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.
The new music player / library
What should a music player / library look like, given our ability to play music independent of physical recording mediums, and our access to multiple devices, collections and the whole Web of music?
We're currently in a transition beyond the physical basis of "albums," and even the "shiny disc" mediums of music. This transition is probably being slowed-up by what I recently called the dogma of the medium, but it's happening.
Music is fundamentally an audible medium, but music has always been created and heard in relationship with other contexts and mediums. Originally, you typically would see the musicians playing in front of you. Even with LPs and CDs, we've had album art. And, really, we co-create all of the music we listen to when we choose to play it in a certain context: there is no one Purple Haze, but rather there are every version everyone has ever played, whether it was Jimi playing it or you pushing play on your iPod. Each of our co-creations connected something audible with something else: kinetic, visual, environmental, social, sexual, imaginary, philosophical, etc.
Music is relationships: relationships between one song and another, or between the same song in multiple versions, or between any one version of the song and all of the times you've heard it. And, as information, we do make these connections internally, in our thoughts and memories; and externally, in what we communicate both through what we ourselves sing and play on instruments, and in the stories we tell others about music. And, this communication of connections always finds its voice in every medium: magazines, books, radio, TV, movies, and now online as email, IM, web pages and sites.
The Err or Man web pages (more coming soon) are going to, first of all, be a communication of connections, from my own perspective. I imagine that these pages should expand over time to include your perspectives as well. We're on the web, and so we can say this pretty simply: we're really just talking about links.
Also, a link-oriented model can facilitate many practicalities around music and the people who listen to it. People link to music, and music links to people. This can manifest in transactional terms (tips, payments, etc.), as well as in creative terms (remixes, evolution from artist to artist).
But, unfortunately, our music players are stuck in a physical-medium-model of music. They see the music not as relationships, but as files of just the audio portion of the music. So, for example, right now, the richer experience with Err or Man is going to come from listening to the CD (sound) while looking at the book (art, maps, lyrics). This website will help you experience something like this as well, but its potential could be so much more if our music players worked first of all in terms of web pages and links.
Today, Lucas Gonze articulated a Song Page Manifesto that represents practical steps towards creating a new model of the music player and music library, based around web pages. This grew out of his post yesterday on creating a dedicated page for a song, which happens to be the song frog in the well that I posted about recently as well.
I am thinking that this all is a significant frontier to venture into . . .
Profound whatever: I Met The Walrus
Really great: I Met the Walrus, an animated short based on a 1969 interview with John Lennon.
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.
One of my favorite parts of the interview is when Lennon talks about the meaning that people find in music, how it's "all in there - either trivia, or profound whatever," and how he discovers this in retrospect in his own music.
World’s first album cover
Great find: images of the world's first album cover.
The post on Undependent has a great summary of the story around the first album cover, and a number of images of the cover and packaging.
For the complete history of the album cover and its creator, just hit Wikipedia or pick up a copy of For the Record. Alex Steinwess, a then 23 years old designer, convinced Columbia’s suits to create the first true album cover. Until then, 78s were sold in generic sleeves.
There's more in Undependent's post (via Kottke).
Raymond Scott tribute videos
A great way to enjoy some Raymond Scott: footage from the Raymond Scott Centennial Tribute Concert, March 12, 2008 at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
These are from the 2005adamo channel on YouTube, which is a fantastic collection of Raymond Scott-related videos. If you don't already own it, I highly recommend this CD of Raymond Scott's music: Reckless Nights & Turkish Twilights.
Here's a video playlist on YouTube for the whole concert:
Also, there's another video that is about Scott's "Fascinations Machines," a collection of electronic instruments he designed in the early 1960s:
Poking around the Tube a little, I also found this trailer for what could be an interesting documentary, Raymond Scott: On to Something.
OK, one more thing: Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo owns Raymond Scott's Electronium instrument:
I've heard that Mothersbaugh is committed to getting the Electronium working again someday, which would be awesome!
King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O, or Frog in the Well
Lucas Gonze posted a nice video / audio of himself playing Frog in the Well. As he says, it's short and simple.
As I commented on Lucas' post, I know this tune as “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” by Chubby Parker & His Old Time Banjo, from Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music. So, I was a little curious about some of the history around this tune, was poking around the web, and found that Roger McGuinn has a whole post on the history of King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki Me O:
“King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki Me O” is a version of the old English song “Frog Went A-Courting.” Its first known appearance is in Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland (1548) under the name “The frog came to the myl dur.” There is a reference in the London Company of Stationer’s Register of 1580 to “A Moste Strange Weddinge of the Frogge and the Mouse.” The oldest known musical version is in Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata in 1611.
There's more in McGuinn's post, including the lyrics and an mp3 of a performance of the song by McGuinn himself, I think.
4 out of 10 “incomprehensible” Bob Dylan interviews
I was thinking about Bob Dylan, and remembered this great compilation of "incomprehensible" Dylan interviews.
I should actually file this under "Things to fear about YouTube," because, of the fabled ten most incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of all time, only 4 of the 10 interviews are available (6 are/were videos—now they're just YouTube's "we're sorry, this video is no longer available").
The #1 most incomprehensible interview is a gloriously preserved text quote (beat you this time, YouTube). It's also my favorite—check out the choice quote on the above linked page, or read the whole interview online Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan, Feburary 1966.
. . . the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. . . .
Here are the 3 videos from the list (fingers crossed that they stay online for a while):
Time Magazine, 1965
Eat the Document, 1965
Vienna street interview, 1981
Cool kinetic sculptures
As Bre said, freaking cool.
Check-out these kinetic sculptures by Tim Prentice (definitely look using the "fast internet connection," unless you absolutely can't).
Questioning the dogma of the medium
I've been thinking about what I call the dogma of the medium, and the need to question it. Here are a few preliminary thoughts.
By dogma of the medium, I mean the automatic acceptance of a medium as a rigidly defined category for creative works. For example, we often think of creative works as belonging to medium-centric categories like books, albums and movies.
Medium-centric ideas are a big part of our recent past: technologies, industries, roles in society and the format of creative works are often tied to specific mediums. We have 300-page books that are written by authors and published by publishers, and sold in bookstores. The dogmatic aspect of this is both in how it effects creators and in how it effects other participants, e.g., the creator is encouraged to create in terms of an existing medium and format, and other participants are conditioned to expect their creative experiences pre-categorized in medium-centric and format-centric terms (do you want to see an action movie?).
The way I think about it: why should a "book" just be a book? Why not text that you read interspersed with dialog audio that you hear, featuring one sequence with a musical soundtrack and a conclusion punctuated by a silent film?
As a musician, I've been thinking a lot about this idea of books with music. Many books describe music as part of a story, and so it seems like an obvious, potentially new medium, in some sense. I was excited to hear about the new Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, coming with a CD of music by David Stutz (as described by Cory at Boing Boing). Being a Neal Stephenson novel, I have to imagine there's a very deliberate orchestration of text and/with music.
When you think practically about some of the possible combinations of mixed-media / multimedia elements, it's easy to both come up with good precedents (books with pictures inside!) and also technically improbable cases (books with buildings inside!). So, the dogma of the medium doesn't effect every corner of creativity, and, at the same time, there isn't necessarily a need to explore every possible corner all at once. But, it's in the middle—in our everyday interaction with books, CDs and movies, that I think this dogma deserves to be questioned.
In particular, with regards to digital works, why confine these to the shape of physical technologies? Why have an online "music store" and iPod that is all about "playing music"? Why have a "book reader" like the Kindle?
These devices do have features beyond their more analog / physical counterparts, but these features are like decorations tacked on to the form of past mediums. So, while an iPod can display images, text or video, the music format of the iPod doesn't give one many creative options for extending music with images, text and video (unless you define the music as a subset of video, e.g., being medium-centric again, just around video).
The web, and hypertext / hypermedia, potentially supports new and imaginative ways to combine text, images, audio and video. But, to the degree that new kinds of creative works may be happening on the web, I think we're still a little stuck evaluating them in medium-centric terms of books, CDs and movies. If a work is not obviously like one of the already established mediums, it's just another "website."
The expansion of copyright laws also reinforce the dogma of the medium. Now that the original copyright on a work automatically extends permissions over any possible translations to new mediums, it's not a given that people will creatively transform works from medium to medium. This exploration now is controlled wholly by the original creator, rather than a larger collective who might find value deriving not only from the original creator's inception, but from many participants sharing and transforming the work into other mediums.
I call Err or Man a "music deck" as a way to highlight it's differences from past mediums and formats. It's nevertheless convenient and useful to sometimes describe it as a CD, or an album, or as a book, or as a website. But, the dogma of the medium is an issue in that people and stores and devices all tend to approach Err or Man in medium-centric terms. That's not going to change (at least for a while), and I even intend for Err or Man to "work," at least to some degree, in terms of medium-centric categories. But, there's also more to find in Err or Man when you put aside the dogma of the medium.
nearby posts:
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