December 2010
15 posts
Seaquence →
seaquence.org
Seaquence is a browser-based sequencer that looks like a petri dish. Or, the more you play with it, a petri dish that acts like a sequencer. You develop your own set of paramecium-ish creatures, each of which acts like a so-called “step sequencer.” That means that it plays a sequence of notes that are notated in a grid-like pattern. Make one creature, toy with its musical DNA (affecting “waveform, octave, scale, melody, envelope, and volume,” as the instruction explain), and then add others to see how they interact.
via boingboing
Listen
Jingle Rock Bell by MeFi user Pink Stainless Rat.
Because I like my Christmas music to be intentionally (rather than inadvertently) absurdist.
[thanks, Tim!]
“
For the following items, please indicate your basic preference level for the genres… [on a scale of 1 to 7, where ‘1’ is ‘strongly dislike’ and ‘7’ is ‘strongly like’.]
1. _____ Classical
2. _____ Blues
3. _____ Country
4. _____ Dance/Electronica
5. _____ Folk
6. _____ Rap/hip-hop
7. _____ Soul/funk
8. _____ Religious
9. _____ Alternative
10. _____ Jazz
11. _____ Rock
12. _____ Pop
13. _____ Heavy Metal
14. _____ Soundtracks/theme songs
Scoring for the four music preference dimensions:
Reflective & Complex: 1, 2, 5, 10
Intense & Rebellious: 9, 11, 13
Upbeat & Conventional: 3, 8, 12, 14
Energetic & Rhythmic: 4, 6, 7
The STOMP [above] is a 14-item scale assessing preferences in music genres. It assesses four broad music-preference dimensions. …
The present research examines individual differences in music preferences….The data indicated that people consider music to be an important aspect of their lives and listening to music as an activity they engaged in frequently….[A]nalyses of the music preferences of over 3,500 individuals converged to reveal four music-preference dimensions: Reflective and Complex, Intense and Rebellious, Upbeat and Conventional, and Energetic and Rhythmic. Preference for these music dimensions were related to a wide array of personality dimensions (e.g., Openness), self-views (e.g., political orientation), and cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal ability). [source]
So help me, I’ll never complain about music recommendation services over-simplifying my musical tastes again.
[via the reliably thought-provoking Collision Detection]
“I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of acoustic guitar. That grinding dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder….Suddenly you had a very mini studio. Playing acoustic, you’d overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as pick up and amplifier at the same time. We were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell.”
—From Keith Richards’ new autobiography. Quoted in this Design Observer article about innovation and disruption in music technologies, and found via the fantastic tech/culture blog Gearfuse.
“[W]e started talking about the fact that our kids listen to a lot of the same music that we do. Because music has become so flat and because there’s, you know, 50 years of it available on the web, and because you don’t actually always know when the music you like was recorded — you just know that you like it, here’s something and it’s fun — that music no longer becomes the cultural divide that it used to be….”
—
Neil Gaiman, quoted in this interview.
The decline of mass media and the rise of digital distribution means that music is not only splintering across audience, but it’s splintering across time; listeners are cratediggers as a matter of course.
