byline goes here
Patrick Jarenwattananon, Visiting Producer
Cardiac Kanye is emotionally adrift on his new 808s and Heartbreak.
It seems as if, in these waning weeks of our Music & Technology series, we've generated a contradiction. And as it has been so many times before, the resolution is -- wait for it -- Kanye West.
On one hand, studio technology has improved by leaps and bounds since before the Internet age of music, and can mask bad singers better than ever. On the other, you can no longer be a terrible live performer and expect to be able to sell a record.
Continue reading "Kanye West, Auto-Tune Crooner" >
categories: Music and Technology
byline goes here
Patrick Jarenwattananon, Visiting Producer
A conceptual rendering of the stage for Death and the Powers, Tod Machover's newest opera.
MIT Media Lab
There was a lot we had to leave out of Liane Hansen's interview with Tod Machover. He spoke for more than 35 minutes for a six-minute segment, and some of it was some pretty heavy stuff. Like, what if we could invent an instrument (a hyperinstrument, in his parlance) which was as natural and easy-to-play as the Guitar Hero controller -- but capable of the expressivity of a piano or cello? Wouldn't it blur the lines between the highly-skilled musicians and the complete dilettantes? (Ahem.) The performers and the audience? Would it unlock the artistic potential in all of us?
Fortunately, we were able to preserve most of the weighty philosophical implications of so-called hyperinstruments. One important subject we weren't able to keep in the on-air interview, however, was the new opera Tod Machover was working on.
Continue reading "Tod Machover's New Opera" >
categories: Music and Technology
byline goes here
Ned Wharton, Senior Producer
Last week, I stood just inches away from a Stradivarius and a Guarneri del Gesu. Liane actually touched the Strad. There I was, holding a microphone over the piano top they were resting on, my hands quivering a bit in fear that I'd drop the mic on one of these precious instruments. Click on the video and you'll see which violin is which.
Continue reading "Violin Envy" >
categories: Music and Technology
byline goes here
Liane Hansen, Host, Weekend Edition Sunday
Professor Michael McCoy leads his freshman engineering class at NYU.
Ned Wharton/NPR
I can't hear well. I also can't sing. More about the latter in another post during our November music and technology series. This is about my hearing, or lack of it.
Tuesday afternoon, I went back to school. The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University trains students for the music industry. I'm sitting in the back of a classroom of about 13 students. Michael McCoy is sitting at the mammoth console and giving a lesson in equalization. He had set up two microphones over a drum kit and recorded a rhythm track. He plays it once as it was recorded. Then he punches some buttons to eliminate hiss and hum, and others to enhance the sound of the drums. McCoy asks the students to listen to - and analyze - the differences. I can't hear many of the changes. My ears are old, and have spent too many years in headphones and in front of big amplifiers in my youth. These young students don't miss a thing.
Continue reading "A Lesson in Equalization" >
categories: Music and Technology
byline goes here
Ned Wharton, Senior Producer
The Moog synthesizer.
erikadotnet/flickr
Growing up, I was a lucky kid with a cool dad. He taught electronic music at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks back in the 1970's, and when I was about 15 years old, he gave me a key to the electronic music lab. I would goof around in there late into the night, where I'd create nests of tangled patch cords as I experimented with one of of those big old modular Moog synthesizers. I felt like a mad scientist!
Continue reading "Music & Technology" >
tags: Music and Technology
categories: Music and Technology
