The Blog of G

OMG! Words cannot describe how impressed I am with an application I just downloaded and installed. :O

“Huh, this is Musical monday whatrye talking about an application for?”

Well if your reading this then you’re probably on a computer with reasonable internet connection and have some interest in music. Then this is every bit as vital an application for you as Pandora is a bookmark.

The application I am talking about is called Songbird and without getting into to much detail it’s a media player based on firefox. It’s opened my eyes to a part of the internet and the blogosphere that I barely new existed. Up hands who has heard of MP3 blogs? OK so maybe I’m late to the party but this is one superb app and I can’t begin to explain it properly so I’m simply gonna wait here while you head off to hear and watch the screencast. I’ll wait for you.

Now it is a very early release at this point but it’s a helluva place to start from, it already does what it set’s out to do, “play the web”

I have barely scratched the surface and I’m completely taken with this so thank you Wired and to you reading “why haven’t you downloaded it already?”

*edit* I just noticed that it is a tad on the resource hungry side, granted my Media centre isn’t the most current (Athlon XP 2000, 512mb ram) but it’s swallowing more than half the resources available still it’s worth it.

This week I want to talk about this article I read recently on wired. the short version of this story is that at the recent Santa Cruz Baroque Festival a contemporary composer, David Cope, premiered a new 12-movement piece from the mind of Antonio Vivaldi.

Yeah, I know Tonios been feedin worms for over 2 century’s so how did David find a new 12 movement piece from a dead composer. Well in short it’s a fake, written by software that David has developed. Essentially, it takes a database of a composers work, analyses the phrasing and then uses that information to create a new piece.

According to the article he has done this with lots of other composers as well as Vivaldi. Now I’m not a huge fan of classical music but this is an incredible creation and what I would love to hear is that David has unleased Emi on the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and Les Claypool. Yeah Les is still alive but there’s method to this madness.

So once we have all these artists and composers absorbed by Emmy, why not mix and match, Hendrix and Beethoven, Zappa and Ravel, Claypool and Debussy. Or let Bach or Haydn go nuts with a full Philharmonic Orchestra.

There are definatly purests who will say that this is souless and grave robbing etc. I don’t, so long as someone doesn’t try to claim that they wrote it rather than the artist or composers “profile”. Bottom line, if it sounds good then who cares how the music was written.

Hi all and welcome to the first installment of Musical Monday, before we get into the meat of this weeks article I just wanted to let you all know what I’m listening too as I type. Well, I have Pandora playing “Swinging Cheese radio” for those of you who aren’t familiar with Pandora, give this a read

Anywho onto this weeks feature. Turn that S**t off!I saw this story a while back and I’ve been meaning to post about it since so I think there is no better way to start a weekly music feature than reminding people that in order to enjoy music fully you need to be able to hear it fully. This is something I can speak with some authority on, in the past I worked in the music industry and having stood in front of a 6500 watt+ PA for 5 or more nights a week for almost 3 years I can say that I am very lucky not to have severe hearing damage, but in reality luck had very little to do with it and ear plugs had everything to do with it.

Unfortunately, I do suffer from some minor tinnitus which has over the last 10 years gotten slightly better, however does tend to leave me with sleepless nights if I go to a Gig or concert.

My case is a little extreme in that I was in front of a PA almost every night for 2-3 hours minimum. I should be far worse off but I was lucky enough to have been warned of the dangers by a rather kindly middle aged drummer, he explained it rather well. It’s not so much really loud noises that do the damage as those that are higher pitched and close by.

If you go to gigs you may have already noticed this but in general the older a drummer gets the further away their cymbals get from there head, this is because they have recognised that high pitched noises (like cymbals in particular) tend to do more damage than say a more bass sound.

Now before we (the human race) discovered amplification and industrialisation of the world, hearing problems were far less common than they are today, unfortunately our modern world gives us plenty of opportunities to damage our hearing without us doing it deliberately.

Where that BBC article goes wrong, imho, is that it focuses on MP3 players as being the evil ear damaging device. This is not entirely true, yes they provide the sounds but it is the headphones that deliver this sound to you. By and large most headphones that are sold with MP3 players are small and do not block much ambient noise out, as a result the wearer ends up turning the volume up to block out the other noise so they can hear their music choice clearly, the irony being that this behavior will lead to hearing loss. In fact I challenge anyone to sit in a quiet room and not hear a buzzing sound at some level when the room is in fact silent. That buzzing sound is damaged hearing. It is almost impossible to avoid in our modern society but there are a few simple things that you can do to avoid unnecessary damage.

Yes it’s that time, the time to put it all out there on the line and see if I can stick with this plan.

So What’s the plan? Well, simply put I am going to start three regular weekly features, this is what’s scary I’m commiting to doing these weekly and well this blogging thing is a hobby from which I generate no income and not only does it take time but it takes idea’s. So I’m gonna give it a go and see if I can manage this. Who knows maybe it’ll all just flow and I’ll take to it like a duck to water.

Anyway, enough of the nerves, on to more important thing’s. Like what are these weekly features gonna be? The first your going to see, will be available from tomorrow and it’s called (insert trumpet fanfare here) “Wednesday is gadget day” and strangely it’s gonna be all about gadgets and it’ll be available (hopefully) every Wednesdays from then on

The next one will appear on fridays, called “F1 Friday” No surprises here either, for the forseeable future, I’m gonna run articles on Formula 1 although I do reserve the right to post about other forms of motorsport if I so chose.

The final feature, for now, will have the stunningly original title of “Music Mondays” and this feature will have relevance to music. That may take the form of an album review or a rant on why the music industry is shrinking, or even just an esoteric rambling about how certain music makes me “feel”

So there you have it, as you’ve guessed I tend to prefer the “it does wot it says on the tin approach” to all that marketing fluff, some people seem to enjoy these days.

I do of course reserve the right to stop any or all of these regular features should I see fit at any time in the future, but prolly the best way to stop that from happening and maybe even to steer the direction of these is through your comments, I know there are people from all over the world reading The blog of George fairly regularly), much to my surprise (I really don’t think I’m that interesting) and I would love to hear from you. so please feel free to comment below.