Those of you who have visited google’s homepage today no doubt found their logo had a “strummable” guitar, in honor of Les Paul’s 96th birthday. Les Paul helped shape the guitar, and I have him to thank for some of the heavy sounds I really love. But he also contributed to recording and signal processing: […]
Category Archives: Music
A lesson for the humanities from new music
This month’s issue of The Wire has a nice article on the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (including a wonderful description of the dilapidated condition of the original equipment). It was the first thing I’d read about Milton Babbitt in a long time, which led me to go find his infamous 1958 essay “Who Cares if […]
Incomplete Theses on Audio Aesthete-ism: Beginnings of a Rant
1. One or two generations ago refined taste in music meant familiarity with a fairly limited (and stable, learnable) Western concert music repertoire. Today that refinement is reflected through a carefully cultivated, willfully eclectic cosmopolitanism. The déclassé listener likes or understands only one genre of music or a limited genre of music. Even apprentice aesthetes […]
1111: we live in an era where dates have interesting numeric sequences
For the first time probably since childhood, I didn’t stay up to see the years turn over. There’s nothing spectacular about that decision — just a mix of jet lag, just getting back from Minnesota and that our main social event around the new year happens to be today instead of last night. Though I […]
At last! A lo-boy record!
I’m used to books taking many years to finish, but lo-boy three has taken much longer than we expected when we laid down most of the tracks in the summer of 2004. “Six years in the making” is overselling and pretentious — especially since it spent most of those six years languishing on hard drives […]
For Synth Nerds Only (a small but significant portion of my readership)
My friend and colleague, Trevor Pinch (coauthor of Analog Days: The History and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer and tons of other Science and Technology books) finally got his old analog synth up and running. He gives Inverse Room a tour:
Music Interlude
First Finches play guitar. Now the sun does: Explanation here.