#7daysofVGM: a thrilling compositional sprint
The #7daysofVGM Composition Challenge is a semi-regular week-long event coordinated by the Video Game Music Academy. It’s basically a compositional sprint—or rather, seven of them in a row. There is...
media
Music In The Round… On Your Headphones
With a virtual reality headset you can experience The New Dublin Voices performing Thomas Tallis’ “Spem In Alium” in the round—right in the middle of it.
Everything is a drum: two large men edition
By now these guys have been on late-night TV and tons of folks have seen them. But it’s so good I had to help spread the word anyway. Here is “Tummy Talk 2”:
audio / entertaining / industry insight / inspiring / interviews / media / science / sound / sound design
Favorite feed: Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast by Defacto Sound
Twenty Thousand Hertz is a great, easy-to-listen-to podcast with stories and interviews about those hidden elements of sound and sound design throughout our world, the ones you might never have considered or even heard of before. The NBC chimes, the voice of Siri, the sounds of the cars we buy, the hum generated by a secret government project—lots of neat little explorations.
dialogue editing / industry insight / interviews / media / music editing / re-recording mixing / resources & references / sound / sound design / sound editing / video
Walter Murch and the rule of six.
Needs-no-introduction editor Walter Murch on six criteria by which to judge the worth, quality, and necessity of an edit.
composing/songwriting / entertaining / inspiring / media / music / music performance / technology / video
Virtual choir: performance, and technology, and… wow.
Composer Eric Whitacre, known for stirring choral compositions, has for several years been doing an experiment he calls “Virtual Choir”. He makes a guide track available for one of his pieces—something to sing along to—and asks the public to record themselves singing their part on camera and send it to him. In this particular rendition, “Virtual Choir 3,” you are apparently hearing 3746 voices from 73 countries performing together. Whoa.
Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 3, ‘Water Night’
Everything is a drum: large man edition.
Yup. This happened.
Musical instruments made of ice.
In Norway (them’s my peeps!) there’s an annual music festival where all the instruments are made mostly or entirely of ice. Look for the cello. That’s right, a cello.
For more info: icemusicfestival.no. Or watch this news piece.
Here in the U.S., there was a University of Michigan ice percussion concert in 2011.
Cool. Pun intended.
Everything is a drum: frozen lake edition.
So apparently a woman slipped on the ice and it made a cool sound, which gave her percussionist husband the idea to write and perform a piece for this frozen lake in Siberia. The ensemble is Ethnobeat. The lake is Lake Baikal, which at one mile deep and 25 million years of age is the oldest and deepest freshwater lake in the world, and also the largest by volume. (Another interesting tidbit: there’s an annual marathon held entirely on the frozen lake.)
I noticed some comments on the video about how it sounds fake. Giving it a really close listen, in my opinion it’s the real deal, although they do seem to have “cheated” by layering on overdubs. In other words, it’s not all performed at once, live, on camera. But it does appear to be real, and that’s pretty awesome. You can read more about the group and their experience on the lake in the Siberian Times.