For some of us who grew up with the rigours of analogue tape multitracking, the term ‘infinite tracks’ has never really lost its shock value.
From a time when tracks were among studio recording’s most valuable resources – and played a quantifiable part in determining the recording process both practically and musically – they’ve become a cheap digital commodity. We think we want more of them.. but we may be a whole lot better off with far fewer.
Commenting on the former BBC Top Gear team reuniting for Amazon’s internet TV enterprise, presenter Richard Hammond enthused over making a programme ‘about a rapidly-changing industry from within another rapidly-changing industry’.
An astute observation, as both broadcast and the motor industry are in major periods of flux. Whether he is specifically aware of the impact of AES67 on broadcast, however, is unlikely.
To players of modest ability, entering a 1970s Birmingham music shop could be like entering the Arctic Circle – an inhospitable place where staff humiliated customers as therapy for their own musical frustrations.
The 1980s brought the ‘non-musician’, insistent on making tunes with machines and samples. Old-school players responded with renewed resentment, but it warmed the climate in the music shop. By comparison, today it’s almost tropical…
Two days ago, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music formally agreed to submit music videos to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) before posting them on YouTube and Vevo.
While presently only applicable to videos that are produced in the UK, the move sends a strong signal regarding the content of some of our music and the fears that surround the internet.
Coming at sound from very different directions, two UK art galleries recently put audio at the forefront of an installation – each making use of contrasting interpretations of sound zoning.
While Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus framed human beings in the context of birds singing in their natural habitat, Audint’s Delusions of the Living Dead demarked areas of the Tate Britain using what they term ‘unsound’.
While cylinders for Edison’s phonograph were the world’s first consumer music format in the late 1880s, the first music chart preceded them by around 50 years. Having originally represented sheet music sales, the music charts have tracked delivery formats through vinyl, cassette and CD to digital downloads.
Now, with music sales in a downward spiral, the UK’s first weekly vinyl chart has been launched.
Under siege from home recording equipment on one front and new music distribution models on another, as well as being eclipsed by the world of gaming, the wider music business has been forced into increasingly desperate attempts to re-evaluate and reinvent itself.
The latest of these is to turn the recording of music itself into an arts project. Can we make the recording studio a show?
Already resigned to its role of ‘poor relation’ to video and film, sound has recently seen new terminology further challenge its dignity. Locked film reels are increasingly being replaced with ones that are ‘soft locked’ or ‘parked’, giving the sound team a moving target.
A recent conference on sound for picture saw a series of high-profile speakers turning this to their advantage, among other insights, however…
Last Monday’s Daily Telegraph carried a short comment by Jonathan Liew on the current Formula One season – specifically, the debate surrounding the sound of the cars’ new engines. In a piece largely obscured by endless strings of similes, he rather missed the point.
He recognises that the broadcast sound is ‘as artificial as it is real’ but is clearly unaware of the reason why loud engines get our adrenaline flowing.
I have a poor memory. I have envied people whose minds enable them to retain, correlate and build upon their memories in ways I cannot. No surprise that I once found myself wondering what it would mean to be able to remember everything. And no small irony that I forgot about it.
I was reminded by a TV documentary that gave such a condition a name, and found myself on a ‘memorable’ journey…
As the first decentralised digital currency, Bitcoin claims to be ‘changing finance in the same way that the web changed publishing’. If so, then pro audio is lined up for another game change on the scale that digital audio wrought on the recording industry and online distribution wrought on record companies.
That’s no small claim, but the signposts are there for those prepared to follow them. So, who is onboard for the ride?
Second screen viewing took another decisive step towards your living room with the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One games consoles last week.
Now lined up in direct competition with smart TVs to provide a domestic media hub, both Sony and Microsoft are looking to cover all bases… including making use of second screen working to expand their gaming. How is the next-gen console shaping up?
I struggled to get my head around computer viruses to begin with. The whole concept was at odds with my understanding of what real-world software was about. And I frowned at the first mention of self-healing DSP. Doesn’t intelligent technology belong to Asimov and his Three Laws?
American neuroscientist Christof Koch reckons that ‘consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system’…
My viewing of the episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot that aired on TV last week wasn’t what anyone had in mind when she penned the story or when the television series began in 1989 – or even when ITV Studios recently made the final run of four episodes. Very much has changed in the intervening years.
And there are more changes in the wind, as the second screen is poised to reshape TV broadcasting – and music could see the greatest changes of all...
It’s been a while – 22 years, in fact – but as I start to retell the story, I lift my hand and it’s trembling gently. Just as it did then.
For a few moments I am transported back to a quiet London hotel room, where I am reading from the transcription of an interview I had done a few days earlier. I’m telling David Sylvian what the other members of his band have said about him and their work together on their most recent album. It’s a bit tense…
Where vinyl and cassette once conspired to carry music in a beautiful symmetry of quality and portability, they have been brought head-to-head by the launch of Cassette Store Day. Rather than reuniting the old team, this has divided opinion over their relative worth.
We’ve become used to the succession of ‘format wars’, but this has to be the first engagement fought between obsolete and obsolescent media…