Spammers wasting their brain power

You spammers really make me smile. You make such an effort looking up blogs, trying to leave comments. You even take the time to write a sentence disguised with obvious meaning, just to make blog authors believe your comment is well worth publishing. The thing is, I just can't see how you can actually trick anyone with this.

Even if your product was worth something -- who wants to find something valuable while being tricked? Do you honestly believe this kind of alluring, slimey backdoor-advertising actually does anything for your brand credit? So pathetic. I'm sorry, but if you're clever enough to search the internet for blogs with keywords that could relate to what you have to sell, you could use that brain power to go back to school and learn something about participation, user experience and brand loyalty.

Simply forget it. I won't accept any post here that contains a link to some trickery fake product. No ol' grandmas you can mug here, guys. Go play elsewhere.

Forecasting Chart Results

Ars Technica reports in Understanding what makes pop music popular:

A couple of PhDs at MIT may change that with a program that mimics the musical tastes of the public.
The application, written by Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan of MIT's Media Laboratory, "listens" to music, analyzes elements of a song (e.g., pitch, beat, tempo, melody) and gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. When compared to the Billboard charts, the software is "surprisingly accurate."

Globeandmail.com also reports:

Computer analysis of songs is not necessarily new. A wide variety of companies spend hours in laboratories breaking down hit songs so the music industry can stay one step ahead of the market.
The goal is to pinpoint trends in pitch, rhythm and cadence that are driving consumer spending habits. However, the MIT researchers believe they've taken the science to another level.
The MIT method, developed at the school's renowned Media Laboratory, also takes into account social responses to hit music that are fed into the algorithms.
The researchers pull data from weblogs, chat rooms and music reviews -- anywhere a song is being discussed -- and feed it into the computer, which allows the software to gauge the popularity of a certain sound.
Once all the information is tabulated, the computer can listen to an entirely new album and predict how people will respond based on what it knows about the latest reactions to the music it has already heard.
...Mr. Whitman and Mr. Jehan, who are both musicians, scoff at those methods.
"They say you bought this so you'll like this. But it's really bad for music because it can only recommend stuff that people have bought a lot of," he said.
Still, the music industry has been trying for decades to come up with a reliable system. The standard practice today is to crunch data from focus groups across a broad spectrum of tastes, which gives hints of a song's true potential in the market.
Despite the performance of HitPredictor, the researchers at MIT aren't looking to build another software program that simply picks commercial hits. Mr. Whitman and Mr. Jehan's goal is to expose the world to a wider variety of music...
...Forecasting what songs people will like before they hear them is easy, they say. In many ways, it's been done for decades without computers. Finding good songs is much harder.
"There's too much music out there and its really hard to figure out what you want to hear," Mr. Whitman said.

Check-check-check-it-out

The Beastie Boys have released vocal tracks from tracks of their last releases. It's all free so you can remix their voices using your own tracks. This is pretty cool... I haven't decided what to do with it yet, but I'm sure there will be something new coming out of it. This is how real artists think if they're not intimidated by greedy lawyers and big entertainment labels.

L4YERCAKE

Last night when we rented L4yercake, Mike went to bed, Eliza stayed up for about 20 mins of the movie and I , well I stayed up all night. It was like an e-mail from an old friend; the lead character reminded me immensely of both my roommate from New Mexico and my roommate from Switzerland, kind of a concentrated combination of the two. The plot was tight with interesting and satisfying twists and turns, that led you into familiar ground with slightly tweaked outcomes that were a bit refreshing considering the state of most modern movies rendering of the drug trade. The lead character narrarated his way through the first 10 minutes exemplifying the practical logic of ethical business and selective association, while explaining how he came to be involved and ultimately exceptionally qualified in the illegal business of underground drugs. L4yercake provided an entertaining movie on many levels(using the word layer again would be pshing it) but it was the simple fact that I felt like I was having a conversation with an old friend whom I hadn't really spoken with in a while.

Remix Ready

Opsound Remix Ready is a label provided by Opsound that enables artists such as DJ's to collaborate with other artists featured on the Opsound website. Remix Ready signifies that the artists posting on Opsound are open to have their music remixed. All you have to do is ask.

Finding the vein

Once in a while I get restless. In such cases, it's rather futile to resist the giddy feeling in my bones. I can try dancing it off. Or I can take out my bike, or simply jog around the block. But in the end, the only thing that really helps is facing the restlessness. There are two kinds of cure that will work most times. One, take a moleskin book and a pen and start drawing. Or I sit down in front of the keyboard and see what your core comes up with. Anything that is creating something is a good therapy for restlessness. The only second way is digging up things. Everything, from what you've got stored in the basement, literally, either in your mind or in real life. And when it comes to digging, the good old bookmarks folder -- grown over generations since 1994 -- is always a good starting point.

With digging I don't mean attempting to sort out thousands of outdated bookmarks. It's rather dipping your hands really deep into the mud, so after it, you've got dirt under your fingernails. It's because of the nature of the web, that under layers of layers of layers, of brittle and shells, dust and rust, you will find that one link that will show you a vein of a gold mine.

Then you'll find what you've been looking for, before you knew you'd been looking for it. Katarakt is such a link. It's a french group of musicians I found under layers of layers, stashed in a list of updated links on Opsound.

When I listen to their music, the doors of conception open wide. It's this kind of music that can lift these doors out of their angles even. Not because it rocks, or because it's so elaborately done. But just because it's touching you inside.

Mind you, this music is for free and it is very expressive. That alone doesn't make it fit for the mainstream.

Resources:
Katarakt Homepage
(Check out the collection of three exceptional music pieces dealing with Arafats death)
A video clip example with an electronica track

GarageBand receives award

GarageBand and Jam Pack Earn MIPA Awards
From Apple Hot News:

This week, GarageBand received the MIPA award in the category “Best Innovative Product” of the year. MIPA is the most prestigious international award in the professional music production industry, presented by 58 international magazines. It’s the first time that a software product earned an award in this category even though several software programs have received nominations over the past five years. Additionally, Jam Pack received a “best of” award in the “Sound Libraries” category.

Words echo in this poet's mind many times before they are spoken

Wired 13.02: Why Wilco Is the Future of Music
The band Wilco and its quiet, haunted leader, Jeff Tweedy, is something different. After its Warner label, Reprise, decided that the group's fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was no good, Wilco dumped them and released the tracks on the Internet. The label was wrong. The album was extraordinary, and a sold-out 30-city tour followed. This success convinced Nonesuch Records, another Warner label, to buy the rights back - reportedly at three times the original price. The Net thus helped make Wilco the success it has become. But once back in Warner's favor, many wondered: Would Wilco forget the Net?..
...I got a chance to ask Tweedy about all this before a concert in Oakland, California (that's the weird thing about law professors hanging around Wired - you get to go to the back of the bus). What struck me most was his clarity. He was a man called to a war that he couldn't believe had to be fought. Yet it isn't ideology that drives him. It's common sense.
"Music," he explained, "is different" from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves."

Hype

Wired News: Like It or Not, Blogs Have Legs
Another interesting article about blogs. It also shows the dynamics of what makes a hype hip.

Resonance in Dynamica

I watched a movie with a collegue last night, it might be helpful to inform you that english is not his first language, at one point he asked me what do you call that, pointing to the little girl on a swing. I asked him what does it do, (a week or so earlier a Brazilian friend of ours pointed out that most english names for things were merely a discription of there function: for example a can opener, opens cans) he replied it swings, and I told him it was simply called a swing. We both remarked on how our brazillian friends concept made such obvious sense.
Art unlike the english language does not always make such obvious sense and therefore benefits from a more in depth analysis to grasp the overall concepts that are helpful when crafting a creation. A basic concept I would like to contribute is called "Resonance in Dynamica". Resonance "which is a fundemental behavior of a harmonic oscillator when it is driven by a periodic force"1, can vary immensley depending upon the orgin of the initial force. "Dynamics or equation of motion" is "The causal relation between the present state and the next state in the future."2 Here we will take the basic components of dynamics and impose upon it a locale which we will call "Dynamica". So, Resonance in Dynamica is defined as the originating force which generates in the moment where the present and the future meet. It is in this meeting of elements where Art is created. Art is NOT created from a structure or a blueprint, it is created in a place, a place that has never been, and yet has always been. If this seems contradictory, your right it is. however when creating ART we need to dig a little deeper into the fabric of things to realize it is not just the thread that holds the world togeather but also the static.
1,2, 1198 -The Pendulum Lab

Let's do it

Yesterday I helped a friend of mine (he is also a member of this site) to bring his DJ set back home. On the way we discussed a party we had helped organizing. It was the party of the place where he had spun and from where we took back the DJ set.

We talked about what was great with this party and what went wrong. And we were both in agreement that while in the end everything had worked out fine -- partly because everybody contributing spent extra time to make things work that hadn't been organized or taken care of -- we also agreed that many things would have been easy to organize better, if someone would have taken care of them beforehand. Not while the party was running already.

So we thought about this for a moment. We know what we can work out together. We have a basic understanding of making enough money to keep the thing going and we don't want to focus on making more money. Because money is not the point, it never was.

Why don't we sit together and work out a standardized party plan. Something that will always work, because all the positions, the responsibilities, the posts to think of will have their place and the system we create will always work, it will always be appliable to any kind of event.

Why don't we call that eve culture: eve for evening and culture... Well, that explains itself. So already eve culture is becoming more than what it is, more than what you can read here. At some point in the near future, this friend of mine and others will sit together and work out a plan to organize parties that will always work. It's not that hard, you know, just someone has to take care of it.

Pool stream

Are you up for eclectic radio, the Event Horizon of mainstream? Opsound has also a radio stream. Simply click the link and then look up the file in your downloads folder. It's called listen.pls. Double click it and iTunes will start streaming.