Interesting Stuff

Oh man, this is awesome! and as icing on the cake, the creator cites all of his sources!

This is why current “IP” rights need to swing further towards fair use: so you can do this sort of awesomeness. The kid with the trumpet just played a scale; the real value here was added by the remixer, and I think it’s bullshit that legally, that trumpet player could send a DMCA takedown notice for this. To the best of my knowledge, the trumpeter has no such intentions; I’m just making a hypothetical here.

Hopefully this sort of remixing will convince the musicians who don’t get it yet that it’s important to allow everyone to have fair use rights. Damn this stuff is sweet!

I’ve been reading about the history of musical tuning (which is way more interesting than it sounds; no pun intended, but please bear with me), and it recently occurred to me that these days, you can actually get all your notes in tune (which has not truly been possible at any point in history more than about 50 years ago). I can’t tell if this will make a significant difference in most music, but I think it would be interesting to try. Before I explain my idea in more detail, let me summarize the various tuning systems over the years, to give you the background of where this came from. Wikipedia, while not necessarily wrong here, is too incomprehensible to really read; I got a lot of information from this old temperament overview.

A history of tuning methods, followed by a new idea →

Rob pointed me towards an interesting experiment that the Washington Post did: they got a world-class violinist to pose as a busker outside a D.C. subway. It turns out that almost no one stopped to listen or give him money, although several people realized that he was better than a typical street performer. You can listen to the whole 45 minutes of music, and it’s pretty nice stuff.