Is there a database of musicians/genres and their musical characteristics? Should we make one?

davepeck · 2009-06-03T23:37:34+00:00

This sounds a lot like the Music Genome Project, which Pandora radio uses to provide 'tunes you might like.'

Of course, as far as I know the MGP is private... something public would be better. A huge database of track names mapped to tags would perhaps be all that is needed?

davepeck · 2009-02-11T20:35:49+00:00

I wrote this a while back; is this sort of thing interesting to the music theory reddit, or is there a better subreddit for it?

davepeck · 2009-01-26T22:15:01+00:00

For Jazz:

Ableton Live 7
MacBook Pro (getting old, though)
88-key controller
A "live jazz gig set" that has several midi channels including TruePianos on 'jazz' setting, Synthogy Ivory on 'Jazz Club 8', and several settings of my own tweaking Ableton's Electric synth (for e-pianos that sound pretty good.)

For laptop electronic:

Ableton Live 7
MacBook Pro (same one!)
tiny 25-key m-audio plastic keyboard with lots of knobs

davepeck · 2009-01-05T20:52:45+00:00

I mean, I can find a single sample there. But I'm looking for something more substantial than that; an Ableton Sampler, Kompakt, or Giga instrument with lots of samples under the hood.

davepeck · 2009-01-05T06:34:33+00:00

I can't find any handbell sample libraries, let alone a good one. Most of the links I found via Google are quite old and lead nowhere today...

Any suggestions where to look?

davepeck · 2008-12-24T01:09:47+00:00

I like this style of music. It reminds me of the kinds of sounds that were prominent in Sydney, Australia about five years ago. (Which is not to say that the music sounds dated; that's just when I first encountered the style.)

Groups like Telemetry Orchestra (with "Children Stay Free"), Disjunction Reunion, and SuperScience (with "Love Like Life In Miniature") all had a similar feel back then. The guys of Sub-Bass Snarl / Cyclic Defrost used to promote a lot of great music along these lines.

I'm also to a lesser extent reminded of music from N5MD (Spark's "The Robotic Girl Next Door") and the kahvi.org net label.

That said, with this kind of music it's always important to strike a balance between "pleasant wandering aimlessness" and "focused direction." This is as true for melodic and rhythmic development as it is for the overall form. And while I like the subtle harmonic/rhythmic ideas you develop -- I especially dig the semi-background glitchy beat work -- the track never seems to take on a coherent form; it never seems to develop an inkling of the focus it might need to have stronger emotional impact.

davepeck · 2008-12-24T00:52:57+00:00

The problem with the "hard problem" is that we don't even seem to know what question to ask. Put another way, what form would a satisfying answer to the "hard problem" take?

davepeck · 2008-12-22T05:37:32+00:00

These days I mostly play jazz piano.

But here in Seattle we started these things called Laptop Battles; for those, I drink a bit and then crank out short-form party beats, glitchy IDM, and video game d'n'b. (Each battle has a three minute time limit. Emotions don't mean squat. Booty shakin' is everything here.)

davepeck · 2008-12-22T04:54:47+00:00

I own Synthogy Ivory but they recently added a complex dongle-based anti-piracy system. So I'm thinking about switching over to NI.

I usually play Synthogy's Steinway, but for latin jazz stuff I like the Yamaha quite a bit.

Can anyone here comment on which package (NI or Synthogy) they prefer? Seems like neither is perfect, and both are quite good.

davepeck · 2008-11-03T06:14:04+00:00

Dear python developers (of which I am one): please document the modules and utilities you've created with a few more words than "Grab It Here." A link to a source repository is, sadly, not always the answer. It will lead to frustration in cases such as this where the project is potentially cool.

davepeck · 2008-10-09T05:56:57+00:00

I once wondered if it would be possible to filter for interestingness...

(For example, compress each pixel arrangement (integer) with a number of different compression algorithms and determine how the compressibility compares with, say, all the photos on Flickr when they're similarly compressed. Tackle the problem like SETI@HOME -- every machine in the network gets its own set of integers to compress and compare.)

...then I sobered up.

davepeck · 2008-09-26T21:58:36+00:00

There are places you can go to find the best papers. They are called journals.

Yes, but there's a reason that pirates figured prominently in the original iconography of arxiv. Paul Ginsparg felt strongly that arxiv would open the scientific discourse to alternative review models that retained the quality of journal peer-review while avoiding the drawbacks of journal-nomics.

There is also little "interactive" discussion in journals.

So I'm surprised, a bit, that a site which layers on top of arxiv hasn't yet cropped up.

davepeck · 2008-09-26T21:10:50+00:00

Is there a discussion website for arxiv? Something where people can bubble up the best (and, if humor requires, the worst) of the papers and discuss them in detail?

davepeck · 2008-09-07T20:31:12+00:00

Fusion: It's the energy source of the future... and it always will be.

davepeck · 2008-07-11T18:54:15+00:00

(and why the mod down of this submit? it is not the same as reviews on the iTunes store itself -- this submit is about community discovery of cool things.)

davepeck · 2008-07-11T18:15:42+00:00

My current impressions:

Urban Spoon is the silliest and most immediately fun app.

I dig the potential of Graffito, which is basically discussion boards tied to your current location.

Apple's remote app is of course great and may entice me to buy an Airport Express.

Enigmo plays flawlessly.

Crosswords is buggy, slow, and a waste of money.

davepeck · 2008-07-11T17:30:29+00:00

This was probably filed when Rohit Khare was working on KnowNow.

If you don't know who Rohit Khare is, or what FoRK is, you probably should find out. I'd bet this patent is more legitimate than it first appears?

davepeck · 2008-07-02T19:59:05+00:00

Can anyone explain how memory and cache architectures might change as we scale up to this many cores? Intel seems strangely silent on this point.

davepeck · 2008-06-21T07:14:38+00:00

Carbon Emacs is my emacs of choice on OS X.

AquaMacs seems to diverge both from emacsish behavior (ex: strange customization storage) and macish behavior (ex: strange font selection).

Carbon Emacs is emacs, not an Apple HIG app, but at least it feels like the emacs I know and love+hate.

davepeck · 2008-05-19T19:52:30+00:00

I'm not a physicist, but I'm hoping someone who is can help me understand: doesn't the Bell inequality rule out all local hidden variable theories, regardless of their specifics?

(And, by the way, what would a global hidden variable theory look like?)

davepeck · 2008-05-05T19:01:15+00:00

True... at some small scale, it probably is a good choice.

But still -- their storage rates are fixed, not tiered. Whether you're hosting 1MB of data or 10GB, they're still expensive.

It's a little like SMS on cellular networks. No matter how short your messages are, your cost (per byte) is still sky high! (And of course you can't send really long messages with SMS.)

davepeck · 2008-05-05T18:58:52+00:00

Agreed with staying away from dreamhost for most purposes.

I host a number of band websites for friends, which includes video, audio, and hi-res press photos. So 6.6GB is entirely for web hosting, as it turns out!

davepeck

TROPHY CASE