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.
Free culture, creative commons, EFF’s $5/month, mediAgora, WebJay
This is mostly just links to good, recent, things out there:
Just out: Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture (which is available for free download, licensed under Creative Commons license allowing derivative works) and, which now features, as a derrivative work, a free audio version read by volunteers. That's both free as in free markets and free as in free beer. (This is what I am listening to now.)
I am releasing my music here under Creative Commons license, and the recent CC Moving Image Contest produced great, short movies about why CC is so important.
Wired News recently featured an article, The Answer to Piracy: Five Bucks?, about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's proposal on how to fairly license online file sharing (i.e., rather than trying to prevent it, make it illegal, or sue people who do it). The EFF's proposal is A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing.
Kevin Marks is a really smart and nice guy whom I have had the pleasure to meet, and I really like his mediAgora: defining a new marketplace for media concept. He recently gave a nice example of how mediAgora could work in his Black, White, Grey and mediAgora post, which comments on the case of the Grey Album.
A few weeks ago, I was looking at my webserver logs here and found a reference to Lucas Gonze's weblog, which has lot's of great stuff and which I'm now reading regularly. One of the finds there is Lucas' project WebJay, which is a great site that allows people to share their mp3 music playlists. Very great!
Welcome, these are Wrong Notes, music blog music
With these Wrong Notes, I hope to experiment with the blog concept / structure itself as a concept / structure for music. Small "microcontent" musical fragments will be presented on their own (as part of each blog post) as well as collected together by virtue of appearing on the main blog page at the same time, and in other time-based collections (e.g., a month archive).
The Wrong Notes will be accessible here in several forms. Each fragment will be directly accessible as a link on this page (also available in RSS2 enclosures), and also in playlist collections (aka music "feeds") in m3u, SMIL, and other formats.
With the formats like SMIL that support mixed media, I may feature additional visual content that may not otherwise appear in the textual portion of the blog. Similarly, all the collection playlists may feature additional musical pieces than what is referenced in the posts.
Besides any novelty of using the blog as a music format, I am interested in creating a blog filled with original music fragments primarily for two reasons: 1) to use the blog as a catalog of my musical ideas / sketches in significantly early and rough form, and 2) to explore alternative, Internet compatible, collection formats / structures for music listening (i.e., neither the album nor the mixtape / playlist formats).
I am making Wrong Notes public and releasing all of the Wrong Notes music under Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) license out of enthusiasm for the power of the Internet and of freely sharing creative ideas, but with no idea how such unfinished and fragmentary music might be related to by others. My hope is that you will find some interest in it and tell me so I can learn from it!
I have an interest in the idea of music that one enjoys hearing a couple times, but not necessarily a lot. Traditionally, recorded music, because of its cost, is often designed with the idea that people should like it so much that they will listen to it over and over.
But, I also enjoy hearing a lot of musical fragments everyday—whether from musicians playing on the street, or from recorded music overheard in passing, or from other sounds. So, I imagine these Wrong Notes perhaps being enjoyable in passing—which I think some people may find appropriate in the listening context of their ever-changing playlists.
Besides Wrong Notes, I also will be releasing music from my Practices, which is more elaborate but still rough. And, I also plan to release full length, finished, albums designed to be listened to in track sequence and, I hope to some, enjoyable being played over and over.
Oh, and the text of this blog will be my thoughts about making music. Times as they are, this will include some posts about copyrights, Internet music distribution, and the music business. And, I'll certainly point out and link to other music I enjoy, as there is so much and always more coming out that I love and want to tell everyone about!
The music never stops
Good article, The Music Never Stopped: Recordings depend on music, not vice versa, by Brian Doherty, which mentions a book I have been hearing about that I would like to read, Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money, by Mark Coleman (via Doc Searls).
I sometimes think of all the various music recording and duplication methods as forms of fabrication: a blueprint is created that is rendered into music through the magic of machines as varied as your player piano to your mp3 player. In other words, what gets distributed (and so-called "pirated") is not the music itself but a copy of the blueprint for rendering the music in a certain type of device.
So, the more common a method of fabrication, e.g., digital audio fabrication being totally common now, the more irrational it is to expect it to be uncommon. When we started giving people digital blueprints of our music on CDs, we maybe mistook the physical CD as the blueprint. But, in fact, we have been giving people digital (1s and 0s) blueprints for decades now.
So, I just mean that it is inevitable that people make digital copies of our music when we have been giving them digital copies for years in the first place. The reason why we record our music in digital form and distribute it in digital form is the pretty much the same reason why people make digital copies.
Unfabricated music can never be truly duplicated: one has to be in the space and time of its emergence. But, many of us create music as fabrication: our music doesn't exist in any physical form without a mechanism of fabrication.
But, there is a larger relational context between musicians and their listeners. Might as well call it psychic, because it can't be measured, sold, bought or fabricated. All music, ultimately, evokes an unfabricated sphere of experience, and we love music for helping us enjoy that sphere.
My old tapes as artifacts
In putting together music to go along with this blog, I decided that besides creating new music (i.e., from scratch), I might find some uses for selections from any music I ever recorded (pretty much all of which is otherwise unavailable—within contexts expecting coherence, generally for good reasons). I am thinking that the "microcontent" context provided by posts like this establishes a promising context for some of my early music, which exists already, essentially, as musical fragments.
Grey Green Red White Blue Black Pink Albums
The Grey Album, DJ Danger Mouse's remix of Jay-Z's vocals from his The Black Album with instrumentation from the Beatles' The White Album, is a great example of creative transformation of previous works. Its concept and execution feel to me like a digital-jazz, and I think it would be great if works created in this manner were given room to flourish, rather than suppressed by copyright restrictions.
Lawrence Lessig has good commentary about the copyright situation in his The Black and White about Grey Tuesday. The Grey Tuesday is an organized protest around which many people are hosting The Grey Album online in spite of legal threats. The EFF also has a good analysis in their Grey Tuesday: A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain.
All this protesting got me thinking that one way musicians could contribute more substantially to this protest would be to produce and release even more works based on remixes of these albums. Here are some ideas:
The Grey and the Blue Album: mix The Grey Album with Joni Mitchell's Blue.
Since the Beatle's 1962-1966 is also known as the Red Album, this is an easy one: The Red, White, and Blue Album: mix the Beatle's Red and White Albums with Mitchell's Blue.
I am sure, at this point, you get the idea. And, it turns out, there are a lot of other albums out there with color names. Just searching around, I found: The Yellow Album, The Pink Album, The Green Album (John Williams) and Green Album (Weezer), an Orange Album or two, and even The Silver Album.
Anyway, I can imagine a whole genre of copyright law protest music focused on color-named-albums remix inspirations. Hey, like Stravinsky suggested*, embrace some constraints and be creative within them. The results will probably at least be novel, which I think offers an essential component to the environment from which new art springs.
Update (3/31): Glad to see that people are continuing to play with this: check out Black on Black which mixes Jay-Z with Metallica's Black Album.
* also found the quote from Stravinsky:
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
Use the Internet to share more music, uh, in person
Mediachest looks neat: it helps you meet people with similar tastes so you can borrow CDs, books, DVDs, etc. from each other (via BoingBoing).
One way or another, the Internet finds ways of reasserting person-to-person connections, and not so much the person to corporation relationships big businesses (like record companies) are set up for. So, remember kids, sharing with your friends is fun!
Test post
Test ear reverends post
nearby posts:
Wrong Feeds
Wrong Pasts
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- September 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- June 2006
- April 2006
- October 2005
- September 2005
- December 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- March 2004
- February 2004
