NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Songs on Music Album Change With Every Listen

In today's iTunes-infiltrated music scene, listening to an album from start to finish is a rare occurrence. It's almost a treat to find one that lets you ignore the skip button altogether. Musician Gwilym Gold is taking that standard practice and turning it on its head by creating a "constantly evolving" album.

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The electro-pop album, Tender Metal, is listened to through an app called Bronze. It features seven songs that change every time they are played. The former member of U.K. group Golden Silvers developed the application over a period of two years with help from scientists at Goldsmiths University in London.

The usual method of recording songs in a studio was followed, but other sounds are generated in real-time in the app. The app is imbedded with information about the tempo and structure of each song, which makes it possible to add subtle changes to make each listening experience unique. Gold told the BBC that "You could listen to it billions of times and it wouldn't be the same."

The album is only available through the Bronze app with no plans of creating a CD or downloadable version. It's currently only available for iPhone and iPad.

via BBC

Credit: 
Redferns via Getty Images

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'Google' for Music Could Be on Its Way

Modern computing has taken over just about every aspect of our music, from creation to production. With programs like iTunes, Garage Band and Virtual DJ, the possibilities for making and organizing our favorite tunes are endless. Engineers at the University of San Diego have found a way to teach computers how to label songs with examples submitted by users, called “game-powered machine learning.” The researchers hope this technique will eventually lead to a text-based multimedia search engine that will find all kinds of music floating around on the Web.

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For the study, researchers had computers learn examples of music that were labeled by fans through a Facebook game called “Herd It” to get category examples. The game had users listen to songs and tag them with categories they felt fit best. The tag with the most votes was the one the computer recognized. The computer analyzed waveforms and recorded common acoustic patterns. This, along with the user-provided tags, made it possible for the machine to predict what songs went with what keywords.

According to the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, music lovers would be able to find any song on the Web by searching with keywords like “funky” or “happy,” even without the aid of track titles or artist names. That could give us a new way to find our favorite songs we never heard of.

Credit: Digital Vision / Getty (top); Jacobs School of Engineering (bottom)

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Whack This Poster To Change Songs

 

While the rest of us have progressed from fast forwarding tapes to skipping CD tracks and onto shaking our iPod to skip songs, employees at London-based digital creative firm Agency Republic studios have yet another way to interact with music. They've created a sound system that’s controlled by a poster that changes songs when something is thrown at it.

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The poster is hooked up to a knock sensor that’s connected to an Arduino nano encased in a “magic box.” All of that is connected to Spotify, the digital music service. When someone throws something at the poster -- shoe, eraser, pen, copy machine -- it will move on to the next song in the Spotify queue. Put this in every office setting and you'll get to know your co-workers music preferences pretty quick, which could either lead to camaraderie or all-out music warfare. Check out the video below for demo:

 

via Laughing Squid

Credit: Agency Republic

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Waterproof iPod Ready For All Kinds of Fun

Waterproof iPod: $160

Waterproof iPod cases are fairly easy to find, but what about a waterproof iPod? It seems like one company, Underwater Audio has cornered the market on that one by making a completely waterproof iPod Shuffle. The shuffle is waterproof up to 100 feet, making it a good fit for swimmers and runners alike.

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Underwater Audio is little vague on the process of making the littlest iPod water-friendly, calling it a “proprietary process,” but one can imagine it has something to do with better gaskets and rubber seals. If you’ve already got an iPod shuffle, it can be sent to Underwater Audio and they will waterproof it for you for a $110 fee. Here’s hoping they expand their line to higher capacity iPods like Classic and Touch in the near future. Waterproof headphones and a special designed set for swimming are also available at $10 and $15, respectively.

IPods are used frequently for working out or running, they encounter a great deal of sweat and moisture, but have no warranty that covers it. This “proprietary process” is something Apple should consider taking as their own.

via Technology News Daily

Credit: Underwater Audio

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Don't Just Ding-Dong, Boogie Down!

MP3 DJ Doorbell: $49.99

Bing, bong...BORING! Even the most basic feature phones on the market have a better choice of ringtones than your house does...unless you have the new MP3 DJ Doorbell. It allows you to customize what you hear when folks come a-callin'. So make it rock, give it a groove or have it ironically incant "Ring My Bell," "Hells Bells" or "My Doorbell."

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How it works: The door button unit takes a single 12V battery and sticks into a cover that you've screwed into the wall. Since the system's wireless, you don't need to worry about rewiring your house. The speaker unit -- which runs on three AA batteries, or can alternatively be powered through its USB port -- works up to 300 feet away. You can choose to either permanently mount it or move it room-to-room (or outside) as you like.

The included MP3 editing software allows you to select and copy onto an SD card exactly what parts of your favorite songs you want to play. When the unit's set to SD, pushing the door button has it attempt to find a song and play that. If none are loaded -- or if you have the unit switched to internal memory -- it'll automatically play one of its 32 preloaded polyphonic tones. Just to keep things fresh, every button push advances the playlist, so your next visitor will trigger a new song/tone.

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Okay, so now that we've covered what it actually does, here's what we wish it did: Since Swann is known for their surveillance and security equipment, we'd like to see the addition of some kind of facial, voice and/or fingerprint recognition. Or perhaps a wireless solution using Bluetooth or NFC. However they do it, it'd be supercool to have a higher-end model that automatically triggers a personalized ringtone for whomever's at your door.

Credit: Swann

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NPR Shows Off Its Music-Centric Side

NPR Music App for iPad: Free

To all of you public radio ethusiasts out there, you'll be happy to hear that NPR has developed another app to bring their listeners even more content. The NPR Music App for iPad will be focused on the music and artists covered by public radio shows. Previously, accessing music played or reviewed on NPR involved going to the website. But the app brings all of the exclusive content like interviews and full album previews to light in a much more user-friendly, portable and aesthetically appealing way.

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The music on the app is situated by genre, content type and individual programs. There is also a search bar for quick artist look ups. A feature much like iTunes Genius, shows up on the app and it will scan a user’s iTunes library and recommend artists or songs NPR has featured. Users will be able to view special performances called Tiny Desk Concerts, as well as a live streaming video.

Credit: NPR

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Did Alan Lomax Invent Pandora?

Decades before you surfed the musical waves on Pandora and Spotify, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax envisioned a "global jukebox" that could publicly circulate the wealth of musical recordings he collected over years of fieldwork.

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Who is Alan Lomax you ask? He was the preeminent musical folklorist in the United States whose 1930s field recordings in the American South introduced blues and folk music to a larger audience. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and he is arguably responsible for the folk boom of the 1960s that delivered us among others, Bob Dylan. To put it mildly, he was paramount to that era's powder-keg of pop-music revolution.

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And now Lomax's dream of a global jukebox is closer to fruition than ever with word that his vast archive -- 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts -- is being digitized so it can be made available online. By the end of February, 17,000 tracks of Lomax's recordings will be released for free streaming online.

Most interesting -- from a tech standpoint -- is that when personal computers became available, Lomax used them to develop methods for classifying music. In his quest to identify similarities among musical styles from around the world, Lomax's systems were quite similar to the algorithms used today by music streaming sites like Pandora.

"Alan was doubly utopian, in that he was imagining something like the Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he thought of as predictive,” Columbia University music professor, John Szwed told the New York Times. Swed in also the author of “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.” 

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“But" Lomax "was also saying that the whole world can have all this data too," Szwed added, "and it can be done in such a way that you can take it home."

Helping spearhead the global jukebox project is the Association for Cultural Equity. On Tuesday, on what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label released a sampler of 16 digital downloads called "The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center."

[Via New York Times]

Credit: Shirley Collins

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How Do You Gift-Wrap An MP3 File?

The simplest question stumped me a few days ago: If somebody gives you music for Christmas, how do you want to get it?

The easy answer was "not in CD form." We haven't bought anything on disc in a while -- aside from kids' music for our daughter, notwithstanding the short lifespan of any shiny plastic object in the hands of a toddler. Digital files are cheaper, more portable, don't require buying an entire album to get the two good songs on it, have zero shipping costs and can't be lost as long as you take a moment to back them up.

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But how exactly does one hand over an ethereal bundle of bits to somebody?

It seems that we figured out how to replace physical purchases of music, books and movies with digital versions without coming to an agreement on how we package them as presents.

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The actual procurement mechanics aren't difficult. The blissful absence of "digital rights management" usage restrictions at Apple, Amazon and other music stores allow you to download a song and then present it to a recipient as you wish. That's where consensus evaporates.

Do you save the music or whatever file that you're giving on a USB flash drive or SD Card, then wrap that and stuff it in a stocking? That at least provides a secondary gift; some flash drives look weird enough to serve as conversation pieces in their own right, while others can double as jewelry. But friends with desk drawers overflowing with spare USB drives and memory cards (as in, most tech journalists) probably don't need any more.

Do you print out the Web page listing the song or album you just bought -- or maybe a screen shot of those files in a folder on your computer--and then wrap that in one way or another before transferring the actual files over at the recipient's convenience? That allows a certain amount of artistic expression, especially if you know origami. Sadly, my own folding talents stop at paper airplanes.

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One reader suggested via Twitter that it would be more ingenious to kidnap the recipient's MP3 player, load the file in question on it, and then wrap up the hardware as a gift. I like that idea, although the timing of this can get tricky or yield some awkward moments.

Or you could simply take advantage of the gift-giving options most digital stores provide for faraway recipients. Apple's iTunes Store lets you send music, videos, audiobooks and apps as gifts -- although its iBooks doesn't allow this option, yet another way in which that e-book store invites its own irrelevance. Amazon lets you send music and Kindle e-books as presents too. But if you want the recipient to "open" these gifts, so to speak, at the same time as others you're giving, you'll have to get up early Christmas morning.

One thing seems clear: As our entertainment moves from atoms to bits, we're going to have more digital-etiquette quandaries like this. Another remains unchanged from the analog world: Giving a gift certificate is your easiest but least creative option.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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Björk: The World's New Science Teacher

Björk, famously adorable in a Swan dress, and as the ephemeral sidekick in the post-punk band The Sugarcubes, and then as a techno/dance music goddess on her own, has released an album that puts her yet again in another league.

The iconoclastic Icelandic pop star's latest album is inspired by neurologist Oliver Sacks' book "Musicophilia," which is about the mind's empathy for music. Björk's album is a suite of iPad apps that many music industry magazines are calling a look at what the future of the industry might be like.

"He (Oliver Sacks) called it 'musicophilia,' she told NPR. "Obviously, I make music, but I wanted to do a project about nature. So I thought, if I call it 'Biophilia', it's sort of empathy with nature."

As New Scientist describes her new album:

[It] evokes humankind's empathy with nature, which Björk has borne out with songs about genetics, crystallisation, plate tectonics and dark matter. The accompanying apps will be released in place of music videos, while the live shows have so far included a recorded voice-over by British naturalist David Attenborough, a live Tesla coil and four "gravity harps" suspended on 3-metre pendulums.

The album, existing as iPad and iPhone apps, as well as on traditional vinyl and cd, represents a breakthrough for the music industry.

From NPR:

Björk fans with iPads or iPhones can download a main app for "Biophilia" that's free. You tap on it and open up to a black background with white, glowing starlike objects. Using your fingers to swipe and tap, the universe expands and turns, and bits of music and songs emerge.

The combination of science-themed songs with computer games and educational lyrics and theory is a bundle of innovation. Song titles include "Solstice," "Dark Matter" and "Crystalline."

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In the usually dispassionate magazine Mojo, the declaration that "Björk Fights to Save Music" might not be all that far from the truth.

Here's a look at the App Intro Narrated by David Attenborough:

 

In "Cosmogony," the first track off the album, Björk sings about the genesis of the universe.

 

"Moon":

 Image: Björk

Music Coming Soon to Facebook

Tech rumors have whirled for a few years now that Facebook is getting close to integrating music into its social networking platform, and now the site has finally confirmed the gossip -- sort of.

Thanks to a keen-eyed programmer who spotted some tell-tale music-related coding in the download link for Facebook Video Chat in early July, company sources leaked out word in late August that Facebook will pump up the jams after its f8 Conference on Sept. 22.

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In another promising sign, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented at the eG8 conference in May, “Music, TV, news, books—those types of things I think people just naturally do with their friends. I hope we can play a part in enabling those new companies to get built, and companies that are out there producing this great content to become more social.”

Despite those kinds of roundabout hints, the social networking site clearly doesn’t want to tip its hand regarding music for Facebook before f8, similar to how Apple intentionally saves big product announcements for its annual conferences.

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“There's nothing new to announce," a Facebook spokesman wrote in an email response regarding press inquiries into whether the site was on the verge of integrating a music streaming service. “Many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook, and we're constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”

Tech blog Mashable has reported that online music streaming sensation Spotify, along with Rdio and MOG, is top name that tech experts expect to lead the chorus line of Facebook music integration. Spotify allows users to stream and listen to a vast library of songs and also share playlists – a social networking capability that could fit well into the Facebook model.

Currently, Facebook users can upload music apps to their profiles pages but they can’t directly share songs and playlists.

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If the social networking site architected an integrated music platform, Facebook friends hunting for fresh tunes could browse each other's music libraries and possibly listen to playlists at the same time. 

But as always when it comes to digital music, tech insiders are wondering whether songs on Facebook would stream for free. Other music streaming services have found different ways to address this question. Spotify, for instance, offers a free service with commercials, or subscribers can pay a monthly free for uninterrupted listening.

And if Facebook spins tunes for free, how will that affect record labels, still struggling to reinvent themselves in this digital age?

It looks like answers to question like these will be left to pure speculation until Facebook, which has been teasing the public about music integration since 2008, addresses them Sept. 22 at the f8 conference.

Credit, musical notes: ICHIRO/Getty Images

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