Pink Air

Baby robot

Radiohead held an online contest to remix their song "Nude". James Houston, a student at Glasgow School of Arts, missed the deadline but aced the contest with this lovely video reinterpretation that's become so popular that Radiohead heard about it and linked to it on their site.

I like Radiohead, old computers and cleverness, so of course I love it. But it also makes me feel like weeping, which is odd. I think that Houston may have explained my reaction when he says:

I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

I find that incredibly touching. As a person with autistic tendencies, I feel an enormous sympathy for babies, animals and machines. This is a song I wrote a few years ago, a lullaby for newborn robots:
Download baby_robot.mp3

(image: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/hacked-robot-babytoy.html)

Measure for measure

I've been meaning to mention the New York Times' songwriting blog for a few weeks. As someone interested in both the meaning of pop songs and how they mean, I find the writing here satisfying and enlightening in a way that very little published musical criticism is.

It's nice (but not necessary) that the authors (Andrew Bird, Darell Brown, Rosanne Cash and Suzanne Vega) are also well-known musicians. In fact, musicians' views of their own songs are often a distraction that keeps you from paying attention to what the song means to you.

But these musicians are very focused on the often stumbly process of song making and how even for the creator, the meaning of the song emerges from the process and the song itself. They address the sweet spot of music appreciation that sits between the technical and the emotional and try to show how a note hit a little flat or the acoustics of a room can illuminate  a whole song.

Another example of this deeply in-between way of thinking about pop music is Tim Riley's book about every one of the Beatles' songs. I wonder if you could write a similar book about ads.

Everybody Talk About

...pop music, but not everyone agree. And while there are plenty of sources for song facts (interviews, production details, ratings, criticism), facts aren't what's really interesting about pop music. Even what the artist says is just another fact. What's interesting is the meaning of the song to you. You may be the only person who thinks that "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is actually about Jesus (or maybe that's me), but that's what makes pop music so emotional and fascinating. The lack of a single, incontrovertible meaning is what makes it interesting.

Our favorite songs release a flood of addictive brain chemicals, but it can be difficult to identify the exact trigger. On paper, the lyrics are often pretty vague given how meaningful they feel when the song is playing. The meaning seems to waft up from a soup of musical and lyrical elements--that chord change, middle eight, drum pattern, intake of breath--combined with our own, often idiosyncratic, knowledge and experience. We may obsess about what strings Jimi used or dissect the symbolism of the English hedgerow, but those are more symptoms of our devotion than explanations. It's that complex, cloudy, personal recipe that we really want to condense into language and share when we're talking about our favorite songs.

I love pop* music. I love talking about it and listening to other people talk about it and what it means to them. Those conversations are almost always more interesting than published music criticism where the opinions have be justified and dressed up as facts. I'd rather just hear people talk about what their favorite songs mean to them. So I made a site for people to do that and I hope that you will.
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*I mean "pop" in the broadest possible sense to include pretty much anything not written by Mozart.

Give the drum machine some!

Digital electronics are now commonly used to replace humans or other pieces of analog equipment in the process of music making. And from many points of view (cost, reliability, compression, stability) digital has been a great improvement. But from an aesthetic point of view, many people find the results disappointing, off-putting or worse. Analog vs. digital is one of those endless techno-religious wars in which values get confused with specs.

I think this is because for a long time, digital computers (broadly speaking) were not being used in the area of their creative competitive advantage, which is remembering and recombining, quickly creating interesting options for us to choose from and refine. (Which, now that I think of it, is probably something many analog fans would object to in the first place.) But now developers are focusing on this area and for some reason, the most interesting results all seem to be coming from Germany.

The latest example is Melodyne from Celemony in Munich. Melodyne 1.0 took an audio sound file and broke it into its constituent notes with a high degree of success if the audio was relatively clear and distinct. The notes then appeared as sound "blobs" which could be changed in length, pitch and tone and triggered individually:

Like a sampler, it allowed you to treat existing audio as if it were just another sound coming from your keyboard. But because it analyzed and represented the sound as individual notes in a performance, you could create variations on existing performances with an ease no sampler could match.

Last month, Celemony introduced Melodyne 2.0. What makes this version even more interesting is that, in theory, it can do the same thing for a multi-part performance, breaking it apart instrument by instrument, note by note, spreading the arrangement out in front of you for detailed manipulation. You can change a single note in a recorded guitar chord. Try out alternate versions of your favorite songs using the original audio. 1.0 allowed variations on a performance. 2.0 allows variation in a performance.

But I'm most excited about what happens when Melodyne doesn't work properly. When, instead of cleanly picking out the bassline from "Hit Me One More Time", it mistakenly combines some of the bass sound with some of the vocal and a bit of the drums to create some unimaginable Frankenstein of virtual "instrument" and melody that never existed in the original. What happens when you play that? Do you hear something that was latent in the original song? A molecular recombinant form with faintly recognizable DNA, like a distant relative of the original? Remixing will gain a whole new set of dimensions. That will be interesting.

(Celemony's video introduction of Melodyne 2.0 is interesting in itself. Strangely Kubrickian in tone. You almost expect to see a Hanso Foundation logo at the end.)

What about the children?

I'd seen it only once, followed by decades of feverish, fruitless searching. I began to doubt my memory and in the end, my sanity. But my white whale has finally surfaced on YouTube. Yes, it's Stevie Wonder at the pinnacle of his career playing an astounding live extended jam of his greatest song with an awesome band (including Ray "Ghostbusters" Parker on rhythm guitar and hat) for an audience of 7-year olds on Sesame Street in 1973. Amazingly, the brilliance of the performance is almost upstaged by the wild child on the fire escape who seems to be having a funktasm. The whole thing just makes me smile crazily and mourn the days when Sesame Street was interesting and brought the funk to the little children.

All you need is Live

At the risk of blaspheming the father, the son and the holy ghosts, I was disappointed by the "new" Beatles album, Love. Maybe it's not surprising given that it was built primarily as a Cirque du Soleil backing track rather than a self-standing album, but the mixes are so conservative that, with a few lovely and promising exceptions (like "Sun King" played backward fading into the intro of "Something") there's nothing revelatory or insightful about it, which is what a great remix should be. Love just feels less interesting than it ought to given the interestingness of the elements the Martins had to work with. It's as if they were asked to dj rather than produce. (Admittedly a vanishingly fine line these days.)

But maybe the richness of the elements was actually part of the problem. So many Beatles songs, even individual parts from songs, are so familiar and interesting that you can't help hearing echoes of the original version, and all those echoes mixed together may make a mess in the mind of the listener. At a certain point, interesting + interesting ≠ more interesting, but confusion. (Kind of like what happened to the show Lost.)

But why not try it yourself and see? A demo version of Live, the best music-mixing-mashing-making software in the world, is available here for free. You can spend months digging into its creative possibilities, but you can also start making interesting mixes of your own pretty quickly. Of course, Live won't make you a great composer/producer/arranger/musician like Sirs George, Paul et al., but it can help you to become a more creative dj. And we're all dj's now.

Don't be a hater

"Here is what is wrong with the British pop industry.  You've had people writing songs who don't give a shit about the people that buy them and you've allowed that to happen.  You should all be hung, drawn and quartered."

This friendly advice courtesy of everybody and nobody's favorite music production team, Stock Aitken & Waterman. Read the 1987 Smash Hits interview and substitute "advertising" for "pop music". Oooh, creepy!

Lyrical errors

Over the past few years I've been collecting interesting misspellings in memos and e-mails. Some of them are so common ("We need to flush out this idea") that the assumed meaning may have changed. What do you do differently when you think that you're flushing an idea rather than fleshing it out?
Whatever their effect on communication, some of them are quite beautiful and would make great song titles. So here's "In Summery", the first track from my upcoming (2010, let's say) album, "Mellow Dramatic".

Terra Semicognita

If you're looking for something that you've never seen before, how do you know when you've found it? I'm wondering because a few days ago I came across the music of Matthew Herbert for the first time and as soon I heard it, I recognized it as something I'd been looking for.
If this had happened in proper cause and effect order, I might first have thought, "I'm looking for something halfway between They Might Be Giants and Aphex Twin." Then I could have queried something like Pandora or Amazon to find the overlap between fans of each. Though I've never had much luck with those kinds of systems. Usually you get a lot of soundalikes of your seed music when what you want is a non-linear result. Something you didn't know you were looking for.
This sort of thing happens fast and slow at the same time. The recognition itself is immediate. In the first few seconds of listening, I could feel my face forming the "interesting" expression, a furrowed brow with a broad, unconscious smile underneath. This is the face I look for when showing advertising. It's the best immediate indicator of positive interest that I know, more valid and reliable than what people will tell you afterwards. It's not one of Ekman's basic facial expressions, but it should be.
What's slow is the subterranean buildup of information, pushing you towards the moment of recognition. Once I knew Herbert's name, I found that I'd mentally bookmarked references to him for some time, but never remembered his name or did any further investigation  "Oh, he's the guy who sampled all the food in his house. Oh, he's the guy who wrote that musical Dogme thing." With no folder to live in, these bits were in my mind, but invisible.
Really interesting things often feel half-remembered, like a dream or deja-vu. There's a certain amount of pleasant frustration that drives us to find out more, even as we're never fully satisfied that we've grasped it. As if there's a very important personal secret up ahead that's always just out of sight.