Vidimasher, AudioMulch, Podcast from a Bus

At ease, recruits.  I know you’re all clamoring to find out how the last sortie went, but I hate to tell you it’s all still classified. Suffice to say that massive audio bombs were dropped on the Beetle Bar, and the casualties on the night included one very melty amplifier and a couple of smouldering mixers, along with all the brains that were destroyed by round after round of audio satisfaction.

That out of the way, I think it’s time we get back to basics: music, technology and the awesome place where they meet.  Enter the Evolution Control Committee.  These bad boys of music have been making mashups since before they were called mashups. Back in the day – way back to the early ’90s – building on the tail end of plunderphonics, they pioneered cut & paste bastard pop. When I say cut & paste, I mean it in the old school manner of actually cutting and pasting pieces of tape to create their mashups.

Fast forward to modern day, and they’re still doing the bootleg thing, but blazing trails with new toys. Check out the VidiMasher 3000:

The VidiMasher 3000

The VidiMasher 3000 in action at Bootie SF

If anyone has some spare Wiimotes and a spare projector to throw my way, I could certainly use one of these myself…

Another technomusical goodie on my radar is AudioMulch. I had the opportunity to meet the creator this week (a fellow who also helped out with the software algorithms for the Reactable, which I’ve blogged about before); we sat down for a quick show and tell of the software. Very quickly, my mind was blown clean up by the possibilities of this visual music studio. Plug sounds in, tinker with the effects visually, in real time, and make awesome shit happen. Girl Talk (the world’s most famous mashup artist (some day I shall dethrone him… some day)) uses it for its mad looping capabilities, but it can be used to manipulate any piece of audio in a multitude of ways.

It’s not designed to be a visual show like the VidiMasher 3000 is, but the above video gives a brief example of what’s meant by ‘visual music studio’. That’s a small part of the interface – check out the AudioMulch YouTube channel to see the full (potentially overwhelming to the unitiated) interface on display.

Girl Talk using Adobe Audition and AudioMulch to mash things up

Finally, nuggets, since good things come in threes, here is a podcast from a bus: The Buscast. Nothing technologically startling there, but I do defy you to tell me that ten years ago such a thing would have ever existed. Time and technology, hand in hand, march ever onwards.

The Buscast archives have only just hit the intarwebz again after an extended period of downtime. Since recon flight leader Debenham punched out before his wing could paint the bullseye, he had the time this weekend to perform maintenance on the Buscast while the taxpayers refitted his bird.

That’s enough for this lecture, noobs. There will be an exam in this room in seven days time on William Shatner and how his creative legacy effected the ‘post-American Empire’ years of the late 21st century.

The Sexy Technological Future of IBM’s Past

Watch as IBM tell us how your DECISIONS will be BOLDER as you make them ONLINE in this totally capital slideshow from the 70s:

http://www.squareamerica.com/ib.htm

I’m busy, so here are some Muppets

I’ve got my hands full prepping for the next Bootie Brisbane (see you there!) so here are some Muppets to amuse you until after the 4th.

Thou Shalt Always Kill

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – Thou Shalt Always Kill

There is much wisdom in this song.  Listen, learn and enjoy. Or else!

On Copyright

Some of you cadets may have heard the news that Sweden’s Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament. For those of you who haven’t manged to strike a balance between time in the flight sims and your studies, the Pirate Party is not advocating paramilitary acts of naval hijackery. Rather, the party strives to reform copyright and patent laws, preserve personal privacy and increasing the transparency of sate admnistration.

As you can imagine, this is fairly interesting to someone, who, for instance, might be a mashup producer. Every time a bootlegger creates a new work he or she is potentially violating copyright law. That may or may not be the case, and while Girl Talk is waving the flag of ‘fair use‘ in the face of the record labels quite bravely by no means is his continued success (or at least the fact that he hasn’t been buried under a massive pile of litigation) any indication of the state of current copyright law interpretation.

This movement isn’t about making everything free and denying creative practitioners a revenue stream – the point is to make copyright laws reasonable. The current hindrances to new creative practise impede our culture far more than our overprotective laws help artists (but they do certainly help the bank accounts of international record labels).

The Prodigy – Their Law (featuring Pop Will Eat Itself)

In modern times, there is very little in music that isn’t a variation on pre-existing fundamentals of music or that builds upon prior successful works. Every song in the charts today uses the western heptatonic scales, practically every song is in 4/4 time, and it would be a very rare song that uses an instrument developed after the synthesizer. Every song in the charts today is therefore a product of that which has come before it – to turn around and decry sampling as unfair because it is merely more accurate than other techniques is an unfair attack upon technology and musicians who are conversant with technology.

Part of the success of any song is attributable to society itself! Witout the approval of an audience, the creative work would languish in obscurity. To say that society has no right to a creative work may be true, but to say it has no right to a popular work certainly must be false. A great part of the success of a lot of mashups is due to the ‘recognition factor’ of the song – which wouldn’t exist without prior critical success.

Futuristic Sex Robotz – Fuck the MPAA | download

Of course, original artists must be recognized and compensated for their efforts. That recognition just needs to be reasonable, and the process for clearing samples needs to be streamlined so you don’t need a city block of legal offices to craft new works.

I think the jury will be out on this one for some time, but I hope for a future where we see a sliding scale for royalties based on how long it’s been since the commercial success of a song – or maybe some other methodology. Somehow, this has to change for the better before every new work is bogged down in an endless stream of sample clearance requests. I just hope it happens while I’m still in the game.

It’s not porn filling up the hard drive, honest!

It really irks me that I’ve got hundreds of gigabytes of storage, only to find that I have way less free space than I ought. In these days of terabyte-sized drives, it’s getting harder and harder to track down where the errant bytes that are taking over your drive. So, I assembled a crack team of data warriors (consisting of, er, myself) to attack this problem.

Come now with me and enter the amazing world of graphical hard drive usage software. These nifty utilities tally up all the files and directories on a drive and display them in a coloured grid. The biggest blocks (or bloc of blocks) on the grid are the biggest culprits, allowing you to easily pinpoint the storage whores on your drives. In my case, I found a massive store of crash logs from an application I’d have never suspected of being such a complete asshat, filling up a folder I’d have never looked in if I was hunting for the whereabouts of my free space manually.

In Windows-land, WinDirStat is your ally here. If you’re a Mac user, GrandPerspective does the same job. Both of these applications are freeware, so there’s no reason you can’t go clean up your messy drives.

GrandPerspective

WinDirStat

Playing Catchup

Argh. I swear there is some original content just around the corner.  Until then, here’s a couple of videos you’ve probably already seen by now (especially if you’re one Mr. Smarty Pants or a member of his entourage).

Han Solo, P. I.

Han Solo, P. I. – side-by-side sequence comparison

Of course, this has spawned the usual gallery of Youtube clones. Watch at your own discretion, however, as the quality varies wildly.

Handheld Gauss Cannon

Er, need I say anything more?

Inside the White Mountain

Watch the video above to take a tour through the ‘James Bond villain datacenter’ – a sprawling facility 30 metres underneath a park in Stockholm, Sweden.

The place really earns its James Bond villain cred – not only is it built in a cold-war bomb shelter, but the facility’s backup generators (pimped with some sexy blue lights) are the same model as used in North Korean submarines. Could you get any more villainy packed away into one hideout?

Yes.

The jewel in the crown is a meeting room suspended above the server farm, which can only be accessed via a glass bridge.

Coolest. Workplace. Ever.

BONUS MATERIAL

LeeDM101 – Hot Pursuit (Audio Espionage) | download

Propellerheads – Spybreak!

Paul Kass – Underground Agent | download

Words of Wisdom

Not particularly specific to life in space, but nonetheless equally applicable there:

• Never get angry at something you can outsmart.
• You’re not shocking us; you just look like an idiot.
• If something is real, you can measure it.