I feel like I must be living in the future. First, I am radioactive. I don’t actually glow, but I am in this isolation room and people are afraid of me. Radioactive iodine comes in different forms but I got it in capsule form. Actually, they gave me so much it was divided between two …
Category Archives: Technology
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 …
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On Rediscovering Music-Making
First, open this page and play the song. Then switch back to this page. Last spring my 2004 G5 “desktop” (more like a “floortop” given its heft and profile) finally gave up the ghost. At the time I just switched to a laptop and kept writing. But its death had some beneficial effects on my …
Recording School
Last night, I attended a “Q&A and discussion of mixes by attendees” featuring Larry Crane at Hotel2Tango Studios. I first learned about Larry through his magazine Tape Op, who is now the world’s second- or third-largest circulation recording magazine. I discovered it in the 1990s at Quimby’s bookstore in Chicago, when I was there to …
Canadians: Tell the CRTC to regulate traffic shaping
Many Canadian Internet Service Providers practice traffic shaping during high-usage periods, which means that while they may sell you a connection at a particular speed (e.g., 10mbps), they may actively slow down your connection if you are using peer to peer software or doing something else they don’t like. To be clear: the regulation issue …
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Sound and the Story
“How records are made” — sent to me by a colleague. That’s right: it’s not the concert performance, it’s a “planned illusion!” How did a 1956 corporate documentary get it right when so many scholars have gotten it wrong? (Original source; http://www.archive.org/details/SoundAndTheS)
The End of Analog TV
Fagstein has an excellent post on the end of analog TV signals in the US, and the same fate that will fall upon Canadians in 2011. I say what I’m about to say as someone who enjoys watching my HDTV on a regular basis. The switchover from analog to digital TV is one of the …