Slashdot Mirror
Frank Zappa's Influence On Linux and FOSS Development
Roblimo writes "Zappa's 'Dinah-Moe Hummm' is totally about Linux, at least in spirit, while the song 'Montana,' with its talk of zirconium-encrusted tweezers and dental floss, 'is obviously about Mac users.' Not only that: In the early '70s Zappa wrote a song called 'Penguin in Bondage,' an obvious foretelling of the anti-Linux lawsuits and threats from SCO, Microsoft, and other evildoers. Zappa was also a heavy user of the Synclavier, an electronic music machine that was a precursor to today's 'studio on a computer' recording and sound editing software. According to an article on DevX, today Zappa would no doubt be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition."
According to an article on DevX, today Zappa would no doubt be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition.
I do not agree with this statement. There is a lot of doubt in my mind. As I listen to Zappa albums, I constantly find new things mixed into them. Often I tell a friend about a great Zappa song but they haven't the patience to listen through five minutes of weirdness just to get to a great guitar lick intricately backed. Anyhow, I would wager that Zappa's thirst for this kind of mixing would lead him to the industry standard: Pro Tools. I highly doubt a professional musician would stray from that but if Zappa dumped some cash into Ardour development and increased its support then maybe. But right now, audio recording on Linux isn't the greatest. Pro Tools is often augmented with dedicated hardware ... I am unaware of how you would do this with Ardour. I also have had one hell of a time trying to get a dual core processor with plenty of ram to record in Linux and also play back what you're recording on top of several tracks without delay.
... like a lot of things in Linux it could have been a configuration error but I spent a lot of time on that. Unfortunately, all musicians are not computer savvy and they certainly do not like messing around with getting software working in the studio.
In my hobby projects, I have given up on audio recordings in Linux although I must say I was impressed with Ubuntu Studio when I was trying to layer guitar tracks a few years ago. It just seemed that the audio bus could not keep up when recording through my M-Audio USB input box
My work here is dung.
What's the magic FOSS connection to the song "broken hearts are for assholes" and in particular the lyric "You're an asshole, you're an asshole, that's right! You're an asshole, you're an asshole, yes yes!"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Can someone explain the appeal of Zappa to me? Most of his songs seem weird for weirdness' sake, but I'm willing to learn.
Where does bromidrosis fit in?
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
So why comment on it, troll?
Without Neckbeard Hippies, you wouldn't even have a fucking computer to troll with.
While Zappa was clearly a tinkerer, he was also one into making music. And music programs simply aren't up to a professional musicians needs on Linux yet. I know, this program's great, that program's great...they are in theory. But they aren't standards in music for a reason. They don't have full feature sets for non-programmers, and more importantly they aren't stable and reliable.
Zappa would probably be ProTools, as other's have suggested - or Nuendo, which actually has a final output sound that's a bit nicer in some ways than ProTools, due to Steinberg's sound algorithms. Both of these require Windows or Mac OS. Of the two, I find it very likely Zappa would prefer Mac - it is simply a better environment for non-text work.
Also I think it's VERY likely Zappa would be using Max/MSP, which doesn't exist for Linux yet and won't be ported any time soon. Or he maybe would be using Symbolic Composer, or programming in Kyma - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyma_(sound_design_language) - but this also is aimed at programming DSP cards in Mac and WIndows environments
However, it is also very likely that Zappa would want some crazy special computer software/hardware combinations, that may be most easily achieved by hiring a programmer, who would then be more likely to write the controlling software in Linux. But again, I doubt it would be Zappa himself.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Frank Zappa was one of the greatest musical geniuses that our species has ever produced. To even remotely insinuate that we could assume his intentions or possible course of action is douchebaggery of the highest order.
Show some fucking respect.
Living With a Nerd
Not only that: In the early '70s Zappa wrote a song called 'Penguin in Bondage,' an obvious foretelling of the anti-Linux lawsuits and threats from SCO, Microsoft, and other evildoers.
No.... No, I think that implies something else altogether. Something... something involving fat nerds in leather suits.
Zappa was also a heavy user of the Synclavier, an electronic music machine that was a precursor to today's 'studio on a computer' recording and sound editing software.
What does this have to do with anything at all? The synclavier was not open source or Linux based. Also, the synclavier did not lead to any FOSS music production tools. In fact, even now, the vast majority of studio work is done on mac OS or windows. How does this synclavier relate to the point they are trying to make? Sounds to me like they are drawing correlations that do not exist.
Frank would be using the best stuff in whatever format. He wouldn't be constrained by Linux, or Windows, or Mac, or whatever.
Appropriating Frank's memory to endorse anything is just wrong, man.
Actually after taking a second look at the "logic" presented in TFS, it starts making more sense.
Zappa is best appreciated when really stoned or tripping out on acid or mushrooms. That's when the connections and the lyrics in his music suddenly seem so brilliantly clever like an inside joke that nobody else in the room - or in the whole universe - can understand. Similarly, the connections and leaps of logic in the summary are the kind of thing that won't speak to you unless you just sucked back a few bowls or you're otherwise in a state where you could spend 30 straight minutes examining the wrinkle patterns on the backs of your hands.
If you don't like this submission, you're clearly not high enough.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Agreed. It's a bit of a stretch. I could understand if the Synclavier was some sort of hobbyist machine, that you could build yourself, but it was a commercial product, and nothing about it was "open source". When the company died, so did the Synclavier.
Roblimo, what are you smoking?.....Can I have some?
It sure is wrong.
Because we all know he'd be using an old Atari ST connected to even older Roland sound modules!
The tweezers in question are encrusted with "Zircon", and not Zirconium, as alleged.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
I'm pretty sure that "Don't eat the yellow snow" and "Let's make the water turn black" were about Windows.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The religious texts say a thing, such as when Jesus told his followers "Remember that all these things will happen before the people now living have all died". And they didn't.
This leaves the religious with three choices, none of them good: either:
1: Jesus was wrong
2: Jesus was a liar
or 3: the Bible doesn't mean what it says, and must be re-interpreted in order for it to remain relevant to us, who are not the audience it was written for.
Needless to say, most of the faithful pick the third option. The Revelation of John is even worse; in modern times most of the faithful read it as if it were written for a modern audience rather than a then-contemporary audience, so we turn a warning about the political power of Rome into a warning about bizarre apocalypse destined to happen in the future (ours).
This post reeks of this sort of post-hoc reasoning. Let's not do Zappa a disservice by deliberately reading him as if he were talking to us about something he clearly wasn't.
While I'm sure (I hope) it was meant as a jest, does this sort of evangelical logic really promote Linux in a way that is useful? This reads like fanboy logic written for the converted. More damning, however, is that while it is supposedly humorous, it's not actually funny.
I wouldn't assume that anything that Dweezil is doing is any kind of predictor for what Frank might have done, but I'm pretty sure whatever he's using is running on Windows. Unfortunately I can't recall the exact source, but one of his blog posts (http://www.dweezilzappaworld.com/posts/54) does mention some hardware that doesn't appear to have vendor supplied drivers for Linux.
Did this author think to even talk with some of the still living Zappa clan? This article isn't much of anything if the author isn't going to even try to get some opinions from those closest to FZ himself.
What a load of complete bollocks. Mumbo Pocus, you might say.
.. of Slashdot's humor stories. I'm dying from laughter, in all seriousness.
You may be posting that sarcastically but I voted this story up as "Funny" in Firehose.
It's completely absurd, of course. "Montana" had nothing at all to do with computers, it was about growing pot. In any case, Zappa would have used whatever tool would have made his job easier for him. My guess would be Pro Tools on a Mac, like most other musicians these days, but that's worth about as much as anyone else's guess--exactly nothing.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Indeed. It would be a shame to use Zappa's name to endorse using the best stuff in whatever format.
God damn it, it's fucking GNU/Religion.
Without Zappa's inspirational lyrics, titties and beer would be nowhere near as popular as they now are!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Newton - FreeBSD
Leibniz - Solaris
Donny from the Big Lebowski - QNX
Phil Hartman - BeOS
Moses - OS2/Warp
Hammurabi - MS DOS 5
Rush Limbaugh - Windows Vista
Of *course* it's all absurd.
But how about this: if you go to the forums on zappa.com and search for Linux, you get 76 results, and only 29 each for Windows and Mac.
This proves something -- something silly, no doubt, but still something (or other).
- R
...is like dancing about architecture.
Agreed.
Although, Dweezil's preference (circa 2006) "is to use the Euphonix R-1 hard-disk recording system and then bump that over to Nuendo." (http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_frankly_dweezil/index3.html), FWIW...
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
C'mon. Zappa's struggles over the years had nothing to do with computers or freedom of the tools he had. It was all about business, musician unions and satirical observations of "the world".
Sure, I could come up with something like, "hey! Opus the penguin from Bloom County was all about the position in society of the Linux user, and obviously because of the penguin reference!". Why not. But if anything, Frank had over 60 studio albums of material released and I'm sure one could make a lot more connections if they thought about it.
The author of the story says that Apple was influenced by LSD. While Jobs has been on record with the statement that it was one of the most important things he did in his life, I'm not ready to chalk up more than a few small points of that company's history to it. People claim to have grand visions and revelations under the influence, so maybe Jobs was just good at recording or remembering his revelations rather than just grabbing a bag of doritos and sitting on the couch listening to Pink Floyd. There were a lot of other things that contributed to Apple's success that had nothing to do with drugs or brainstorms thereof (see: Xerox, Homebrew Computer Club, IBM, Palm, etc).
So how is Linux influenced by Zappa? Linux was influenced by the entire history of UNIX and other commercial operating systems, not some avant garde musician. As well, why would he be using Linux? As others have mentioned, I'm sure he would be using whatever the best tool is. He made heavy use of the Synclavier back in the day because it was THE tool for electronic music and was capable of playing the complex compositions he defined and had someone program in for him (see: G-Spot Tornado and just about everything on Civilization Phaze III). I appreciate the progress that we've made in regards to music production on Linux, but from everything I've ever read about Frank, he's not going to use Linux for music production because of the philosophy. Yes, he was a tinkerer, but there isn't anything about Linux that you couldn't do with another platform when it comes to music.
Frank dedicated his time to his music and his family. I honestly don't think he'd have time for the difficulties involved with using Linux when he could just buy a Mac for Pro Tools or Digital Performer. Besides, I think I saw Mac Book Pro or two at a Dweezil Zappa show recently ;-)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
In many Zappa albums, there are some tracks that are all-time favorites of mine, and others that I just can't stand. There are only a few albums of his that I can play through without interruption -- Hot Rats, the Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar series, Apostrophe ('), and Over-Nite Sensation come to mind.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Newton - FreeBSD Leibniz - Solaris Donny from the Big Lebowski - QNX Phil Hartman - BeOS Moses - OS2/Warp Hammurabi - MS DOS 5 Rush Limbaugh - Windows Vista
T.J. Schmitz - the man, the myth, the legend - o
But... but... but... he doesn't wear black turtlenecks or sip lattes or sit in coffee shops all day reading Marx. How could he possibly use OS X?
Taking a bet with a hooker that you could get her off, then nailing her hooker-friend until dynamo finally got into it enough to get off???
I mean, I can't say that I ever got a balky machine to install an rpm just by doing it to another machine in front of it.
Am I missing something here?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
The hardware was certainly versatile. Dartmouth College built its mid-80s network infrastructure around multi-purpose network gateways around boards made by NED (makers of the Synclavier) and at the time was probably the world's largest LocalTalk network.
Maybe... just maybe they can lay a claim that prior exposure to Zappa albums may make a person more likely to adopt Linux...
For instance, my early years of tripping to Billy The Mountain while playing Risk might, just might, have made it easier for me to accept software packages that sings its own tune, an os that requires text file manipulation to properly use a display adapter and made me willing to install Linux on a Sparc10 even though it took me a couple of weeks to replace the Sun bitmap with a penguin
So there you go, prepare for a career in Linux by receiving brain damage while listening to Zappa
Wherever You Go, There You Are
This could be confirmed if we could find out what Dweezil Zappa uses. He has very much followed in the footsteps of his father. He may not be the pioneer that his father was but he tours and play's his fathers music quite often. Zappa was a one of kind in his industry, like Hunter S. Thompson a true rebel against The Establishment(s)
at what point did Rush Limbaugh die? I totally missed that one!
Does brain-death count? If so, I'm guessing some time before 1988. :)
Yes, but the real question is what OS will Jesus be using during the second coming and will your system be compatible?
At least the good thing about Linux is that regardless of what it is, you can be sure that some hacker will have posted a solution a short while after it is announced. Whether it will be legal to use it is another issue, but then so will the fees required by MS and Apple sales reps and lawyers.
This will all be moot soon, when Google gets their android act together. Until then it will be best if Jesus just postponed his second visit.
Weird just means art doesn't it. One of the most funny things I've noticed in this world is that "artistic" types who go to a gallery and blather on and on about the "freedom" of Picasso, and Jackson Pollock will positively run in terror from music that violates 32 bar AABA song structure. So Zappa is how much weird, he's kind of weird? But you know whenever I feel blue, I put on "Trout Mask Replica", (not Zappa but close) laugh my ass off, and am able to proceed mightily through this world which is much much weirder than Frank Zappa.
http://www.othermusic.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf8TM4CIk5g
I don't believe for a second that Zappa would be into FOSS. Read up on how he (and now the Zappa Family Trust) refused to release Captain Beefheart's original Bat Chain Puller, over hair-splitting legal technicalities and a bit of good old-fashioned spite. Thirty-two years now, and still the only way to get it is as a bootleg.
Yes, Acquiring a taste for Zappa can be done, even for the uninitiated/unsuspecting.
When I was in college I had a cassette with "Thing Fish" on it, and my roommate accidentally took it home with him for summer break. He got a delivery job that summer. The company truck had a cassette deck in it but no CD player. Since my roommate had no cassettes, he decided to give "Thing Fish" a listen (or three). Once he started listening to it he really loved it. This is a guy who previously had pretty mainstream musical tastes.
So I'd say as long as you're open to the weirdness and not too easily offended, you should give it a shot.
Actually from what I've heard, Jesus is like most other guys - he probably won't come more than once; rather he will probably just roll over and go to sleep. His brother Ricardo, on the other hand, I hear he's a stallion and just keeps going....
He was alive during the Atari ST's existence and he didn't use it. The Synclavier might look like a piece of shit now, but it was ahead of its time in its day.
Mind you, I'm not slagging on him, but he seems to have kind of faded into the background. He's been dead just shy of 20 years and his music was always a tad experimental, but he doesn't seem to get tied into "modern" rock music the same way someone like John Cale does or some of the other proto-punk artists do.
"Dinah-Moe Humm" might, in fact, be about Linux. Namely, the lyric "I got a spot that gets me hot, and you ain't been to it."
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
This is what I've found to be frightening about his work. I 'get' a lot of it. No drugs, no altered states. It just makes sense to me.
This worries me sometimes.
I think FZ would have been more than capable of appreciating and maybe even lampooning some of the pathologies associated with I.T. but I wouldn't go so far as to speculate what tools he'd use today. My brother in law used to run a small recording studio and he told me about a really effective 8 track Tascam reel-to-reel tape that had lots of editing features (SMTPE, ability to control which tracks played/recorded from a panel, etc and it was relatively inexpensive. It was basically intended to semi-pros and the RIAA goons put the pressure on to have it killed. Apparently, they feared a reduced need for recording studios. FZ didn't lampoon that and I'm sure lots of that sort of thing went on. Just didn't seem to be up his alley.
Totally agree with that. Zappa would care less about the 'political' side of computing and would just demand the best tool to do his job, and cost or openness wouldn't even factor into the equation.
And no, Montana was NOT about mac users.. What the hell is he smoking?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In the early '70s Zappa wrote a song called 'Penguin in Bondage,' an obvious foretelling of the anti-Linux lawsuits and threats from SCO, Microsoft, and other evildoers.
Since Tux came into being in April-May of 1996, it is impossible for Mr. Zappa to have used a penguin reference to suggest anything about Linus in the "early '70s." See: http://www.sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_History_of_Tux_the_Linux_Penguin
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Rush Limbaugh - Windows Vista
I'm sorry to say Rush Limbaugh is very much alive and a Mac user. He once volunteered to appear in an Apple ad but his offer was refused, thank goodness.
Also I'm pretty sure the author of the article is smoking crack. How did this make the front page?
Edi Weitz rocks!
Buddy Holley, Ritchie Valens, and the "Big Bopper" are Windows fans. Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison couldn't be reached for comment.
1. Take the current industry standard for PROFESSIONAL recording studios (not hobbiest or indi guys on a budget).
2. Add custom hardware and software from the top engineers in the industry.
THAT's what Zappa would be using. That's what Zappa has always used, dating back to the mid 1960s. You can find numerous references to his custom recording boards and equipment in assorted online archives. Doesn't the Zappa website have pictures of his homestudio?
Zappa was a professional, a perfectionist and a business man. He didn't waste time on fads or tolerate incompetence (in people or hardware/software). He relied exclusively on experts (musical or otherwise) to execute is particular vision.
"Arf!" she said.
Rush Limbaugh isn't dead goddammit!
Don't get me excited like that.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
I disagree. Zappa was fastidious about his music - wierd and wonderful time changes, surrounding himself with the highest quality musicians, etc.
A Linux user is invariably fastidious about getting the best speed from a computer, optimising compiler flags, carefully choosing all the right desktop components, etc.
Not that I care either way (I'm mostly Linux user without being a zealot, I like Zappa's humour in his music without caring too much about his self-indulgent guitar solos) but Britney Spears is more closer to Apple - nice to look at, easy on the ears and eyes, but definitely corporate-controlled and no real substance.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
No way, he'd be using a TRS-80 with an ORCH-85... all 3 voices... and he'd make the aliasing do things you'd never imagine!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
...idle. Why isn't this posted there?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"Imaginary guitar notes and imaginary vocals exist only in the imagination of the imaginer...and... ultimately, who gives a fuck anyway?" - The Central Scrutinizer.
Sugapablo
Having "Zappa" in your article immediately makes you "not a hippie", though.
I am not devoid of humor.
But Zappa himself disapproves of drugs!
I am not devoid of humor.