RootJam’s featured blogger…

MUSIC TECH WITH FERDINAND

RootJam Blogger Ferd Schroeder has been a fan of electronic rock music for as long as he can remember.  He’s also a fan of the instruments that artists use to make electronic art.  His blog for RootJam focuses on web-based creativity, but  Fred also researches and comments on general trends and tools used in the creation of popular art.

How The Beatles Produced Songs

Last modified on 2010-11-09 18:00:37 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

This is probably one of the most famous crosswalks in music history, and now the studio nearby http://www.britainexpress.com/London/abbey-road.htm been made into a National Monument http://www.examiner.com/x-4732-Celebrity-Travel-Examiner~y2010m2d23-The-Beatles-Abbey-Road-Studios-declared-a-historic-building .

But that’s not the reason we’re blogging it today.  RootJammer ‘curvaceps’ has forwarded something very thought provoking about the Beatles’ activities at Abbey Road Studios to us!

These days, we take for granted that commercial music is  made using expensive, complex tools.

When we think about music that’s as important as the Beatles’ music, we assume they worked in studios like this:

…but the reality was far humbler, as stuff like the above simply wasn’t invented yet.  voila:

Rootjammer “Curvaceps” and her friend Len were looking around the Web at Abbey Road stuff when they found out about the monument thing above, and found a link to a blog with several audio interviews describing how The Beatles actually _did_ work in the studio:

http://waxy.org/2009/10/audio_analysis_of_the_beatles_multitrack_masters/

The EMI tape recorders in the studio had only 4 tracks, and oftentimes the band had to work very economically, recording entire ensembles onto a single track, carefully bouncing material from track to track, or even manually synchronizing recordings with help of an engineer, using tape recorders and mixers more like musical instruments than documentation devices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_double_tracking .

This was a very interesting link for us to find out about.  The work we can’t talk to the public about just yet [shh!] involves _exactly_ this sort of  idea about media creation, but we hadn’t really thought too much about how those wonderful old Beatles songs were created, or how similar the work was to what we hope our users will be doing.

It’s really inspiring to think about how the limitations of the 1960s technology were pushed aside by creativity, persistence and talent, and how this could relate to the humble little media tools we currently have in development here at RootJam!

“seaquence” ambient music generator

Last modified on 2010-11-09 17:21:25 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“seaquence” http://seaquence.org/ is a free-to-play social music project similar to other interactive browser-based sound environments we have previously reported on such as kepler’s orrery http://www.art.net/~simran/GenerativeMusic/kepler.html and the Tone Matrix http://lab.andre-michelle.com/swf/fl10/ToneMatrix.swf . it is subtly different from these two apps in that it encourages casual end-users to save and share their creations with others. here is a short video http://vimeo.com/15375205 of “seaquence” in operation.

waveforms are shaped into sounds, and are then programmed with a simple graphical stepsequencer, which initiates a little living sound ‘creature’. multiple creatures can be made. when the ‘seaquence’ playback is launched, these organisms freely navigate a small playspace on the user’s screen, interacting with each other. the interactions control the playback of the sequence programs that each waveform creature is ‘programmed’ with, resulting in a sort of living ambient music.

‘seaquence’ is social in that these creatures can be shared and edited. although this feature is currently very primitive, we can see how it might be expanded into something far more sophisticated, allowing a wide range of musical and possibly visual interactions between people who use the system.

seaquence was initially revealed in an alpha state almost a year ago. at that time it had a far different look, and this demo video depicts it being used to drive a different sort of music than what the current version seems to excel at.

Created by Ryan Alexander, Gabriel Dunne and Daniel Masse, “seaquence” is co-sponsored by San Francisco’s Gray Area Foundation for the Arts http://www.gaffta.org/ , an interactive-media group which also helped fund the syzygryd collaborative sequencer/sound sculpture http://www.syzygryd.com/  we blogged here shortly before its debut at Burning Man 2010.

Although not for everyone, we see ‘seaquence’ as part of an emerging trend in online music – social ‘light footprint’ interactive environments which gently encourage creativity on part of a larger audience. …an active rather than passive listening experience, but not so active as to prevent one from getting some work done!

A Youtube Music Collaboration

Last modified on 2011-03-13 16:27:17 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

There have been a few people who have been experimenting with extending youtube’s functionality, mostly in a way where people can do DJ-type sets, or even remix two video/soundtracks.  examples include The YouTube Mixer and TurnTubelist [which i think is a very witty name!].

Recently, however, Artist/Composer Darren Solomen decided to test the limit and discovered that he could mix and sync up close to 20 youtube videos!  with this knowledge, he put out the call to his performer friends, requesting video clips of them performing on an instrument in a specific music key, in this case Bflat.  the endresult is a fascinating notion of asyncrhonous collaboration, “In B Flat.”

It’s 20 different videos on one page, each one a different instrument. You can start any instrument at any time, and it always comes out “right”.

“It should make a composition that’s pretty interesting,” Solomon says. “Sometimes, something comes up, and you just go, ‘Man, I could not have planned that better.’ ”

RootJam thinks this is a pretty interesting concept, and wonders about the possibility of launching multiple youtube clips in rhythmic synchronisation with each other.  with such a system, one could replace tracks at will, or re-compose their relationship to each other, providing a sort of non-realtime band, or perhaps arrangements of a specific band’s existing material.

it’s fascinating to think about music as being a component in something like a video clip, yet becoming the ‘center stage’ object when several video clips are combined.   if a large library of ‘tested’ clips were available per song, it’d be a simple matter to create many versions of the same song, and using the ‘member’ playlist privileges of a user account, these songs could be retrieved and shared with others.

in this way, youtube becomes a sort of musical instrument that just happens to provide visuals, and is yet another example of how our basic notions of media and sharing are constantly in flux these days!

-ferd

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/12/134436766/a-inventive-work-finds-harmony-in-b-flat

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