Music Technology Posts from July, 2008



Play It Yourself – Or Get A Remote Session Musician?

Monday, July 28th, 2008

If you have a killer tune in your head that you just can’t get down to disk, you may need to improve your playing skills, or even learn a competely new instrument. On the other hand, it may be quicker and more effective to hire someone else to do it for you…
(more…)

When Earthquakes Sing

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Earthquakes are caused by powerful movements of tectonic plates, and like all movements where two objects collide or physically interact, sound is also produced. If you happen to experience an earthquake first-hand, you’re unlikely to be hanging around to analyse what it sounds like; fortunately, researchers have done the hard work for you…
(more…)

Useless Plugins For Your DAW

Friday, July 18th, 2008

There are many plugins freely available that add useful functionality to your home recording studio. Sonicfinger have produced none of these, but instead focus on alternative studio tools such as the ‘Virtual Studio Visitor’ plugin, which digitally emulates the effect of a visitor’s presence on the performance of the musicians…
(more…)

Wilhelm Scream – Is It The Purple People Eater?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

The Wilhelm Scream is probably the most famous scream in the world – after Edvard Munch’s painting of ‘The Scream’, that is. Although you may not know it, if you have watched more than a handful of movies during your lifetime, you have almost certainly heard the Wilhelm Scream at some point…
(more…)

The Best Busker In The World

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

When it comes to music, can the general public tell the difference between an average hack and true world-class talent? The proliferation of reality TV singing contests would imply they cannot; but of course that is more about celebrity than either talent or music. Last year, however, The Washington Post conducted an interesting experiment – they placed the world’s greatest violinist in a metro station playing a $3.5 million violin to see if anyone would notice…
(more…)

Music Stock – Investing In Artists

Monday, July 7th, 2008

In the old days of the record industry, major labels made a loss on 90% of the artists that they signed. Even to the most fiscally obtuse observer, this was clearly an inefficient model, and now that music distribution is either free or extensively affordable, this approach has become non-viable. Thankfully, a new business model has emerged that promises to remove this investment risk – get the fans to pay for the record before it has even been recorded…
(more…)

Acoustic Cloak Bends Sound

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Spain does seem to be a hotbed of audio research these days; the Univesitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona brought us the ReacTable, and now engineers at the Polytechnic University of Valencia have devised a method of bending sound around an obstacle so that it effectively becomes inaudible…
(more…)