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.
technology
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’
Tesla coil music.
Remember Tesla coils? You’ve probably seen them at a science museum or on TV. You probably haven’t asked yourself whether or not they could be used to make music.
Bone-cam.
I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone do this yet. Dave Finlayson, trombonist with the New York Phil, gets clever with his video camera. The performance is great but… I just can’t stop laughing.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soDn2puEuL8&w=420&h=315]
Aside from the entertainment and the performance itself, anyone who wonders how a trombone works is getting a close-up look. You can actually see the various distinct positions the slide has to be held at, and the quick but fluid motion necessary to get between them for a clean change of pitch.
Old Spice Muscle Music.
In case you haven’t heard / seen / tinkered with this yet… you have to watch “Old Spice Muscle Music.” And be sure to noodle around with it after the short video is done. As a drummer and sound guy I was weirdly entertained!
Old Spice Muscle Music from Terry Crews on Vimeo.
Vsauce asks: Will we ever run out of new music?
A neat little edutainment channel on YouTube, called Vsauce, is full of geeky-fun videos about fascinating science questions. One I really enjoyed watching:
“Will we ever run out of new music?”
What we love about analogue.
I found this article, “Analogue Warmth: The Sound of Tubes, Tape & Transformers,” in Sound On Sound from a few years ago. It’s a technical explanation of all the factors that appear to combine together to create that “analogue warmth” so many people talk about missing, and different ways to go about recreating it.
The impending extinction of film.
The future just comes faster and faster, doesn’t it?
Not long ago, this all seemed like speculation. Now, it’s almost a countdown timer.
Check out this piece from Studio Daily, on the impending extinction of film.
Noteflight – great cloud notation software.
There are so many amazing things happening online now with music and audio software. More and more is possible with software that doesn’t even live on your computer. Noteflight, a cloud-based music notation program, is one example of this. It doesn’t compare to Sibelius and Finale (yet), but considering it’s all taking place through a website… it’s fantastic. And of course, this engenders an entire social facet of the music-creating experience that never existed until now.