Category: music

“The report makes a direct comparison between choirs and amateur sports clubs, noting that while around 300,000 more people sing in choirs than play amateur football, football receives £30m in funding every year – compared with under £500k a year for choirs.”

Shut up, critics who can’t stop talking about how rap isn’t music. “Since rap’s natural language is the repeated loop, the critique of it can’t be that it uses inert repeated loops. We actually have to accept the loop as a given and to dig deeper to see if those loops are malleable enough for the artist to create thematic meaning. Miranda does not disappoint. Listening to the cast album reveals an entire world of sonic meaning.”

One of the wildly cool tools available at Empac, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: “The wave system, a modular array of more than 500 speakers, uses acoustical trickery to reproduce organic sounds with unusually high fidelity. It can also “place” (and seem to move, quickly) those eerily lifelike tones at specific coordinates. Any but the most superficial kind of explanation of how this is possible tends to involve high math (like Bessel functions). But if you had to describe the effect, you might go for trippy and exciting.”

Apparently, opera sounds better at the Proms? “The amazing thing about opera at the Proms is it’s like lifting the lid on the engine of opera, because you can see into the orchestra all the time. It’s like you’re enmeshed in it.”

Dubbed the encephalophone, the instrument uses a method for recording brain activity called the electroencephalogram (EEG) to control a synthesizer. Sounds are generated via two different types of brain signals; those associated with opening and closing the eyes, and those related either to movement or just imagining movement.

“Two weeks ago I moved from Scotland to Germany to start a new job as an iOS engineer at SoundCloud. On Monday of last week I started that job. By Thursday evening I, along with 172 of my new colleagues, was officially being laid off. And then, on Friday, I received somewhere in the region of sixty emails about potential new jobs.”

“The streaming giant - which laid off 40 percent of its staff [last] Thursday - has long struggled to stay both stable and independent. But its unique contributions to music consumption can’t be overstated.”

More and more, from Ted Lehmann’s experience, roots musicians are coming to the scene with more classical training. It would be common, 25 years ago, for roots musicians to be unable to read music, Lehmann said. When he got his start blogging about and photographing musicians in 2003 — Lehmann considers himself a “newbie” — things were changing, but slowly. “You’d ask them that question [about being able to read music] and they’d say, ‘Well, a little bit, but not enough to hurt me,’” he said. “In other words, ‘I’m not going to lose my improvisational awareness.’”

The company’s blog post refers to Pachet’s previous work “assisting artists in music composition” and strongly suggests a foray into new territory for Spotify’s growing creator services department: the development of creative tools for songwriters and artists. Until now, that team has focused on things like arming artists with listener analytics data, helping musicians target fans with concert tickets, and simply teaching artists and managers how to make the most of Spotify as a platform for connecting with fans. The idea of Spotify developing its own semi-robotic GarageBand software is a fairly radical—and to some, perhaps terrifying—departure from what it’s been working on thus far.

As the cameras panned over the orchestra, soloists and chorus, each and every musician (even the terrific timpanist with a goatee that extended down to his white tie) gave the impression of attempting to personally bring light, reason, substance, even love, into the life of world leaders capable of making the world better or blowing it to smithereens.