SonicTruths

The marvellously opinionated double act of Steve Lawson and Andrew Dubber carry on our series of guest posts by speakers from our Future of Musicianship event on May 1, 2012 in London. The Kiwi accent belongs to Dubber, the British one to Steve.

 

Steve Lawson & Andrew Dubber with Heli Rajasalo of Loving & Living Music

(via lovinglivingmusic.com)

A really fantastic addendum to the panel discussion. I particularly liked the discussion of music and jobs towards the end:

Andrew: Most of the young musicians who say [I want to play music for a living], they mean not that "I want my job to be playing music" but that "I want to play music, and I don't want a job!"

Andrew: So if you were re-writing music education poilcy from scratch... how do you approach that?

Steve: I think we play music to kids, and we get them excited about it. And we ask them "how do you think that was done?"" And then we teach them the music they love, whatever that may be.

Podcast on lovinglivingmusic.com.

The gTar is a fully digital guitar that makes it easy for anybody to play music, regardless of experience. All you have to do is dock your iPhone in the body, load up the gTar app, and an array of interactive LEDs along the fretboard will show you how to play. 

You may be asking yourself what it means for a guitar to be "digital." While most guitars have pickups to amplify the sound of vibrating strings, the gTar has none - instead, we've designed the gTar with sensors that detect exactly what you're playing in real-time and relay each note to your iPhone, which then produces the actual sound. This makes it possible for us to do all kinds of exciting things, so let's get into it!

Wow, this looks fantastic!

A versatile digital guitar which really teaches you to play a normal guitar - while having you creating real music from day one?

This is the way forwards.

London’s streets will become a stage for hundreds of talented young singers and musicians aged 11-25 this summer.

We're looking for any act that is portable from super singer songwriters to exhilarating ensembles. Prizes up for grabs include music kit, training and a coveted TfL busking licence. Performers could get the chance to perform at iconic locations including BT London Live, Hyde Park during the Games.

Applications can be made at www.molpresents.com/gigs.

Watch the launch video to get the lowdown and see last year’s winner, The Robbie Boyd Band in action:

I'm excited about this! Music should be an essential part of bringing London to life this summer for the games.

Geiger's network protocol, Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), provides a fully compliant IP connection between two computers. His setup uses a pair of Arduino microcontrollers, some sensors, a pair of xylophones and two people to play the xylophones.

[...] The Arduino is attached to a series of series of LED's. Each LED corresponds to a hexadecimal character, as well as a key on a xylophone. As an LED lights up, the human participant strikes the corresponding key on the xylophone. Piezo sensors are attached to each xylophone, so that they are able to sense when a note is played on the other xylophone. The Arduino for the receiving computer senses the note and then converts it back into hexadecimal code.

[...] Typically, it takes about 15 minutes to transmit a single packet at this rate -- if the volunteer is patient enough to complete a whole packet, and doesn't hit any wrong notes in the process. Such dedication and proficiency has turned out to be a rarity in trials, however. "Humans are really terrible interfaces," Geiger said.

I would love to see this. Actually, I'm not sure I would stick around for 15 minutes to see the first packet come in...!

Read the whole article, with link to the academic(?) paper here.

Music streaming will come of age next week when the UK industry comes together to launch the UK's first Official Streaming Chart.

The new Top 100 rundown, which will launch on Monday May 14, will be compiled by the Official Charts Company with data from the nation's leading streaming services and supported by the Entertainment Retailers Association (Era) and labels association the BPI.

The Official Streaming Chart will be the first chart which ranks audio streams from both ad-funded and subscription streaming services in the UK, to reflect the growing interest in this new generation of music services.

The Ministry of Defence has confirmed a sonic device will be deployed in London during the Olympics.

The American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) can be used to send verbal warnings over a long distance or emit a beam of pain-inducing tones.

The equipment was spotted fixed to a landing craft on the Thames at Westminster this week.

The manufacturer denies it is a weapon and the MoD said it would be used "primarily in the loud hailer mode".

A beam of pain-inducing tones.

This is one audio technology I am not in favour of.

The Next SoundCloud Launches In Private Beta…..

“Next SoundCloud has been re-engineered from the inside out,” said Eric Wahlforss, founder & CTO. “It’s much more than an aesthetic change. By making use of state of the art technologies available in the latest generation browsers, we’ve created a technology platform that enables us to provide a much better user experience and develop new features faster.”

Notable features included in the private beta launch:

Read the rest

Hello, I'm a musical time machine. Go back in time to hear how popular music has changed from 1940 to today, as told by the Billboard Top 100.

Fun!

Probably only fun if you're an Rdio user. (Free time-limited trials in the UK.)

Give it a try!

Musician and educator Will Kuhn caused quite an uproar in the iOS music community last week with a thought provoking article entitled “Writing Music On iOS Is Still A Bag Of Hurt.”  Despite the aggressive stance of the article’s title, Kuhn makes some intelligent points about the process of writing music on an iPad or iPhone and how it compares to the process of composing on a desktop computer.  He laments the lack of plugins on the iOS platform and makes some great suggestions for moving things along towards more efficient iOS music making.

[...]

It’s hard to argue with Kuhn on some points – we’ve all hit frustrating walls on our iPads that have made us long for our favorite features from a desktop DAW – but I have trouble calling that a bag of hurt.  I think there’s a lot of potential to change the way that we think about music production inside the iOS music world; I believe that we’re in a pretty amazing place right now and things are only going to get better.

iOS Music & You offers a thoughtful rebuttal to an interesting post about creating music on the iPad/iPhone.

Challenge: Name a style of music you dislike and it's up to fans of said style to find artists that could change your opinion.

Reddit comes through: a great resource for learning to like new genres of music...