The MIT Media Lab legend and early music-technology figure Tod Machover contributed a rangy essay at nytimes.com this week. After a brief autobiography, he talks about the relative democratization of music technology, and then about an opera he’s been at work on. In the process, he expresses his own concerns about the pace of progress [...]
One of the best Resonance FM podcast series is focused, as its name puts it in an admirably straightforward way, on the Voice on Record. The series, hosted by Sean Williams, shares various audio examples that emphasize human speech.
In the past, this has involved everything from children’s records to the landing of man on [...]
Class distinctions and cultural assumptions aside, classical music isn’t foreign to hip-hop. Violins are a common emotional cue for producers, and enough hip-hop hits — from Coolio to Nas to the Beastie Boys, just to name a few — have sampled classical music to register it a common if not everyday occurrence. Hip-hop is often [...]
Contour Editions is a new record label based out of New York City. Its first three releases consist of two free album-length downloads and one long-form video. There are also plans for “physical” releases. Gil Sansón’s Por la Adversidad a las Estrellas, Contour’s inaugural free release, is a series of three transformation tracks, each taking [...]
These are the top 10 most viewed posts on Disquiet.com for the entire year of 2009, during which 474 posts were published on the site.
A new department debuted on Disquiet.com this past year, and while there have only been four entries in it thus far, all four made the top 10 of the year. [...]
From Primus Luta’s site, avanturb.com, the opening graphs of his thinking on sampling:
Within a western music theory context, the transcription of music is one of the first steps to analyzing a form relative to the history of music. Once the form has been transcribed it can be dragged through the theoretical ringer required for [...]
Each year, around this time, I post a look back at the music released in the previous 12 months. And each year, I go on in some way about the absurdity and futility of such an effort, but it’s still something I continue to do, so rather than open with a sense of false disparagement, [...]