Melody Roads

The Hokkaido Research Institute in Japan has encoded 3 roads with songs. Basically, this is a musical version of rumble strips.

I have to confess, there is something incredibly appealing about the idea. Encoding random art in industrial surfaces seems like a great thing to me. I also have to confess immediately imagining high-tech tagging where, instead of spraypainting your tag on the walls of your neighborhood, you encode a theme song in the road. That just seemed awesomely ridiculous.

However, there appear to be a few practical considerations: the rate of playback is dependent on the speed of the car. If you encode the road for a car going 28 miles an hour (as was the case in the roads in the article), then it doesnt take much fluctuation in speed to have the song pitch-shift up and increase the tempo dramatically.

Finally, I'd expect that the expense of creating the roads mght make them somewhat permanent, and- being a music snob, I can only imagine the kind of road rage I'd experience if I found myself having to drive over "my humps" road every day on the way to work.

Guilt Post

It's been too long since I posted something vaguely on-topic for this blog, so I thought I'd just post a link to More contact mic goodness. I don't really know anything about this video, but I think it is a pretty well done improv on a simple instrument. Searching for contact mics on youtube is always fun.

A rant worth reading

Kyle directed me to this rant which so completely captured the zeitgeist of this musical age that I had to link it. I really hope that it gets a lot of eyeballs, because it really crystallized for me a lot of things I had been feeling since Oink went down recently.

There have been only 2 online services I have ever seen that acheived a library complete enough to offer a large Stockhausen discography: Napster, very shortly before it was closed down, and Oink, for over six months. I choose stockhausen because he is a relatively big fish in the relatively small pond of 20th-century electronic composition. It's not just that I like that style of music, it's that, to me, that is the real promise of the intersection of the internet and music. I would really love to see a stable, reliable, source for ALL music, no matter how obscure. Actually, the more obscure the better. Nobody has trouble getting the latest britney spears record, but the 40 or so people that really want to hear the 1933 recording of Ionization are going to have a hard time through traditional channels.

Music appreciation has changed so much from when I was a teenager. I used to spend a LOT of time going to various record stores, and talking to strangers about my favorite bands. I had no official discography source- periodically, I'd just manage to find a previously unknown album recorded by one of my favorite bands, and it was as if some god was rewarding my peculiar sense of devotion. It would immediately be copied to many many tapes and distributed to the 16 or so other people I knew that would desperately want their own copy. That's just the way it worked. The record companies weren't aware that they were losing money, because it would cost them more money to stock Brown Reason to Live in San Diego than they would make through sales of the few people who would want it.

Now that kids have amazon, band fansites, and generally access to a few orders of magnitude more information than I did, the form their mania takes will certainly be very different than it was for my generation. But I still think that sharing will be a huge part of it, and that they will love the bands that they find. Love them. Want the best for them. Support them. I really believe that no matter what distribution model is finally selected, bands that really reach their listeners will find that their listeners want to take care of them. What nobody really is that interested in supporting is the sybaritic, outmoded, parasite that RIAA labels have become.

Testing the limits of procrastination

So it's been a long time since I posted, and I've actually had people bugging me about it, which I guess is good.

Hopefully I can find some time to put together a bit about the Noel Hill concertina workshop I attended in august- but that will be another day.

For now, Check out the Silophone Project. It's a grain elevator in montreal that has been rigged with speakers, a microphone, an internet connection, and software to allow you to hear your audio clips played inside said grain elevator.

My Paranoia.

I couldn't help noticing today that Ironkey Thumb Drives had purchased ads at slashdot, sourceforge, and boingboing. Clearly they were targeting me. Kyle also sent me email, so I decided to talk a bit about what I currently do.

First of all- if you just use windows, or possibly just windows and osx, AND YOU TRUST YOURSELF TO ALWAYS CARRY YOUR THUMB DRIVE - then you might as well just get an ironkey. They have a host of cool features I don't much worry about, and are ultimately more secure than what I do. If you, like me, use linux AND windows, and are just looking for a relatively easy way to have seperate, secure, passwords for all the different services and sites you interact with, read on.

Up to a few months ago, I had been just relying on a simple algorithm for my passwords- I took the domain name of the site, interleaved the letters (blogger = brleogg), mixed the case (brleogg = BrLeOgG), then made it k-rad (BrLeOgG = BrL30gG). I liked it- it was easy for me to do, and kept me from having the same password everywhere. The drawback was it didnt work so well for things that weren't websites, if someone had one password, they could eventually figure out the rest, and it was still vulnerable to keyloggers.

My new, improved, solution is to use Password Safe for windows, and the beta Java client for linux. It's simple, and it works well. Password Safe has a lot of great features that make it easy to use with windows. User names and passwords are automagically put in your clipboard, so key loggers only get ctrl-v when trying to get what you are doing. I put the binaries for both, and the safe file, on a thumb drive, and I have a portable password storage system that I am happy with.

I also keep the binaries and safe file on my home file server, which I can access remotely (I wouldn't do this from an internet cafe, or machine I thought might have a keylogger, obviously)- so if I forget my usb drive, I am not out of luck (this is why I prefer this solution to the Ironkey solution). If you didn't have your own personal file server, you could make do with a Gmail account, box.net free account, or xdrive free account.

So- the ironkey solution offers hardware encryption, a secure browser through a trusted network, and much much more. It's windows-centric at the moment, though they are promising linux support real soon now. All in all- if you trust yourself to always have your ironkey with you, it is a better solution than what I do. But for me, security is a spectrum with ease of use on one side, and total security on the other. My solution offers me just enough flexibility that I prefer it for the time being. I may eventually switch to using an ironkey in the place of my current thumb drive though, because they look really cool =)

Hope for the world

Sometimes the world seems a little bleak to me. The actions of people, corporations, and governments all seem to be both predictable and petty.

Then you read something like the following excerpt from this article

A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.

Really?! That is so AWESOME! Normally the struggles of nations is just depressing, but when you throw trained rodents in trench coats into the equation, it just gets cool. I just hope the countermeasures are as inventive...

Brian Eno discovers screensavers

I'm assuming that most of you know who Brian Eno is. If not- he wrote some good music, he wrote some pretentious music, he did amazing things as a producer, probably the most impressive of which was inventing the Talking Heads' sound.

Anyway.

He's had some interesting compositional practices in the past, and I am always interested in hearing what he is up to.

Apparently, this week, that is presenting an installation in which he basically makes a screen saver. With audio. There's a bit of a tease over at apple.com where they pretend to maybe discuss the interesting bits of what exactly he did, but- as is usually the case- the people who report on algorithmic composition aren't really interested in algorithms (looks like maybe it was some primitive genetic algorithm? or possibly random...). There were some frightening bits (they used DIRECTOR?!), and, sadly, I came away with the impression that they hadnt actually done anything other than make a nifty screensaver, then cash in on Eno's reputation as an electronic magician.

I'm sure we can all relate...

Poor, poor Souljahboy.

Gamelan on Bicycle

So, after looking more into contact mics, I found out about Richard Lerman- a man who, it appears, knows a great deal about recording strange objects, and not much about web design. The video above shows some gamelan-esque composition using a bicycle and contact microphones.

The Score is the best part. I am a sucker for non-traditional notation, especially if it is as well executed as this.

Bridge Music (first post)

So, this guy is composing a percussive piece that uses a bridge outside of Poughkeepsie, NY as an instrument.

He recorded a 2 -minute proof of concept which I thought was pretty neatly done.

This gives me a longing for contact mics.

Artistic Statements always tend to rub me the wrong way, so I tried to hurry over the majority of the article (which was rife with statements such as "I only play big instruments"). However, the article did mention several different strikers (rubber mallets, peen hammers, and an assortment of ball bearings run down a surface). Once you get past the obligatory music biz blah-blah, this is a pretty impressive example of composition with found material.

I was a little surprised that he went exclusively with contact mics, I would have thought that some of those surfaces would behave like gongs, allowing for some radically different sounds based on mic distance from the surface, like stockhausen did in Mikrophonie