A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Ableton, Bookmaker: Recently the former lead singer of Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke, announced a line of synthesizer modules. In turn, the module synthesizer manufacturer Tiptop announced it had formed a record label. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Ableton, the developer of the widely used software Live, has become a book publisher. This week it announced Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers, a collection of “solutions to common roadblocks in the creative process” by Dennis DeSantis. Warp Records trainspotters will recognize DeSantis as the person who arranged an Autechre track for the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and who produced remixes for the group’s collection of acoustic renditions of Aphex Twin tracks. More on DeSantis’ book at: https://makingmusic.ableton.com/
— Aural Hearing: For Bloomberg, David Gauvey Herbert wrote a solid overview of the state of assisted hearing devices, with an emphasis on how cost, new technology, and Bluetooth are changing the landscape. One useful term is “PSAP,” which stands for “personal sound amplification products. That term encompasses the range of hearing assistance tools not, in the United States, classified by the FDA as medical devices: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-05/hearing-aid-alternatives-get-cheaper-more-powerful
— Game On: At Gamasutra, game developer Rob Bridgett wrote in detail about the challenges of employing “adaptive audio” in mobile video games. In the course of doing so, he made a useful distinction between “adaptive” and “interactive”: “By adaptive, I’m describing a system that is aware of the activity of the user through collection of data, which then makes changes of certain factors to either fit that behavior, or to adjust certain parameters and responses to best cater for that behavior. It is a system that doesn’t ask for a user-input, but makes changes on their behalf based on data collected. By interactive, I simply mean that a user has access to, and control over, certain elements of the experience.”: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobBridgett/
— CNMAT Man: The “musical scientist/scientific musician” David Wessel passed away last October at age 72. Wessel founded the University of Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, aka CNMAT, and this month Andrew Gilbert wrote an overview of Wessel’s life and career: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/03/20/david-wessel-musical-scientistscientific-musician/
This first appeared in the March 24, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.