... is that Videotron is owned by Québécor Media, who also owns a healty chunk of the local music industry. In other words, they are highly motivated to fight file-sharing of copyrighted material.
This has a strong Sony feel to it.. the same company owning entities in domains that have conflicting interests, and end up shooting themselves in the foot.
Your spelling is right... Jean-Michel Jarre used this laser harp that was custom-built for him (by a british engineer, if I remember correctly) in many live concerts. Those were fairly strong beams, and with a lot of smoke, you could see them shooting very high. Jarre being the quintessential showman, he played with white gloves, officially because the rays burned his hands (yeah, right, of course, Jean-Michel), practically because the rays were reflected and dispersed on the glove surface and his hands seemed to light up.
Musically speaking, the instrument was very limited; it was the equivalent of your run-of-the-mill-Casio-cheapo no velocity, no aftertouch keyboard. Beam free or beam cut, that's it. Very easy to implement in MIDI. What would be *very* cool would be to use the vertical position of the hand (the height at which the beam is cut) to modify factors such as signal amplitude (volume/tremolo), slight pitch alterations (vibrato), wave shape, etc. A hell of a lot harder to implement, but very interesting.
For examples of the harp in action, see Jarre in Houston, mega-concert event recorded in 86, in which one of the Challenger astronauts, Ron McNair, was supposed to play sax from the shuttle. There is also a short documentary before the concert itself where Jarre talks about the harp. For audio examples, the album "Houston/Lyon: cities in concert" includes those parts.
More info on Jean-Michel Jarre at http://www.jarre.net/
The greedier the industry gets, the better it is for the artists and the public in general, simply because it will eventually reach the point where everybody (and, hopefully, Metallica too) will just want to bypass them. The nice thing is, we now have the means to do so. It's much easier to convince a judge that a publisher does not deserve protection if it's obviously ripping everybody off.
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... is that Videotron is owned by Québécor Media, who also owns a healty chunk of the local music industry. In other words, they are highly motivated to fight file-sharing of copyrighted material.
This has a strong Sony feel to it.. the same company owning entities in domains that have conflicting interests, and end up shooting themselves in the foot.
Your spelling is right... Jean-Michel Jarre used this laser harp that was custom-built for him (by a british engineer, if I remember correctly) in many live concerts. Those were fairly strong beams, and with a lot of smoke, you could see them shooting very high. Jarre being the quintessential showman, he played with white gloves, officially because the rays burned his hands (yeah, right, of course, Jean-Michel), practically because the rays were reflected and dispersed on the glove surface and his hands seemed to light up.
Musically speaking, the instrument was very limited; it was the equivalent of your run-of-the-mill-Casio-cheapo no velocity, no aftertouch keyboard. Beam free or beam cut, that's it. Very easy to implement in MIDI. What would be *very* cool would be to use the vertical position of the hand (the height at which the beam is cut) to modify factors such as signal amplitude (volume/tremolo), slight pitch alterations (vibrato), wave shape, etc. A hell of a lot harder to implement, but very interesting.
For examples of the harp in action, see Jarre in Houston, mega-concert event recorded in 86, in which one of the Challenger astronauts, Ron McNair, was supposed to play sax from the shuttle. There is also a short documentary before the concert itself where Jarre talks about the harp. For audio examples, the album "Houston/Lyon: cities in concert" includes those parts.
More info on Jean-Michel Jarre at http://www.jarre.net/
The greedier the industry gets, the better it is for the artists and the public in general, simply because it will eventually reach the point where everybody (and, hopefully, Metallica too) will just want to bypass them. The nice thing is, we now have the means to do so. It's much easier to convince a judge that a publisher does not deserve protection if it's obviously ripping everybody off.