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 […]
Category Archives: Music
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.
Music Nerd Interlude
For all you computer musicians out there reading this, I learned of this interesting free plugin. It’s based on very simple principles but offers some cool sound-bending effects. I also like how simple it is–way better than some “special effects” plugins with dozens of interacting parameters.
More Than a Few Words on the Form of Music
This week I received a CD from Owen Chapman, my colleague at Concordia. Entitled Calling the Voice-O-Graph, it is an album of sample-based music though he also plays some of the parts himself. If you click the link to the online part of the project, you’ll see the idea behind it is pretty interesting: free […]