Although this has been making the rounds here and there it’s taken me a few weeks to actually sit down and appreciate this cover of The Animals House of the Rising Sun covered entirely using audio samples recorded from legacy computer equipment and diagnostic machines. The piece uses four primary “instruments” including an HP Scanjet 3P, an Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope as the organ, a Texas instrument Ti-99/4A with a Tektronix Oscilloscope as the guitar and a hard-drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller as the bass drum and cymbal.
Collosal: House of the Rising Sun Covered by Legacy Computer Equipment
The Card Speaker, designed by IDEA International, is a portable speaker system that operates for up to 5 hours on a 2-hour charge. No bigger than a credit card, the sleek speaker connects to any device with a 3.5 mm headphone plug, and charges via USB battery charge cable. Colors come in gold, silver, or black.
ThinkBigChief: Card Speaker
In order to give you an idea of what’s going on in a song at a glance we are doing research on new techniques for visualising the variability, or structural changes of rhythm, harmony and timbre in a song.
Last.fm: Audio Flowers: Visualizing the Sound of Music
Drummond has always been about flipping the switch on baked-in ideas about art and music, but this is something else. Performance for the sake of performance, completely dissolving the boundaries between musician and audience, to the point where they become one and the same entity.
I find conceptual music deeply fascinating and satisfying, and the idea of a piece of music mutating and evolving beyond the reach of it’s composer is an amazing idea.
Excuses and Half Truths: The End Of Recorded Music: Bill Drummond And The17
What’s the song in the rollerskating Diet Coke ad? Who portrays the Mac home movie in the Mac/PC ad? What commercials have used Goldfrapp songs? The answers to these questions and more
splendAd – Advertising database
Here’s where the samples on some of my favourite Daft Punk tracks came from. It’s all legit, paid in full, above board. Still strange to hear, though.
YouTube: Where Daft Punk got their samples from
Record companies and movie studios like products. Real, tangible, physical products you can buy, place in a bag, and carry home. This keeps the issue of distribution and ownership nice and straightforward – those who are holding the product in exchange for money hold a licence to use it, within predefined boundaries. Accountants, lawyers, and those fresh out of an economics degree can cope with this model with no problem at all.
But what if the customer doesn’t necessarily want or need a physical, touchy-feely product in a box? What if, for example, they can download the album or film or book or whatever, and this fits in with their highly digital lifestyle?
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Ten years ago, when I left home, I realised that I could earn a surprisingly decent living by playing records in a pub. Certainly on the face of it, the “work” involved is ideal: you spend Friday and Saturday night in the place you would have been anyway, surrounded by your friends, playing your favourite records, drinking for free and getting paid for it. This is where my career began in earnest, as it paid for me to eventually leave the backwater of the Thames-valley provincial town and move to London.
It didn’t take long to realise that, in reality, there’s a little more to it than just playing the records you like. The pub DJ is there for one purpose and one purpose alone: to sell more alcohol. The role of the club DJ is a little more complex: they are more like some kind of attraction, but the DJ in the pub beforehand does well to know his place. He’s basically an extension of the bar staff, and that’s how he earns his keep.
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