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.