November 2010
17 posts
“Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced - the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.”
—John Oswald, quoted in this interview.
“Everybody knows there are extremely rich people in the music business and discerning listeners have noticed that those are generally not the musicians that they like. So they don’t feel good about handing over money for a CD when it’s going to those people. But if you can see a band, buy a band’s recordings and know that there is no middle-man collecting, they can’t stop giving. They see that we’ve given and now it’s their turn to give.”
—Musician Kristin Hersh, from this interview with Nancy Baym.
“
Wired: When you finally got your hands on a computer in the 1950s, what did you do with it?
Brooks: In our first year of graduate school, a friend and I wrote a program to compose tunes. The only large sample of tunes we had access to was hymns, so we started generating common-meter hymns. They were good enough that we could have palmed them off to any choir.
” —Fred Brooks, of The Mythical Man-Month fame, on what must be some of the earliest computer-generated music.
“
The second band I started managing, called “Zero,” recorded some stuff, and we didn’t really know what to do. We weren’t going to go to a label, because it didn’t make sense. So we sat and burned about two hundred CDs. And I think at some point we realized that it would be much easier if people just burned it themselves and gave it to other people, rather than us sitting and doing this. It was really boring.
So on the other side of the CD we had instructions about how to burn it. All of that was pretty new here back then [India, c. 2000]. So we explained this is what you do: get a CD writer, find a friend, buy a blank CD for just 20 rupees, and give it away. Just make sure that they burn another copy and give it to someone else.
We took a lot of pride in that. And the more we asked people to do that, the more people ended up buying the album, which was really strange. We did the first two hundred albums like that, but we were actually mass-printing albums after that. We did about eight to ten thousand copies by the end of the year.
” —Fantastic interview with TED Fellow Vijay Nair on the emergent independent (and non-Bollywood) music industry in India. Don’t miss the killer final paragraph.
Listen
Pauses in pop music, as discussed on WNYC’s Soundcheck (30:25).
What’s your favourite example? I think mine might be 2:25 of David Sylvian’s “Orpheus.” I suspect I’ll be noticing them a lot more now…
