Most people listen to music through their ears…and because every ear is different, we probably perceive the same sounds in slightly different ways. However, as Evelyn Glennie points out, there is much more to listening than what comes through our ears, and more to performance than simply following a series of dots on a sheet…
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Music Technology Posts from December, 2008
Reason Sound Patch Charts
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008Reason 4 brought us a host of new features to play with, including the jolly Thor polysynth. As an added bonus, the Propellerheads asked a variety of professional musicians and producers to create custom patches for Thor. Now they’ve added a section to their website where a variety of Reason pros reveal their top 5 patches…
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Pro Tools 8 – Reviewed And Improved
Thursday, December 18th, 2008Digidesign have announced that all flavours of Pro Tools 8 (HD, LE and M-Powered) are now shipping. This latest release brings a number of improvements over version 7.4 that may well be worth the upgrade…
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Is Perfect Pitch Dying Out?
Monday, December 15th, 2008Perfect pitch refers to the ability of a person to identify or reproduce a note (tone) in the absence of any musical context. For example, if you play a single tone to a person with this ability, they will be able to correctly identify which note it is – and they may also be able to sing a requested note without any reference to an instrument or backing track. However, there have been some suggestions lately that these abilities may be in decline…
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Vinyl Music Still Sounds Good
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008Although some experts estimate that the Compact Disc will meet its doom by 2015, it seems that vinyl is enjoying a mini-renaissance, some thirty years after LP sales peaked in 1978. The vinyl record has always been popular with DJs, but do they actually sound better than new digital formats?
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Should We Write Thirty-Second-Songs?
Friday, December 5th, 2008Whether we like it or not, music consumers are buying mp3 downloads from websites that only play thirty second snippets of songs. If you want someone to buy your song, you have thirty seconds or less to create a spend-inducing impact. But what are the real implications of this dynamic?
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Music Recommendations By The Numbers
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Nowadays, there is nothing preventing the independent musician from entering the music market – everyone can sell their music online, quickly and easily. The problem for music consumers is that they are being flooded with choices, so they need to find a reliable music recommendation system. Most algorithms of this type use collaborative filtering, but there are alternatives…
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