Moving on...

Wow, long time no update! What's been going on? Where did I go?

Well, what's happening is that I've transferred my blog over to wordpress, and I'm combining it with the band's blog. Makes it easier for me to update!

I've also abandoned the customized theme for here in the mean time. I'll keep this site up for the time being, but no more updates will be occurring here. So please check out the new blog over at ThePawnshopManual.com!

Reed Ghazala - The Father of Circuit Bending

Even if you don't know what circuit bending is, you've definitely heard what it does. Although it's front and center in glitch, Avant-garde and noise music, elements of it can be heard in main stream genres too.

So what is circuit bending? The art of creatively rewiring, customizing, and shorting an electronic circuit. Usually it's tiny, low voltage electronics - guitar effects, children's toys etc. It's a really neat process, and something that tickles the experimenter in me!

Reed Ghazala is the acknowledged "father" of this practice. He might not be the first one to do it, but he's definitely the one to coin the term and spread it as a musical instrument. Here's a short documentary that's both informative and fascinating. Makes me want to go out and dig up all my half-dead electronics!

Interactive, Web-based Music Video for 3 Dreams of Black

Remember the Arcade Fire Google Chrome Video that I talked about a few months ago? It utilized the new HTML 5 standard and combined it with google maps - to create a personalized music video based on your location. Very neat stuff.

Today's post is something that further pushes the envelope with "web-based" music videos...and it's really awesome (it's brought together by Chris Milk, the same people who did the Arcade Fire vid).

"3 Dreams of Black" is a track from the concept album "ROME" by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. The album features Norah Jones and Jack White and will be released some time in the near future. In the mean time, they've released a really neat promo video that is designed specifically for viewing through a web browser. In fact, much like the Arcade Fire video, you can ONLY watch it online, using google chrome. But boy is it cool.

It's so interactive that it feels like a video game - you can change the view point, and guide the animals as they morph and interact with the environment. In fact in many ways it's closer to a video game, because many of the elements are rendered live (if you don't know what that means, it just means your computer is actually creating each frame, instead of just playing each frame).

What's more, you can also create your own animals/creatures to appear - and some of them will even automatically appear in other people's viewing experience. It's not just interactive, it also connects viewers to each other!

See the actual video at www.ro.me

See the behind the scenes video here:


What do you think?

CD case/Circuit Board/Instrument

This is really neat...again, like many others like this, it is extremely gimmicky - but the gimmick is so cool that I would buy it.

Check it out - it's CD case that is also an instrument/circuit board that you can play!



While I suspect that this is expensive to make and difficult to create, I think it would be fairly easy to do a non-electric instrument - say, an integrated kazoo - and it would instantly add value to the fan.

Would you buy something like this, just because it's cool?

world's first location aware album

 What happens when you combine the idea of a concept album with the localized interactive innovation of trackdropper? Bluebrain's new album, The National Mall.

Bluebrain has come up with a really neat concept album about the national mall in Washington, that can ONLY be listened to when you're at the national mall. In fact, each song has a specific location around the mall, and you have to physically go there with an iphone to be able to listen to the songs:

"'The National Mall’ works by tracking a users location via the iPhones built-in GPS capabilities. Hundreds of zones within the Mall are tagged and alter the sound based on where the listener is located in proximity to them. Zones overlap and interact in dynamic ways that, while far from random, will yield a unique experience with each listen. The proprietary design that is the engine behind the app will stay hidden from view as the melodies, rhythms, instrumentation and pace of the music vary based on the listeners’ chosen path. ‘The National Mall’ is an ambitious project that will allow users to listen to and interact with a work of music in a way that’s never been possible before."

The part that really excites me are the overlapping zones - it will be really neat to see what they've done.

Awesome!! I would probably combine it with a regular downloadable release, but the idea is definitely something that pushes interactivity to a new level.

The Invisible Instrument

On this blog I've talked about Music Hack Day here, and here in the past. Seriously, this is a concept/conference that just keeps giving!

For those who aren't familiar with it - Put together music nerds with computer nerds, give them 24 hours to hack together a music related application/program, and you have... Music Hack Day.

The winner of the top prize for Music Hack Day NYC is really mind blowing (okay, I said that about other Music Hack Day creations, but it's all so true!), and it's called The Invisible Instrument. Created by Tim Soo, it combines the responsiveness of real instruments, the programmability and portability of digital instruments, and the fun factor of air guitar! Just watch the video, and you will want to try it yourself. The program is in development though, so if you like what he is doing, help fund the project by going here!

Shoes as an Instrument #2

Awhile ago, I posted a blog about a shoe that Nike made (purely for promotional purposes, not for production) - in which a set of shoes were fitted with MIDI triggers on the soles. That blog post his here.

Adidas has now come up with something very similar - but this time it's wireless and a little bit more collaborative. Check it out below!

a documentary about the crybaby wah-wah pedal

Chances are, if you're not a guitarist you won't know what a phaser, tremolo, flanger, and other effects pedals do.  Knowledge about product names such as Big Muff, Memory Man, Fuzz Face... even less likely so.

But if you know any guitar effect pedal, chances are it's the wah-wah... and more specifically, the crybaby wahwah pedal.  It's what makes Voodoo Child sound so psychedelic. It's what enables the wakawaka 70's funk/porno effect. It's everywhere, it's fun... and heck, it's the first guitar pedal I ever bought!

The crybaby is to wahwah what kleenex is to tissue paper - the ubiquitous, original product.  There is a fun little documentary about the crybaby that is circulating the internet right now, that you should definitely check out, if you're a fan of any music that has any electric guitars in them:


Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.

design change!

Long time readers will recognize that I've completely revamped the design of this blog! If you've also been following my personal musical developments, then you will be familiar with this design - it integrates quite cleanly into my musical project.

Why did I do this? Well, for starters, the size of the old website had become obsolete - the standard size of youtube videos became much larger than the width of the website.  It is also a reflection of the fact that the increased capabilities of the average computer, as well as the average internet connection speed has gone up significantly since the last design.

Finally, the purpose of this blog might slightly change - although it will continue to cover interesting musical things, there might be times when I post about developments about my own projects as well.

All these considerations combined, the design has now changed! A little sad, but should be for the better!

LAPD radios...as Music

I often ponder the ingredients of a song - the structure, the chords, the genre, the lyrics... but even then, sometimes I am blown away with surprise, when certain ingredients are put together in such a way that they are far and beyond what I could have anticipated.

Today's post is a really strange, simple idea, but it comes across as really surreal and full of emotion. At youarelisteningtolosangeles.com, the musician? artist? combined the LAPD radio stream with ambient music from soundcloud. The result is this...really, cold musical landscape of a futuristic dystopia. Something straight out of a science fiction film noir. If Blade Runner was being remade in 2011, this is how the film would start.

The ingredients here are simple - ambient music + random cops talking about things going on in the city. Yet the result is so much more. The dialog of the cops are full of codes, and just muffled enough that you can sort of understand them...adding to the mystery of it, and making it seem almost robotic. The music makes it seem more dramatic, like a never ending dialogue of problems in the city....

Just check it out. Very neat. It's also intriguing to see how different ambient pieces change the feeling.

A hybrid CD-Vinyl!

This is just cool. Gimmicky, and maybe a fleeting joy..but still just COOL.

French hip-hop producer/artist Wax Tailor released an album/single on a hybrid cd/vinyl disk. The bottom is a standard cd, but the top side is a vinyl single! Damn, that's cool (ya..it was released in 2009, but I just found out about it..)

If you want to buy one, go here.

Solo Drummer...with a full Orchestra

This is kind of the exact opposite of my last post (where I talked about an orchestra covering a rock song)...since this is a solo drummer, "covering" a classical piece.

You hear/see drummers playing along with pre-recorded orchestras, but it's very rare to see a full, live orchestra play as the backing band of a solo drummer. So rare in fact, that you can see some of the orchestra members watching the drummer during their rests (..they should probably be looking at the conductor).

P.S. - I've also mentioned this guy in one of the first posts I did on this blog.

Marching Band Version of "Bulls on Parade"

I think the title says it all.
In my opinion, this really works well because it faithfully recaptures the emotion and the sledgehammer like wall of sound that the original Rage Against The Machine recording had. This could have easily been cheesy and watered down, but they kept the rough edges. Very cool.

Shimon, The Robot That Can Improvise Music

In one my previous posts, I talked about "seperating performance from recording". In it, I discussed the digitization of an actual performance, such that you can simulate a recording - say a piano piece by Thelonious Monk - and replicate it on a real piano (If this doesn't make sense, you're not alone. It's something that's hard to explain with the current lingo in music. So go check the other blog post). Today's post is a similar endeavor, but with an even more challenging task - a robot that can not only simulate a player, but improvise over live music.

This can be done of course, by the fact that music - even improvisation - follows a set of general rules. Yet the fascinating thing here, is that the type of improvisation can be programmed to be characterized as different real life artists. As the video explains, Shimon (the name of the robot) can programmed to be "30% artist A, and 40% artist B, and the rest something else". At the same time, it is able to react to real time input by the musicians Shimon is playing with! That's an amazing technical accomplishment!

Of course, this makes me ponder the same question as the other post: Would you truly enjoy this music? Would it somehow "cheapen" it? Does it even matter?



And here's a full performance:

TrackDropper - Geocaching with Music!

Ahh... Music Hack Day. What a wonderful concept. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can check out my blog post on it here. Here's a really cool idea that came out of Music Hack Day London 2010: TrackDropper.

As I'm sure many of you net savvy readers are aware, geocaching is one of the neatest things to catch on in the last decade. With the advent of cheap GPS devices and the internet, the nerdy scavenger hunt has become an accessible and fun way to discover things about the places you go to - whether that is your local neighborhood, or somewhere in a foreign country. It lets you be just a little more connected to your surroundings, to your fellow human beings in a way that is strangely personal.

And then comes Trackdropper, created by Andrew Bruce, Chris Lowis and Yves Raimond. The concept is very simple: instead of just sharing music online to anyone who has an internet connection, this app associates a specific location with the music file. In other words, you have to actually go to the location to download the music. Geocaching....with music!

Yes, it's illegal, and it's piracy with a twist... but the potential to make this something extraordinary makes this really exciting.

By associating a specific location with your music, a musician could write a song that is specific to that place. You could dictate the surroundings, the atmosphere, the noise and smells that a musical piece is associated with! And because you have to go there personally to get it, that strange sense of being "personal" could be experienced by the listener. Imagine singing a song about a specific scene, a part of a river, a famous building.. and you can have the listener actually see the real thing as they listen. On a more practical usage, You could also easily release a song at a specific location to be timed with a public performance/signing, or other publicity events.

The app is currently limited to the Android phone, but isfree for download here. Go re-discover your own neighborhood!

TrackDropper from Yves Raimond on Vimeo.

Interactive, Personalized Music Video by Arcade Fire

I don't know how I completely missed this until now, but better late then never!

The new music video - although calling it that doesn't really describe everything that's going on in it - by Arcade Fire is one heck of an interesting experiment. It's a joint project between them and google. "...google? Google made videos?"

...well, not exactly. This is where it gets interesting.

Instead of a normal video, it's an interactive experience that combines traditional music videos, google maps, your own text input, mouse movements, and browser technology. Using a specific video clip as the basis, it uses the ability to place different sized browser windows to create a seamless experience that is custom made to each person.  By adding a location - and google streetview's photos of that area - the video renders 3D images of your address, while adding 3D animations over it.  At the same time, the multiple windows create a split screen (split several different ways) viewing experience that jumps between the windows, rendering different things. It's really quite neat, not just as a music video but as an internet browsing experience. Indeed, it's a refreshing and surprising way to enjoy the internet itself. This really changes the concept of the music video.

But really, this won't make any sense unless you see it yourself. To see it properly, you'll need to download google chrome.

So go see The Wilderness Downtown - An interactive film by Chris Milk, featuring "We Used to Wait" by The Arcade Fire.

To learn more about this project, and how it's done, go here.

Need a Drummer? A Guitarist? A Kazoo..ist? Musical Collective Might Be The Solution

If you're a musician, song-writer, or composer, you've probably been faced with the following dilemmas: You have an awesome idea, but you don't have the instruments to put it down in a recording.  You can't afford to pay for a professional studio musician, but you really need a drummer.  You have a great snippet of a song/piece, but maybe you don't know what to do with it.

In other words, you want to collaborate with someone...but you don't have the right people around you.

In the age of the internet however, this shouldn't be such a problem. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of a forum for this specific niche - you had craigslist to jam with locals, you had music forums to discuss technical/equipment related things, and you had sample library websites where the focus is a little different.  The closest thing were electronic music forums, but there wasn't much out there for composers and other musicians.  What musicians wanted was a forum where they could post snippets, ideas, or even entire songs - and have other musicians and composers add things to it.

Well, we seem to have finally arrived at such a forum.  The Musical Collective is brand spanking new website that is aiming to become the hubris for musical collaboration. It's still in it's infant stages, but I am hoping that it takes off - as the founder, Brad Westness says:

I wanted to make a place where people could collaborate on music, kind of like the famous stories of "The Postal Service" completing their album by mailing tapes back and forth. I thought this would be a little more convenient than mailing tapes.

Way more convenient indeed.

What do you think?

Scientists Create Cloth that Listens and Produces Sound

I'm quite a bit behind on videos, music, and pieces of news that should be of interest to the readers of this blog... I'll try to get them up as soon as I can.

Here's something was in the news this past July, which you may have missed.  A group of scientists at MIT have created a cloth that can "hear" and emit noise. It's a functional fibre that can detect sound and change them into electrical signals on one end - so it acts like a massive, body microphone. On the other end, the fibre can vibrate at specific frequencies if it is connected to a power supply - like a massive speaker.

So your clothes could be your own ghetto blaster - just hook up your ipad to your clothes and you have a massive speaker that surrounds you - literally - in sound. Or it could record your heartbeats, environmental surroundings, and of course your vocals for later use..... imagine the creative possibilities!

Naturally, this seems more useful in medical (keeping track of biological signs on a wearer) or military/surveillance (how easy would it be to record conversations, if all you needed was a piece of cloth?)....but the musical creativity that could emerge from such a product would be so fascinating.

The fibres look like this:

For more on the science behind this, follow this link.

Indie Folk...with an African Twist

African musical influences - whether it be North, South, East or West African - have shaped the development of reggae, blues, rock, jazz, calipso, tango, mamba, salsa...and many other styles of music.  But in all of these cases, the African influence evolved into a brand new genre, effectively becoming it's own style of music.  Yet for all it's musical influence, it is rarely used as the primary motif of a piece of music.

"What do you mean?" You say?

This might be explained easier if I compare it to Latin music.  When a piece of music has a Latin flair to it, it is usually quite prominent - the rhythm, the scales, the melody, and even sometimes the language - is used in a way that it is front and center of the music.  If the basis is rock music - such as Santana's music - you can hear the Latin influence on the melody and rhythm, all the while still being undeniably "rock".  Or Indian music and the role it plays in "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles, or "Beware..." by Jay-Z and Punjabi MC.

African styles of music however, don't often get that kind of creative usage in Western music. And I don't know why.

There are exceptions of course, and I find them very refreshing - such as Shakira's Waka Waka song, Paul Simon's Graceland, or even the Lion King soundtrack.  But you probably haven't heard much else that prominently has an African flair to the music.

Given that rarity...would you be curious what Indie Folk with African flair would sound like? Of course you would be!

If you've watched the MLB playoffs this year, you may have noticed a new Blackberry Torch commercial. While the commercial itself isn't incredibly memorable, the music in the background completely floored me - and I found myself hoping that it's an actual artist that plays this type of music, instead of it being a jingle that was written just for the commercial. In fact, it was only the last few seconds that really stood out, because it clearly had a twangy, nasal, multi-voiced rhythmic feel - a prominent African flair.

The song is by tUnE-yArDs, which is the moniker of an Oakland based musician named Merrill Garbus. It's really rough sounding - it's recorded at home, using non-professional equipment - but it makes the sound that much more raw and honest. She has one album out right now, and it's full of little gems that are African influenced, yet unmistakably indie folk. Where does her African flair come from? She spent some time studying and living in Kenya! Very cool.

So without further ado, here is "Fiya" (Fire) by tUnE-yArDs. If at first it seems really straightforward folk, wait until it builds up. The African flair comes in slowly, but completely takes over the melody and feel of the song at around 4:00.

No Instruments? We Have Iphones!

This is an interesting story of creativity coming out of adversity and constraint. Atomic Tom, a band based out of Brooklyn, recently had their instruments stolen. An unfortunately fairly common problem for bands. I can't imagine how bummed out they would have been - but it turns out they are garnering more attention than ever before, thanks to their creativity.

Using nothing but their iphones and a battery powered amp, they decided to make a video of them playing in the New York subway system. That's right - all of their instruments are music apps for the iphone. It's a fun little video, and the song is pretty good too.

Creativity trumps again!

"Take Me Out" by Atomic Tom

*UPDATE OCT 20* -- Turns out they didn't actually have their instruments stolen, they just said that to provide a better effect. I guess that's good news. Also, for those who are curious, we now know what apps they used:

Guitar - iShred
Drums - Drum Meister
Bass Guitar - Pocket Guitar
Piano - Piano Virtuoso