Time for music special number twooo.
- Bob Dylan’s prophecy: The kryptonite we need against Trumpism - Rather aptly, I start with my favourite of all time, Bob Dylan. This is an excellent and lovely poetic deconstruction of some of Dylan’s best and most famous work. To all the naysayers of Dylan’s Nobel, this is the right antidote. Dylan’s music is poetry; and the poetry is enhanced by being in a song.
He resorts to what I would call a surrealism not of cynical laughter but joyous present-mindedness when he considers his situation as an artist, or really a thinking person caught up in murderous capitalism, in “Like a Rolling Stone”.
This is an overtly romantic sentence about a great piece of writing and performance, summing up the soul of the entire article. - Spotify’s Blockchain Acquisition is a Big Deal - interesting piece of news. Not sure if it is good or not, but we should definitely take note. Blockchain when integrated with music ensures that the royalties go to the rightful owner. So is Spotify just ensuring that this happens, or is it a plan to somehow circumvent record labels altogether?
- How Amanda Palmer Gave the Music Industry the Finger with Crowdfunding - Amanda Palmer is a wonderful artist and what is even more heartening to know is that her work is crowdfunded. She asks a generous and sizeable team of fans to put money into her next project, offering only them priority updates, early releases and high quality lossless versions of the music. Makes sense?
The Patreon patrons have been a godsend in that sense. I’ve had to continually re-educate myself that this isn’t about selling music. It’s about making music. I got so used to those two being inseparable that it took a lot of psychological work to divorce the processes. But thank God — it’s been a real liberation.
It’s an almost unbelievable feeling to know that 9,000 people will pay for anything I make. They haven’t just promised; they’ve put down their credit card. And the next thing I put out will probably be completely different. - Neural Nostalgia and Now THAT Was Music - Why do we love the music we first listened to as teenagers? Apparently when people get old (hey I’m young) they lose the ability to start appreciating new music so readily or easily; is there a scientific reason behind this?
- The Positive Psychology of Metal Music
Another methodological concern is the skewing of cause and effect in such accounts. In the logic of these sensationalized stories, are individuals troubled because they like a certain kind of music, or do they like a certain kind of music because they’re troubled? If it’s the latter, then restricting access to the music isn’t helpful. If it’s the former, the scapegoating of a genre rather than psychological or social factors is awfully convenient.
- How to Listen to Music: A Vintage Guide to the 7 Essential Skills - This is a Brain Pickings piece with material from Music: Ways of Listening, a 1982 guide. My favourite is the first point :
Develop your sensitivity to music. Try to respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet. When we really hear sounds, we may find them all quite expressive, magical and even ‘beautiful.’ On a more complex level, try to relate sounds to each other in patterns: the successive notes in a melody, or the interrelationships between an ice cream truck jingle and nearby children’s games. - Surface Noise - Excerpt from a book called The New Analog, this piece talks about what we’ve lost in the transition from analog to digital.
We might call it thick listening, alert to the depth of the many layers in multitrack recording. They listen through the surface noise of the LP, through the hiss of the master tape, through the layers of the music itself all the way back to the room in which it was played, where two horn players are standing and chatting.
In other words, they are listening to more than the signal of the music—they are listening to the signal framed and enriched by noise.
Do digital formats reward this kind of attention? Our developing habits would seem to indicate otherwise. - The Art and Science of White Noise
Pigeon is an engineer by nature and by training. He’s clear when we speak on the phone that he does not consider himself an artist. To him, this is science. He’s not creating a nature soundscape just because it sounds beautiful and can be relaxing. Pigeon is an engineer of noise. He records the rain. He records the wind. He records the insects. “Even when I am in nature gathering sounds, I will find sounds to cover all frequencies,” he says.
What Pigeon is creating is what you and I might call “white noise.” An inaccurate term, he says, used to describe a ton of varied sounds that all do the same thing: block out other unwanted noise. People sleep to noises now, work to noises, play noises in their headphones while they walk to work. Done poorly, these noises don’t block out the world around by anything but volume, which is why Pigeon is so precise about the noises he creates, the noises he uploads to his site myNoise. Noises might be easy to find, but they aren’t easy to make correctly. - Iconic Playlists: What Emoji Say About Music - If you haven’t seen this beautiful feature by the Spotify analytics team, go see it now!
- The Science of Listening - Brilliant. Good and thorough writing. Here’s the table of contents : A new frontier for artificial intelligence, The architecture of sound, Avoiding the sound of silence, Sound from all directions and How noise kills.
Hope you enjoyed this one; I’ll try to keep the specials coming. Have a great week!
Kat