The musical stylings of Sarah Palin

Thursday, October 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Free Jazz Maverick.

Mechanical Turk takes apart Girl Talk

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is brilliant. It works solely as a finely cut gem of pure enjoyment, but it is also a pop art puzzle. It’s the puzzle aspect that Andy Baio decided to take a HIT out on. This post describes how he got all the Billboard chart data for the 264 sampled songs on the album by paying $0.02 for every verified answer using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. To say the least, the crowd sourcing worked, “Within an hour, all but 4 answers were submitted. The median time to finish a request was an impressive 26 seconds”

Here’s some of the resulting data, mapped out all pretty.

We have a great deal of Girl Talk on the Remix Radio stream. Stay tuned.

Tags: demix, remix

The music of voicemail

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

I only just learned of Storyscape a few minutes ago, and this is the first video I found. If this serendipitous selection doesn’t represent some kind of sampling error, it may very well be the greatest online journal of all time.

Voicemail from Amber Boardman on Vimeo.

More of Amber Boardman’s attempts to highlight the poetry in the mundane can be found here.

Hijacking the volume knob

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

If you give any thought at all to how music sounds, you should read this terrific treatise on mastering and the tyranny of ‘loudness’ by the Chicago Mastering Service.

Now frankly, I think that general audiophile snobbery (“How can you stand to listen to that 192 MP3?!?!?!”) is the quickest way to come off as a complete douche. But, I’m fascinated by the evolution of how we present information and the mixing of format and function.

The short of it is that music has gotten a lot louder, but this quest for loudness comes at a price.

For example, this is a waveform from a Stooges song from a 1990 CD release:

This is the same Stooges track after it was “mastered” by Sony for a 1997 release:

To quote Jason Ward:

“THIS BOX IS FULL!!!!!!!!!! There is a difference of less than 3 decibels between the loudest average part of this track and the loudest digital word that can be represented as sound. This is what we call a true sausage. This record is shockingly loud, but also just shocking. The volume in this case has been achieved with almost constant clipping of the original waveforms.”

It’s defintely worth reading the whole article. Check it, yo!

Culture, for free

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Here’s a conference near and dear to our hearts: Free Culture 2008!

If you’re in or around Berkeley this weekend (Oct. 11- 12) you should join me for a couple days of geeking out on free culture, technology, copyright, and remixing.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Prof. Pam Samuelson, and John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla are the keynotes with many more panels and presenters lined up.