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Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Shock the Monkey
PreacherTom writes "The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music, but also adapt it into something more modern. In doing so, he actually posted a sample pack of Shock the Monkey consisting of vocals and other pieces of the original multitrack recording. Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit. In actuality, Gabriel is pleased with the results."
With all due respect, this is a gratuitious attempt to take advantage of free labor to generate revenue for publishing he owns. As well as an attempt to encourage others to remake that crappy song into something that resembles good music. Nice try.
So HE'S the one behind those insipid "shock the monkey" banner ads that inspired me to write AdBlock! I am calling upon all wise men to boycott Peter Gabriel. It shouldn't be hard, considering he's just some stupid blogger.
Nine inch Nails put out a track and allowed it to be remixed..
s html?tid=141&tid=3
see
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/16/1417205.
to remix Peter Gabriel and Paris Hilton's new song and call it Shock the Junkie
... do I "win $20"?
Petey, if you're really serious, release "In Your Eyes" raw tracks. Then we'll talk. Don't dump your crap into the marketplace and expect the best talent to do your bidding for free.
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated? So when musicians are making mp3s do they do it with seperate tracks or do they mix the tracks together and then encode an mp3 from the resulting mix, which immediately goes and tries to seperate the tracks again?
How we know is more important than what we know.
The music industry has done a good job of scaring me away from music downloads. Completely.
I moved to anime. Granted, I download more than I buy, but I spend $500+ a year on DVDs alone. This is because I can "preview" a series before it's out. That used to be money I spend on music.
Back in the late 90's I used to spend a killing on CDs, not so anymore. Common sense and the internet spoiled me - I could tell ahead of time whether a CD is worth it or not (it's not 99.9% of the time, unless one-two good tracks but not especially memorable tracks are worth $15 when a good movie for the same money entertains for about 90 minutes or so).
At most, I buy CDs for anime soundtracks, but in this case I know if it's good or not from the anime itself, ne?
Where's PETA when you really need them?
He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. -- The Sphinx, Mystery Men
I really don't like the visual that's giving me.
(NSFW link)
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
"The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music"
In other words the copyright holder is giving others permission to do something. Well that certainly beats digitally knocking him over the head, and taking the goods.
I feel better already.
A star is pleased with himself... Hmm.. sounds like a case of the "Tom Cruises"
Is that anything like punching the monkey?
Sorry, you knew someone had to ask...
O/T: I still do not understand the obsession people have with anime. What do the Japanese know about making shitty cartoons that we don't?
Real musicians (ie not Britney etc) love having their music remixed & worked on by other musicians. If you listen to hiphop, you'll know that everyone lets everyone else play with their beats, lyrics, etc. Honestly, BFD.
While I agree with most commentors that Peter Gabriel didn't exactly pick his shining accomplishment for the amateur mixers to work with, there were a few "gems" amongst the entries. Here was one of my personal favorites ... who would have thought Carmen and Shock the Monkey would go together so well?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
We came up with the "Mr. Nice Guy" which is to fold your pinky down, really giving a half-shocker...
More like surprise the monkey.
Doin' a
"Don't dump your crap into the marketplace and expect the best talent to do your bidding for free."
Hey! It worked for sourceforge.
It's a well-known song by a well-released artist. Sure, the RIAA could dig some plain-old selling-CDs value out of it, but they've gone to that well plenty of times. So this is as much publicity stunt as artistic endeavor, and it's reaffirming exactly what the RIAA does: promote big acts.
What the major labels provide to an artist is massive promotion, and this artist has already been promoted. If you want to take down the RIAA, find some ways to connect to brilliant-but-obscure bands that don't have the money for radio air play, posters in Virgin Megastores, etc.
They are facinating in how they work, but let me provide a quick laymen explanation:
.wav file with equivalent (for most humans -some one might disagree - i don't) quality.
.j.
First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.
Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:
1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)
Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have
2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?
This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a
Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Uh, no. It just letting listeners remix already recorded segments into something they like.
Really.
Journalists are stupid. Sometimes.
Politdics openly.
As much as I love Peter Gabriel, he isn't the first to release tracks for fans to mix. Barenaked Ladies have also been offering songs from their newest album for people to mix (some of the newly-mixed songs will go on an EP, the proceeds going to charity). Anyways, I think it's great that more popular artists are sticking it to the man, so to speak, and disregarding everything the RIAA wants you to believe. More power to 'em, and if it means rehashing old songs in order to get attention, then so be it. At least they're starting to clue in on the fact that free music does more good than harm (most of the time).
When I think Peter Gabriel my mind is instantly driven to the video for "Sledgehammer" with the stop motion animated food. With all of the Photoshopping talent online, why should the remix project stop with music alone? Music videos would likely be impressive as well.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Oh, I agree. We know about as more (I'd say even more) about making shitty cartoons than the japanese.
It's in the area of good ones we need catching up.
(BTW, the answer here begins in the attitude. Here, it's cartoons, as in primarily for kids, there it is an accepted medium for all kinds of entertainment.)
I dont care if he likes free downloads, this is news for nerds, not news for has beens....
You can see that the actual artists -- the people the RIAA pretend to be protecting -- have repeatedly fallen on our side, supporting file sharing and music communities. They are above the petty business interests and sheer greed that has driven the RIAA to attempt to destroy the music industry.
With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.
On the off chance that your question is a serious one, I'll try to explain. The primary difference between American cartoons and Japanese cartoons is, in my opinion at least, the target audience. American society views cartoons as intended for children. Most of the cartoons produced here in the states are simple and devoid of anything that might offend parents. You will never see Disney (or any other domestic cartoon studio) release anything like "Ninja Scroll", "Slayer", or "Demon City Shinjuku". They're not child-safe. (Remember cartoons are for children.)
This isn't the case with the Japanese cartoons, which is why most fans of anime that I've personally met refer to it as anime instead of Japanese cartoons. The material will range from silly (Photon, Dragon Half) to serious (Jin-Roh, Ghost in the Shell, Last Exile). There are also scores of romantic comedies usually these involve a love triangle of some sort, i.e. Lum, Ranma 1/2, Vandread, Love Hina. There is something for just about any interest imaginable. (La Blue Girl comes to mind. Ick.) This isn't to say that there isn't anime intended for children because there is. It just isn't the focus of the genre.
In short, anime doesn't walk on eggshells.
no text here
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Instead of shocking the monkey, try "spanking the monkey".
this was too much, found it a few days ago:
e r.html
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/mp3s/fouri
You just can't make this stuff up! here's the text, reproduced, but as my friend said, it puts Weird Al to shame (sorry Al!), the song itself sounds really, really good! So, this is your Nerd Moment of Zen for the Week (for sure!):
Table 4.1: Properties of the Fourier Transform
(or, Fourier's Song)
Integrate your function times a complex exponential
It's really not so hard you can do it with your pencil
And when you're done with this calculation
You've got a brand new function - the Fourier Transformation
What a prism does to sunlight, what the ear does to sound
Fourier does to signals, it's the coolest trick around
Now filtering is easy, you don't need to convolve
All you do is multiply in order to solve.
From time into frequency - from frequency to time
Every operation in the time domain
Has a Fourier analog - that's what I claim
Think of a delay, a simple shift in time
It becomes a phase rotation - now that's truly sublime!
And to differentiate, here's a simple trick
Just multiply by J omega, ain't that slick?
Integration is the inverse, what you gonna do?
Divide instead of multiply - you can do it too.
From time into frequency - from frequency to time
Let's do some examples... consider a sine
It's mapped to a delta, in frequency - not time
Now take that same delta as a function of time
Mapped into frequency - of course - it's a sine!
Sine x on x is handy, let's call it a sinc.
Its Fourier Transform is simpler than you think.
You get a pulse that's shaped just like a top hat...
Squeeze the pulse thin, and the sinc grows fat.
Or make the pulse wide, and the sinc grows dense,
The uncertainty principle is just common sense.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I only said that to get your attention, maybe a little cred. I doubt that most folks around here have even HEARD hiphop - although the radio has soaked you all in rap, for sure.
.
;)
_ hop (wikipedia, you shine tonight)
To quote the immortal KRS-One: Rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live.
I mean it, hip hop is barely a music format, it is more of a mindset that has NOTHIN' but NOTHIN' to do with the music you hear today. Really Really. Here is a underground tip for otherwise plaid slashdotters.. and an album i wish EVERYONE owned, which will prove the point: Aceyalone's Book Of Human Language
After you listen to that, let's have this discussion again. We can go over the Four Elements. Maybe over the still cooling body of Clear Channel, if we can arrange it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_elements_of_hip
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Freedom to create derivative works. Freedom to distribute. Freedom to use as you see fit. No copyright nonsense.
The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.
The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.
The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.
Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.
It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Your example of two people whistling at 700 Hz and 703 Hz is misleading. I believe you're assuming that since the difference is 3 Hz, and the human ear can only hear Hz greater than 20, that the difference would be inaudible and one could be dropped. But what actually happens is that the two waves will alternatingly compliment and destruct each other, with the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases.
:). I was actually hoping the Wikipedia article would explain the data portion of the MP3 format, and not just the header. But the above is what I learned from reading the actual technical documentation years ago.
This gets to the fundamental mistake in your explanation. If MP3s (or more generally, digital music) only stored the most prominant waves, the above phenomenon would not be recorded. The recording would not match the actual sound at all, as the complimentary aspects of sound waves are a big part of what makes music interesting to listen to.
What actually happens is that the waves are all recorded as one master waveform. The amplitude of this waveform is recorded regularly at very short intervals. For CDs, there are 44,100 recorded points per second. Due to the very small intervals, any waveforms that could not be caught at this fidelity would be due to frequencies so high that they're inaudible. MP3s try to draw the same curve without taking so many recordings. It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform, carefully deciding on which differences would result acceptable errors that are either outside of human hearing or small compared to the other frequencies compositing the wave. There is never a datapoint in either CD or MP3 that says "currently there's a sound at 700 Hz and at 703 Hz." Instead, the only recorded data is where the wave is (in terms of amplitude) and (in the case of MP3s) where the wave is going.
The parent poster asked about "tracks" and how they're seperated out. I believe this the poster's just using the wrong terminology. What's actually seperated out is the output from the different speakers. These are more accurately called channels. "Tracks" are the output of a specific instrument, and are traditionally stored as two unique channels in recording studios. The bitrate of these channels would match, or exceed, the quality of the end recording. Therefore if a pop song has 16 tracks, it would take 32 channels, all individually stored at high bitrates, to store in an unmixed format. This is a lot more data than distributing the "mixed" version, where all the waveforms are saved together as two channels, and is what is sold at CD stores and as MP3s/AACs.
I hope this explains things a bit better
Jon
ps. Sorry for the original post as AC, but I don't want this post to be buried at 0 moderation.
my blog
The japanese know PLENTY about making shitty cartoons, trust me.
Same on the dedicated website http://bush-of-ghosts.com/remix/bush_of_ghosts.htm ; you can upload your remixes, which are then made available inline with the Creative Commons licenses.
The Afro-Celt Sound System - also on Real World records - did something similar several years ago, although the tracks were distributed with a Flash remixer so I'm not sure how open they actually were.
"If you want to take down the RIAA, find some ways to connect to brilliant-but-obscure bands that don't have the money for radio air play, posters in Virgin Megastores, etc."
Have them all do the soundtrack to F/OSS games. That'll make them big time in no time.
Oh Lord! Another one. The only thing you've produced is a long post that no one would pay to read. When you're actually a content creator that people will pay. THEN you can start telling us what copyright, and content creation is all about. Not some unknown with a hidden agenda.
I remember when the RIAA had artists quotes about piracy, PG's quote was very noncommital, and din't condem anyone. I forget the exact quote, but it was something like "it is a deeply troubling issue"
He put out a CD quite a while ago, like 10 years or something, called "No World Order" that encouraged people to remix it.
Anyone remember that?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The thing that is kind of new here is bands releasing songs as tracks - so you can have just a vocal track, or a base guitar track and mix in other things as you like. It's not just being able to download songs from the web...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry dude. I actually live by my opinion. I get paid for writing (~ creating) GPL code.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If you mix all the tracks together, you get 16 bit resolution. However, the proportion of that value from any one track mixed must necessarily be a number not representable accurately by a 16-bit figure.
If you've originally mixed 10% of one track in, how do you bring it forward? Multiply the whole mix by 5%?
If the tracks are separate, you mix the numbers and add the result together. The result will have peaks bigger than the 16-bit maximum and you normalise the result to fit within the envelope needed.
So you need the tracks separately.
I sincerely wish that this was something which could be solved so easily.
Your argument is interesting, but after further examination, somewhat akin to early Communist and Socialist economic models. It looks good on paper, but might not really manage to create a situation where many content creators would be motivated to do so, or even in a position where they could make the commitment of both time and resources necessary for them to come up with the music at the level of sophistication that a Peter Gabriel album does when it is conceived, written, played, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered. This in turn could lead to the kind of long-term and endemic paucity of outstanding creative works in a similar fashion to that which ended happening in the former Soviet Union with their economic policies.
There are far many more complex and entertwined issues to this dilemna, and while I wholeheartedly agree that current copyright issues are increasingly antiquated and will likely slowly disappear in their present form, there are many reasons why this particular approach will probably not be adopted as law. Mind you, the 'de facto' result at the street level today is already so completely out of hand, that it may make less and less of a difference anyway, as it has proven utterly impossible to police and regulate. Major Hip-Hop artists make no bones about selling bootleg 'mixtapes' by the bucketload as part of their viral marketing strategies, everyone and their sister can create instant mashups which besides being difficult to even recognize, make it utterly impossible for anyone to try and collect royalties from, so in a sense the result is pretty much the same. But consequently and already noticeable, many contemporary artists have reduced the amount of time they can afford to spend in the studio crafting recording masterpieces which no one will buy in great numbers, choosing to instead put out slighty more 'average' albums and dedicate their time and energies to performing live, which for many has proven to be a reliable way to help to pay the bills...
As a whole, it is quite flattering to see that someone like Peter Gabriel (who besides being a legendary performer, also has consistently tried to further his participation to the global music community, with his World Music festival (WOMAD), Real World recording studio complex, as well as through his record label which is supporting many great, unknown but talented artists.) doing something that few have dared to try in order to stay relevant. Kudos all the way!!
Z.
Open Source Music? It might sound like...
;-)
"... you know you've gotta SHOCK the monkey, yeah yeah, shock the monkey, shock shock shock..."
"This song is distributed under the mGPL, and may be freely redistributed subject to the following conditions..."
(Or would it be more like a BSD-ish license?)
hallux-s
Look, I'm a big Genesis and Peter Gabriel fan, and I raise my hat to him for doing the "Open Source thing" with his music.
But I *REALLY AM* getting sick and tired of these idiots who constantly think they can do a better job than the original artist in making his/her/their songs sound better - either through making some plasticized dance-beat cover version or just cutting the original into bits and having some rap bloke talk all over it.
And don't even talk to me about "tribute bands" - if they're clever enough to copy the original artist that well, they're clever enough to write their own original music and work their way up from playing pubs and clubs - just like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles had to do.
Please, go and mess about with your modern music as much as you like and do it with my blessing. But with regard to the stuff I've been listening to now for anything up to 35 years, *LEAVE IT ALONE*!!! It didn't need some kid calling himself a "DJ" messing about with it then so it doesn't need it now.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...some people get it and others don't.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
How is some one releasing a library under the LGPL and then another bloke using that library for another app different then the modern remix?
//ain't no different then dumb code - don't DL it!!
Your not upset about remixing, your upset about the general quality (at times). Trust me on this.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I know it's been said before, but Gabriel and other artists who opt to do this are smarter than it might initially look.
;-)
As in the terminology of the open source software market, in this context Gabriel's music constitutes what they call a "loss leader."
He puts his entire discography online, free for the taking. He doesn't make a cracker from that, and presumably he wouldn't plan to. He also lets people do the mashy thing as Bowie did. This generates enormous positive PR for him that he supposedly "gets the open source revolution." Then after a while, he either decides he's got bored sitting at home, or he wants to make some additional revenue...so he decides he wants to do a comeback series of concerts. He'd use his site with the free music as a point of sale for the concert tickets. Let's also say hypothetically that in the meanwhile, a particular one of the mashies of his music has become unusually popular. So he arranges for the author of this particular mashy to play at the concerts with him as a supporting act...Mashy Kid either does his thing solo, or better yet, he and Gabriel do a duet of sorts. Gabriel could also do something like a "very limited" run of autographed photos or CDs to sell at the concerts...which given the infinitely replicable nature of the music files, would hold particular appeal as unique objects.
Mashy Kid gets professionally discovered, so he's very happy...Gabriel's positive public image would be through the roof by this point...and he could also more or less surf home after the concerts on the tidal wave of cash that would have been forthcoming. (Assuming he still has a large fanbase of course, which I'm assuming he does...not to mention the additional demand that would have been raised by the chance of seeing Mashy Kid play)
This of course is only one of an infinite number of possible scenarios by which he could make a fortune with this.
So...yep, it's a crazy move, all right. Crazy like a fox.
Anime is for people who like lots of cartoons of Cthuloid tentacles raping schoolgirls. That's it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Holy crap. All I have to say is: fuck yes.
Your sig and your post synergize so well :)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Your premise was faulty. The MP3 process does NOT have a step that separates out the individual "tracks" of a song.
And also, you may be surprised that not all songs are created by recording one instrument at a time each on it's own track and then mixed together by the Neptunes. There are occasionally musicians who are in the same room and actually PLAY TOGETHER and are recorded on the same mic (or pair of mics more properly).
Ask the nice Mr. Albini if you don't believe me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm pretty sure Trent Reznor did something similar to this a long time ago.
For example:
1. Interactivity - Why does those youngsters need a plethora of widesceen/surround sound/commentary/frappuchino options on every bloody DVD that comes out? By the time you've worked out what bleeding settings you want, you've changed your mind about what you wanted to watch in the first place! BUT, make a nice hot strong cup of tea first, sit down in your favourite chair, take a sip of your tea and it *DOESN'T MATTER* what sound/screen/moccachino options are set, you WILL just relax and enjoy your movie whatever way the screen or sound is!
2. Remixing - What's this constant need to "fiddle about" with music with that lot? Why have they got to take "this bit from that track, that bit from this track" and then, *WHEN THEY'VE FINISHED* fiddling with it, they get some big black American bloke to do so much talking over it that you can't hear it anyway! BUT, if they just had a sip of a nice strong hot cup of tea first, they'd put all the CDs they want to listen to in a little pile next to their comfy chair and just *PLAY EACH ONE IN ORDER* while listening intently in a relaxed mood.
3. Coffee - What's all this business about "iced mocha laccamaccachino with marshmallows and little umbrella in the top" in, for example, Starbucks? You get a coffee because you are thirsty, you stand in a queue for 30 minutes and when you finally get to the end of the queue, you order something that takes a further two days to manufacture from start to finish... and then you wonder why you're miserable??? How simple is a nice hot cup of tea to make - teabag, hot water and milk and sugar if you want it, what's the big deal? And you can put it in a thermos flask and carry it about with you so you can have a nice, hot cup of tea whenever you want one.
4. Fashion - What's all this business about wearing jeans where the gusset is dangling down round by your knees? If we'd have worn those in my day, friends would have laughed at you for looking like you'd dropped a "brown trout" or two in the back of your Levi's! And how do you run??? Is this planet eventually going to be entirely inhabited by people in "sensible, cheap, elasticated waist jeans" because all the fashionable ones weren't able to run away quick enough from falling buildings, crashing airliners and raging infernos? BUT, before making those clothing choices, have a nice, hot, strong cup of tea and the caffeine entering your system combined with the warmth from the hot liquid, and "terminal clothing" will be a thing of the past!
Tea, nice and hot... that's the answer.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Did you know that Jim's Big Ego did that ages ago with their song Mix Tape?
but in response to a trollish parent.
Yep, my eldest kid had those really big pants for a while, in my day we dressed with style, ball crushers and platform shoes all round!
Interesting link, "double dutching" was something young girls played with two skipping ropes in the 60's, they would recite "songs" to the beat of the jumping. I suppose it was an early kind of areobics class or rap dancing.
Music is a powerfull force, it can speak to or across generations, my sig says it all (Re: Bob Marley for footnotes).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Peter Gabriel ....just a stupid blogger? excuse yourself...... Peter Gabriel was the BEST pop artist ever! And this is coming from someone who DESPISES popular music. lemme guess you probably think Phil Collins was the star of Genesis, too! what a loser you are! Gabriel made Genesis popular for Progressive/Rock/Classical all in one. Then the record company started pressuring them on time.... so Lamb Lies down on broadway suffered. then P. Gabriel and S. Hackket left and PHIL COLLINS RUINED THE GREATEST BAND EVER!
I am a real sound engineer.
When Albini records a band playing together in a room, he'll put spot mics on everything and DI bass or whatever else he can.
The only tracks with significant spill will be drum overheads and a couple of ambient mics that he likes to stick around the place.
So around 20 tracks of spot mics and four or so that might be picking up the other players.
Everyone will also be baffled off as it's a nightmare to get a good drum sound if there is loads of spill.
Even the beatles recorded like this.
As far as MP3s go, yes compression will be much better on single tracks of a multitrack as described above compared to compressing the mixdown.
There will of course be twenty times as many tracks, so it will be a lot more data, but the individual tracks will compress better.
Marillion did the same thing to a whole album (Anoraknophobia) as a competition a few years back and released the best remixes as the CD Remixomatosis (and the nearly-best-remixes as a "free" fan club CD). Winners also got cash prices, and many of the remixes sound really, really excellent.
...as Marillion had a successful project like this a few years ago which given the scope was much more ambitious: http://www.marillion.com/remix/index.htm
And there is always Plunderphonics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plunderphonics which does not exactly apply here, but does bear some mention in terms of principle motivations.
Marillion allowed people to download (for a small fee, 'cause it was an expensive proposition) the separate tracks (and alternates), including unprocessed vocals, for their Anaraknophobia album back in 2000, and took the best remixes from the fans and released them as Remixomatosis a couple of years later.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
So, what have YOU produced?
I'd pay to read that post. And BTW, I earn good money every month giving away photos that I have "produced".
Not some unknown with a hidden agenda.
Quoth the AC.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Parent is broadly correct, the only comment I'd make is on the budget for movies, where I wonder about whether it's possible for cinema showings/movie theaters to act as "live performance" as it were for films they show, i.e. for theaters to organise themselves in advance and under contract/by subscription to fund new movies, paid for at the box office. In other words, in a post-copyright world, to serve the same sort of function for movies that live performance concerts and touring would provide for musicians.
Comments that this model is like Socialism or Communism are wrong; there is a similarity, but the difference is that we are not talking about tangible property in limited supply. We are talking about intangibles which cost nothing to replicate or distribute, and which are therefore in infinite supply, which is why this model can work. This wasn't previously the case, content was always tied to physical expression in tangible/scarce media in the past, which is why 18th/19th century copyright made a kind of sense it doesn't any more.
Think about this; if physical goods was instantly replicable, Star-Trek style, at zero cost, then you might find not only that our ideas about property would be forced to change, but also that Socialist/Communist ideals might suddenly work in that context, whereas in a real world of scarce goods they do not. For digital content, however, there is no scarcity, and copyright is a wholly artificial scarcity imposed on that which makes our society poorer than it need be, as well as supporting a wholly artificial "industry" that does not in fact add value or generate wealth at all, however much money it handles.
One more time for all the programmers. Copyright as applied to software is a smidgeon of what copyright is used for. So, screw all the novellists?
Though a little harsh on the other posters, the parent is correct. Also, just to finish the process discussed in parent, the real compression comes when the psychoacoustic model tells the quantizer where to distribute available bits, with the number of available bits being driven by the desired bit rate. Basically you look at the signal to mask ratio in each subband, and distribute the most bits to the subbands that have the highest SMR.
Other bands have done similar things for a long time. The earliest example I remember is Pitchshifter (pitchshifter.com) putting their samples on CDs and making use of remixes they're sent. They even made their own label so that they could put a free mix CD with their live album, which their previous label wouldn't allow. As someone else has said, true hip-hop has done similar for ages, where it has been tolerated. Some other bands have gone the whole hog by allowing sharing of live bootlegs, or tolerating sharing of new content (some still feeling free to comment on lack of sales at gigs I have been to). One rather big rock/indie group I have worked for even distributed soundboard recordings of their live shows through p2p and forums under pseudonyms made up at a rehearsal. We were a bit wasted, and later watch a pirate copy of Scream 3 months before it released where we were.
What NIN, Peter Gabriel, and others have done by allowing users to mix their stuff is nothing new but does allow for people to see use of the technology for promotion - although how this relates to sales and actually making any stand against RIAA tactics and to try to work with the filesharing public is beyond me, and is probably short lived.
"I'd pay to read that post."
I don't see an astrix by your name. So no you didn't.
"And BTW, I earn good money every month giving away photos that I have "produced"."
All under the copyright system that the OP wants to get rid of. Let me know how it turns out after he gets his way.
"Quoth the AC."
I know you're not THAT dumb.
I was going to mention the Shamen CD (which I'm fortunate enough to have a copy of), but you beat me to it. :-)
Sigue Sigue Sputnik has encouraged fan remixes of their music for as long as I've been aware of the band. I'm not aware of them releasing a CD with specific tracks and samples, but they've made a lot of them available online. I don't have the URL, but there is/was a web site for them (unofficial, I suspect) that had a flash app that allowed you to mix tracks right on the web page. Nifty stuff.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a completely unreasonable BPM to work with? 148.5 I could understand. Ah well... perhaps I can hack up a remix in spite of that.
-=Zeus=And=Hades=-
The Kennedy Meriwether Collective release a new album, "Sapphire Hibernation" Free song download at www.SirBillkay.com More info: http://thekmc.com/PRPage.aspx
I love giving these sorts of things to my digital media classes to play with when they're learning about digital audio.
I told you!!!!!
I first read that as Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Spank the Monkey.. heh... great game.. great game.. especially if you know the cheat for it ;)
Let me see, taking a perfectly awful song like Shock the Monkey, and combining it with Crap or Hip-Shot "music" will "Save The World For File Sharers Everywhere" (TM).
This is the same artist who wanted to name all of his albums "Peter Gabriel", and got really pissed when the record company wanted a different title for each one, so people could tell them apart.
(sigh)
>>>crawling back under my bridge.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
The cover by Ozzie and Coal Chamber was vastly superior.
Why not fork?
... and actually used the track on the disc.
For Revolverlution Public Enemy not only had a remix contest, but it was before the album was even released. They had a couple tracks on their website, including the title track Revolverlution. The winner of the remix contest was put on the album. The cool thing, it's really a different track, the guy has a totally different flow than Chuck D., and definitly falls into the "using current song to create a new song" rather than just simple copying (like the labels tend to say about remixes).
Or else like David Byrne, David Bowie, or Lawrence Lessig - they're already millionaires and don't need it anyway.
Releasing individual tracks of a song is similar to releasing the source code of a program (from a musician's point of view). I wish more people would do that. I'd love to buy a DVD containing all the studio tracks of recordings of Bjoerk songs, for example, and remove the "singing", keeping the songs as instrumentals. But I don't have the freedom to do this, so I my only option is to not listen to it at all because I can't stand Bjoerk stuff the way it's been released :(
Somebody please mod the parent spam to hell.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Peter Gabriel is a real pioneer in thinking about how music, technology and communities come together. And this action is just the latest step in a long road. He realized early on the power that labels had over his music, so in the '80s and early 90's he bought back the rights to his catalog from the labels that had originally published it. (It is standard practice in contracts for the musician to sign over copyright to their songs to the label). Once those rights were secured he began to explore new ways of using his music. Two very early efforts were the Xplora and EVE cd-roms (see the site here .
In the summer of 1994 I was hired by the Starwave Corporation in Seattle to be part of a small team developing EVE. The idea was pretty interesting -- pair the work of different contemporary visual artists up with songs from Gabriel, treating each as raw material, then create a framework in which people can explore, share and remix that material to create an integrated audio/video hybrid that is greater than the sum of its parts. I had just finished a graduate art program that had similar ideas, so I felt right at home.
We used the work of artists Helen Chadwick , Yayoi Kusama , Cathy de Monchaux , and Nils-Udo -- using high rez scans of their work as starting points. They were paired up with Gabriel's songs 'Come Talk To Me' , 'Shaking The Tree' , and 'In Your Eyes'. We had the equivalent of the sample packs that he has made available on-line for Shock the Monkey. These were professionally produced loops from the multi-track masters. Gabriel's recording process usually involves dozens and dozens of tracks, so these samples weren't mix-downs, but elements from a single track.
We created something called the Interactive Musical Xperience to bring these elements together. It was a kind of audio/video sampler that you could play with your keyboard, triggering sound and animation loops against a rendered landscape background. The software quantized everything so you would always be in time and you could work improvisationally or with a simple graphical timeline. The team developing it had a diverse background in software development, fine art and filmmaking. My job eventually became to create functional mockups of the interaction using Director 4....! The production team eventually relocated to the Real World studios in Box, UK which was an incredibly intense creative environment -- musicians, engineers, filmmakers, photographers, designers all working together in a bucolic 'campus' made from an old mill complex.
Although I eventually left Real World and Starwave to pursue my own artwork, it was a really great experience. The fact that the rest of the world has started to catch up to the ideas Peter Gabriel has been thinking about since the early 90's only reaffirms how resonant those ideas continue to be.
Moby had a remix contest for "Everytime You Touch Me" where he included the samples on a track of a single.
I think the difference in what NIN and Peter Gabriel are doing is that they're allowing free distribution through downloads as opposed to having to pay for the CD to participate. A minor difference.
Actually, in 1788 Mozart released the sheet music to many of his earlier compositions, so that any moderately competent musician could alter the music accordingly, thus "remixing" it. At the time, it was seen as a tawdry, money-generating gimmick, but now, 218 years later, Peter Gabriel has finally proven that Mozart was, in fact, a closet genius.
This is similar to what some companies have done with software that's reached its commercial end of life - they open-sourced it. This gets them out of the costs of stocking, distributing, and maintaining the product, while making them look good.
Back when you had to renew copyrights, that routinely happened to movies and music; the Internet Archive has an archive of about a hundred feature films and serials whose copyright wasn't renewed. Since the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, we don't have that happening in the US any more. But distributors still do have some costs associated with keeping content in the catalog.
So now we're seeing a new way for content owners to get some last publicity benefit out of music that's reached its end of life. We might see more of this from the rap/hip hop business, where careers tend to be short and few artists have long-term hits.
Don't do it. I wondered what the fuss was about anime and now I've
got gigabytes of the stuff. It's kind of addicted.
Some of the stories have surprising depth and inventiveness.
I'd say many of the american movie studios could learn a thing
or two about depth of story and character development from the
anime writers.
Oh yeah, and there's tentacles if you want them but it's not true
to say that every anime production has tentacles.
Although, it would be rather amusing if some sweet innocent love
story all of a sudden turned into a tentacle battle.
"I'd love to buy a DVD containing all the studio tracks of recordings of Bjoerk songs, for example, and remove the "singing", keeping the songs as instrumentals. "
Karaoke
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...though you had to purchase the album to get the DVD that contains the discrete tracks.
See http://www.limoremix.com/ to listen to what others have remixed and posted.
FWIW, White Limousine is IMO his best work since "Barely Breathing" and his second album as well.
Duncan and Peter have it right...forget record sales...when you've got fan mindshare, the money will inevitably come.
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
PG's 'Shock the Monkey' remix competition was started in June 2006. The competition is over now.
I am not a lawyer, but I am a published author and a professional writer. And, while there's a lot wrong in the post one branch above this one, getting into a pissing match over it isn't going to help, particularly when most of this tends to be over a misunderstanding about what copyright is and why it is there.
So, instead of arguing, I'm going to educate - this is copyright 101. So please pay close attention, and you'll understand what is going on a lot better. I'm going to start by describing what copyright is and what it does, and then talk about why we still need it (and, I'd argue, need it even more than before).
Copyright today in most western countries is based on an international agreement called the Berne Convention, first signed at the end of the 19th century, and most recently updated in the 1970s. There is a history of copyright that goes far beyond the Berne Convention, such as the Stationer's Log in 17th century England and a clause in the original U.S. Constitution, but we're dealing with copyright as it is today, not its history (which, while relevant, is for another discussion). For the sake of this discussion, we'll call the copyrighted material "art" (it takes less time to type than "copyrighted material").
Copyright covers two basic functions - the first is the right to distribute (hence "copy-right"), and the second is derivative works. Both of these tend to be misunderstood a great deal by laymen.
The right to distribute basically means that the creator of the art is able to decide how that art is to be distributed within reasonable means. If the creator wishes the art to be released to the public for free download, the creator is allowed to do that. If the creator wants to sell the publication rights to a publisher, the creator can do that too. It's important to note that there is no explicit instruction in copyright law of how a creator is to distribute his/her art - what this amounts to in the end is that the wishes of the creator must be respected under law.
There are limits to these wishes, however. For example, while the creator owns the copyrights to the content itself, s/he does not own what the content is distributed on. So, if I write a book about an alien invasion where the aliens are using biological weapons, sell the publication rights to a publisher, and you buy the printed book, I cannot tell you that you can only read it in the wee hours of the morning, or anything like that. I also cannot tell you that you can't give that book you just bought away as a present, or sell it to a used bookstore, as you own the paper it is printed on, and can do what you like with it in that regard. I CAN tell you that you cannot copy it and sell it on the street corner, or give copies of it away, as that would undermine my wishes as to how it is to be distributed. If you disregard my wishes in terms of distribution, copyright law allows me to take action to protect my intellectual property and ensure that my wishes are respected.
(An example of copyright in action is the open source license, which recently stood up in court. That license has its binding power because copyright law supports it.)
These wishes are also mitigated by fair use. Fair use means that if you are writing an academic paper and you want to quote the aforementioned book about the alien invastion, you may do so without asking permission, so long as you give credit where it is due. There are other clauses and limitations, but those vary internationally, and most people here actually do have a good sense of what fair use is - it's copyright that seems to cause people all the trouble.
Depending on what country you are in, copyright extends anywhere from 50-75 years after the death of the creator. This is a source of much debate. On the creator's side, it allows the creator to leave a legacy for his/her family based on his/her hard work. When it comes to what it means on the side of the publishers or public, it's a bit more complicated. A lot depends on what ri
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
This is something to make you think. I am actually considering doing this. Some people might not think it was very funny.
... TIT ... light..." with a video of a ceiling light being turned on. Some people might think this was pretty funny. Might be pretty popular on YouTube.
Around in the 80's there was a song released by Neil Diamond called "Heartlight". It was an ET-theme "turn on your heart light..." I recently moved into a new house where they assumed you would be replacing all of the overhead lights with ceiling fans, so they put in really ugly lights that were very, very cheap. These lights are very breast-shaped and everyone seeing them calls them "nipple lights" or "tit lights".
So, how about if I make a nice music video of the lights being turned on and off with Neil Diamond's music in the background... except the word "heart" is replaced by a very different voice saying "tit"?
Would this be fair use? Would Neil Diamond (or his agents, distribution company, etc.) be within reason for suing should I post this video on the Internet for all to download? Clearly, this oversteps the line of simply a parody - it is using his original material in a way that he did not intend in a way that devalues the original material.
Just think about "Turn on your
Because we can do this now, easily, should we be able to? What about a re-rub of the movie Mary Poppins with Mary's voice replaced by a trash-talkin' African American girl where about every fifth word was "muthr-fuckin"? Do you think Disney would find this flattering?
How about taking a Boston Pops recording and adding some off-key "mistakes" just to make it more "accessible"? All in good fun, I assure you.
"Untrue. DRM is something the companies want in order to force you to pay for the same thing multiple times and filesharing is just the excuse."
Here's one for slashdot. Why the f**k did we bother these folks if all most were going to do was ignore what they said, and continue with the same old song and dance? I suggest any potential interviewees pay attention to the answer.
Based on the age of Peter Gabriel's music and the maturity of the people who would remix it, I'd call it the commercial equivalent of "Trusting your 35-year old child to babysit his own ass, even if he wants to have some friends over for beer."
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Very good post.
"There are other clauses and limitations, but those vary internationally, and most people here actually do have a good sense of what fair use is"
I disagree.
"(This is not to be confused with patent law, where you CAN patent an idea and prevent others from using it without permission, or trademark law, where you can do the same with a name.)"
Within limits, but lets stay on topic.
"So, why do we need copyright today? It comes down to respect."
It also puts "art" creators on a more equal footing. The natural protections that most physical works enjoy, aren't present with intangiable works.
Not new for PG. In XPLORA1 (the Mac CD that came full of US goodies) he also gave samples and a mixer to remix a song from US (Was it "Blood of Eden"? I can't remember.. and I have an Intel Mac, so I can't run it...)