One of our favorite stops for internet radio is somafm.com, out of San Fransisco, California.  They’ve got a channel for almost everything, and (unusual for independent internet radio) the programming is of uniformly high quality.

While working, our favorite channel is Groove Salad for chilled out electronica (it makes us feel smart).  At this time of year, though, the Xmas in Frisco stream is also well worth a listen, although the silly and irreverent take on holiday music - from kitschy to historic to moderately offensive - might not be for everyone (warning: some of the hip-hop material could not be considered even remotely ‘office-friendly’) .

What we wanted to draw your attention to, though, is mission control.  This somafm channel is a stream of ambient electronic music combined with the live communications feed  from the current STS-129 Nasa Space Shuttle mission.  It’s a fascinating listen - minutes of ambient music will go by, and suddenly some mundane communication between the shuttle and Nasa will occur, rendered somehow strangely poignant by the underlying music.

The classic argument against space exploration - that there are more than enough problems down here on Earth to invest in fixing first - has sadly never seemed more valid.  However, mission control is a great example of the kind of innovative niche programming available over the “long-tail” of the internet, and a great case study in the technology-enabled blurring of the lines between art and science.

The STS-129 mission is scheduled to touch down on November 27th.  That should be interesting - I know where my internet radio dial will be set to that day…

Before getting involved in technology/new media research and analysis, I made a living as a  musician and composer.  Frankly, at times it was more of a living than at others - but suffice it to say, I was active enough to leave a fair amount of online evidence of a musical career still laying around up there in the cloud.

Although my days of releasing CDs (back when they still released CDs, that is) and writing for TV commercials are largely behind me, every now and then I still google myself (who doesn’t occasionally self-google?) - and a few weeks ago, I started noticing videos with my music showing up in search results on YouTube.  The recordings being used (demos from various older projects) were all otherwise unencumbered and were still being licensed occasionally for other uses, so in an effort to protect myself, I decided to contact YouTube and see if I could draw their attention to the issue.
Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new and interesting way some recording artists have started to use the internet: in an "if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em" move, several pop acts have decided to embrace the medium to the extent of making even the individual elements (the discrete instrumental and vocal parts that make up the recording as a whole) of some of their work freely available online.  The general public can download these ’stems’, alter them, edit them, add new material, and put it all back together as a new (and hopefully interesting) creation of their own.

Completing the circle, these remixes can then be uploaded back onto the original artists’ websites, for sharing and commentary.

Just a few artists hosting public remix "contests": Radiohead , Mariah Carey , Franz Ferdinand , Third Eye Blind , and Nine Inch Nails …

And so you have fans, aspiring DJs, and recording studio professionals all sharing their creations side by side on the original artist’s website: a fundamental redefinition and flattening of of the artist/audience relationship, the composition/production relationship, and an obvious musical corollary to web 2.0 - ‘open source music’, if you will…


All well and good. But while that’s what the cool kids have been up to, along comes Microsoft Research with a decidedly uncool demo of their new $29.95 Songsmith application. This program will take a melody sung into your computer’s audio input and generate chords and accompaniment based on on the pitches it detects, the styles you select, and the settings of parameters with names such as "Happy" and "Jazzy" (more on the modeling and algorithms behind all that here) .
Whether or not this is an intriguing or a sadly misguided use of technology is open for discussion - what’s more interesting (to me, at least) are the cover versions of popular songs now starting to appear up on Youtube using the original vocal tracks as Songsmith input material. Some (such as this version of Oasis’ "Wonderwall") are almost musical - while others (such as this take on Van Halen) are just kind of cringe-inducing.


It would be all to easy to come down on Songsmith as fundamentally anti -musical (a lot of people have seen that unfortunate Microsoft demo video and done just that) - but consider this: if you believe (as I do) that a little play-time is healthy for us grownups too, what’s so bad about software that lets people have some fun with their computer creating these Soundsmith cover version/remixes?  Maybe they’ll be inspired to use the software to take it a step further and at least get at least a whiff of what it might be like to write a song on their own from scratch…

So while it might not be for everyone, I think Microsoft Songsmith is just fine, for what it is - unleashing the inner Moby within all the John Hodgman s out there…

As part of my ‘other life’ as a music composer/producer, about a year ago I was invited to give a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in studio production.  To teach my approach to mixing, I decided to bring the individual tracks from a recent piece I had done - almost 30 discrete sound files with one instrument or part on each, that together made up the piece as a whole.  These were then remixed by the students during the workshop while I coached the sessions - not only a great way to demonstrate my personal production and mixing methodologies, but (somewhat unexpectedly) it was also very interesting to see how others approached and altered the material.

Now consider the Web 2.0 model, in which there’s no longer just that one-way street running from server to client - instead, communication occurs in a more reciprocal and viral manner.   Well, as it happens, there’s a near-perfectly analogous phenomenon going on with recorded music: much as I had done, artists are making the individual elements (or “stems”) that taken together comprise their finished recordings freely available online - to to be freely downloaded, deconstructed, altered, and remixed by anyone who cares to.  The power of today’s personal computer and the ubiquity of multitrack digital audio applications such as Apple’s included-with-the-OS  Garage Band make this possibility for everyone, not just us recording studio types.

It appears Thomas Friedman was right, the world is getting flatter….

A few examples:

• Easily 20 years ahead of its time, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 release “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” was, at the risk of understatement, a groundbreaking record (just ask Moby, who built a career on his 1999 homage, “Play”).  Concurrent with a 2006 Bush of Ghosts re-release, Byrne and Eno made stems of several tracks available to the public and hosted an online remix competition, in which remixes could be uploaded back to the site and then voted on - results of which can be heard here.

• Kudus to Warner Music Group for going along with Byrne and Eno on the open licensing.   Radiohead, on the other hand, having had abandoned their traditional major label to release their latest album “In Rainbows” online themselves this year, could do whatever they pleased with the material - which was to simultaneously give away stems of the track “Nude” online for a similar remix competition.  The response from both professional DJs and producers as well as the general public was described by the band as ‘overwhelming’ - so much so, in fact,  that another track (”Reckoner“) was subsequently given away for remix as well.

Think of it as “open source music” (in fact, Byrne and Eno used the same Creative Commons license well-known in the open source software community to make the stems available).

I’m not a gamer - for me, though, (and maybe you?) this is a great way to have some fun with your computer. Try it out sometime… a little bit of creative playing around is good for you.