Posts filed under ‘Sounds and Music’
Music and Depression
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8671706/Making-music-can-help-overcome-depression.html
Even though they immediately preface it with some ‘legendarily gloomy composers’ for whom it did not help, the overall article is interesting. It focuses on a study where adults who were given music therapy sessions showed fewer signs of anxiety and depression and that the effects were long lasting enough to be significant.
I’ve said before that music saves lives, although it sounds a little trite at times, I still believe it. Certainly, it can’t do it alone, and usually it is listening instead of creating, but we’re all humans and need certain things to survive.
Add comment 2011/08/06
JoCo’s got it
I was going to make a post about how hip-hop is very postmodern with all the pastiche playing a heavy role, having been evolved quite literally out of sampling and recutting existing music and building from there, but there are plenty of other writers who have already done it better than I could in this space. Besides, I’d probably sound like a pretentious git.
Instead, I present you with this song, a classic by some definitions.
(Keep an eye out for Cosmopygian and dorsum in the video)
Now for something completely different, but still a catchy and enduring song
Cass Elliot & John Denver – Leaving On A Jet Plane
Now for the synthesis, sort of. This may only make sense in my own mind, but at worst, you’ve managed to listen to three great songs.
Jonathan Coulton – Baby Got Back
Add comment 2011/07/16
Gear for your Ear
While not as catchy as “Skills to pay the bills” I thought I would go over some of the tools I’m planning to make use of in creating my songs.
I’m planning to use Audacity to tweak samples and possibly add the vocals back to the final track. It’s a great piece of software and has a Lisp-based plugin called Nyquist that I hope to use at some point, too.
For actually creating the tracks, I have Renoise, a tracker-based sequencer and audio effects engine. I’m going through a few tutorials now and hope to grok it soon.
For a few accent scratches, there’s the excellently-named TerminatorX. I’ve been having a few problems getting it to run on my 64-bit Debian system but I may just submit a bug report and hope for a new packaged version.
Finally, on the hardware side, I have a Beat707 that I’ve managed to get a few patterns made with. It does help to have the USB MIDI connection, too, so I can actually hear what the pretty blinking lights actually mean.
Today is also IPv6 day, but what I don’t understand is why some companies are turning it off after just one day…
Add comment 2011/06/08