Posts by Tom Beard
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It would seem the Herald has opted to open up the Swine Flu story to YourViews, where the antivax people appear to be having a party of some kind.
Indeed. And there seems to be a global pandemic of idiocy:
Remember Hong Kong flu,Y2K,avian flu & global warming just to name a few non-events?
The common denominator was media hype & fortunes made by vested interests such as drug companies, IT companies and Al Gore Inc. Swine flu has at least kept the medico bureaucrats busy - might have been different though if Anzac Day had been 'Mondayised'. Contacting them at their Sounds holiday homes could have proved an interesting exercise.
Yes, this was obviously started by "medico bureaucrats", who somehow managed to kill a bunch of people in Mexico via remote control from their secret Marlborough Sounds bunkers.
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Ironically, people with the most vigorous immune systems were the most likely to die this way
Ironically, that means that my lifestyle of late nights, hard drinking and avoiding fresh vegetables may end up being a lifesaver.
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Some great Vocoder etc moments? Hope these qualify:
"In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country", Boards of Canada
"O Superman", Laurie Anderson
"Sexy Boy", AirOh, yes indeed. How could I forget "O Superman"?! And I'd add "Kelly Watch the Stars" by Air.
"Hamburger Lady", Throbbing Gristle -- but was that vocoder or some cut-up device they invented themselves?
Hmm, I'll have to have a look. There are a lot of other cutup/sampling/distortion effects that can sound a bit like vocoding, and various time-stretching and granular synthesis techniques (as stretched to breaking point by Fat Boy Slim, Chemical Brothers and others) can give a mechanical effect. Ditto for a lot of the glitchy/gated effects.
such frustrations largely come from the self-conscious blending of the tropes of electronic and guitar music rather than the sounds of the instruments themselves
Very true: rather than saying "Hey, let's mix rawk and techno!", if the whole range of electronic and acoustic instruments and techniques are treated as a broad palette for creating music, the results can be extraordinary. While I'm not so much into the current electro/punk crossovers (I keep wishing there was more electro, as well as wondering whether Bang!Bang!Eche! are up after their bedtime), I'm thinking of things like early Underworld, Electronic (the Bernard Sumner/Johnny Marr/Neil Tennant collaboration) and some of the ambient Fripp/Eno stuff.
the world however, does not require me to take a stance on Jesus Jones
Let's just say I had a misguided youth.
I'm on a boat! I'm on a boat!
Too many dicks!
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also... i did not know what Audiomulch was until i read your post... but a quick Google and a 60 day evaluation trial now mean that the chances of me getting any work done today are now effectively zero... i would very much like to blame you instead of my own weakness in discipline... that OK with you?
Fine with me! The same thing happened to me after reading about Audiomulch in an interview with Bevan Smith (of Aspen, Signer and Over The Atlantic), and it got me back into making music again after a long hiatus. I've played around with PD a bit, too, but it's a bit more technical and I haven't quite got my head around it. Jeskola Buzz is my current audio-toy of choice, after hearing that Disasteradio uses it.
nothing makes me sadder than people choosing when they don't have to...
Quite true, and it's interesting that Bevan has moved on to more of an indie-rock mode. There are some interesting crossovers, such as Scottish ambient/indie guitar outfit Slow Moe (on Bevan's Involve label), but some caution should be exercised when blending guitar bands and electronic music. That's a path that can lead to frustration, disaster, and ultimately Jesus Jones.
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Okay, so who's game for a list of "Best Vocoder/Autotune Moments ever?" Here's a start:
Walter-slash-Wendy Carlos: Beethoven's 9th (from A Clockwork Orange)
Kraftwerk: Autobahn, The Robots, Europe Endless, Ohm Sweet Ohm...
New Order: Bizarre Love Triangle and The Beach
Daft Punk: Around the World
Herbie Hancock: Rockit
Beastie Boys: Intergalactic
The original Cylons.And a big QI "Obvious but wrong" siren for anyone who mentions the Daleks :-)
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Speaking of threads, has anyone here ever worn a hand-knitted jumper with a keyboard design on it? Anyone?
*cough*
he still won't listen to anything that doesn't have a blues riff buried under there somewhere.
I still pretty much refuse to listen to anything that doesn't have a 303, sampler, Moog modular, turntable, vocoder, FX-502P or a nerd with a laptop running Audiomulch. Preferably all at the same time.
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"hell, i'd embed it myself"
Agreed.
Ah, the '88 version. The original didn't have vocoder, but its B-side/remix "The Beach" did. I remember when my brother first got the 12" and put the flip-side on, I said "It's just the same song slowed down! I told you that you're not supposed to play it on 33: it's actually a single."
Best New Order vocoder moment: towards the end of "Bizarre Love Triangle". Actually, I'm starting to wonder just what proportion of my CD collection has vocoders/pitch shifters/speak'n'spell etc in it: I suspect it's at least 10%
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A vocoder just makes the voice sounds robotic. Auto-tune changes the pitch
Actually, the vocoder does both, as it imposes a pitch or chord upon a voice. Or strictly speaking, it's the other way around: it takes a sound source then alters the dynamics of the each frequency band in that source to match the dynamics of the voice: in crude terms, it makes an instrument talk rather than giving a voice a pitch. Wikipedia has a useful summary. The only reason it sounds "robotic" is that the multi-band filtering and dynamics-following are only approximations to the dynamics of a voice. The more accurate the processing, the more natural it sounds.
Which takes us to Auto-tune, which is in one sense a more sophisticated vocoder. As the article says, the intention was always to sound natural, and most Autotuning will be transparent to us. It's only when they tweak it to sound like a deliberate effect that we notice it like this. This video is clever since, unlike most of the pop/R&B uses of it, the effect is made even more obvious by using external sources.
A lot of innovations in electronic music come from mistakes or deliberate misues of equipment that was supposed to make things cleaner and more pseudo-natural, or from outside the world of music. Vocoders were for voice compression & encryption before Walter/Wendy Carlos did A Clockwork Orange and Kraftwerk did Autobahn; the TB-303 was supposed to sound like a real bass guitar, not like a squealing bout of acidic mayhem; the famous machine-gun kick drum in Blue Monday was meant to sound like a soft echo; and of course guitars were never supposed to be fuzzy.
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Sometimes it's best to just let the people speak. And then skewer them mercilessly and hilariously.
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But then, haven't virtually all peoples inhabiting any nearly any place you care to name "evolved [t]here as a uniique response to the land and the generations of history that have passed...." to some degree or other?
Yes, and that's kind of the point. It's not an individual that is indigenous or not, but a culture.
Most of this comes from Michael King's "Being Pakeha", where he argues that "Pakeha" is also an indigenous culture of NZ. It exists only here, and it has evolved as a result of engagement with the unique conditions of living here: partly the land itself, but also contact with Maori, the lasting influences of Anglo/Celtic roots, the recent experience of being colonists and the sense of distance from Britain. All of that has gone towards shaping a new culture, one that may not have existed even a few generations ago when England was "Home" and white NZers thought that their membership of the British Empire was at least as important as being Nzers. I'd still suggest that "Pakeha"-ness as a culture or ethnicity is still nascent rather than fully evolved, but it's an interesting concept.
And BTW, I don't think that King was saying that the indigineity of Pakeha makes them Tangata Whenua. That's a whole 'nother kettle of Ika.