Eric Blue's Blog

From LifeHacker:

One of the best ways to discover new music online is with Last.fm, a music recommendation community. Last.fm serves you up new tunes based on a marriage of your unique preferences and the rest of the huge Last.fm community. Last.fm is a pretty simple way to listen to tunes, but there are a few quick and dirty ways you can oomph it up a little. Keep reading for fifteen ways to tweak your Last.fm listening experience.

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Last December, I was in a bit of a creative mood and decided to put together a video titled Morphing Faces of Beauty.

Summary from YouTube:

Using a computer generated photo of the ideal beautiful woman as a baseline(credited to faceresearch.org), I fed this photo into a face transformer (from perceptionlab.com). This transformer can convert a photo based on age, race, and other options into a new photo. I then used a morphing application to transition between these photos.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENxJAlN1wM

A few people have asked what song I used for the background music. And, the answer is that I actually created the song using Garage Band. I posted about my first song last July (titled "Transition") in the article Creating Music With Apple Garage Band. I started work on a second song, but only partially finished. Then, a few months later I completed the song. As I was working on the Morphing Faces of Beauty video, I realized that this song would be the perfect fit.

Here is the song:

M3U Stream

MP3 File

Posted by EricB at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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Information Aesthetics recently posted about a new music visualization interface from Burst Labs.

And, here's a quick summary from NotCot:

"The Discover interface of Burst Labs is mesmerizingly brilliant ~ and there’s a melody for every mood you could possibly feel or imagine, and truly one of the most refreshing flashy user experiences i’ve encountered recently. Burst Labs is the latest brainchild of The Burst Collective: which Compose + Produces Music, Licenses Music, Records Music, and now gives you an incredible multi sensory experience to browse this ambient digital music space. Odds are you’ve already heard their music and didn’t even realize it… "

I compiled a list of compelling music visualization resources last November. I'll be sure to include the Burst interface in my next major update.

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A little bit of music humor for the weekend....

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Lee Byron at megamu.com has posted an article illustrating some visualization using the Last.fm social music service.

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The other week I posted an article about my IPod music and videos suddenly disappearing. I had some time this evening to start digging into the problem and came up with some interesting results. The first thing I did was backup my entire iPod (originally formatted under Windows).

I was planning on restoring, and then importing all music and videos from the backup drive. However, after a little Googling I came across a lifesaving article on LifeHacker:

Hack Attack: Add music and movies to your iPod from any computer without iTunes

Adam Posh reviewed a cross-platform iTunes replacement called Floola. The reason why I was even investigating an iTunes replacement was to find a way to copy a number of .mp4 files directly to the iPod. I use Rhapsody quite a bit and have purchased a number of albums over the last 2 years. Although Rhapsody does support transfering the files to the iPod in MP4 format, these files are not playable in iTunes. In fact, since these songs are no longer recognized on the iPod, if I try to import them I get an authorization error. My thought was that Floola would allow me to perform the copy, but that was not the case.

Fortunately, I discovered an option in Floola that allows you to "repair" a corrupt iTunes database (under Tools -> Advanced -> Repair). Apparently this rebuilds the iTunesDB file under the hidden iPod_Control directory based on the existing music and video files that are on the iPod. Sure enough, after clicking and waiting for a few minutes, 4,000+ of my songs and videos were recovered. This didn't include the tracks purchased through Rhapsody, but I'm sure I'll be able to recover if I re-transfer using my PC laptop.

Thanks to LifeHacker and Floola, I saved a ton of time in trying to solve a tedious problem!

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This is smart, funny, and a great track! Alanis Morissette does a parody of the song "My Humps" from the Black Eyed Peas.

Parody

Original

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Can Infected Mushroom get any better? These guys rock!

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This video is pretty amazing. Find out more about Reactable here.

"The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

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I lucked out yesterday and stumbled across a new Trance album via Rhapsody's just added RSS feed. The album is Psychadelic Perspectives from GOE a.k.a. Lukas Keller (@ Psychedelic Systems). I got into PsyTrance a couple years ago and have been a huge fan of Astral Projection, Infected Mushroom, and Juno Reactor. I definitely have to put this album at the top of my list. Especially the track Transcendence!

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Over the last few years, I'd say that my musical taste has expanded quite a bit. I now listen to artists and genres that I probably wouldn't have given a chance before. This is in large part to my Rhapsody subscription. Rhapsody can recommend music in a few different ways:

My Rhapsody - recommends new artists/albums based on previous tracks I've listened to

Instant playlists - creates dynamic playlists

Top artists per genre

New album releases per selected genre

This type of recommendation is certainly valuable. But, it is limited by the fact that you don't have a lot of flexibility in specifying the criteria for how the music should be recommended. In the last year or so I've noticed a number of free services that take the concept of music recommendation and make it much more dynamic and feature-rich. For example:

Visualization - the ability to view a mind/concept map of artists and how they relate to each other

Basic Search - search by artist/genre

Advanced Search - search by musical preference - find new artists and songs by music tempo(slow/fast), mood(uplifting/dark), genre (pop, techno, etc), and era (70's, 80's, 90's)

Social Recommendation - what do other users like?

User Feedback - the ability to flag likes/dislikes about songs. The system will adjust future playlists based on this feedback.

Sample Music - can you listen to a sample?

Update: (01/06/07) I've added a couple more sites based on recent discussions and discoveries. Thanks to Sean Coon for an interesting post on user rating/feedback, and pointing out Pandora. As more sites and services come out, I hope to keep this list up to date.

Musicovery

http://www.musicovery.com/index.php?ct=us
Features: Visualization, Advanced Search, Sample Music

Music Lens

http://www.musiclens.de/contest/
Features: Visualization, Advanced Search, Sample Music

Gnoosic

http://www.gnoosic.com/
Features: Visualization, Basic Search, Social Recommendation

Music Map

http://www.dimvision.com/musicmap/
Features: Visualization, Basic Search

Live Plasma

http://www.liveplasma.com/
Features: Visualization, Basic Search

Last.fm

http://www.last.fm
Features: Basic Search, Social Recommendation, Sample Music

Pandora (Music Genome Project)

http://www.pandora.com/
Features: Basic Search, Social Recommendation, Sample Music, User Feedback

TuneGlue MusicMap

http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/
Features: Basic Search, Visualization

Posted by EricB at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

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Did you ever get the feeling that you've heard a particular song before? I had that feeling today. The 2 songs in particular are The Clearing from the Sonicaid Concentration CD, and At The Water's Edge from Bob Holroyd's latest CD Without Within.
The Sonicaid Concentration CD is composed by David Bradstreet and John Herberman.

These 2 tracks have very different musical styles, but the first 15 seconds of each song sounds remarkably similar. Both albums came out around 2003, so I'm not sure if there was some sort of collaboration, sampling, or if this is just a coincidence. You can listen and see for yourself. I have a sample of the first 15 seconds, and visual output of the tracks using the latest product from Adobe, called Soundbooth.

At The Water's Edge

M3U Stream |
MP3 File

The Clearing

M3U Stream |
MP3 File

Posted by EricB at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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I started experimenting with Garage Band 3 earlier this week. I have to say that I'm very impressed with how intuitive it is to compose new songs. I do have a moderate musical background: 8+ years (throughout school) in various bands (concert, marching, jazz) and orchestra. But, none of it was really necessary while using Garage Band.

I originally decided to explore and take a shot at piecing together a techno song. What I ended up doing was creating a collage of some of my favorite genres. The song, called Transition, is comprised of 4 main parts. The main purpose of this experiment was to see how smoothly I could make the transition between different music styles: Ambient -> Techno -> EthnicFusion/AmbientDub/World -> Trance. Some of the categories are often times difficult to determine, but this is probably the best description for the main parts of the song.

Here is the song (Transition - 1:38):

M3U Stream

MP3 File

I have a very diverse taste in music. Some of my favorite musicians in the genres I listed above include Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Banco De Gaia, Paul Oakenfold, Astral Projection, Infected Mushroom, Bob Holroyd, and E.S. Posthumus.

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