WRONG NOTES: a blog of ear reverence
Wrong Notes collects posts on music, art, culture and fun stuff. Also included: news about the Ear Reverends.
Ancient computer music
A 1951 recording of a computer making music—ancient in computer years.
The BBC reports at length about short recordings of bits of Baa Baa Black Sheep and In the Mood, which are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music. Amusingly, there is some debate as to whether the computer was generating music as music, or just as a kind of sound effect to punctuate the end of an early computer game.
In any case, the music comes across now more as a museum artifact than music, per se. The video in the article, however, is an iconic newsreel from the era, and is actually fun to watch.
I'll post about topics like this from time to time because I enjoy hearing about odd historical instruments—especially mechanical ones. But, early computer music and early sound recordings are definitely of interest.
I was hoping to cap this post off with the video clip of the Beatles playing Ticket to Ride on the Time / Space Visualiser in the The Chase, a 1965 episode of Dr. Who. I imagined that would be a nice complement in that it's a past vision of a future time looking back at a past that was, in actuality, really the present (at the time).
Unfortunately, the BBC has pulled that clip from YouTube, and I can't find it elsewhere right now. So, we'll all have to track it down elsewhere in the future.
Theme music and the Rockonator
I've just posted all of the theme music created by the Ear Reverends.
My current definition of theme music for the Ear Reverends is: music created for other people to use on a website, in a video, or with a book. In one case ("Spy? Music"), the theme was more of an experiment that came out of a discussion of why it made no sense to create a theme. So, it's a bit of an anti-theme—which probably will be obvious when you hear it.
Newly released to this site is the theme for the Rockonator (scroll down, click the "get recommendation now" button to hear the theme in context). This theme was produced in early 2008 by the Ear Reverends, and it's well worth 14 seconds of your time. (Hmm, that's two 14 second long themes I've now composed. . .)
The Rockonator is a feature on the Rock On website, the companion to Dan Kennedy's excellent and funny book about the big record business, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. The stories in Rock On about creepy corporate record business life are really relevant to the Ear Reverends—e.g., that lifestyle is exactly the kind of thing we like to avoid.
You can listen to the Rockonator and other Ear Reverends' theme music in the theme music section of this site.
TV antiheros and anti-lost
I've already watched too much TV in my life, haven't I?
While I was in Hawaii, I started thinking about TV shows with plots set on tropical islands. Lost obviously came to mind, and so did Gilligan's Island. That's when I realized:
The problem with Lost is that it's just Gilligan's Island, except less funny.
Each week, someone new shows up on the island—someone who could rescue the castaways. But then, at the last minute, there's some implausible event that prompts the rescuers to leave the scene without the castaways. . .
George Saunder's New Yorker piece, Antiheros, is a funny re-imagining of something like Heroes.
I am sure even Lost and Heroes are going to prove to be part of Tommy Westphall's mind, as is most of TV (and much of even our own illusory reality).
Arts and comics rambles
This is just a rambling post about some of what I did last night, with some links for my friend Rob Schwartz.
Rob's been visiting Seattle from North Carolina this week, and we went out to dinner last night. On the way, we went to Roq La Rue gallery and saw the Chris Reccardi "Mono" / Chris Crites "Gun Show" show. Then we went next door to the Blvd gallery and saw the Bigfoot show, which we really liked. While there, we ran into artist Rich Lehl, who currently has a show at Wall of Sound.
A little later, we started talking about comics.
I was telling Rob he definitely should read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Making Comics. I also mentioned some comics / graphic novels that I've read and enjoyed recently, including some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and all of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 that's out, to date.
That's especially for Rob, but y'all should check-out that stuff yourselves, yo!
Wild and nature sounds
For the first part of this week, I spent each night sleeping next to a pond on the big island of Hawaii. And, each morning at 5am, thousands of birds started off their day with a fantastically simultaneous and cacophonous conversation about the rising sun and whatever else birds go on about each morning.
Half-asleep, I tried to make some recordings of what I was hearing. If any of the recordings turn out, I'll post some sounds here. But, one thing I was wondering about while recording was how much of the low humming sound of the electric generator motors was going get picked up by the microphone.
Being able to hear this hum reminded me of a good article I read recently by my favorite writer in Wired, Clive Thompson, on how man-made noise may be altering earth's ecology.
The article features info about bio-acoustician Bernie Krause, who makes field recordings of natural places unpolluted by the sounds of humans. Krause has a pretty great website, Wild Sanctuary, that features his field recordings and also his music.
Wild Sanctuary also offers what it calls a Sound Map, as an add-on for Google Earth, that lets you click on locations around the world and hear their sounds—I'll have to check that out!
Katnip Kollege
This is a great, 1938 Merrie Melodies cartoon.
Blank Cassette Tape J-cards exhibit
The cassette tape gave us so many things.
Polar Alert Studios Top 100 is an online visual exhibit of cassette tape J-cards. The exhibit makes me think about the cassette as an emblem of not only an era of modern music, but as an emblem of an era of graphic and visual art.
btw, Wikipedia has a lowly article on the J-card. Right now, it’s a pithy bit of info if you know nothing, but it currently feels like a toss-off entry in the bigger scheme of things.
Bambi Meets Godzilla
I always remember the first time I saw this when I was a kid. Brilliant.
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