The concept of surround sound reproduction has been around for almost as long as loudspeakers have; in fact, the first movie to feature surround sound was Walt Disney’s Fantasia, which boasted an eight-channel orchestral score. As the theatres of the time were ill-equipped to reproduce such aural extravagance, the Fantasound technical crew (and their innovative equipment) toured the production around the States until it was cut short by the advent of World War II…
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Music Technology Posts from September, 2007
Sound Is All Around
Monday, September 17th, 2007Linking to Music Technology
Friday, September 14th, 2007Although the blogroll on this site does link to some very interesting and contemporary music technology resources, it is probably more useful to have such links structured in categorical arrays. As such, I have implemented a long-overdue links page which provides direct access to plenty of quality content…
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Patching Up A Gig With Reason
Thursday, September 13th, 2007Although its primary function is as a music creation and production tool, Propellerhead’s Reason is also a versatile live performance vehicle – all the more so if you take advantage of some of the unique possibilities opened up by the combinator device…
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Tenori-On For Live Music Performance
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007The Tenori-On is a new music controller interface created by Toshio Iwai, a Japanese artist/musician/inventor, and released in the UK by Yamaha. The device is in the form of a square tablet with a grid of 16×16 buttons which light up in response to the artist’s touch, allowing the creation of music to be part-playing, part-painting…
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Music Technology Blog Turns One
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007Today is the official birthday of the Podcomplex Music Technology Blog – it’s been a year now since I wrote my first post here in September 2006. Although I only began posting regularly in March 2007, I think I’ll take this opportunity to highlight some of the main stories that have featured on these pages over the past twelve months…
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Ringle On The Noise Floor
Monday, September 10th, 2007It seems that not only are ringtones not going away, they are now going to be actively promoted and sold directly to consumers by the major record labels. The new packaging format is to be dubbed the ‘ringle’, and the industry is hoping this will take over from the standard CD single release, which has been suffering a serious sales decline lately…
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Daft Punk In Sampling Shocker
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007This, apparently, is the age of the mashup – find two songs of seemingly disparate genres, meld them together and suddenly everyone thinks you’re an awesome DJ creating an entirely new artform. Which, to some extent, is the case – although for anyone with a basic knowledge of musical structures, it’s also as easy as shooting fish in a kettle. Countless songs use the same simple structures and chords, the majority of them trundling along at an unremarkable 120bpm, and even songs in different keys and tempos can be mixed together easily with a little digital manipulation.
Sampling itself is an older technique, whereby a sound is recorded and subsequently manipulated in ways that are not possible with traditional instruments. An article over at CDM expresses surprise at the revelation that many of Daft Punk’s tracks are based on riffs taken from older songs, thereby vastly diminishing the author’s opinion of the robotic duo’s musical genius…
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