Great piece over at The Atlantic on the history of “personal music”:
The purpose of the headphone is to concentrate a quiet and private sound in the ear of the listener. This is a radical departure from music’s social purpose in history.
And also, on music’s educational benefits:
If headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have headphones?
The answer is surprising. Give this article a good solid 10 minutes to sink in.
Here’s an interesting tidbit buried among all the other Apple news: Apple bought a small Italian plugin company.
I feel like I used AutoSampler at one point:
AutoSampler has been designed to be as simple as possible to operate. For sampling an hardware instrument, you just need to connect it to your Mac through MIDI and audio cables. The MIDI synth is sent a sequence of notes at various pitches and velocities and each sample is recorded, trimmed, normalized, saved and automatically inserted at the appropriate place in newly created instruments.
Pretty cool – I’d like to see this baked into future editions of Logic, for sure. But why acquire this company with expertise in sampling-based plugins? Surely Logic’s engineers could do this on their own. And Garageband’s sampler is…
…only on iOS. Here’s another Redmatica product: GBSamplerManager
Use your EXS24 instruments in your GarageBand for iPad songs
There are literally tens of thousands of commercial and freely available EXS24 sounds available on the internet. Drum loops, vintage analog synths, everything. With GBSamplerManager you can easily use them in your GarageBand iOS projects. And if you want to migrate your hardware and software synth sounds to GarageBand iOS you can purchase the simple one-click AutoSampler application on your Mac to create your own sampled sound library.
So, if we’re almost a year from the last major GarageBand release, and we’re just now buying a highly relevant company whose products could be baked into the next GarageBand, AND their products are highly relevant to the probably more popular iOS GarageBand, then either:
A) Apple already copied Redmatica’s core apps and they’re being swell and offering them jobs because their products will likely no longer be relevant. Expect a big release soon with all of the cool sampling features.
Or
B) There isn’t going to be a major GarageBand release until at least 6-8 months from now, giving them time to implement Redmatica’s software. Expect a big release in 8-12 months.
Either way, this acquisition tells me that Apple is serious about improving the state of affairs on Mac GarageBand, which is a good thing for everyone – if Apple is trying to improve their audio products, the OS is going to stay ahead of the game as well.
Another amazing repurposing of the stuff you normally hear during disney movies. It’s like DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, but instead of a record store, it’s the kid’s movie section at Target.
(via xlr8r – includes download link)
This is sonically and technically amazing stuff. It’s like a Paulstretch creation done live by real musicians in real time. Or maybe it’s like being in Inception and hearing what’s happening one dream higher. This is a 4.5 minute piece, slowed down (due to being filmed at 300fps). I’m guessing to get the sound quality to be equally high when time stretched he recorded either at (above?) 192kHz/48bit or one of those DSD recorders that go at around 5mHz/1bit.
(edit: it was actually time stretched using Michael Klingbeil’s SPEAR) – I wonder if it’s even possible to record fast enough to get this type of effect?
Either way, amazing stuff:
Great Q&A with TI:ME’s executive director in SBO this month. I sometimes have trouble defining what exactly TI:ME does, and this paragraph really nails it down:
There are a lot of band directors moving towards retirement. The older band directors are the ones who are least likely to adapt. Many of the newer ones coming in are already familiar with some of the more widespread music software, but they still haven’t spent a ton of time doing audio production or recording. Those educators could still benefit from some training on a basic understanding of the physics of sound and how to explain that to kids. The bottom line is that TI:ME wants to help teachers figure out how to solve these problems.
Bottom line: if you’re a music teacher and your classes are losing modern relevance, TI:ME will help you drag yourself (kicking and screaming?) into the 21st century.