Yesterday’s New York Times caught up with a story that’s been making the rounds of the internet music circles since Zoe Keating published her finances about a year ago: in many cases, Spotify pays so little they might as well not be paying artists at all. Sure, artists get fractions of cents in royalties, but very …
Continue reading “Once Again, the Political Economy of Communication People Had It Right”
Over on FlowTV, in which I consider the formatted characteristics of television: http://flowtv.org/2012/01/formatted-to-fit-your-screen/.
I had occasion to read the October 4th, 1968 issue of TIME magazine (Canada edition!) cover to cover last night.* There is something magical about reading periodicals from another era, where what we experience as history is rendered as quotidian life, and you get a glimpse of how your own moment, as it is rendered …
Continue reading “UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time”
okay, surprise, we’re back. I’m here in Los Angeles for the NEH/Vectors Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (and there’s something in the title about American Studies, but I’m here on Mellon money and don’t really count as an American Studies person as far as I can tell, so please forgive me that …
Continue reading “Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Week 1”
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: …
It made no sense to get a fancy new desktop and run off to California, so last summer I hotrodded my out of warrantee 2007 Macbook Pro laptop. I replaced the CD drive with a solid state hard drive for the system files (it makes the computer feel faster) and I upgraded the RAM and …
Continue reading “Rebuilding a Macbook Pro (inside a new one)”
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 …
Continue reading “Incomplete Theses on Audio Aesthete-ism: Beginnings of a Rant”
