Shazam, the iPhone app whose raison d’être is song identification, “creates a spectrogram for each song in its database–a graph that plots three dimensions of music: frequency vs. amplitude vs. time. The algorithm then picks out just those points that represent the peaks of the graph….”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
The Global Kindle Marks A Historic Evolution
“The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.”
Wanted: The MPAA’s Next Washington Lobbyist
“Proper candidate must have solid Capitol Hill contacts, be able to multitask and have great people skills. Position reports to quarrelsome entertainment executives at six global media conglomerates who often have conflicting agendas and can be somewhat mercurial. … Key issues include piracy, or as we now call it, ‘content protection.'”
Motion Picture Association Of America Chief To Step Down
The departure of MPAA head Dan Glickman, who succeeded Jack Valenti in 2004, “was not unexpected given the behind-the-scenes expressions of discontent with him in Hollywood. It now formally opens one of Washington’s most-high profile and coveted lobbying posts.”
Chicago’s Lyric Opera Orchestra In Contract Struggle
“As the union tells it, Lyric management ‘walked out of negotiations July 7’ and didn’t return until September 4. On September 25, with the season set to open the next night, Lyric made an abrupt ‘final’ offer: a one-year contract with salaries frozen at current rates. … The musicians voted it down” and are “now working without a contract.”
When Neil Simon Had His Finger On The Audience’s Pulse
“For better and worse, Simon’s plays–in their complacency, insularity, and, yes, hilarity–connected with their audience on a level that theater almost never does anymore. Simon’s wisecrack-laden comedies made him, by many estimates, the most commercially successful playwright of all time.”
China, Its Critics Clash Over Free Expression In Frankfurt
“China was the ‘honored guest’ this past week at the Frankfurt Book Fair…. But what Beijing hoped would be a celebration of its cultural achievements turned into a tug of war between control and free speech, as much a showcase for Chinese dissidents as the state’s approved writers.”
Beware: The Bean Counters Rule In Publishing
“Ezra Pound’s injunction to writers was ‘make it new’. But if the dice are loaded, and the people who are calling the odds are not readers but marketing people, what hope for new fiction?”
Richard Rogers Wins Britain’s Stirling Architecture Prize
“The prize comes as a ringing endorsement from his peers despite Rogers being bumped off the £1 billion Chelsea Barracks redevelopment project by the intervention of Prince Charles. His victory — for the Maggie’s Centre in Hammersmith, west London — came as a surprise.”
How An Apartheid Setting Alters Porgy And Bess
“In the decades since Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway … it’s become fashionable in some quarters to criticise” the George Gershwin piece “as reductive, even patronising. But transplanted” by Cape Town Opera “to a place and an era when state-sanctioned oppression and segregation was a part of life,” it “has recovered its edge.”