Back at it again

With a new school year comes new challenges and opportunities. I’ll try to keep you up to date.

Moved on

In case you were curious, yes, this blog has moved on and we’re now tucked away in an undisclosed location: http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/

Keep on keepin’ on!

The Milli-Vanilli of the Olympics?

The New York Times has an account from the post-performance world of music education: at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a central moment featured a young girl singing (who, it turns out, wasn’t actually singing. A good read, with this great quote:

By Tuesday, the Chinese media had already pounced on the story, instigating a national conversation that government censors were trying to mute by stripping away many, but not all, of the public comments posted online. The outrage was especially heated over the cold calculation used to appraise the girls.

“Please save the last bit of trueness in our children,” wrote one person with an online name of Weirderhua. “They think Yang Peiyi’s smile is not cute enough? What we need is truth, not some fake loveliness! I hope the kids will not be hurt. This is not their fault.”

Another person added: “Children are innocent. Don’t contaminate their minds!”

Mr. Lin, the father, said his daughter had been under strict orders not to discuss plans for the performance. He got only the 15-minute notice about her role and was thrilled. He only later learned of the voice switch when he saw a video clip of the interview by the musical director, Mr. Chen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/sports/olympics/13beijing.html?ex=1376280000&en=925892efa500e4d3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Sasha Frere-Jones on Auto-Tune

A great article that gets at Auto-Tune and some larger issues around recording and the artificial/real world that recording gives us. The closing paragraphs are, as often with Frere-Jones, magnificent:

Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music. Whether the engineer merely tweaks a few bum notes or makes a singer tootle like Robby the Robot, recorded music is still a composite of sounds that may or may not have happened in real time. An effect is always achieved, and not necessarily the one intended. Aren’t some of the most entertaining and fruitful sounds in pop—distortion, whammy bars, scratching—the result of glorious abuse of the tools? At this late date, it’s hard to see how the invisible use of tools could imply an inauthentic product, as if a layer of manipulation were standing between the audience and an unsullied object. In reality, the unsullied object is the Sasquatch of music. Even a purely live recording is a distortion and paraphrasing of an acoustic event.

Sir George Martin, via e-mail, wrote to me about his work with John Lennon, one of the most famously processed voices in pop history. “It’s true that John was never satisfied with the sound of his voice,” Martin explained. “He failed to realize that what he heard came through the bones of his body and was not his true sound. He was always looking for perfection, and in his imagination his voice was always superior to the sound of anything on tape.” To paraphrase, what we hear on Beatles records is Lennon’s imagination. T-Pain’s deployment of Auto-Tune is a similar assertion of self, no different in kind from the older, more traditional tricks of tape-splicing, double-tracking the voice, and adding a little reverb.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/06/09/080609crmu_music_frerejones

Nine Inch Nails

Yet another story that looks at the possible futures for music in a digital age. Link below this quote:

Mr. Reznor has no global solution for how to sustain a long-term career as a recording musician, much less start one, when listeners take free digital music for granted. “It’s all out there,” he added. “I don’t agree that it should be free, but it is free, and you can either accept it or you can put your head in the sand.”

He knows what he doesn’t want to do: make his music a marketing accessory. “Now just making good music, or great music, isn’t enough,” Mr. Reznor said. “Now I have to sell T-shirts, or I have to choose which whorish association is the least stinky. I don’t really want to be on the side of a bus or in a BlackBerry ad hawking some product that sucks just so I can get my record out. I want to maintain some dignity and self-respect in the process, if that’s possible these days.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/arts/music/08pare.html?ex=1370577600&en=8516369c0df0fffa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Hatto Hobson Hoax Revealed!

Here’s my favorite quote from the New Yorker piece:

Among the most diligent and dispassionate students of the Hatto hoax is Andrys Basten, the woman who had posted the “Mephisto Waltz” on her Web site. She is a retired computer consultant who lives in Northern California. According to her, the Godowsky and other examples in which recordings have been sped up or slowed down—“with results which some listeners even now can find more pleasing than the original pianists’ versions”—suggest that Hatto and Barry had set out to create “their own ideal versions, using her musical ideas and his technological know-how.” In Basten’s interpretation of their interpretation, “He was the producer of these improved versions, while she was the musician behind them. They both could enjoy the accolades rolling in.

[full article highly recommended and freely available here: 
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/17/070917fa_fact_singer?currentPage=all ]

Here’s the post by Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio (where he blogged the discovery process):

http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax2.html 

 

Homework: listen, survey, comment

This must be complete by Thursday morning at 10 a.m

You will listen to the following four recordings (2 songs, each in two versions), then choose which you think is ‘best’ via the surveymonkey link, and finally comment as to why you chose the A or B versions of each song.

You’ll hear more about this in class on Thursday.

Listen to the files (mp3 files on my directory):
(please do not save these, they are for listening to from the server for class purposes only!)
Follow this link, and login with your Netfiles UIUC ID (same as CITES email):
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mdthib/www/mp3

Survey Link
Please listen closely, preferably more than one time, before deciding, and once this survey is complete, be sure to comment:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=r1_2fnVB5e_2fI2dsYewD5Pinw_3d_3d

The $42,000 piano

Technology writer and former Broadway musician David Pogue has a review of a rather extravagant gadget:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue.html?ex=1366084800&en=ae4d2bbe8a2fa005&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Suzanne Vega on songwriting

The New York Times has been running a set of blogs on writing/creating music, and here is a wonderful entry by Suzanne Vega. FYEO (For Your Enjoyment Only—no response required)

http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/teen-beat/

Required Comment 1: What about the wiki?

Comment before class on Thursday

Please visit the wiki for the Tchaik project. Given that this is a quick and dirty first try at something that might hold potential for integrating technology into ensemble settings, explore, comment, and critique.

We will do something similar next semester (I’m planning this: we’ll work with an already arranged Sousa march to create new parts, etc.; and we’ll notate a much shorter piece such as an overture for a spring performance). Given that, how might a wiki like this be used? What could be added? What could be enhanced? What would be educational and interesting for students in terms of resources and activities?

Thanks for visiting, and thanks for the great work that is evidenced by these artifacts. Here’s the site:

http://digitaltchaik.pbwiki.com/