself from the phone) and opened…

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In 1983 Steve Jobs in a characteristically brilliant speech introduced the Mac as the solution to IBM's dominance in the PC industry. "IBM wants it all." He says a few times. A clip of the speech is available on YouTube (embedded below):

This speech was also the unveiling of the legendary 1984 Mac ad. Shot by Ridely Scott for the agency Chiat/Day. It won numerous awards despite only being officially shown on TV once during the superbowl. Here it is (YouTube):

Fast forward a quarter of a century and replace the PC industry with the music industry and IBM…

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Bill Drummond's memoir "45" is a great read (Amazon UK, US). It's about his time with the KLF, producing, music and art and reaching the age of 45. He's one of the more interesting artists around today. When he was with the KLF they wrote The Manual “HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE – THE EASY WAY”. It has been out of print for a long time but is now available for free on the web.

Here's a lecture he gave on the end of music as product.

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Two charity songs have recently appeared on YouTube. First we have the youngsters and a collaborative project called ChartJackers with a song called I've Got Nothing for Children in Need.

Second here's the oldies and a song called We Will Remember Them for The Royal British Legion.

Brings a tear to my eyes.

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Have you noticed your new CDs are louder than your old CDs (or even albums)? That's because the volume has been turned up in the mastering process. This results in a loss of dynamics (less difference between quiet and loud) and hence a worse sounding record. Now there's an industry organisation called Turn Me Up campaigning for a return to dynamics. They've made a demo video (embedded below from YouTube) which demonstrates the effects. Music Machinery has an excellent entry (complete with graphs) on this subject and here's the Wikipedia article. Quiet is the new loud.

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