'Abide with Me' Is Top Musical Hallucination (Reuters)
Grok Headline matches for 'Abide with Me' Is Top Musical Hallucination (Reuters)
"Abide with me" is top musical
hallucination (Reuters)
"Abide with me" is top musical
hallucination (Reuters)
03/06/2004 02:00 AMReuters - "Abide with Me", a hymn penned in the mid-1800s, is one of
the most common tunes
heard in musical hallucinations, a psychiatrist says.
IT's Musical Habits
IT's Musical Habits
07/20/2004 09:22 AMMusical Shares
Musical Shares
09/13/2004 10:44 AMApple's supremacy in the digital music market will be challenged by a
joint launch this month by Microsoft and Napster. By Guy Clapperton,
The Guardian (via MyAppleMenu)
Mac Vs. Microsoft: The Musical
Mac Vs. Microsoft: The Musical
01/22/2004 02:09 AMWill other PC manufacturers follow in HP's footsteps? Only time will
tell. By Jefferson Graham (USA Today via MyAppleMenu)
Musical Baton
Musical Baton
06/05/2005 11:19 PMTotal volume of music files on my computer
Yahoo! Music Engine says ?132 Songs, 9 hrs, 25 min, 03 sec, 553MB?.
The last CD I bought was
That's quite a while ago, I don't remember which one was last exactly.
Let's say Kid A - Radiohead.
Song playing right now
Well, I was watching TV, but if I want to hear music I usually listen
to my LAUNCHcast radio station, so I started that. ?
Musical interlude
Musical interlude
12/11/2003 10:56 AM
This morning I'm listening to Start Me Up by the Rolling
Stones. What an excellent song. Man. It's so weird that Microsoft
chose this as the theme song for Windows 95. Wow. I think they chose
it because they wanted us to think about the Start Menu. But ohhh you
make a grown man cry. If you rough it up startitup startitup don't
make a grown man cry. She's my fave-fave-favorite shape. Never never
never stop. I take you places you never never seen. Never never never
stop. Start me up never stop. Start me up never stop. You make a grown
man cry. You make a dead man come.
The New Musical Functionality...
The New Musical Functionality...
07/17/2004 08:20 AMOver the last few months webloggia has been full of discussions
about the new musical functionality that's starting to emerge around
the web. I wasn't immune from this trend - I wrote about MediaUnbound (On MediaUnbound and Recommendations
Engines) and linked to the (currently pretty awful) Music Recommendation System for
iTunes. Dan Hill has also been talking around the subject, talking
about first So
cialising mp3-based music listening and then about whether wh
ether recommendations scale. And those minxes over at 2lmc linked and commented upon the
views of people who are suggesting better ways that iTunes could handle transitions between songs. And of course the new
version of iTunes and the iTunes Music
Store also now has the user-generated iMix feature -
standard web-native functionality which allows people (and now people
in the UK, France and Germany rather than just
the US) to put mix tapes on the web where other people can rate and/or
buy them. And that's just the tip of the iceberg...
Then of course there are the staples of this new musical
functionality - from the rapidly-becoming-indispensible audioscrobbler (which uses
the flexibility and granularity of net-enabled MP3 playing devices to
create charts, lists and recommendations) through to the
self-generating radio stations like last.fm and launchcast. And then there's all
the little hook-in tools like iChatStatus (publish current listening to iChat's presence
display) and Kung-Tunes
(publish current listening to the web) that have slowly becoming
integrated into my life without my really noticing how they all hook
together, communicate, branch off and build upon each other.
All this new funtionality is emerging at the same time (or at least
starting to be adopted at the same time) because we're beginning to
see a world in which a decent number of early adopters are now
starting to do a substantial portion of their listening on digital
devices. Obviously the iPod
has been the major success story here - the definitive product that
has been encouraging people to do the necessary work to transfer their
music into more easily manipulatable digital files. But the increasing
prevelance of broadband and wireless connectivity is helping too -
becauase it's the connection of these appliances to the internet that
has created the explosion in interoperable, interconnected devices,
applications and people. Clearly, the number of people listening to
music through these channels is still tiny compared to the entire
music-consuming public. There may be many people using iPods, but
there's still an adoption path for moving all your listening
into digital jukeboxes and being perpetually connected to the internet
(ubiquitous, always-on, non-computer-centric internet in the home is
a bit of an obsession of mine
at the moment).
But this small proportion looks like it is set to grow. One of the
first questions you have to ask yourself in any organic R&D role
(which is I think how I'd characterise what I do) is am I a freak
or am I an early adopter? You have to have some sense of how much
your instincts and excitements are in tune with real people in the
world because otherwise you cannot possibly evaluate how those people
might respond to the products, concepts or propositions that you think
are exciting. In this case, it's becoming fairly clear that people who
are listening to digital music and in connected ways are very
definitely more like early adopters than they are freaks. They're
pointing in roughly the right direction. And there are now enough of
them that it's becoming more and more worth people's time ot build
little tools or widgets or applications or paradigms or appliances or
business models around them. Which in turn appears to be making the
whole area still more attractive, creating a feedback loop that is
pulling more and more people towards new ways of listening. I don't
want to sound too cheesy but I'm afraid I can't help myself - it's
pretty clear that we've reached a critical mass and that new musical
functionality is about to explode. The only question now is what will
be there when the smoke clears?
Over the next few days I'm going to write about some of the core
trends that I'm seeing in people's use of digital music, attempting to
extrapolate from some current behaviours that we're all observing
around us - concentrating on how people wish to interact and use their
music. I'm not going to spend too much time on the way some people may
wish to legislate against these desires or build around them - because
I believe for the most part that any attempt to do so will inevitably
fail. Competing models that more adequately fulfil those needs will
rise to take over in their place. The model that meets the most needs
(while having the least obvious incumberences) will probably win in
the really long-term, even if the market, commercial advantages or
monopolist practices deform it in the short to medium term.
I'll be talking about four major areas that seem to me to be
indicative of the unevenly-distributed musical functionality of the
future - (1) portability and access, (2) navigation, (3)
self-presentation and social uses of music and (4) data use and
privacy. These trends within these areas are - I believe -
representative of much larger trends across the consumption of all
text-based, audio-based and video-based media and so it might be
possible to draw conclusions beyond the consumption of music. I am
however not planning to do so. And I make no claims that these areas
of enquiry are absolute or canonical, or that there are no other areas
that I should also be investigating. All I'll argue is that these four
areas are core to the movements that we're currently seeing and that
they are each likely to play themselves out in the product designs,
interface designs and business models of the near future.
Of course what comes after that remains to be seen...
Tomorrow: The New Musical Functionality, Portability and
access...
Read the comments
The Last Starfighter--The Musical!
The Last Starfighter--The Musical!
09/22/2004 10:58 PMThings musical
Things musical
08/02/2004 02:37 AMhttp://www.musicmobs.com/ - social network for musical tastes
musicplasma.com - visualization of musicial influences
original music from me and Stuart Sharpe - circa 1982:
Funky Quest - by Me
W
hat am I gonna do for fun - by Stuart Sharpe
Musical Snares
Musical Snares
10/28/2003 11:06 PMI should have known better, because now I'm sitting exactly where
Microsoft wants me, facing a significant "switching cost" if I want to
adopt iTunes as my music-management software of choice. Sometime soon,
I will start the laborious process of re-ripping all my CDs into MP3
files so they will play nice with iTunes. But the more I think about
it, the more antsy I get about my decision to back the iTunes camp. By
Andrew Leonard (Salon via MyAppleMenu)
Musical chairs
Musical chairs
04/15/2004 04:58 PMAs online audio hits a commercial crescendo, key companies are
jockeying for position. But both RealNetworks and Apple may be left to
go it alone as the sound of Microsoft's footsteps grows louder.
Big River, the musical
Big River, the musical
03/23/2005 05:34 PMJen took me to see the musical "Big River" last night. It was
incredible! Totally awesome! First of all Huck...
Motorola goes musical
Motorola goes musical
08/04/2004 10:28 PMThe Tribune Aug 5 2004 1:41AM GMT
GarageBand For The Musical Newbie
GarageBand For The Musical Newbie
04/21/2004 08:43 AMWhat, I wondered, could an ordinary musical ignoramus like me actually
create using this software? Let's find out. By Giles Turnbull,
O'Reilly Network (via MyAppleMenu)
iTunes and musical taste
iTunes and musical taste
11/12/2003 01:02 PMWired is running a tongue-in-cheek article about the ability of iTunes
users to share their playlists. "Thanks to the ability of Apple's
iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now
possible to judge someone's taste in music -- or lack of it -- in a
way that previously required a certain level of intimacy," the article
states. It further notes that iTunes users are starting to realize
that their playlists can affect the social image they project, and...
[ Evil Dead: The Musical ]
[ Evil Dead: The Musical ]
06/13/2004 07:32 AMIt's ba-a-ack! .. just that .. musical
evildeadthemusical.com
track
this site | 3 links
Evil Dead: The Musical
Evil Dead: The Musical
06/12/2004 08:35 PM
Evil Dead: The
Musical In making your list of should-be musical theater
productions, you've likely considered the
Evil Dead
series, right? Fortunately for you, Montreal's
Just for Laughs comedy festival has put
together
just that,
believe it or not, for this year's festival.
A special run will happen in Toronto on the week of June 22nd before
moving to Montreal for a full run.
Mechanical musical marvels
Mechanical musical marvels
06/21/2004 01:42 PMMechanical Music Digest is devoted to antique nickelodeons, musical
toys, automatons, and other wonderful contraptions of yesteryear. The
site is no beauty, but the content is magnificent, with articles on
miniature player pianos, steam-powered calliopes, and even amazing
fakes:
"Please be
aware that there is currently a 'wave' of brand new, made-to-deceive
old-looking automatons reaching the international marketplace.
The few different variants of this monkey 'hookah-like' smoker which
we've seen are purposely constructed so as to allow no internal
inspection..."
Link (via String Can Phone)Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.5
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.5
12/26/2003 06:46 PMA MIDI track accompaniment generator.
Musical Porch Swing
Musical Porch Swing
06/17/2005 06:11 PM
The Musical Porch Swing
is now available from Musical Furnishings, a company that specializes
in making everyday furniture that doubles as giant xylophones. The
furniture is made from western red cedar and operates in the same
manner as a normal xylophone. Each slat is a different note.
The swings begin at $1000 and include the mallets.
Musical Porch
Swing [i4u]
was done of IT professionals and their
musical tastes
was done of IT professionals and their
musical tastes
07/21/2004 11:14 AMDevelopers play air guitar to Megadeth The Register .. Musical
preferences of computer geeks .. Nerds Musical Preference
Survey
theregister.co.uk/2004/07/20/musical_preference_survey
track
this site | 4 links
MusicBrainz: metainformación musical
MusicBrainz: metainformación musical
05/27/2004 07:37 AMJobs & Gates: The Musical
Jobs & Gates: The Musical
07/11/2004 07:55 PMA musical based on the lives of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates will be performed this week at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, New York...
Best Musical Score (By a Laptop)
Best Musical Score (By a Laptop)
06/26/2004 01:06 AMNew York Times Jun 26 2004 5:16AM GMT
coming next, Power Law: The Musical
coming next, Power Law: The Musical
01/07/2004 05:34 PMcam's teaching a class on power laws. most students will sit all the
way in the back, with fewer and fewer as you get to the front of the
room.
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.9
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.9
07/05/2004 03:59 PMA MIDI track accompaniment generator.
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.7
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.7
04/20/2004 08:43 PMA MIDI track accompaniment generator.
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.8
Musical MIDI Accompaniment 0.8
06/24/2004 10:46 PMA MIDI track accompaniment generator.
New offering makes musical connection
New offering makes musical connection
04/02/2005 09:20 AMChicago Tribune Apr 2 2005 12:21PM GMT
Violinist, 16, wins musical title
Violinist, 16, wins musical title
05/02/2004 04:45 PMA 16-year-old violinist wins the 26th Young Musician of the Year.
MUSICALinEx: informática musical y LinEx
MUSICALinEx: informática musical y LinEx
04/20/2004 04:44 AM'Avenue Q' wins Tony for best musical
'Avenue Q' wins Tony for best musical
06/07/2004 10:42 AMHelping Hand For Musical PowerBooks
Helping Hand For Musical PowerBooks
02/19/2004 10:08 AMA trio of Australian musicians is making PowerBook music using a
system on the surface even easier than GarageBand -- simply by using
their hands. (Macworld UK via MyAppleMenu)
Hot Game: Musical Cell Phones
Hot Game: Musical Cell Phones
12/30/2004 04:55 PMTheStreet.com Dec 30 2004 7:04PM GMT
Livewire: Plucking Musical Gems from the
Web
Livewire: Plucking Musical Gems from the
Web
11/15/2003 12:08 PMBoston Globe Nov 15 2003 10:01AM ET
The New Musical Functionality:
Portability and access
The New Musical Functionality:
Portability and access
07/26/2004 05:41 PMThe other day I started this run of posts on the New Musical
Functionality by arguing that the behaviour of an until-recently
small group of digital music fans seemed to be now spreading into the
mainstream. I also listed four areas that seemed to me to be where the
most significant changes in consumption patterns were occurring -
areas to which I believe that anyone building sites, services or
hardware around music should be paying close attention. These four
areas were (1) portability and access, (2) navigation, (3)
self-presentation/social uses and (4) data use and privacy. Today I'm
going to concentrate briefly on the trends towards portability and
access.
This may seem like an obvious place to start, but I think it's an
important thing to get out in the open: the core difference between an
iPod and a CD Walkman isn't
audio quality. That's not to say that there isn't a differences in the
audio quality between the MP3/AAC file and CD 'originals' because - of
course - there is and it is a significant one. However, in defiance of
the normal path of technological achievements, the newer technology
does not have the advantage in reproductive fidelity. In the future
this may change (Apple's lossless
compression and increasingly cheap storage space are just two of
the reasons why), but at the moment MP3s and AACs use lossy forms of
compression and for this reason simply do not sound as good as their
CD originals. It would probably be pushing it to say that this is the
first significant change of popular audio format that actually made
the sound quality worse (vinyl fans have been criticising the CD for
that for years), but it does at least seem to be one of the first
where claims of improved sound haven't been a major selling point.
So why are these new formats and players starting to occupy the
mainstream so effectively? What is it that means people want iPods so
desperately even though they're effectively purchasing a technology
that will result in a decrease in audio quality? Again the answer is
so obvious that it hardly bears repeating - particularly given that
it's on every single bloody advert that Apple produce. The reason that
people are buying iPods is because they want 10,000 songs in their
pockets. They want access to music wherever they are in the world.
More still - they want access to all their music
everywhere. Every last bit. Every last place.
As I've said, this sounds obvious but it is important. It's
important because once we understand the need that a product is
filling, we can attempt to find other/better ways of filling it. The
iPod's current success has demonstrated that the need exists - and how
- but I would argue that in the longer term it is by no means obvious
that the need would be best served by small portable hard discs
embedded in MP3 players.
It doesn't take a lot of foresight to see the scope for development
in this area. In the short-term, the trend seems fairly clear -
storage capacity looks set to increase and/or devices look set to get
smaller. This has been the trend of almost all computing technology
over the last few decades (cf. Moore's Law for
the near-parallel phenomenon happening in processor speed). Given
these fundamental developments, there aren't an enormous numbers of
directions that these devices can go.
The first two options for future product directions around this
stuff are (1) larger capacities and (2) smaller form factors. We have
already seen movements in both of these directions (iPod Mini / 60Gb iPod coming). However, there's only so far that either
of these trends can develop.
Increased capacity ceases to be interesting at the point where
there is more capacity than data to fill it - hence the problem with
saying that newer iPods can hold 10,000 songs. There are very few
people in the world who would be capable, let alone interested, in
sourcing that much music. After listening to my music exclusively
through a computer for the last two or three years, I've still only
got 8,000 MP3s. And I'm hardly representative. If we're talking about
significant subsequent increases in capacity then there are some
pretty clear limits in place. 10,000 songs is about a month of solid
listening. 100,000 songs would be getting on for a year. 1,000,000
songs a lifetime. Somewhere between a month and lifetime, the marginal
utility of another song being on your iPod reaches zero (even assuming
that physics lets you get to that size in the first place).
Of course when we talk about capacity in terms of songs we're kind of
missing the point. From this point on, advances in capacity are more
likely to allow us to listen to
higher quality audio than they
are to increase the number of songs that people want to listen to. A
tenfold increase in portable storage would mean that a future iPod
could carry the same number of songs as a current iPod except in Apple
Lossless formats that have all the sound quality of a CD. A parallel
increase in bandwidth speeds could mean that the last few decades of
work on compression could become fundamentally redundant - much like
the techniques that meant programmers had to write whole applications
to run with 8k of RAM are now pretty much irrelevant. So this is
clearly a direction things are likely to move over the next few years.
But even this has its limits. Once you've escalated disc size ten
times there's nowhere to go in terms of audio quality - or at least,
nowhere that will make the slightest difference to most individual
consumers. So again any subsequent growth in capacity will have to be
sold in terms of an increased number of songs that could be held - and
as such the gradual diminishing marginal utility problem comes in
again. Increased capacity, therefore, has only so much of a shelf life
- can only go so far before it collapses under its own weight.
The other potential obvious future direction - as I've said above -
is to make the appliances themselves smaller. Here again there are
limits to utility. There would seem to be a size under which a device
ceases to be practical - that size being directly related to the size
of interface elements, screens and buttons, which in turn relate
directly to the size of fingers and thumbs and the limits of human
vision. Now again, you can merge this in as a direction with the
increased capacities and find a bottomed-out form factor and gradually
increase the capacity on it - and no doubt this is the main approach
that people like Apple will take over the next few years. At least
that is until physics steps in or human interest (in having
unlistenable amounts of music) begins to wane - both of which are
probably a way off, but remain definite limits to future development
in these directions.
Of course, there are certain conditions where an appliance may
usefully shrink below the size of its interface, and that's when it
shares that interface with a number of other pieces of technology.
This is the approach that the mobile phone manufacturers have taken -
as the phones became almost unmanageably small, people's attention
moved instead to enhancing functionality and adding in cameras, PDAs,
web-browsers, comms equipment, bluetooth and the like. This had the
effect of keeping the form factors at manageable sizes while still
allowing competition and product development to occur. There's
absolutely no doubt that this kind of hybridisation will be / is
already a core part of the development of portable digital music
players. Much of this hybridisation results in useful connections and
possible new products emerging from music devices that are permanently
network-enabled.
All of this previous stuff has been relatively uncontroversial -
it's no more than the immediate development along a couple of
pre-existing axes of the products we have in our stores today. The
incorporation of network-enabled devices has the capacity to change
things a lot though. This is where alternative models for fulfilling a
design for universal access and portability are likely to start
emerging more strongly. We currently seem to be moving towards a world
with greater and greater connectivity and one in which some kind of
flat-rate, always-on broad-ish band internet access is likely to be
integrated into pretty much all portable devices. This opens up other
possibilities for having access to all of your music wherever
you might be - and without actually carrying any of the files around
with you. We could be looking towards a near future in which all of
your media (and perhaps applications and information) can be held 'in
the sky' and streamed/downloaded down to whatever appliance you like
as and when required. Where this repository would live (with an ISP,
with your home server, on your TV's set top-box, on Apple's iTunes
Music store) is not immediately clear. But it's conceivable that -
given enough bandwidth and centralisation - massively redundant models
like we have at the moment where everyone has their own copy of a
music file could be replaced completely by centralised music-on-demand
services. Personally, I'm not much convinced that particular extreme
is likely - people still seem to like to own music and still think of
it as an object rather than as a service - but that's not particularly
relevant. The important aspect is simply that the same user need can
be met in different ways.
So will we move towards larger portable hard discs or towards
connected repositories explorable through massive bandwidth? Probably
the direction that we take here will depend on nothing more elegant
and interesting than financial cost. If enormous storage options were
to become enormously cheap and small, then carrying a significant hard
disc is likely to remain the preference of individual music fans. On
the other hand, if bandwidth became cheap, then we'll probably find
ourselves in a more service-driven and centralised streaming-based
world. The model that's most likely to dominate is likely to lie
somewhere in between the two - in hybridised technologies that use
hard disks as local copies of stashes of music held in more
centralised locations - using the network to syncas and when
appropriate (see note) as well as a mediator for various forms of
engagement, navigation and data-mining around and in-between
individual listeners. But more around that stuff in the next part of
this sprawling rant around the New Musical Functionality: On trends in
navigation.... (Coming Soon)
Note: Syncing becomes very important in a world with
innumerable devices and limited connectivity. On a slight tangent -
there are innumerable hybrid models where increases in portable data
collide with the ability to access data at a distance. At the desktop
level you can imagine computers running off the wired internet
creating the impression of your 'home' computer wherever you sit, and
on the portable level with large local storage being kept up-to-date
perpetually via slower trickle-fed syncing protocols.
Read the
comments
Beat Goes On For Musical Instrument
Makers
Beat Goes On For Musical Instrument
Makers
01/22/2004 02:09 AMWith new software promising to turn home computers into mini-recording
studios, the industry is buzzing about its happiest prospect in years:
the birth of the digital garage band. By Sue Zeidler (Reuters via
MyAppleMenu)
RealNetworks Seeks a Musical Alliance
With Apple
RealNetworks Seeks a Musical Alliance
With Apple
04/15/2004 03:42 AMRealNetworks made a direct appeal to Apple Computer, suggesting that
the two companies form a common front against Microsoft in the digital
music business.
RealNetworks seeks musical alliance with
Apple
RealNetworks seeks musical alliance with
Apple
04/14/2004 11:46 PMIn an e-mail sent to Apple CEO Steve Jobs last week, RealNetworks CEO
Rob Glaser suggested that the two companies form a "tactical alliance"
against Microsoft in the digital music business...
Grok Description matches for 'Abide with Me' Is Top Musical Hallucination (Reuters)
GrokA matches for 'Abide with Me' Is Top Musical Hallucination (Reuters)
'Abide with Me' Is Top Musical Hallucination (Reuters)
