To Find A Star

I've talked a lot about how technology can benefit the listener on this blog, but one of the ways technology really helps in the business is for the actual musician. Before the rise of the internet, getting publicity for a new singer or band to get an album put out was hard work, and it took a lot of time and money. You needed to get into the recording studio, pop out a solid single or EP, get yourself on the Ed Sullivan Show or an equivalent and hope to high heaven that the public liked what they heard. Or, you would slip some radio DJ a couple hundred bucks to play your song a couple of times, enough so that the people listening would start to go, "Hmm, what's that?" and go out and buy the song. It was a tricky business, publicity.

Now, not that payola isn't still an issue (an a big one, to all sorts of smaller labels that can't afford to be paying Z100 to play their artists' song ten times a day), but the internet makes it 100x easier for smaller bands and artists to make their way.

Just look at MySpace. Their music site has given so many musicians - and a couple of very, very famous ones - the chance to get their music out there to be listened to. For example, Lily Allen started on MySpace, posting a couple of songs, including her big hits Smile and LDN. She made so many "friends," got so much online hype that she garnered up huge publicity and huge demand for her debut album. Gnarls Barkley's massive hit "Crazy" also came into the limelight on MySpace - people were listening online, and suddenly so was everyone on the radio.

YouTube has also helped many people find their 15 minutes of fame - and for some, that 15 minutes has blown into actual celebrity. Esmée Denters, who posted a number of videos on her account of her singing popular songs, like JT's "What Comes Around," got massive numbers of views, and eventually grabbed the attention of Justin Timberlake himself, who asked her to open for his worldwide tour, and signed her to his record label.

The danger of this, of course, is the number of two-bit "music stars" coming out of this. One immediately springs to mind (and she has a pretty large cult following, so I might get in trouble for this), and that's Julia Nunes. Oh God.

By now, you guys all know how I feel about the Beatles. So that this has gotten such praise? It's embarrassing. Even a bit offensive. Every time I hear this, with its annoying ukulele and nasaly singing, I get a little bit angry. Because she's getting a record contract, and other more talented people are not, and it's just because there are thousands of fans out there that just eat this right up. Come on, people! I know, I know, to each their own, and "Everyone should have a chance to express themselves" and "Let the girl sing if she wants to" and "I like it so shut up who cares what you think" and "Oh yeah and you could do better?" and "It makes me happy so why are you being mean???" but this is just really bad.

And that's the downside of the whole internet fame. This Nunes girl will get her 15 minutes, and if she's lucky, a top 100 hit or two, but then she'll fade into obscurity, playing little gigs in small town bars until she retires and gets a desk job somewhere, or maybe a place on a reality TV show. Maybe that's harsh. But isn't that the truth? With so many "celebrities" popping up every other day, the actual meaning of "celebrity" has shrunk. Anyone can have those 15 minutes - everyone can have some sort of celebrity. Fame is no longer some special thing, it's actually pretty readily accessible if you have a computer with a microphone or even just a video phone.

Finding that "true star" is so much more difficult now...sure, anyone can have a top 10 hit nowadays if you have a six-pack and a smart record producer, but so few people have that infamy, that long-lasting quality that people will remember in 50 years. I have to wonder who the definitive celebrity is in this era. The 50s had Marilyn and Audrey, the 80s had MJ and Madonna, and the 00s have...Beyoncé? Britney? Every Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe can be a star, so the "wealth of celebrity," so to speak, is thinning. What's being famous when everyone is?

Our real lives, our real personalities are being hidden behind both a cyber wall and the wall of the protective public. Maybe Perez Hilton knows every detail about Britney Spears' life, but she's retreated emotionally so far away from the outside world that we don't know who the real person is anymore. So I'm going to throw it out there and say that in this time of growing exposure, with the paparazzi at every pseudo-celebrity's door and TMZ finding out gossip the second it happens, we are actually growing more and more insular and anonymous as a society.

Just something to think about on your Sunday afternoon.

And on a similar note...

And I'll get off my pedestal now, but this version of Franz Schubert's classic "Ave Maria" by Barbara Bonney is stunning. It's recorded, but no amount of studio magic can make this:

What Technology Cannot Do

You know, for everything I say about how technology is improving our auditory enjoyment of music; how it's advancing music production quality, giving us more and more excellent songs, I have to take a step back and say there are some things technology cannot do to music.

Technology cannot create that feeling that you get when you listen to something truly beautiful. Maybe this is a matter of taste, but I truly believe that sound bites and computer chips, no matter how pitch-perfect and flawless, can't give you goosebumps. They can't make you cry. They can make you want to listen again and again, but in the end, imperfections are what make a song perfect. Does that make sense? When I want to listen to a fun dance tune, that's one thing - bring out the AutoTune, I'm all ears. But when I'm in the mood to hear true art, true beauty, I look for one thing - the skill that it takes to make it.

Maybe it's because I'm in a choir who does operatic, choral music, but to me, nothing and no one demonstrates the true futility of technology than Pavarotti singing Nussun Dorma. This is classical music, but dear God it's absolutely gorgeous. There's no editing in this; actually, the backing choir could probably have been amped a little more and there's some annoying distortion, but you HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS. The imperfections are what make it so legendary - that he can pull notes like this so deep from within his body and make it look like there's so little effort involved. This is LIVE. This is not in a studio. This is Pavarotti and his voice, with a full orchestra behind him.

And so I sound like my grandpa, but where can true artisanship, true beauty, and true emotion be expressed in electronica or techno? How can Lady Gaga (no matter how much I love her) call herself an artist? THIS is art. THIS is true music. And it just goes to show that real talent, real musical might, transcends all technology.

4-Chord Song

This is an amazing video! It's a mash-up of a bunch of the songs that have been popular in the past couple decades - all of which use the same four chords. How much fun is this? Obviously these are just really catchy chords, as so many catchy songs have been made with the four-part combination. And it brings up the question (and this might be a bit out there, but oh well)...are we just hearing the same song over and over again? There's only so much one can do with four chords - is our understanding of music based simply in the auditory pleasure in hearing those same chords? Hmm...

Wired Magazine Tech + Music Timeline

This is a really useful timeline from Wired magazine, where it shows the progression in music from the experiments in sound technology by Thomas Edison, the father of the gramophone, to the early 1990s and the digital multitrack systems. Obviously, since it doesn't go up until the present day, it's a tad outdated, but it is still very interesting. Music technology really came into fruition in the 1980s with the invention of the compact disc (CD), and now, with the common utilization of the mp3, music is becoming more and more accessible.

This is from Edison to email (oh, I'm so clever....)

CLICK FOR THE TIMELINE

AutoTune in Time

I was looking through some of the back issues of Time, and I found this really great article from February 5, 2009 that talks about the emergence of AutoTune into the music market. It talks about the history of the technology way better than I ever could, and it's very readable, so if you are even slightly interested in the subject, or if you have a couple minutes to spare, pop over to the website and read the article.

I've taken out a couple of my favorite quotes for you all, just to get a good flavor for the piece:

"It's like Photoshop for the human voice. Auto-Tune doesn't make it possible for just anyone to sing like a pro, but used as its creator intended, it can transform a wavering performance into something technically flawless."

"Of the half a dozen engineers and producers interviewed for this story, none could remember a pop recording session in the past few years when Auto-Tune didn't make a cameo--and none could think of a singer who would want that fact known. "There's no shame in fixing a note or two," says Jim Anderson, professor of the Clive Davis department of recorded music at New York University and president of the Audio Engineering Society. "But we've gone far beyond that.""

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck."

Very interesting. It's like the hidden secret of the music industry - everyone's using it, but no one wants to own up to it.

Anyway, here is a list of About.com's top 10 best songs made with AutoTune, including "Believe" by Cher in 1998, which started the entire phenomenon.

Music Production @ NYU

From this website:

"Music Technology at NYU Steinhardt is a leading and internationally recognized program in music, sound and audio technology. Students prepare for successful careers in sound engineering, computer music, audio-visual production and post-production, mastering, scoring for film and multimedia, audio for games, software development, and multimedia production.

Students study with premier faculty in New York City, the heart of the nation's new media and music industries, and join an active community of scholars, artists and engineers exploring the cutting edge of technology and music.

State-of-the-art facilities include 11 fully equipped recording and computer music studios, listening rooms and research labs where over 40 Music Technology specialization courses are taught.

The Music Technology program offers an extensive internship program at major recording studios, new-media web-related companies, music-scoring houses and other music industry enterprises."

I think it's amazing that so many universities are offering full-on courses in music production. Achieving high quality sound takes time, practice, and experience, and programs like Steinhardt's help educate a new generation of producers.

That these programs are so widely received by students clearly demonstrates that the passion for great-sounding music has not died with the tinny iPod speaker. They can obviously appreciate something more, and this program proves that point exactly to those older naysayers who label this generation as one with no esteem for music quality.

Radio 1 Live Lounge

One of the ways music is coming to us faster than ever is through the radio. You wouldn't believe it, but the radio is still a great way of finding new music - new songs and new artists get airplay. It's the mother of all mediums, and some of the new improvements on your old radio include satellite technology like Sirius, which allows access to innumerable stations and static-free listening (for a price, of course).

I love jamming out to Capital Radio in the morning as I get ready for school, but I also love listening to Radio 1's Live Lounge - in case you don't know, artists come on to the show, play one of their own tunes live, and then usually cover another song. It's brilliant. There are some duds, as would be expected, but so much of what comes out is simply amazing.

And whoops, in case you miss it on the radio, you can tune in right away on the Capital Radio website, or even look at old videos of the recording sessions that have been put up on YouTube (once again, thank you, Steve Chen, for arguably the most useful site on the web).

Here is one of my favorites, the Noisettes (famous for "Don't Upset the Rhythm"), performing The Killer's classic, "When You Were Young" (click on the links for these originals). This is pure class.

X-Factor and Public Consumption

OK, I might be stretching the boundaries of what is acceptable on this "music and technology" blog, but it's my party and I'll post if I want to, right?

Anyway, the X-Factor is so stellar this year, but I rarely have time to sit down and watch it, because I'm usually out on Saturday nights when it comes out. Woe is me, but that's where the almighty YouTube comes in. Thank the stars for Channel 4's more lenient public broadcasting laws, because almost as soon as the program shows on live TV, they upload the performances to YouTube so I can watch them. In HD video and sound, too.

Some people might gripe that the C4 bosses will be losing revenue because more people will watch it this way, for free online, but I think the opposite - more people will tune in when it they're watching TV because they've seen it online first. They're reaching a whole new audience with this free online situation, which is brilliant for both the consumer (who is getting their show for free) and the producer (who will get more publicity, and thus more money). Win/win.

So, that being said, enjoy Olly Murs performing on Diva week. I like the flapper dresses in the background:

Last.fm

Technology can help music in a multitude of ways, as we've seen so clearly on this blog. The internet ties in very neatly with that...blogs like this one can give information on new songs, new bands, new ways of looking at the musical world....but sometimes, the internet is just perfect at taking what we already have and putting it in a different way.

A perfect example of this is Last.fm, the online music site that takes every play count from your iTunes and "scrobbles" (aka uploading the song to their database) it, determining what kind of music you listen to and how much of it. It then gives you recommendations based on the information it receives from you, makes a playlist to listen to, and finds "friends" who have similar musical interests to you. It tells you what gigs of artists you like or would like are playing in your area. It shows pictures, concert and official videos, and biographies of every artist on the site (of which there are thousands, from Britney to the most obscure indie band).

Basically, it's amazing. I would recommend anyone with even a slight taste in music to check it out - it's free, and there's a great downloadable applet that scrobbles your songs as you play them. So go do it!

Headphones and Sound Quality

Back in the day, when music wasn't about what beats could be played loudest in as many clubs as possible, musicians and producers really and truly cared about the sound of their product. They created special microphones to pick out the right vibrations of sound waves, went through reels and reels of tape to get the right sounding takes, and listened to the songs over and over again to make sure it was perfect. Now, I'm not saying that music today is sloppily thrown together - with the implementation of computer technology into the equation, it is simply easier to make louder, stronger bass and drum lines.

We also have forgotten what it is like to listen to these songs at their premium. No longer looking for the best speakers in town, we tend to be content with our tinny computer speakers and those little earbuds they make for a dime a dozen in China. When I got my first pair of "real" headphones last year, I was amazed at the difference in the sound quality.

These Sennheiser HD 800 are the best on the market, and although they are most certainly out of my price range at just under $1400 a pop, I still want them! Imagine the quality of the bass, the distortion-free clarity.

picture from http://www.headphone.com/selection-guide/sennheiser-hd-800.php