The new artist model says anybody can make and distribute a recording. It is much less expensive to make a record today and recorded music is only going to become less valuable to everyone over time. The real hard part is promotion. The true nemesis of the artist is obscurity. There is a glut of music out there and the situation is only going to get worse. This is the reality of the future of music, abundance and saturation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhHQHNDQSUQ
GOOD COPY BAD COPY - a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture. Comments invited.

Thanks to futureofmusicbook.com.

Sure, genetic music was the out-of-left-field offshoot of the Human Genome Project, but we can’t deny that the field — such as it is — has shown surprising longevity. If you have a free minute, check out this newly issued patent. It covers “music generated by decoding and transcribing genetic information within a DNA sequence into a music signal having melody and harmony,” according to the abstract. The inventors listed are a couple of lawyers (hence the title of this post).

There are seven comments, including the following:

Oh, those lawyers! Too bad, they don’t really invent anything, they only use somebody else’s stuff. The music derived from nucleic acid sequences was created long time ago. Back in 1995 a tape with such music was available and distributed at the international conference on the structure and function of the ribosome in Victoria, British Columbia. Anybody who wanted could get a tape at the conference. The music was not a timeless masterpiece, but it was cohesive and even somewhat pleasing. The tape was in 1995, clearly the idea was even before that.

Here are some samples of gene music from another source The following is the Huntingtin protein.

For those in the know, you can hear an obvious repeated pattern of glutamines and polyprolines in this sample.

For my inaugural post to this blog, I’d like to write about something I’ve been thinking about lately, and hopefully begin a discussion on it. Namely, what to make of geotagged audio samples and recordings. In case you’re not familiar with the term, geotagging is the practice of assigning geographic coordinates to a piece of media like a recording or photo as a form of metadata. In one incarnation, such as on the Freesound project, geotagged samples are layered over Google maps, allowing one to zoom in on any spot on the planet and potentially find samples tagged to specific geographic locations. As numerous startups and one very large corporation (beginning with a ‘G’ and ending with ‘oogle’) have realized, the commercial potential of geotagging is huge. But we hear less about its scientific potential and, of importance here, its aesthetic potential.

Scientifically, geotagged audio has potential in areas such as the environmental sciences. As one example, imagine taking annual recordings of a section of forest over many years, studying the variations or declines in population of certain bird species via their prominence in the recordings. This has likely already been done, but then imagine putting those incremental recordings into the public sphere via an application like Google Earth.

Of course, as an artist, I am primarily interested in the aesthetic potential of this technology. Currently on Freesound (and hopefully soon on Google Earth too), one can navigate around a map of the world, looking for and listening to geotagged samples, downloading them if one is interested in using them further. However, once the geotagged sample is downloaded and separated from its coordinates, it becomes just another field recording without any accompanying data. For a geotagged sample or recording to be of value compositionally – as a geotagged sample tied to a specific place and not just an anonymous field recording – the metadata must be maintained for compositional use. This is where we apparently reach the edge of current development: tools for working compositionally with geotagged sounds off of a network have not really been developed. There is a multitude of approaches to using this type of material, from composers interested in ecoacoustics to installationists wanting to tap ‘global’ recordings in some improvisatory way. What I’m getting at here is the need for a discussion (hopefully to take place below), about the aesthetic and technical issues surrounding geotagged audio, and tools that composers/artists would like to see available for making the best of this material.

If you were to make use of geotagged audio, what would you use it for? What kind of interfaces into a geotagged audio database would interest you?

Derek Holzer (Binaural Tunnel Study, Binaural rainstorm, Seto song) * Yannick Dauby (Bats-Echolocation) * Planktone (Industry 2, Windmill) * Cedric Peyronnet (Fences And Wind) * Dallas Simpson (Binaural Environmental) * Nick Mariette (Wisdom Tooth Extraction In Binaural) * John Tenny (Desert Wind In The Hall) [via Sonic Surrounds]

A new social music mixing site is re-thinking interactive audio. Splice, which is still in beta, is a community site that encourages users to submit raw sounds. Users can then build songs out of each other’s sounds. Each creation can be remixed, rearranged, deconstructed and completely re-worked by anyone else in the Splice community.

Splice’s coolest feature is the browser-based sequencer. Songs are assembled and mixed without ever leaving the browser. You can also see details about the users who contributed each track as you mix.

Once you log in (you have to register and build a profile to use the service) you can browse through sounds and completed songs, all submitted by users. People have posted beats, drones, piano loops and guitar arpeggios. There are even some truly odd recordings, like spoken poems and children babbling. Splice accepts all of the popular music formats: WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and even FLAC. Each sound is tagged and most are marked with a BPM value. Songs can be opened in the sequencer and tweaked. The mixer will also auto-adjust the BPMs of your sounds so that the beats match up. Add or subtract sounds, slide some faders, then publish your work.

Everything produced by the Splice community is released with an Attribution Creative Commons license. Any song on Splice can be downloaded as an MP3.

If you’re new to Splice, you might want to watch the short demo video, which will show you the basics. The site requires Flash Player 9 to use. Splice also runs best in Firefox.

Give it a whirl, make some noise.

Or, read on to see how it all works.

All Wandering Ear releases are available for free download in 192kpbs MP3 format individually or packaged using WinZip. All content is subject to the copyright of the respective artists. Full permission was explicitly granted for inclusion on the Wandering Ear website. Wandering Ear releases are free to download under a Creative Commons License for personal use. Commercial usage is prohibited unless individually negotiated with the respective artists and Wandering Ear.

Listen to: we005 Melt: Minnesota Remixed.

In 2006, the net label Wandering Ear debuted with the compilation “Thaw: Field Recordings from Minnesota”. Now, a host of audio artists from around the world have mined these recordings as source material for remixes, bending and folding the sounds to their own ends. Ducks, geese, lakes, waterfalls, boats, helicopters, and answering machine messages are spun into new and unexpected dimensions. Every track from “Thaw” has been reworked for this compilation. Well worth the listen!

STEIM is the Amsterdam centre for research and development of instruments and tools for performers in the electronic performance arts. STEIM presents a night packed with a broad selection of essential live steps into hybrid electroacoustica. It’s all about meaning-machine interactions, emerging economies of breath and radio waves, composing the now; the merging of studio and live, of composing and improvisation; enchanted neurons; electric body energy versus the wall plugs, the state of musical impact, embedded instruments, the decisive moment of push, riffs, licks, grooves and other celebrations of sound and sounds. STEIM hosts the pioneering work of Atau Tanaka, Mazen Kerbaj and Takuro Mizuta Lippit (djsniff) – STEIM’s new artistic directors for the year 2007 – together with composer, musician, instrument designer and long time STEIM-director Michel Waisvisz.

Featuring: DJ Sniff (JP/NL), Atau Tanaka (USA), Mazen Kerbaj (LB) & Joel Ryan (USA/NL), Christine Sehnaoui (LB/F) & Michel Waisvisz (NL).

DJ Sniff (JP/NL) (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) believes in the autonomy of the turntable as a musical instrument and the musicianship of the DJ. His music focuses on the selection of sound material amplified through the phonographic needle and its reconstruction through electro-acoustical methods and techniques of turntablism. Sniff articulates his sensitive, cooly restraint collage technique through his heterogeneous dj setup of his own invention. The place of the once customary second turntable set is being taken by a ’sensor scratch box’. This feature gives him a definitive edge over two turntable spinning instrumentalists and widely extends the dialectics of his musical source material, mixing early music conrète iconography with Japanese ethnic song and hiphop cuts, with copied multiples of themselves. DJ Sniff live sets are beautifully controlled, evolving streams of ideas.

Atau Tanaka’s Concrete Corps is a suite of etudes for biosensor performer and natural sounds. The sensor interface captures forearm electromyogram biosignals reflecting muscle tension. The system renders as musical instrument the performer’s own body, allowing him to articulate sound through concentrated gesture. The sources are recordings of natural sounds - wolves, water, machinery, and telecommunications devices - that are stored in the computer. Gestural data is digitized and mapped to processes sculpting the original sound recordings. The interplay is the search of the corporeal gesture idiomatic to a sound, zooming in and squeezing out the essence of the acoustic via the digital, mediated by the body. Atau Tanaka’s fragile yet powerful stage persona coaxes his frenzied sound with the masterly control of his arm muscle tension. Atau’s expressive freedom and the mime and elegance of his hands and arms give a specal edge to his work.

Mazen Kerbaj (LB) & Joel Ryan (USA/NL) In recent blogs the Lebanese musician, comic book artist and painter Mazen Kerbaj has given a charched and personal response to the bombings of his hometown Beirut. This highly prolific artist has been credited to be the very first, together with Christine Sehnaoui, to perform improvised music in the Middle-East. Kerbaj’s compelling trumpet playing focusses on the instruments basic sonic and idiomatic properties. Specialising in the low and the flatulent, he traces invisible shapes in the air, rather than splashing paint on a canvas. Kerbaj’ trumpet wedges more often than not between his knees, his lips gripping a standard or single reed mouth piece, connected by balloons or garden hose pipe, modulating this imaginative extension of his windpipe with utmost serious playfulness and with the aid of colorful toys. Joel Ryan is a composer, inventor and scientist. He is a pioneer in the design of musical instruments based on real time digital signal processing. Released from the spell of academic modernism, Ryan seeks to bring a concreteness to digital electronic media through the intelligent touch of the performer. Joel Ryan’s real time DSP wizardry folds Kerbaj’s extended technique ‘inside out’. The collaboration of Mazen Kerbaj and Joel Ryan is a mosaic, it resembles ever shifting hues and waves of sudden apparent frenzy.

Living in Paris, Christine Sehnaoui is from lebanese origins. When she discovered improvised music, Sehnaoui decided started to focuss on sound experimentation on the alto saxophone. Her main musical partners include Sharif Sehnaoui, Michel Waisvisz and Mazen Kerbaj. Michel Waisvisz is a composer/performer of live electronic music, who has developed new ways to achieve physical touch with electronic music instruments. Sometimes this is done by literally touching the electricity inside the instruments and thereby becoming a thinking component of the machine. After numourous tours and collaborations with a wide variety of artists ranging from Laurie Anderson and DJ Spooky to Steve Lacy and Najib Cheradi, his music is currently characterised by its sparse, almost silent and highly intuitive nature. Christine Sehnaoui and Michel Waisvisz’ s performances are breathtaking, organically evolving, but also playful musical events.

In his 1995 film Telephones, artist Christian Marclay spliced together snippets of actors from Hollywood films answering phones. Apple contacted Marclay, he says, to get permission to use the concept for a new iPhone ad (above) debuted during the Oscars.
He refused. They took the idea anyway.

“The way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy,” Marclay says. He talked to a lawyer about taking legal action over the ripoff, but was told “there’s nothing I can do about it. They have the right to get inspired.”

Contemporary art, of course, is often about appropriation and recontextualizing material, but the brazenness of Apple’s move is too bad. Still, Marclay isn’t keen on going to court.

“This culture’s so much about suing each other that if we want to have anything that’s more of an open exchange of ideas, one has to stop this mentality. I’m just honored that they thought my work was interesting enough that they felt they could just rip it off.”

The following mini-documentary on Marclay’s work included Telephones about 3:40 in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yqM3dAqTzs

[blogged by Paul on Eyeteeth]