free variable

I enjoy Rodrigo y Gabriela’s classical guitar cover of Metallica’s instrumental “Orion” (get the cd or mp3 from amazon.com) far more than I should admit. I will resist the temptation to point out how extensively mid-period Metallica and similar artists have borrowed the melodic and vertical materials of flamenco and just note that — except for some ill-advised signal processing during the bridge (on the recording, that is, not in the live video) — this song is wholly entertaining.

Keyboardist Enrico Baiano is apparently known for flexible tempi and unconventional interpretations. His live recording of Scarlatti’s sonata K.119 at the 2007 Scarlatti Music Festival in Japan (iTunes link; it is not in print on physical media as far as I can tell) is pretty over-the-top, in a great way. K.119 is one of Scarlatti’s more guitaristic works, and Baiano’s performance dramatically accentuates this element, presenting Scarlatti as a sort of proto-Romantic, Iberian Eddie Van Halen. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a while.

I’ve attached a video of a slightly less incendiary Baiano performance of this piece; it, too, is excellent.

Yesterday — as Tim, Greg, and I were heading back from an epic road trip — Greg mentioned that he had been meaning to listen to my song “An exciting film” from the first FAWM compilation (more info and an amusing story here; the song itself is available as a download from iTunes or Amazon). While this probably has the most exposure of any pop song I’ve written, I don’t regard it as my best work.

I haven’t had time to finish any productions in a while, but I’ve written some stuff that I’m still pretty happy with. Here’s a list of what I believe are the best songs of the madcap ontic and William Afham catalogs so far, in roughly chronological order and with some RIYLs; song title links are generally to MP3s:

1. “natural lemon flavor (archery target mix)” I wrote this while waiting for students to show up to my office hours one day when I was teaching CS 537 in the summer of 2005; as such, it probably has the highest bang-for-buck ratio of any time-wasting I did as a graduate student. Production info is here.
2. “akvavit” is probably the best of the William Afham songs; it’s more ambient and abstract than most of the madcap ontic material. Production info is here. (If you like this sort of thing, you may also want to check out the drone-based “exophora.”)
3. I wrote “grains of snow” for FAWM 2008; the idea was roughly: “what would a lament aria for synthesizer sound like?” I like the way it draws on my hip-hop, dub, and glitch influences while remaining melodic and accessible. Production info is here.
4. Recently, my productions have been influenced more and more by dubstep artists. “twilight” is probably the best of my dubstep tunes. (If you like dubstep, you may also want to hear “sometimes you are not so fond of me” and “provocations, too,” both of which are more cinematic and less dystopian.)

You can listen to the madcap ontic tracks mentioned above if you have Flash installed:

Of course, I welcome listener feedback, even if it’s just to say that you enjoyed (or hated) one of these songs.

One of the finest achievements of western art is Bach’s d minor Partita for solo violin (BWV 1004); in particular, the Chaconne is technically dazzling, emotionally loaded, and sublime. (For a fun middlebrow musicological excursus on the piece and its relation to German chorales, check out the Hilliard Ensemble’s amazing Morimur album — but be sure to get it on a physical disc; the liner notes explain the project and are spectacular.)

Below are a few beats of Antonio Sinopoli’s guitar transcription of the Chaconne. Unlike Segovia’s famous and idiosyncratic arrangement, Sinopoli eschews scordatura and transposes to e minor; he is otherwise far more faithful to the original. The score I have was published by Ricordi Buenos Aires; it identifies the piece as “Chacona” and the author as “Juan S. Bach” (!)

RIYL: Music for the rest of your life.

John S. Gray writes, in a comment on one of my all-time favorite posts, to share an endorsement of Sony’s ATRAC3Plus codec for classical music recording. As far as I can tell, Gray is the audio archivist for the Canadian Music Centre, so I’m inclined to accept his perceptions as sound. I also find Gray’s claim that a high-capacity Minidisc beats a slow tape for fidelity on long recordings extremely plausible.

I am rather dismayed that solid-state and hard-disk based recorders seem to have displaced the Minidisc from its former prominence. The media were cheap, the devices were small and convenient — and more than suitable for field (and performance) recording as well as mobile listening. (The ubiquity of iPod-like players that can handle days of music in AAC or lossless formats certainly reduced the utility proposition of MDs for playback.) In fact, the only inconveniences I experienced with my minidisc player over many happy years were political, not technical.

Revisiting this post also reminds me that it has been a long time since I’ve had a friendly argument with Pliable — like the one that led to the “digital audio quality” post in the first place. Perhaps it’s time to write more about music.

RIYL: what Jerry Bruckheimer teaches you about digital signal processing — a pet peeve so well-documented that my close friends form mirth vortexes at the mere mention of “enhance.”

“The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms” (pdf link) is a fascinating paper by Godfried Toussaint at McGill. Friends of this site will likely guess that I was powerless to resist reading the whole thing after glancing at the first paragraph:

What do African bell rhythms, spallation neutron source (SNS) accelerators in nuclear physics, Sturmian words and string theory (stringology) in computer science, Markoff numbers and two-distance sequences in number theory, drawing digital straight lines in computer graphics, calculating leap years in calendar design, and an ancient algorithm [...] for computing the greatest common divisor of two numbers, originally described by Euclid, have in common? The short answer is: patterns distributed as evenly as possible. For the long answer please read on.

Touissant shows that the Euclidean greatest-common-divisor algorithm has the same structure as an algorithm, due to Bjorklund, for evenly scheduling n pulses in k units of time. (Bjorklund’s application was scheduling high-voltage power over intervals.) He then demonstrates that this algorithm can be used to generate musical rhythms that have appeared in music throughout recorded history; for example, scheduling three pulses over eight units of time results in the tresillo, or 3+3+2/8 rhythm. (This rhythm is familiar in African and Caribbean music; Touissant notes that it is also the rhythm of the bass part in Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”)

This discussion alone would make for an excellent read, but it represents only the first fifth of the paper! Touissant also identifies a wide range of actual rhythms from world music that can be generated using this technique; compares rhythms generated using this technique to rhythms categorized in the aksak system of rhythms (which I first encountered, but not by that name, in the music of Bartók); and finally, makes convincing analogies with finding leap years, drawing straight lines on grids of pixels, and several other problem domains.

I haven’t had so much fun reading a research paper in ages. If you are reading this site, you will probably enjoy Touissant’s paper.

“Max for Live?” Sounds exciting. Is it possible for Gerhard Behles to break his own company’s press-release embargo?

Thomas is fascinated by the guitar, and despite my best efforts with Bach transcriptions on the classical guitar, he seems to love the electric (“the orange guitar,” as he calls it, in particular) more than anything. A couple of days ago, I moved my amp up from its exile in the basement to the home office so that Thomas and I could play together, and we’ve since spent some time making sounds with the guitar in the evenings after I come home from work.

When I was just about to put him to bed tonight, he said “Downstairs, Daddy! Downstairs!” I asked him what was downstairs, suspecting that he heard the furnace or wanted to watch TV or something. Nope. “The other amplifier, Daddy. And the bass.” Oh, right. Should I bring that upstairs tomorrow, so we can play the bass together? “Yes.”

I guess if WT turns into a superdork, we’ll know who to blame. Sorry, sweetie.

I noticed (via the MF catalog) that Electro-Harmonix has just released something called a “Bass Blogger.” In addition to being a colossally stupid, already-anachronistic name, this somehow sounds really dirty. From looking at the product description, I can’t tell it apart from their other 74 bass distortion pedals, but whatever.

There was a lot of commotion a while ago when some overcaffeinated kid revealed that the beat for the ubiquitous Usher single “Love in This Club” is made up of royalty-free loops, specifically, some synthesizer lines from the “Euro Hero Synth” set in Apple’s GarageBand. (All of the Apple loops have these bafflingly creativity-destroying names like “Cop Show Clav,” “Glow Stick Anthem Acid Bass,” “Angsty Chorused Flannel Stratocaster,” and “Uzbek Tech-House Breakdown Balalaika.”)

Of course, I use and love Logic Studio (which comes with approximately 2.7 years of royalty-free loops, including all of those included with GarageBand), but I never install loops. If I had — and if, you know, everyone else in the world hadn’t already done it — I might throw down a quick and mildly droll remix. This would probably be even easier than it sounds, since it seems like much of the production for “Love in This Club” may have been done in GarageBand. In particular, you might notice the obvious application of the “Earbleed Squarewave Mastering” preset:

Usher may not “care who’s watching,” but he cares even less, apparently, about those who are listening. Who’s winning the loudness war now?

NB: some preset and loop names may be imaginary.

μ-blogging

“μ” as “micro:” I added a link to my twitter feed to the top of the page here in case any readers enjoy this site but think that weblog posts are typically too carefully crafted and coherent. If I know you and you’re on twitter, send a follow request!

“μ” as a lowercase Greek letter: I will get in trouble with Andrea if I admit how long I spent trying to typeset some Polytonic Greek in LaTeX today, so I won’t. I should just say that, if dissertations are to be judged by the epigraph typography at the beginning of chapters, then I am surely in line for several prestigious awards. I should also say that this is what eventually worked, for those of you who might have to do something similar and are finding this page via Google:

1. Add this to your preamble:

   
   \usepackage{ucs}
   \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
   \usepackage[polutonikogreek,english]{babel}
   

2. Then you can simply input your text, in Unicode, as an argument to the \greektext macro.

Oddly, this is one area in which HTML beats LaTeX. In HTML, I can just type the Unicode in, and it works (if your computing environment is sufficiently modern):

οὐ γὰρ μήποτε τοῦτο δαμῇ εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα·
ἀλλὰ σὺ τῆσδ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ διζήσιός εἶργε νόημα.

(Special recognition to the first reader to say something smart about this quotation.)

Music notes

I’ve had a terrible time with earworm lately.

This morning, I had Busoni’s setting of Goethe’s “Flohlied” stuck in my head. Right before lunch, it was replaced by Tag Team’s “Whoomp! There it is!” Later in the afternoon, it was Fugazi’s “Arpeggiator.” None of these has been particularly conducive to accomplishing anything requiring any concentration; also, I feel like I’m permanently listening to some terrible first-semester college-radio DJ.

Jam on it

Wikiquote has a long way to go before it is comparable to Bartlett’s. I found one detail of Wikiquote’s genesis pretty bizarre: when it was first established in 2003, it lived on wo.wikipedia.org, which is the Wolof-language Wikipedia site. It was there for two weeks. I bet that a lot of Wolof speakers were totally perplexed when their community-edited encyclopedia resource was replaced with a bunch of English-language quips from Homer Simpson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and various minor characters from the Star Wars universe.

I feel bad about my shortage of recent prescriptions, so here’s a policy idea to improve undergraduate education in the United States: Assure undergrads that, yes, it is all right to use Wikipedia — as long as they only use Wolof Wikipedia. (I learned something new from my visit: Apparently, “Soppi” is Wolof for “edit.”)

RIYL

Unicode: Nerdtacular bumper sticker.

Wikipedia snark: Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars, Why Wikipedia is almost comically awesome.

Wolof: “Senegal Champions of Africa,” by the Black Seeds. Seriously, download this song.

I caught this breezy, entertaining story about the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album on All Things Considered last night. That baby is 17 now, which — as reporter Chana Joffe-Walt helpfully points out — makes me very old.

I almost feel bad for the kid — whose real name is Spencer Elden — because his over-the-top teenage ennui is permanently captured in the NPR archives. It doesn’t help that Joffe-Walt assumes a near-mockumentary tone throughout the whole piece. It really doesn’t help that Elden is nostalgic for an era that he never knew and calculatedly overwrought about it to the point of self-parody:

These days, Elden says, his peers concentrate on “playing Rock Band on Xbox, like, that’s not a real band! That’s the difference between the ’90s and kids nowadays; kids in the ’90s would actually go out and make a [real] band!”

But overall, life is good, he says. When he’s not being repressed by video games and computers, Elden blasts music — mostly techno — and carries around a big bag of angst, mostly around the fact that he is “so over” high school.

“Same people, same teachers … going to your locker, worrying about stupid girls … I wanna get something going, I wanna travel,” he says.

Andrea points out that if Elden is disappointed by doing the same thing every day, he is likely to be unimpressed with life after high school in its many forms. I was grateful that no one interviewed me on national radio when I was a teenager, but I’m mostly just impressed at how little things change: everyone wishes that they were a teenager at a different time, as if that is the precise circumstance that would make young adulthood more bearable.

You see, when Elden was being photographed in a swimming pool, I was a teenager. I think I had Nevermind on cassette. Elden is nostalgic for an idealized version of my adolescence!

I find his nostalgia wholly hilarious, since I spent an awful lot of time jumping through hoops in school, mired in tedium or trivia, and worrying about girls (some of whom, no doubt, were “stupid”). Most pointedly, when I was a teenager, I thought that everything (and especially “youth culture”) would have been better, more interesting, and more authentic had I only been seventeen years older.

Yes, my friends and I gathered our actual musical instruments and congregated in various formations in basements to make noise — but, had we access to Rock Band, we sure as hell would have played it, too. I know this because what we had instead was Jeopardy! on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which involved typing in responses (in the form of a question) with a joypad — and we played that by choice.

Instead of posting angsty rants on MySpace, we published them at Kinko’s. When I was a teenage “independent publisher,” I often spent more than half of my after-school income making photocopies. Now I spend a few dollars a month on web hosting and don’t lose money or irritate friends if I don’t accurately estimate my readership numbers every time I write something new.

When I wished that I had been a teenager a short generation earlier, part of the appeal was the prospect of being able to hear punk rock bands like the Sex Pistols or the Clash while they were still young and relevant, still performing, or still alive, depending on the group. In the Sex Pistols’ 1976 song “Anarchy in the U.K.,” Johnny Rotten snarls “I don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.” I can think of no better single-sentence summary of the mindset of teenage angst.

Pioneering sound designer and electronic musician Delia Derbyshire apparently had a stash of hundreds of unreleased recordings in her attic when she died in 2001; their existence became public knowledge this week. The one that will probably get the most nerd attention is this glitchy excerpt, which Paul Hartnoll describes by saying that it “could be coming out next week on Warp Records.”

I think Hartnoll is only slightly hyperbolic with “next week”, but seriously, listen to that short track. Does it sound like it’s 40 years old, or does it sound like Artificial Intelligence? It could easily be early Autechre or pre-RDJ Aphex Twin.

Think about the pop-culture climate of the day: #1 pop songs in the late 1960s included such innovative, groundbreaking compositions as “Hello, I Love You” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Consider also that Derbyshire wasn’t using synthesizers: just manipulated sounds (from tape), electronic oscillators, and various filters and signal modulators. The article quotes Hartnoll again, regarding Derbyshire’s retirement from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: “I think she got a bit disheartened and a bit bored with it all when the synthesizer came along and it all became a little too easy.”

Pretty much.

RIYL: electronic lapels, Stockhausen on AFX and vice versa. If electronic oscillators and musique concrète are too modern for you, why not build a cornemuse?

Ben Fritz writes about Lips, a newly-announced karaoke video game. Lips is notable because it will apparently allow players to plug their iPod into their Xbox and sing along with DRM-free songs from their personal music libraries. (It is also compatible with Microsoft’s Zune, which should make several dozen people very happy.)

Fritz wonders how the music industry, who currently realize royalties from the inclusion of songs in video games (and especially as paid downloadable content for music games), will react to this:

And on the face of it, it doesn’t seem like there’s a reason why the source of the music (my iPod vs the game disc) should [a]ffect who gets paid. Half the people who bought “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith” may already own lots of Aerosmith CDs, but that doesn’t mean Activision got out of paying to use the songs. Making the song into a game is arguably a transformative use for commercial gain.

Well, the legal reason why it doesn’t matter is that you aren’t actually copying anything when you play a song from your iPod. Copyright only governs distribution; you can sing along with, remix, or generally fold, spindle, and mutilate copyrighted works as much as you want as long as you keep the end results to yourself. The reason why Activation et al. have paid royalties is that they are actually distributing the original songs (or — in the case of some songs in the Guitar Hero games — that they are distributing recordings of copyrighted compositions). There isn’t a provision in copyright law stating that someone other than the copyright holder may distribute work X in format Z to me if I already own work X in format Y. With the Lips model, there is no distribution, and since the game only works with DRM-free files, the DMCA (which criminalizes defeating copy protection even if no copyright infringement occurs) doesn’t come into play.

Microsoft already allows Xbox users to play their own digital music (from CD or iPod) along with other video games. Incorporating what is essentially a sophisticated music player into a music game does not infringe upon any copyrights. As Fritz indicates, the more interesting question is political, not legal: how will this sort of technology impact the increasingly-strained relationships between rights holders and technology companies? Certainly the RIAA could try and insist on a check for every sale of Lips; it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done something like that, and Microsoft might not have a strong position to argue from.

This photo.net query is either pretty hilarious, a sad commentary on the age, or both. (link via markd on twitter) Of course, there are obvious parallels to this question in the audio-nerd world, where novice recordists often ask “which plugin/software will make my recordings sound like artist/producer X” — ignoring performance, technique, instrument, room, microphones, mic placement, and preamplification. For some reason, though, reading this recalled this classic Onion article for me.

This highlighted comment at CDM, from Russian DJ Artjom, is all kinds of awesome:

In general, I don’t want play in the club, because people come there to drink and to search partner for copulate. This is bad.

I haven’t watched American Idol this season, but a friend mentioned to me that this week’s performances were all Andrew Lloyd Webber numbers. In a nearly record-setting case of taxi wit, I only realized what a terrible idea this was after skimming this NYT article (via Althouse)¹. I should be clear that I am no more a fan of American Idol than I am of the disturbingly similar presidential primary process, although I do occasionally pay attention to the early-season “catastrophe” phase featured prominently in both. In addition, regular readers already know that I consider Webber’s oeuvre banal to the point of toxicity, and that I believe that perpetrating a Webber performance constitutes not merely an aesthetic but possibly also a moral wrong.

However, proliferating Webber is not only a bad idea for American Idol in aesthetic and moral terms; it is also a bad idea when you consider the sensibilities of their oft-beleaguered trio of judges. Consider the types of awful contestants who appear in the catastrophe phase: the goofball with implausibly bad technique, the crazy person with delusions of grandeur, and the person who is singing in scales drawn from Partch. Unfortunately, the contestant who has cut her or — more frequently — his performing teeth on musical theater and show choir repertoire is often able to fit into all of these types, and often is completely incapable of accepting their just verdict without a profanity-laden meltdown. Featuring Andrew Lloyd Webber prominently on the show counteracts the rich precedent of criticizing contestants who sound like “dinner theater” performers; so doing will only encourage these sorts of people to live the dream and further clog the American Idol applicant process.

¹ Note also that the article features the NYT’s trademark, finger-on-the-pulse sensitivity to the concerns of conventional Christians. It does seem vastly more likely that the performance — which I haven’t seen — was terrible than that people were offended by Webber’s heterodoxy.

According to this article, Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy is unable to write songs in front of other people. That’s reasonable, I guess. Apparently, he’s uncomfortable with exposing some parts of the process:

[W]orking melodies over, you’re constantly sounding like a yowling cat, as you’re trying to find the right melody. And you find stupid melodies, too, and stupid lyrics that you never would want anybody to think that you’d knowingly entertain….

While I am not by any stretch a connoisseur of pop music, I should disclose that I have been subjected to the Decemberists’ oeuvre several times and found it affected, grating, and essentially unlistenable. However, I now have new respect for Meloy. If he’s paralyzed by the prospect of “sounding like a yowling cat” in front of a fawning reporter from the Guardian, he must be an extremely seasoned performer to muster the courage to perform live at all.

David Pogue links to this entertaining site, which lets you discover what song was atop the Billboard charts on any given day (like, for example, your day of birth). Mine, sadly, is a boring old disco number; Andrea’s is an hilariously awesome disco number (namely, Meco’s Star Wars theme arrangement). I’ve got to give the advantage to the muse on this one. (WT is even more unfortunate than I, though — his birthday featured an American Indentured Servant winner at the top of the pop charts.)